Joel said:
"With all the science and technology, more people
feel disconnected, and thus are becoming neurotically attached to cell
phones, to constant conversation, to constant entertainment, to being in
touch with everyone but themselves."
feel disconnected, and thus are becoming neurotically attached to cell
phones, to constant conversation, to constant entertainment, to being in
touch with everyone but themselves."
Fine thought Joel, I am reminded of AT&T's "Reach out and touch someone""
and the desperate, and sometimes tragic rush to cybersex, online chat rooms, matching services, etc.
"dat's me!--de new dat's moiderin' de old! I'm de ting in coal dat makes it boin"
- The Hairy Ape, by Eugene O'Neill
- The Hairy Ape, by Eugene O'Neill
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-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Weishaus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA
Sent: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 08:36:47 -0700
Subject: Fw: [webartery] State of new media from strawberry fields forever -
----- Original Message ----- From: "Joel Weishaus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005 8:22 AM Subject: Re: [webartery] State of new media from strawberry fields forever - Alan: This must be answered, and not just by me, as it touches on so much of what I, and I guess others who work almost exclusively in the digital, have thought and think about. Let's start at a signpost, this one being the Paleolithic caves. Did the people who painted these caves think their work would last forever? I doubt that they even thought about it, or had a concept of longevity. They followed their spirit and did what they had to do. We think on a different time-scale, but we still follow our spirit and do what we have to do. The future of the internet will have to take care of itself. I suspect it will go on expanding, getting faster, more prevalent in the average person's life. Our work, then, will be considered pioneering. What we say and make will be annotated into a history of the medium. I don't follow the mass media, corporate concerns, or even the Art World--I have no idea anymore what's being written in Art in America or Artforum, et al., because when I did I found that there's nothing happening there, that what's interesting is happening here. As for contributions, who knows? At least we're not part of the political rabble or what these days passes for journalism--talk about entertainers! Our work is to tend the Promethean Fire, and I think we are doing it with distinction, We are honoring the artists who came before us, not by bidding on their paintings, but by, as they did, biting on the Gordian Knot. Nor do I think science is more important to the future of the species than is our work. Like art, science is a journey with no end; while technology is more often applied to war and profiteering than to anything the species really needs. No wonder so many people are running to churches, to another generation of evangelists who rip-off their pocketbooks while they're looking upwards to Jesus.With all the science and technology, more people feel disconnected, and thus are becoming neurotically attached to cell phones, to constant conversation, to constant entertainment, to being in touch with everyone but themselves. As for wars, they should be ignored, in the sense of the old _expression_, "What if someone gave a war and nobody came?" Let the politicians deceive people into thinking they are serving their country by killing others, because we're no going to be able to stop it. All we can do is, as I said, tend the Promethean Fire and continue to bite on the Gordian Knot. -Joel ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2005 8:17 PM Subject: [webartery] State of new media from strawberry fields forever - State of new media from strawberry fields forever - The work I'm doing isn't much different from the work you're doing. It will disappear when the net goes down or when it's no longer tended. Nobody tends things forever. It's amazingly ephemeral; there's nothing to it; it's stillborn, passed in email or on a website, that's all. It's not as if we're contributing to the well-being of humanity; the idea that art makes any sort of social or political difference is long outmoded, repeatedly proven wrong. We're not even making paintings which have a modicum of a chance of survival, 'being as how' they're concrete, inert, almost idiotic things (in the sense of Rosset or Sartre). Certainly we haven't made any contribution to physical theory or the sciences in general, and our work is rarely entertaining. At our performances and readings, only the rest of us show up. The 'culture' such as it is, follows mass media, corporate distribution systems, subtended radicalities; the best one hopes for is museum sponsorship. We've saved no one's lives through our art - turn the machine off, and we're pretty much done for. We engage in outmoded theories, bouncing one theorist off another, as if any of it mattered in the universe at large. We work through fast-forward intellectual fashions, situations in which phenomenology, existentialism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and so forth - name your 'movement,' name your theorist - are considered outmoded, as if philosophy had advanced since Heraclitus. We ignore scientific theory, or borrow from it, on a simplistic or meta- phoric level, as a form of legitimation, as if we're somehow connected with scientific 'advances.' We confuse science with technology, substituting cleverness for any real disciplinary understanding, in fields ranging from psychoanalysis through physics. Our theoretical work is written as if it somehow matters, somehow says something about the world, which we hardly understand. We substitute cultural politics for political action and depth; we ignore war or illustrate it. We entertain ourselves endlessly, as if our work had nothing to do with entertainment (some might call us failed comedians, novelists, what have you, substituting surface transformations for that hypothetical depth that seems to infest the canon). I am guilty of all of the above. We go on and on and on... _ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webartery/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
