nevermind the bricolage

Blackstar

 

One of the great things about 2016 is the release of a new David Bowie album. I have been a lifelong Bowie fan and he seldom fails to deliver musically as far as I am concerned. The new album is a departure from the last and travels with a new band into 'jazz' territory, an area Bowie has not mined much. 

I like Bowie's sense of adventure, in age of calculation, heritage acts and overblown pop, it's refreshing to find a musician who has been around as long as he has who is still pushing into new territory. He is not the only one--there is so much good music out there-the digital age has brought so much stuff to the surface if we are willing to look, but there is something about Bowie--I still remember walking down a hallway at a party in London and hearing Changes for the first time and being immediately hooked-crazy but that's the way music works for me.

Simon Critchley, the philosopher, and also lifelong Bowie fan, has a great book about Bowie's music called simply, Bowie--worth a read if you haven't got to it yet.

 

Recens

What were you doing when you were 15 or 8 or 12 years-old for that matter? Well I wasn't doing much to be honest, unlike Norway's Elise, who started blogging at 8, launched a blog network called Archetype with a group of friends when 12 and then launched Recens Paper, a youth magazine when she was 15!!

The magazine is directed toward 'generation z,' a generation that, according to the magazine's website is, 

"...fed up with all the commercials that are dumped on us, the beauty standards which ruin our self-confidence, and the gender stereotypes that put us in a box. We know how the beauty standards and gender stereotypes more or less affect every teenager."

Elsewhere, the young editor declares that the magazine, 

"gives a voice to the youth and is what they want to see, instead of perfectionism, gender stereotypes, beauty standards and commercialism."

The second edition of Recens is out now. You don't need to be 15 years-old to appreciate both the quality and content of the publication. The content focus is helpful to anyone who has come of age in the midst of  consumer-culture where we are bombarded by so much over-hyped information, where the focus on body insecurities seems to get more and more intense as days go by, and where rampant commercialism is still thrust forward as the 'go-to' mode of being, even though we all know it is completely empty and devoid of meaning.

This particular magazine could also be seen as part of what is clearly a re-vitalization of niche-magazines that are popping up everywhere. If you get the chance go find a really good magazine stand and spend a little time checking out all the new and interesting magazines that are out there today.

The Lost Lectures: Art+Shit

There seems to be a bit of an explosion in learning for fun environments, where the desire for knowledge about life, about the world, is driving both entrepreneurial spirit and culture hunger in really interesting ways. A case in point would be a venture in London called The Lost Lectures. Their tagline: enchanting talks/secret locations, tells you a lot about what they are up to. They find really interesting venues for world class speakers, thinkers, writers, artists etc., to give provocative talks. 

Here's one featuring Jake Chapman, half of the Chapman Brothers, provocateurs of the art world.

 

The site is worth a long exploration and the talks combined with the locations are fantastic.  The blurb about themselves says,

It’s an underground series that’s re-imagining the lecture concept, pushing it’s boundaries to their creative edges by creating immersive worlds and unforgettable experiences with World-class speakers across an eclectic host of fields. Each evening we bring together a mix of scientists, artists, techies, designers, entrepreneurs and entertainers and many more in incredible, inaccessible and secret locations.

 

Brain

What does your brain look like? If you talk to a neuro-scientist you'd get one perspective, a biologist would give you another. Douglas Coupland would offer a personal aesthetic view of his own brain. Coupland is probably best known for his writing but art has always been a part of his creative arsenal.  For a retrospective he created a room filled with 5,000 objects he collected over 20 years and carefully arranged in a masterwork called The Brain. Coupland is a collector, maybe even a bit of an obsessive one and the articles he put together aren't random, they are carefully curated ojects that offer insight in to his personality, likes, desires and drives. The layout of the items was designed to represent the contents and organization of Coupland's physical brain, not that the viewer would necessarily know that. Humour is a big part of it-with pieces like Seat of Consciousness (“the elusive site of self-reflexive awareness that scientists have yet to pinpoint”).

Coupland has been writing a lot about the effect of technology the  “new neural reality,” and the technology that “relentlessly colonizes the planet and our brains.” One of Coupland's big themes is that the Internet has deleted the idea that our lives our made up of stories and instead is now made up of tasks and that we need to consider how we are to restructure our lives in light of that. He also said the nostalgia for the 20th century brain won't do you any good--couldn't agree more.

 

Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan is surely one of the funniest, cynical and canny artists around. Whether it is the provocation of La Nona ora (the ninth hour) a sculpture in which Pope john Paul has been hit by a meteorite or the hyperreal images found in TOILETPAPER magazine, he fills the world with images that grab your attention and make you think differently about the world.

Now comes a documentary...or does there? Noone is really sure if there is a documentary about the artist or whether this is yet another performance piece, but there is a trailer and you can find it here.

knee-cha: a mini bio

 

Allure of the Selfie

I started thinking more critically about the selfie, last time I was teaching on theology and media culture. The Institute of Network Cultures has a small book you can download by Brooke Wendt entitled, The Allure of the Selfie. Given the pervasiveness of selfies and their culture-shaping contributions to body image/focus/obsession, it might be a worthwhile read for many. It's less than 60 pages so not going to be too big of a commitment but will be beneficial if you are thinking about this stuff.

clouds illusions

I've been teaching a class on theology and media, focusing primarily on television and digital media, exploring the acceleration of change and the theological implications of living mediated lives. As I come to this class every eighteen months or so I am aware of how quickly things shift and change. We now find ourselves in the era of 'cloud' technology, the digitality of the present/future seems to be this strange notion of the cloud-our information, our lives, disappearing into internet vapour and no longer living on our computers.

Surely one of the more interesting dynamics of digital living is the growing disconnect with materiality when it comes to our stuff--our music library is made up of files rather than tape or vinyl, our photos are digital, our letters and communications are e-mail, text, tweets-seldom tangible, mediated via machines--mobile devices, laptops, ipads etc. And then there is the cloud-we are intensely suspicious of this sudden appearing, because like much of digital technology it appears to us in a finished form and we are caught up in it before we even know what's really go on and our thoughts about it are usually retroactive-it's only when it works against us rather than for us that we realize its dark side--the recent leak of celebrity nude pics, hacked from the cloud basically--you might delete something from your phone, but it's not gone, nothing  is ever 'gone', it's stored in the cloud which surrounds us, consumes, subsumes us in its vaporous nothingness.

Now it seems to me that there is something of a connect here with some forms of theological reflection. There is a history of 'cloud theology,' be it works, like The Cloude of Unknowyng, the anonymous Middle-English book on contemplative prayer, or Nichols Cusa's 'cloud of impossibility' which addresses the concept of learned ignorance (not-knowing to put it in contemporary terms perhaps), a sort of return to Socratic inquiry.

Cloud computing places everything within our reach but removes it from our grasp-we have to access it through a process, it doesn't live on our devices, they become tools of access. 

The interesting thing about cloud technology is that it’s not a place or location, it’s a highway system. Look at the Google data center in the image above-it's all tubes and pipes. The Cloud contains loads of information and files, but that reality only articulates itself when I go to my computer, launch a programme and resume work on something at the point I left it on my ipad earlier. And we are not really supposed to be thinking about this very much, even though every digital outlet from Apple to Google to Amazon is championing its benefits, we’re simply meant to realize that we can have our data where we need it, when we need it.

Socrates declared that "All I know is that I know nothing," which was the inspiration for Cusa's move to learned ignorance, the premise being that what we know is contingent and we cannot know things precisely because what we know of anything is through relations. For Cusa, the cloud is defined by blindness, darkness and ignorance (an apt metaphor it seems to me for our understanding of the digital cloud), and it is this cloud that we must deal with when we consider the sacred--the darkness itself, if you like, is illuminating.

 

The cloud confronts us with contradictions-both the theological cloud of unknowing and the digital cloud---we don't know enough but we are in relation, and we need to reflect on our not-knowing, our ignorance rather than jump to conclusions and simplistic answers.

In his wonderful book, Nudities, Giorgio Agamben writes,

"The ways in which we do not know things are just as important (and perhaps even more important) as the ways in which we know them...it is possible, in fact, that the way in which we are able to be ignorant is precisely what defines the rank of what we are able to know and that the articulation of a zone of non-knowledge is the condition and at the same time the touchstone of all our knowledge...The act of living is, in this sense, the capacity to keep ourselves in harmonious relationship with what escapes us."

It's virtually impossible not to enter the digital cloud these days, unless one opts out of all connectivities related to the Internet, but avoidance and resistance has seldom seemed the right move to me, and when it comes to digitality I think it is not possible, better then to take some time to frame our ignorance. The same would be true for me when it comes to issues of the sacred-a learned ignorance, and informed not-knowing might just be the pathway not only to fresh understandings but also out of old cul-de-sacs.

 

 

et nox sicut dies illuminabitur: dark nights of the universe

I.
In the foundations of color, vision sees the
Universe; in the foundations of the Universe, it
sees man; in the foundations of man, it sees
vision.
The Earth, the World, the Universe have to do
with man: the Earth a little, the World a lot, the
Universe passionately. The Universe is the inner
passion for the Remote.
Man works the Earth, lives in the World, thinks
according to the Universe.
The Earth is man’s ground, the World his
neighbor, the Universe his secret.
The Earth is the strait through which passes the
light of the World; it is the tongue made of sand
and water upon which, standing, man strides
against the World.
The World is everything too vast and too narrow
for the Earth, and again too narrow for the
Universe.
Man gropes around the World and the World
floats in the Universe unable to touch its borders.

I've been reading a lot of the philosopher Simon Critchley lately and via him stumbled across Eugene Thacker and his marvellous book, In the Dust of this Planet: The Horrors of Philosophy, which, in my mind, is a must-read (not least for any fan of HBO's True Detective-it was a foundational text for the writer of the series).

Last year Thacker and some others hosted an event at Recess Arts in NYC-a four night exploration of laruelle's four-stanza poem, Du Noir Univers (dark nights of the universe). Here is one of the audio recordings of the sessions--really worth sitting down and giving the rest of them a listen.

 

 

from food porn to food deserts

Someone recommended that I see the film, One Hundred Foot Journey, a film set in an idyllic village in France that revolves around two restaurants--you guessed it-one hundred feet and a million miles from each other. It's a sweet film, nothing that profound, a light-hearted exploration of cultural difference, racism, bigotry, traditions and the benefit of learning from each other. An Indian family of cooks moves across the street from a Michelin-starred bastion of French culinary tradition-sparks fly and food is the medium.

As I watched the camera linger over eggs, the sheen of the yolk captured in a transcendental light and watched over and over as characters argued about, tasted, waxed lyrical about mushrooms, the five sauces of French cooking and the delight of Indian spices--I realized that I was watching a 90-minute food porn film! Now, I'm ok with food porn, although I must confess, much of it is lost on me, not sure if it is my lifelong fish-allergy or what, but when it comes to food it is probably the least adventurous part of my life-caution always prevails with me when it comes to food-I'm happy eating a very narrow set of foods, so food porn is watchable and enjoyable, but I am not that turned on by it and hardly a full-on particiapnt and not even much of a voyeur. I have a friend with whom I occasionally go to restaurants on her 'hot-list' and I love her reaction to the food she tastes as much, if not more than the reaction of my own taste buds.

But the film got me thinking about this love affair we are having with food. It's been building for years and in the past decade has poked above the surface of the culture and gone mainstream. it's not just the Food Channel, Cooking Channel, celebrity chef culture, there are magazines, there is a food-truck craze that shows little sign of abating, and so many other avenues down which our culture celebrates, no revels orgiastically, in food. One Hundred Foot Journey is at least the second film this summer that trades in food--Chef, Jon Favreau's homage to food truck eating opened the summer.

I have no issue at all with it, and in fact, I enjoy going to eat with people because it tends to mean that one is with people for whom you care and who care for you in return, and the occasion is usually a really enjoyable one, because food brings us together. I am just wondering what the current giddiness with food reflects about us and about culture at present.

There is no doubt in my mind that foodie-culture is connected to other shifts in our culture that are moving us more and more away from the modern world of utility and convenience. Food isn't just fuel, it is something to take delight in-it's about community, connecting with ourselves and others, connecting with the earth and with the material world in general. Cooking at home has become the new 'going-out,' building a list of go-to restaurants has become de-rigeur for many.

Slow-food movements, the increasing expansion of health food and organics into middle America (and middle-Britain for that matter), farmers markets, all these things point to a new relationship with food in our culture. And it is globally fuelled-food comes from anywhere and everywhere and the rules are broken almost everytime you go to a restaurant-in the 21st century, anything goes-old school, new school, in-between school, no school.

The other side of the equation is the counter to all this. We hear talk of food deserts, of large portions of our cities where there is little access to good food--processed and fast food remain the main diet of many poor and disadvantaged people, particulalry in the inner-city and un-gentrified parts of the urban landscape.

As always, a complicated picture, on the one hand you have a large section of the public enjoying food and exploring new eating and diet horizons in a manner that is mind-boggling, and on the other, people struggling to get access to affordable and healthy food. Food is always about access and economics-it's not that there isn't enough food to go around, it is that food, like everything exists within an economic horizon of profit and loss and it goes where the money is.

So what to make of it? Well, a couple of thoughts. Firstly, I think our new found devotion to food has something to do with a desire for a home, a sense of home anyway, that we have never had. I mean 'home' in the sense of a time in which everything felt ordered, organized and laid-out for us, in a way that we simply cannot experience in our digitally interconnected, globally shaped pluralized world. I think our time is longing, yearning even, for a rootedness and an anchoring--think about our retro-fascination for instance, and that food is a galvanizing place--all this cooking, eating, preparing, it reeks of home.

Secondly, I think it is about re-ordering the new world we find ourselves in by thinking about things that we haven't thought about for years. And food is central in that. Again, think about the 50s and 60s--processed food-tv dinners-fast-food culture-food on the run-colouring, additives, chemicals, dyes, living with little sense of where food came from, what it might represent beyond fuel for our working lives (work being another element of our world that we are reviewing). Now we are starting to think about food, enjoy it, savour it, prepare it, celebrate and take time with it.

As the modern worlds loses its grip on our lives, we are, as I just mentioned, taking the time to re-think many things and this is indicative of a huge cultural shift that we are all experiencing and we come toward the middle of the second decade of the 21st century we are beginning to re-frame our lives, our worlds, with new perspectives and ideas, letting go of ways that shaped us for much of the 20th century and finally finding our way into the 21st.