The Zen of Pad.ma (May 2018 Version)
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0. MAD.MA
And there is Mad.ma. So one of our collaborators who we had invited to Bombay... it was very hot, and he was a bit sick, and had been spending a lot of time in front of a computer, working with these archives. And he had
a nightmare. He had a nightmare where he was in the archive, he was actually in that system, and he was clicking a lot, and things were connected. Everything was really dynamic, nothing was static anymore, including himself. He himself in his dream was becoming pixelated. And then he went to the menu of the website, to figure out how stuff worked. And then in the menu, he saw the name of the archive. And he thought he was using Pad.ma. But in fact, in his dream, the name was Mad.ma. So... this kind of super-hyper-dynamic archive. And even though this will not exist, and should not exist, it's still something I, in the last two months, have been working on quite thoroughly. And it takes place between Pad.ma and bak.ma and Indiancine.ma, and maybe 858.MA.
THE ZEN OF PAD.MA
1. DO IT
2. THE DOERS DECIDE
3. WAITING IS FORBIDDEN
3. NO PARKING
This was still a total misunderstanding, and it would take two more years to resolve it.
4. RELEASE IMMEDIATELY, WORRY ABOUT RETRO-CAUSATION LATER
5. PREMATURE SEPARATION OF LABOR IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
This is usually the one... I think that's the most important one: Premature separation of labor is the root of all evil. It's, again, the variation of a programming mantra. So what does premature separation of labor... or, different question: Why do so many archive projects fail? And why do so many of those that don't fail, why do they suck?
It's usually because there is separation of labor. There's some ideas people who have ideas, and then there's some tech people who implement these ideas, and then there's no language between them, and then there's a deadline, and then they're not ready, and then it's already over.
Like, if you have ideas people and tech people... the moment you hire tech people, it's done, it's over. I'm not saying it will fail, but if it won't fail, it will suck. And it will suck because the tech people have no investment in the project, because the tech people get... I mean, they're probably the only ones who get paid, because you have no idea what to pay them, and you think what they do is so specialized, and they have to...
So it's not the... you don't have a language. You ask them, like, can you do it like... And then you get a... You think you have a problem, and then you get a designer. And then it fails. Then it's guaranteed that it fails. Add a designer to the mix, and it fails.
But it's not just a funny thing, because separation of labor means that there's some people who do the work, there's some people who do the dishes, and there's some people who represent the archive at conferences; some people do the flying, some people do the bookkeeping, some people do the... This is why projects suck.
And archive projects usually suck. Because no-one has a clear perspective on, you know... Why does our archive suck? Lets ask our tech people... if they can make it suck less. No. Lets just not. Stop with this type of...
I think with Pad.ma, we were very... I mean, there is no pure state of complete... There will always be separation of labor. It's not... I'm not advertizing the state of everyone does everything equally, because that's not going to happen, and that's also not desireable. But you have to actively resist, if you do stuff like Pad.ma, and Indiancine.ma, and bak.ma, and 858... you have to resist this kind of... these kind of boxes of... You know, there's these two German guys who do the... No, that's... If it was like that, we... I wouldn't be here, and we wouldn't be talking about Pad.ma or bak.ma or 858, because they would not exist.
Or these are the... you know, these are the artist guys, and these are the lawyers, these are the copyright people, and these are the... No. It's the copyright people who do the film archive, and it's the local activists who do the tech... You have to... you have to be very careful to always get out of these boxes in which you are inevitable confined. Separation of labor... lets's leave out the "premature"... separation of labor is the root of all evil, period. That's number five.
6. FLAT IS BETTER THAN NESTED
It's this. It's also a matter of flatness and nestedness. I think each of these could fill an entire presentation, so I am going to try to be a bit cursory in this. It's a thing that, in Pad.ma, in doing Pad.ma, haunts us, in a way, or is with us, as a question, has been with us for a long time.
So... the one-liner for this is: Collaboration can be messy, and we should refuse the temptation to just talk about happy collaborative projects, because that's not how stuff happens in the real world.
This is not my idea, collaboration and cooperation, these are not... they mean the same, to work together, and there is no clear reason why I make this distinction.
But cooperation, to me, is associated with a more bureaucratic type of... cooperation is what you do in an institution, you cooperate... There is coorperative multi-tasking in programming... so you cooperate.
Whereas collaboration, which means the same: to work together... it evokes the person of the collaborator. And the collaborator is the figure who works with the enemy.
Because that's what we do. We are not fully contained within the generosity of our great groups that do all this fantastic work, within respect and within solidarity.
Working together can be really brusque, and it can be... It's not necessarily generous. The collaborators in a group of groups follow their own interests and agendas.
Whereas cooperation is this idea... it takes place in larger organizations, it's like teamwork. I mean... the institution will tell you: that's yesterday's models, we are all flat, we have flat hierarchies, we're totally open. It's nonsense, it's not, it just looks flat.
I remember that the Springer Verlag, in Berlin, they're building this new office tower, their new headquarter. And it's... I can see it actually, from my house. It's this idea... it's totally open, they won't have offices anymore, and you can play minigolf inside the... whatever. It's just nonsense. This is just ornament, and I'm not talking about that.
Teamwork, what happens in institutions, is about synchronization, about specialization, it's about effective communication. It's procedures and protocols of self-monitoring, of self-evaluation, in case something goes wrong.
Like... ironically, when I see it from my house, from my balcony, it blocks the view to the dome of the Reichstag, it's exactly in front of it, seen from my house. Which is another of these... you know, you build a glass roof on top of the parlament, and everything is going to be transparent. No, it's not. It's the cooperation.
So... if it was about simple dichotomies, you have networked collectives on one side, and on the other side, you have something like the institution. But I don't think that this black-and-white opposition is very interesting, and it won't take us very far. Collaboration is actually more of a dark and muddy shade of grey, which is anyway more interesting.
Collaboration would mean to abandon two ideologies at the same time. First, the romantic notion of fair exchanges between equal partners, but it's also the puritan ethics of abstinence, where it's about keeping your hands clean, avoiding any contact with your enemy.
And I would propose, as the model of collaboration, the parasite, the model of the parasite. It's the organism that drops onto and lives inside another organism, about which Michel Serres writes: "The parasite invents something new. He [or she] obtains energy and pays for it in information. He obtains the roast and pays for it with stories..." That's an archive thing. "He [or she] establishes an unjust pact."
So between the parasite and the host, you will find an almost entirely abusive constellation. The parasites just sucks. Parasitical collaboration does not look for use value, it looks for abuse-value, quite literally. And it's precisely this type of abuse that makes host move, and absorb something new.
And again, it's not that simple, because we're not living in a world that on the one side has hosts, and on the other side has parasites. The parasite - the way we work, the way we do it - it's not binary, it's not like that. Michel Serres says: "The parasite parasites the parasites." So within collaboration, you're never just the host, you're never just parasitical. And that can be quite a mess.
Especially since collaboration itself never appears in a pure form. Again, there is abusive collaboration, and there is more bureaucratic cooperation - this is not a clear-cut opposition, you will find one inside the other. There is no dialectics in which they would give way to a third, higher form of working together. It doesn't exist. Each of these modes requires the other for its own ends.
So without a minimum of cooperation, collaboration - what we do - would rapidly disintegrate. And without a bit of collaboration, cooperative environments - think: the institution - would come to a standstill. But I think that the advantage of collaboration over cooperation may be that it can form a parasitical relation to managerial or bureaucratic cooperation, whereas cooperation usually fails quite spectacularly at managing, or integrating, or whatever they're calling it, or otherwise neutralizing the collaborators.
So collaboration is now sometimes confused with, but it's distinctively different from... it's confused with the current, the dominant ideology of... what we do, being in a self-regulating market. It's this kind of neoliberal type of anarchy. This idea of... you know, we're just egoistic participants in exchanges, and by the magic of the market, and this is the market of commodified social relations, you know, the fittest of us will survive. And then we have our survivor archive here. It's not.
It's not. It's the exact opposite. Collaboration is not an economy of accumulation. It's not a trade. It's an economy of expenditure. It's not... you don't accumulate in a collaborative environment. You expend.
And the need to collaborate arises from situations like... sometimes you can't perform, sometimes you're tired, you're not effective. And it's not necessarily because everything is so boring, but because you simply cannot do it. There are situations in which you have to be unfair. You have to form some more like, excessive or unfair types of collaboration. Because they're intense, and intensity may result in production. And the art of it is then to find a type of meta-stability that makes them sustainable.
So what I'm saying is that... I don't think that collaboration does, or should, shield itself from affective energy that flows through working together. It taps into destructive energy, in order to produce. The first parasite you work with steals your ideas, the next one steals your best friend. None of them will do your bookkeeping, we've been there, or the dishes, we've been there. And at some point, these will have to be done. But at the same time, you may be able live at someone else's expense, to draw resources from other networks and organizations who are willing to open themselves up, even if just temporarily, to this mode of work.
So... this is kind of the context. How do you avoid in such a collaborative environment, and I've touched upon this before, that everyone falls back into their fields. You know, the artists make art, the software developers do software, then you have the bookkeepers, the frequent flyers...
You need coalitions with cooperative environments, probably, to avoid falling into these kind of traps. You have to talk to corporations, to filmmakers, to activists, at the same time. And you tell them different stories. You have to push things in directions that can be conflicting, and not comfortable, just to get some room to move. You're not always going to... in collaboration, you're not always going to operate within your own competence, and with responsibility.
But sometimes... sometimes you have to play.
So that's just a rough outline of what would be collaboration versus cooperation, and why we prefer the one. But...
8. NOTHING BEATS FRIENDSHIP-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
We had to rethink all that quite recently. Because this idea of working with the enemy, collaboration, of being impure... When we thought about this a lot, around 2010 or so, we thought of the enemy as maybe the art school, or the museum, or the archive conference organizer, even though we were ourselves, and have been forever, archive conference organizers... We thought of it as... the stuff you're confronted with in the arts. And museums and such.
Of course, then, now it's 2018, you have other enemies. And maybe you have different types of enemies. Your enemy can be the State, your enemy can be social media, your enemy can be hysteria, your enemy can be fascism. And of course, there are certain... of course, there, you cannot collaborate, collaboration is impossible, then it falls back onto the initial meaning of the word.
Because... if you do your archive wrong, you'll get invited to a show, you're in Documenta or you're in Manifesta or some Bienniale, and that's not so bad. If you, in the other type of collaboration, do something wrong, you're probably going to be dead, or injured, or in exile or something, and that's not... the one thing is much better than the other, obviously.
So... we had to reintroduce one term into our practice... I thought we should try and do that, which is friendship. This is a software development methodology. There's these ideas... you do test-driven development, it's a technical term, you develop software by just writing tests, and then matching these tests drives development.
No, what we do is maybe, in Pad.ma, and that's why it works, is friendship-driven development. It's software that, in the first place, Jan and I started writing for ourselves. So we were our first users, we didn't think about others so much. But then we realized, no, we'd also do it for friends.
It's a thing that has very few adressees, in the first place. It's: I want to make the archive for my friend XY. I want to make a thing
that my two friends X and Y can use for their project this-and-that. It's specifically for friends. And this is part of what can work, or not, within collaboration, and that's actually what drives software development. I would propose this as a software development methodology that we should look at more: friendship-driven development.
9. THERE ARE NO FAIR INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGES
This was initially called... what was it called... "Air Travel Is an Illusion", or something... It's something you realize when you work what we call "internationally"... Jan and I, we spend a lot of time in Bombay or in Bangalore or in Delhi or sometimes even in Calcutta... It's not just that in collaboration, things are not fair. None of these things are fair, none of these things are even. They are deeply asymetrical, and it's very good to remember that these international exchanges as well, internationally funded or whatever, that all of this is deeply and violently asymmetrical.
I hold a German passport, and the German passport, whatever I think about it, it's a document, it's a piece of... you know it, some of you have it, and it allows you to access, what, 190 territories in the world, and I'm also, like... I travel, or I can travel. Whereas there are many people, of course, who don't travel. Not just because they lack the German passport, but also because they lack the... I always found that funny, in the Nineties, or in the late Eighties even, when the first big U.S. Hip Hop artists came to Europe, and the tours never happened, because they all showed up at the airport, and they were like: What? We need a passport to go there? And that's funny, because, of course, it's not just lack of passport that makes you not travel, but it's lack of conditions that allow for leaving.
There are so many people who think they travel internationally and meet so many interesting people. But I think it's nonsense, they don't. They meet a tiny caste, if you will, of people who meet people who travel internationally. It's a class distinction, also. And then these people get to represent misery. Ah, I met you in Delhi, why don't you come to Berlin... But people don't see... they are so fascinated by the internationality of it that they forget everything about class. And then they forget everything about caste, because they didn't know anything about caste in the first place. So this stuff is more complicated than you think. And traveling is anyway problematic, no-one likes to travel, air travel, it's a race to the bottom, it's not going to continue forever. So... international exchanges, very problematic.
10. ARCHIVISTS DON'T SEARCH, THEY FIND
11. NEVER ATTRIBUTE TO MALICE WHICH CAN BE ADEQUATELY EXPLAINED BY STUPIDITY
12. ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED FORM OF STUPIDITY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FRON MALICE
13. ACTIONS ARE YOUR ONLY TRUE BELONGINGS
INSPIRED BY THE ZEN OF PYTHON BY TIM PETERS
NOT WITHOUT: ZINNIA AMBARPARDIWALA SHAINA ANAND SANJAY BHANGAR MADHUSHREE DUTTA JAN GERBER LAWRENCE LIANG NAMITA MALHOTRA ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA ZULEKHA SAYYED SIMPREET SINGH ASHOK SUKUMARAN
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