About
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
November 09 2011
tyranny of light
tyranny of light wherein hallucinations are clearly and distinctly seen, and being seen are recognised, and recognised are understood, and understood are taken as held in common; and in this light all individual consciousness corresponds, as if the clear part of every monad coincided, and to this tyranny each individual consciousness defers and by it is coopted.
August 09 2011
to placard: letter on arts funding crisis, to demolish an idea
[-The following went to Spectre -]
State arts funding does not have the interests of the artist or of art at its centre as its reason. It is rather a symbolic – political and economic and ethological – allowance that such things might emerge as artists and arts which if they do may be managed and organised, judged and branded.
The critical economy appears to be the next major franchise, of the semantic Web, for example, as copyright on material expression ceases to stick, given digital dissolution, and ownership of opinion arises, stratifies and propagates through personalisation of services, through P2P recommendation. +, like, :> … However, arts funding provides pre-eminently for the ecology that supports managers, organisers, and critical apparati, even if the latter often give the impression of parasitism. When societies do not allow the critical threshold of economic freedom to be reached such that a stage of emergence can be insured, then what is at risk is an ecology or network.
The state in removing itself from the art/arts equation by withdrawing funding eliminates a hub from this network. This may not destroy the network but its deleterious effects will ramify throughout it.
The current system of tertiary student loans in New Zealand we know to cost more to run than the previous system of student allowances. In fact, this was known before the system was implemented. Likewise, looking only at economic indexes, cutting state funding for the arts, above an ascertainable threshold of sufficient funding, costs the state more than continuing its support.
How is it possible to ascertain the amount of funding that suffices? Where the existence of significant arts institutions is threatened, where that significance is given the larger meaning of ‘acting as a hub for the (artistic, social, civic, ethological, economic, political, critical, and so on) network,’ is where the threshold lies.
Theatres and cinemas are clearly hubs, but that the former is also an artistic hub, bringing the company responsible for the work together in the same institution as that in which it is shown. Theatre therefore displays even more hub-like characteristics when it has a resident company and is not simply the venue for visitors.
Much of this discussion seems to have recycled notions of economic lean-ness or efficiency, whereby the arts in Europe have grown fat, Brad Brace for one advocating a crash diet and the dynamic individualism of a lean mean art-making machine. [visit him here] Is an excess of funding than what suffices in sustaining significant arts institutions adequate justification to cut state funding?
I would like to live in a society in which such a problem arises. Justification is usually from the macroeconomic, with all the attendant ironies that even minor financial institutions are worthy of state bail-outs. And as they devolve on macroeconomic arguments they have recourse to the unscientific theories of fashionable economic thinking, or ideology.
It is this idea that cutting state funding somehow works or creates benefits that needs to be demolished.
July 22 2011
to placard: sufficient conditioning; a call to raise expectations of and from conditions considered sufficient
[-with minor alterations, the following was sent to the Listserv Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives-]
Dear Un-Alike,
I’m intrigued by the support here for decentralization as a condition for a desirable network. Decentralization is what the social graph aspires to, lighting up the dark zones of the net, growing virally, accumulating capital from a closed circuit of service – P2P, yes, and emphasising personalization alongside offering software as a service. A network as I understand it leans towards a hub and feeder model before either a centripetally hierarchical, an egalitarian, or a random distribution.
The problem of social media is the many and the one and the various non-processual practices to which we, one, they are submitted. The box/circle/cutter of normalisation and presumptive (profiling) generalisation (based on a consumption-use dictatorship – i.e. what a majority will commit to, with a click – and what the power to sell will prescribe) strikes me, in other words, the constraint of expression of the individual and the reciprocal constraint of articulation of the societies, strike me as being more critical, and more problematic, in existing online social-individual arrangements.
Time, it seems to me, is of the essence in what is at stake for social networks to work: processual, non-presumptive – and non-patronising (!), constructive of both individual and social identities, multiple and whole – by turns, in time -, further, relational in so far as difference enters between and before the one and the many, you, me, one them …us.
I am working in the field of this problematic, this critical milieu, in order to build a poly-lingual dialogical commons, an online social processual and differential simulacrum, and am seeking collaborators in many fields, pre-eminently – where the need is greatest – in code-writing. Please contact me if you are interested. [here]
I feel I should add that I agree neither that entrepreneurial activity has a natural proclivity towards promoting unethical behaviour, nor that the commercial can somehow be separated from the constructive, creative and artistic – and socially responsible – spheres. In fact, it seems to me that a lot of art is exploitative and static, non-progressive, cynical, repressive, however enjoyable it may be; and a lot of commercial activity is affirmative, creative, constructive and ethical – despite erring on the side of lack of imagination, vision… often. I am interested in building an apparatus for online interaction with the support of entrepreneurs and expect this project to be artistically and commercially viable, adequate and effective: in fact, the standards that I am applying are those of both artistic and commercial efficacy – real-world intervention – for this constructivist undertaking.
…
…further, you can show your support for this project by signing in here – yes, it’s legit and safe, not a scam, and it is a help.
July 01 2011
World City Christchurch – building a city for the future
We, the people of New Zealand, give the glass-fibre infrastructure along with a data-pipeline connecting it to the world to Christchurch.
This is the cap-stone of my idea to build Christchurch as an economically productive – high-tech, sustainable – green, and above all a new city.
The cost of the UFB – Ultra-Fast Broadband – network proposed for NZ is said to be in the vicinity of $6 billion, the product of a government partnership with Telecom. Without a serviceable data-cable connecting it to the world, an additional $400 million or so, the UFB is subject to existing data-caps on the single service New Zealand currently has connecting it with the United States.
I suggest we deal directly with the issue of Christchurch’s productivity by connecting it with an integrated civic-wide UFB network that has built into its cost the necessary international data-pipeline. The national UFB project and the need to think about the future of the city of Christchurch are opportunities for economic progress that can be brought together and must be thought of conjointly as an unprecedented opportunity.
Rebuilding Christchurch’s infrastructure should not be limited to restoring it. We ought to be looking at both future-proofing it and using the rebuild as incentive to encourage investment in the city. Restoration is not sustainable; innovation is.
What will sustain the city is what will build World City Christchurch: an environment that will inspire businesses to come is connected globally; an environment that will inspire people to live in it is connected locally and nationally.
I said that rethinking the national UFB without an international cable as a civic UFB with an international cable was the cap-stone of my idea for Christchurch. There are two further aspects to the vision that work in harmony with it.
A system of canals is built for the transportation of heavy goods throughout the city. The system would be woven in to the fabric of the city, joining it to the wider water-network of the Canterbury Planes: the Garden City linked to its gardens.
Such a system of water-ways has been considered before, at the period of Christchurch’s establishment. Since aquifers and subterranean rivers and streams are a feature of the Planes, it is a plan that deserves another look. Not only a Venice of the South but a city determined not to sink back into the swamp of liquefaction.
The third element to this plan already has widespread endorsement: the Copenhagenization of Christchurch; a network of cycle-ways connect the city, with ‘green corridors’ through parks, encouraging people to ride by taking cycle-paths away from roads, making them safe, and also enhancing the natural beauty of the city. (Perhaps Christchurch would then be helmet-free, in consideration of the fact that cities where cycle-helmets are mandatory clearly indicate they are not cycle-friendly.)
These architectures, of a glass-fibre infrastructure hardwired to the world, of a system of canals, and a network of cycle-ways, duly provide for the foundation of a new civic architecture. A new style of city. To start with the buildings and the houses is to recreate the past, to try and bring it back, rather than to discover in the middle of this crisis anything new. The city could again be beautiful, but it will never be as it was.
If the Christchurch earthquakes constitute a national disaster, then the nation ought to be doing more than being asked to pay up. If Christchurch’s disaster has had, as the Prime Minister has stated, a deleterious affect on GDP unparalleled in New Zealand’s history, then New Zealand ought to be encouraging the building of a productive city, a city that can pay back.
In its rush into public relations disaster, in the guise of disaster-control, I don’t think the prospect of economic growth has been seriously considered as a part of the so-called rebuild. Through building a city that will by the very nature of its civic architecture and infrastructure attract investors, entrepreneurs and inhabitants, Christchurch ought to make a greater economic contribution. The build needs to take on this vision of a city with the potential for real and sustainable growth.
Please contact me here if you support this plan and wish to promote its cause.
notes:
On Silicon Valley Christchurch:
“Christchurch has a window of opportunity” – here
Mention of the Venice of the South:
“The Venice of the South Pacific we might have been had the proposal gone ahead for the city to be connected to the sea via the Avon-Heathcote estuary to the south and the Waimakariri River to the North.” – here
On Copenhagenization:
“JG: We’re commissioned to rebuilding efforts in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the recent earthquake. They want to use the opportunity to get rid of many of the bad compromises from the 20th century, which are burdening all cities in the western world. They want to make a very good city for the 21st century, rather than just repeating all the errors from the past. Interesting…and humbling.” – here
June 23 2011
艾未未 … Beijing police have released Ai Weiwei on bail
“The decision comes also in consideration of the fact that Ai has repeatedly said he is willing to pay the taxes he evaded, police said.”
“The Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd, a company Ai controlled, was found to have evaded a huge amount of taxes and intentionally destroyed accounting documents, police said.”
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
