Stop Recycling. Start Repairing.

Stop Recycling. Start Repairing.
- Arne Hendriks & Joanna van der Zanden

We didn’t write the Repair Manifesto to safe the planet or because throwing away things without a clear reason seemed ridiculous. We wrote it, together with Cynthia Hathaway, because we love the repaired object and the trace it bares, the history it portrays and the care it reflects. We wrote it because repair adds beauty to our lives and sets us free.

1. Extending the life of your products creates the opportunity to built a relationship with things. Something that can’t be done in a world of recycled disposables. If there is truth in the idea that things have a soul, it is probably the soul we project as part of our memories and our experiences with that thing. Every time you throw away something needlessly, you throw away the possibility to enrich your relationship with the world. To us the repaired object is a sign of intimicy between man and object.

2. In The Wastemakers, published in 1960, Vance Packard writes how during the forties and fifties designers were almost forced to create disposable products. The quality of cars, appliances, homes and clothes went down, on purpose. Companies manufactured products with a very short lifespan. It is something the industry calls planned obscolesense. And it’s still everywhere. But it is important to understand that it hasn’t always been like that. It is a proces, and processes can be reversed.

3. The newest trend in the ‘repair industry’ is actually not repair at all. It is what’s called black-boxing. Designing black boxes that cannot be opened, That show nothing of the way they are made, that cannot be modified and that certainly cannot be repaired. Today’s cars for example are black-boxed to the extend that being an independant car repairman is almost impossible, or very boring. All they can do is throw away the broken unit and replace it with a new one, often creating much more waste then necessary. All road patrol can do these days when your car breaks down is pick up the phone and call for a tow truck. No more craftmanship, no more quick-fixes, no more creativity.

4. Repaired things are beautiful things. Not necessarily on the surface, although this is sometimes the case, but because of the story it tells. It tells us about the time consuming dedication or about speedy functionality. It tells about the nature of the accident and the resourcefulness of the mender. It tells about local customs and personal taste. About trends, glue, string, tape, tools, technique, time, and about so many other things.

5. In the first place things get repaired to restore functionality but it is also about challenging ourselves. Every broken item is a puzzle, sometimes literally, sometimes with missing pieces. And who doesn’t love solving puzzles. When it comes to repair there are puzzles for beginners, puzzles for the highly experienced and everything in between. Everyone can repair.

6. At some point industries started to appropriate models from fashion, where products go out of style so quickly you almost immediately after purchase feel the need to replace it. One fashion retailer even proclaimed: “We are not in this business to put beautiful clothes on woman, we are in this business to make women feel unhappy with the clothes they have in their closet.” Now multiply that idea with almost all the products we have...

7. Nothing teaches you more about a thing then taking it apart and figuring out how to fix it. And sometimes you learn that a thing can’t actually be fixed. Not because it is theoretically impossible, but because designers have made it impossible. On the other hand often things can be fixed so very very easily. Like this certain dvd player we had at Platform21 where we wrote the manifesto in 2009. We don’t actually know why, but everytime we open and close it, it works fine for several months, then decides to take a rest. We kind of loved that dvd-player for it.

8. It was both luck and misfortune that the Repair Manifesto was spread at the height of the recession. Luck because it probably was partly responsible for the enormous media coverage, and thus the spread of the word. But at the same time we worried that it would become synonoumous with the idea that we only had to repair things because there was a recession. We worried that people would think it was only the hardship that inspired repair creativity. And even if that is partly true, for us it was about the real value of repair, the real beauty, the real substance and mentality. Because otherwise, once the recession is over, so is repair and that would be a mistake.

9. In times when everybody has the same IKEA Billy in their bedroom, and we all drive the same cars, ride the same bikes, wear the same clothes and use the same gadgets, it is nice that through repair we can add a bit of personality to our products, and express our individuality.

10. We are becoming a people of button pushers. One push and everything works, or doesn’t. In a luxury car commercial we saw the other day it said: “You pay for it. But it owns you.” Another good reason to keep repairing our old cars, just to make sure it is clear who is in charge here.

11. Repair obviously has its limits. We don’t suggest you overdo it. Every product has its end, or becomes a museum piece. And when it comes to its end, it is a good thing it can be recycled. But because it still feeds our throw-away mentality, because it teaches us nothing, because it still feeds our arrogance against things, and because it is way less fun, until then we say: Stop recycling and start repairing!

The Instructables Restaurant

here is

the pilot

and

An instructable how to make one yourself

Shaping the void

We live in a panoptical environment, surrounded by and embedded in its mediatized matrix. Media facilitate the new-found land we stand on. Meditated representation has replaced the represented. It is the truth. Not as a metaphor, not as a warning, but more real then the soil we grow our crops on. Complex unknowable matter and emotion is replaced by easily mediated sound bytes and video clips. It has become our primary source for knowing. Personal representations are overtly available. You can find photos of my family, you can see where I live, you know what I like and dislike, you know what work I do and when I’m on the move. And I know about you.

Democratic models for designing media turn everyone into an accomplice. The dialectical model of the watcher and the watched is outdated. Everybody is watching everybody. Power relations and its inherent oppression have also been democratized. It is also no longer valid to presume that conformity becomes the normal behaviour for individuals who wish to remain unnoticed, nor that the culpability of oppression shifts from the watcher to the watched. Everybody’s been given shared responsibility for the design that facilitates our gaze. We’re all guilty.This mutually inclusive panoptical village creates panoptical behaviour. Since representation replaced the represented media-attention is what we desire. We need to be seen on-screen. We need to be universally visible, findable and understandable and to accommodate this need, we need to be simplified. The immense popularity of reality TV, talent shows, cosplay, live action role playing, online communities, and other forms of direct mediation of the individual is a direct consequence of the fact that to be part of life we need to be part of the mediated world. Life is there.

We discarded our desire to be unseen, and yet a strategy of camouflage lies at the very heart of all this; just not in a traditional twigs-and-leaves kind of way. Camouflage is a method of concealing yourself from an enemy by making yourself appear to be part of the natural surroundings. The difference now is that our natural surroundings, the surroundings in which we are born, are a landscape of meditated representations, and in the participatory democratic model we are our own enemy. We show ourselves so that we remain unseen. We are in a state of post-camouflaged invisibility: the visual void in total presence. In the slipstream of total visuality arrives its inevitable consequence: the more we see, the more we are not seeing. Reading the visual becomes almost an impossibility in a world where one image-cloud is replaced by the next image-cloud ever quicker. The overwhelmed eye is an indifferent eye. The art of being unseen and thus undefinable has transformed into the art of being definable in infinite variations. Information is evolving as we watch, and thus it is in a constant state of incompletion. It is not an accumulation of facts but of alterations, re-calculations and re-interpretations. It never is.

In this situation what we cannot see becomes what we are most obsessed with. And as in any good horror movie, what we don’t see drives our imagination and actions. It is the paradox of this time that with all that we know our actions are still driven by that which we don’t. The camouflaged skin is the perfect projection screen for what we fear, love and believe. Believing is seeing.

As this negative space enters the fantasy of democratized power, it starts to shape events. It is a game of coding and decoding. How serious it gets, depends on where the game is being played and what’s at stake. The artists in this exhibition try to find the glitch in the omnipresent matrix by scripting their own unknowable environment. Interpreting what is not known is the greatest challenge of any surveillance-specialist. We project a reality on top of things. The artist is a shaman/hacker voluntarily stuck in a wormhole between positive and negative space, between the represented, and the representation. By suggestion, omitting and abstracting the artist makes the absence felt. Perhaps because he instinctively want us to remember that once we were godlike beings that deserved more then a TV dinner.

Join the Instructables Restaurant

ill open an open-source restaurant that is completely made of, and only serves food based on the original instructables all the members on instructables.com have made or will make.

I mean, every chair, dishwasher, menucard, light etc. and all the food, will together be the restaurant. And I would like to ask you guys for your brilliant, funny, original ideas concerning all aspects restauranty. Inside the restaurant everything will be presented with the original instruction and accreditation to the maker. I have been involved in several pilot and concept restaurants in the past like Food Facility, a restaurant based on take-out restaurants by Catalonian designer Marti Guixe, and The Micro-Green Restaurant by Debra Solomon of culiblog.org. Both at Mediamatic in Amsterdam, where I was at the time working as an exhibition maker. I would appreciate it so much if you'd get involved in this and share your ideas with me to make it into an incredible creative place for adventurous diners, and maybe the first open source restaurant ever created (but i'm not sure about that and I guess it doesn't really matter anyway). In some restaurants you can buy the stuff you see, in this restaurant you'll go home knowing how to re-create what you just enjoyed, be it the food or the chair you sat on.

If you like it, please join the group about this: http://www.instructables.com/group/instructables-restaurant/

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Identity non grata

The Dutchman does not exist.

-Princess Maxima (future queen of the Netherlands)

Consensus has been institutionalised in the Netherlands, where the national identity is reflected in countless advisory and consultative bodies.

-Mark Kranenburg (journalist)

Until recently the Dutch identity found a strong metaphor in the engine for its latest economic revival, the Polder model. The Polder model is a Dutch-designed system for achieving consensus on economic policies with all parties involved, government, employers and employees. It was about making sure things didn’t get out of control so business could get down to business. The Dutch created their identity out of a pragmatic getting along.

This profitable attitude came to a stop with the killing of politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 by an animal rights activist. His supporters accused the Dutch government for demonizing their popular leader and thus, indirectly, of being responsible for his murder. Two years later Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim extremist for releasing, together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a controversial film on the position of Islamic women. The consequences to Dutch society are well known: intolerance was increasingly tolerated; society polarized quickly and people mistrusted politics to a level unheard of before. It caused a political crisis in a country where political things had been comfortably boring. So boring actually that Dutch artists never have been very inspired by it. Five years ago, before the tragedies, when asked to reflect on art and Dutch identity I wrote: In a lot of Dutch art the lack of drama seems to bring forth some sort of romantic notion, a fleeing from the scene of the non-crime. There was a tendency to imagine other, more heroic or romantic lives. To say that Dutch art was not the counter-force it is in some nations is an understatement. Paradoxically this meant that once things heated up artists lacked the tools and the stamina to sink their teeth into the matter, even if Theo van Gogh was an artist himself and related to one of the symbols of Dutch art, Vincent van Gogh. As a matter of fact Theo van Gogh was one of the few that could, and would have gone full throttle on an issue like this.

An explanation for the lack of artistic involvement in the national debate following the murders could be that the situation asked for diplomacy and the reinstitution of consensus. It is not arts traditional responsibilities to create consensus and avoid sharp conflicts. Probably more the opposite. But that’s precisely the point. Dutch arts’ moment had passed in the years before, while dreaming of places less ‘boring’. Arts role if any should be to create the transparency in which the abuse of mythological constructions is harder to get away with. In this case the mythological character that the pragmatic Dutch identity had always been.

To speak of a crisis in the identity is to speak of a crisis in pinpointing the dynamics of a certain moment. It is in this moment that myth is often used as a tool to recreate stability, even if in bypassing the reasons for the instability of the moment.

The linguistic confusion this creates between art and politics can be witnessed in the mixed zone of national cultural policies where the artist and the politician use the same words but speak a fundamentally different language. Keywords in Dutch cultural policy are participation, large audiences and low thresholds. It aspires for art what it aspire for politics; democracy based on a common set of values. By setting the agenda quite clearly in favour of projects that are focussed on creating another polder culture Dutch political involvement in culture is copying its own logic, making art a short term political or even mythological tool, not just in pushing an agenda of consensus but even by its inner logic of representation by the few. Consensus, the need for incorporating as many as we can into the identity of the Dutch is, like its economic model, just a way to get down to business, the business of politics. Art represents the opposite of politics. It deals with the individual, and with seeing, with individual seeing, not with identifying with and seeing for. Dutch art, had it been a constructive part of society, could have been a force of consensus, not by looking for it or forcing it like politics do, but by uploading the individual potential for the critical moment when the choice is made between seeing for yourself or letting somebody else do the seeing for you. At the moment there is only one artist-collective that can do the job the way the Dutch government would like: The Royal family. Ironically they are the only Dutch citizens who don’t have freedom of speech. Nobody knows better what it means to struggle for identity.

On a floating BMW

Een paar maanden geleden tijdens de TMF Awards, bij het optreden van de rapgroep Party Squad (we rampeneren op de vloer en het geeft geen ene moer) zweefde er een BMW boven het publiek. De techniek was feilloos. De glimmende natte droom voor pubertjes en papas slalomde aan onzichtbare kettingen geruisloos en vloeiend door de lucht van de Heineken Music Hall. In tijden niet zo’n goed werk gezien: brutaal, fout, grensoverschrijdend, en bovenal volledig transparant. Zo’n ervaring maakt een betere consument van je. Ik kan het alleen maar vergelijken met het speeksel-in-je-mond-werk van Greco, de kitscherige late Matthew Barney of de zon van Olafur Eliasson in de Tate. Waar het object een pseudo-religieuze ervaring tot stand brengt en het kritiekloze innemen een aanvang neemt. De Franse semioticus Roland Barthes heeft ooit een Citroën met een kathedraal vergeleken. In een mooi tekstje dicht hij het auto-object magische krachten toe. Ik heb de neiging de diepere rituele betekenis van spullen voor waar aan te nemen maar als jullie het er niet mee eens zijn hoor ik het graag. Waar Barthes de onaantastbare status van het object door de vieze vingertjes van het publiek laat domesticeren, daar bewaart de BMW een onoverbrugbare afstand. Slim natuurlijk want niet in het aanraken maar in het kijken klampen wij ons aan de dingen vast. Als het met het onderwijs en de kunst nog iets wil worden moeten we het oog eerst eens bevrijden van die glimmende BMW kunst die overal de baas is. Maar dat zal niet eenvoudig zijn. Volgens de filosoof George Bataille is het vastklampen aan de dingen überhaupt de enige manier om mens te kunnen zijn. Zodra wij de veilige functionaliteit van het object vaarwel zeggen, vallen we terug in de chaos. Worden we weer beestjes. Een vliegende BMW als viering van het menszijn.

Cosplay, or how a bunch of dressed up kids are changing reality

In the nineties the otaku spent life in a cocoon, locked in gadget-filled bedrooms, surfing the web, consuming information like there was no tomorrow.

They hardly left their homes. Reality only entered into the otakus life in a pre-mediated format. Not the tree but the picture of a tree. Not the sex and violence but pornography and mangastyle slashing and bashing. Some felt guilty for not providing these kids with the right social skills to tackle the real world. But while they worried about saving a lost generation from slipping into oblivion, the lost were brewing visions of another future. Like the sea just before a tsunami, the otaku retreated almost beyond the horizon, consciously or unconsciously building momentum for a very big wave. The unlikely avantgarde of this wave is the cosplayer.

In a simple but firm denial of the context of first-reality, they make and publicly wear costumes based on characters from manga-comics, anime-movies and videogames. On top of this there are unwritten rules of engagement that include extreme enthousiasm for everything involved with cosplaying and the firm denial of anything that might kill the illusion. If you’re not part of the alternate reality you will be ignored. This impenetrable space, a strong simplification of reality and a ritualization of language and behaviour enables the cosplayer to enter into the most hostile of environments without having to succumb to the outside pressure to ridicule the moment, as long as there is a group.

Unlike the oldschool otaku who didn’t care much for meeting his peers in the flesh, cosplayers use their shared interest as a reason to get together. Conventions to this end have popped up all over the world and the numbers of active participants are growing fast. During highly energetic get-togethers cosplayers act out sketches from favourite films, perform mock fights, para para dance, draw mangas and exchange lots of costume-making tips. A visit to one of them is like entering a stitch-and-glue universe populated by spotty princesses and skinny superheroes wearing plastic things that go BLEEP BLEEP. Most of the time they are jumping up and down with excitement, frantically exchanging info; do exclamations of how much they love this or that, how great it was at this or that convention and what the coolest episode of this or that anime is.

Communication is reduced to a mantra of sound bytes and dress coded gestures. It is not so much THAT the otaku loves but the compulsive way in which they do, overturning common sense and the rational order in the surrealist strategy of Mad Love. Their hyper enthusiasm and hyper consumption is appropriating everything none-hyper. First-reality people don’t have the right tools to process and understand. It’s an intimidating first glimpse of a future yet to come and it gets more so when the cosplayers start to leave the marked territory of the convention centres and enter first-life. If during the 90’s the otaku knew how to retreat into this coded landscape, the otaku of today insists on projecting his harrypotteristic view of reality onto the world canvas. It’s a process that is effectively changing reality. Although the costumes of cosplay may not reminisce of the revolutionary uniforms of the past, they are battle-gear nonetheless.

Today in Tokyo there are streets where cosplay is so abundant that not dressing up inadvertently turns you into a bystander, out of touch and out of control. Who’s the geek now? These living sculptures created themselves. They didn’t need a Pygmalion, or God for that matter. They’ve pulled themselves from invisibility very much like Baron von Munchhausen pulled himself from the swamp by denying first-reality and creating a second-reality for himself in which he was the glorious centre. Ignore the context until it can no longer ignore you. Now it’s just a matter of continuous cosplaying until critical mass is achieved. By turning the real into a myth and thus controlling its destiny, the ones who live there become a mythological people. If the otaku stops believing in the first world, it will disappear, along with those who live there.

Das Leiden des jungen Kunstkritikers

The contemporary art critic is a masochistic Wunderkammer-shaman. Positioned somewhere between the untranslatable and the uninterested, the art and its public, this self-elected inhabitant of the fringe goes where nobody wants to go anymore. With the possible exception of the artist who, by his instinct for survival, became an invader of even the most uninviting spaces.

The writer on art claims that to look at the whole you need to step outside. You need to objectify the viewing relationship and create freedom and space for reflection. Quite a safe, well thought through position, apart from the fact that it’s nonsense. Outside personal likes and dislikes there is nothing. To deny this is conceptual suicide.

Reading the visual is an internal affair. But too often the art critic uses art to deny himself and hide what shouldn’t be hidden. The critic has been suspended in an embryonic state for to long, lulled into auto-submission by the fact that in writing about artists he sometimes feels like one. The time has come to crawl from the egg and realize he could be one.

The critic must become a poet. Only this ridiculous and narcistic move might present a chance at change. Art criticism needs to take a risk, or destruct itself in trying. To be a good art critic, don’t just express yourself, expose yourself. When it comes to suffering, especially the silent kind, the critic knows a thing or two. Now is the time to take it to the next level.

Until then, artists being of a more cunning disposition, will increasingly infiltrate the structure of art criticism, exploit its weaknesses, ridicule the lingo and play God with greater cynical detachment and sense for decorum.

If the art writer is not willing to sacrifice his safe but impotent position, the secondary text for which legions of his fellow sufferers have slaved in the past, will disappear. The critic, living on the all too symbolic edge, could easily be pushed of. And that would be a sad end. Nothing is worse then letting someone else do the failing for you.

Arne Hendriks