Search results for "place "
A Cherry Tree and Memories
Imported from Menticulture
I went for a walk by Pond House and Horsepool Hill in search of a cherry tree and memories of my father.
Production - [Critical Media Concepts and Contexts]
"All that is solid melts into air" (Engels, F. & Marx, K., 1848. The Communist Manifesto) This lecture explored the notion of production, and found that every attempt to pin "production" down ended in the pursuit of something disappearing.
Evaporation du lac by FrancoisRoche on Flickr
Introduction
The ideas presented can be summarised in any one of the following ways:
- an examination of how creativity and production are actually forms of translation and transformation: not making something from nothing (creation) but reworking existing things into new forms (reproduction)
- deconstructing the common perception that human civilisation, with its industrial and manufacturing superstructures which underpin commercial production, represent a form of progress towards an ever better future.
- suggesting that the human production of knowledge is inseparable from the practices and motives which underpin it: it is instrumental, not objective
- tracing the shift away from the object and its aura, towards experience and its commodification
We occasionally looked at the practice of mapping in order to illustrate some of these ideas.
Production as creativity
- Poiesis - production as it is expressed by philosophers like Aristotle and Heidegger. The latter's notion of poiesis is a bringing-forth, like "the bursting of a blossom into bloom" (Heidegger, M., 1954. The Question Concerning Technology) - not the magical creation of things that did not exist before: rather, a liminal, threshold experience which facilitates transformation.
March 19, 2006: Apple tree blossoms by Matt McGee on Flickr
- Memetics and memes - the notion that thoughts, ideas and units of cultural information as they are expressed in our conscious thoughts are transferred and spread from mind to mind as genes are spread from body to body via reproduction. As such humans are merely vehicles - for both genes and memes. The idea was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976. The Selfish Gene) and has been taken up by other commentators on cultural ideas.
- Representation - the basic problems of philosophy revolve around various configurations of three components and their relationships: the world, the subject and representation. Representation might be thought of as the image of the world in our conscious thought. Various different philosophical traditions might argue about the relationship between the world and our image of the world (i.e. the relationship between world and representation). See Arthur C. Danto for a good introduction to the problems of philosophy, (1997. Connections to the World)
Shadow Play by Swamibu on Flickr
We can think then of representation as a reproduction of the world - the image of the world as it appears in human consciousness. A map, too, is a representation of the world. Does conscious human thought "map" accurately onto the world? For that matter, do maps accurately represent the world (consider the reductionism inherent in portraying the multi-dimensional earth in the two dimensions of a piece of paper or a screen)? Representation is a mediated and interpreted image of what is given: a copy of the world, which may be subject to distortion through our imperfect human sensory apparatus. As Shakespeare intimates - we see through a glass, darkly.
The images we work and rework - such as poetry (from the same etymological root as poiesis) are not inventions of language, but the reimplementation and translation of language. Of course language mutates and evolves through use. The introduction of "newness" - variety, diversity, heterogeneity might be comparable to the evolution of new species: iterative mutation induced through erroneous copying. The "meme" is the cultural manifestation of the biological gene.
Creativity, then might not be about a godlike ability to conjure things into existence from nothing, but part of the work of constant change and transformation that human beings enter into. There is no production, there is only reproduction, and - thankfully - reproduction is given to error?
translation by Swiv on Flickr
Production as the material and immaterial means of production and reproduction
- The parasite - the parasite is an organism which exploits a host without returning any benefit. Michael Serres' philosophical work (1984, The Parasite) provokes the thought that reproduction is a parasitical process. We might note that our industrial production processes viewed at the planetary level might be seen as rather parasitical.
- Complexity and reductionism - trying to understand either the material or immaterial systems which encompass contemporary culture requires getting to grips with prohibitively complex networks of interrelated factors, so we take short cuts (systems theory, marxism, discourse analysis, etc). Niklas Luhmann's development of systems theory - especially his application of it to the mass media (1996. The Reality of the Mass Media) is instructive here.
- Mechanical reproduction - understanding reproduction (and what it is we are reproducing) is one of the ways which people (especially marxists) have used to try to analyse the relationship between 'production' and culture.
No471701 by . SantiMB . on Flickr
- Marxism - a inescapably important thread of cultural analysis for over 150 years. You can find more about marxism here and ideology here. A marxist analysis of production might lead us to conclude that our acts of production and reproduction are aimed at little more than the continual reproduction of the means and conditions of our being able to engage in acts of production and reproduction. This might help us to understand everything from the resilience of capitalism to Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" (1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man).
- Aura - the important and influential writer Walter Benjamin, who emerged form the important and influential Frankfurt School (who criticised the capital-oriented culture industry), analysed mechanical reproduction as leading to the loss of 'aura' of the work of art: the 'authentic' unique object of pilgrimage becomes the disposable object of consumption (1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Wither, and whither, the aura?
- Aesthetics, politics and fascism - Benjamin's sometimes equivocal essay (sometimes appearing to celebrate processes of democratisation and rebellion against the authority of tradition) also suggests that mechanical reproduction opens art up to exploitation for political purposes (i.e. propaganda); essentially, the co-option of art by those seeking power helped to facilitate the rise of fascism. He suggests that the aestheticisation of politics (in contemporary terms, this might be seen in the triumph of PR in politics) should be combated by the politicisation of art.
- Technological determinism - the suggestion that human lives are shaped by the technologies they invent. This idea is often ridiculed, since it is taken, in extremis, to argue that human beings have no freedom or agency. It is nevertheless a useful concept when thinking about how, for example, the built environment determines human behaviour: think about how the architecture of spaces like supermarkets and airports 'funnel' your movements. The argument here might be how much this is influenced by technology (which after all, human beings "create") and how much our behaviour is socially learned and constructed. See Henri Lefebvre (1974. The Production of Space) or Marc Augé (1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) on the way we make, and are made by, space.
Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology by gadl on Flickr
Imagine I create a web page with an interactive map. My act of production of this web-based product relies on a precariously constructed network of immaterial labour interacting with the material conditions which facilitate and shape it. I utilise APIs providing textually represented information to write codes implemented by browsers using interpreters based on formats produced by assemblages of people working commercially towards shareholder profit or in open source collectives for infinitely varied motives, using complex stacks of code layers whose material manifestations essentially consist of the configuration of magnetised atoms on slivers of semi-conductors, co-opted into the mediation and storage of binary digits.
labyrinthine circuit board lines by quapan on Flickr
As of November 2009, the internet weighs 498, 438,559,990 kg (2009. Slashdot, How Heavy is the Internet?). How does one begin to untangle the complex web of interactions which go into the production of something which has only existed for a few decades and yet has grown mind-bogglingly large? And what perspectives might we take on the partner to our exponential growth in material production and reproduction? The partner of production is consumption: what ways can we hope to make sense of the consumption of resources that our production necessitates? How many more internets' worth of plastic and metal waste do we dump in landfills every year?
Calgary NW Landfill - 3 by D'Arcy Norman on Flickr
The interactions between the many actors which constitute the material and immaterial nodes in the networks of production and reproduction which facilitate our work as makers of digital artefacts, writers of diegeses on paper, copiers of performances onto photographic film, are extraordinarily complex, and all mutually embedded in and amongst each other. To pull out nodes from the network is to inevitably foreground certain figures and to discount other grounds. Such disembeddings are reductive: they try to simplify and by doing so, exclude. Only with such caveats should we proceed.
Production as the narrative of human knowledge
- Instrumental reason - the idea that human knowledge strives towards ever greater objective truth is a problematic idea; we might wonder if human knowledge is much more instrumental - i.e. partially directed towards purposes and outcomes.
- Teleology - the idea of future purpose. Humans often behave teleologically - believing that we are making progress, that we are working towards purposes. Instrumental reason as described above is exemplary of telelogically directed activities. But we might also question whether 'progress' is inevitably towards better things.
![Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2787/4081543252_bf844a2e86.jpg)
Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham on Flickr
Consider maps and their relation to human perception and space and place to illustrate this. Early maps do not show aerial views, but human level perspectives. Naturalistic attempts at spatial and geographical "accuracy" (i.e. attempting to create spatially representative images of coastlines, cities and roads: "geography" literally means the drawing of the earth) is a late invention: earlier maps showed boundaries as perfectly circular, rivers as straight, important buildings as circles, etc. It is too simple to say that these early maps are "less accurate": actually they were trying to achieve something other than the naturalistic representation that we seek in maps.
Centro storico by zZeta on Flickr
Do maps get better as they get more naturalistically representative? Or, do they perhaps just serve different (rather than better) purposes? A contemporary geological map might be very useful to someone looking for minerals, but incomprehensible to most other people. Cook's mapping of the antipodes was as much a part of, and inseparable from, the practice of empire-building aided with ships and guns, as it was about charting navigable routes or creating disinterested representations of the natural world in order to have a more complete and objective understanding of it.
Some concluding remarks
- Simulacrum - Jean Baudrillard (1985. Simulacra and Simulation) imagined the world we inhabit as being a simulacrum - a 1:1 map of the world, rather than the world itself. The world of representation - that image world which humans construct around themselves, the world of mediation - is the world we inhabit. This world of experience is no longer "authentic" - its aura has withered as it has become an endlessly reproducible commodity. Experience has become the commodity produced for the purpose of consumption.
streetview by dq. on Flickr
Google Streetview is close to showing us the 1:1 map of the world - an external environment centred around the roads and commercial centres which structure our lives. Have we disappeared into that frozen mediated world in which nothing occurs but exchange, capital, and commerce? Are there no more geographies to explore or maps to produce, and are we now only left to consume the endlessly reproduced products of a culture industry? Have we disappeared into the map, or can we use the map to create authentic experiences? Perhaps we can escape the tyranny of consumption by becoming producers of our own experiences, using the resources of the given world: like the flâneur - the stroller and seeker of visions - of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin?
BlakeWalkers by joeflintham
DJ Spooky has likened DJs to contemporary "troubadours", and that the artistry of remixing "found" sounds and samples is part of a new digital folk culture. (Birringer, J. 2008. Performance, Technology and Science, New York: PAJ Publications). The direct comparison here is with oral cultures in which the same stories are used and retold, each telling generates new rhythms and themes, resonances and meanings. Traditional music lovers might long for "real" music - as though the sound produced by a bow on a cello is somehow more "authentic" than a sample of a sample of a sample. Where is originality, newness, creativity and authenticity?
Is the DJ a parasite on the creative work of artists nurtured by the culture industry? Or is industry capital a parasite on the productive work of the artist? Or are the works themselves, the audio ephemera, around which such praxis and commerce revolve: the memes - are these the real parasites?
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-02-18T22:55:18Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- From Andragogy to Heutagogy
heutagogy is appropriate to the needs of learners in the twenty-first century, particularly in the development of individual capability
Tags: education learning pedagogy self-directed-study andragogy heutagogy
- A few thoughts on copyright and culture - Ars Technica
Contemporary film, fiction, and music each employ their own sophisticated grammar, their own dense web of allusions, such that they're often not even fully intelligible unless you've been exposed to the prerequisite "texts."
Tags: copyright culture intertextuality
- Networked_Performance - Live Stage: Contemporary Fl^aneurie [Rochester, MI]
How does fl^anerie in art relate to GPS systems, virtual reality, surveillance, mapping, MMPORGs, and social networking
Tags: spatiality space place urban gps flaneur cities
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-04T03:04:37Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Maps for Advocacy: An Introduction to Geographical Mapping Techniques | Tactical Technology Collective
using maps in advocacy. The mapping process for advocacy is explained vividly through case studies, descriptions of procedures and methods, a review of data sources as well as a glossary of mapping terminology
Tags: mapping geo advocacy participation media-participation cartography spatiality space place map geotagging
- The Valve - A Literary Organ | Three Very Short Kurmanji Stories
a way of interpellating a whole country, a whole people, as violent and barbaric
Tags: imperialism colonialism
- Photojojo >> Day of the Dead: Memorial Photography
the process of dying was ultimately all about understanding and appreciating life
Tags: death photography history
- A List Apart: Articles: Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript
useful tips on implementing progressive enhancement
Tags: javascript programming ajax
- DIYcity
DIYcity aims to accomplish [the goals of making cities more efficient, more effective, more sustainable, better able to respond to problems, friendlier and generally more accessible to the individual user] with user-built applications created on top of existing web technologies
Tags: city urban activism sotware smart-mob
- City of Transformation Paul Virilio in Obama's America
your LOLquote: "dromology has no real meaning outside of logics of capture and endocolonization and predation"
Tags: virilio capitalism economics theory
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2008-11-03T00:43:10Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- SitePoint Blogs >> 7 Places to Find the Code You Need
code search engines and snippet libraries
Tags: code programming archive development
- Code: Flickr Developer Blog >> The Shape of Alpha
Interesting map / place / shape data API from Flickr and their geodata
Tags: geotagging mapping maps spatiality space place photography api shapes
- New evidence for homeopathy
An open assessment of the current evidence suggests that homeopathy is probably effective for a number of conditions including allergies, upper respiratory tract infections and 'flu, but more research is desperately needed
Tags: homeopathy medicine research trial
- Granum :: Book information
The Internet is viewed as a tool, channel and forum enabling citizens to make an impact on social, cultural and political change. Civic empowerment through the Internet emerges in people's everyday life. Big politics is broken into pieces to become a multitude of small, more personalised political engagements. The Internet is a powerful medium for gathering coalitions and organising mobilisations of all kinds. It also transforms political styles and types of activities
Tags: politics media-participation participation book internet activism engagement
- Air Force Aims to 'Rewrite Laws of Cyberspace' | Danger Room from Wired.com
..." upcoming Air Force doctrine calls for the service to have the 'freedom to attack' online. A research program, launched in May, shoots for 'gain access' to 'any and all' computers"
Tags: technology military security internet surveillance
- #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet - CNN.com
" the dark side of communication" ... "Kids don't realize that one post can destroy somebody's life forever"
Tags: psychology anonymity public-sphere anger trolling abuse
- Home - FOLDED-IN
"Folded-In is a 3D multiuser online videogame, which attempts a detournement of the representational space of YouTube, by transforming it into a gamespace, and by respectively turning the selected videos and the tags into game elements"
Tags: remix participation game youtube web2.0 mashup
- Nation Institute
Tags: for:saraha_3
land's end closed bridge danger - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
land's end vacant picnic tables - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
imported from flickr:places and non-places
Tarmacked and picnic-tabled tourism consumption area deserted.
land's end facade - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
imported from flickr:places and non-places
The Land's End experience announces itself as a facade decorated by the simulation of heritage, a contorted mixture of local culture and ancient architecture: the gateway to a weathered edifice of eroded nature is a perfectly manipulated, reconstructed mythology.
land's end private welcome - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
imported from flickr:places and non-places
Land's End: not a place, but an institution, a destination as defined by markets rather than journeys. A privatised landmark, which must be consumed before one can genuinely say one has been there. The experience is defined by the receipt, rather than the memory. Two geographical locations, one place, one non-place; one real and hidden, one hyperreal and visible; one authentic, one super-authentic; one interchangeable with any other segment of coast, one uniquely desirable, marketed, photographed, reproduced, signposted, visited, crossed off and processed like any other indigestible packaging.
Web as Soundscape
I have, just over the past weekend, acquired www.websoundscape.com as the site which will be used to host and disseminate the Soundseeing artefacts and research which I'm working on with Andy Causton at Bournemouth University. More info here when I have it :-)
beach at night - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
imported from flickr:places and non-places
The white flash of the camera renders the beachscape blue. The darkness pushes the chip's algorithms into handshake exposure. The beachfront lights trace into the timelapsed still. The image simulates dynamism, where the memory of experience is flat and dull. The pebbles, though, are revealed as the boney scrapyard they are.
The image ignores the roar of live sound, the roar of waves receding, and approaching, and receding again. The flash scintillates and is gone, as is the memory, the moment and the care for the world. All that remains is an exposed retinal trace of things gone.
Arcade - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
imported from flickr:places and non-places
The word 'arcade' invokes Walter Benjamin. I even like to imagine that somewhere in a municipal office, an architect even thought of Benjamin's flâneurs, strolling through the decaying decadence of a Parisian walk, as this space was committed to blueprint.
When I picture this place in my mind, I imagine the ground is reflective, a perfect mirror echoing back the gorgeous temptations of the shop fronts - this despite the fact that every time I actually see it, even when it is not locked up to keep out vomiting nightlifers, the matte, grimy floor supports only occasional, isolated humans amongst the litter and the pigeons.
Atrium - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
imported from flickr:places and non-places
The new atrium space at Bournemouth University: at 7.30am, the light dapples the empty space. I feel ambiguous in this place - it is more inviting when empty - the more people fill the space, the more it falters. Just out of shot is not a lecture theatre, but an icon of consumerism: Costa Coffee.
Seats - [Flickr:Places-And-Non-Places]
imported from flickr:places and non-places
The space in the BU atrium is very tall, but nevertheless decapitates you. Enter more than one individual into the space and there is only cacophony, rather than conversation. The surface has an aesthetic quality, which is ruptured and lost by the entrance of human beings.
Places and non-places
I started a new flickr set. Quote:
Marc Augé describes, in "non-places : Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity", the reconfiguration of space in contemporary society. Here history bites our heels, space expands yet the world shrinks, and the individual is supposed to be allowed to be, do, but most of all, consume, whatever is necessary for them to achieve selfhood.
Of place, we might have thought that "all the inhabitants need do is recognise themselves in it". Now, in the supermodern space, we misrecognise ourselves: we obey direction, and we are permitted to experience only solitude: the consequence of individualism is solipsism, that of consumerism is solitude.
Updates will appear here via the magic of the Flickr API and python, or you can watch it at source.
Phenomenology, positivism, and prozac
[Cross-posted at CEMP - following Mike's responses (1) & (2) to the 'Hello world' post]
So we've had a few posts in which we've tried to locate notions of truth within competing knowledge practices, and seen phenomenological responses to the postmodern challenge to ontology. It might help (well, at least, it might help me!) to talk about a real world example to tease out these problems.
Recently there was a flurry of news coverage about the efficacy of SSRIs (Seroxat, Prozac, etc). Some researchers conducted a meta-analysis of both published and previously unpublished data on the use of SSRIs, and found that in the majority of cases, particularly where depression is not acute, SSRIs have no more efficacy than placebos. Now this kind of subject prompts a host of ethical and ontological problems, which force us to look at the overlap of medicine, media, and industry. Those domains all represent a veritable red rag of competing 'knowledge practices' and ethical concerns.
For starters, is it responsible for the media to provide mass coverage of a story, leading unavoidably to people using these medicines worrying that their medicine isn't 'real' medicine? If they start to think, maybe this medicine is just a placebo, then perhaps even the benefit gained from the placebo might be lost. Maybe it won't - the problem is a) no-one has a cast-iron understanding of what the 'placebo effect' is and how it works, and b) even if they did, the media isn't necessarily in the best position to make those kinds of calls. We might say, on balance, freedom of information is better than suppression, but we'd better be clear that we can defend that position when the mental health of millions of people is at stake.
Next up: what does it mean to say that the mental health of millions of people is at stake? Are we refering to a positivist analysis that says x million people have a condition called 'depression' which is merely a disciplinary discourse seeking to medicalise and subjugate a population in order to reify opportunistic power relations? Perhaps we are. But does that mean we have to discount the reported 'lived conditions' of those people whose phenomenological 'making-sense' of the world has at least been aided by a 'discourse of depression'? Don't we also have to acknowledge that there are cases where severe depression can arguably be treated through medicines, despite the possibility that the scientific understanding of chemicals and their interactions with the body might be imprecise, or even that that knowledge is 'socially constructed', and at some level reflects a historically contingent situation in which the body is subjected to disciplinary practices. We might find evidence that 'medicine works', both from 'reductionist, positivist knowledge practices' (where double-blind trials show statistical correlations between use of medicine and improvement in mental health) and from phenomenological analyses where participants taking such medicines report an improvement in their condition. These two different knowledge practices may be measuring entirely different things, but they might also happen to converge on a shared 'truth'.
So how do we handle situations where these different knowledge practices diverge towards different truths? Because they begin from different ontological assumptions, and because we are not in a position to fundamentally favour one ontology over another, we have to turn to other means to separate them. Might we say that because pharma-companies may be pulling a fast one by non-reporting of unfavourable trial data, we therefore bring an end to the reported benefits (albeit indistinguishable from placebo) that some people gain from those medicines? Do we say that the 'discourse of placebo' is a useful tool that people use in the experience of health practices, but it's only useful as long as we don't tell them what they're taking is a placebo? Would we then be forced to acknowledge that what we need is more medical research into what the placebo effect is, even though such knowledge practices are reductionist and take no account of patient's 'lived experiences'?
Of course, I haven't a clue, and none of these questions are intended to be rhetorical, merely to illustrate the problems that arise when different 'methods' produce different 'truths'.
Placebo prozac
Imported from Menticulture
SSRIs are no better than placebo at treating depression in the majority of cases. It's been a couple of weeks since this story broke, but it was infinitely fascinating, and for a while I was amazed that no-one seemed to be examining the weird reflexive problem that breaking the story itself seemed to present. Placebo (in my limited understanding) works because patients believe they are being treated - and presumably the improvement in the psychological state of the patient has physiological benefits. But then if the national media tells everyone that even though the pills they take are actual 'medicines' as defined by NICE and the pharma-industry (rather than sugar-pills), actually the benefit they're getting is really only a placebo, doesn't that mean that you remove the efficacy of even the placebo (because now everyone knows their benefits are 'only' psychological)?
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2007-06-17T14:00:35Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Download mp3s from Google
Awesome google search hack
Tags: google mp3 search download hack
- Structured Procrastination
Finally I have found someone that understands.
Tags: work-displacement procrastination productivity lifehacks
