5 March 2010: "Animal Collective at the Guggenheim: a Conceptual Post for the Most Conceptual Experience in the History of Indie Music"

This post is about the ecstasy of communication. Carles tests the limits of conceptuality in an era that has contested the very idea of the concept and forwarded the hypothesis that there can be no hypotheses; that referentiality is always tentative, contingent, a mirage, or, as the philosophical cum artistic presentation by the Animal Collective group suggests, a projection. "Lights projecting, utilizing space, altering space," Carles notes. "This is art, architecture, and design. This is life." Or is it the "live performance art economy," as he has descrobed it elsewhere?

In other words, the space of everyday life is a projection, and moreover, one that is in continual flux. So though the spiraling space in which this experience occurs implies a locus for a transcendental signified, a core of meaning -- "In the middle is authenticity, a portal to the centre of the Earth" -- the shattering truth is that there is no truth; "art, architecture and design" are as shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. "Visuals ’stunning’ me," Carles admits. "Taking me to a different place."

Carles has gone into orbit, one might say -- "5 senses taken 2 the next level," as he explains. Jean Baudrillard, in his seminal essay "The Ecstasy of Communication," describes the "satellitization of the real" -- "the very quotidian nature of the terrestrial habitat hypostastized in space means the end of metaphysics. The end of hyperreality now begins." Of course there is always movement, the inexorable movement of the trace. The spiral up out of immanence is revealed instead to be, as Carles puts it, "a downward spiral of altdom."

The space of the public sphere, the coordinated and deliberate confusion between virtuality and physical reality prompts difficulties in measuring the ontology of experientiality: "This experience can only be experienced if ur here," Carles notes, but we have lost the moorings, as he well knows, for determining presence. As Baudrillard has written, the reflexive space in which mirror scenes could be enacted to establish the illusion of identity have be supplanted by "a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold -- the smooth operational surface of communication." Physical presence has been supplanted by the "control screen" -- as Carles puts it: "Familiar technology. Lights. Button pressing."

With nothing to anchor shifting identities within the non-places of consumerism under late capitalism, we are forced to spin around and around, dervishes of desire, feverishly panting after subjectivity or longing for a ritualized dizzy oblivion. The uninterrupted interface. Carles linguisticaly emulates this phenomenology of experience: "swimming in metaphorical strawberry jam / I could touch it /I was swimming in it." But the sensorium manufactured at the Guggenheim museum, itself a testament to an old reification of the problematic of the aesthetic, was nothing more than a simulacrum, which allowed it to present the clearest manifestation of this nascent decade of a long familiar conundrum, but which nonetheless made it "for one night... into the most relevant space in the history of the world." Time and space are collapsed under the strain of eternal semiotic decentering. Relevance is an aporia, if not a existential vacuum. And still we continue to spiral...