5 July, 1 pm, documenta 12 Halle 

Seated on the podium of the documenta-Halle was a long row of at least 15 international guests. Among them was Clémentine Deliss, publisher of Metronome, accompanied by her co-editors and authors of the last two issues. The rather slim Metronome No. 10 was created with Oscar Tourzon on a typewriter in the remoteness of Oregon, whereas the thicker, yellow volume involved the cooperation of  many participants in Tokyo, including a Tokyo-based expert commission set up to study future academic faculties and forms of knowledge production This volume appeared here in Kassel under the name of the “faculty of car polishing”. Deliss conceives of her medium as blueprint, as a “peripatetic organ”. Over the past 10 years she has produced the magazine in various cities and in diverse constellations, constantly thematising the conditions of its production and varying them from issue to issue. The two issues mentioned above were published under the label of “Future Academy”, a mobile research lab launched in 2002 by Metronome. As the name indicates, this project experiments with different, more open forms of learning and teaching situations, and engages in debate with the post-Fordist university and international art colleges. Created in the forests of Oregon, the first magazine provides a practical guide for survivalists in the form of a glossary, the other is a reader containing collected conversations and articles. Oscar Tourzon, co-publisher of issue No. 10, reflects upon the economy of the art system, explores what form an independent, self-sufficient community would actually take and contrasts this with the life style of “Bert and Holly”, who live off 300 dollars a year. “This is the rigorous, death-affirming choice one has to make to be free.” As Tourzon speaks, a Japanese woman clad in a red cape is unpacking a set of red plastic picnic crockery, which she distributes to the guests and the audience, before sitting or lying on the stage. The type-written issue is described by Tourzon as a “primitive blog”. It is a glossary of collected statements by participants of the “Future Academy” and resembles a DIY manual which explains how to keep dry, how nutritious sunflower seeds are and how to live in solitude. After a “commercial break”, they begin selling the slim Metronome for one euro to members of the audience. The Greek architect then poses the key question concerning the “Future Academy”: How do we want to be educated? Many people spend a lot of money on their education, the “Future Academy” is more favourably priced and acts as the parasite of the universities.
Deliss stresses that her focus in compiling each issue is the social environment and forging closer cooperation, or a “conceptual intimacy”, as she describes it. What is significant about people’s attempts to formalise their experiences? Deliss continually seeks to examine their underlying conditions. Does Metronome still function? Is it still effective or has it become just another representational medium? At the same time, she orients herself on what the British anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson has termed the “metalogue”, namely the monitoring of circumstances and structures which impact upon all communication and its progression. Metalogues have the potential to transform learning processes.
During the Lunch Lecture, the group has discovered a formal equivalence for these theoretical considerations: the silent actions of the Japanese woman allude to the conventions of such events by breathing life into the intervening space between the public and the podium.

Taking part were: Clémentine Deliss, Christos Papoulias, Thomas Boutoux, Oscar Tuazon, Takayuki Yamamoto, Kim Bang, Naohiro Deguchi, Kaori Matsumoto, Steven Mykietyn, Nico Dockx, Jan Mast, Stephanie Snyder, Johannes Raether, Pablo Herrera D. Veitia, April Mellor, Ella Barclay, Toku Matsubuchi, Naohiro Deguchi

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