#pseudo-philosophy

[garthnightmare]

102- based on the weather

The earliest and oldest deity among humanity must logically have been the wind; for what could be more numinous, what could call to mind the prescence of a deity more than something that is utterly invisible, yet causes the visible portions of one's living world to bend, dance, soar and sway before its might?

It may be said that light and darkness are the oldest known opposition- two states of being observable to the human being. But the early hominid can realise their control of these states- why, at the blink of their eye it is done. But the pathetic wheeze of exhalation cannot hope to match the great, formless gusts that ravage the landscape and torment the trees. Surely, then, it follows logically that the first divine force to be worshipped, beseeched, called upon, would be the wind. It is doubly more likely if we take into account the manner in which the wind was harnessed by older civilisations- for windmills, and ships, and to carry scents, and such.

And yet we no longer worship a wind god in this land. Instead we take it for granted, or assign it a vague, corporate divinity. I am certain that someone is deeply offended by the omission. They will rise again, when the time is right for it, you can count on that.

[fanofpossibilities]

At various points in my life, different teachers tried to show me how to appreciate art: visual, movies, music, food, literature, poetry, etc. I've always found art to be an interactive experience. Perhaps the artist was attempting to impart a particular something, but the perceiver also brings his/her game to the interaction: experience, mood, preferences... No artist can predict what the outcome of that interaction will be. I find it funny that anyone supposes to teach me how to do something that is so personal "correctly". That said. It's a great day for an art safari. I cannot put into words exactly why certain pieces get selected. Somehow, something between the pieces and I resonates. Often with awe, sometimes with amusement. Perhaps I wont leave behind anything more permanent than my various collections. Maybe some poor bored soul will someday peruse them, trying to figure out the mind behind the pieces. "Why the heck did she choose that?"

[musingsofawizard]

If the stop light were blue, would people still stop?  If the chicken never crossed the road, how would we ever know how its story goes?  Things are there for a reason, and things happen for a reason. Other times, someone just dicks around and tips a series of dominoes that lead to a catastrophe or a miracle.  Gotta love chaos theory sometimes.

Shuyin the Wizard

[nasharchy]

Memes

Memes are a metaphor for the human condition. They illustrate our existential anguish. Memes are like our children, which we send out into a cruel and unforgiving world, and know not if they will flourish, or wither and die. And like our children, memes are our legacy, our one chance at a glimmer of eternal life. Memes are a manifestation of our fear of death. And though we laugh, laughing in the face of death as if it holds no power over us, we know deep inside that there is no escape, but it only drives us to laugh even more. It is this juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy which defines what it is to truly be human. And in the end, do we create the memes, or do the memes create us?

[pcoitinho-blog]

Hyperspatialism

Nicolas Sasson, Carousel, 2011

Pictorial representation has been historically linked with that of space. From the volumeless ethereal environments of Byzantine art, to Bruneleschi's models for mathematical perspective; the artist struggle for accurate depiction is intrinsic with their mastery of the environment.

The twentieth century brought technological and cultural shifts which freed the artist from pictorialism, opening possibilities to explore volume outside physical bounds. Abstraction, as seen in Malevich's dissolving planes, is just as capable of depicting space, focusing not on volume but on perception.

Perhaps the most well known examples of disrupting perception to create volume, are Lucio Fontana's Concetti Spatziali; Fontana, a key player in the spatialism movement, once more freed the picture from its plane through the intervention of his razor, creating allegorical sculptures in the introduction of rhythm between the volume of the canvas and its voids.

The spatialists' triumph over space has never been as relevant as in our non-spatial hypermodernity; a global village with no geographical constraints which poses a fundamentally differnt view of space than that of Bruneleschi's Renaissance. Geographies have been tamed, razed and rebuilt.

This shift is perfectly captured by Jan Robert leegt's work, which is crafted from Hypermaterial: a process of contextualisation, in which artist creates sculptural volumes in two dimensions. This desciptive, digital, prime matter of the artist own conception is becoming to today's media practicioners what marble or wood were to yesterday's sculptors.

Enter Hyperspatialism: a concept to describe sculptural and geogphysical volumes through abstraction; through a semantic contextualisation that creates both its matter and counterpart. Hyperspatialism is a contemporary view of space in art, both sculputural and geographic; as the dwindling distances and metaphorical masses of the networked world bring scultpure in line with geography and volume with void.

Hyperspatialim: Space, Geography and the Internet is a digital exhibition at the Online Museum.

The exhibition wonders between volume and void; between the sculptural forms of Jan Robert Leegt (NL), Nicolas Sasson (FR) and Clement Valla (US) and the psycogeography of JODI (NL), Olia Lialina (RU) and Jeroen Van Loon (NL).

See it at http://theonlinemuseum.org/collections/hyperspatialism

[pcoitinho-blog]

Redefining Values: Image

Take the word “image”, for example. In the context of the contemporary photographically-saturated, media-rich, society it has come to mean a snapshot, capturing a moment of reality and its context, biased by the actor’s point of view. “Image” therefore has become aesthetics in its larger sense: it is the description of reality through deliberate intervention. In describing any form of art, as is the job of the critic, images are created, tied to a contextual point of view. As such, through process of description a performance, music or movie becomes an image.

[pcoitinho-blog]

Julian Assange: "When you post to Facebook, you're being a rat". Why he should shut up, and other thoughts

The controversial character recently released a new book and attended the launch through a videoconference from his safe heaven in the Ecuatorian Embassy in London.

I appreciate and most certainly agree with most of Assange's thoughts on information neutrality and overbearing power of media outlets, but I could not disagree more with his superficially sensational and inflammatory tactics; which are perfectly captured by The Guardian in the form of the quote from the audience: "he's so steampunk".(1) Now, Steampunk is a formalist interpretation of an alternative future which joins the aesthetics of punk with a shallow understanding of victorian culture. The careless – and I'll go as far as to say incorrect – use of this term could not be further from reinforcing what is an important message, instead showing a certain disregard for real conceptual and fully fledged thinking from Assange and his audience.

I strongly oppose informational control, and think the Internet should forever remain a pseudo-anarchic vehicle for self expression and knowledge sharing, one with a decentralised layout of individual privately managed nodes, with no organisational censure or top-down structure. The Internet is a self regulatory organism, a snapshot of the lore of contemporary society, powered by its constituents. After all, the Internet is an organic human construct, created and shaped by us (2). No single entity is able to topple this distributed architecture.

Feeble arguments are weakening the political gravitas of activists such as Tim Berners-Lee and negligent sensationalism overshadows the seismic impact of free information, and the heroic courage of Edward Snowden.(3) Finally, the general disregard for quality is laughable when compared to the fact-checked and well-considered journalism of The Guardian, New York Times or Der Spiegel.

I propose that instead of passively preaching to mindless sheep, we actively inquire. Lets look to the Arts, which chronicle the socio-political landscape of our times, raising relevant questions and instigating healthy debate. I say we read James Briddle's disruptive thoughts on his The New Aesthetic blog (4) and Constant Dullaart's powerful newspeak Balconisms essay on the personal and private. (5) We must use the Internet as a vehicle to express the disgust we feel with the current state of the world through well crafted and well considered words, like the alt lit poets of Pop Serial. (6) We live in the most incredible of times where we feel no problem is unsurmountable through ingenuity. We are fighting for democracy, struggling to express ourselves, slowly carving our personal space, looking for balance with the natural real and pushing for better world every day; and the Internet is largely to thank for that.

Let us never forget Olia Lialina's Agatha Appears: "Internet its not computers, applications, scripts... Its not a technology but a new world, new philosophy." (7) Otherwise we fall into the self fulfilling category of Assage's prophecies.

Pedro Costa Coitinho

1. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/25/julian-assange-eric-schmidt-google-wikileaks 2. Stephanie Bailey. OurSpace: take the net in your hands. 3. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1824254/ 4. http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/about 5. http://artpapers.org/feature_articles/feature3_2014_0304.html 6. http://issue5.popserial.net 7. http://rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/28591/

[pcoitinho-blog]

Culture and Language

The discussion surrounding the definition of art, or its function, is a topic for philosophical debate; but it is universally accepted that art is irrevocably associated to culture at its deepest level.

Culture the inexplicable collective subconscious of our most imminent groups. Your culture starts with your family's culture, moving in echelons through increasingly larger stratum following your friends, your city, your interests and your country. Each step along the way, the common factor is communication.

Language lives beyond formalised grammatical rules; it exists within a context. A nations language offered the largest context available, and today we see language barriers within countries, and language bridges outside it. The feeling of alienation of foreignness occurs even in social situations close to home, with the feeling of unease in the miscommunication of diverging interests. Some times, you just don't know what to talk about. The same is true in reverse, were communicating with someone who shares your same interests, beyond language, can be effortless;

The word 'foreign' itself is tied to the notion of language. As such, the post-geographical generation of information doesn't travel in space, but rather in language. A different language, means a different culture: a different social context, a different time, a different place. The concept of culture is undergoing a seismic shift.

Art for the post-geographical, post-cultural, digital native generation, thus, can be explained in terms of language. The aesthetics of which might seem at first homogenised, but are instead a reflection of a wider phenomenon of universality.

What is art in a time post-culture, and how does it reflect this notion aesthetically and conceptually? What is the role of the curator, and what are the methods and tools to articulate and contextualise art in a homogenous cultural sphere?