intro / stress is the inevitable outcome of a system that incorporates every gesture into a global competition for resources. it is a condition that announces the brutal inscription of a system of production pushing the body's endurance to ever new limits. stress seeps into the body, shaping flesh, dreams, images, desire, policies, products, life forms, value, violence. stress expands into the world, creating a new, post-natural ecology, aimed at the ultimate fusion of capital and nervous systems. the techno-neuronal system produced by this stressed ecology provides contemporaneity with a new gestural lexicon for the human body behavioural templates for the survival of the fittest. parts of this lexicon were identified, alphabetised, explored, and rendered in their visual / visceral aspect in the installation STRESS.alarm / clocks ticking ubiquitously, in alarming precision, regulate the global system. electronic impulses synchronise labour with capital, missiles with targets, catastrophes with their images. gradually, the constant state of alertness this ceaseless pulsing provokes is embodied as state of emergency. alarming clocks everywhere, counting the beat, from birth to dying.
blitzkrieg / total mechanisation recofigures the temporal experience of violence. the tedious pace of wars of attrition is replaced by lightning bursts of highly concentrated destruction. in order to deliver such concentrated brutality, the state endures a profound metamorphosis. it can no longer conceive of itself as geographical extension - it must evolve into a predatory organism. as predator, the state's circuitry must be streamlined toward rapid information gathering. its infrastructure must be designed toward swift discharges of force. its ethos must be to strike only to kill.
collapse / collapse maps the terrain beyond the boundary. beyond the threshold, there is struggle to regain composure, to reconstitute equilibrium, to feed the lungs starved for oxygen, to find our place in the world again, to understand the new conditions of this world, to assess he contours of this new life form, this new body, this new state of being beyond.
defenestration / there is a force attracting all masses - directly proportional to their distance. there is one threshold from beyond which there is no return. the point of no return announces the spectacular event, itself endowed with its own gravitational field, attracting masses of viewers whose size and attention are directly proportional to the event's horror, and inversely proportional to its potential for repitition.
exodus / every outburst of energy generates dislocation. this dislocation may be chaotic, or reveal a harmonic unfolding, like a wave. in either case, the displaced mass has only two foreseeable outcomes: either to crash violently into annihilation, or to dissipate quietly in a less agitated field. what can not be foreseen is how the energy generated by the forcedly displaced will return back to perform its revenge, whose name is history.
formation / its force field is sometimes discreet, sometimes anamorphic, and other times explicitly precise. in each case, bodies trapped within a formation capture with crystal clarity the contradictory tensions modernity has to resolve for the maintenance of its greatest invention - the monadic subject, oscillating between the mirage of individuality and the call of the mass. that such tension is managed by detailed regulation of individual motions within a larger collective body shows just how modernity's project is, first and foremost, a gigantic choreographic effort, in the most literal sense.
g-force / he thought of himself as matter: mass, surface, density, opacity. he thought of himself as measurable: height, weight, age, pulse. he thought of himself as structure: bones, ligamont, muscle, cartilage. he thought of the world as pure force, against which he would collide. once, he thought the world had turned purple; it was only is eyes flooding with blood. he always looked like a child after each experiment. he was constantly being photographed.
hailstorm / on the edge of everydayness, unsuspected shadows and colours vibrate continously with unique intensity and cadence. in the half-lit rooms of the world, a luminous beat lulls the scopic field, bathed by the hailstorming aura of the television era. content is overcome by form, form overflows into impression, impression dilutes into lightning flashes. television dances its magic inscription beyond the retina, on walk. it delivers not facts, but pulse.
invent / interruption, conditioning, recording, individual, vibration, pastine, evolution, advertising, speed, news, safety, work, planning, leisure, fission, freezing, codifying, impulse, instant.
jitterbug / "jitterbug" stands metonymically for any action in which "a glorious expediture of energy" takes place. "our industrial civilisation builds up tension: it confines people to patterns. the jitterbug relieves the tension in violent dance very free and unconfined," wrote african american choreographer katherine dunham in 1941. such expenditure without economy is absolute dance. the irony: as long as it remains an agent of relief, or discharge, jitterbug participates entirely in the very europhoria, anxieties and economy of stress.
karoshi / the link between capital and the body lies in the capacity of each to maintain constant output, and to increase this output in moments of crisis. when output falters, both the market and the body risk a perilous shock, whose conseqences include cardiac arrest, distress, or major capital drainage. the danger may be fatal. output is the life circle and the vicious circle of any stress-including system. failure to sustain it becomes the system's natural selection process.
logo / each day the average western citizen sees, assimilates, and recognises 16.000 different logos. these are so many lighthouses guiding us in our experience of the world. as graphic equivalent of the compass and as modern derivative of mediaval heraldry, the logo first of all tells us where we stand. its inscription on every landscape recasts space as site of perpetual recognition. its presence on every piece of garment recasts subjectivity as tribal.
mengele / permutation between thresholds of horror and thresholds of the socially acceptable are: imaginable but impossible; unimaginable but possible; imaginable and possible; unimaginable and impossible. when all four are in operation, it is the thresholds themselves that require revision - not because they have gone beyond their own conceivable limits, but because the limits have been introjected into the system's core. in the case of violence and horror, it is clear that a revision of their "exterior nature" to the boundaries of society is in order - for their "uniamginable impossibility" is nothing but the unmasking of the quiet routine of the system.
noise / modernity's process of individuation forgrounds character, the unique voice, the opinion. thus, a cacophony of the self slowly takes shape. as each voice begets a new voice, the old communal chorus a fragmented mass of soloists, each singing a unique song, each filling up the air with a competitive urge to out-solo every other voice. amidst the apparent noise, however, a vibrating force harmonises each soloing voice; a word centripetally summons the noisy soloists into the chorus line of progress: money.
ontology / when the constant desire to become another becomes the stability of being, and when this desiring being fuses intimately with the plasticity of matter, then ontology becomes synonymous with ecoogy.
panic / helmet, telephone, turbine, conveyor belt, escalator, money, barbie, television, electric chair, dentist's chair, ambulance, computer, surveillance camera, velcro, viagra, oncomouse, light bulb, uniform, car, deodorant, zoom lens, remote control.
quantity / new equations increasingly relate one thing to another thing, producing new quantifications of the world: incidents per passenger mile, defects per million, parts per billion, deaths per vertical meter, complaints per staff unit, stabbings per traffic hour, blood volume per minute. with every new, increasingly improbable relation a threshold is defined.
rupture / poachers, mercenaries, militias, hijackers, terrorists, vigilantes, assassins: central characters in the ecology of stress. when market forces are more than the market can bear, the result is a rupture of the membrane of power. violence spurts in the vent. poachers, terrorists, assassins step in, not as alien forces, but as intrinsic players in the economy and ecology of stress. they complement and guarantee the flow of information, goods, capital, power and of the violent images they help generate.
sense / the "ever changing same" bouncing against itself on the surfaces people create when they (trans)pose culture and reality.
time / the notion of time changes if it is no longer perceived as an ocean but becomes encapsuled in the body. the human body is 80% water and 100% time.
ultra / the intensified perception that all limits are destined to be surpassed finds its most abominable manifestation in the contemporary, telegenic, smooth-talking ultraconservative.
vertigo / urbanscapes stretch out as our new horizons, replacing and flattering out the old panoramic curve. the urban delivers space as continuous linearity and renders place as detachable form. everywhere feels here. as in a dream, the urbanspace stumbles in.
waiting / vladimir saying, "well? shall we go?" and estragon replying, "yes, let's go," and beckett adding the performative punch line for the drama of modernity: "[they don't move.]"
x / the sign of mystery, of the pornographic, of interdiction, of the experimental, of highly classified information is also the heraldic symbol of the systematic trespassing of unthinkable scientific thresholds. crossing away, the state hopes to mask its propensity to act as mad scientist.
yesterday / every incomplete past as it dreams of its fantastic future casts the experience of todayness as perpetual deja vu: the past erupts in the present to announce the immediate recognisable, and predictable. deja vu is a psychogenic state clinically linked with tiredness. when fatigue is the prevailing societal condition, deja vu becomes the collective back entrance for all of yesterday's postponed tomorrows.
zero / at the zero point of energy, when all should be at perfect rest, particles still endure infinitesimal vibration. this is the last threshold of the persistence of reality. zero announces not the beginning, nor the end, but the constant, microscopic, vibratile motion towards endless modification.
