At its inception, a new art is indistinguishable from the technology that enables it.
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
835 - Aphorism
How true is this? -
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
838 - Multiplicity
is the title of last year's book by Rita Carter exploring the phenomenon of multiple personalities. Not multiple personality disorder, but the idea that, if one's personality at any given time is a neural map of memories related to a particular situation, and if the situations one is exposed to are sufficiently distinct from one another, one might develop several distinct personalities, to a greater or lesser extent aware of one another, as a normal, indeed adaptive, response.
Rita Carter's argument is that this is normative in today's globalised society. We are parent, student, worker, bully, pleaser, lover, clown, and so on, and the personality we show, say at a party or at work, is simply one of several responses we could call upon. Today's society is transfixed both by role-playing and by celebrity personalities. So identity is defined by obsessive tick-boxing, but also by the philosophy that given the opportunity we'd all shine uniquely in the spotlight. And these influences, together with the freedoms given to us by new technologies, city anonymity, and exposure to multitudes of people, drive us, now more than ever, individually to create and refine new personalities - somewhat in the manner, I guess, that living things specificate as genetic populations.
Wow. That's controversial. Of the book, then, by way of validation: ‘A tour de force -- a compendium of anecdote, research and speculation that is quite breathtaking’ NEW SCIENTIST.
I am interested in this thesis for many reasons. Here are a few:
1. As someone with an interest in theology, I notice that religious myths fluctuate between monotheisms and polytheisms. A God will be fixated upon, raised to the status of Sky God, then left to drift away, to be replaced by a pantheon, out of whom a new Sky God will in time be chosen. It intrigues me that as Christianity loses favour in the West, it is replaced by neo-pagan pantheons. This is happening at just the point in history that our concept of a unique self, to the fulfilment of which we are enjoined to work, may be replaced by the concept of multiple selves.
2. For me, the journey into multiplicity began when, on leaving Church, I was approached one day by a man who struck me on the arm and said (speaking, I felt, of the voices within as much as outside himself) "You are now one of us." I have blogged about this, and my conviction, as it happened, that I had dreamt of the event months before, here. So untangling the meaning of what happened has for me a prophetic aspect to do with my vocation as a post-Church leader. If increasing numbers of us experience an increasingly diverse sense of self/selves, and if this is natural, one would expect those of us pastoring in such communities to have a positive experience of the same phenomenon.
3. Multiplicity, if true, strikes a mortal blow to any hope that we might be able to encapsulate the essential facts about a person's nature on a database, let alone an ID card. This isn't an argument against or for ID cards - just a recognition that the facts they could contain would be limited, and could not dependably state anything categorical about personality or criminal tendencies. Some might find that relief enough to assent to the process of state identification, whilst others might see in it the potential for huge miscarriages of justice, the definition of which we are only beginning to find words for, let alone legal case history.
4. The book Multiplicity explores some of the raw materials out of which the art of storying is fashioned. Storying, as I imagine it, is the conscious creation of narratives of one's own choosing out of the stuff of one's life. At one end of the spectrum such a narrative might be seen to have unfolded over a lifetime, but at the other one might choose to create a narrative over a day, or even over the course of a chance encounter, split second, in a street. Personality, character, is precisely where such storymaking starts: 'Once upon a time there was a boy called Jack.... '. And if multiplicity is true, then the calling up and shaping of a new personality, or refashioning of an old one, might be approached with the same degree of artifice a painter might bring to painting technique, a poet to choices of word and form, and a free-runner to cityscape acrobatics. A storyer would deal in neural networking the way a draughtsman deals in pen and ink, or an actor in script (or its absence).
Rita Carter's argument is that this is normative in today's globalised society. We are parent, student, worker, bully, pleaser, lover, clown, and so on, and the personality we show, say at a party or at work, is simply one of several responses we could call upon. Today's society is transfixed both by role-playing and by celebrity personalities. So identity is defined by obsessive tick-boxing, but also by the philosophy that given the opportunity we'd all shine uniquely in the spotlight. And these influences, together with the freedoms given to us by new technologies, city anonymity, and exposure to multitudes of people, drive us, now more than ever, individually to create and refine new personalities - somewhat in the manner, I guess, that living things specificate as genetic populations.
Wow. That's controversial. Of the book, then, by way of validation: ‘A tour de force -- a compendium of anecdote, research and speculation that is quite breathtaking’ NEW SCIENTIST.
I am interested in this thesis for many reasons. Here are a few:
1. As someone with an interest in theology, I notice that religious myths fluctuate between monotheisms and polytheisms. A God will be fixated upon, raised to the status of Sky God, then left to drift away, to be replaced by a pantheon, out of whom a new Sky God will in time be chosen. It intrigues me that as Christianity loses favour in the West, it is replaced by neo-pagan pantheons. This is happening at just the point in history that our concept of a unique self, to the fulfilment of which we are enjoined to work, may be replaced by the concept of multiple selves.
2. For me, the journey into multiplicity began when, on leaving Church, I was approached one day by a man who struck me on the arm and said (speaking, I felt, of the voices within as much as outside himself) "You are now one of us." I have blogged about this, and my conviction, as it happened, that I had dreamt of the event months before, here. So untangling the meaning of what happened has for me a prophetic aspect to do with my vocation as a post-Church leader. If increasing numbers of us experience an increasingly diverse sense of self/selves, and if this is natural, one would expect those of us pastoring in such communities to have a positive experience of the same phenomenon.
3. Multiplicity, if true, strikes a mortal blow to any hope that we might be able to encapsulate the essential facts about a person's nature on a database, let alone an ID card. This isn't an argument against or for ID cards - just a recognition that the facts they could contain would be limited, and could not dependably state anything categorical about personality or criminal tendencies. Some might find that relief enough to assent to the process of state identification, whilst others might see in it the potential for huge miscarriages of justice, the definition of which we are only beginning to find words for, let alone legal case history.
4. The book Multiplicity explores some of the raw materials out of which the art of storying is fashioned. Storying, as I imagine it, is the conscious creation of narratives of one's own choosing out of the stuff of one's life. At one end of the spectrum such a narrative might be seen to have unfolded over a lifetime, but at the other one might choose to create a narrative over a day, or even over the course of a chance encounter, split second, in a street. Personality, character, is precisely where such storymaking starts: 'Once upon a time there was a boy called Jack.... '. And if multiplicity is true, then the calling up and shaping of a new personality, or refashioning of an old one, might be approached with the same degree of artifice a painter might bring to painting technique, a poet to choices of word and form, and a free-runner to cityscape acrobatics. A storyer would deal in neural networking the way a draughtsman deals in pen and ink, or an actor in script (or its absence).
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
839 - Reclamation of Fenwick Spoil Heap as a Memorial for Hartley
This rears up out of the fields behind Backworth and Earsdon. It's the former coal mining spoil at Fenwick and Eccles. There are distant sounds of quadbikes, and old tyres and deadwood like animal corpses. North Tyneside has promised for years to reclaim the land, but locals have suspected that the clay required to make it good was to come from a controversial landfill proposal, at present abandoned, for a site down the road.
Whitley News Guardian published a letter making this claim last month: we stumbled upon the spoil heaps on our walk on Saturday. And all this has got me wondering.
Earsdon itself is a beautiful village, and home to a sombre memorial to 200 dead men and boys in a pit disaster at Hartley. That disaster might have been the Somme, visiting fifty years early on the work force of a North East mining village. Contemporary accounts compared it to 'a vast Golgotha'.
The 150th Anniversary of the disaster will take place in 2012 - three years time. A terrible, terrible indictment if the only memorial Northumberland, North Tyneside and SITA saw fit to raise was a fresh trench at Seghill. And a far more fitting memorial if the reclamation of the spoil heaps went ahead as promised.
More about Sita here. And an opportunity to contact North Tyneside Council about the reclamation here.
840 - Cometh The Hour...
Closed my book on multiple personalities before reading the synopses of creative persona, and went to Morrisons instead.
On the way back I bumped into a guy I worked with at Seven Stories, digitising old reel-to-reel tapes. He told me he'd just completed an oral history project in Suffolk, for which he'd bought a CD robot, capable of cutting individual disks, and printing them with unique labels.
He is planning to use the machine, in his musician's guise, with musician friends, one of whom is his teenage daughter, a guitarist. He told me about the group - how they span thirty-three years; how he is proud that his daughter, when school allows, can tour with them. He says they are anti-rock (the way, I think, punk or radical folk can be anti-rock: something uncategorisable, new). Sometimes they'll gig as slow as possible, like a slow-bike race, I guess.
We talked about awakening creative energy. Now's time for a fresh burst of it. Like King Arthur, he said: when England needs him, he's there waking up.
Rough times ahead, however you view it, if the seventies are back economically, and the eighties, around the corner ready to plunder and despoil what's left. Good to know King Arthur and his bards and battlers are already shaking free of the soil: grassroots against intolerance and the dead hands of exploitation and bigotry.
On the way back I bumped into a guy I worked with at Seven Stories, digitising old reel-to-reel tapes. He told me he'd just completed an oral history project in Suffolk, for which he'd bought a CD robot, capable of cutting individual disks, and printing them with unique labels.
He is planning to use the machine, in his musician's guise, with musician friends, one of whom is his teenage daughter, a guitarist. He told me about the group - how they span thirty-three years; how he is proud that his daughter, when school allows, can tour with them. He says they are anti-rock (the way, I think, punk or radical folk can be anti-rock: something uncategorisable, new). Sometimes they'll gig as slow as possible, like a slow-bike race, I guess.
We talked about awakening creative energy. Now's time for a fresh burst of it. Like King Arthur, he said: when England needs him, he's there waking up.
Rough times ahead, however you view it, if the seventies are back economically, and the eighties, around the corner ready to plunder and despoil what's left. Good to know King Arthur and his bards and battlers are already shaking free of the soil: grassroots against intolerance and the dead hands of exploitation and bigotry.
Monday, 4 May 2009
841 - Rendezvous Cafe Window
Sitting inside with tea and fabulous outsized muffins. I like the way that the marks on the window, and the old-fashioned putty-edged iron frames, make the scene outside look like photographic plates from an ancient camera. I thought about cropping the photo, and tried it, but the vestige of frame in the top left-hand corner guides the eye: removing it opens the picture out too much.
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