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.
Bonnie Raitt was being played in the Hobart Sushi Bar by a couple of the customers when I was sitting there having a bit of lunch. It was a bluesy song with John Lee Hooker---a smoldering “I’m In The Mood”. The customers were talking about how they watched music videos on YouTube. A older Chinese man, at another table, was reading what looked like a poetry book--haiku?
So when I went back to the hotel I took a look on YouTube for the critically admired Raitt, as I had heard little of her music --apart from the Don Was produced Nick of Time. All I knew was that she had been struggling to do more than sell product on the drug addicted backroads of the lonesome highway, and that Raitt was one of the few women to play bottleneck.
What is of interest is the way music and graphics are being put together by the fans and then posted for us to see. A lot of work goes into putting the found imagery together into a video form that expresses the music in a visual form, which takes us beyond the broadcast yourself ethos.
Back to the cafe and urban life:
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Sushi Cafe, Hobart, 2007
The moment in the cafe was spent wondering about the art/culture side of Hobart--the local designer clothes shops, the graffiti, the wilderness photographers, artists etc whose the clean and green image that Tasmania enjoys internationally was in such contrast to that of Gunn's Tasmania. The latter stands for a return to the environmentally destructive ways that have historically been so damaging to the island. When I returned to the hotel I've dug up links to wilderness photographers living and working in Tasmania:
However, as my interest was in 'cityness', not wilderness photography, in the sense of liveliness of people in public space.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Museum, Hobart, 2007
It is cityness as urbanity I was interested in:- in the sense of meetings of difference, life and play, speech and conversation - also with strangers - and the use of all the senses--that I was interested in. The city, its buildings, art and human lives should be seen as works contrary to routine production and profit of the capitalist market. It offers the potential for unplanned events, chance encounters and coincidences, which can create new possibilities and resources.
Few Australians think of Hobart in terms of cityness.
| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:11 AM | Permalink
Gary,
i love Hobart. It is one of my favourite Australian cities. It definitely has 'cityness.'