[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[christopher sullivan]

Eugenio. you speak of something I posted earlier, the challenge of agreement as
a sign of a healthy community. commonality with criticality sounds a lot
healthier. I myself do not think that art is something that all members of a
community should engage in, I do think that all should experience it, but for
me there is nothing exclusionary about being an observer. and observer and
partaker of a good cook at a restaurant, a good musician, reading the book of a
good writer. 
     I recently got a survey form an agency that had granted me money decades
ago, their questionnaire asked me nothing but question about how my work
engaged, involved, gave voice to, the community. It was frustrating because my
work is very social, but it does not function in this, collaborative , workshop
way with non artists. I guess it gets down to me really being invested in an art
object, the social aspect of which can be vastly varies. 

saw a great piece by a performance artist Barrie cole. 
it was about face book. I paraphrase, but it went like this. 

"I am talking about the Face book dream, you know what that is, yes you do. It
is the Idea that you will gather together all of the people from your
fragmented past, and present, and when they are all assembled, suddenly , 
your life history will make perfect sense."

Chris Sullivan.   

Quoting Eugenio Tisselli <cubo23 at yahoo.com>:

> Davin,
> 
> When I read your phrase
> 
> > And, if we live in a true community, our
> > ideas and actions
> > are bound to modify, be modified, contradict, and/or
> > complement the
> > negotiation of being.
> 
> the rose-colored environment of Facebook immediately came to mind. You know,
> you can "like" but not "dislike", and people rarely disagree or contradict
> each other. You say that we are bound to be contradicted when we live in a
> true community, and I would say that we actually need to be contradicted in
> order to set arguments, discussions and debates in motion. The fact that we
> are here at empyre, not necessarily contradicting each other, but offering
> continuous counterpoints and different viewpoints, makes us all richer.
> Knowledge can emerge from disagreement. So, in the almost complete absence of
> a minimal quota of agonistic exchanges between people, how can a community
> emerge from Facebook? Are there so many contradictions and conflicts in the
> "real world" that we turn to Facebook simply to escape from them? Could we
> then see Facebook as an "anti-community", where we all just whiz by other
> poeple's walls, stopping only to acknowledge what we like and
>  ignoring what we don't?
> 
> Eugenio.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>       
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 


Christopher Sullivan
Dept. of Film/Video/New Media
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 so michigan
Chicago Ill 60603
csulli at saic.edu
312-345-3802