 I'm Eleanor Bauer. Thank you for coming. We should start because I'm being asked to finish on time and I did prepare a 45 minute talk. And I would like to have time for talking afterwards also. Maybe a mic stand will arrive momentarily, but until then it'll be this style. I just wanted to, there's something that came up after watching, attending last night's lecture. First I should just start by saying thank you to IETM for having me here. Thank you to especially Alessandro Simeoni who suggested that I propose this talk in the first place. And thanks to Eric Corin yesterday and Geekyapens and Annie Bozini for doing a lot of the dirty work so that I don't have to stand here and define populism for all of us. Yeah, I have some written stuff and I have some free jazz. So it'll be in and out of reading. But one thing we have to address is vocabulary, obviously. The words, how we use them, including the word concepts of identity, nation, culture and populist or populism or populist. I just want to remind us that language is inherently evolutionary. It is the original open source code in the sense that each one of us who uses a language is also a developer of it. So it is very, very important how we speak and the words we use. The words populism, nationalism or nation and identity are complex and messy and have been used in very different ways historically. Like the left saying right now like populism is bad, identitarianism linked to nationality is bad. Yes, I agree. Like culture as we link it to bacteria maybe is like a free and open and messy thing that evolves in a very kind of person to person like open source way, let's say. And it's not, but of course there's structural institutional forces that determine norms. But each one of us is a link in the node and has influence of how those things are shaped. I just have to, it's very tricky. It's easy to say like we need to disidentify culture from nation for instance. To say nations, borders, nations need to conceive of themselves in a more pluralist sense and to detach identity from nationality is an important first step. Like that would be the logical argument in a sort of leftist pluralist agenda, which is my agenda. But we have to remember also that the function of a nation historically has not always been the same thing and to equate nation and identity has been not only a colonial force or a force of maintaining power or a face of erasing difference as in the institution of a dictionary or a national language that erases micro dialects and et cetera, but it's also been used to liberation like for liberatory means. Like for Haiti to declare a national identity to free themselves from their colonial power was a necessity for instance, I mean to name one. For nation states to form democracies to free themselves from feudalism was a necessity. So it's of course like it's real that that nations do participate in the forming of our identities and yeah. So and there's still institutions that are nationally funded artistic institutions. EU funded, city funded, all of these like outlines of where identity is shaped are important and we're all participating in them. So in a way that can't be completely discarded but they have to be questioned of course. Anyway, that was a little free jazz. Yeah, so it's up to each and every one of us to redefine these terms like nation, identity, culture, populace and to be part and parcel of the change we would like to see in the world in relation to language drift but also in relation to just the world as it is changing. Poet Charles Bernstein in an interview with Curtis Fox on November 6th, 2018 for the Poetry Foundation said, the world is not a given, the world changes based on our descriptions and projections of it. What could be a more accurate statement given the so-called post-truth social climate we are living in? The world is not a given, the world changes based on our descriptions and projections of it. The traumas and ruptures of the post-truth era are exposing the holes and tears in the fabric of our co-constructed reality. As long as the left holds on to rationality as the only way to save truth and accuses the right of emotional propaganda, we allow populist movements that have no concern for the populace to use the division between the elite and the excluded to pretend or between the rational minded and the emotional, the governmental and the actual social, these false divides to use those false divides to pretend to give the excluded a voice. Artistic practices, social practices and discursive practices that listen to the murmur of the multitude with exactitude are what are needed now. And that is as much about how we listen as it is about how we speak. In a call for sensitivity to complexity, chaos and emotional intelligence, my talk unfolds the relation between nonsense, nuisance, like trouble to cause trouble, provoke nuisance. And new sense. And new sense, as well as other axes along which artists and other cultural workers can promote a more pluralist conception of the populace. I want to address questions of the art and the age of populism conference in relationship to the divide between rationality and emotionality and public discourse among other non-helpful divides that hinder the complex pluralist populist poetics. Rationality is but an island in the totality of human thought and understanding. The history of democracy as noted yesterday in Eric's talk from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution has favored rationality as the guiding force of democracy. But it is certainly not the only faculty at our disposal as humans capable of understanding other humans. And it is most definitely not the primary faculty being exercised and trained by most humans today in the highly effective and emotionally driven attention economy which I will talk about later. How can intelligent public discourse include emotions and rationality in a non-binary and inclusive mode of understanding through respecting various media of thought which I will also address later. Chantal Mouff has pointed out that one of the failures of the left has been to the failures of the left has been to exclude passions from politics favoring rational argumentation over emotional persuasion and propaganda. It is necessary to include emotional intelligence as well as other forms of understanding all of them through all of our senses. Not just to gain political influence but to actually be able to understand each other and to live in a world populated by many others and of increasing difference. Increasingly loud and visible differences. How can the arts bring us closer not only to imagining a better future as mentioned yesterday, but to sensing more accurately and acutely with all of our sense faculties and sense-making faculties the reality we already inhabit. For how could you imagine a change project without an adequate assessment of what is as it is? To embrace the whole complexity of the populace without masking contradictions and misunderstandings without simplifying and reducing struggles calls for radical interdisciplinarity and I don't mean like some fetishized interdisciplinary of the art world like a multimedia show with video and singing and whatever. I mean radical interdisciplinary like really embracing different media of thought, different ways of thinking, different schools of thought and that they necessarily have to make efforts of translation or understanding what could be the conceptual frameworks that can hold these differences together. A radical interdisciplinarity that respects all forms of communication and sense-making. Each of us embodies a pluralism of senses and sensibilities. Each of us is a many in one who assumes a different role or identity according to the different groups and networks we move within and each one of us is changing. To adequately recognize each other as such requires an anti-identitarian, multi-sensory and multi-level approach to ourselves and to each other not just a multi-level approach to politics or to the city or to the nation but a multi-level approach to the many in one that is each and every one of us. When different registers of sense-making from the aesthetic and sensual to the social and cultural to the scientific and technical to the effective and emotional and et cetera are acknowledged and respected as a necessary pluralism of the senses then we can begin to think about pluralism not only in terms of identities but in terms of faculties which cut across demographic orderings. Am I speaking too quickly or are we doing okay? Too quickly? It's like it's recorded and live streamed. I can send you the PDF. Questions? Well, we got so little time and we started late, I'll do my best. Within each individual is also, I'll repeat a lot of stuff too. Within each individual, just listen, let it wash over you, it's good. Within each individual is also a population of minds equally present with or without having a voice. How can we think through our own cognitive effective pluralism as a first step in undoing cognitive biases and troubling cognitive dissonance? Are we familiar with the concept of cognitive bias? It's what you don't see because what you see is what you already know. This idea, it's not about pattern recognition but your recognition patterns like how your learned behaviors and everything you understand about the world frame and structure what you can still understand about the world, basically, cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance is when something confronts your world view that's already structured is dissonant with what you already understand and most of the time, there's a lot of perceptual studies thanks science that we really don't even see what we don't understand a lot of the time. What we don't already know is practically invisible to us consciously. That's a gross over generalization of what is more nuanced, obviously, in the perceptual world but you don't have time. So how is pluralism of media of thought? Media of thought is a concept I will unpack later. A model to approach other scales of silence and visibility, coherence and non-coherence. How can pluralism in thought bring us closer to understanding the complexity and messiness of experience of each other and of the world? The first issue or word concept I need to address is identity. In a round table hosted by Spike Art Magazine in Berlin on the 21st of April, 2017, between curators Heidi Ballet, Chris Durkin and Turdad Zolgdar. I don't say his name well, Zolgdar. I need to look that up. When Chris Durkin expressed his fear of the art world regressing into some 90s identity politics when they were talking about diversity and curation, Chris Durkin said, oh no, what do you want to go back to 90s identity politics? And he was kind of like squirming about that. And Turdad said identity politics are not an end but a necessary means. The identity of the artist is not the meaning of the work, but one means to understand it and above all a necessary consideration in the curation of who speaks to whom about what. Otherwise, how will we ever get beyond the persistent bias in Eurocentric North American Western traditions of art, philosophy, science and literature in short any form of authorship or authority that allows authors of a certain color, white, gender, male and sexual orientation straight to speak about the world as if from a neutral and invisible position of clairvoyance and genius and assumes that everyone else is busy with identity politics. This is, no, this is very important. I would like to make note here of the last question in the discussion after yesterday's keynote speech when asked how a white cisgendered heterosexual man will prepare themselves for a more pluralist and diverse conception of the populist. First, the question was watered down to what place does the innocent white male have? And then the answer was more or less with recourse to Marx that the oppressed are responsible for the revolution, not the oppressors. Both of these moves were complete and utter cop out with all due respect to both Guy and Eric to the real questions at hand, which are how will the white man prepare himself for true diversification? We're facing, it's a very serious issue right now because sexism, racism is as hard for white men. It's not nice to be put in that position for men who don't want to assume it as hard as it is for other people. So it's all of our job to deal with this. And it is also, it's a real problem today. Stieglitz, the economist Stieglitz in his book, The Great Divide, he talks about the erasure of the middle class and how this expectation that white men had graduating from school that they should assume positions of power is what's causing great disappointment and anger and suicide rates among 30 some odd white men, which are the big force behind the Tiki torch bearing populist movements and nationalist identitarian movements we see everywhere today. So this like white man pain is a real problem that turns violent if we don't recognize that all of our responsibility of thinking that power looks like a white man in a suit is violent and it's not good for anybody. So that's the first step. I would like to, yeah. So I also noted that I would like to know here also the blindness of privilege to speak as no one or to be speaking from a position of authority that is implied in terms like universal human rights. When Eric suggested some kind of transcendence of national identity through recourse to the human, who else would use such terms as universal human rights than a white male? Because no one else believes in the universal human because no one else in the history of Western patriarchy has been represented in sculptures, paintings, scriptures and all sorts of narratives as the universal human. Everyone else as far as I can see from where I stand besides a white heterosexual cis-gendered man is a particular kind of human who must be speaking with a particular kind of interest. And that is the first step wherein the arts have a duty and a responsibility and an ability to change who is a subject of contemporary democracy. Who has a voice? Who speaks for whom and how? And here I reiterate identity is not an ends but a means, a necessary consideration. Diversity is a necessary criteria for evaluating what kinds of identities are represented and what positions of power or visibility. And it's everyone's job to undo and destabilize the structural inequalities that continue to give power to white men and consider all others as othered. But curatorial labels that use minority groups as niche market signifiers for your festival or your mini-focus on queer art or whatever. Now we're gonna do some to torque festival. These are not affirmative of diversity or productive of visibility. They also reinstate the invisibility of apparently unnecessary modifiers, white, male, and heteronormative. To describe the highest earning and most celebrated artists as well as the most powerful people in any profession working today. The white supremacist patriarchy maintains its invisible neutrality by categorically naming everyone except straight white men of European descent as racialized, gendered, sexualized, foreign, othered and continually marginalized. This also translates directly to market value as devaluation, maintaining the historic links between economic inequality, race, and gender. Excavating this stronghold of dominance is two-fold. Straight white men ought to be named as such and everyone else deserves equal rights to anonymity, objectivity, innovation, and other intellectual privilege that has been asymmetrically distributed for centuries. The Xenofeminist Manifesto, authored by the moniker Laboria Kubonix by a number of authors together, in fact, quote, declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular. You can find the Xenofeminist Manifesto online, of course. This is one of the early promises of the internet which quickly was co-opted by a kind of hypercapitalism that feeds off of identity assertion in the technologically mediated sociality of the information age. Doing the exact inverse, then granting the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular, social media force us to constantly affirm and assert an identity. Rather than allowing for anonymity, the internet with its major investors have captured us in identity affirming algorithmic bubbles, wherein it is not only forbidden to use a false moniker on Facebook, for example, try as they may to control it, but all of your clicks, your shares, your comments, and navigations online are monitored in order for the media moguls of the internet to feed you more of what you already think, hence affirming cognitive bias, whether you like it or not. No wonder we are trapped in a new form of tribalism where clusters of people who identify with each other gather in echo chambers of polarized belief. More on this later. True diversity means anyone having the right to appear as nobody. It means having people of color, women, trans, and non-binary gendered people and not only the able-bodied in positions of visibility and power without having to be labeled as anything other than in a position of power. Everyone in this room has the potential to affect this change. In the programs you curate, in the institutions where you work, in the positions you hire for. In the invisible and innocent neutrality of the white heterocyst gendered male, the call-out culture of naming what has been previously imminent and unspoken is a necessary step towards leveling the playing field, but the inverse gesture is also necessary. I said this already. Everybody should be permitted to occupy generic, unmarked, and major spaces, changing the face of hegemony itself. But demographic diversity is only one step, a way in which identity is a necessary means, but not an end. The other way that identity is a means and not an end is that we are all changing. The identity we assume right now will change when we are engaged in different activities, in different groups, and changes throughout our lives. I, like you, am a process. Whether or not I am willing or aware, I am changed and changing. I, like you, in order to feel in correspondence with my reality, wish to be seen as changing and permitted to change. Acknowledging change and allowing others to change means not assuming you know anything about a person's mind no matter how long you've been acquainted and most certainly not based on appearances. Acknowledging change and allowing others to change means also allowing the white cisgendered heterosexual old men to change. Ask your grandfather or your boss what their preferred gender pronoun is. Maybe it's changed. We, like everything, are constituted by dynamic processes of change in constant negotiation between order and chaos, between entropy and organization. In all of our actions, we are participating and implicated in the continual ordering and reordering of our co-constructed reality. Socially, culturally, psychically, emotionally, biologically, environmentally, materially, physically, anatomically, cosmologically, symbolically, in our language, representationally, in our images. To be is to change and to change is to be. Perception itself is a matter of sensitivity to change and difference in time. Identity formation of any kind at any level is a reduction of the constant flux and chaos of a being or thing. To recognize consistency and repetition in the change of another being is to identify them. To perform one's own resistance to disorganizing forces is to assert an identity. Identities are virtual objects, useful like names or numbers for consolidating and simplifying our understandings of things. Through the creation of categories and values, through affinity and comparison, creating sets and subsets and relations and systems of meanings with them, but nothing more. Unfortunately, it is much more in the art market. The symbolic value of an identity transforms directly into market value in the professionalization of one's activity. As a professional artist, it has been my determined interest to resist my own transformation from a complex changing and dynamic system of forces into an identity. Mostly it's painful to insist that I'm not what I was. The transformation of noise into information, of chaos into order of sense perceptions into sense of being into identity all depends on an observer's ordering mind to produce such orders. Identity is a question of being seen. Identification is the activity of an observer. It is also performative. We perform identities. If we are to sensitize ourselves to the nuances, complexities and volatility of each other, we have to be able to constantly question our frameworks of seeing, our cognitive biases, the ordering structure of our perception of others. Artistic authorship is a process of arrangement and composition which proposes to all who engage with the artwork an effective and cognitive experience in which the basic processes of pattern recognition and interpretation are at stake. Making arts is a means by which people offer others, offer each other ways of seeing, feeling, sensing and understanding. In contemporary art, we're looking for new ways of seeing, feeling, sensing and understanding are encouraged. The concept of artistic identity is a true paradox, a catch 22. If you have formed a comprehensible, recognizable and stable artistic identity, it means you're repeating yourself. So what is new and how are you contemporary? If you fail or refuse to maintain a stable artistic identity, it's very hard to sell your art because money likes certainty and it's hard to get anyone to invest in something too unstable. I have learned to talk about what I do in descriptive terms and certainties. I have learned to project futures and promises into my practice in order to secure resources. All of this certainty while it is the only way for me to support my art is poison in my artistic mind. Because I consider it my duty as an artist driven by curiosity and attracted to that which I do not yet understand. It's my duty to speak in other terms and to make space for experiences and discourses that reflect my fundamental and our fundamental complexity and instability. Artistic practice and especially being a dancer constantly reminds me of how I am changed by what I do. It humbles me and it makes me full of doubt. Art is a learning process. Artworks are ciphers for ways of seeing and thinking through the world in the world about things in the world. I'm not interested in asserting statements about my artwork nor about my artwork that should foreclose any possibility for the work in its search for new insight to do its work. So please, to everyone in this room whose job it is to market, produce, publicize, curate, fund and support artistic work, I ask you to be vigilant about where and how you are asking for certainty. Where and how you are asserting identity on a situation that maybe doesn't want it. Stay with the trouble, hover in what you don't understand and maybe you'll start to see more of what you didn't already know. Sorry if I'm preaching a little bit. Gotta use my platform, you know? A proper openness to an artwork's aesthetic informational properties allows any artwork to be about anything and therefore also allows anyone and everyone the position of truth claim and the possibility to speak as anyone. Here we're talking about the relation between artist and artwork. The possibility to speak as anyone is a crucial tool in fiction, for example and in traditions of performance. Fiction shapes reality by informing imaginations and figuring the possible. Actors, dancers, performers, writers exercise various methods of becoming other through embodying fictions. A sophisticated and sensitive differentiation and relation between the artist and their artwork allows at the baseline any artist's work no matter the genre to show us ways of seeing anything or anyone else in the world other than the artist. If we engage our senses intelligently we can read the artwork itself for indications of the extent to which and how the art regards the artist's gender, sex, race, creed, religion, class, body or politics and the extent to which the art turns its gaze elsewhere. Each artwork and each artist is an individual node in a complex effective system of relations. Each node, each person and each thing they make positions itself uniquely towards the entire system. It is our job as attendees, witnesses and observers of things made by others to study closely the things in themselves for information about the forces that brought them into being, including but not confined to the authors, conscious and subconscious intentions, ideologies and identities. Even for the artist who aims at frictionless self-expression with no cognizance of their own constructedness and with no acknowledgement of the many forces and influences that speak through them, artists are not identical with their artworks and one does not explain the other. Artistic identity is also therefore a flawed concept insofar as it normally functions through the identity of the artist themselves and through the identification of the artist and the artwork. This is a direct result of the art market and its practices of representation, promotion and circulation of artworks in which the artist's name accumulates and carries value through their individual artworks rather than their ideas. Galleries and theaters don't pay for ideas, they mostly bet on authors, which is why a perfectly forged replica of a Picasso is worthless, but the original signed Picasso is worth millions. Why the thousands of artist assistants and collaborators throughout the world who craft and influence the work of well-known artists remain anonymous and why a mysterious piece called Untitled didn't tour when it was presented anonymously in 2005, at 10th of August by a group of well-known choreographers whose other works tour very successfully when attached to their names. In light of the enormous institutional and economic force that sustains the commodification of an artist's identity and how that translates directly to font size of single author's names being larger than the piece, being larger than the collaborators, how could audiences and critics not think of artworks as artists and vice versa? Certain qualities of an artist's mind, their ways of thinking, their ways of sensing and seeing are in the artwork, but the artwork is not necessarily a transposition or translation or representation of their identity, their inner workings or even of an ideology which they must represent. It's possible that an artist's artwork even represents ideologies and formal structures in the world that they themselves don't represent. A Nazi can paint a painting of the black forest that has nothing to do with nationalism. Maybe it shows me biodiversity that is directly antithetical to the ideologies that the Nazi who painted the black forest represents. Just for an example, to read the artwork always through the artist to concern interpretation of the work with the author's conscious or unconscious intentions, if taken alone, reduces the artwork to autobiography and psychoanalysis. Such reduction precludes the possibility of the artwork to be evidence of things in the world besides the author. The differentiation of artists and artwork allows the artwork to do its job, that is, to offer ways of seeing the world and not just ways of seeing the artist. I have to move forward, but yeah. A close reading of an artwork can tell you a lot about the artist and a lot about the world, but a close reading of both artists and artwork, separate but bound in relation, tells you more about both and about the worlds they each engender. Individual artworks and individual artists, like individual audience members, are each unique constellations of actual forces in the world. Everyone and everything is a compression of dynamic forces and in themselves represents or stands as evidence of those constitutive forces. All unique perspectives, all of these individual units evidencing different structural possibilities are necessary for an adequate representation of the world. No model, however abstract, will ever be able to accurately and sufficiently picture the world as it is. No worldview is complete. Pluralism is therefore a necessity for comprehension of reality as it is. Like in a mathematical model, if you start with a polygon and we say each edge or each angle is a perspective and you multiply those perspectives until basically you have a sphere, right? You see the mathematical model. That's pluralism constituting the world versus the sphere which is smooth. In the pluralist, it would never be, it would always have texture. You'd have a very spiky globe but you would never have a smooth abstraction of the world. That's, yeah, anyway. To conclude this section on identity, art can teach us just this section on identity because I still have to talk about the attention and economy and I still have to talk about art, more about art. To conclude this section on identity, art can teach us if we let it through a pluralism of the senses, through seeing, hearing, feeling and sensing, how to read things and people as evidence of whatever speaks through them as systems in themselves uniquely aligning and organizing the larger structures and forces they embody and inhabit. So this idea now of the many media of thought I need to address. There's a structuralist view that language speaks through you as much as you speak through it. So any utterance in a language expresses the grammars, syntaxes, codes, ideologies, histories, culture of that language. You could move this also to other media of thought. Like if I'm dancing, dance speaks through me as much as I speak through it. When I'm moving, all of my training, the history, the culture, all the patterns I embody, all of those are encoded and patterned. They're speaking in my dancing as much as I am speaking through them, they are speaking through me. So in his book Orality and Literacy, just a bit on language and how it's shaping, how our minds have been changing through language first. We'll talk about language. In his book Orality and Literacy, the technologizing of the world, Walter Ong traces how writing has completely shifted consciousness. So in primary oral cultures, primarily oral cultures, everything was embedded in a life world. There was no reality that was detached from a speaker in their bodies, in space and time. It was all very social and dialectic. It was all about the micro-identity and the immediate reality. With writing, we reached abstraction, analysis, and even concepts of time that were made possible only through the exteriorization of thought in writing. So people before writing didn't know what year they were born or what year it was. They didn't need to. It didn't mean anything. So the way that writing has shaped our consciousness, our perception of time, our way of living in the world is so huge. He writes about it in his book Orality and Literacy. Walter Ong, it's very interesting. And then he speaks about, he wrote this book in the 80s. So in the 80s, he then spoke about a second orality with film, no, with television, radio, and telephone. What we're experiencing now is like a third orality, I think, where with a computer in every pocket and the total mediatization of our language, and doing this all the time, and doing this all the time, language has been compressed to be closer to orality. So language drift is accelerating also outside of the sort of historic modern nation states that produced dictionaries and kind of controlled the sort of dialectic diversity that's all kind of, that's coming up again. And that's part of the new tribalism that we're living in. It's like a new, it's like a third orality in the terms of Walter Ong. And this also has to do, so we have to move now into the discussion of the attention economy. What's happening also with the increase of information in our consciousness is that we used to function in information scarcity and through, we would learn things internalizing and externalizing, writing and reading or whatever, talking and listening. And now there's so much more externalized information that our interiorization of information has decreased. It's all in the cloud or hard drives or you can look it up on Wikipedia. So now there's an increased externalized amount of information, but also everybody has this experience of being bombarded with too much information, which is why people also reject what they don't understand. So this cognitive bias is not only in the algorithmic bubbles of Google feeding you what you already think and what you already want to hear, but it's also just in the fact that you are fed too much information that you feel overwhelmed but overwhelmed with familiarity actually, overwhelmed with noise. It's not information. It's not new knowledge. Most of it is just noise. So people are naturally in this rejecting of information mode. So technology is doing this to us in a very real way that we have to face and understand and become a part of. Well, James Williams, and he's sort of the authority on attention economy. He tells the story of, what's his name? Diogenes, he was basically the closest thing to a modern day troll, living in like a little ceramic pot in the marketplace and Alexander the Great was a big fan of him and Alexander the Great walked over one day to Diogenes and he says, what can I give you? I want to give you anything. And Diogenes was like very sour, very critical, very fun, made fun of everybody. He was just like very sharp. I know I have to finish then. And James Williams, no, sorry. Diogenes says, stand out of my light. You're blocking my light. This is basically what's happening in the attention economy is all of these people, Facebook, Netflix, Google, et cetera, they're standing there saying, what do you want? Let me give you more of what you want. And actually they're standing in our light, literally. The attention economy functions by keeping our, there's three terms they use. Starlight, daylight, and spotlight. Attention, spotlight is where your media attention is, like what you're looking at right here right now. Daylight is the collective sort of mindedness, like what do we all see together here in the daylight? And starlight is like the North Star, your guiding dreams and visions. Prior to the attention economy, whose only aim is to hold our attention in spotlight, just hold our attention, that's it, because our attention is money. Your starlight and your daylight would determine what you do with your spotlight. But now your spotlight is determined by forces that have no interest in your daylight or your starlight. So there's a great article in The Economist you can find about how the attention economy is destroying our democracy, because it's erasing daylight, but also destroying our ability, like it was said yesterday, that artists' job is to imagine a different future. This notion of starlight, what you wanna move towards, larger goals and dreams and visions, is also completely obscured. So what kind of imagination do you have when spotlight is completely shaped and formed? So that spotlight, being guided by algorithmic stuff and et cetera, is actually shaping and obscuring and changing where starlight is or where daylight is. So, boy oh boy. There's also in the attention economy what gets the most clicks. Emotionally, the strongest emotion that's encouraged is outrage. So we're emotionally being trained to be angry. So these are all the conditions and forces in the world that are making populism completely possible right now. It's not the same populism as in the 30s, but it has the same aims. It's still a strategy to maintain power and to give those without a voice the impression that they have a savior somewhere. But the means of operation are completely different. So this emotional appeal of the clickonomy, so to speak, is fueled by outrage. You're supposed to be angry. That's how you will hold your attention to your device and keep commenting or liking its rage and humor. Humor is like the minor second, but outrage is huge. So, and then yeah, and there's no responsibility towards democracy or meaning production in any of these media mogul companies. I mean there's a quote, Netflix said, they named their major competitors as YouTube, Instagram, and Sleep. And Mark Zuckerberg, after the 2016 elections, he said, our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, identifying the truth is complicated. That was after the 2016 elections, basically by saying like, it's not our job to deal with journalism, truth, not my problem. I just show you what's meaningful. So it's like it's all effective that we're being pulled into very emotional registers. So in a way to coming back full circle to the Chantal Mouff thing of inviting passions into politics, we need to upgrade our emotional intelligence, our sensitivities through other media of thought than this one. And that's in short what art can do. Art is often still in a daylight setting. It's about the time and space we share, offering ways of seeing and feeling and sensing through different media of thought, not just language, not just screens, but color, texture, sound, vision, touch, affect, sensation. Not just to remodel the imaginary, but to reorder the sensible in the Ranciere sense of the aesthetics of the politics of aesthetic. I think it's very important that we all take care that art can also, what art can also do in this very identitarian age of populism is to allow us a space to trouble the simplifying, identifying tendencies that allow something like populism to take place. So offering a safe space for confusion and in a place to wrestle with cognitive bias I think is very important here also. So it's even on our level, our job to undo our attachment to concepts of identity as ways of seeing. And the last thing I wanna just talk about is this relation between nonsense, nuisance and nuisance. So there's nonsense that's negligible that doesn't make any sense and we don't care and it doesn't bother us. And then there's nonsense that has enough tethering to the daylight, to the world as it is that other people perceive and the words they use to describe it that produces a nuisance. So nonsense that troubles what we think makes sense enough to produce a friction for new sense. And I think practices that engender complexity and sensitivity allow for a softening or a displacement of the borders between order and chaos, between noise and information. The ways that we make sense of each other in the world are allowed to move and shift in artistic experiences that let that happen. There's artistic experiences that are very identity-oriented and simplifying but maybe it's about paying attention to which ones we're giving space to that can offer a dismantling of these maybe identitarian tendencies. To be destroyed, to lose your identity and to lose your recognition patterns in the space of art can translate to a different world beyond art, I hope. And then my time is very up. I wanted to have time for discussion but we started really late so send me an email. Info at goodmove.be.