Michael Szpakowski
Since the beginning
Works in Harlow United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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DISCUSSION

Re: Old media making new media cool


that *is* stunning!
m.
--- Pall Thayer <p_thay@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:

> This is a very impressive video idea created with
> simple black and
> white photocopies:
>
>
http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcontents/2007/05/modest_mouse_vi.html
>
>
> --
> Pall Thayer
> p_thay@alcor.concordia.ca
>
> http://www.this.is/pallit
>
>
>
>
>

DISCUSSION

A Small Competition With Modest prizes


A small competition with modest prizes.

Please participate, please circulate!

http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/song/

best

michael

DISCUSSION

Fwd: Robert Roth's Health Proxy


Hi
Robert Roth is a friend of mine & hence I've been
lucky enough to read most of this work in various
fragments & drafts over the past two or three years.
I think it is absolutely extraordinary & I love it.
Also, I can think of nothing quite like it - the
nearest analogy I could begin to draw is if the Pillow
Book of Sei Shonagon had been written by a 60ish year
old New York Jewish anarchist with an singular talent
for friendship & anxious self-scrutiny in equal
measure, a love of baseball, a highly developed sense
of humour & perhaps rather unfashionably, a huge &
generous heart.
I really can't recommend it too highly - do yourself a
favour & order a copy (see forward below). You won't
regret it. If you buy a copy & you aren't wowed by it,
mail me & I'll send you the price of the book
best
michael

Yuganta Press

proudly announces the publication of

Health Proxy by Robert Roth

This extraordinary book dares to hope in full view of
the darkness of
our times. Roth's many friendships, the key to this
hope, repudiate
the assertion that "hell is other people." Seldom have
the bits and
pieces of a man's life added up so poignantly, as
Roth's do, to the
body and soul of an entire community.

For a more complete description, please go to
http://www.yuganta.com/health.html

You can order the book by credit card at
http://www.yuganta.com/ordering.html

You can also, if you prefer, send a check to Yuganta
Press for the
amount of $12.00 (which includes postage and
handling.) If you order
more than one book, please add $1 for each additional
book.

Yuganta Press, 6 Rushmore Circle, Stamford, CT 06905.

Phone: 203 322 5438. E-mail: orders@yuganta.com

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: is art useless?


Hi Curt
I wasn't being combative or having a tilt at you & I'm
sorry if my rather quick & compressed formulation made
it appear so, nor would I wish to simply dismiss
Heidegger. I quite agree that insight (& indeed
talent) isn't the sole preserve of the righteous,
however defined.
I *do* think there is a particular problem with
Heidegger though -the man was a *member* of the Nazi
party for over 10 years during the commission by the
Nazis of crimes against humanity that were quite
singular in their awfulness.

Even his reflections way after the time were marked
by, to put it at its most charitable, an insensitivity
that is quite breathtaking (his comparison of the
Holocaust with the mechanisation of agriculture).
So what I find difficult to accept is that there was
no connection *at some level* between the actions &
the thought ( because if there *isn't* that connection
*at some level* in a philosopher between 'say' & 'do'
then their work is either meaningless or cant) of
someone as smart as Heidegger clearly was. And that to
me is troubling. I'm absolutely *not* arguing that
everything he said is simply tainted & should be
rejected tout court as a sort of contagion; only that
a degree of caution is required. Therefore I guess I
feel that if I see a discussion of Heidegger that
doesn't at least once reference this pretty salient
feature of his life, I feel obliged to point it out,
on a kind of health warning principle.
best
michael

--- curt cloninger <curt@lab404.com> wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> Not to be flip either, but that seems a convenient
> excuse to dismiss his writing carte blanche without
> weighing the merit of what he has to say. Althusser
> strangled his wife. Pollock was a drunk. Marx was
> a bum (and a Marxist!). Heck, Kierkeggard was a
> freaking *Christian* (for God's sake). Heidegger's
> involvement with the Nazi party seems less like an
> elephant and more like a bogey (depending on your
> particular flavor of literary criticism and how much
> it depends on the author's personal biography).
>
> I think Geert is right. Especially with Heidegger,
> a close reading is necessary (and surely in German
> would be even better). Especially in his later
> writings, he's coming to understand that denotative
> prose isn't the best tool to use to elucidate a
> project of re-examining the received and calcified
> presumptions of language. So his language gets
> necessarily more poetic, and the event of reading it
> is all part of his overall project.
>
> Admittedly, Heidegger is particularly keen on how a
> person actually lives daily in the world. He's a
> big proponent of doing rather than saying (which
> makes him useful to anyone who thinks art is a way
> of doing that explores realms in which words fall
> short). So the claims of his particular philosophy
> do invite a closer examination of his own personal
> way of being in the world than someone like Derrida.
> To me Heidegger's membership in the Nazi part
> illustrates not so much that Heidegger's philosophy
> is wrong or leads to wrong ways of doing, but that
> it takes more than a philosophy (right, wrong, or
> otherwise) or an art practice (paradigm advancing,
> politically engaged, or otherwise) to empower one to
> act ethically in the world.
>
> Respect,
> Curt
>
> ++++++++++
>
> michael wrote:
> Hi all
> I really mean to be neither flip nor glib, but my
> big
> problem with Heidegger is that fact that he was a
> Nazi.
> Kind of elephant in the roomish really :)
> michael
> +
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> +
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>

DISCUSSION

Re: is art useless?


Hi all
I really mean to be neither flip nor glib, but my big
problem with Heidegger is that fact that he was a
Nazi.
Kind of elephant in the roomish really :)
michael

--- Geert Dekkers <geert@nznl.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> As far as I understand Being And Time (just halfway
> through my first
> reading) Heideggers object is not to answer the
> grand ontological
> question, but to discover effective ways in which to
> ask such a
> question. Heidegger covers a larger part of the
> philosophical
> discourse in order to find object and method of an
> inquiry into Being
> and Time. Which for me already answers the question
> "is art useful",
> (I know, a well-trodden path), it is useful not
> because it provides
> us with answers, but with ways to ask effectively.
>
> Now, of course, there are many valid art forms that
> do not address
> ontological problems and do not wish to. You might
> even concur that
> there are more important things to be done in this
> day and age. These
> art forms use symbol, metaphor, and other figures as
> ready-mades, or
> mine technological veins for new figures, in order
> to communicate
> content. Much activist art falls in this category.
> And -- again --
> this is not to say that good work is not being done.
> Absolutely, and
> I love and admire much of this work. Its "use" is
> obvious, because it
> clarifies and propogates issues that concern us all.
> But when I see a
> question of the "uselessness" of art, I inadvertedly
> mould this
> question into one of the "uselessness" of art
> projects asking
> fundamental, ontological questions.
>
> Furthermore, when the question "is art useless?"
> comes up, and
> especially if you read a discouraging NO in this
> question, you could
> also ask the same of Heideggers project in Being and
> Time. Is it
> useless to wish to ask these fundamental questions?
> Of course we then
> get into the notion of use, and uselessness. And
> again, Heideggers
> work, but now "The Origin of Art" can be called in.
> Among other
> things, Heidegger here attempts to clear the stage
> of "equipmental"
> work, in order to focus of the "work" of art. This
> clearing is in
> itself commendable. In other words -- there is "use"
> in this work,
> even if the object may never be reached.
>
> Well, where is ontological problem addressed in art?
> In Morandi,
> where he questions the objects. In Barnett Newman
> and other post-
> abstract-expressionists, where he questions the
> artworks. In Beuys,
> where he questions the artist. Now in computer art
> there has been
> much work done in this last realm, and more
> specifically concerning
> the production of artworks, where a computer program
> takes over the
> artist in the creation process. That this falls
> short at the moment
> is not withstanding the importance of the programme,
> and I'm sure
> with the advances made in AI, RDF/OWL and Jeff
> Hawkins' HTM, the
> project will gain momentum in the coming years.
>
> The importance of Heidegger is not so much in the
> conclusions he
> reaches, even if these conclusions are powerful.
> Even in the summary
> of The Origin of the Work of Art, you realise that
> the truth isn't
> all here, but just as much in the meticulous shaping
> of the text by
> Heidegger, and your close reading of it. There is
> use in this close
> proximity, there is love here. From writer and
> reader both.
>
>
> Geert Dekkers---------------------------
> http://nznl.com | http://nznl.org | http://nznl.net
> ---------------------------------------
>
>
>
> On 28/04/2007, at 4:07 PM, curt cloninger wrote:
>
> > Hi Eric,
> >
> > There are thinkers like Deleuze and after him
> Brian Massumi and
> > Bruno Latour trying to think of ways in which art
> (and humans)
> > might be different in a networked world. But
> they've all read
> > their Heidegger and are in dialogue with him.
> Heidegger raises
> > meta-philosophical questions that are still
> relevant. For
> > instance: how novel is any system of ontological
> knowing that
> > derives from an inherited way of being in the
> world which makes
> > implicit assumptions about 'being' that have yet
> to be purposefully
> > considered? Descartes says, 'I think therefore I
> am, and that's a
> > pretty novel deduction,' and Heidegger replies,
> 'Seems like a fresh
> > idea, but you're already making implicit medieval
> assumptions about
> > what thinking and being even are.' You can
> construct new
> > ontologies until the cows come home, but unless
> you've realized
> > some new way of being in the world, and have
> considered at length
> > what it means to create ontologies from this new
> place in the
> > world, then you're not breaki!
> > ng with the past. You're simply carrying the
> past forward unawares.
> >
> > To take just one example, a regular coke can in my
> world *at all*
> > effects my world much more radically than a coke
> can embedded with
> > a smart chip tied into a network. A reading of
> Heidegger suggests
> > we should spend some time wrestling with what a
> 'thing' even is
> > before we launch headlong into trying to figure
> out what a 'smart
> > thing' is.
> >
> > If Heidegger's understanding and treatment of
> "technology" needs
> > some upgrading, it is properly done in dialogue
> with the specifics
> > of what he claimed, not with a dismissive wave of
> the 21st Century
> > reset button, which throws any useful suspicion he
> might have
> > afforded us out with the bath water. [That last
> sentence mixes no
> > less than four metaphors. Yes!]
> >
> > Duchamp said, 'the function of art is to question
> art' (I'm
> > probably paraphrasing or misattributing
> altogether). Might the
> > function of art be to question the whole project
> of ontological
> > knowing? If such is the case, art is likely to
> perpetually evade
> > your constructed systems of ontological knowing
> (whether they are
> > based on Leibniz or Vannevar Bush or Berners-Lee
> or Bigfoot). Such
> > evasion is one of the functions of art.
> >
> > Curt
> >
> >
> > P.S. http://www.slanderous.org/curt.jpg indicates
> you think I'm
> > http://www.curtcloninger.com . That is my uncle.
> We have the same
> > name.
> >
> > +++++++++
> >
> > eric dymond wrote:
> >
> > ..The thread has quoted Habermas, and other
> thinkers from the last
> > millenium as if they carried weight in a described
> ontology that is
> > friendly to machines and humans alike. They
> couldn't forsee the
> > machinic world computer mediated knowledge exists
> in. So what do we
> > have then?
> > Well, I'd prefer looking to Steve Pepper and Tim
> Berner Lee rather
> > than Benjamin or Habermas, or any other Euro
> thinker from the non-
> > networked millenium we left behind. We could quote
> dead philosphers
> > and seera of the past.
> > That is not the best route to travel to understand
> how the word
> > "ART" would survive in this millenium.
> > From a strictly ontological appraoch, something
> like "web art" or
> > "painting" can be accomodated, there is room for
> qualification and
> > quntification. But "ART", I do know a little bit
> about Information
> > and Document theory and practice. From this small
> hill on the new
> > media landscape the word "ART" is now just an
> adverb that connotes
> > intent.
> > I tried setting up Ontopia Navigator to accomodate
> the word "ART"
> > and failed to generate anything worthwhile. Of
> course the failure
> > could be mine, but I think it has more to do with
> the way we now
> > organize knowledge.
> > +
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>
>