[-empyre-] empyre's on going conversation

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

Message from Maria Moreira:

Hello you all, thanks for the on going conversation.

Maybe "Die Fälschung" / "Circle of Deceit"/ "O Ocaso de um Povo" could
find a new effectiveness outside the entertainment industry and
participate in the flow of the 'suppressed memories from the 1980s war
[that] are now re-turning, re-appearing'.

In a way, Schlöndorff in his film [1] puts forward a suggestion of
answer to the question on efficiency, through a personage with a
hybrid name, Arianna Nassar, played by Hanna Schygulla, who decides to
stay in Lebanon and adopts a war baby, going against medical advice on
the child being a no-guaranties deeply traumatised baby - decision
making as an act of active compassion and the firm inclusion of
uncertainty as a variable not to be controlled/ eradicated but to be
interacted with as an exercise on alterity, on dilation, not erasing
but still shattering the 'compulsive complicity in "the disease of
identity" [2], here played over the divide normal/abnormal.

It is the atavism in the persistence of the need for such divides that
we could ask if it is still present in the clean aesthetics/messy
making divide, I mean, that we keep registering the smoothness as the
proper working, when actually the fact is the working itself is messy,
is unstable, and perversely, there is where the newness of the digital
day-to-day life resides -it is a mixed-standards exercise on
open-ended efficiency, as it includes uncertainty and many different
ways to get to a same destination, thus imploding single perspective
takes on any given lanscape.

Going back to the hacker as a player for the contemporary imaginary,
despite the bullish aspect, the fact that a teenage in Malaysia can
stop operating systems around the world, this as a figure of thought,
gives a dimension of the digital realm as a still fresh public space
-corporate & machine dependent for sure, yet still prone to outbursts
of individual folie.

> From the point of view of a politics of imagination, there is a very
interesting seed inside this figure of thought, as it points out one
of the differences Benjamin's ideas would have to content with, that
is, not only the works of art/ products/ images are undergoing the
effects of reproducibility, but this is happening with the production
tools themselves, even with limitations of context and all the
recurring attempts of regulation, each time the technology reaffirms
this possibility of extended accessibility.

On who watches all the tapes of all the thousands of surveillance
cameras in London's tubes and train stations?

Unfortunately, one just needs some complication happening around a
given geography of fences and walls, and an ugly/ threatening answer
to this question will slowly creep in, and the assessment works will
start.

Yet, speaking about games and nourishing figures of thought any
geography can be turned into a playground for acts of imagination...
and then its accidents could get overlaid by a possibility of joy, joy
as carrier, rescued joy, working joy...



-------------------------------------------

[1] Based on the novel by German poet Nicolas Born [translated by
Leila Vennewitz as The deception (1983) ISBN 0-316-10273-3], and the
screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere[nice interview here:
http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/screenwriters/jean-claude_carriere.htm
]


[2] Ahearne, Jeremy. (1995) Michel de Certeau, Interpretation and its
Others. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 191-192