[Reader-list] International Call To Creative Action.

Sun Mar 30 16:48:46 IST 2003

What an excellent initiative, I wish you the very best 
with it. We are all invited to think of the many ways 
we might die these days, and perhaps the antidote to 
the nihilism of The Anglo-American West attempting to 
solve a problem it created by causing more problems, 
is to consider the ways we might live. Art and criticism 
have always considered this question.

There are very recent cultural shifts in how we imagine
our world and the nightmare presented to us in North America -
a future that looks like some of the worst dytopian phantasies
in science fiction, as well as some of the worst political
solutions (which we are seeing played out in 'Homeland Security'
Witchhunt paranoia in North America, and in the present War
in Iraq) to imagined threats embodied by even the slightest 
difference or deviation from the 'norm'. Yesterday I met
an Arab in Toronto wearing a sign: 'I am not a Terrorist'.
What kind of society is it that 

 There have been signs of emergent fascism in Europe and in 
North America for several years. Only seven or eight years ago
the idea that politics had anything to do with art or criticism
digital or otherwise was supported by many, in vacant looks, 
silences, sneers, slanders. The field of digital culture
perhaps because it emerged culturally in stages: within
a culture of IT professionals

Instead of the 'vector' of overpopulation and the belief in
'a tragedy of the commons' caused by competition over limited
resources, we find that there are some projections worldwide 
are now for depopulation should present trends continue. We can 
see what can happen in a generation to one of the fundamental
beliefs underlying peoples' and cultures' world views, or 
'horizons of understanding', as well as political decision 
making, and economic policies, and all that derive from 
the complex interaction of these three, so lets see what different 
scenarios we may imagine for ourselves in our world for ourselves 
and for the generations to come. Science and technology
have a role, but not the deciding one.

At the head of Toronto's march against the war in on Saturday 
22nd March 2003 was a reproduction of Guernica. Picasso's painting
representing, mediating and refusing the first arial Blitzkrieg
practised by the Nazi Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War in 
1938. The painting was removed from the UN where it has hung 
since the building opened in 1952 during debate over War in Iraq. 

Faces in the marching crowd, expressions, gestures, from fear to 
refusal to fear embedded passions in Picasso's Guernica.
For the first time I began to understand exactly how the 'aura'
in the work of art might translate through reproduction and changing
context. I see no reason why this aura should not reside also in
digital reproduction and digital art. Nor why it should cling
to worn out ideas about digital technology and culture, that
some change is coming to culture due to something called technology.
Technology and humans have always had interrelationship
we would not be human without our technologies and our
interelations with them are profoundly cultural, as we
see with that Western promise of technological nirvana
Internet.

Its really great to read this proposal and I would hope to
add something to the programme as I have been writing, and 
sometimes almost perfoming my own impression or protest
 of the 'fascist turn' in culture, those very dark pre and 
post 911 days in 'Thoughts on the "Unmarked Grave of History" 
from the Unmade Bed of
Culture' - . I'm uploading bytes of it to a number of lists 
and online projects before getting it publishing.

Let's create art and lets create affinities across and in spite
of the processes of globalisation. And lets replace those who
preferred silence to criticism as it seemed the pragmatic thing 
to do, or because going against the grain did not appear to suit 
self interest at the time, or because they were people who did 
not value these faculties, with people who can make: create, 
criticise what they create, and celebrate their criticism and 
creativity. Let's get back to celebrating our intrinsic 
samenesses and our ecstatic differences, and let the 'middle 
managers of meaning' who mediated art, culture and technology 
fulfil their infantile aspirations for power (such a vacuous 
fetish) elsewhere.

What makes an artist and a critic? Well, individually they can't 
shut up and collectively can't be shut up. They just don't make
much of a fuss about it.

Yours Truly,

   Lachlan Brown
   Toronto.

Subject: [Reader-list] International Call To Creative Action.

> 
> Hi I would like to bring to your attention the International Call To
> Creative Action.
> The theme is to explore your post 911 experience.
> All the winning and finalists entries will be published September 2003, on
> the 911 International Call to Creative Action, a digital storytelling
> interactive DVD, to be presented to the United Nations Library, and Canadian
> Parliamentary Library and the American Library of Congress.
> Categories: Writer, Visual Artist, Photography, Multimedia, and a separate
> family or school entry. Detailed information is on the web site or email
> info at netcomediainteractive.com. Entry fee: fifteen ($15) US money order with
> one (1) entry or twenty five dollars ($25) US money order for three (3)
> entries.1st Prize: $250, 2nd Prize: $150, all in US currency. Winners will
> receive a copy of the published DVD.
> Deadline post marked May 1, 2003
> c/o
> netcoMedia Interactive
> 1027 Davie Street, Suite 532
> Vancouver, BC, 
> Canada V6E 4L2
> http://www.netcomediainteractive.com
> Info at netcomediainteractive.com
> 
> 
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Lachlan Brown

T+VM: +1 416 666 1452
eFax: +1 435 603 2156

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