FuturePresent

positive realization

living green
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira
part of my 'most interesting' set on flickr

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No one ever really taught me that we're able to emanate positive focused energy and emotion, nor that each of us are what we believe we are. These are ways of thinking I've zoned in and out of from time to time, though it's taken me over thirty years to realize.

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'Feed your head'.

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screenshot of I Met the Walrus (2008)
director: Josh Raskin
illustrator: James Braithwaite
soundtrack: Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969)

This animation features in 'profound whatever' on FuturePresent

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transience

On the 20th Anniversary of The Fall of The Berlin Wall
The lessons we don't learn from history: leaving a temporary mark on what remains of The Wall, East side, Berlin
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

'profound whatever'

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death 1.1
a butterfly in the pool, La Luna, Tuscany
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

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I've just began re-reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1985) after sixteen years: thinking about Nietzsche's idea that we exist between 'eternal return' and 'absence of return'. 

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times...the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht)...Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes [us] to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and [our] earthly being, and become only half real, [our] movements as free as they are insignificant (Kundera, 1985: 2).

A friend of mine, Iain Mackie, introduced me to Josh Raskin's I Met the Walrus (2008), the soundtrack of which is Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969). I think Lennon may have had this dichotomy in mind, when he referred to the "profound whatever" (interview with Jerry Levitan, 1969). Could it be that we live in, "a world that rests essentially on the non-existence of return, [where] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted" (Kundera, 1985: 4)? Or, refuting Parmenides' dialectical thinking, do we exist at once through the 'lightness' and 'heaviness' of being, until the two become ambiguously deceptive. Indeed, from a certain perspective, transience and infinity may be perceived as one, made both of 'heaviness' and 'lightness'.

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When Nietzsche Wept: Eternal Return (2007)

director and writer: Pinchas Perry
script based on Irvin D. Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession (1992)

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I met the Walrus (2008)

director: Josh Raskin
illustrator: James Braithwaite
soundtrack: Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969)

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sand storm

sand storm
Worms Head from Rhossili Bay, The Gower, Wales, UK
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

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"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. 

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. 

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." 

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (2005)

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Click here to access the Murakami site at Random House

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"i am a brave girl captain"

I don't remember ever being so scared as I have been over the last few weeks. But I remember now that, like Mary, "I am a brave girl captain."

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Image left: Still photograph of the animation The Poster Children, transmediale 09: DEEP NORTH.
CC Claudia Vieira

Image right: Ludo, Ivor Cutler, 1974.
A total enfringement of copyright, but I like to think of it as free promotion: If you haven't heard Ivor Cutler before, give him a try: Ivor Cutler: open.spotify.com/artist/60SKMJ5AgD6DuxTNbVrrSQI wanted to add this to 'dreams' set on flickr, and to this post, you see.

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dreams

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POSSIBLE SOUNDTRACK(S)

Feelin' Good, Claudia Gabriela Vieira, CC 2009

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Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now (Live Miles of Aisles LP Version) on Spotify

Fleet Foxes, Tiger Mountain Peasant Song on Spotify 

Jeffrey Lewis Back When I Was 4 on Spotify

Johnny Cash, Hurt on Spotify

The Cure, To Wish Impossible Things.on Spotify

Or, Mary's Drawer by Ivor Cutler, if you can find it.

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dreams

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plasma

 

...of red balloons and plasma mebranes, Edinburgh Festival 2008 CC Cláudia Vieira

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Blogging at dawn from my office of light. A friend left me two gifts a couple of nights ago. One, the hand-written version of an untitled poem by Denise Levertov below, the other, a copy of the Nan Goldin interview ‘The Labour of Love’. They sparked ideas about love, networks and magnetism.

 

If Denise Levertov is my new muse, Nan Goldin is my choke 

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For those of you who prefer text, here is an electronic version of Denise Levertov untitled poem: 

'Often you seem to be listening to music
that others cannot hear. Rilke would have loved you:
You never intrude, you never ask questions
of those, crying in the dark, who are most near.

<>You always keep something of yourself for yourself,
In electronic bars, even in bedrooms.
Rilke would have praised you: your nearness is far,
And therefore, your distance like the stars.

Yet some things you miss and some things you lose
By keeping your arm outstretched, and some things
You’ll never know unless one, at least, knows you
Like a close up, in detail –

Blow, by human blow.’

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The second text is ‘The Labour of Love’, Anja Cronberg and Christian Barbe’s interview with Nan Goldin , published in Acne Paper, No.7, Autumn 08. I stopped reading after the lead quote: “What we call falling madly in love with someone is not so much evidence of how deeply we care for our lover, but more the relief that we’re not alone anymore.” (2008: 107). I could have read on but there are so many other things I'd enjoy more.

There was purpose in each of these gifts. I think I thought I knew why my friend had offered me these gems from her scrapbook of dreams. Shared experiences; sharing experiences. I recalled one person in particular, and sensed my friend had made that connection long before offering this poem to me.

Yet, re-reading Levertov makes me think we all shun close-ups to a greater or lesser degree, we all distance ourselves from each other sometimes, oftentimes, sometimes. Some people we let nearer, some less. So near, so far. Attraction and repulsion. Our psycho-cultural metanarratives often enact this self-protection, both from harm and from the dilution of self in polyvalents. Sometimes it’s about preserving that space in which each of us just is. Alone. That space, fresh and stale, where only ‘I’ breathes. And some things we do miss and some things we do lose. Many things trail into the tragic pelagic.

There are moments when people connect fundamentally, others when it seems entirely impossible to relate each other's inner worlds. Lately, I’ve recalled the rule of attraction, and close encounters of the first kind drift into the current. Though sometimes against it, still.

If Denise Levertov is my new muse, Nan Goldin is my choke. Nan seems bitter, her feminism, hyperbole. Falling in love to me isn’t something that fills in the loneliness and emptiness (or not just that in some spaces, places, cases). It’s far deeper, mutual, selfless and selfish. It’s understanding one’s body, letting someone else understand one’s body, understanding a body that is different to one’s own, letting one understand it. This body is our own, tuning in and out of singularity, in waves of meiosis and fusion. We interconnect through light and magnetic force, perhaps close to the one the Sanskrit call Prana. At the cellular level, meiosis and fusion recur: constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing; fizzling plasma, realigning ourselves perpetually along the magnetic line of force.

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And so, we have different experiences of love, Goldin and I.

To me our ways of seeing are our 'reality', we evoke it. Positive charge leads to/is led by positive push/pull.

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But then I do sit alone at dawn in my office of light.

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DARK PLACES 001

A screen shot of a Google map of Tyneham, Dorset, UK

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Recently I've been conducting research for Dark Places, a project by The Office of Experiments. Supported by The Arts Catalyst and SCAN.

On my way to Worbarrow Tout on Purbeck over the weekend, I thought I'd explore Tyneham village, commandeered by the War Office (MoD) in 1943 and uninhabited since. It's perfect for Dark Places. The project focuses particularly on publicly documenting and archiving artefact of restricted spaces (and thinking about the relationships between private/restricted/public spaces).

In this third phase of my research for the project, I'm mapping the 'touristification' of (and signification of 'risk' in) Tyneham village. I've documented the photos I have so far on flickr and google maps, though I'll return this week to extend the document:

go to Tyneham photoset on flickr

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A screen shot of a Google map of Portland Bill, Portland, UK. QinetiQ, MoD Portland Bill, takes up the top left-hand land section of the map.

Previous research trips have included a public walk to the Fossil Forest, Lulworth, an archaeological and geological site of special interest along the Jurassic Coast, now in MoD restricted territory. I have also documented QinetiQ, MoD Portland Bill, with Neal White, founder of The Office of Experiments.

The most interesting part of the project so far has been the interview The Office of Experiments conducted with Mike Kenner, an Open Government campaigner and Cold War researcher. Mike Kenner was interviewed for Top Secrets Revealed: Porton Down (2004), a HTV documentary investigating the past activities of the UK Government's Biological Warfare facility at Porton Down, Wiltshire. Mike has released documents to The Office of Experiments for public archiving. Details of Mike's latest research can be found on his twitter profile: @wellbright. More to follow.

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My current photographic archive for Dark Places can be found in the Dark Places Collection on flickr

This is an ongoing project.

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RETHINKING MY ECO-ETHICS

Mediating a 'world on the brink': Lucas, my son, and a friend interacting with a 'climate change' visualisation at Bournemouth's Oceanarium

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I've been feeling quite dispondent about my relationship to technology and our networked media world of late. Through the timespan of this blog, this relationship has (d)evolved. An early advocate of free, participatory online culture, I've long grown disillusioned by the constant techno-babble of us technocrats, in our social networks. What are the benefits of being networked together 24/7 at a speed that refigures conceptions of spacetime, individually and communally? What of the hunger for the up-to-the-nanosecond-latest gadgets, apps and apis? What of the twitterverse? What of international technological divides? What of Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (Prensky 2001)? What of Digital Emmigrants? Must we be pulled by the centripetal force towards technological advancement?

This isn't a new loop on my chain of consciousness necessarily. As I wrote in my first blog post, 'Quit Staring at my Navel' v3.0, 'exploring the possibilities for activism online does not preclude that the way forward is not the refusenik's.' (15 October 2006) My exploration of techno-activism (of the value of online networks for activist purposes) seems (increasingly, if only partially) redundant, living as we do in a small Dorset market town, set on two rivers, surrounded by farmland on which we grow our own fruit and vegetables, with the New Forest to the East and the Isle of Purbeck to the South West. It seems redundant in contrast to other pleasures in my life: my local community, students, friends and family, communicating face-to-face[1], the sun, splashing in sea and river, camping, climbing trees, trampolining, touching hands, dancing to 78s, parties, gigs, festivals; my 'First Life'. Pickerell's take on 'Negotiating the tensions of techno-environmentalism', in Cyberprotest: environmental activism online (2003) outlines the quandary in which many of us find ourselves.

Is it just me, or do the tweets below from Yoko Ono give us clues about just how awry our networked culture has become? Context: I was ecstatic when Yoko Ono decided to return my follow on twitter (Yoko does appears to follow everyone that follows her, but that still put me several degrees closer to Lennon). After repetitive tweets of this kind, I stopped following her on twitter. I think she may have returned the complement. It's not just me: it was my partner that made me think about this form of online activism ever more closely.

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Yoko Ono, twitter, 1:08 PM Sep 21st [@yokoono]

Yoko Ono, twitter, 9:43 PM Sep 15th [@yokoono]

Yoko Ono, twitter, 10:12 PM Mar 24th [@yokoono]

 

My perspective on digital culture (d)evolves as my environment (d)evolves. Just as living in Brighton did beforehand. And so way back, to a time when the superhighway was the all-American-übermotorway, when webs were made by spiders and words beginning with an i-before-the-P were limited to a post-Alexander-the-Great battle, tropical American shrubs, morning glories, bronchodilators, antidepressants and a Latin pronoun meaning '(it/her/him/them)sel(f/ves)', revered by lawyers, Catholics and 'scholars' exclusively. The relations of i to x are relatively . E=mc². That this may be a truism, doesn't make it any less worthy of consideration.

What is my place in networked culture? Why teach interactive media practice when I question this premise: the advancement of the internet and associative cultures (hell, the advancement of technology) = a better world and society? How do I help my students carve out a future in interactive media in this context? Why teach wider media and cultural history/sociology/philosophy when I then re-think the goal of better-ing the world itself? Of course, this questioning of purpose is not helped by my diminished belief in 'Higher' Education and its bureaucracies. Jensen's dystopian but pertinent question in today's Z Space - Can journalism schools be relevant in a world on the brink? (16 September 2008) - reminds me that many of us are at odds with media education generally.

But moving towards techno-environmentalism itself may be the key. Several texts have recently helped me re-conceive my relationship with technology, none more so than Miller's incisive critique on e-waste and defense of techno-recycling, in 'Ecological Ethics and Media Technology' (2008). The crux of the matter: 'The eco-crisis presents media studies with an eco-ethical choice: either continue to document and assess the growing consumption of media technologies without understanding their ecological context, or advocate policies and influence polities to reduce the consumption of media technologies - not an easy choice for a field hooked on iPodpeople and PCers' (Maxwell and Miller 2008: 335).

Lest I get too caught up in the seriousness of our current 'world on the brink', as Jensen refers to it (16 September 2009), CreativeCloud's humorous (and haunting) ecotech parodies lighten the mood a little.

I continue to ponder on this, my thoughts only partially thought.

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[and rethought, revised 25 September 2009]

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[1] Even the use of f-2-f here seems understatedly turgid

THE CHANGING DISCOURSES ON 'POLICE BRUTALITY'

"Tomlinson is propelled forward to the ground with a great deal of force"

(G20 police assault revealed in video, Guardian Unlimited*, 7 April 2009: Scene 4: 31 seconds)

courtesy: The Guardian

 

Following on from 'Financial Fools Day' (FuturePresent Blog, 01 April 09), the latest Saturday Guardian (hardcopy) (12 April 2009) made me return to thinking about media representation of police-precipitated violence.

Now, the questioning of police conduct has long been part of everyday discourse, part of long-running urban mythology. In Barthes' sense of the term, mythologies are narratives through which we give meaning to the world around us (Mythologies, 1972); in this case I’m referring to folk mythologies of police violence reflecting the power structures in society over time. Like all mythologies, these are partly attuned to, and partly out of tune with, actuality. Not least because the police are not a mass, but constituted by individuals with different temperaments, albeit individuals adhering to macro, formal laws and codes of conduct, and micro, informal systems of practice.

Certainly, police violence is part and parcel of the discursive territory of, say, The Stop the War Coalition (see Edwards, 'London Demonstration to Protest the Police Attack on Ian Tomlinson', Manchester Stop the War Coalition, 08 April 2009, for a pertinent example of this) and currently prominent within the blogosphere (see Bristle’s Blog from the BunKRS). However, critical perspective on 'Operation Glencoe' (the £7.5m G20 security strategy, supported by six police forces) has bled out notably to the mainstream media over the last two weeks. In context with the YouTube docs tweeted by @guardiantech: G20 protest footage: police v demonstrators ('Financial Fools Day', FuturePresent Blog, 01 April 09: comments) and the G20 police assault revealed in video (Guardian Unlimited, 7 April 2009), the front-page and follow-up double-page spread in this Saturday Guardian (hardcopy) (12 April 2009), precipitated by Ian Tomlinson's contentious and premature death after the G20 London demo, concretise what seems to me to be an unprecedented transformation in the representation of police conduct. The Guardian Unlimited's G20 coverage overall indicates the disproportionate focus on police violence at the G20 protests in London.

The Guardian are not unique here: mainstream news sources as diverse as BBC News and The Times have expressed concerns over G20 police tactics. However, it seems to be the case that The Guardian's is a much more extensive critique of 'Operation Glencoe'; it is certainly the case that the angle of media reportage changed significantly pre-and-post demos. The screenshot below of the first page of an archive search of Times Online for 'G20 + police + violence' indicates the nuanced change in reportage between 28 March and 11 April 2009.

 

The Times Online: 'G20 police violence ' archive search

28 March - 11 April 2009

CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE FOR A FULL-SCALE VERSION

 

To my mind, these kinds of documents are long overdue. From an anecdotal perspective, I was impressed by the serenity and support of the police in the main anti-Iraq-War demo in London in 2003. Yet, to say I was ‘impressed’ already tells of my pre-conditioning by folk mythologies of police violence. Certainly, these mythologies were concretised by my experience of the police when I participated in the march through Brighton attempting to deliver a petition calling for the closure of the EDO MBM Factory (Home Farm Business Park, Brighton, UK) to Brighton Town Hall. EDO MBM was a prominent link between the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and Brighton and Hove City Council, ironically, the first council in the UK to be awarded United Nations Peace Messenger City status. Protestors were blockaded in North Street (some streets away from Brighton Town Hall) by police. Effectively, the police curtailed our right to petition our own council peacefully (for a non-anecdotal perspective, see Eccles, Police hold line against peace marchers, The Argus, 18 September 2006).

Alternatively, in my little town of Wimborne, the police have instilled in me a sense of trust. Though the ‘bobby on the beat’ has long disappeared even from my town, from my experience, there is an air of calmness associated with local police, as they ride around, often on their bicycles, often in a pastoral, rather than disciplinary, role. Then again, I live in the kind of town where some people continue to take the risk of leaving their doors and cars unlocked. Occasionally, this turns out to be a foolish decision but, more often than not, there are no repercussions. Recently, my car wing mirror was broken overnight by two youths, who seemed to have used the roads in my vicinity as their destructive playground. A friendly policewoman informed me of the crime early the next morning, before I’d even noticed the damage to my car. The youths had already given themselves up. This was followed by police phone calls every other day updating me of the process of prosecution. The police solution was one of ‘restorative justice’, by which I mean that we, the victims of the crimes, were involved in defining a non-custodial punishment for the youths. Other local police mythologies range from the bobby who walked a friend of mine home hand-in-hand after my friend had decided erroneously that  ketamine would be his drug of choice for the evening, to another arrested agressively for just walking down the street.

My point is that sometimes the police fall foul of the law themselves, sometimes not. My point is that, from my perspective, media reportage of demos generally has all too often tended to demonise demonstrators and reify police. My point is that representations of the G20 protests in London amongst certain media factions seem to be breaking this mold in the most unabashed of discourses. My friend, Daniel Cox, noted that this may signal a lingering left-of-centre-media post-2003-Anti-War-Demos-got-us-nowhere-resentment (this is epitomised, for example, in Pidd, We marched then...But what now?, Guardian Unlimited, 22 April 2005). Daniel tempered my optimism by reminding me that we're far, far off from the likes of The Daily Mail tapping into this discursive shift. Notwithstanding, the moderated Mail Online News Board on 'How well did the Police handle the G20 protests?' reveals a more complex demographic than the one one may define instinctively as the readership of The Daily Mail. Some of the comments, of course, are right on the mark. Here are two contrasting viewpoints:

 

"Well it was obvious that the man [Tomlinson] was no threat, he was just walking past with his hands in his pockets, maybe leaving the demo? I think that policeman should have spoken to the man first to see if he was going to make toruble!"

saarp a.k.a. Barbara Magill, South Africa

"Absolutely they [the police involved] should be prosecuted and fired immediately.

If it were Muslims demonstrating, they'd be running backwards, and ignoring the verbal abuse from them - oh, they've already done that!"

charlottenc

 

The complexity of discursive currents is highlighted by the sponsored links on the archive search page of The Times Online featured above: from Christian Khan Solicitors advertising for 'advice on legal actions against the police', to The US Department of Sate's America.gov's Alternatives to Violence [sic], to Assured Risk Strategies' G20 March Security consultancy service, to (some twisted humour evident here) Violent Cop on lovefilm, cash-ins on this latest news agenda item are rife. Almost enough for me to boycott lovefilm. But not quite.

In addition, any pro-Guardian discourse I may weave myself into is countered further by my distinctive feeling that The Guardian are sensationalising their content increasingly (for instance, see the disparity between the headline and body of this Saturday Guardian's front-page article - Lewis, Pathologist in Ian Tomlinson G20 death case was reprimanded over conduct, 11 April 2009: 1) and falling fouly to the 'cult of personality' (for example, see Allen, Front row fashionistas, 13 March 2009).

 

Ultimately, and in the name of one of their listeners, Richard_SM, BBC Radio 4's iPM asks the most pertinent question of all: The G20 protests. Does the media only cover violence? (Mair, 1 April 2009). The programme "prides itself in [giving us] '[Our] News'. [We] are at the very centre. The show revolves around [our] knowledge, ideas and experiences" (Vallance, Suggest a story, 14 March 2009). As Tracey details, "iPM has talked about Richard_SM before. He wrote suggesting we look at how the media covers demonstrations. 'Tens of thousands sacrificed their time' to attend protests about events in Gaza, but the demos were 'hardly covered'. He contrasts this with the heckling of a military parade in Luton and the Peter Mandelson green goo incident, which were widely reported." (Reporting demos, and all that Jazz, BBC RADIO 4: iPM, 31 March 2009).

 

The thing is: after the current forore subsides, who'll remember anything of the G20 gathering and its counter-discourses, aside from vague lingering memories of two days when British police lost it on camera big time, and one innocent bystander died?

 

 

*I'm ignoring The Guardian's recent rebranding of Guardian Unlimited into guardian.co.uk for as long as I can get away with it legitimately. As the screenshot from guardian.co.uk below demonstrates, The Guardian itself doesn't seem to have yet decided between the two variations (screenshot dated 14 April 09).