Boolean Works

EN
Boolean Works is a framework for the art, technics and theory of Johannes Bongers since 1991.Boolean Logic, developed by mathematician George Boole in the 19th century, is credited as the foundation of the information age and modern digital technology.Boolean logic as a technical mentality leads to less vitality, increasing homogeneity, and capitalism's obsession with identity, where being rules over becoming, repressing any actual potential of radical agency.Since 1991, Boolean Works has appropriated the Boolean logical operators AND, OR, NOT to expand the applications of Boolean Logic beyond the dominant mode of technology that infiltrates our minds and communities and is changing the way we see the world and ourselves.The Boolean Works framework, Post-Boolean, draws on several key insights: the coherence between the three ecologies (mind, social, and milieu) of Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon's concept of individuation, Bergsons and Deleuzes concepts of time, Jesper Hoffmeyer's semiotics of nature, and Heidegger's essence of technology have been significant sources of inspiration for this work. Boolean Works shares its mentality with Joseph Beuys' Erweiterte Kunstbegriff, the extended concept of art, which seeks to expand art's potential to incorporate psychic, social and various life processes and critique the capitalist mode of being.Boolean Works encompasses a range of magnitudes, depths, and perspectives, embodied in sculpture, mixed media installations, text works, diagrams, video, spatial narratives, exhibition and curatorial programs and the digital knowledge network Fazzination. Boolean Works extends to gardens and the color yellow as a way to subvert capitalism. In Bongers work death is always near.Since 2019, Boolean Works has been constructing an artistic-political cosmology to increase vitality and variety and working on individual and collective agency. This cosmology includes 'apps' like the municipality Gemeente Nieuwe IJssel, the city of ANDSTERDAM, a pan-ecological political party SOOOS, and a sontological concept for living organisms: Per~son. In 2023, Technotlogy is launched, an open Operating System (OS), a supportive platform for the existing apps and the ones to come.Recent works and projects include links to websites or additional information.

NL
Boolean Works is het framework voor de kunst en theorie van Johannes Bongers sinds 1991.De conceptuele kunstenaar Johannes Bongers bouwt sinds 2010 aan een kosmologie. Het begon met de kleur geel, waarmee het kapitalisme wordt uitgedaagd dit toe te eigenen, zoals het met alle verschil doet. geel, Leeg. De kleur werd uitgebreid met installaties en organisaties die ten doel hebben het menselijk handelingsvermogen te reactiveren en om te buigen van stabiele identiteit naar een actief worden. De kosmologie bestaat nu uit een Gemeente, een stad, een bos, een tuin, een kunstcollectie afkomstig uit één plant, een politieke partij en een nieuw concept voor mens en dier. En sinds 2023 een nieuw concept voor technologie: Technotlogy.Na goudsmid en kristallograaf en na een carrière met museale solotentoonstellingen en opdrachten begon beeldhouwer Bongers zijn weg door de dimensies, de verschillende schalen en orders of magnitude van het leven. Eerst als curator en daarna in de technologie, hij was 15 jaar creatief directeur in technologiebedrijven en bouwde expertise op rond informatietheorie. Zijn aanpak groeide uit in de richting van het leven zelf, de vraagstukken van de mens, de maatschappij en het milieu en de betekenis van technologie.De vraagstukken van mens, maatschappij en milieu en de samenhang daartussen, hij noemt deze 'de drie ecologieën naar Félix Guattari, zijn vooreerst kennisvraagstukken. Er is een crisis die alle bestaande crises overstijgt waarin de mens een misbegrip heeft over wie en wat die is, wat de relatie is tot de leefomgeving en wat de essentie van technologie daarin veroorzaakt.De toenemende homogenisering, het afnemende menselijk handelingsvermogen, de toeëigening van het publieke van door het private en de verder groeiende technische mentaliteit zijn de grote vraagstukken waarmee Bongers zich inlaat. De kunstmatige scheiding tussen organisme en leefwereld – van alle organismen kent alleen de mens die scheiding – heeft zijn volle aandacht. Deze scheiding is een vraagstuk van topologische sluiting dat in de kern een existentieel beeldhouwkundig vraagstuk is.De conceptuele kunst en de concepten die hij als kunstenaar, creatief directeur en nu in zijn artistieke politiek uitwerkt zijn bijna zonder uitzondering verbonden met de dood, met tijd en met variatie. Hij bestudeert het allerkleinste als de manifestatie van een onderliggende structuur. De prefix Ge-, de Ω vorm van een camerabeweging, een element in een stadswapen, het wegvallen van een zin of een streepje in een woord, vormen de groeikernen voor een nieuwe vitaliteit. Zijn aanpak is een pleidooi voor het uitbreiden van het kunstbegrip, het buiten de grenzen treden van kunst en kunstenaars, ook om de regie te pakken op vraagstukken die veel te belangrijk zijn om ze aan politiek en massamedia over te laten. Bongers' aanpak is een pleidooi om het denken materieel te beschouwen, voortdurend heen en terug tussen interieur en buitenwereld en daarop doorbouwen.De werken vanaf 2019 vormen een zich uitbreidende structuur: de Gemeente Nieuwe IJssel waarin oefenen centraal staat, de stad ANDSTERDAM als wordende stad in plaats van op het 'zijnde' gericht (I am sterdam), SOOOS de linkse politieke partij met een driedubbele SOS, het verdwenen Bosje van Bannink en Per-soon waarin levende wezens door-klank zijn en door stem en klank politiek worden verbonden. En sinds 2023 een nieuw technologie paradigma Technotlogy waarin kunst en techniek hun gezamenlijke oorsprong hervinden.Deze werken roepen op er aan deel te nemen, bij te dragen, ze zijn veelal open source, met oefeningen, voorbeelden en zelfs een politiek programma.

• Contact and websites

DIAGRAM TECHNOTLOGY 2023

'NOT (L'inconnue de la Seine)' is a perspective relief artwork from 1991, created from a black and white photograph of the death mask of an unidentified young woman found drowned in the River Seine in Paris in the 1880's. Later we found her scaled porcelain death mask. The work marks our endless attempts – it is not about copy, simulatior or original, and not to bring her back to life – to sculpt in time.

SOOOS is a pan-ecological political concept for a progressive movement that addresses not just the social and environmental crisis but the more general declining coherence between the ecology of mind, social structures, and the natural environment — the "three ecologies" — in a dystopia brought about and exploited by modern technology. S.O.O.O.S is the Morse coded call for help, for the urgent need for getting insight and taking action. More information at SOOOS.ORG.

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DENKMAL, PUBLIC ART GIFT TO THE COMMUNITY OF GENDRINGEN, BRONZE, 2022. VISIT DENKMAL

ANDSTERDAM, City of the Three ecologies. The city of 'BECOMING' over 'BEING'. ANDSTERDAM

MY DREAM, YOUR FUTURE (BOOLEAN WORKS MARCH 2022)

"The Living Present" invokes the conceptual frameworks of time formulated by Henri Bergson in 1889 and later reinterpreted by Gilles Deleuze in 1968. These frameworks illuminate the myriad possibilities inherent in the present moment—possibilities that carry the imprints of the past and unfurl into the unfolding future. Positioned against this philosophical backdrop are disparate elements that engage in a complex dialogue: A 1974 blackboard by the social sculptor Joseph Beuys, housed in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), serves as one focal point. Beuys, a World War II German pilot, claims to have been rescued by Tartars in Crimea, a narrative that disrupts traditional historical accounts, but supports his speculative realist oeuvre. Alongside this, we find a Future analysis diagram along temporal, spatial, social and other vectors, a project initiated in 2011 by Johannes Bongers. These components collectively frame the earliest sculptural experiments of Vladimir Putin in a school in Sevastopol, Crimea, during the incipient phase of Russia's occupation of Ukraine.

'seeing is not saving' is a sculpture project inspired by "Le Radeau de la Méduse" (1819) by Théodore Géricault, which hangs in the Louvre. The painting is the first political artwork that was inspired by a mass media newspaper article about the despair of survivors on a raft, who were left by the officers of the ship they worked on. The viewpoint of the sculpture is taken from the rescue frigate on the horizon in the painting. It shows the men on the raft but from the reversed viewpoint of the painting. From this position, today's hopeless predicament is depicted. The title is added later after Friedrich Tietjen who wrote about a photograph of drowned refugees: "Seeing does not mean saving" pointing in this work at the lacking agency to bridge the distance between reality, art, and action.

Newspaper article November 20, 2021 in NRC

Bosje van Bannink demolished, 2019-2022.
1000+ images of this tiny forest. Bosje van Bannink

Closure is a collection of minimal sculptures and conceptual models exploring the asymmetrical relationship between organisms and their environments. Sculpture, as an art discipline, inherited the deep knowledge about how an entity and its environment is related; not biological but ontological and material. Making this tacit knowledge available, is extremely relevant today, as the cascade of crises and catastrophes often finds its origin, both epistemological, mental, and social, in misunderstandings about this relationship. (02/2023)

'The Family' is a collection of 300 (and growing) gold and platinum leaves, thinner than paper, all from one single rhubarb mother plant that is approximately the same age as the artist. The rhubarb leaf is a "pattern that connects," referencing to Gregory Bateson: its five-fingered shape is related to the human hand.Gold and platinum are created in the collisions of neutron stars. When two neutron stars collide, they create a massive explosion known as a kilonova. The intense heat and pressure of the collision can fuse atomic nuclei together, forming new heavy elements like gold and platinum. These elements are then scattered into space, where they can eventually become part of new stars, planets and rhubarb leaves. In contrast to the metals, the rhubarb mother plant is located at one single spot in our universe, grows regularly each year, and its leaves are collected and prepared at a specific point in time. In 'The Family' spacetime vectors cross in a perpetual process of individuation between modes of matter and ideas.

In front of a primary school, a small meadow with three apple trees is transformed into a garden that celebrates the coherence between the three ecologies: the mind, the social and the milieu. To teach children about the importance of the mind and ideas, community and difference between groups, and the environment as part of being a self. Destroy the environment and you destroy yourself.

Artistic political intervention: The hacking of the Socialist Co-Party program of December 6, 2021 LINK to the program. This work precedes SOOOS, a new ecological political party from 2022.

Malus Domestica (Schone van Boskoop) apples are conserved in paper of De Witte Raaf, edition September 2021.

CHANGING THE MODE OF BEING BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL, THE SOCIAL AND MILIEU: ANDSTERDAM (BW 9/2022)

NOT (Fettecke, 1982 AND Fountain, 1917) merges Beuys' and Duchamp's radical art. This piece is co-created with the mother of the artist. The AND operator connects what both artworks have in common. The Boolean NOT operator inverts this connection and negates the result.

Town Hall of Gemeente Nieuwe IJssel, Gemeente of the Three Ecologies. 2019 - today

The Trilemma+ Game, which began in 2013, is a study in dimensional relations. In 2017, information technology was added to the Trilemma, resulting in the Tetralemma. This diagram will be updated to incorporate insights gained from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other environmental crises. The Trilemma+ Game is based on the Boolean logic operations of AND, OR, and NOT.

BOOLEAN IDENTITY, diagrams of an auto-psychoanalytic practice 2012

A priori, 2012

geeL, Leeg materiaal is a long term project about conquering the capture of capitalism and the reconstruction of subjectivity. geeL, Leeg materiaal is not about color but is about the negation of capitalism. Yellow is the consumer activation color and, in Boolean terms, NOT (RED, BLUE, ORANGE, PURPLE, ANTHRACITE, GREENISH). In semiotics the color yellow is an open or empty signifier, an empty meaning. geeL, Leeg materiaal isolates this emptiness and inflates it.

The Marriage from Hell between Nation State, Capitalism and Hard Technology (2014)

Proto is a Boolean Park exclave for dimensional prototyping

Thanks to Sean Carroll for basic scheme complexity and entropy

2005. STIP is a diagram for dimensional concepting in a technological environment. The STIP, PITS, TIPS dimensions form a tetrahedron where every node is directly connected to the other three. The non-hierarchical structure of the tetrahedron makes STIP an extremely powerful design tool. Presented at EGOS, Vienna 2007.

Critique on mass media has always been conspicuous and was belittled by Marshall McLuhan: a book is also a mass medium. To the notions of Post Media, Post Mass Media and 'Digital as Post Media' in art theory and critical theory, BW adds a fourth category that dominates all previous ones: Social Mass Media. The amount of communication it produces is the real problem, the destructive force.

STEM connects The Three Ecologies of Guattari with Techné (or Heidegger's Gestell).

At a certain point Bongers started making diagrams to structure his ideas and concepts.

Boolean Lights @ Ligetti.com 1993-2021. You experience the Boolean AND OR NOT operators in full, steering the various material qualities of the wall lights.

In the background of STOA (Power Plant), hidden behind an industrial facade, high voltage transformers are buzzing; generating mental, social and artistic energy to energise life and conquer death, entropy and homogenisation in this ancient temple-column (Stoa) glass architecture.

Ensemble of a Dutch axe, a piece of Hedera root, a nomadic/Turkana spear, a German wooden demo rifle (WO1) and a Yellow Entropic Tube.

ARTIST IMPRESSION 2020. DENKMAL IS A PUBLIC ART GIFT TO THE COMMUNITY OF GENDRINGEN 2020. LINK TO PDF

DENKMAL, 2022, BRONZE

CONCEPTUAL DIAGRAM OF PER-SON AND PER-SONATURE 2020

Mind AND Nature, after Gregory Bateson 1979. He first suggested an other booktitle: Pattern which connects. Crossing borders between disciplines and connecting different epistemologies, just like Bateson and Guattari did, "Pattern which connect' gives me daily guidance. Even the deconstruction of ontologies seem to me, although not yet clear, very relevant.

Ips Typographus is a biosemiotic copywriter. Ips Typographus (Per-son) performs in GROND# 2. GROND program 2021-2022

SON IS SOUND. For Joseph Beuys, sound was as important a sculptural material as fat, felt, or copper. He was certain that you hear a sculpture before you see it.

PER-SON performing in GROND #0

Yellow-ness as Firstness: “An instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever… it has its own quality which consists of nothing else”. Charles Sanders Peirce, 1931

NOT (Orphee), REMAKE clip from MOORD, 1993 Centraal Museum Utrecht. Originally cinematic material is transferred to 'limits of glass' by the 1993 video monitor and in 2021 computer screen or mobile. The longer Orphee is banging on the 'division' between life and death, the more the act is gaining relevance in times of Social Mass Media.

Closing curtains 2011. Architecture, Original sound, Death, Montage. *I filmed what i hoped was going to happen. *

Clip of Beeldbeschrijving/Explosion of a Memory Heiner Müller, in CSHO #6 't Luie End 1997. The landscape beyond life described from death. 2 channel theatre-video. Concept and played by Gerardjan Rijnders.

NOT (Lady Lazarus/Zimmer der Dame) from 1997 is a 5-channel 3D video that has been compressed into one single demo. The videos in Boolean Works explore the stretching of spacetime architecture, the lens, sound and montage; most works are about death, absence and landscapes beyond. Soundtrack of this video is "Duinpad" by Richard Bolhuis reversed.

Overlijdensbericht/Obituary (After H. Müller) is a public text installation that reenacts a physical exhibition of Bongers' work. The phrase "I may be Japanese" is deconstructed and projected onto the deconstructed pavilion of Bernard Tschumi.

Exhibition concept of Bongers with Paul Groot, Beyer, Driessens & Verstappen e.a.

'Beeldbeschrijving' is a collaborative text piece created for the opening show of TENT, Rotterdam. The original play by Heiner Müller, also named 'Beeldbeschrijving', depicts a landscape beyond this side of life and includes passages that were written using automatic writing. The text is made heard in the show.

TRUE SELF, FALSE SELF is part of a 10 piece museum installation. TRUE SELF, FALSE SELF is referring to Boolean Logic resulting in TRUE/FALSE, 0 or 1. The show is about death and resurrection.

Gaze of Orpheus is a 2-channel video installation and glass rooms. The mimetic process of the two videos – each a 15-minute museum walk-through, with one camera moving forward and one moving backwards – is similar to the concept of the "Gaze of Orpheus" where life and death swap by looking back and forth.

WHALE (1991, glass, steel wire)

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Psychotic Object # I MAY BE JAPANESE

Boolean Fruit is an exhibition plan and curatorial experiment created for De Appel, Amsterdam. Bongers used Boolean logic to create the exhibition architecture of Boolean Fruit. The principles of AND, OR, and NOT were applied to the "Route Architecturale" drawn for the two protagonists: Logos and Phonos. These two concepts are in conflict, struggling over dominance in our minds and culture.

City counsil of ANDSTERDAM

Boolean Park is an information studio. Its clients include companies in the cultural sector: KCO, North Sea Jazz, Holland Festival, Mens + Boek e.a.

Harald Szeemann, the renowned curator, has been a great inspiration for Bongers.

Buying Yellow at the HEMA (2013)

YELLOW CONTRA MATERIAL WORKSHOP

'Het levende levenloze wezen' is part of I May Be Japanese, 1995, Gallery Sluijmer & Van Leeuwen, mixed media installation

MODEL FOR CHANGE (BATESON, WEICK AND VAN STAVEREN) 2021

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REAR WINDOW (1954), Boolean sculpture for Stichting Vedute in 1993

Case Study House Omega was based on an Omega shaped camera movement in Profession Reporter of Michelangelo Antonioni. The projects of CSHO mark the stages and montage of this moviescene: interior/secret, body, camera, gaze, window, psyche, identity, landscape, psychosis and death (Omega). 100+ artists, architects and authors participated.

GREEN 1.01 & GREEN 2.0, Case Study House Omega #5, Our first project about The Three Ecologies,1997

BONZAI AND ARTIFICIAL TREES + VIDEOS OF HANDWRITING THE THEATREPLAY BILDBESCHREIBUNG OF HEINER MÜLLER

First leaf as per-son of Boolean Family. Multiple with spacetime stamp

The Three Sisters. A Public Art Space Template at GROND 2020

Recommended herbicides by Wageningen University NL for effective crop control

FIRST SOLO 1991. Private portraits standing and sleeping. Inspired by The Poetics of Space of Gaston Bachelard and Oponthoud van de dood van Maurice Blanchot.

GROND PROGRAM 2021/2022

BOOLEAN BARS #7, # 13, 2019

Bongers' fascination with the relation between the psyche and the social, especially in times of destruction, originates from an early age. This is Bongers' first calligraphy/letter writing at the age of 17 about Erich Fromm's "Fear of Freedom" (1941).