an entry for Ordinaryness
I just wanted to post something in uncommons that was not related wholly to any one topic but addressed a few points in a language that is not too formal. I am slowly getting around to the reading of your first chapter doll, a more detailed reading of armins chapter first then yours. armin i have really found your discussion on modernism/p.modernism really useful and am intrigued particularly by things such as this 'Only if art matches the latest technological developments of the forces of production, it can be an instrument for gaining new knowledge and also a potential for critical interventions (p. 21)' and this 'Aestheticism found the perfect unity of form and content, yet did so within a schizophrenic society. The artist reaches symbolic unity while everything else gets increasingly fragmented through progressing techno-civilisation. Still the best solution to address this problem comes, so Bürger, from the historic avant-garde. It solves the problem by lifting it onto another layer, by asking that art should be reunited with the praxis of life, by ending the autonomy of art. The artist-subject revolts against form which confronts him as something alien. P. 28'.
asking myself what art is, is part of what i am doing, and i felt that even more strongly after being to dortmund. i will write a short post on my thoughts but i want to be informed enough to do so and am continuing with my guidebook on the philosophy of science and both of your papers before i do. i was not sure about the exhibition atall, i was not sure about the curators intention or if i thought that it was coherent. for me there definitely was two halves, the half that i thought was art, and the other that 'looked' like art. i felt that there was a holding back of certain questions and artworks, yet a pushing of other ideas or aesthetic formats that to me was slightly contirived and limited in its inception and its concept... beware the illustration. sometimes things are well-informed, but this does not necessarily make a good show and for me a good exhibition must have an underlying link or philosophy between the works. i felt that this was a bit disjointed but maybe that was the intention, to provoke dialogue about the nature of art and not really about media and rationality, although that was present too in smaller facets. the space at phoenix halle is another bug bear of mine, and once again i am not sure that i agreed with the way in which it was presented... i felt it lacked integration somehow. however i do understand it must be a really difficult thing to do in such a unique space, but with this particular subject, i felt that it could have been different. the essay by the curators is not out yet so i will try to get my thoughts down by the start of june.
getting back to the reading, i am not the worlds greatest reader, and have to try to pick strategically the books that i will read. i learn by experience and accept that everyone learns in life at a different pace. the phd has/is a steep learning curve in all directions (as it should be) and i feel that i am sometimes doing the phd back to front... but i suppose that judgement stems from what is classed as a classic phd. i am only now getting my teeth into the philosophy of science... a much needed grounding in such terminology as Humes paradox on the ' uniformity of nature' and 'inductive reasoning', i also need to find out a bit more about popper and khun. i am also needing to look back to my small book on Kant to try to find links between his thinking and quantum physics and thus ultimately consciousness. a big topic i know, but one that is imperative to the subjective/objective study... i also had another great idea when i was in dortmund, this is the second time i've been there and the second time that i have come away with an idea that is crucial to my study. it really is about subjective/objective/consciousness, life and praxis... so here goes, please dont think i'm too weird ;-)) using EVP i am going to interview my shower on the objectivity of science. the 'white noise' of the water acts as a a base with which to modulate acoustics on. i really have to believe in what i am doing and my intention has to be true, otherwise i will get nothing. in a couple of months i will be taught reiki properly... doll this relates absolutely to what you were saying before about the difference in the phd if we were placed in a different culture, does it not?!
because of this 'enlightened' idea, i have much to do... i am now halfway through my study and need to finish some artwork that is only half-heartedly started. 'electric chair' (my film about testing methodologies, witches and radio that was a 'dortmund' idea) needs to be finished, this will now be in august. underwater selkie filming will be this weekend as the water was too cold before, this means another five hour drive up north to where the water is clear. 'interview with a shower' needs to be done before the autumn. i also need to try to get an art institution on my side so that i can present my thesis as 'art, i thus need a plan and artwork to back it up. i am thinking about europe, as the art phd there is still very young. there may be some willing funding for a more innovative look at practice-led phd. this week i also have a thesis monitoring committee meeting and on the 11th june i have Centrespace at the VRC which is a large exhibition space, to try out my ideas and gain feedback from supervisors selected invitees. i will post some images from this in due course.
well to finish my blab, doll and ms. static thanks for listening, welcome to adnan (how are you adnan?) and armin, how do you actually 'speed read' Foucault?
Lx
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splitting the leech
doll, how do you do that?! split the leech from the rest of the post... i must learn more html.
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” (Heisenberg, (cited in), Zukav G., Dancing Wu Li Masters, p.136)
thanks for the link... have heard of bohn. he was one of the QPhys. i was interested in so your suggestion for the book is right up my street. a friend here already did a basic thesis in overlaying quantum ideas to psychological theory. she did this 12 yrs ago and although it was for undergrad psychology has got alot of general interesting refs in it. bohn was involved in the non-local relations theory of Qphys. which is of immense interest to me because of the notion that there may be some 'other' way that communication is transmitted that is not electromagnetic... armin what are your thought on the 'field'? Cetaceans are said to be telepathic which in my wholly inductive reasoning suggests that electromagnetism is not the reason they are, as EM energy does not travel great distances through water unless it is of very low frequency with a large power supply... however my thinking is open on that one.
also i am interested in the parallel universes or 'many worlds theory' which was partially espoused by hugh everett. here was a great prog about that a couple of year ago where his son (the lead person in 'the eels') presented a documentary about his father which obviously gave an insight into his domestic strains/self troubles as well as his brilliance and thus unfortunate early death. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett
back to the telly, i have see 'coast' but dont know if it is the same as 'the coast'. there is a presenter in it that is obviously from celtic/irish decsent as he is glaswegian, dark, short and quite 'passionate' in his manner. not like i buy into stereotypes or anything ;-) ... is it the same series?
i am not going diving over the next three days, i am attempting to film on my own, which will be quite difficult as i need to weight down tripod then work out positioning, light ect in combination with tidal flow. for 3 hrs filming under water i hope to have 4-5 mins good footage. i have been concentrating on notes today which i will try to post here in my journal before i go. its important to do this so that i remove as much contrived notion as possible and strip my ideas back to minimum. there are deeper ways of thinking about the myth of 'selkie'; my take on it this weekend will just be one, and it certainly is not to do with beauty or watery floatyness, if i do do that sort of filming it will be with contrivation or expectation in mind... being 40 only adds to the contrivedness of that expectation.
doll, i have not had time to read your paper, sorry... but will take it with me. if not i promise to read it on my return. i am about to throw millions of things in the air again to juggle, incl. this forum so excuse please!! i do know that my writing is not shit, only perhaps in a theoretical sense compared to armin, you or foucault ;-) i have went from fine art undergrad to artist to single parent to doctoral researcher in 12 yrs, a very steep learning curve in all directions. being succinct in writing and aware of specific world-views is only a learned activity that inevitably takes time...
have a great w/end all
Lx
science authors
hi lindsay
armin already mentioned brian greene ..i loved his 'the elegant universe' --it is a very lay-friendly intro to QP - stuff like string theory (which is already outa fashion, but still fascinating to ponder) and n-dimensional space -- i think he also made a tv series on this stuff (i havent seen it)
also a big fave of mine is 'blackfoot physics' by f. david peat. he was a student of the radical Qphysicist david bohm ... who is also worth poking around..but as i recall his texts were harder for a non-physics person..he has this idea about enfolded reality/// anyway..he was quite an iconoclast and the copenhagen physicists scorned his ideas if i remember rightly
anyway...blackfoot physics is about david peat's journeys-physical and conceptual-with various indigenous elders and thinkers, and weaves togethe various cosmological ways of interpreting the world..i loved this book and it inspired my never-really-made (but one day will be) project soft accidents
i think u wd find a lot of interest in this book
david peat runs an art&science centre in a tiny italian village called pari, near sienna. me and my b/f at the time went to meet him and his wife...he is an interesting guy, very oxbridge i guess, but full of enthusiasm and wonderment...he really liked my gashgirl and puppetmistress dirty projects, so i guess he had a nice kinky side too
anyway...there is a website he runs..i havent looked for a while...
his site is here
http://www.fdavidpeat.com/
and the pari centre is here
http://www.paricenter.com/
over the w/e i will look in the messiest of my book shelves for other science books
btw, none of ur wriitng that i have read is "shit"
enjoy ur dive/sea walk this w/e!
which reminds me... have u seen this series? The Coast.....
The nation's love affair with the coast will be reawakened for this entertaining
and ambitious exploration of the entire UK coastline. Every part of the 9,000
-mile coast is covered to explore how we've shaped it - and how it shapes us.
Hosted by a team of history and geography experts who investigate everything
from life on a nuclear submarine; rebuilding the Titanic using computer images;
the story behind the first Butlins holiday camp; and the birth of the Severn Bore.
Discover the curious, sometimes dysfunctional, relationship between the British
and the seas.
------------------------------------------------------------
if it is of interest to u it it can be downloaded from thebox.bz (u have to join, its free) ..the series The Coast is a free leech this week -- that means u can d/l it from the box and it doesn't effect your sharing ratio..anyway..ignore all this if its irrelevant...i get a lot of my pommie tele fix from thebox.
doll
details...
armin, you have replied in detail and no worries about not replying in any more detail, things are loosely organic here and thats the way they should stay in this space...
i know that the postmodern post was only notes, but for some reason i found it a more engaging read (and by this i mean the density and the structure)... it was like a bullet
another bullet i like is http://www.cultural-science.org/FeastPapers2008/RichardLeeBp.pdf this paper condenses history of knowledge structures, and is quite clunkily processual; not nearly as interesting as yours in the style, but it is informative in its content for the person that requires a world view in a hurry ... i can only really read papers like this in the early morning when my brain is still chilled out with the comfort of the subconscious still partially present...
please can you upload the geert text here, it would be nice to have the option for everyone to read it if they thought it necessary.
doll i will try to read your chapters tomorrow as early saturday morning, when i am still with the singing birds and my meta plane, i will start my 5 hr drive north to try to walk along the bottom of the sea... :-)
Lx
some initial replies
lindsay, thanks for your comments. I don't know if it is good manners to promise 'i will reply in more detail later' yet gthis is what I have to say, as I have a doctors appointment in half an hour and afterwrads I will visit a friend who is very good on ecnomics, politics and grassroots media. so maybe i will also reply indirectly, by posting more research soon.
easy things first: my notes on postmodernism are really only mostly notes from one book by P Buerger. What I will read next is The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey whom doll_yoko also has mentioned, really an important guy who takes on the postmodernists and poststructuralists. after that I feel maybe more equipped to continue this question, "how we became postmodern". it is important insofar as the mainstream discourse on media art of the 1990s (and still going) is very strongly linked to postmodern theorists such as lytoard, baudrillard, virilio and deleuze and guattari. yet I am keeping a scepticism about that question if postmodernism really is a reality, if modernity is really about to end any time soon or has already done so. I doubt that and harvey provides good arguments on that.
A good theoretical physicist who writes books about quantum physics in language understandable to us normal humans is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Greene
a really important point that you single out is the question of participatory practices. I think it would be wrong to say that participatory practices in art (not just media art) came from the hacker movement. the futurist and dadaist soirees were already participatory (if shouting and throwing things at the artists counts as 'participation'). the trajectory of participatory art proper I think starts in the 1950s. the reasons for this are compley and maybe deserve a chapter of their own. one thing is that the receptive side of artistic production suddenly became more important. artists realised more strongly that the audience are coproducers of the work - even if there is no real participation in terms of changeable bits in the work or anything like that. this could be linked to a new sensibility towards the aesthetics of the field, something I am very drawn to, es it obviously corresponds with the electromagnetic field. I strongly suspect that the new worldview developed by Einstein et al through relativity theory and quantum physics arrived in the art world and inspired this new sensibility which is especially strong in the New Tendencies exhibitions and groups. in the sixties this then exploded into various practices such as fluxus, happening, mail art and early media art which directly invited participation by the audiences. at the same time also a strong movement emerged which was about participatory media practcies more ina grassroots sense, as an emancipatory project of make your own media. involved were artists, some of whom drifted into community media practice and thereby left the gallery system once and for all, and others who did not and became famous video artists, and later even dropped the 'video' such as Dan Graham.
so that is something I learned through Buergers Theory of the Avantgarde. the avant-garde desires to transgress the borders between art and life, to, for example, make things that are directly relevant for people, that helps them in an emancipatory struggle, lets say feminist or black or puerto rican community media groups, will in the end lead to leaving the art system. others, who share the same impulse initially, transfer that energy into creation of formal works which carry maybe a similar message, but do so within a museum context. I am not judgemental about either of that directions but recognise the problematic. The autonomy of art is nothing that artists can be accused of personally as Lovink seems to have done - have not read his post fully - but a social category, which means it is also a reality. art as an institutional system has been and is granted a level of autonomy. it is artists, curators, critics and audiences who together decide - as in Bordieus relational field, what is art and what is not - and not politicians and busienessmen, even though they hold the purse strings. the autonomy of art is problematic and precarious, but we have to deal with it as a reality which will prefer certain choices.
Have to stop now, cause have to see the doctor, but only one last remark, Lovink has dedicated a whole chapter in his latest book Zero Comments, on what he calls the crisis of media art, under the title the cool obscure. I have it and can email it or even upload it in our private study area. some of his arguments I support but on the whole it is muddled and lacks specificity. I hope to be able soon to answer to that, as this discussion keeps going but achieves little clarifications.
later
armin
Hmm...
yes i packed alot into that post but my comments on dortmund are general and need to be more specific (my intention is not to bruise egos which is why i need more time)... i also never said why i was interested in the quotes i picked out of armins text on p.modernism...?! i will have to think longer.
doll, i am not adverse to reading about the hands on, theoretical aspects of Q. physics as long as it is in ley terms, infact it may be useful so if you do have any suggestions...
armin i have now read your first chapter/ t.paper in more detail, the next stage in my method is to scan over it again an re-contextulaise the notes i have highlighted so that i can maybe tease out some specific things. i found it very informative and thanks, i had not heard of the french institution in the 60's for example, that was making art out of scientific method. however at the moment i am not going to say anything that you already dont know, and general points are that it is very long! also the way it is structured with some of the more specific points that you wish to discuss running through the text instead of stated at the beginning, i find a little disorientating for the reader; but i suppose this just highlights for me why the linear text is problematic. with your writing it is almost like there should be 'blocks' of discussion that could be read in any order rather than chapters as such.
also, although your text is about media art, some of the main argument will be about the participatory nature that is/has surfaced from the hacker movement, yes? being originally from a fine art background, and having rejected the mainstream gallery system in favour of this way of working, i just wondered what section i am in and are you going to mention the moves in other art subjects that are also moving towards this paradigm as it really is quite revolutionary. there are alot of artists that just have that attitude naturally, even more so in britain as our education system has moved away from the masterclass system a decade ago, in this respect, it is europe who is behind and why i reject lovinks/montevideos claim in his first blog post that 'fine art' does not accept new media art easily or that we use media as eclecticism. in an academic sense 'fine art', if you want to categorise us, is moving forward and becoming more and more aware of other theoretical frameworks/world views; yes we still do hold onto autonomy in a naive way, but we are discussing this more and more and the merger of fine art and MAI at dundee into 'art and media' really is starting to tell this tale. i know that this is not where your argument wants to be placed, but just wondered what you thought, and is it not relevant to a string in your debate as regards of how we view the avant-garde, the politics of the gallery system and the rejection of this on a grass-roots level? do you fear the amalgamation of years of philosophy, navel-gazing and naivity over technology with media arts? what are its implications not only for here in dundee, but for 'media arts' itself? where then will there be a further break in the chain, what will split off next? i am interested to see where this will go...
your text is very interesting and i am ashamed that my writing is so shit, it has the potential to be much better and far more poetic. for the record, i am dreading even looking at my t.report again, as i know it is clunky and repetitive but it needs to be re-worked to contextualise what i am doing. but it was a means to an end, and now i am through it which was the aim...
listening quietly
hi lindsay
wow-- u packed a lot into that posting! will pick up a couple of the threads over the weekend...and also look in my bookcase to see if i read any philosophy of science a few years ago when i was researching quantum physics for an art project that is yet to be made -- but i think i was reading books by scientists which i guess is not really so meta-level as what u r probably after..but i can recommend a couple on Q physics if its of interest..
reiki! great... am reading /well dipping into ..a strange book about the relationship between our physical bodies and our esoteric bodies... will write down the deetz when i am in the same place as the book...(my flat is on 3 levels, and my writing den is downstairs, and bedroom up the top..with the esoteric reading material...) all-important kitchen on the middle level
how to speed read Focault
this is not so difficult. first you need to become a chain smoker. then you go to a library which has hard wooden stools, you sit down and read and take notes as fast as you can. the nicotine withdrawal symptoms will keep you focused until you can stand it no longer. my resulting notes are proof of the efficiency of the method;-)
my latest notetaking is on the question of 'what is a medium' which took me both into media science as defined in the humanities and into 'modern spiritism', that is spiritism after Mesmer, which, after the telegraph, started to mix up the mystical notion of the medium with the aether. my notes are so inconclusive, therefore I have not yet published them. I was aiming at a text that could also be out in the open tnl. if i dont get there soon enough I'll post it as an open office document here.
regarding philosophy of science I very much recommend Paul Feyerabend, especially his first book Against Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
and especially inspiring for artists (and curators) Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, which is about quantum physics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Bachelard