The Value of Culture: Culture and the Anthropologists
"Melvyn Bragg continues his exploration of the idea of culture by considering its use in the discipline of anthropology. In 1871 the anthropologist Edward Tylor published Primitive Culture, an enormously influential work which for the first time placed culture at the centre of the study of humanity. His definition of culture as the 'capabilities and habits acquired by man' ensured that later generations saw culture as common to all humans, and not simply as the preserve of writers and philosophers."
(Melvyn Bragg, 2013)
"The Value of Culture: Culture and the Anthropologists", Radio broadcast, Episode 2 of 5, Duration: 42 minutes, First broadcast: Monday 01 January 2013, Presenter/Melvyn Bragg, Producer/Thomas Morris for the BBC Radio 4, UK.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Greek Crisis Explained: Nomint's animated trilogy
"The Greek Crisis explained in 3 episodes. We didn't want to have our hands tied when it came to Greek Financial Crisis. It was a joint decision to set them free, and this is what they came up with; the 'Greek Crisis Explained' Trilogy. This project was basically assigned by us to ourselves and our brief was happily clear-cut: 'Present our very own version of the Greek Crisis'. And the story goes like this; Greece, a young spoiled girl gets devoured by Dept [sic], a humongous monster. EU cannot help Greece out on its own. And when all hope is lost, IMF is brought into play..."
(Nomint)
Fig.1 "Greek Crisis Explained", CONCEPT / DIRECTION / DESIGN / ANIMATION / PRODUCTION: NOMINT nomint.gr/ Creative direction: Christos Lefakis, Yannis Konstantinidis, Direction / Story: Marilena Vatseri, Manos Gerogiannis, Christos Lefakis, Yannis Konstantinidis, Animation: Marilena Vatseri, Manos Gerogiannis, Christos Lefakis, Yannis Konstantinidis, Lead design: George Xanthos (aka Weirdink), Additional design: Manolis Mavris, Sound design: Christos Lefakis, Voiceover: Ross Douglas, Production Team: Aristotelis Michailidis, Marianna Papachristodoulou
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur
"If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engi~eer, whom Levi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it 'out of nothing,' 'out of whole cloth,' would be the creator of the verbe, the verbe itself. The notion of the engineer who had supposedly broken with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Levi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that thee engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse breaking with the received historical discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by a cenain bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes."
(Jacques Derrida)
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, pp 278-294
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Remix Is The Very Nature Of The Digital
William Gibson (Wired, Issue 13.07 - July 2005)
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.
Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
