open source synergy

"What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, this were valued as a moment, however transitory, of the realization of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken? What un-disciplined stories would be told?"
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti

these days it feels as if everything i'm reading, seeing and hearing is synergistically sparking off one another and it's all part of one big idea-universe. synergy describes a system where the collaborative outcome is greater than the sum of its parts. the "greater than" effect for me is the incredibly exciting feeling of existing in a coherent network of ideas and values and like-minded people -- i wonder if this is what it's like to find god and religion -- you suddenly understand that everything makes sense and is relational and even the things that don't make sense are still part of the larger sense-making system you've discovered.

it's a hegelian universe: the kind that's based on the concept of absolute spirit and everything being relational via synthesis, where rocks are just the lowest organization of spirit in a spectrum that stretches out to include the most enlightened, reflective creatures in the universe: maybe it's a person, but maybe it's an animal or a fungus -- we can't really know. hegel thinks it's a rationally self-reflective person, but i'm not so sure... C got me a shittake mushroom kit for my birthday, and it's producing mushrooms finally, and each day i mist this 6" x 9" x 8" mycelium cake and when i come home, those little mushrooms have doubled in size. i've also got this really happy and frantically growing fiddle leaf ficus that unfurls new leaves everytime I turn around -- i'm amazed at all this growing energy going on in my little living room, and then i have to remind myself that I'm a walking laboratory of catalysts and growing and decay, too.

today I attended a talk by Rick Prelinger, co-founder of The Prelinger Library, and Richard Rinehart, digital media director for the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM), part of the very excellent Takeovers & Makeovers: Appropriation, Fair Use, and Copyright in the Digital Age conference that just happened at BAM. really motivating and empowering manifestos for participatory culture and the liberation of art and art-making from the tyranny of concepts like originality and sole, copyrighted authorship. they're advocates for open source programming, the creative commons, and museums and archives as banks of material for public access and use. i've just re-read Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" for the first time since college, and his call for the avant-garde to transform and adapt the apparatuses of production to alienate the ruling classes while enabling the proletarian masses to themselves create casts an encouraging light on the blogosphere, diy and maker-moment that we're in, where mccain doesn't know how to email but grade school kids are adept bloggers, hackers and piraters.

it's more fodder for feeling excited about making and writing a bunch of stuff, including this blog, and for seeing the world synergistically. once you catch onto a thread, you see the entire fabric differently.

case in point: the New Museum's online exhibition of Paul Chan's gorgeous 7 Lights series ("Lights" is supposed to be struck through but I can't figure out how to format that...) allows you to download the source file that's part of the range of materials Chan used to create these pieces. i wouldn't have fully understood the larger significance of this kind of accessibility without the constellation of marx, benjamin, and those talks that fired me up today.

watch 1st Light (strikethrough), which i first saw at the Whitney Biennial a few years ago, and the other six pieces. be patient! they're troubling and beautiful and worth the wait.

Sources
music: Evening Star, Fripp & Eno. Music for Films, Brian Eno
text: "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin
movement: ballet

beguine: pointe shoes & politics

because obama won, and then i bought pointe shoes, and these days i'm more politically informed than i've ever been in my life -- which is not saying much, but i'm trying -- i decided it was time to end the 5+ year ban i've had on blogging, and start my own repository of half-baked ideas to commemorate all these beginnings: the post-Bush era, my first steps en pointe, the very beginning of knowing how the world works.

it's part narcissism, but part optimism. some genuine things happened this past tuesday, amid all the political theater and performance: a whole lot of people turned away from one model of governance and towards another; a whole lot of people defied the story we'd been told about americans -- that we're anti-intellectual, racist, and fundamentally motivated by fear. while fears for our failing economy (and the end of capitalism) probably account for obama's wide margin of victory, each vote cast for obama was a rejection of the vulgar rhetoric of fear that characterized the mccain campaign's efforts to distract us from the coherence and pragmatism of obama's platform and principles. there's still a frightening and embarrassingly large community of american idiots who think obama is a muslim sociaist terrorist, and i hope that the turn this country takes towards behaving more honorably because of an obama presidency ends up being the biggest, bitter-est pill those bigoted foolios ever have to swallow.

which is not to say that we're on the road to becoming an ethical, social democracy. we're a corporatist superpower through and through, and the best we can hope for is some damage control in the short-term, and in the long-term, to model some better behavior for the large, geopolitical entities that've been making their ascendence in the world even as we've been in decline.

but i can't really say anything incredibly new, incisive or informed about the state of the world; Naomi Klein does it better, and reading The Shock Doctrine has inspired a paradigm shift in my thinking and being in the world.

ballet was the other inspiration for this paradigm shift. more on this, later.

Sources
text: Big Questions #11: Sweetness and Light, Anders Nilsen
music: "This is How We Walk on the Moon," Arthur Russell
film: The Times of Harvey Milk
food: Dagoba organic chocolate, "chai"