----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------

Hi all

Terry replies that he is out there  hoping "to catch more glimpses of the 
developing paradigm there" (why going to Venice?), the externalized memory 
system
of velocitized selves, the cognitive distributive system. Meanwhile, Terry you 
describe briefly the Glastonbury Festival -- did you see the performers and the 
crowds
as an example of the new developing paradigm? and if so, can you say why, and 
how this might be linked to the questions that Simon  Biggs proposes as 
leitmotifs for this month's discussion 
such as ....<how artists, arts groups, academics and activists might ensure 
their activities are sustainable as the processes of technologisation and 
globalisation unfold?>

I suppose I'm asking about the theme:  resistance to what? why futile? futile 
in regard to what? the unfolding processes of technologisation and 
globalisation?

[Simon from NZ schreibt]
>>
..so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's
image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like
stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body -
since we don't yet know what a body can do...
>

all right --  this idea of the body not knowing yet what it can do, I like it. 
And yet we do grow older, and so do our behaviors.  
But can we track back to the idea of resistance, then, and ask here (for 
example those amongst you here on the list who were at this Resistance ISEA)
what exactly would be our intuitive or rational response to  what Terry has 
called, in his first posting, "the collective behaviour both online and via 
social media"
and then explained as as narrative construct?  A few examples have popped up, 
the ISEA panel on The Future of the Moving Images, Big Data, Mr Snowden and 
surveillance prisms,  the
'collective (social) state from which we individually emerge ....within a 
complexity of voices that situate themselves through various performative 
activities' (this is
Simon Biggs's  interesting evocation of James Leach's anthropology and what 
James discussed here in 2010 on the subject of social creativity), junk noise 
and dropped data (Christine), the children at the
Montessori school, the Glastonbury Festival....

I'd think bodies learn when to resist and when to be exuberant; I just 
participated in an event, maybe similar to Glastonbury maybe not, at Houston's 
Pride Parade last Saturday which was mind blowing,
hundreds of thousands of people in our community and city celebrating each 
other and expressing whatever they needed or desired on the streets we had 
taken for day and a night. 

The euphoria of the Parade was a physical shared event, a kind of dance, but 
also expression of political will. This connects it to May 68, and many other 
moments of irruption of the commune-political and the sexual.
Along the lines of the Technicians of the Sacred that I quoted, the poetry I 
perceived in the happening had a tribal-communal dimension that is unaffected 
by the beforementioned unfolding processes of
technologisation - and it is precisely not velocitized, it requires a slowing 
down, duration, a slow pantomime relying on bodily memory that is not 
expropriated. 

These kinds of memories, and their political dimension of experience and 
learning, within societal systems of repression of creativity, are related, 
wouldn't you think, to what we see in Egypt right now, although
their's was not a Parade nor a Festival, and yet is described at the moment as 
'celebration' on Tahrir Square continuing with the military helicopters 
"providing further spectacle" flying over the heads of the celebrants. 

What liturgies are we witnessing? And how incredibly complex they are. 
Un-mediatable, this complexity, by facebook or twitter.  And no surveillance 
data were gathered at the Pride Parade, except of course if you
think of the celebrants capturing their joy on their cell phones, photographing 
themselves, embracing themselves each other.  Low resolution, less realistic.

How do we construct stories of these uprisings? 

James Leach, a few years back, said that

>>
creativity is not outside human experience, but part of its everyday reality. 
Creativity is inherent in what it is to be a human being because in myth, the 
actions referred to above, beginning with the acts which established gender, 
and thus the possibilities for human reproduction and kinship [JL; this does 
not work in the context of the Pride Parade of course except otherwise], were 
the actions of the first human beings constituting themselves as human and not 
something else. In their everyday lives of gardening, animal husbandry, hunting 
etc., these people are the same as those first creator beings, and thus are 
constantly partaking of the original ‘creativity’ as they also constitute their 
lives as human and not something else...

Having said all that, and given the underlying premise of all the above is that 
we, just as Reite people do, constitute our existences through the particular 
way we engage in relations to each other (social ontology), structured through 
certain key principles available in myths we tell ourselves about how we have 
got here and what our responsibilities as human being are — what are we to make 
of the current idea that somehow the mediation of human relations through 
technological networks will make us more ‘creative’?
What is it about the speeding up of communication, the mediation of 
geographical and social distance, that makes us believe (and I use the word 
consciously) that we are going to be doing anything very different?
>>[http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/07/04/empyre-creativity-as-a-social-ontology/]

Well, this is a good question, but the myths may be changing. 

regards
Johannes Birringer



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