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de Public Club , 15-11-2006 (*see below what The Public Club is about) In recent years public services have developed into a market-player. Public services such as the media, energy, health care, social welfare and cultural institutions have become increasingly detached from the ideal of the common good. The policies relating to the various spheres of public life are no longer oriented towards their original reason for being. They have become increasingly concerned with the ideals of the market –characterized by a growing obsession with efficiency and a return-on-investment. In this new context, whereby strategies from the market are being put into place within the public domain, citizens become consumers – they are addressed as consumers and increasingly respond as consumers. Collective memory, the sharing of history and place, and all others characteristics of a well functioning society, seem now to be out of step with the mission statements of these Quangos (1) and other executives of the public domain. This development is not incidental, it can be explained historically. Before accepting such conditions as irreversible we must take time to consider a possible counter-strategy. Designers, intellectuals and artists are concerned with, and produce work within, culture. Cultural practise is an instrument that allows us to make fundamental encounters that enables us to think beyond reality (reality is always a slippery thing to define, but, for now we will define it as what we know or what is being conceived as possible). The neo-liberal concept of the split market-culture can't continue, one should choose between the parallel worlds of the public and corporate sphere. Not that they exclude each other or have to be conquered and challenged, but just that they are different. We choose culture. The Public Club is its agency. The field in which the Public Club operates is the public domain; the place where beauty and friction meet, where a balance between the individual and the collective exists. Ideally it is the domain where we share, meet or collectively produce without intrumentalization or profit. This makes it, by definition, a temporary situation and a collective condition – a product of collective interaction. The question is not where or what the Public domain is, but rather, when. During the 20th century public services were falsely identified with the public domain. As if the state set and maintained the preconditions for the public domain. The public club challenges this. The public domain is international: It's an illusion to think that Globalization or EU-zation still have to come because they are already here, which means the public domain is already supra urban and supra national - whether it’s about the free movement of people, labor or culture. Also in the cultural field the desire to organize culture nationally leads to unreal competitive positions. One can see this schizophrenia in the different biennales where the situation of nationally organized pavilions and international curators, artists, designers or architects is kept in place. Here culture becomes the cue ball of competitive culture-politics – the branding of a city, the branding of a nation. The longing for a national identity does not finds its solution in the nostalgia of ‘national heritage’. The answer to the question of who we are can only be answered by sharing culture publicly and not by positioning ourselves as Dutch, French or German – which will only ever define us through our difference to each other. The borders of the public domain aren't geographical, they are semantic and temporary. The public domain is underground: Commercial and institutional parties dominate society and the true public domain is increasingly marginal in relation to them. Accepting this reality creates new possibilities: freed from its pragmatic function (the safety-net of public utility is transferred to the level of insurance) it can become a subversive domain: different, alternative and contradictory. The public domain is not the space to be designed or aesthitisized, but the playground wherein the untimely differences within the institutionalized worlds become visible and exchangeable. Some design offices claim to do public space, but the paradox is that the public-ness of public space decreases as the design of it increases. The public domain is experimental: Most of the tasks that belong to the public services - as guardians of the public domain – are now being organized by or through the market or through the offices of quangos. The PublicClub considers the public domain to be the R&D department of our society, the breeding ground for new ideas and alternatives. Freed from the logic of performance, bureaucracy or direct implementation, it can experiment with new forms of collectivity in areas as various as the media, energy, health care, social welfare and cultural institutions &c. These experimental models should not be mistaken for the "innovation" rhetoric that the knights of the creative industry proclaim – it represents another way of thinking, its goals are not to be the fuel or grease of corporate culture but to create alternative realms. Freed from the implementation models things can be allowed to develop that can’t be developed elsewhere. With such models we can share and participate on the basis of curiosity and concern and need no longer be ruled by a profit motive imposed upon them. ----------------- (*) This statement is a starting point and invitation to The Public Club; an agency of independent writers, designers, artists preoccupied with, and working in the public domain. It is in our wish to come to an agency that adresses the individual approaches and brings them to another level of recognition. In fact, the Public Club should not have a logo but a communal signature. The form and structure of the this network of connected practices, the agency-without-an–office is subject to discussion. (1) Quangos: Quasi autonomous National Governmental Organisations, semi-privatized public services and governamental organizations. |
WHAT WE DO Since 2000 TEAM TCHM developed an hybrid practice in design, writing and research. TEAM TCHM is currently rewriting it’s own policy.  www.praudioguide.nl  Multiplicity & Visual Identities Design Research in Multicultural hybrid societies |