FuturePresent

'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 John 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 may be perceived as 'heavy' and infinity as 'light'.

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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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absolute freedom is a misnomer

Pedn Vounder, Treen, Cornwall
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

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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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freak out

CC Cláudia Vieira

 

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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transnationalisation v. localisation of culture

The transnational web v. The localisation of news

12 October 2009, 01:27 GMT: Screenshot of a UK-only google search for 'Liberta di Benevento berlusconi bbc'.

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Interesting search results, whilst trying to find an English-language document of Silvio Berlusconi's speech against freedom of the press at Festa Libertà di Benevento. I needed one for the original post I had in mind, so as to make the story accessible to a big section of my audience:

For the Berlusconi non-immunity cause: tweeting a friend's fb 'What's on your mind?':

"Caro Silvio. Se alcuni commenti ti sputtanao e un problema tuo e, per favore, finiscila con sta farsa e fai carico delle tue responsabilita`. Queste "accuse" non mi toccano e ti parlo da ITALIANO."

This comment is a response to Berlusconi's speech against freedom of the press at Festa Libertà di Benevento webcast on Sky.it. And for english-speakers, here is Reuters' take on what Berlusconi is contesting.

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So, a search for an UK-only online document turned into an event of contradictory cultural forces: whilst the web is transnational (it evades national boundaries and specificities), 'newsworthiness' continues (politically) localised (why are texts referring to  Silvio Berlusconi's speech against freedom of the press at Festa Libertà di Benevento in any other language than Italian so few and far between?).

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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

refuel

 

Just ignoring the fact that i've ignored this blog for far longer than would ever be acceptable.

 

Refocus on succint, regular posts, rather than essay-style infrequencies.