----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hello - the biennale in Venice has its own draw but as I'm going there and as
the biennale is on, it seems a reasonable place to detect signs of the new.
Glastonbury suddenly struck me as a gathering with a primary function of
corroborating a set of ideas for a generation (like many other youth festivals
that are about sharing ideas) but Glastonbury of course was one of the first
and I've had the privilege of watching it transmute year upon year - I live
nearby - as it takes on the changes put forward by the performing community. It
began spontaneously and arose out of the alternative networks of the 60's,
where Buckminster Fuller, Stafford Beer, Edmund Carpenter, McLuhan etc were
leading thought and early user generated ecological and cybernetics oriented
ideas were networked at early festivals such as this. Today, the children of
the people who attended the first festivals come - but so do the curious from
outside the initial networking system. Also television has picked up
Glastonbury as a 'National Treasure' and embraced many of the values put
forward. Equally, the recent Olympics opening ceremony featured the iconic
Glastobury Tor out of which the working class of the industrial revolution were
seen to come out of - as if Glastonbury were the Heart of 'ideal version of
England where the paradigmatic virtues are nurtured and grown.
Here there was an attempt to take back the values of 'Albion' or 'Avalon' from
the clutches of the right wing (we took on courtly and Arthurian values quite
heavily here) - and so though the UK is gripped by survivalist concerns
(against the developments in the marketplace from developing economies) and
many of the youth exhibit the narrow focus of one of the last great dinosaurs
Thatcher, actually, it is within this festival that is exported throughout the
world as a paradigmaticly important cognitive distributive network that has
linked in to global information distribution.
Re Resistance is Futile - I think that each year a theme is proposed that
allows ideas to coagulate around it and if the theme functions correctly then
it epitomises the natures of the changes that have occurred in the preceding
period. I'm not sure that this particular theme was completely relevant to the
world as it stands at the moment. If you've bought a more right wing ideology
then you'd buy the idea that the market is the best mechanism for working
through materialist concerns. 'Nature red in tooth and claw' seems to be an
important concept if you buy materialism, because people understand that if
they were cast out into the wild naked, most would not survive, But it seems to
me to be an entirely misplaced argument that if something eats something else,
then we too must do the same and be the same.
In terms of activities being 'sustainable as the processes of technologisation
and globalisation'. I don't think we need be anxious. If you seek an audience
and approval for what you do then only pain can follow. Art must be made for
it's own sake by the artist. It is good to display, but for different reasons
than some artists do this for. Critique is the principle issue, but actually,
the artist must be their own principle critic. I have made Art for 40 years,
and my work has been shown around the world remotely for which I am glad.
Sometimes though, a local event has more potency for me because I get to relate
to the person viewing the work and we have an equal exchange where I am not
elevated above them simply because I have made the work. The gallery and museum
scenario maintains the idea of the artist and curator as priest and if the
cognitive neuroscientists are right - we no longer need shamans, curators,
academics or any other kind of bureaucrat to maintain the distance between
artwork, viewer and artist.
Why would we be different in the future? SImply because we are not the same as
we were in the past. The timescales are so much longer in the view I am
expressing. 2 million years ago we began behaving differently (apparently) and
after a certain period other developments occurred (only ten thousand years for
theoreticising and bureaucratising language). A lot of what you, Johannes,
mention as valuable is within the last 10,000. I mentioned that this was a
scaffolded viewpoint which takes the best of and builds upon developments from
the past - but does not preclude contemporary and future developments. It's all
part of the continuum. I sense a degree of nostalgia for these behaviours,
which is fine. But measured against a 1 billion year development from the
earliest multi-celled creatures, apes jumping around mimetically, poetically,
artistically, sensuously….. this is just a small element within the timescale.
And that's only if you take account of evolution in this little and secluded
part of the galaxy.
...And I have to admit here to not being Speciesist and so I have no particular
allegiance to human behaviour. I will stick with it whilst being one, grunt
when required and publicly resist what I consider to be abhorrent, but I will
try to be a resistant inhabitant in the set-up. My resistance is to describe
limitations of the ape outlook.
Best, Terry
On 6 Jul 2013, at 06:12, Johannes Birringer
<johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk<mailto:johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk>> wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hi all
Terry replies that he is out there hoping "to catch more glimpses of the
developing paradigm there" (why going to Venice?), the externalized memory
system
of velocitized selves, the cognitive distributive system. Meanwhile, Terry you
describe briefly the Glastonbury Festival -- did you see the performers and the
crowds
as an example of the new developing paradigm? and if so, can you say why, and
how this might be linked to the questions that Simon Biggs proposes as
leitmotifs for this month's discussion
such as ....<how artists, arts groups, academics and activists might ensure
their activities are sustainable as the processes of technologisation and
globalisation unfold?>
I suppose I'm asking about the theme: resistance to what? why futile? futile
in regard to what? the unfolding processes of technologisation and
globalisation?
[Simon from NZ schreibt]
..so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's
image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like
stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body -
since we don't yet know what a body can do...
all right -- this idea of the body not knowing yet what it can do, I like it.
And yet we do grow older, and so do our behaviors.
But can we track back to the idea of resistance, then, and ask here (for
example those amongst you here on the list who were at this Resistance ISEA)
what exactly would be our intuitive or rational response to what Terry has
called, in his first posting, "the collective behaviour both online and via
social media"
and then explained as as narrative construct? A few examples have popped up,
the ISEA panel on The Future of the Moving Images, Big Data, Mr Snowden and
surveillance prisms, the
'collective (social) state from which we individually emerge ....within a
complexity of voices that situate themselves through various performative
activities' (this is
Simon Biggs's interesting evocation of James Leach's anthropology and what
James discussed here in 2010 on the subject of social creativity), junk noise
and dropped data (Christine), the children at the
Montessori school, the Glastonbury Festival....
I'd think bodies learn when to resist and when to be exuberant; I just
participated in an event, maybe similar to Glastonbury maybe not, at Houston's
Pride Parade last Saturday which was mind blowing,
hundreds of thousands of people in our community and city celebrating each
other and expressing whatever they needed or desired on the streets we had
taken for day and a night.
The euphoria of the Parade was a physical shared event, a kind of dance, but
also expression of political will. This connects it to May 68, and many other
moments of irruption of the commune-political and the sexual.
Along the lines of the Technicians of the Sacred that I quoted, the poetry I
perceived in the happening had a tribal-communal dimension that is unaffected
by the beforementioned unfolding processes of
technologisation - and it is precisely not velocitized, it requires a slowing
down, duration, a slow pantomime relying on bodily memory that is not
expropriated.
These kinds of memories, and their political dimension of experience and
learning, within societal systems of repression of creativity, are related,
wouldn't you think, to what we see in Egypt right now, although
their's was not a Parade nor a Festival, and yet is described at the moment as
'celebration' on Tahrir Square continuing with the military helicopters
"providing further spectacle" flying over the heads of the celebrants.
What liturgies are we witnessing? And how incredibly complex they are.
Un-mediatable, this complexity, by facebook or twitter. And no surveillance
data were gathered at the Pride Parade, except of course if you
think of the celebrants capturing their joy on their cell phones, photographing
themselves, embracing themselves each other. Low resolution, less realistic.
How do we construct stories of these uprisings?
James Leach, a few years back, said that
creativity is not outside human experience, but part of its everyday reality.
Creativity is inherent in what it is to be a human being because in myth, the
actions referred to above, beginning with the acts which established gender,
and thus the possibilities for human reproduction and kinship [JL; this does
not work in the context of the Pride Parade of course except otherwise], were
the actions of the first human beings constituting themselves as human and not
something else. In their everyday lives of gardening, animal husbandry, hunting
etc., these people are the same as those first creator beings, and thus are
constantly partaking of the original ‘creativity’ as they also constitute their
lives as human and not something else...
Having said all that, and given the underlying premise of all the above is that
we, just as Reite people do, constitute our existences through the particular
way we engage in relations to each other (social ontology), structured through
certain key principles available in myths we tell ourselves about how we have
got here and what our responsibilities as human being are — what are we to make
of the current idea that somehow the mediation of human relations through
technological networks will make us more ‘creative’?
What is it about the speeding up of communication, the mediation of
geographical and social distance, that makes us believe (and I use the word
consciously) that we are going to be doing anything very different?
[http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/07/04/empyre-creativity-as-a-social-ontology/]
Well, this is a good question, but the myths may be changing.
regards
Johannes Birringer
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Terry Flaxton
Professor of Cinematography and Lens Based Media
University of West of England
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/flaxtonpage1.htm
+ 44 (0) 117 328 7149
+44 (0) 7976 370 984
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