POTENTIAL: Spurse
Spurse launches its high-stakes art practice by introducing an idiosyncratic definition of ‘excess.’ Instead of dismal thoughts of bloated complacency, spurse welcomes extra capacity that does not yet perform a function but could. One compelling example of such excess is the underutilized workings of the human brain. Spurse offers an exuberant description of this potential by citing the “wondrous, complex and situated entanglement.”³ of humans with their environment, enabling us to be “part of its dynamic and continuous creation.”⁴

The following propositions summarize these natural entanglements:

- All actions are collective.
- Everything affects and is affected by everything else.
- All human actions in the present affect biological, technological, social, and material systems in the future.

These proclamations guide Spurse, a loose collective of approximately eighty artists, urban planners, geographers, biologists, and statisticians. Their varied expertise accounts for the range and rigor of the group’s pursuits. The spokesperson for the group is Iain Kerr who studied philosophy and architecture, but everyone is welcome to enter the fluid space of the group’s exploration. Spurse also invites the audience to activate their mental “excess” and join them in considering the total overhaul of every system on the globe.

Darwin’s theory that chance, not design, drives evolution unites this disparate bevy of creative thinkers. When chance propels change, variation increases along with the chances for an organism or a community to successfully adapt to environmental shifts. Spurse not only welcomes chance as the harbinger of hope, it propagates opportunities for chance to conduct its beneficial work.

For “From the Fat of the Land,” Spurse is constructing an interactive game designed to mutate thoughts and thereby to generate and systematize new world views adapted to a radically changing environment. Cosmological Proposition Generator consisting of several tables pieced together. The tops of the tables are cut with deep slits into which disks will be inserted. Each is inscribed with a text that addresses some broad topic such as imagined places or ecosystems. As the wheels rotate at speeds determined by vectors, they create random combinations of relationships. Each is a new potential cosmology.

Paul Bartow, another member of the group, explains that Spurse plans to further multiply possibilities for random generation by sending out a call across the internet for others to contribute and respond and experiment. They hope to trigger unintended trajectories because as people tune into the cosmological apparatus, adding their own world views, they “will act as a generator of other cosmological productions that operate as random generators themselves … It is with this activity of dialing the apparatus that one is in the production of excess, i.e., a production of cosmologies, the fat if you will.”⁵ Kerr sums up the project by declaring that all combinations are welcome because “any alternative to the status quo has potential. This is the future emerging.” ⁶

Spurse
sample cosmology: cosmology of the virtual/actual Response to Cosmological Proposition Generator questionnaire submitted via fax
2007

Spurse
Cosmological Proposition Generator Tables, bars, filters, wheels, portable shelving unit with digital camer, computer, all-in-one fax machine, chair, questionnaires.
Grand Arts installation view
2007