1A NEW FORM OF OPEN SCORE
Psychic Architecture
Cast of Characters
Michael Connor: A man in his 30s
Brian Droitcour: Yelp Elite '13, '14
Ann Demeulemeester: A woman in her 50s
Juliana Huxtable: A woman in her 20s
Next Panelist: The next panelist
Helen Connor: Michael's mother
Carol Droitcour: Brian's mother
Lucy Demeulemeester: Ann's mother
Clair Huxtable: Juliana's mother
THIRDLOOKintern: A twitter account read daily by every other character. Does not actually show up at any point in the script
Scene
New Museum theatre
Time
The recent past
ACT I
SCENE I
SETTING: We are in the basement level theatre of New Museum
MICHAEL
Thanks for coming. I am nervously excited and paralyzed by anxiety to announce the panelists for A NEW FORM OF OPEN SCORE, a panel on the psychic architecture of conversation design as it relates to art. Through the process of expectation, we are designing, building and inhabiting a new form of architecture. For example, right now I'm sitting in my office imagining how the Open Score panel I'm moderating later today will play out.
The first panelist I'd like to introduce is Brian Droitcour.
BRIAN
Hey man what's up.
MICHAEL
Uh, hi Brian. Brian is an editor at Art in America, edited The Animated Reader poetry collection, and is a budding social media chiropterist. Brian, can you briefly explain your background in psychic architecture and art?
BRIAN
Totally. Basically I imagine stuff all day long, and on all different timelines even. It's nuts, like I'll be about to catch a wave at Riis and briefly imagine and mentally design how the wave will break in the next 2 seconds. Or I'll envision what the landscape of contemporary poetry will look like over the course of the next 30,000 years through the Neanderthal Resurgence and the Sapiens Wars. I basically consider myself a professional at this point.
(BRIAN tilts head back and shakes his sun-blond hair once)
MICHAEL
The next panelist I want to introduce is Ann Demeulemeester. Ann has been working with mental spaces, and the outward physical projection of self-perception through clothing since the launch of her eponymous fashion house in the early 80s.
ANN
Thanks Michael it's great to be here. Psychic architecture is an ancient practice predating the earliest known examples of human physical architecture in 40,000 BCE.
MICHAEL
Juliana Huxtable is a poet, artist, model and DJ. Her work was included in the 2015 New Museum Triennial. I hope many of you have had a chance to see Juliana Huxtable DJ as well, where she builds cohesive urgency and freedom of expression on the dancefloor. Maybe you were at Holy Mountain in February 2015 when she played Total Freedom's Get Low remix at 4am, an instance that felt like the perfect highlight of my life for months. But my personal favorite Juliana Huxtable memory is from Miami Basel 2014 when I walked into Sandbar at 2am and Juliana is playing brutal pounding techno to a completely empty dancefloor. I went to the center of the dancefloor alone, stood there for about 3 or 4 minutes and then left.
JULIANA
I remember that night at Sandbar too. It's interesting you bring that up now at this panel. So far we have discussed the architecture of expectation, design choices in the imagination and visualization of events yet to occur. The world and design of our memories is continuously reimagined, in complete flux. By accessing your memory of that night, you are redesigning and overwriting what the music sounded like, what I looked like on stage, how the sandy floor felt as you moved to the center of the room and stood still.
MICHAEL
How does the temporal vantage point-be it before, during or after the event-modify the process of psychic architecture?
NEXT PANELIST
(looks up from their phone for first time and you can see their gaunt face, lips swollen blue from neuroin addiction)
Excuse me you didn't introduce me yet how are you going to start posing discussion questions like I'm not even here?
MICHAEL thinks
You aren't here. I changed my mind there are only 3 panelists.
MICHAEL
Sometimes I listen to music and it evokes a powerful memory of seeing the artist perform the song live. Or sometimes I listen to music and imagine myself at a vague future party hearing the same song and dancing. And I am filled with anticipation for that envisioned moment. In this way, the music forms a hyperlink to the future or past.
ANNE
So I actually know exactly what you mean, I do that all the time. Like I'm listening to One by Trackman and imagining when Objekt played it at a party in Miami during Basel last year, or when Function played it at the Bunker 10 year anniversary party last month. On top of both those layers, while listening to the song on my headphones on the subway or while walking through soho, I visualize hearing the song at a rave in the future and completely letting go.
JULIANA
I love that track.
BRIAN
Yeah, Trackman and Maya Jane Coles are my favs to listen to early mornings riding the subway out to Rockaway with my board. This is a really cool point about music as hyperlink or nodal point between past, present and future. And it reminds me of the way that, like, when listening to a song on really bad speakers like someone's laptop or a small portable radio at the beach, the song can still be so powerful to me. Like if I know the song really well and it's one of my favs, I can listen to it on totally degraded speakers with no bass and still get killer chills down my back since the song is evoking my intimate familiarity and precise memories of what it sounds like.
JULIANA
And the same can happen for art. I can look at photos I took on my phone at Neue Galerie or images in a Diana Al-Hadid book and be vividly brought back to the immersive feeling of seeing the work in person, and level of detail of texture, space and smell from being 10 inches away.
ANNE
It's not fair though. Using images as access points to deeper memories of a past experience propagates structures of privilege and access. The mass produced access in books, or low resolution images online have higher value and emotional response to those who have the means and access to the in person experience. The uselessly tiny pictures in the book Raf Simons: Redux are the perfect example of this. The 4 centimeter images remind me of the original pieces and the beauty and symbolism he used. But they contain insufficient detail for subsequent generations to draw from and learn from them.
MICHAEL thinks
God this is going perfectly. I really want to check my phone I wonder if I can get away with it quickly right now while everyone is watching the panelists.
(checks phone below table)
Wtf no more people fav'd my tweet about a psychic prison of my own making. That was FUNNY
JULIANA
Another example that comes to mind for nodal points connecting past present and future is here at New Museum actually. Every time I'm on the 4th floor I notice how much dust has accumulated on the windowsills. This isn't an architectural feature unique to SANAA's New Museum either. Yoshio Taniguchi implemented the same feature in MOMA's central atrium; the windowsills facing MOMA's central atrium are rich with dust motes. Each time I visit, the artwork displayed shifts and changes, and different people are in the museum with me, and I myself am a different person. But the personal moments I share with the accumulated dust-and the largest dust motes I'm sure have a life of their own-link me back to the last time I stood there weeks or months earlier.
ANN
Like a Heraclitus everything flows, except dust...perhaps.
BRIAN thinks
I wonder what the waves are like at 92nd Street right now. There're gonna be some killer breaks today I hope I don't miss it cause of this panel. But that would be OK too. There will be good waves again in the future.
JULIANA thinks
Omg that's zen af Brian lol.. wait u can't hear me can u
MICHAEL
I want to bring it back to the psychic architecture of these moments. What level of detail do you put into your psychic designs? When do you notice more detail or less detail?
ANN
So actually yes, recalling memories is thrilling because each small memory triggers the unpacking of a rich emotional experience. My strongest memories have significantly higher detail and depth than any of my psychic architecture. Layers and depths, reinterpreted through nostalgia and introspection, fun or sadness or loneliness or ecstasy or slightly different self.
That only past memories and not future memories-a term I use to refer to psychic architecture or the anticipated memories I haven't lived yet-are this rich is a personal failure. As the architect I have only myself and lack of creative vision or effort to blame for the lack of detail.
JULIANA
Really good point. As an experiment I want to try building a future memory that's more richly populated with physical and emotional detail than any past memory.
BRIAN
Why bother you gotta live in the present more. Like what's the point of building such a rich world of memory? It's only accessible to you.
JULIANA
Who is the end user? It's you right? I don't think a constructed memory is any less legitimate than a so-called real memory. And it's not more legitimate either of course. I guess I apply a type of formalism to my mental world, evaluating the mental interior purely by its content and not the process or history by which it's created.
ANN
If the goal is high detail and rich emotion, then surely using real memories is easiest. They still make Hollywood movies by hiring actors. They don't yet simulate the entire thing frame by frame, and even completely animated films use real voice actors.
JULIANA
But they are closer than ever and might soon.
ANN
Eventually, you're right. What will that mean? That by watching a purely fabricated movie we share collective future memories?
JULIANA
It's relative, right. The future memory for you might be partially or completely inspired by the past memory of the filmmaker or artist.
MICHAEL
What are the repercussions of allowing these shared visions to come from a single source, propagating the normative perspective of individuals or teams?
ANN
Well, art and media are always about sharing perspectives. Optimistically-and naively-art is a way to share the mental interior of a diverse range of perspectives. When I read something someone else wrote, or see their art, that's a form of telepathy. I am sharing the thoughts, ideas and psychic architecture that previously existed only in the artists' heads.
But actually artists don't have equal power. Some have much louder voices, some have stronger networks. The privileged have more visibility and influence, and by creating their own work are inherently marginalizing everyone else.
JULIANA
In a way, the most subversive act is refusal to participate in the creative economy. By joining, each artist is complicit and therefore propagates the current system.
BRIAN
Yeah definitely. Psychic architecture is the way I escape. The world is arbitrary and, like, fascist and only in my own psychic designs, or the psychic designs of others, I guess, can a truly egalitarian society exist.
MICHAEL
How do you access that idealized egalitarian society?
BRIAN
On the waves, man. In my head, in music or in books. Any moment of completely nonverbal bliss is when I know I'm there. When I feel my center of gravity through the soles of my feet on my board. Or when I'm at a rave and bend over next to the speaker so my head's right in front of the subwoofer and I see the pitch black darkness of what I know should be the concrete floor I'm standing on, and my mind is blank.
JULIANA
We all have limitations and prejudices. By filling in details of psychic architecture, attempting to populate the virtual psychic-scape with complete detail, I am ineluctably perverting or destroying any utopia. The utopian and egalitarian mental space Brian is talking about, I can only create it vaguely. As soon as I fill in more details it becomes corrupt.
MICHAEL
Is this a form of escapism? Escapism from the real world, giving up on real change?
ANN
There is a privileged selfishness to accelerationism and nihilism. To say things need to get worse before they can get better, or that nothing matters, is massively insensitive to the marginalized members of society who suffer most. In that sense, escapism is irresponsible and, even, reprehensible.
BRIAN
What Juliana just said though. That, like, by participating artists or any member of society are complicit in propagating the oppression of mainstream society. We aren't withdrawing, we are creating a new space collectively.
JULIANA
What I believe is that, collectively, when as many members of society build and immigrate to our vague utopian spaces, that will be reflected in reality too.
BRIAN
Yeah like when can every human die and the universe revert to its natural life and death cycles with happy plants and rocks and oxygen molecules and huge perfect waves.
MICHAEL
We have reached the limits of my attention span. Let's reflect briefly. What was your favorite moment of today's panel? I'll start by saying Brian, I love what being a surfer has done for you. Your attitude is almost unrecognizable, and your hair and strong shoulders look great. You'll have to take me surfing sometime.
BRIAN thinks
Do I like the movie Dogville more than Pariah? Pariah is so good and I hella cried but Dogville feels more comprehensive and references so many political and social aspects of American and humanity. Wait crap is Michael talking to me.
BRIAN
Hahaha totally man anytime.
MICHAEL
... and Brian what was your favorite moment of today's panel?
BRIAN
Oh good question, man. My favorite part is basically the structure of this session itself, Michael. I love that you are effectively creating a fanfiction of your own panel, fantasizing about what you want to happen even while you must know on some level the irrelevance of this exercise as preparation for the so-called real panel. The actual panel will be nothing like this. Just your process of imagining it is fun though. Exploratory and satisfies the, like, anxiety you are feeling.
JULIANA
We didn't talk about it explicitly, but I love the tragic heroism in trying to create utopian mindscapes built from memories of loved ones lost, lost time, things past. They are created from real memories and real interactions with people—Basel parties, Holy Mountain. But interactions with the real world and real people can also be traumatically destructive to our abilities as psychic architects. For example no one new fav'ing Michael's tweet during the panel. Our lives rooted in the real world are the building blocks and lifeblood for our internal worlds. But the pain we feel in the real world is unbearable and we build utopian psychic architecture for the explicit purpose of escaping.
Overall my favorite part was the way our panel itself-especially the mutual love for One by Trackman we discovered-serves as hyperlink to such rich memories and emotions. And we find they are not lost to time or death or memory.
ANN
So I actually was thinking of saying exactly that, Juliana. Amazing. But actually I guess my favorite specific moment is something else you said earlier, Juliana. I loved what you said about dust as architecture, and what you implied about the world of dust. The dust on the windows sills of New Museum or MOMA or anywhere absolutely has its own desires and aspirations. And as responsible beings cohabiting the same world it's our responsibility to ask how we can best help dust motes achieve their dreams.
JULIANA
What are you doing after this? Want to get dinner together?
ANN
Perfect, let's continue this conversation at Souen.
(BLACKOUT)
(END OF SCENE)
