Monday, August 17, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
INFINITE SUNDAYS WITHOUT COMMODITIES....
INFINITE SUNDAYS
David Graeber attempts to synthesize the insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss. He sees value as a model for human “meaning-making”. Starting with Marxist definitions of consumption and production, he introduces Mauss’s idea of "objects that are not consumed" and constructs a list of things that are neither consumption nor production. Graeber’s list includes those human activities that are not consumption, in the narrow sense of simply purchasing something, and are not production, in the sense of creating or modifying something intended for sale or exchange. It includes:
0. cooking a meal
0. extinguishing a fire
0. dressing and undressing
0. applying makeup
0. watching television
0. playing in a band
0. falling in love
0. reading
0. listening to music
0. going to a museum or gallery
0. taking a photograph
0. gardening
0. writing
0. conducting a coming of age ceremony
0. going window shopping
0. doing sports
0. acting
0. turning around in a circle
0. teaching
0. having an argument
0. playing games
0. having sex
0. attending a religious service
looking at old photos
David Graeber attempts to synthesize the insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss. He sees value as a model for human “meaning-making”. Starting with Marxist definitions of consumption and production, he introduces Mauss’s idea of "objects that are not consumed" and constructs a list of things that are neither consumption nor production. Graeber’s list includes those human activities that are not consumption, in the narrow sense of simply purchasing something, and are not production, in the sense of creating or modifying something intended for sale or exchange. It includes:
0. cooking a meal
0. extinguishing a fire
0. dressing and undressing
0. applying makeup
0. watching television
0. playing in a band
0. falling in love
0. reading
0. listening to music
0. going to a museum or gallery
0. taking a photograph
0. gardening
0. writing
0. conducting a coming of age ceremony
0. going window shopping
0. doing sports
0. acting
0. turning around in a circle
0. teaching
0. having an argument
0. playing games
0. having sex
0. attending a religious service
looking at old photos
FRAG CITY SHAMANS
FRAG CITY SHAMANS
Beliefs
Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.[7] Shamanism requires individualized knowledge and special abilities and operate outside established religions. Many shamans operate alone, although some take on an apprentice. Shamans can gather into associations, as Indian tantric practitioners have done.[citation needed]
-WIKIPEDIA
The image is something like this: we are like swallows in the air above a city. We swoop. We descend. From a distance-as I have watched the winter swallows above the ancient city of Rome from high on the Goethe-treading hills above Prati-it looks impressive. There, in a blob-like swarm are a couple of thousand birds who make the patterns of indiscriminant blobs above the city…. they dive and they swoop and you wonder if they move from the command of some leader, or do they react to the one next to them. The first two or three seconds that I saw this swarm of small birds high above the streets of Rome I immediately thought it was something supernatural or some UFO. The visible world with this phenomena and the spectacle of the light hitting thousands of underside white as they turned seemed to be more supernatural than any invisible force behind this outer manifestation. Where they breeding? Feeding? Delighting in the company of the other or the pattern that they could make? If they were merely reacting to the birds closest to them…as they probably were…then what could they do as a collective? Could they change their destiny?
Or were they condemned to move in bulbous clouds above the city? Will-Less and lacking in purpose? Did they feel very few simple elements within and this was an added extra for them to communicate with each other? What if there was no purpose other than to breed and eat and they could accomplish this very well on the ground hopping about like squirrels.
Of course that image moves immediately to that of the purpose-laden animal of the city. The upright hominid. Was the city itself a frozen swarm and now…. the frag city…. was detaching and the colligated swarm of concrete, steel, and traffic was now becoming part of a big global city? From what I have seen on the streets…the bumping up against ‘the other’ from Seoul to the plane to the streets of NYC…I wouldn’t want to follow the patterns and larger movements of the individuals next to me who appear to have some form of inscrutable autism spectrum disorder. No way. The kid next to me on the crowded airplane immediately tapped into his electronic device. So did I. Then there were the facilities…. the infrastructure of the LCD screen in front of everybody. The streets where I live have two or three new expensive food markets. The suburban turned urban baby yuppies push their Maclarens with their baby yuppies down the sidewalk three abreast and defy anybody in their path to challenge their supremacy and arrogance as breeders. There is an implicit feeling in the air as you move through this delightfully diverse city that everybody has or should have a script. If they don’t embrace this they cannot make those beautiful swarms of database aesthetics high above the city.
This is the new type of morality, which is actually the old type of normative morality. From prison Gramschi talked about the ‘tyranny of the collective’ and how it is the petite bourgeois impulses from the core of this thoughtless, purposeless swarm that produces the leaders like Mussolini and George bush…not the other way around. There is probably a lot of truth to this. The group swarms and convinces itself that there is no other larger good…. family, religion, the meaning of death, even the idea of ‘retirement’…outside the pattern of the swarm. In the social feed of face book the swarm appears as a parade but the pattern of the behaviors and the choice of archives creates the imperative for the next person to take their ‘stance’ in the exhibitionist line of the next small biography.
Beliefs
Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.[7] Shamanism requires individualized knowledge and special abilities and operate outside established religions. Many shamans operate alone, although some take on an apprentice. Shamans can gather into associations, as Indian tantric practitioners have done.[citation needed]
-WIKIPEDIA
The image is something like this: we are like swallows in the air above a city. We swoop. We descend. From a distance-as I have watched the winter swallows above the ancient city of Rome from high on the Goethe-treading hills above Prati-it looks impressive. There, in a blob-like swarm are a couple of thousand birds who make the patterns of indiscriminant blobs above the city…. they dive and they swoop and you wonder if they move from the command of some leader, or do they react to the one next to them. The first two or three seconds that I saw this swarm of small birds high above the streets of Rome I immediately thought it was something supernatural or some UFO. The visible world with this phenomena and the spectacle of the light hitting thousands of underside white as they turned seemed to be more supernatural than any invisible force behind this outer manifestation. Where they breeding? Feeding? Delighting in the company of the other or the pattern that they could make? If they were merely reacting to the birds closest to them…as they probably were…then what could they do as a collective? Could they change their destiny?
Or were they condemned to move in bulbous clouds above the city? Will-Less and lacking in purpose? Did they feel very few simple elements within and this was an added extra for them to communicate with each other? What if there was no purpose other than to breed and eat and they could accomplish this very well on the ground hopping about like squirrels.
Of course that image moves immediately to that of the purpose-laden animal of the city. The upright hominid. Was the city itself a frozen swarm and now…. the frag city…. was detaching and the colligated swarm of concrete, steel, and traffic was now becoming part of a big global city? From what I have seen on the streets…the bumping up against ‘the other’ from Seoul to the plane to the streets of NYC…I wouldn’t want to follow the patterns and larger movements of the individuals next to me who appear to have some form of inscrutable autism spectrum disorder. No way. The kid next to me on the crowded airplane immediately tapped into his electronic device. So did I. Then there were the facilities…. the infrastructure of the LCD screen in front of everybody. The streets where I live have two or three new expensive food markets. The suburban turned urban baby yuppies push their Maclarens with their baby yuppies down the sidewalk three abreast and defy anybody in their path to challenge their supremacy and arrogance as breeders. There is an implicit feeling in the air as you move through this delightfully diverse city that everybody has or should have a script. If they don’t embrace this they cannot make those beautiful swarms of database aesthetics high above the city.
This is the new type of morality, which is actually the old type of normative morality. From prison Gramschi talked about the ‘tyranny of the collective’ and how it is the petite bourgeois impulses from the core of this thoughtless, purposeless swarm that produces the leaders like Mussolini and George bush…not the other way around. There is probably a lot of truth to this. The group swarms and convinces itself that there is no other larger good…. family, religion, the meaning of death, even the idea of ‘retirement’…outside the pattern of the swarm. In the social feed of face book the swarm appears as a parade but the pattern of the behaviors and the choice of archives creates the imperative for the next person to take their ‘stance’ in the exhibitionist line of the next small biography.
FRAG CITY
The dance had been passed down as memes (from master to student) since the seventh century and now, in the projected media studio of Sogang university, I am projecting a special software over that dance to analyze the gestures. The software lets me watch how the space is used by the traditional dancer and I view three things that come out of this for possible use in addition to the beautiful pictures that the media makes in reaction to the dance. The media used by the student enhances these qualities:
1. Student: it would help the modern student of this ancient dance to watch and approximate the movements of the master as they can be recorded and transferred through the projected spatialized media (my Indian dance associate said that the teach often just sat in front of the student and told the dancer what they are doing as a manifestation of the moves from the inside.
2. Audience: this visual software…, which crates a type of prosthetic for seeing, can help the aficionado and the greater audiences a continued appreciation of this ancient dance. (Ironically a lot of the dance was reconstructed for modern times by the visual culture of painting the dancers moves in ancient scrolls)
3. Collaborator: the watcher becomes a collaborator…with the inclusion of this visual analysis software. My vectors cross over the body and demonstrate the lines and the ‘chi’ of the performance. The outside edges of the frame become a way of calibrating (by the master) the lines of the performance in relationship to the edges. We can then turn these edges into types of harmonic or atonal music; we could also turn it into olfactory transducers (digital to analog output) into pleasant scents. We could also turn this into the velocity of a fountain or we could combine this with the Fibonacci databases of the financial markets online and combine this with the ancient dance. There are a lot of things we could do with this.
What the media does with the visual analysis. Human computer interface and ancient performance practices. We find a reclaiming of the portrayal, the use, and the ultimate citizen use of space that would increase awareness and, perhaps, a sense of agency over the ‘annihilation of space’.
1. Student: it would help the modern student of this ancient dance to watch and approximate the movements of the master as they can be recorded and transferred through the projected spatialized media (my Indian dance associate said that the teach often just sat in front of the student and told the dancer what they are doing as a manifestation of the moves from the inside.
2. Audience: this visual software…, which crates a type of prosthetic for seeing, can help the aficionado and the greater audiences a continued appreciation of this ancient dance. (Ironically a lot of the dance was reconstructed for modern times by the visual culture of painting the dancers moves in ancient scrolls)
3. Collaborator: the watcher becomes a collaborator…with the inclusion of this visual analysis software. My vectors cross over the body and demonstrate the lines and the ‘chi’ of the performance. The outside edges of the frame become a way of calibrating (by the master) the lines of the performance in relationship to the edges. We can then turn these edges into types of harmonic or atonal music; we could also turn it into olfactory transducers (digital to analog output) into pleasant scents. We could also turn this into the velocity of a fountain or we could combine this with the Fibonacci databases of the financial markets online and combine this with the ancient dance. There are a lot of things we could do with this.
What the media does with the visual analysis. Human computer interface and ancient performance practices. We find a reclaiming of the portrayal, the use, and the ultimate citizen use of space that would increase awareness and, perhaps, a sense of agency over the ‘annihilation of space’.
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