Hello! I see that some slackers have been more than punctual in taking the initiative and getting this forum under way. Whereas some others, ahem, have waited for the sun to warm the earth before sallying forth. This is just as it should be, for it places us straightaway at the heart of the issues we are to address: the paradoxes of slackerdom.

Three questions are of supreme interest to me with respect to what I take to be our common concern in performing the everlasting Sunday:

- Why is authentic slacking different than mere laziness (if it is)? I choose that phrasing deliberately to underscore the ticklish distinction between the two: I feel it is somehow slacker-incompatible to identify an “authentic” as opposed to an inauthentic mode of slacking, just as it is absurd to suggest that describing laziness as “mere” does anything but upgrade it to some more interestingly corrosive status. Still, it strikes me as useful, even necessary to attempt to conceptualize slacking off as a specific way of being in the world – as opposed to indolence or idleness (and other agreeable states) on the one hand, and languor or what Christians call slothfulness on the other.

- This ontological speculation on slacking’s core definition begs the second question: slacking’s political ontology. By both slacking off from the imperative to work and, symmetrically, deliberately abstaining from leisure and other modes of consumerism, slackers embody a fascinating – and for the productivist majority, infuriating – performative double bind, akin to the famous “I am a liar” that had the Greeks stumped. Slackers don’t “just” slack off; they go at it full-tilt. Clearly, the studied and ostentatious practice of doing not much at all is all-consuming. But is it subversive? Does it have seditious potential within a regime of productivism? Can it obstruct the reifying logic of “creativity” and “artistic research projects” we hear so much about?

I’m very much of two minds about the whole issue of “data-mining,” as Lev Manovich puts it – or “data-recovery” as others might say inasmuch as we have all contributed to that ever-expanding mother-lode – with which Renée Ridgway has invited us to engage in her recent, thought-igniting post. The sheer magnitude of data accumulation is positively diabolical – or at least demonic, to use a more genteel term for the hellish little fellow. Indeed, in a fascinating if somewhat sibylline passage in his deliciously premonitory novel, The Crying of Lot 49, written in the early 1960s, Thomas Pynchon imagines an ambivalent character whom I see as Data’s Demon.

For some time now, I’ve been meaning to respond to Lee Weng Choy’s thoughtful posting on the need for “slowing things down.” There is something intuitively urgent about that appeal for calm, which I felt needed to be fleshed out. Has something happened to time, I found myself wondering, or is it just our overwrought egos and zealous scheduling that need to be put on depressants?

One has to be pretty mean-spirited to find much wrong with dreaming. But what I like best about dreams is that they put the lie to the increasingly prevalent idea that we all live in the same world - the very quintessence of contemporary ideology. Clad in the decidedly dad-reminiscent rhetorical garments of “common sense,” the one-world argument is regularly trotted out by our neoliberal realists to encourage us to fall into line, wake up to reality, singular, and give up our insistence on alternatives to the merely existent. In the name of the efficient governance of the existent order, they trivialise the fictionalising imagination – that is, the imagination that splinters and multiplies the real – as utopian dreaming, claiming that the real is one. But in making such a claim, they let the cat out of the bag – if only because everyone has that extraordinary and yet perfectly ordinary experience of dreaming.

One of the questions I struggle with most regarding art is whether or not to continue using the word at all. On the one hand, it designates an amorphous set of symbolic configurations and activities by and large so at odds with what I refer to when I use the term, I wonder if I would not be well advised to look for a different word. Yet on the other hand, I am loath to yield the monopoly on the use of that term to those whose usage I find so uncongenial.

Exhibitions are all right for those of us who like that sort of thing, but like other artworldly activities, they’re pretty harmless. As art seems to have exhausted much of its potential, why not turn our art-critically honed tools to more corrosive phenomena – the kind that suit no one’s purpose, like that all-pervasive, horizontal network of open-source speech-acts of confident uncertainty known as rumour? If only because rumour can wreak more havoc in the public sphere in half an hour than art can in a century, is it not worth at least considering as a possible role model for an unauthored, viewer-free art that escapes itself?

One of the leitmotivs of n.e.w.s., I take it, is precisely the idea of shifting, displacing, moving with an eye to all the cardinal points of the compass. Though real “geographic diversity” is mentioned in the project presentation, geography - like the sort of conceptual mobility also foregrounded in the write-up - provides a metaphor for understanding the condition of art today and its blithe refusals to acknowledge its disorientation and recalibrate its sextant.

When you hear “exit strategies” what do you think of first? Iraq and environs? The neo-liberal mindset, its wanton growth-cures-all productivism? Or maybe, depending on the extent of your Napoleon complex, exodus from the intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream artworld? This project seeks to imagine gangplanks out of contemporary warfare, capitalism, and art, not necessarily in that order.