Hi Johannes, as usual, a few or more things. I think I sent out Stephen Wolfram's keynote url from SXSW; I'm not utterly pessimistic, but pessimistic about human behavior, inertia, inability to change things for the better, the feeling in the United States at least that it's all a zero-sum game and to hell with the consequences; my gain is your loss and so be it. We try to save manatees by donating and talking ahd getting others involved; these animals, every last one of them, is scarred from propellers from boats. There are guards you could buy for the props that are inexpensive and stop the animals from being injured, but the boat owners feel that curtails their rights, and people don't use them. So the population is wounded, and people who watch and try to help the manatees identify them by their scars. And that's that.
I feel as an artist, I'm bound up in my projects, that we all are, and that we might work for a common good or common goal and most of us are way left of center at least in the US, but, on the other hand, a lot of artists I know don't vote and don't really push for change. Or if we do, we're ineffectual; my view of the world is one of uttermost pessimism and I can't get beyond that. Maybe instead of the absence of aura, we're all aura, and aura is all that is left, maker-bots and projects, I'm not sure. And to be honest I don't honestly know what I'm talking about, but at every occasion I do try and bring up issues around ecology and extinctions because to me they're at least as important as knowing where the planet is from, who we are, and other basic questions. The disconnect fascinates and frightens me - Hemingway writing about the beauty of the lions he's about to kill. And what animal can possibly face up to the gun? The Hastac conference sounds like the kind of conf. I love - Subtle Technologies, also in To., or SLSA, are others - fairly small, general, based on, at least for me, a lot of networking but also just talking between and after formal presentations, and some good excitement comes out of them. At SXSW on the other hand, we actually waited in a 'Green Room' before going on - it was that formal, and instead of maybe 150, there were 13000 people present (and another 25000 or so arriving as we left, for the music part). I don't think btw we can shape the future, that our technologies are revolutionary, that we actually are aware of what we're doing and the consequences of such. There have been studies indicating that we as primates have only a limited ability to think, project, into the future (which makes for an interesting take on existentialism) - one that lasts I think maybe 10-15 years at best. Events get the better of us and the world's far too interconnected for articulated solutions or the classical thinking of the futurists. We increasingly hide out, enclave; today on the news it was announced that five states have passed laws against filming in factory farms - the idea is to protect the rather torturing practices of the managers, which keeps them in business, the animals be damned. So actually exposing the various practices (I won't go into them) is off- limits, enclaved. The woundings and deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is enclaved. The rich are enclaved; the markets are reaching record highs, and the number of homeless in NYC has increased 61%. The contradictions are furious and much as I love the Occupy movements, I think they're useless against the advancement of global capital flows, the denudation of the environment, the increased extinctions of flora and fauna, the increase in populations and regional conflicts etc. etc. So what to do? I talk about this stuff; I admit I don't know what I'm talking about, but I talk. And in maybe 10 years the world will be, not through this talking, but through changes occurring even now, that we can't imagine, utterly unrecognizable... - Alan, and thank you _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
