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Cold, common.

Molecular surface of the capsid of human rhinovirus 16, one of the viruses which cause the common cold. Protein spikes are coloured grey for visual clarity.

 

I Want You To Want Me

A video installation by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar for MOMA’s Elastic Mind exhibiton.

A lovely treatment of data, in this case dating data represented as balloons…

trope development

The island development is coming along with the terraforming complete-ish.
Here are some happy snaps:

looking forward to developing the android AI’s and other scripted objects.

white male christian art

I went to see the bill viola at Redfern last night. Sadly I really enjoyed it, despite the christianity, the huge production values and the white male privilege that enables the work and sidesteps critique. I met him last year briefly and went to a public lecture in San Jose, California, USA. I felt jealous about his obvious comfort and confidence.

April 9, 2008 - May 17, 2008
Tristan’s Ascension (2005) and Fire Woman (2005), “Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall): LOVE/DEATH: The Tristan Project, 2005″, St. Saviour’s Church, Redfern, Australia (from 6:30 - 10:30pm)

trope in SL

Trash Maggs, Auteur Writer and Artaud Artaud (Me)  on SL in the space I’m developing. The project is called trope. and is to be a repositioning of text in virtual environments. The website can be found here: trope.

It will be launched at the Sydney Writers festival in May during our new media writing panel. Details here.

More later…..

creative 20/20 summit? maybe 10/20….good work keep going..

well I feel I need to blog this. after the 20 20 summit in canberra with mr rudd.
here is a link to “Towards a creative Australia: the future of the arts, film and design” and the background briefing paper.

It is good to know that: “We value our artists, film-makers, designers, authors, playwrights and performers because they entertain us, challenge us and inspire us.” 

Here is the full statement:

“Creativity is increasingly recognised and celebrated for its contribution to cultural development, economic growth and social harmony; but it’s also intrinsically good. We value our artists, film-makers, designers, authors, playwrights and performers because they entertain us, challenge us and inspire us.

Australian cultural endeavour feeds the roots of our creativity; it helps preserve and protect the storehouses of the nation’s memory; it supports and sustains our disadvantaged and marginalised communities; and it shapes and defines our shared national identity.

Australian culture, in all its various forms and guises, is interwoven with the philosophy and the spirit of our nation, it is at the heart of who we are and is integral to the way we see ourselves and how others see us. Through film, writing and performance we try to define our unique experience, tell our own stories in our own voices and make our mark on the world.

The remarkable growth of the commercial Indigenous arts sector is indicative of the powerful transformative force of culture and the arts - growth which is rooted in tradition, land and language but which looks to the future. For many remote communities the development of a cultural enterprise has resulted in better health, educational and social outcomes.

Creativity will play a critical role in building and shaping Australia’s economy. Our artists and designers are amongst the best in the world and have the capacity to lead the charge into the new, technology-rich emerging industries. A future Australian economy will be driven by our ideas and our creativity, by smart design and canny management of our intellectual property.

Creative activity is also a fundamental part of our individual education. The arts can be provocative and subversive, challenging us to question the status quo. Through creative endeavours we learn to accept ambiguity, to move forward after failure, to think beyond preconceived boundaries and to communicate our emotions.”

Even though Kev’s intro speech made reference to “the internet” repeatedly, in the arts section there is no reference, explicit or otherwise to the internet, new media or digital media. film gets a guernsey as art but not digital media…tricky to nominate some forms/practice but not others, although it is pitched at a popularist audience it has some pretty explicit positions on the function of art, it would be good to have extended that into the practices of art as well… I feel like i am apologising for the omission, but what i really wanted to say is that it does nothing to allay my feeling that it is just more of the same rhetoric.

 

 

not rocket science…

but useful nonetheless…

There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990   

ποίησις - poesis

greek from ποιέω

 ”to make”, Latin poesis (see also -poiesis).

1. fabrication, creation, production,
2. poetry, poetic composition
3. magical procedure

FLOw

I have been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalya’s book on flow for a bit now. It is a bit dry and awkward in that way academic writing that tries to be popularist can be, not flow-like at all…

Anyway that aside, his work definately describes the art making experience at length, using a range of examples of other activities that evoke the state of flow. The phenomenon of flow is a state of joy, creativity and total involvement in which problems disappear and there is a feeling of transcendence. Sounds like meditation too, though it seems that single mindedness is the flow state with the absence of distractions. Mihaly’s book is about how to achieve happiness essentially, through flow, and the flow needs to have creativity at it’s core to be flow. For me it is the absence of the self in states of total immersion that seems to regenerate the self at a fundamental level. Explains why i make art and am happiest when immersed in certain aspects of a project, particularly the making phase, though grant writing can have this effect too.

Now the reason for this post is to show you one of my favourite “games”, not surprisingly called FLOw, by Jenova Chen.

He has another game where you are a cloud consuming other clouds and dictating weather which is lovely as well. I appreciate environments that you can explore and be immersed in rather than having to play a game… reminds me of Myst which was successful for it’s immersive and exploratory quality more so than the gameplay as such. Of course while I’m at it i can’t leave out Char Davies’  Osmose and Ephémère - especially for using breathing as the navigation device. Users have claimed to have experienced god in her work, i think it is the flow state being evoked, and hence the link between flow and transcendental meditation, just using different vehicles on the same map really.

 

bringing up stuff

a dérive task for the weekend..

Now I’ve been banging on about the derive for a bit now, so i think it is time for a little action.

I would like to suggest a derive for all my lovely readers (there are probably 5 of you…)

For your derive, drop your usual motives for movement and action and let yourself be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters you can find there.

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same awakening of consciousness, since the cross-checking of these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at objective conclusions.

Here’s how:

1. Have a read of Guy Debord’s original Theory of the dérive.

2. Do it. You may wish to make a map to record your dérive on, or make the map as you go. A series of photos would be a nice way to do it.

3. Try giving your derive map to someone from your area. see what they can add….or where they end up.

4. Do not relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life’.

5. Report back….let me know how you go, post a link in the comments here to you derive blog post.

 

Disclaimer: 

1. dérive: literally “drift” or “drifting.” Like détournement, this term has usually been anglicized as both a noun and a verb.

2. “The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but…) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us” (Ivan Chtcheglov, excerpt from a 1963 letter to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #9, p. 38).

back to the dérive

Debord’s The Naked City (1957), as a map of the dérive, is said to bring out those differences that are suppressed by the abstract and homogeneous descriptions of the ‘voyeur’, by fragmenting and re-connecting the Plan de Paris. In the dérive, the city is experienced as a cluster of events, never fully seen and always contingent: ”there are spaces where experiences coalesce or resonate, so-called ‘unities of atmosphere’, between which red arrows marking trajectories of ‘impassioned attraction’ trace an open narrative. Space is shown to be inhabited, i.e. it is not some contextual container which social relations somehow fill, but a product of the performance of inhabiting. As such, space is incorporated into social practice. As a practice of inhabiting space, the dérive was an attempt to contest the reification of lived experience as it becomes representation, and so contest the ‘society of the spectacle’”[ Guy Debord, 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography', Les Lèvres Nues # 6, 1955, in Theory of the Dérive and other… pp 18-21.]  in other words, to re-entangle the detached eye/I in the densely opaque daily behaviours of urban experience. It was also an attempt to transgress the naturalised territories and causal narratives inscribed upon social space, in order to reconstruct them in terms of libidinal and sensual pleasures. Ultimately, it was to unearth the possibilities for a new organisation of urban life that were hidden in the reified structure of the city.

lost in translation

It will be an interesting Olympricks…..

Let’s hope China can get the message about Tibet, I hope kev’s chinese is better than these chinese engrish toilet signs. i have no hope in hell of reading chinese though….

the graveyard

I have been following the online art of Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn for many years, probably since the mid 90s. Auriea does incredibly beautiful work, especially her entropy8 site and associated projects. There is an archive here.

She has just released a new “game”, more like an exploratory space/ painting than an actual game. There is no explicit goal to be achieved, or rewards to be collected which I like. I enjoy that you get to be an old woman shuffling about and having a sit on a park bench. You can find it here.