[-empyre-] game on, still, maybe (a final remark about november from Maria Moreira)

["sergio basbaum" <sbasbaum@gmail.com>]

Empyreans,

Sorry for OT posting, but this a final message about november Maria
Moreira asked me to post, since her attempts were beeing sent back by
the server.

following the present debate,

S.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: maria moreira <mariamoreir@yahoo.com>
Date: Dec 7, 2006 11:26 AM
Subject: game on, still, maybe
To: sbasbaum@gmail.com


On relocating utopia / the presentification of the messianic promise.

The seductive in Benjamin is that he is/was a rhizomatic thinker
avant-la-letre.

For despair of his academic peers, he calls into action open-ended/not
referred propositions like his comment on Atget that 'It has quite
justly been said of him that he photographed them [the deserted Paris
streets] like scenes of crime'. And from there Benjamin activates his
remark towards many rhizomes/ treads of thought, leaving generous
space for later readers to follow.

Looking from this side of our digital times so obsessed with forensic
evidences, the crime scene actualised by Atget's images are not of
detective/pulp fiction extraction - they are crime scenes of urban
social injustice, but they present their evidence in a very peculiar
way, that does not circumscribe a who-done-it narrative inside the
villain/ victim divide.

The gardens and properties, shown when their owners are away, are
given the chance to claim their awaiting innocence of service, and
that they will respond to a reversibility in conditions. The workers
gazing back to the camera are fully invested of their dignity as
individuals, subject to unfair conditions yet not corned into the
paralysis of victimisation.

 <http://masters-of-photography.com/A/atget/atget_rue_du_maure_full.html>

As Benjamin said about Atget's images- 'They stir the viewer; he feels
challenged by them in a new way'. Those observed/observing subjects'
returned gaze open up a mutuality that has the camera's eye being the
agent of a non- hierarchical moment of mutual awareness, which
surpraisely does not erase difference.

Quite contrary, Atget brilliancy in allowing for a situation of
returned gaze to be installed without commanding the scene's narrative
[no traditional villain/ victim plot], has this early-technology
camera eye extending the apprehended difference of its framed subject
to include the unknown difference of its future observers, which are
lured to the question - what would be if they inhabited/ created a
different world?

Thus, this mutuality-in-difference has a seed of solidarity that
relocates the messianic promise from an utopia/distant future to a
closer/possible follow up of consciousness. Also inside this loop of
mutuality-in-difference, as there is no vertical line of action or
command, the messianic promise has no vacant site for guiding figures
to be inserted. The promise of the mutuality-in-difference is an
affair between brothers-and-sisters, coming from everywhere, learning
from their differences, while-you-go.

The lines of action here are horizontals, as they are [still] in the internet.

So, rephrasing the above for the digital - what would be if ideas of
digital collaboration/ participation were interrogated on its capacity
of creating mutuality-in-difference? For instance, could multi-players
game be termed as an exercise of mutuality-in-difference? Could it be
structured beyond the narrative plot, as an exercise on extended
solidarity? Is this already happening? If no/yes, why?

On a butterfly flying not thinking

For a maker the flying is a thinking, a gestural thinking, an
enactment of being-in-space as transformation [this being H. Oiticica/
L. Clark raw material, btw].

Here a quotation:

A simpler example: a person is walking across the room. At any
instance, is [s]he "only" at a particular place in the room, one
defined, say, by Cartesian coordinates? If so, how does he get to the
next place - in other words, how does he cross the threshold of the
limits of the increment? […] "Becoming" - whether in the form of
simple motion or historical transformation - cannot be divided into
discrete increments of identity, but flows as a continuum, so that at
any one "point" […] a thing is simultaneously what it "is" and what it
is "becoming". Identities are transformational, sliding and shifting
in an ongoing complex stream of becoming […]

Lebbeus, Wood. (1995) Everyday War. In: Lang, Peter, ed. (1995) Mortal
City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, p.48).

For us entering/exiting the space of this conversation over the net,
the manifold time of the archive, allowing the returning to the
postings is a bonus towards transformation, as the repetition while
going through the texts counteracts the formatting effects of
selective attention, always a persist cultural by-product. This or the
persistence of memory doing a work of slow-release…

On imagination and digital technology

Friedrich Kittler, talking at the ICA, London a few years ago,
commented on the fact that our technological age so far has been
unable to dream outside its own technological paradigm. Unlike other
ages, our ideas of transformed realities are actually within reach of
treads of research/ hypothesis already hosted by the digital paradigm,
and Kittler asked if that was not a sign of a totalitarian structuring
of perception, where the efficiency of a set of tools disavows
dissent.

Would that be the ultimate 'noiseless noise'?

If so, all power to the imagination, then.

But maybe, this could also be a sign that the flow of changes in
paradigm being forced onto the real by human imagination as response
to perceived needs, this flow is now migrating from investigating
technological propositions to focus on ethical propositions as a real
source for the production of realities.

Could a new ethical paradigm be so powerful as our technological
paradigm is in shaping the entirety of our lives?

I hope so and would like to believe that ideas like
mutuality-in-difference and strategies of listening are part of a
larger body of collective gestures-as-thinking evolving a culture of
ethical negotiation of the present, this meaning, an ethics of
learning [new possibilities], an ethics of knowing-not-to-know.

In a way, investigative art making is an exercise on this, on
knowing-not-to-know, keeping your joy as the acid test.

Here something from Burroughs, just for the playfulness in mixing
different technological ages, maybe a way of dealing with the forceful
ascendence of any of them:

<http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/burroughs_william/Burroughs-William_Origin-and-Theory-of-the-Tape-Cut-Ups.mp3>

Cheers, Maria



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