[-empyre-] Hello from Hell

[Kriss Ravetto]

Hi [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology community,

I have been baking here on the East Coast of the US with the record  
heat wave, and I agree with the point about creativity and temperature  
(I do not feel very creative).  Apologies if I am not coherent, there  
is still some morning breeze here.

Given that I come to the question of creativity and social networking  
through critical theory ? I teach film and media theory at the  
University of Edinburgh.  I am aware I am going to change the tone a  
bit.  I would like to start by rethinking a few points (particularly  
terms)  that came up in last week?s discussion, and ask if James and  
Simon had some thoughts about these issues:

1)  ?a tendency to focus only on the visual.? Hasn?t this  focus on  
the visual changed with immersive and more interactive work that  
attempts to be more affective (trigger kinesthetic as well as  
emotional responses)?

2) ?complex nature of our experience? ? How do we understand  
experience? Isn?t it also creative? Or are we back to oppositions  
about active / passive, the singular and the general.  Experience  
seems to fall into the category of what Deleuze called the problematic  
since it cannot be singular (yet we perceive it as such), since it  
requires action, interaction, mediation, and some creative  
interpretation.  When we talk about ?our experience? are we talking  
about something that is also a creative network ? that is not owned by  
anyone?

3)  artist genius as Foucault argued is now a question of signature  
which means copyright and legality.   The social science network seems  
to operate on different principles and I would argue that it is a  
platform designed to produce social creative ontology.

4)  I am curious about what people mean by the ?ideology of the  
visual.? If images think then they must not think in terms of  
language, but in terms of images, no? Therefore, if we are talking  
ideology, aren?t we talking the creation of visual concepts.  The  
problem here is can a single image think, or do we need a chain of  
images to think (like the Lacanian chain of signifiers, i.e. the  
cinematic)?  This has been debated since the 1960s (Metz, Pasolini,  
Dayan, Mulvey, etc.)

5)  When we talk about sense, we talk about it as tacit knowledge.   
Where does sense take place: take vision for instance, do we claim it  
only takes place in the brain? Or are there other interfaces? Do they  
make sense?


6) When we talk about Privacy or secrecy / trade secrets (i.e., no  
open lab) then yes, innovation needs privacy in its inception. (This  
is the subject of my husband's Mario Biagioli?s, current work, "From  
Ciphers to Confidentiality" in States of Secrecy).


7) Intimacy leads us in a completely different direction. Privacy is  
the problematic term here: when we refer to secrecy (in terms of  
innovation, we are talking trade secrets, and nothing intimate), but  
rights to privacy do touch on this, yet again, privacy seems to me,  
not to be intimate.  Innovation or creative communities need not be  
intimate, unless we are redefining what this term means.   Also, I am  
not sure that intimacy is related to place.

But this leads to the question of platforms as space.  How does a site  
relate to space? Yes, we can reveal intimate secrets on such sites,  
but there is something spatially distinct an estrangement, and at the  
same time the spectacular (as Victor Burgin argues).


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