<<
Peter Weibel
THE LIBERATED OBJECT
CODING AS DESIGN
In the discourse of liberation defined by classical modern movements such as cubism, futurism, suprematism, constructivism, productivism, De Stijl, etc., an aesthetic utopism emerged, which extended from the easel painting to all realms of human life. From Malevich to Mondrian, from Tatlin to Doesburg there were thus not only works within the visual arts, but also in architecture and in daily production. The pictorial principles gained color, form, surface material in the wars of independence and found themselves transformed again in the world of objects. In concealed form, the liberation of the object inscribed in modernism, which led to the independence of color, form and surface, i. e., to abstract art (to art informel) produced a negative dialectic subtext. The liberation of form, color and material is followed by the liberated object itself, the last link in this chain. This becomes manifest in the suppression of the formal principle by means of the principle of neoplastic design.
In the second half of the 20th century the avantgarde program finds its continuation. After almost all painterly and pictorial means have been liberated, it is now the object that marks the beginning of this movement of liberation which is being liberated. Like the transition from giving something form to design, design is now being succeededby coding as a new aesthetic principle. We are living in an age in which coding is emerging as a new means of design. The suppression of design, however, has not led to a new spirituality, as " the spiritual in art " in Kandinsky and Mondrian whose theosophic underpinnings are known. Rather, it has ushered in an age of media and electronics which represent a new form of immateriality, i.e., the variable immateriality of news, the new form of design known as CODE. Coding is the structuring of information and data. Code is the attempt to apply the free manipulation and variability of the digital image to the world of objects. The liberated image in digital art and the liberated object correspond. The postmodern ambivalence of the object status correspond to the variable position of postmodern subjectivity. They are the two ends of one rope hung over the abyss of politics. The liberated object is the last station of modernism's aesthetic utopianism.
The forms of the objects and their relationships is painfully at odds with man's desire for experience. Not an insurrection of the abstract but one of subjectivity against the object can provide relief for this pain. Ontology and metaphysics of occidental subjectivity are dealt with in the living room to which the world of objects of the bourgeois individual has shrunken: furniture-morals, furniture-metaphysics. In this "delusionary room" (J.B. Blume) the vacant chair is the "self", the table the arena of phallic selfassertion.
Furniture collapse, because morals are always the morals of a class that is on the decline. Furniture, derived from the French I'mouble ", originally referred to movable property as opposed to "res immobiles", non-movable assets such as property, etc. The fact that furniture, once something movable, also appears to us to be something immovable, has to do with the intellectual change of an epoch, with the transformation of subjectivity in the industrial age. It also has to do with the fact that the living room has become a metaphor of the mind's fear of change. in this realm between movable assets (movement) and non-movable ones (non-movement), the subject moves motivus (motivating). An expression of this motive (revolt), French: revolt, this mutiny again furniture as immovables is the liberation of the object from its rigidity, its stability, its identity and its transformation into a code. The free subject rebels against one-directional objects since the human mind is entitled to multi-directional objects and a multi-dimensional world. The digital code transforms the world into a field of variables.
excerpt from a lecture held at the 29th International Art Talks of the Galerie naechst St. Stephan, March 16, 1985.