8 posts tagged “new”
'Nature is never interrupted, never takes a vacation, never stops ruminating over its systems and tinkering with them. It works beneath a nano-level with the intelligence of entropy aimed at infinity. That's a lot of hard drive, a lot of gigabytes, a vast span, a wide plane of action, and all of it at a speed far greater than that of light because it effectively combines the velocity of all its operations at once.'
- Richard Grossinger
'There is a great insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore: that Nature is a minded entity; that Nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields; that Nature is not the empty, despiritualized lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.'
- Terence McKenna
'The real marks of wildness are a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.'
- Robert Bly
'I used the word Xanthos a moment ago. I don't know whether there is a Xanthos or not, and I really don't care one way or another, but there must be a place in the world, perhaps in the Grecian islands, where you come to the end of the known world and you are thoroughly alone and yet you are not frightened of it, but rejoice, because at this dropping off place you can feel the old ancestral world which is eternally young and new and fecundating. You stand there, wherever this place is, like a newly hatched chick beside its eggshell. This place is Xanthos...'
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
She don't know the modern world and its ravages
Instead of money she's got yams and cabbages
She lives in a dome,
I don't care if I never get home.
My girl is the queen of the Jungle Folk
You should see the things we see when we smoke
We think all of life is a funny joke
She's sharp as a tack,
I don't care if I never get back.
My girl is the queen of 10 villages
We live on the fruits of her pillages
She eats other queens
She's a re-realist
She doesn't use a fork
I don't think I'll go back to New York.'
- Lyrics from 'Queen of the Savages', by the dreamy Magnetic Fields
"My joy is when you're possessed like a medium, you know, I'll be sitting round and it'll come in the middle of the night or at the time when you don't want to do it - that's the exciting part... So I'm lying around and this thing comes as a whole piece, you know, words and music, and I think well, you know, can I say I wrote it? I don't know who the hell wrote it... You're like driven and you find yourself over on a piano or guitar and you put it down because it's been given to you or whatever it is that you tune into." - John Lennon via The Lives of Muses by Francine Prose.
Culture is everything we don't have to do.
We have to eat, but we didn't have to invent Baked Alaskas and Beef Wellington. We have to clothe ourselves, but we didn't have to invent platform shoes and polka-dot bikinis. We have to communicate, but we didn't have to invent sonnets and sonatas. Everything we do—beyond simply keeping ourselves alive—we do because we like making and experiencing art and culture.
Eno's Second Law
Science is the conversation about how the world is. Culture is the conversation about how else the world could be, and how else we could experience it.
Science wants to know what can be said about the world, what can be predicted about it. Art likes to see which other worlds are possible, to see how it would feel if it were this way instead of that way. As such art can give us the practice and agility to think and experience in new ways - preparing us for the new understandings of things that science supplies.
- Brian Eno (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/eno.html) via the World Question Center (http://www.edge.org/q2004/q04_print.html)
'Did you know that this is the beginning of the era of true love? The end of oppression? Of the self or the other. It's true. True love can only exist in the absence of oppression and where true love exists there is no oppression.
This is the moment of the invention of peace on earth. Like the moment just before the invention of the printing press. Or the day after, or the week of. Imagine the sun going down and you pass a window and someone inside is writing notes (and that someone is you) and those notes are about a letterpress- or an airplane- or the that the world is round- or that peace will come to earth. We will look back on this moment with astonishment and wonder how we lived in the time of war- much the same way we look back with astonishment at a time on earth without humans- or birds- or clouds- or at a time when dinosaurs lived-
But do not forget that everything on earth and in heaven may come and go. There was a time before humanity. There was a time before America. There was a time before the sky, there was a time before earth. And this is the time before peace.
I declare that the age of war is over and that soon it will be a memory.
War is now extinct and peace is the new species.
Imagine this. And Invent this with the full force of your soul, your mind, your heart, your voice.
Earth is heaven, the water is magic, the ground is magic, your voice is magic, you are pure magic. Remember yourself. Bring peace.
Peace to all the children of the world, forever and ever and now,
Love.'
- Becky Stark via LavenderDiamond.com/news.html
"Every day mind is getting out of bed, eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, going to bed. It is laughing and crying, being anxious and joyful. Everyday mind is walking and talking, sitting down and standing up. It is the mind of suffering, conflict, anger and hatred, love and devotion. How can everyday mind be the way? Everyday mind, we say, is too mundane, too ordinary, and so we want the opposite, we want the magical.
It is our very search, our lust for the miraculous and magical, that hides from us the truth that simply to be, simply to know I am, is already the miracle that we seek. Everything, as it is, is perfect, but you must stop seeing it as if in a mirror, as if in a dream."
- Albert Low via WhiskeyRiver - http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com/2008/05/every-day-mind-is-getting-out-of-bed.html
To wit, check out this excerpt from a very intriguing article about the etymology of the phrase 'new media art' by Susan Elizabeth Ryan:
Forever New
New media has been hailed by art-and-technology enthusiasts as a cultural practice much larger than art, or any other existing discipline. Lev Manovich, in his influential book The Language of New Media (MIT 2001), helps isolate and particularize the qualities of these new, new media. Bypassing historical usages, he says that "New Media" is a term defined by popular usage. In journals and television, new media means "the use of the computer for distribution and exhibition rather than production." He argues that new media is essentially unlike conventional media, either of the art or mass communication varieties. It is a new kind of thing, but we can define it: new media are not just digital; they are marked by the characteristics of numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding; and they are complex, containing both "computer" and "cultural" layers...
...And new terms for "new media" are already on the horizon. Multimedia is one that has been used frequently used, though it, too, has a complex etymology. The Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive's project "Archiving the Avant-Garde," part of the Variable Media Network, concerns itself with "variable media," encompassing "digital and Internet art, performance, installation, conceptual [art] . . . that represent the history of alternative artistic practice." "Variable media" historicizes the broad range of work that initially resisted objectification. The project seeks to collect, preserve, and categorize this work, rendering formerly "dematerialized" work as objects. Julian Stallabrass points out that today, "the materiality of the art object persists, even for video and media art [he defines the latter as "anything from online art to computer controlled sound environments"], which has generally been accepted as art only by paying the price of becoming partly material." But then again, that is exactly what the medium in art has always been: materialist.
Perhaps terms like new media or media art are diabolical. Or perhaps not. Commenting on video in 1996, Jacques Derrida said something with which I would like to close: "One never sees a new art, one thinks one sees it, but a 'new art,' as people say a little loosely, may be recognized by the fact that it is not recognized."
From Intelligent Agent 5.2: http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol5_No2_new%20media_ryan.htm
