semifictionalized

[carlburton]

Cage for Pelodiscus sinensis, 2005 by Wesley Meuris

[semifictionalized-blog]

The idea that we live in an experience economy has influenced not only many of the actors in the market but also Academia. The perspectives produced by organizing concepts like the experience market, industry or economy have been rewarding in many ways for research on leisure, tourism, heritage and urban planning. They have directed our attention to new aspects or dimensions and become powerful tools for actors, institutions, communities and regions to reorganize their market profiles. As a heritage is packaged as an event, a hotel as a narrative or a landscape as a sensorama, culture and economy are linked in new ways. On a more general level this interest has also led to research that focuses on the ways in which experiences are produced, narrated and mediated.

Orvar Löfgren (2008): The Secret Lives of Tourists: Delays, Disappointments and Daydreams, Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, Vol. 8, No. 1, p 86

[chaosbureau]

Capitalism is a boiling whirlwind of impermanence. It reveals how things are always shifting and changing. But it isn’t the ultimate horizon of meaning. Capitalism does have structure—the relationship between owners and workers, for instance. It has predictability, patterns in the chaos. And, curiosly, capitalism creates things that are more solid than things ever were. Alongside global warming, “hyperobjects” will be our lasting legacy. Materials from humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium will far outlast current social and biological forms. We are talking about hundreds and thousands of year. Five hundred years from now, polystyrene objects such as cups and takeout boxes will still exist. Ten thousand years ago, Stonehenge didn’t exist. Ten thousand years from now, plutonium will still exist. Hyperobjects do not rot in our lifetimes. They do not burn without themselves burning (releasing radiation, dioxins, and so on). The ecological thought must think the future of these objects, these toxic things that apepar almost more real than reality itself, like the acidic blood of the Alien in Ridley Scott’s film, which burns through metal floors. This blood is a science fiction version of demonic ichor. Reason must find a way to deal with these demonic substances. With its apocalyptic visions and thousand-year itches, Christianity isn’t ready for hyperobjects. Yet, thinking about these materials does involve something like religion, because they transcend our personal death. Living tissue is usually far more stable than chemical compounds. But hyperobjects outlast us all.“

Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (p. 130)

[semifictionalized-blog]

The colonization of nature, emerging from the Enlightenment principles of Cartesian dualism between human and nonhuman worlds, situated the nonhuman world as objectified, passive, and separate, and “elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional experiental relations among people, plants and animals." Destructive and utilitarian, idealized and exoticized nature has been colonized in concepts as well as in practice. It entailed a multifarious, complex, and at times contradictory pattern of bureaucratic rationalization, scientific and technological mastery, military domination, integration within the expanding capitalist economy, and legal systematization in order to manage and maximize the the possibilities of resource exploitation.

- T. J. Demos (2016): Decolonizing Nature, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin, p. 14.

[riffsbeagan]

The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers [2016]