Podcasting, Memorry, Playlists, and the Postmodern Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.