Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 2, 2005. For further information on MANDY MARTIN, refer here: http://www.mandy-martin.com/
If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
adrift on a sea of information at a time when the world's night is a destitute time. In the age of the world's night, the abyss of the world must be endured.
---- Adelaide is home. Work is often in Canberra. Relaxation is in Victor Harbor. I'm a frustrated photographer & philosopher who has lost his way in life. I used to be a policy wonk. Now, as a knowledge worker I have trouble learning to live in a complex digital world. Personal expression is the way I critically cope in a technological mode of being.
The notion of the information superhighway and discourse of "surfing" or "cruising" the 'web or 'net carries connotations of fast travelling, of adventure, and of individual excitement and adventure -- connotations enhanced by the discourse of the "electronic frontier" with the connotations of exploration, the establishment of new communal spaces, and of being on the cutting-edge of the new. The metaphors of the 'net and 'web also point to connectedness, rhizomatic and multilayered levels of experience and texture, that naturalize and domesticate the highly artificial and complex technological worlds of the new computer networks.
The notion of a "friction-free" capitalism covers over the messiness, conflictedness, and suffering created from the reorganization of capitalism in which there are necessarily winners and losers, and tremendous pain from dislocation, downsizing, and economic downward mobility, uncertainty and anxiety.
That is what we experienced in the 1980s. Pauline Hanson expressed the cry of pain and anguish of the industrial working class who became Howard's battlers after 1996.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Sturt Street, Adelaide, 2007
We feel that we stand on an abyss between life and death, and we realize that in general, there can be no friction-free capitalism: capitalism itself depends on competition, antagonisms, and what Schumpeter called "creative destruction." It's a sobering enlightenment and hard to handle.
What I experience is the road-weary, lonesome nomad strolling aimlessly and forlornly; raw and confused as I wander through the shopping malls
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Canberra Centre, 2007
The image is the only outlet for expressing my desolation as I struggles with a market-mechanism predicated on self-interest and a Darwinian logic of the survival of the fittest. That logic is most clearly expressed in the workings of the financial markets.
So we buy an ipod and listen to music on our own. It's our therapy, technological style.
Music is a way to patch the holes in our dream. Or is it two bottles of loneliness?
| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:51 AM | Permalink
I am hunting for the source of the idea that "this generation is the most recorded and the least remembered".
Do you know where that comes from?
It is interesting to consider the rise of these "net" communities in which social transaction is enacted with the lack of a co-present person/partner, and what the implications of this might be.
Fiona,
I've recently come across the phrase "this generation is the most recorded and the least remembered", and it was probably in the mainstream media. Was it in relation to the baby boomers? I cannot remember. But it doesn't make sense for the baby boomers. They dominate too much. The current generation?
Re the post. I've reworked it as I started it very early this morning and it was rough.
It's acute for me when I'm in Canberra: the sense of a light net community and the physical isolation. I'm not sure that the former is compensation for the latter. Canberra is a hard place when you live a nomadic existence there, and are not a part of the party political machinery. When you are it is fun.
So I take photos to cope with existential anguish. Then again everybody suffers existenial anguish doing the Canberra gig. It's that sort of place.
These public spaces are indeed alienating. I often feel that they have some strange claim upon the community previously owned by the church. There seems to be a soaring faux-cathedral type of interior space, with light flooding in from the clerestory, which indicates the status of leisure shopping and consumerism: replacing the sense of perhaps spirituality, or communion (?).
I often feel that I am in the cathedral of capitalism in those places.
anyway.
Re quote... I'd love to know who said it and why exactly.
Give me a yell if you are Sydney I would be happy to shout you a drink at least. Tho its not so alienating here, mostly.
Its been a looong day.
Fiona,
Canberra Centre is a modern arcade where we find our dreams and desires being expressed for us as we wander through as consumers in our leisure time.
Interesting post, if somewhat sobering.
I am hunting for the source of the idea that "this generation is the most recorded and the least remembered".
Do you know where that comes from?
It is interesting to consider the rise of these "net" communities in which social transaction is enacted with the lack of a co-present person/partner, and what the implications of this might be.
Best wishes.