[-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ Resistance to the neurosis of the intelligent Ape

Sun Jul 7 19:40:29 EST 2013

Hello - the biennale in Venice has its own draw but as I'm going there and as the biennale is on, it seems a reasonable place to detect signs of the new. Glastonbury suddenly struck me as a gathering with a primary function of corroborating a set of ideas for a generation (like many other youth festivals that are about sharing ideas) but Glastonbury of course was one of the first and I've had the privilege of watching it transmute year upon year - I live nearby - as it takes on the changes put forward by the performing community. It began spontaneously and arose out of the alternative networks of the 60's, where Buckminster Fuller, Stafford Beer, Edmund Carpenter, McLuhan etc were leading thought and early user generated ecological and cybernetics oriented ideas were networked at early festivals such as this. Today, the children of the people who attended the first festivals come - but so do the curious from outside the initial networking system. Also television has picked up Glastonbury as a 'National Treasure' and embraced many of the values put forward. Equally, the recent Olympics opening ceremony featured the iconic Glastobury Tor out of which the working class of the industrial revolution were seen to come out of - as if Glastonbury were the Heart of 'ideal version of England where the paradigmatic virtues are nurtured and grown.

Here there was an attempt to take back the values of 'Albion' or 'Avalon' from the clutches of the right wing (we took on courtly and Arthurian values quite heavily here) - and so though the UK is gripped by survivalist concerns (against the developments in the marketplace from developing economies) and many of the youth exhibit the narrow focus of one of the last great dinosaurs Thatcher, actually, it is within this festival that is exported throughout the world as a paradigmaticly important cognitive distributive network that has linked in to global information distribution.

Re Resistance is Futile - I think that each year a theme is proposed that allows ideas to coagulate around it and if the theme functions correctly then it epitomises the natures of the changes that have occurred in the preceding period. I'm not sure that this particular theme was completely relevant to the world as it stands at the moment. If you've bought a more right wing ideology then you'd buy the idea that the market is the best mechanism for working through materialist concerns. 'Nature red in tooth and claw' seems to be an important concept if you buy materialism, because people understand that if they were cast out into the wild naked, most would not survive, But it seems to me to be an entirely misplaced argument that if something eats something else, then we too must do the same and be the same.

In terms of activities being 'sustainable as the processes of technologisation and globalisation'. I don't think we need be anxious. If you seek an audience and approval for what you do then only pain can follow. Art must be made for it's own sake by the artist. It is good to display, but for different reasons than some artists do this for. Critique is the principle issue, but actually, the artist must be their own principle critic. I have made Art for 40 years, and my work has been shown around the world remotely for which I am glad. Sometimes though, a local event has more potency for me because I get to relate to the person viewing the work and we have an equal exchange where I am not elevated above them simply because I have made the work. The gallery and museum scenario maintains the idea of the artist and curator as priest and if the cognitive neuroscientists are right - we no longer need shamans, curators, academics or any other kind of bureaucrat to maintain the distance between artwork, viewer and artist.

Why would we be different in the future? SImply because we are not the same as we were in the past. The timescales are so much longer in the view I am expressing. 2 million years ago we began behaving differently (apparently) and after a certain period other developments occurred (only ten thousand years for theoreticising and bureaucratising language). A lot of what you, Johannes, mention as valuable is within the last 10,000. I mentioned that this was a scaffolded viewpoint which takes the best of and builds upon developments from the past - but does not preclude contemporary and future developments. It's all part of the continuum. I sense a degree of nostalgia for these behaviours, which is fine. But measured against a 1 billion year development from the earliest multi-celled creatures, apes jumping around mimetically, poetically, artistically, sensuously….. this is just a small element within the timescale. And that's only if you take account of evolution in this little and secluded part of the galaxy.

...And I have to admit here to not being Speciesist and so I have no particular allegiance to human behaviour. I will stick with it whilst being one, grunt when required and publicly resist what I consider to be abhorrent, but I will try to be a resistant inhabitant in the set-up. My resistance is to describe limitations of the ape outlook.

Best, Terry

On 6 Jul 2013, at 06:12, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk<mailto:Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>> wrote:

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------

Hi all

Terry replies that he is out there  hoping "to catch more glimpses of the developing paradigm there" (why going to Venice?), the externalized memory system
of velocitized selves, the cognitive distributive system. Meanwhile, Terry you describe briefly the Glastonbury Festival -- did you see the performers and the crowds
as an example of the new developing paradigm? and if so, can you say why, and how this might be linked to the questions that Simon  Biggs proposes as leitmotifs for this month's discussion
such as ....<how artists, arts groups, academics and activists might ensure their activities are sustainable as the processes of technologisation and globalisation unfold?>

I suppose I'm asking about the theme:  resistance to what? why futile? futile in regard to what? the unfolding processes of technologisation and globalisation?

[Simon from NZ schreibt]

..so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's
image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like
stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body -
since we don't yet know what a body can do...

all right --  this idea of the body not knowing yet what it can do, I like it. And yet we do grow older, and so do our behaviors.
But can we track back to the idea of resistance, then, and ask here (for example those amongst you here on the list who were at this Resistance ISEA)
what exactly would be our intuitive or rational response to  what Terry has called, in his first posting, "the collective behaviour both online and via social media"
and then explained as as narrative construct?  A few examples have popped up, the ISEA panel on The Future of the Moving Images, Big Data, Mr Snowden and surveillance prisms,  the
'collective (social) state from which we individually emerge ....within a complexity of voices that situate themselves through various performative activities' (this is
Simon Biggs's  interesting evocation of James Leach's anthropology and what James discussed here in 2010 on the subject of social creativity), junk noise and dropped data (Christine), the children at the
Montessori school, the Glastonbury Festival....

I'd think bodies learn when to resist and when to be exuberant; I just participated in an event, maybe similar to Glastonbury maybe not, at Houston's Pride Parade last Saturday which was mind blowing,
hundreds of thousands of people in our community and city celebrating each other and expressing whatever they needed or desired on the streets we had taken for day and a night.

The euphoria of the Parade was a physical shared event, a kind of dance, but also expression of political will. This connects it to May 68, and many other moments of irruption of the commune-political and the sexual.
Along the lines of the Technicians of the Sacred that I quoted, the poetry I perceived in the happening had a tribal-communal dimension that is unaffected by the beforementioned unfolding processes of
technologisation - and it is precisely not velocitized, it requires a slowing down, duration, a slow pantomime relying on bodily memory that is not expropriated.

These kinds of memories, and their political dimension of experience and learning, within societal systems of repression of creativity, are related, wouldn't you think, to what we see in Egypt right now, although
their's was not a Parade nor a Festival, and yet is described at the moment as 'celebration' on Tahrir Square continuing with the military helicopters "providing further spectacle" flying over the heads of the celebrants.

What liturgies are we witnessing? And how incredibly complex they are. Un-mediatable, this complexity, by facebook or twitter.  And no surveillance data were gathered at the Pride Parade, except of course if you
think of the celebrants capturing their joy on their cell phones, photographing themselves, embracing themselves each other.  Low resolution, less realistic.

How do we construct stories of these uprisings?

James Leach, a few years back, said that

creativity is not outside human experience, but part of its everyday reality. Creativity is inherent in what it is to be a human being because in myth, the actions referred to above, beginning with the acts which established gender, and thus the possibilities for human reproduction and kinship [JL; this does not work in the context of the Pride Parade of course except otherwise], were the actions of the first human beings constituting themselves as human and not something else. In their everyday lives of gardening, animal husbandry, hunting etc., these people are the same as those first creator beings, and thus are constantly partaking of the original ‘creativity’ as they also constitute their lives as human and not something else...

Having said all that, and given the underlying premise of all the above is that we, just as Reite people do, constitute our existences through the particular way we engage in relations to each other (social ontology), structured through certain key principles available in myths we tell ourselves about how we have got here and what our responsibilities as human being are — what are we to make of the current idea that somehow the mediation of human relations through technological networks will make us more ‘creative’?
What is it about the speeding up of communication, the mediation of geographical and social distance, that makes us believe (and I use the word consciously) that we are going to be doing anything very different?
[http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/07/04/empyre-creativity-as-a-social-ontology/]

Well, this is a good question, but the myths may be changing.

regards
Johannes Birringer

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Terry Flaxton
Professor of Cinematography and Lens Based Media
University of West of England
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/flaxtonpage1.htm
+ 44 (0) 117 328 7149
+44 (0) 7976 370 984

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