Metamedia at Stanford
"Metamedia ia a studio and lab that pursues research and pedagogy in design history and media materialities.
It is located online, in Stanford Archaeology Center, and has worldwide affiliates.
Metamedia combines archaeology and media, with an archaeological and long-term focus on how people get on with things, with media(works) treated as modes of engagement between people and things. Media as artifacts and prostheses as well as systems to convey meaning: we emphasize the materialities of mediation at the heart of design - the way the steel was burnished, the clay was turned, how the vessel connects makers and materials, users and contents in genealogies of containment, portage, representation ... whatever work gets done."
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Roland Barthes: Readerly and Writerly Texts
"The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages."
(Roland Barthes, p.5)
1). Roland Barthes (1970). "S/Z" translated by Richard Miller, Blackwell Publishing.
2). A British one penny coin from 1903, which has been defaced by Suffragettes. Crown copyright.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Internet Cafés: hybrids involving analogue and digital, virtual and real
"Terms like 'Internet café' or 'cybercafé' bring us right back to the 90s along with phrases like 'web page' or 'digital divide', which were invented to describe new hybrids involving analog and digital, virtual and real as well as the present and near future.
It's not that these terms have grown obsolete. It's rather that these 20th-century phenomena they once described have outgrown their terminology. They were born as metaphors, but over time turned into idioms, and their analog parts were the first [to] lose their original meanings. People who did not witness the emergence of the web do not fully understand why browser content is still called a 'page'. It's has also become unclear what public internet access facilities have in common with cafés, yet we continue calling them 'internet cafés' or 'cybercafés'."
(Olia Lialina, 2012-01-10)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Exposition Futur Anterieur: the future of an alternative past
"Articulée autour des trois axes convergents mais néanmoins autonomes que constituent le rétrofuturisme, le steampunk et l'archéomodernisme, l'exposition a pour enjeu de faire dialoguer des productions culturelles issues du passé, qui tentaient à leur époque d'envisager ce que pourrait être le futur - c'est-à-dire approximativement notre postmodernité - avec des œuvres d'artistes actuels qui revisitent le passé et réactivent certaines visions du futur ou de la modernité générées essentiellement entre le dernier tiers du XIXe et la première moitié du XXe siècle.
Structured around the themes of retrofuturism, steampunk and archeomodernism - a concept developed by the academic, critic and curator Arnaud Pierre, the exhibition FUTUR PERFECT aims to create a dialogue between past cultural output that imagined the future, what is essentially our postmodern era - with work from contemporary artists, which in both form and substances refer to the pas [sic] by revisiting and reviving certain visions of the future or of modernity, generated by mainly between the last third of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The exhibition takes a transversal approach, intersecting different aesthetic and temporal veins. A selection of work from contemporary artists will be grouped with older work and documents - each giving perspectives to the others. In addition, one section will be dedicated to cinema and another to the various accessories, devices and artefacts developed by the steampunk community. in a separate section, the exhibition will also include the first French retrospective of the American magazine Retrofuturism, in the form of an installation designed by its originator, the artist and editor Lloyd Dunn."
(Commissaire de l'exposition / Curator : Jean-François Sanz, Galerie du Jour agnès b.)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Empathic Civilisation: our (collective) empathetic consciousness
"Never has the world seemed so completely united-in the form of communication, commerce, and culture-and so savagely torn apart-in the form of war, financial meltdown, global warming, and even the migration of diseases. ...
The human-made environment is rapidly morphing into a global space, yet our existing modes of consciousness are structured for earlier eras of history, which are just as quickly fading away. Humanity, Rifkin argues, finds itself on the cusp of its greatest experiment to date: refashioning human consciousness so that human beings can mutually live and flourish in the new globalizing society…
As the forces of globalization accelerate, deepen, and become ever more complex, the older faith-based and rational forms of consciousness are likely to become stressed, and even dangerous, as they attempt to navigate a world increasingly beyond their reach and control. Indeed, the emergence of this empathetic consciousness has implications for the future that will likely be as profound and far-reaching as when Enlightenment philosophers upended faith-based consciousness with the canon of reason."
(Jeremy Rifkin)
[A noble effort to explain the consequences of post-traditional society framed through a biological deterministic lens.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
