[Reader-list] International Call To Creative Action.

Sun Mar 30 17:03:14 IST 2003

Sorry, I haven't completed this message and meant to 
save it as a draft but accidentally sent it. I love 
this sort of accident with these ridiculous 
technologies of media and communication that I've 
studied and worked with for almost 10 years now, but 
this is not a complete or a revised message yet, and 
I will probably send it later tomorrow. It won't be 
much different, but the unfinished sentences will I 
hope be finished. I tend to leap on
to another idea, another thread, another intervention
another paragraph.

Sorry Serai-L

Truly,

Lachlan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lachlan Brown" <lachlan at london.com>
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 11:18:46 +0000 
To: gabrown at axionet.com, reader-list at mail.sarai.net
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] International Call To Creative Action.

> 
> 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
> > 
> > 
> > _________________________________________
> > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> > Critiques & Collaborations
> > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
> > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> Lachlan Brown
> 
> T+VM: +1 416 666 1452
> eFax: +1 435 603 2156
>                                        
> 
> -- 
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> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
> List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
> 

Lachlan Brown

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

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