Virtuous Virtuality or Virtual Virtuosity

Anarchism is just one strategy that has been employed toward the ends of establishing global communism; the total community, an assembly of altruistic agents. And what is required to bring about global Communism, is a strong enough population of altruists that they can sustain their community long enough to instantiate the mechanisms of altruism and exterminate all cowards (non-altruists). But the problem is, in our model society exists another type of agent, which are cowards in the guise of altruists; those who behave cowardly (in their own interest), but signal altruism. I'll call these agents positive imposters in that they express an additional signifier which permits them to insinuate themselves into a community of altruists and feed of it. And what we can produce in social simulations, and what we’ve seen historically in the case of the Communist project, is that positive imposters will devastate the coherence of a community of altruists.

And there is yet one more type of agent in our social model as regards the building of global Communism, which are altruists who lack the signifiers of altruism. These I’ll call negative imposters. And you can easily sniff them out. They’re the saddest folk in the scene. They have for some reason a propensity to look like they don’t care, but deep down they really do. Maybe it’s because they want to succeed. Maybe it’s because they know that to be an altruist is not a winning play. And they’d rather be a coward, but they never will be. This is really sad.

I, for myself, have not been yet so clever to discern if I am in fact a positive imposter, that is, a coward with the signifiers of an altruist, or a negative imposter, that is, an altruist with the signifiers of a coward. But what’s for certain is that I am an imposter. And as an imposter I can tell you with some certainty that we are very dangerous. And if be you an altruist, you ought to be careful to discern what characters constitute your community. I’m talking about a generalized paranoia. And paranoia is an attribute of culture which is also required for creating the conditions for bringing about global Communism. Because that paranoia tells us that there is a schism in the fabric of reality, and that we can not only make corrections when confronted by that schism, but also witness an entirely new world which is always-already there.

And as an imposter, I cannot stand here today and tell you what my work really does. But I can tell you what my work wants to do, given its genetic wisdom descendent from me its imposter-creator. And that is to produce opportunities for these schisms to reveal themselves.

One zone where I find ample room for reconfiguration is in documentation, and with Faltpavillon, we’ve taken opportunities to engage in new modalities of documentation as prerequisite of the program. So, the photo documentation covers not only the artwork proper, but also moments of beauty, interest, or activity that we encounter along the way and in the midst of the presentation itself. And we have also begun as a practice to take audio documentation, because as it happens, the presentations are rich with spontaneous sound.

But lucky for me, art is filled with imposters. Altruists who present as altruists and cowards who present as cowards have no place in the art complex. There’s nowhere for them to be. They find other things to do. All we have today before us are altruists who look like cowards and cowards who look like altruists. But this is okay. This is alright. Because art requires imposters. Art needs that schism. Because only imposters can produce the conditions for cognitive dissonance to take place: for constitutive disassociation.

As genuine agents we would have the option for virtuality or virtuosity. However as imposters, we may choose to make virtuous virtuality (negative imposter) or virtual virtuosity (positive imposter). This option does nothing to help me approach an answer to my own position. My work is constantly oscillating between virtuous virtuality and virtual virtuosity. I mention this to at least clarify my doubt as to what kind of imposter I am.

Art is a confidence game – top to bottom. Even if I aim to liberate a viewer from the confines of their aesthetic regime, I still have to con my way there. I can’t just point at reality, I have to show a picture of reality. I have to trick them into looking at the world. And we even sometimes defend these gestures with pseudoscience or pataphysics.

Some of you will think, “Haha is this guy serious?” And I say to you now!