Pablo Markin: A Sentence A Day

Podcasting, Memorry, Playlists, and the Postmodern Self

2010-04-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

It is a pleasant feeling probably to reach a point in the development of one's sensibility that one might go back and re-listen radio broadcasts that have accompanied one through past stages of everyday life. It is not only that we now have podcasts to go with the soundtrack of our life but also we have an access to them in a manner completely dissociated from their proper chronology. They usher us into a post-temporal dimension of media experience that puts every point of the time-line of their original occurrence into the same plane of immanence of digital mediation. Thus, digital formats become second order mediatizations of media content where the personal chronologies of listening and viewing become reshuffled way past a live sense of contact with time towards a whole new additional layer of picking and choosing, virtual flanerie, museumized consciousness. No doubt, it is the combination of particular hardware and software, media management practices and conditions of their mutual availability that confine this sensibility to some parts of the world. However, as these conditions and their local equivalents reach further beyond to become globally ubiquitous, one could speak of the deleglement des senses on a properly global scale.

Stray Thoughts on Cities, Development and Aesthetics

2010-04-08T15:08:00.000-07:00

To think of it, global cities of culture were also sites where ideas for art and design were developed from creative sparks of ideas into more of mass followings that must have justified the place of these cities in the collective memory of next generations. This backward perspective nevertheless seeks to project itself into a comparative and a present dimension in order that a sense of how one might detect emerging urban hot soots of style can develop. The flurry of down-town development/redevelopment projects that one might discover upon zooming in on a given urban landscape leaves one wanting for terms in which their comparison can be achieved with reasonable conceptual economy. In absence of a leading kind of economic activity that might independently boost the fortunes of any given city, the urgency to reinvent not only economic make-up of a given city but also to manage the on-going crisis of the efforts to do so singles out urban style as a single workable strategy for encouraging positive sum cooperation strategies among the stakeholders in cities, surrounding regions and across the globe. As bases for economic common sense melt away buffeted by the uncertainties of the disorganized capitalism, it is the shared aesthetics that seems to provide the common ground for shared urban life.

Inspiration from How Cities and Regions Can Be Approached

2010-04-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

It is this grip of exhilaration that writing on wonders and plights of city life throw me into that I want to elaborate on. Cities are important. No question about that. Parts of them are durable. Parts are ephemeral. However, it is this collective and individually shared intention to write about them that captivates me. Cities interpellate us. Cities challenge preconceived perceptions. Passions burst around some of them. Sleepy downtowns define others. One can go the range of theoretical vocabulary and methodological approaches in trying to approach what cities are. However, it is a way of writing about them that is vernacular and informed alike that shows the way towards the freedom with which one can approach cities in their multiple aspects. One aspect at a time, it becomes possible not so much to connect the dots around the issues that makes cities up but to get an expanded vision of what a single point of departure towards understanding of cities might be. If there is a methodology it seems to be ethnography that goes global. It is somewhere on the interface between the global and the local that the essence of what makes cities different from other terms of spatial reference seems to lie.

What Comes Richly Due After a Self-Searching While

2010-04-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

I guess everybody has to confront one's demons one day or another. It's another matter altogether when the demonic content swells in a dream, like an old wound hurting with the pain thought to be confined to days long gone by. Whether we learn anything from our experience or not, there seems to be a coming to terms stage at which we question our identity, our image and our future. It all hangs somehow together in the space where we search for ourselves and others. Not sure if a present moment can be congealed into an amber-piece-like time-capsule, I make circles around what this very moment means to me when put into a string of sentences about myself and people I encounter. Chance encounters, strangers' joys and sorrows, afterthoughts overly long in coming add up to a post-reflective consciousness of what does it mean to deal with change on the scale of everyday life. Things coming and things going build probably ephemeral museums of remembrance in our and other people's minds that like surreal castles hovering in the air of avant-garde paintings become, depending on circumstances, either individual or collective legacies.

Global Cities Within A Structure of Their Relations

2010-03-06T05:51:00.000-08:00

Globalization I perceive as a social transition taking place in many locations at different speeds. This seems to call for reconsideration of the notion of global cities that in their rankings suggest that there are degrees of globality that different cities can possess or do. Rather I would attempt at approaching global cities in ontological terms that allow to determine whether a city is global or not but not to what extent. This, in other words, promises to bring more clarity to the question of strategies to project a global city image that art biennials seem to be a part of. As the number of art biennials grows to saturation, when every large city will have its own biennale, it will be more obvious that the challenge is less to become a global city than to reveal a structure of relations between global cities and to map a given city's place within it. Whether art biennials can help with this task? To the extent that I will be attempting to uncover structural underpinnings of their existence in each city the task appears to be doable since structural relations between global cities bel0ng to the same analytical level and language that art biennials can be analyzed in.

Art Biennials as Anti-Institutional Institutions

2010-03-06T05:43:00.000-08:00

Approaching the subject of ar biennials, there is a sense of hypercomplexity of the subject that lends itself to be describe more in terms of post-structurial theory than in anything like sociological formulations that could be easily transferred to discussions taking place at governmental, NGO and international meetings about effects of globalizations, ways to react to it, and their local impact. On one hand, I perceive art biennials as anti-institutional institutions that directly grow from the developments in the field of contemporary art. In a way, they represent the state of the art of the international institutional discussion in the field on how relations between artists, institutions, and public should be organized. On the other hand, I am receptive to how global context, transformations and actors shape what happens on the urban level that art biennials also represent. This way there is a sense of merger between two levels of global and local agency that in the case of art biennials produce a rich research field that when thought of comparatively can yield important insights on institutional globalization, cities of culture and social transitions.

Breaking the Mould of Long Silences Between Blog Posts

2010-03-06T03:20:00.000-08:00

It has been a while between this post and the one preceding it. In part, I am looking at ways in which mobile blogging can be practiced. In part, I am trying to overcome the hiatus of the daily bloghing routine I have announced earlier on. In part, it is a matter of getting used to a different, net-oriented hardware setup that feels still alienating to the fingers and hands that hover a little awkwardly over the keyboard only about 80 percent so big as it is regularly. Ergonomic rules and instructions suddenly come to mind. Typing on my lap is certainly the most attractive mode with this present condition of haviong it weighing less and taking up less space. Nevertheless, the point is to burst open the gates of what feels as a writing block of sorts, to touch on the subjects that make rounds in my reflections and to blaze a trail towards a web strategy of sorts, especially since Internet seems to be here to stay despite the rise in information intensity, complexity and diversity it causes. Thinking globally, acting locally, when restricted to the blog page seems to be a leitmotif of my trying to break the mold of seeking for my place in the larger information landscape all the while making my discursive bets.

Sunlight Falling Through the Missing Sunshade Canopies

2010-01-02T06:04:00.000-08:00

Closing my eyes on a white plastic chair. Feeling the heat of sun at the zenith of its daily route. Letting go of worries of the past year. Groping for strands of thought that would lead forward. Taking in the air of the grass lawn. Walking through a sparsely populated patio. Catching a glimpse of someone's looking into the looking glass. Nodding farewell while heading to the exit. Getting past the greenery across a fence. Blue sky drawing a cloudy arc over the horizon. Black road slightly vaulting as it passes by bushes and trees. Landscape put together from hills, slopes, building and huts. Sounds of basketball or soccer reaching through the window. Wet floor leaving tiny channels of water between the tiles. Furniture waiting to be brought into a clean room. A nod looking at a profile turning at a passer's by speed. Lunch time sending its cooking sounds travelling around. Leaves and branches translucently blocking the view from a window with blinds half open. A year putting its effects into the boxes of recollections and charts. A decade as a measure for what has changed and what didn't over the time past. Classical music as a soundtrack of everyday life. Radio streams as interfaces of multiple language identities. Prose poems as explanations.

On European Union's Transition towards Lisbon Treaty

2009-11-20T06:36:00.000-08:00

It is difficult to miss the point that the multi-year drama over the approval of the Lisbon treaty by the member-states of the European Union was more about a collision of the badly understood institutional change of the EU and the popular perception of what this involves for each member country in terms of its positioning within the larger structure of relations. Indubitably, the EU gains it its overall influence in internal and external affairs through the very fact of becoming better governed and coordinated that the election of its president and foreign minister only weakly signifies. The effects of the change will be seen only later when the reorganized and still reforming itself EU commences on a track of transformation that has taken a coal and steel agreement as its starting point. It is clear that any offers of state-like symbols for the EU meets with stiff resistance yet. However, the Lisbon treaty by preserving the institutional moorings of the constitutional agrrement proffered earlier on for the approval by the EU's nations still ensures the forward momentum for the further institutionalization of the EU as a single actor capable of concerted course of action, be it internally or externally. Consequently, it should raise the stakes for closer cross-border cooperation within the Union, for the benefits of such coalition building would have immediate impact for accumulation of power within the from now on more effective and influential EU.

A Chatting Age Morphing into a Digital Blogosphere

2009-11-18T15:07:00.000-08:00

It's strage that the pressure to be verbal has brought the blogosphere to maturity that challenges the assumptions of the newspaper, television and literature age with blogs, youtubes and e-books that seem to apply the same kind of pressure on the producers of content with the means of distribution and access eclipsing the original structure of relations. Its seems that another revolution is underway - that of the free content sweeping away the assumptions that the paid-for content has made possible for the last two hundred years or so. When newspapers and magazines hardly offer anything more complicated and the next blog post can aspire to be, when a wealth of special publication projects fills ever more niches, when audiences break down to the micro level of individual person, and when big corporations might in the near future offer exit strategies to individual content producers rather than companies, the playing field of the mass media as we know if may be heading for another capitalist shake-up that might leave the English-speaking public sphere at a disadvantage vis-a-vis other language and cultural environments where relative marginality, cultural traditions and institutional set-up will let a new arrangements of media providers and consumers to arise.

Sensibility, Addiction and Digitality: Perspectives on Being Post-Digital

2009-11-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

From Negroponte's Being Digital we have moved into a whole different period of being post-digital with predictably short time span that made it possible to declare a new post-periodization to set in. Not honored with a theoretical terminology of its own, digital capitalism grows at a steep pace even in the days of one of the deepest economic crisis of last century and possibly of this, of this is only a beginning of tendencies that take shape. What in the economic world is called a new normal of economic conjuncture appears to have its pendant in the psychological new normal of addictive sensibility, addictive environments and addictive digitality that come into representative shapes in art exhibitions, computer games, amusement parks and historical districts that rest increasingly on digital media, caffeinated drinks and aesthetic sensibility to get their message across our increasingly distractive environments of instant communication, information overload, and nomadic lifestyles. These dimensions become ever more definitive as cities all over the world put ever increasing numbers of coffee shops on the maps of their flagship airports, art districts and upscale downtowns, ever thicker Wi-Fi network coverage and computer infrastructure into their daily operation, ever more money into art projects, museums and events, and ever more effort into fighting addictions to substances engendering dependencies strong and weak.

Runaway and Uncontrollable as a Defining Feature of This Century

2009-11-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

The sad and fascinating feature of our times is that an increasing number of things that make up an inseparable part of our everyday lives is out of our control. From Google mail, internet applications, fossil energy, and risk estimations to our own selves. The irony of the situation is that both the trappings of modernity that surround us have come of age somewhere between 19th and 20th century, and therefore are not new or exciting in themselves. To this adds a seemingly subterranean shift in our self-perception, self-representation and self-development that we try but not always succeed to control. Indeed, decades if not centuries of development of social and human sciences do threated to reduce humans to nothing much than bundles of more or less idiosyncratic reactions that invariably follow same probability laws that do large collections of bees, animal herds and plain random samples. Economies of scale march forward, offer us ever cheaper and perfect material world, and put increasing premium on ephemeral and unstable factors. If to change ones sense of self is as easy as taking a medication, downloading a software and receiving a therapy session, then the core of our decision making power also shifts from within the sphere of our life-world into the non-human systems that surround us and that increasingly take lead in how we spend our time, how we perceive ourselves and how our moods are swayed. Cinema as an essentially a scientific and scholarly instrument can be a case in point.

Through the Looking Glass into the Second Life

2009-11-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

Had Alice that got enticed to follow the white rabbit in a vest with a pocket clock into the Wonderland come of age in our epoch she not only would make a pretty wizened old lady but also be playing with the Second Life environments to get an after-taste of her long past childhood experiences of exploring a world that strangely resembled a dream. It is not just that I am trying to get at a root of what makes Second Life so attractive and engrossing, as actually any well-made game that is sold by the dozen in the shopping malls side by side with gaming consoles, but also my totally surprised realization that not only game-like environments can have a chance in the adult world but also that even a plain computing set-up can be enough to let one enjoy what the virtual reality has to offer. It gives me a pause not only about the gaming consoles that definitely come close to being micro-supercomputers for home use, since that is the capacity that the sophisticated games demand to run smoothly, but also these possibilities to become involved intensely and intimately in the hybrid environment that consists of stable hardware set-up, powerful internet infrastructure and software layers that make the whole prestidigitatorial trick possible. Daily magic of high technology.

Manhattans 2.0 on Foreign and Far Away Shores

2009-10-31T15:24:00.000-07:00

The picture that refuses to become forgotten is an aerial shot of a business district jutting into a water expanse that goes around an island that carries, as a giant ship standing still under its crushing weight, a whole landscape of skyscrapers shooting into wuthering heights that only a bird's eye view can measure. Rather than being the southern tip of Manhattan, the small scale vertigo that the magazine illustration captures refers to is Chongqing, a city in the mainland China. Wikipedia article on it does not disappoint in terms of iconic images that this 35-millions plus megapolis routinely churns out in its daily toil of representation. A brief scroll through what amounts to an analytical precis and a newspaper overview of an encyclopedia article that it offers in English depicts soaring construction, demographic, and economic trajectories of urban growth that undeniably catapults the city and the country around it to the position that seemed only recently to be restricted to the countries that had had a place in the story of Western modernity. With the half a trillion yuan budget that the province is going to throw on the aim of moving up the value chain, Chongqing may be in a position to genetically, nanotechnologically and cyber-optically reengineer the value chain itself just as New York, and the country around it, did when it grew at comparable speed. If my impression from a European periodical does not fail me, welcome-mats for modernity 2.0 are being already rolled out around the world.

The Shifting Sense of the Present Moment

2009-10-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

Not sure where my sense of the present and/or contemporary situation comes from in my case, I do sense a shift that the present global and local indicators register that affects how I represent to myself where the world moves and how one can map one's position on this changing geography of global flows and places. The development hitting closest to home to my sensibility is the rise and rise of netbooks as a new category of device that apparently promises to reshape the computing landscape. Strangely enough, reminiscent of the one laptop a child trend this technological development can be hoped to made biggest changes in the countries loosely named the second world, these places that are neither too affluent nor too poor to fit into a binary opposition of the opposition between the global North and the global South. Not only that but the fact that there appears to be a more unexpected than usual convergence between the two towards an average amount of insecurity of long before declared analytically insufficient classification between these two abstract groups too that makes the developing world, another term crying for a more precise definition, that sets the terms of what counts for a cool device. Taiwan and China turn out to be new and unexpected trailblazers of what is actually considered to be a new and trendy development in the everyday life of our electronic environment on a global scale, since it is difficult to believe that iPhone's portability and capabilities are going to make as much of difference for an average person regardless where she or he is, as a full-blown and truly portable set-up of netbooks would. Besides, netbooks are already a category rather than a brand-name that are fast coming to the coffee-shops near you.

From Zeitgeist to Tagesgeist

2009-10-18T05:09:00.000-07:00

Somewhat in jest, after our belief into Zeitgeist falls into question, I wonder if one could replace it with its daily version: Tagesgeist. Spirit of time makes place for a spirit of day with all that the overcharged age of instant technology, online communication and constant obsolescence brings with it. We no longer revere and take notice of anything as classical as a Zeitgeist, as the very notion of time becomes fragmented into digital slices of temporality. We become instead surfers of what another day brings on its media wings to our attention, sensation and experience. No longer integral personalities we become instances that take it a day at a time. Long term planning is being replaced with crisis management, micro-blogging takes place of long-winded blog-posts and the technology around us gets smaller, more carriable and standardized to the point of fading into a single environment of information management. Managers of our own lives, living in times of enormous and badly understood global changes, we become overtaxed by what it means to jump from one set of certainties to another from one day to another, as if our personal and mental software has to be reloaded on a slightest notice of lifeworlds that stop being capable of an oversight. Tagesgeist opens the doors to an age of the baroque sensibility of our days.

Vielleicht die notwendigen Uebergaenge, die man machen soll

2009-09-22T06:13:00.000-07:00

Es is eine Weile seit ich mich auch auf deutsch ausdruecken versuche. Hin und her mache ich Schritte in dieser Richtung, aber der Umschlag auf dem Ebene des Alltagsleben hat auf sich warten gelassen. Jetzt bin ich an dem Punkt angelangt, wo ich es auch wage. Es ist zum Teil mehr als ein Satz per Tag, wie es meine fruehere englische Formulierung hat, aber, wenn man es fortsetzen versucht, kann auch das herkommliche Format zum Dienst stehen. Oder? Mein letzter noch nicht klar ausgedruckter Gedankengang handelte von Fortfuehren von den sensiblen Bildern, mit denen der Tagausbruch endet. Es immer gibt diese ungenaue Teilchen von Gefuehlen, Ueberlegungen, Vorstellungen und Bildgefuegen, die man lieber beibehalten wuerde. Es kann man auch als einen Drang zum Literarischen betrachten. Doch fuehle ich, dass es sodass ist, was das Stoff von Tagebuechern ausmacht. Die innere Welt, die vielleicht nie entdeckt wird, ohne dass die jemand in Woertern zusammenfasst. Eine Sebstdokumentationpflicht, die wir uns selbst abstatten sollen, um, nicht zuletzt, zu uns selbst einen besseren Zugang zu haben. Gewisse Umwege zu Selbstbewusstsein, scheint es mir. Vielleicht kann auch nur ein einziges Bild zu fassen reichen.

Translating Difficult Days into Wordy Blog Posts

2009-09-22T05:53:00.000-07:00

It turns out what I have to say doesn't wait for it to be brought into the virtual publicity of the blogosphere, it takes an effort to find the words and the pictures that would make it into a line of movement from one topic unto another, I need keeping doing what I promised myself doing regularly anyway, without censure, shyness or blockade. At times it seems blog-writing is like a self-delivered caring service that we so much need but are unable to take up without a nudge from an outside impulse. It is strange how sadly disfunctional can we appear to ourselves, and I am afraid, others. It is somehow a junction where habit and knowledge depend on each other but do not make mutual transition in terms of action or what people, I, do. Lots of investment just into unlocking our collective ability to exercise our imagination in a semi-public, semi-private context. It's like participating in an auto-attentive age where everyone speaks to oneself, others and into an electrified void of possible points of access to what we make available on the web. Somehow it also has to do with a sense of place and time that gets transmitted though the sentences that explore these two with one verbal probe after another. Place and time as felt sensations.

Looking Back onto Yesterday in a Rearview Mirrow of Tomorrow

2009-07-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

Somehow it is of a surprising impact on me that a flurry of anniversary congratulations would make it into a watershed of sorts when though hard and fast ties are in an imperceptible flux even though I keep telling myself that everything is the way it was an emotional bond stays, another gets rediscovered and a smattering of other connections emerge in what is nothing else than a web 2.0 effect on outstretched social ties that spanning the globe give a totally different sense of connectedness and belonging than a face to face society of yore would, which brings me to a personal aftermath of displacement, diaspora and exile that though for me stopped being neatly contained in those terms is still of relevance to others who probably cannot as easily shake off their legacies of belonging to other places and shores in favour of a more cosmopolitan personality that I have to become in order to move on towards opportunities that I have to try myself at opening myself to, unless my actual performance, circumstances out of my control and a plain confluence of random events make me write a similar piece next year in a more somber key.

From a Narrative Arc to Philosophical Arcades

2009-07-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

Past has somehow caught up with me with memories of people, places, and things past that though far in space and time has suddenly become present and close-by. A wave of consternation, inspiration, and wistfulness has come over, overwhelmed, and started to boil over. It is this engagement hand in hand with disengagement, working along, through, and over that both gives impulse to and takes with its waning an outburst of care, memory and reflection not all conscious, not all consequential, and not all earnest. Like shadows that get half occluded by figures of one's own speech. That's what any modernism is, was and will be about - making absent present while avoiding any simplification, formulas, and conventions. A silent cry of a long gone past echoes in the chambers of personal recollection like a distant brawl of forces beyond human control. An earthquake falling on multiple fates, a realisation of the endlessness of lines of causality, a manifold search for a relation to the heart of the matter darkened by patina of oblivion.

Anchoring Recollections

2009-05-09T02:44:00.000-07:00

It seems to depend on a combination of the after-taste of strong coffee, the gusts of fresh wind, and the moth-overgrown concrete bank that together give a sensation of travelling in time to other moments when sitting with a book in hand in a campus-like environment was a thing to do, with a trendy city spreading wide beyond the lightly fenced grounds where name-plates grace patina-carrying brick walls, where time stands still from one page-turning to another, and where another cup of coffee is just a walk away. Less a nostalgia, it is a feeling of concert with a set of recollections, experiences and intentions that this moment anchors in its hic et nunc materiality.

In a Maze of Linguistic Mirrors Looking into Media Looking-Glass

2009-05-03T02:36:00.000-07:00

Difficult to say what change I go through as I test linguistic territories I previously only eyed from a media distance, as I slowly become involved in the languages I read in a process similar to that that makes me ask myself if I get infected by the worry about the viral dangers of what only few years ago was a theoretical possibility that as it becomes increasingly realistic hits the media with a double force of realized fears and derealized risks as the international army of experts and executives walk a tight rope of openness and opacity as the public comes to terms with the inevitable consequences of even low intensity public health crisis that a new flu strain can lead to an outbreak that we in our everyday lives do not necesserily know how to deal with other than do the simplest of precautionary measures however insufficient they may be that I become linguisitically aware of in multiple registers of direct inner speech and its translation, seeking for passing translations, translating myself on the sidelines of my attention span, trying not to slip too frequently between direct and reported speech of my proper voice that threatens to get lost in mutliple translations from one primary language into another that vies for a comparable degree of primal connection to my imagination, sensation and expression.

A Movie Night in Jerusalem

2009-02-26T14:35:00.000-08:00

It does make a strong impact to watch three short films in the language that you don't understand, with subtitles in English and with a partial introduction in French. The place is in an out of the way part of Eastern Jerusalem. The language of the short films is Arabic. Before the movie starts a sparse crowd starts to gather. One can hear French, Arabic, English and Hebrew spoken. We bring our dialogue in German to this linguistic melange. The movie program is in French and Arabic. What leaves its mark is not only the place - the area of Jerusalem that looks more foreign that elsewhere - but also what the three movies quietly say to us, the viewers. A film about a family tragedies and struggles, another about a love story that falls apart, and still another one about remembering past violence while riding the everyday streets of conflict. One may argue about the aesthetic merits and demerits of films, about the relations between the tradition and modernity, about the canon and its contemporary reception. But the youth of the audience, the nearness of actors after the screening, and the other, more village-like side of Jerusalem that shows through on the way back leave a strange impact. Difficult to express, necessary to explore and important to write down. It is as if I have witnessed a cultural event that takes place between linguistic borders. A culturally borderline experience. Experiences without a translation but looking for it.

Words Appearing on a Virtual Page (Thursday, October, 2008)

2008-10-23T10:09:00.000-07:00

My impression is that words do not exist up until the very moment my fingers start tapping on the keyboard in an interaction almost wholly out of my conscious control as if I were steering a process that runs all by itself, as if I were participating in the work of a machine of writing that in a post-structural turn of operation does not need an author anymore, as if formulations were falling on a page as leaves off the wilting trees that can think no more than the squirrels running up and down their trunks, as if the coming winter were sending its primordial chill forward into the still serene and gossamer days that come before a coldness fills the air, as if a general malaise in the global economy were finding its way into the metaphors that usually cheerful arts and letters shower upon the consuming masses that take up easy credit as easily as their pick an ice cream off a stall or up from a crate, as if the void of the virtual page I am filling were drawing me into itself with a bothersome intention of verbal fruition, as if my memories were looking for vehicles of their arrival to expression locked up in faraway domains of my unconsciousness, as if I were transforming myself into an imperfect likeness of another writing personality that visitates my efforts to put words into sentences that are at a loss for a structure that could lend them a meaning reaching beyond the need to make a transition from one world to another.

Everyday Life. With Asian Characteristics

2008-10-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

Daily screenful of words. Should I turn to carefully ethnographizing my every twitch of reflective behaviour? Reflectio ergo sum? Possibly a movement from me present to me virtual that is not likely to arrive at any given destination. Visiting today my old residence right in the middle of the campus that was converted into a university office building made a quaint impression. Two exhibit cases in the lobby have artifacts and books make a grounded impression of area and subject studies that find their home under the room of the former hospital that the building historically is. Second floor greets its wanderers with posters on career in Japan, Chinese and Japanese language tests, and a Chinese trade show at the local exhibition grounds. A whiff of opportunity on paths not taken. I wonder what comes of the common Asian heritage of the countries of the region given the preeminence of Chinese culture and civilization - just consider Chinese characters and arts - now that a certain threshold of economic, political, cultural, and social achievement has been arrived at. It may be before long that not only cool Japan conquers the gaming consoles and widescreen entertainment but also other Asian countries become unquestioned leaders in growing niches of everyday life. Merchandise in supermarkets maybe one thing, but a self-reflected awareness on a mass level of an epochal reorientation away from the West and towards the East could be a fascinating transition to observe. And comment on.

Blogging Exercise Redux (Friday, October, 2008)

2008-10-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

To manage transitions does appear to be a skill anyone would want to have, me included. It is just that when one has to summon what it takes to make a transition, a real process of looking for sources of the self, especially as they are likely to go through a mutation, has a chance to start in earnest. At the site of multiple negotiations of memories, discourses, and languages, a tentative way of approaching space, of imaginations, of cities, and of movements, becomes being accessible - not because of knowing beforehand how to do it but because of the mere necessity of making a next move, like in a game of chess, when a succession of alternating strategic and tactical steps lets a judgment on overall success or failure to be made. However, in a situation with far more alternatives, far less transparency, and far reaching absence of stakes, I wonder how one can reformulate the playing field of choosing, acting, and evaluating. Sounds resigned. But even in breaking rules, roles, and moulds, a new and tentative form of ordering strives to emerge. As in our everyday life I suppose. Repetition and difference of the routinized ways of behaving oneself - and strange that behaving others come linguistically across as a contemplative turn of speech and, upon a reflection, thought - reveal themselves to work both ways - expectedly and unexpectedly at once, given that this once is an element in a series, very much like a singularity in Deleuze's logic of thought.

Fresh Print of Godard's Pierro le Fou as the Mirror of Cultural Production

2007-11-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

Fresh look at Godard's Pierro le Fou amazes at its masterful use of just the notion of intertextuality that must have been gaining in theoretical currency at the time of the New Wave of the French cinema that on the background of apparently low-budget production costs, as far as Hollywood standards go, exhibits high level of cultural investment into a feature film that runs slightly longer than a B-class movie of the day would, given the epic lengths of the major film productions that made the press headlines and roster of critical reviews, which extends the film work not only between the low and high cultural genres, as car chases, social characterizations, and comical moments attest, but also between the 1960s and 2000s as the matters of political, poetical, and social awareness that the film raises before the amused gazes of its viewers have retained their relevance almost to a degree that structural analysis, just coming into theoretical vogue as Godard was making his film, reveals with striking precision when Vietnam war, mediatization of violence, quantified reports of combat casualties and collateral damage make film characters, as well as us by extension of identification, wonder about what would it take to understand the lives the fate of which modern media of representation convey.

From Appropriation of Nature to Accumulation of Culture

2007-11-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

As the possibilities for technological progress take increasing amounts of investments to put at the service of capital accumulation not only does it seem that the gap between developed and developing nations reaches qualitative proportions beyond which the horizon of common course of development splinters into space-dependent perspectives but also the role of culture as secondary dimension of process of accumulation reaching increasing proportions of importance becomes implicated in the strategies of intensification that have made visible impact on preceding stage of modernization as a consequence of which it is possible to see the process of modernization of modernity as a two-level reflexivity both of itself and of its environment as the two gain in degree of their interpenetration as different aspects of single process of accumulation where the share of appropriation of nature decreases in favor of appropriation of culture as growing core of activities that constitute the current stage of transformation of modernity as constellation of attractors around which converge dynamic equilibria of global centers of disorganized capitalism, of localized appropriations of modernist legacies, and of collective foci of experience stabilization.

Incorrect Memories of Poems in Another Language

2007-10-18T15:26:00.000-07:00

Meandering of thought, behind-the-scenes self-rehearsals, stage management of the improvised jam-sessions of everyday life, memories of words compared and parsed, city landscapes traversed against the sun, soundtracts overheard from subway travellers, routes of repeated recollections, side-notes of the monologue of internal dialogue, technological reproduction of media that put us in tune with our times.

Thinking of Short Sentences

2007-10-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

To try to capture the essence of the fleeting moment in one well-built sentence can well serve as reason for concluding the day with some sense of achievement.

Personalization of the Media

2007-09-10T17:55:00.000-07:00

Looking at place from somebody else's perspective mediated by digital photography only becomes an act of intimate perception when the whole concatenation of decisions that precede any mass media visual content has been collapsed into singe choice of individual photographer that as contemporary art curator wields within the domain of his or her subjective choices the authority that the growing number of institutions are forced to relate to in terms that render the sphere of personal privacy inviolate, which comes into pointed contradiction with the handling of privacy within the communications media that give so much pride of place to individual expression the primary among which would presently be the internet that in its drive to combine the spaces of data flows, contexts of their materialization, and personalization of its interfaces has apparently exacerbated the contradictions that have laid dormant within the situations that have been defined by less fluid media; the first modern period in this respect must appear hopelessly removed from the vertiginous streams of digitized exchanges that take us on their daily ebb and flow that we in our everyday routines set into reflexive motion.

Subjects on the Move

2007-09-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

If subjectivity is a place then cities where modern subjects first came to become mass phenomenon should have something observably different about their spatial structures that sets them apart from other agglomerations of objects, relations, and flows, which would have special significance for displaced subjects who in bringing with them memory of other constellations of spatial relations experience their finding themselves in time and space as discrepancy in the structures that orient what makes up everyday life towards points where self-grasping awareness transits into moments of actualization that for the subject-on-the-move, as opposed to the exile or displaced person, always remain distributed across the trajectory from the point of provisional departure to the destinations that are final until further notice in which case the stable narrative forms in which belonging to any one social formation could take are haunted by the textual relations of articulation, rather than ruling, of the experience as it is given in particular privileged points of fictional vision that in their objectified form resemble the works of architecture as moment of urban existence that connects individual to collective in part random and part pre-determined ways.

Media Mirrors for Late Modern Subjects

2007-09-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between how urban environment structures our daily routines and how we tend to tell ourselves our lives as stories the transition of modern experience from logics nested in the contexts of immediate practice to those that become divorced from it lies at our late modern feet the fruits of centuries long coping with the groundlessness of the modern existence as the strong narrative motifs rooted in tradition, society, and economy give way to volatile improvisation that rather than leave space for unreflected selfhood crushes what makes our identities up against the wall of constant change that makes the conditions of our existence always new, which must in no small measure have contributed to the interest with which we read our daily newspapers, listen to our media-streams, and watch our visual dose of entertainment and documentary footage not so much as to fill some inner void but to recombine the structure of our inner workings in tune with the latest state of the art that the ever changing second modernity legislates through its self-appointed representatives, augurs, and potentates.

Invention of the Self

2007-09-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

While reading someone else's biography is always reassuring on the grounds of having textual structure of that described lifespan savingly fixed in the verbal material of narration, the moments when the becoming of our life reaches the highly self-aware forms of necessity to make decisions, even if provisional ones, bring quiet anguish to our minds that most probably look for ways to adapt to the structuring structure of everyday life, taken with all its events that encompass those with low probability as well as those that are highly so, more than to get actualized through plying the course that will correspond to the trajectory of development of our selves or so it seems within the elaborate optical illusion called the modern condition.

Photo-Transit

2007-09-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

'One thing after another' provides a guiding motto not only to the changes that sculpture has gone through in the second half of the twentieth century but apparently to the everyday life of the modern individuals who are drawn towards the spaces where words, things, and relations mingle in one largely chaotic conglomeration of points of view that relay among them their visitors who possess to varying degrees the perceptual apparatuses that enable the fixation of the random acts of perception in media that range across senses, temporalities, and places, which brings me to the process whereby I am going from one snapshot to another in a grip that borders on thing-like sensuality that accumulates one object after another into a series of visually transmitted recollections of my digital camera.

Prior Notices

2007-09-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

Probably thoughts are as random events as all other natural processes that only through loops of self-reflexivity gain in stabilization in what counts as our awareness; for that to gradually attain the degree of self-evidence it must have taken the long development from the pre-modern situation to the present day when little ever is taken for granted except for the expectation that things, ideas, and arrangements arrive at their expiry date sometimes with and sometimes without prior notice, which may distinguish the second modern condition from more usual understanding of modernity when lines of mind's eye vision were so drawn as to allow for a linear perspective to come into existence in certain privileged points the multiplication of which might correspond from the first modern moment to the presently constituting itself global modern situation of perspectival simultaneity that somehow hearkens back to the moment of modernism that may prove itself to be foundational in certain unexpected ways.