re:place 2007 (part2)
| The conference’s last day started with the interesting panel on Interdisciplinary Theory in Practice and that one with Christopher Salter’s stimulating talk entitled ‘Unstable Events: Performative Science, materiality and Machinic practices‘. Summing up the performative as a practice to ‘transform the world in ‘real time’.’ | |
| Another highlight was the lecture by Janine Marchessault and Michael Darroch on ‘Anonymous History as Methodology: The Collaborations of Siegfried Giedion, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and the Explorations Group (1951-53)‘. |  |
| The paper addresses Giedion’s influences on and collaborations with the Explorations Group, based on an interdisciplinary seminar held at the University of Toronto at the beginnings of the 1950s, among whose participants was also the at that time barely know professor McLuhan.
The Cross-Cultural Perspectives panel in the afternoon finally led not only in its papers, but as well in the evolving discussion around the given contributions to the demand that still a wider view is needed. | |
| It was kind of perfectly summed up in the statement that the current state is one where just ‘new stories’ come into view, they develop around and describe ‘new realities’, which desperately demand for ‘new contexts’ .. i.e. wider contexts.
A perfect lecture in this regard was Erkki Huhtamo’s talk on ‘Intercultural Interfaces: Correcting the pro-Western Bias of Media History‘, which laid out a framework for from the west overlooked or repressed/subdued (as own) developments. Among other points E.Huhtamo referred to this critical quote by Jack Goody form the book ‘The Theft of History’: |   |
The field of cultural studies, both in its British and its American variant, is chaotic. The base of the latter is virtually exclusively western writings, usually philosophers, often French, who comment upon life without offering much data except their own internal reflections or modern, urban societies. The level of generality of such comments is such that one has no real need of information to enter into the conversation. (Jack Goody, The Theft of History, 2006) | |
... between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Heterotopias, M.Foucault, 1967)
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- re:place 2007 (part2)
- on >> mind the __ GAP* ?
- Published:
- 11.20.07 / 12am
- Category:
- media, perception, performativity
- Author:
- mo
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