Friday, April 3, 2009

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] NEW MEDIA: USER'S BEHAVIOUR, SOCIAL SYSTEMS, AND THE BODY POLITIC

Dear Yasminers and friends,

Allow me first of all to thank Ricardo and Roger for inviting me to participate in your discussions.

I would like to link the very interesting point made by Eugienio, which opens a one month discussion about the impact of new media on social behaviour and creativity, to the creative experience. He explains how the new media brings local into global and vice versa. I would like to apply his statement to creativity and put on a new question: has new media created a new art or has it created a new artistic expression?

In other terms my point is whether new media is a powerful tool for creativity in different art fields or whether it has introduced new concepts and new ideas which had permitted the emersion of a new form of art.

Generally speaking if we look back to the art history we know (as defined by J. Rancière) that in the 19th century fine arts had a representative "scope". Creativity kept on serving that aim. In the 20th century art moved towards expressivity. With the introduction of new media in the 60' something else has raised. P. Weibel thinks that digital image has changed man's conception. Movement, speed, transformation, etc. are considered as the main essence of contemporary artistic forms. What new media is entailing in connection to artistic expression? Is new media just a tool or an art form?

Coming back to Eugenio's point can we associate the "tool" and the "art from" or shall we keep them separated?

Teresa


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Teresa Wagner
e-mail: t.wagner@unesco.org
Http://portal.unesco.org/culture

-----Message d'origine-----
De : yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr [mailto:yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr] De la part de Eugenio Tisselli
Envoyé : jeudi 2 avril 2009 21:22
À : yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
Objet : Re: [Yasmin_discussions] NEW MEDIA: USER'S BEHAVIOUR, SOCIAL SYSTEMS,AND THE BODY POLITIC


Dear Yasminers,

First of all, I would like to thank Ricardo Mbarkho and Roger Malina for having me as a respondent in our new topic: "New Media: User's Behaviour, Social Systems, and the Body Politic"... I hope that we will have an interesting exchange!

I would like to start by adressing one of the main questions that Ricardo has proposed: "Are global and local systems two separate entities, or is it about one place?" ... for too long, a tendency to think about the local and the global as two separate -yet interacting- social spaces has prevailed. But what lies in between? Do we have to make a quantum leap to travel between those two spaces? And where would we "land" if we did the jump from our locality into "the global"?

As Bruno Latour proposes in his revealing book "Reassembling the social" (by the way, I'm not a sociologist ;), we can "expand locally everywhere", provided we can trace the links between different localities. The theory of network topology, together with interactive visualization technologies, can become valuable tools for tracking the myriads of connections in the increasingly complex system that our world is becoming.

Think about your mobile phone for a while: a symbol of the globalized practice of ubiquitous communication, and yet an intimate and personal object with which you can contact your colleagues or reach your loved ones... whether they are physically near or far. Your mobile phone turns you into a moving communications hub, a tool for invoking dispersed localities and bringing them into your own. But think also about the thing itself: the screen, the plastic case, the circuits and microchips... where do all these parts come from? Components from all around the world, suddenly in the palm of your hand. And while mobile phones are being used more and more as tools that serve not only for communication in daily life, but also as media in which creative and artistic practices are based, they are also the direct cause of many conflicts which (seem to) happen "out there", in the "global space". If we trace the route which ends in the palm of our hands, between the circuits in our mobile phones, we will almost certainly find its origin in Central Africa, where brutal wars are being financed greatly through the exploitation of Coltan, a metallic ore mined mostly in Congo which has become an indispensable material for the manufacturing of consumer electronics... such as our phone.

Viewing "the local" and "the global" as two separate entities tends to obscure the links, routes and connections that we must be aware of, if we want to make a more humane, rational and respectful usage of technology, or of consumer products in general. We should be able track the far-away localities from which our own local things come from; otherwise, we will find ourselves blinded by the distance. Quoting Latour, "... this tracking may end up in a shared definition of a common world"... sounds like it might be worth giving it a try! But how do we start?

Looking forward to hearing from you all...

Best wishes,
Eugenio.

Eugenio Tisselli Vélez
cubo23@yahoo.com
http://www.motorhueso.net


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