dear all it is interesting to me to read the responses, or the conversation between Mark and Alan, but I find Mark's (and to some extent yours, Alan, as well) commentary too close to a kind of romanticism that evokes/links decaying landscapes and empires and the sublime (aesthetics).
And John did respond to my query, thank you, regarding "posturing of power, and the decay implicit in myths of cultural heritage.. and 'preservation'", and I thought his discussion of the depletion of energy/force (for building archive and hoarding in the museums of the former west) and depletion of social order (a kind of chaos theory of the end of political, including the poor cousins of landscape art and border art?), also in the US empire (Amurika? whose albion is that?), was very thought-provoking. It did make me think, and wonder also, given Alan's silence, whether I offended sensibilities here evoking a materialist dialectics that would see iconoclasm/destruction in another light. It was so easy to condemn ISIS and be morally abhorred; and when you ask why is there no abhorrence and condemnation and protest against the state governments that took the war to Syria and destroyed Syria (after destroying Iraq), well, are we powerless to stop war, stop the refugee crisis? nothing unknowable here, Mark, I guess. respectfully, Johannes Birringer ________________________________________ From: netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org [netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org] on behalf of Mark Hancock [mark.r.hanc...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, March 14, 2016 12:29 AM To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Interspersed amongst the decaying landscapes of Albion Hi, Yes! It probably is me collapsing, bits falling away and into the ocean (of the sublime?). I’d be interested to find out more of your feelings of insignificance, because I imagine that comes from knowing that there is so much more to know in the world. Perhaps the decaying landscape is our own uncertainty in the face of so much unknowable? M > On 13 Mar 2016, at 20:12, Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com> wrote: > > > Hi Mark, > > Wouldn't it be true to say that you're collapsing, not the landscape? And > whether that content is somehow manifest to us as viewers? I feel the same > sort of vertigo, but I associate it with the Kantian sublime (which for all I > know relates to Peirce's continuum via Zalamea), and a resulting, for me, > sense of insignificance - literally in the presennce of being (and Being) > _awe-struck._ ... > > - Alan > > On Sun, 13 Mar 2016, Mark Hancock wrote: > >> Hi all, thank you for taking the time to view the video! >> >> >> In a very general, not too researched way, I was reading about Deep Time in >> (I think, I?m still on holiday away from my bookshelves) Collapse journal, >> Volume 2. That, coupled with a comic from Image, called Injection, which >> touches on aspects of British folklore and AI, got me thinking last year >> about the idea of cinema as occult exploration; part ritual, part >> documentation, perhaps? So I created these Deep Time Exploration experiment >> films, which I?ve linked below. >> >> This latest piece is an extension of that exploration, trying to see >> something in the landscape beyond what initially meets the eye. >> >> As for decaying landscapes, I?m extremely risk-averse and nervous whenever I >> go near any cliffs, constantly worrying that they?ll collapse and crush me. >> There?s beauty in there, but also fear. To me, the landscapes are constantly >> collapsing. Maybe I?m being paranoid. >> >> I?ve been using GoPros for a couple of years, because I?ve wanted to take >> this ?extreme sports? documentation tool and use it in a different, >> creative/playful way. As I?ve been thinking about this all now, I realised >> that one root was probably the work of Mark Amerika. In fact, an interview >> for DigiCult* I did with Mark a few years ago, probably lodged itself in my >> neural pathways. >> >> It?s rare that I get to think and write about my own work, so thank you and >> your references and thoughts have really got me thinking and making some >> connections. >> >> Regards >> >> Mark >Interspersed amongst the decaying landscapes of Albion netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org [netbehaviour-boun...@netbehaviour.org] on behalf of John Hopkins [chaz...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, March 12, 2016 7:21 PM To: netbehaviour@netbehaviour.org Hei Johannes -- > What interests me here is the posturing of power, and the decay implicit in > myths of cultural heritage anyway, and what is "preservation" standing in > for? What chasms? Preservation, the archive as one form of that process, is only possible when there is excess energy available to maintain the 'material' order of whatever is being preserved. We in the developed world have lived through a time where energy excess (glut) has allowed wide-scale preservation of 'old' things. Historically, in times of less available energy, 'old' or non-essential things were 'allowed' to fall into disorder. In times of great chaos -- times where energy flows are undirected, or there are many flows that are not unified, or are directed in many different 'directions' -- sees the act of preservation contract forced to contract to the scale of embodied presence alone. The primary focus of existence becomes: finding food, water, air, and defending the body from the chaos that threatens to enter it. We are living in a time where there is no longer a lock on energy sources (that the 'West' has so long had), rising population brings greater competition, and with that, anger, fear, and 'decline' from the standards that we have enjoyed for one hundred years or so -- well, since forests, whale oil, coal, and, finally oil gave some humans an energy glut. Within glut we could save more, until now, we can save our entire 'lives' digitally (at the cost of CO2 generated from The Cloud). While around our glutted enclaves, chaos builds, and where we once projected order (via archaeology among the many colonial tools of projected power and 'order') we have no choice but to watch chaos creep back in: we are power-less to stop it. We no longer have the energy. So it has been for Life on the planet all along, we are running under the same laws of nature as the last 3+ billion years or so. There will be more evidences of this (perhaps the dis-order Amurikans are witnessing in their social system is a direct manifestation of the imbalance between too many people and too little energy compared to the high times of Empire in decades past -- implicit in "Make Amurika Great Again". Same with Europe. With chaos on the doorstep. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
