Fw: [-empyre-] locative city, annotated space au

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

fwd from Simon Taylor
which some how  got caught in the filters..

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Simon" <swht@clear.net>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 7:53 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] locative city, annotated space au


dear empyreans,
an interesting thing I have experienced in these antipodes, the
post-colonial cultures; cultures which have endured the imposition of
enlightenment thinking without the experience of humare; such cultures are
surveying the West as I write, finding a double in our secular postmodernist
and therefore reflected eyes; an angle of deflection, if you will, still;
and a nostalgia, a still beating sentiment, aroused under liberalism by such
terms as the 'underdog'; a sympathy because a hope and a hope (ours) for a
return from the historical repression of the sacred (we have a
constitutional monarchy here for an example of what is now the repressed):
the differential is insuperable, insurmountable: academe operates under the
aegis of the secular enlightenment; terminology per se is constrained to
deflect attention away from its shortcomings: it is time for a sort of
pragmatism sadly lacking in the Realpolitik of our day, which really can't
cope with the liberal burden of sentimentally inspired sympathy for those
cultures it would seek to be most in tune with while raping - as the
already-raped, as the guilt-instilling... (a recent commentator called the
War on Terrorism a war on national insecurity in the USA)... you might read
this as not of-a-piece but surely the poststructuralist mind is attuned to
the rhizomatics of Al Qaeda! there is this sort of fiddling which goes on as
ships go down, as Nicholas Mosley might say, minimalising, in hypo-ironic
mode: the bridge to be built is always inside the leaps our own
understanding has made, repressed, as such, inside terminological shifts,
secreting - in all senses - the excess or essence of a mode of style and
content pretended as surpassed:
'Brandingsmittel' might be sure the augmented or annotated space; any space
which is not ours, will it handle the medium? It takes an artist - a long
time - to get the alien inside the new medium, the mindscape of her/im, the
frustration of expectations, the devaluation of corporate misunderstanding
in that effort unsupported.
yours
simon taylor

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <hight@34n118w.net>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 10:56 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] locative city, annotated space au


> >if you could overlap two different periods (or more) in a place, which
> wou;d you choose?
>
> what do you find most interesting about the possibilities with location
> aware art and technology? now....in 5 years...in 20.......
>
>
> can you think of better terminology for all this ?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Wow.
> > I agree with you that content is absolutely crucial.  I am really
> > concerned about what I call the "whizz bang kapow" or "gadget factor"
So
> > much is made of cool gear and interesting experiments , but rich content
> > and a new artistic work in terms of methodology and metaphor is often
> > lacking. t
> >
> >
> > "I" and linearity are not what I see in a city.  In 34n the narratives I
> > wrote are from the pov's of people in many different places and times
and
> > place is resonant with multiple voices, nonlinearity and the application
> > of new approaches to content, not a rehashing of what could work in a
more
> > traditional form. There can be situationist type work too in a sense of
> > questioning governmental controls, and of place  (what if it is a place
> > one knows but all the data is of a place that is far off..and
> > misunderstood.....afghanastan for example......)
> >
> > "style is a personal form of originality".   that is a horrible
construct
> > for any work .....if you mean as style over substance.....
> >
> > ayers.......rich with meaning.......artistic skill in researching and in
> > placing to heighten awareness of place while also questioning it
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > I agree with you that content is crucial ( thy soat is m
> >> Dear empyreans,
> >> this type of silicon-augmentation of the meatscape brings a number of
> >> things
> >> to mind. They are, in no particular order:
> >>
> >> 1. Benjamin's Arcaden-Pojekt. Antecedent for the flaneur is the
> >> Baudelairean
> >> dandy for whom "style is a personal form of originality". (I would like
> >> to
> >> juxtapose here the impersonally totalised reading of place with the
> >> "monument to sentiment" (Deleuze and Guattari) I understand as both
> >> underwritten by Baudelaire's idea of style and as constitutive -might
> >> one
> >> use the word hypostasis? - of the art act);
> >>
> >> 2. The legend of the Golem - place augmented by data as Golem-like;
> >>
> >> 3. From 1984 onward, New Zealand (whence I write) underwent a
> >> thoroughgoing
> >> and abstract reorientation of its social and economic structures
towards
> >> a
> >> Friedman-esque 'free' market system. This one local commentator has
> >> called
> >> "the New Zealand experiment". The impact of the experiment on cultural
> >> institutions has been immense, experientially, although unmeasured. But
> >> I
> >> am
> >> bringing to your attention one aspect of this transformation of the
> >> socius:
> >> there is no longer - outside the field of transformative processes - an
> >> effective means, media, for critiquing%
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
>
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