Last Saturday I went to the ArtHack Exhibit closing party at 319 Scholes St, Brooklyn (New York).
Located in an industrial complex in Brooklyn, at night, loooong two blocks from the subway, graffiti all over, small door… that gave way to heaven: young (I was the oldest hacker in that space, but I did not feel that way) energetic happy people tinkering with technology and proudly showing their “toys” (hacks, mashups, creations, or whatever).
I just installed RePress: This plug-in enables you to magically uncensor any website on the internet from your own WordPress installation. Why and How.
The net was all up in arms this week. After the marvelous uprising against SOPA and PIPA, the new battle ground was Twitter`s announcement of country specific censorship. Never mind that they are open about it (unlike Facebook), never mind that they are talking about their offices and employees in those countries where censorship is the law… if you hear “censorship” and “net” get up and scream! Wired has a nice piece about it.
Last week I went to 3 exhibitions/events that have allowed me to see the importance of context in the interpretation (and enjoyment) of a work of art. Note that I differentiate “interpretation” and “enjoyment”, although for many of us, those two concepts go hand in hand. But this is just a short post, so the Phenomenological Aesthetics will have to wait (you can read Dewey, Hartmann, Adorno, Ortega y Gasset, Sartre, etc, etc in the meantime 😉 )
When Émile Durkheim wrote on the concept of anomie (expanding on Jean-Marie Guyau`s work) in his 1897 book Suicide, he spoke of one end of anomie: a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion causing a destructive mismatch (moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations).
This is happening in the XXI century world, in many countries: those totalitarian (military or religious) societies where the social rule, expectations, and repression conform a cage around individuals, deposessing them of their individuality, their aspirations, subtly (or otherwise) imposing a social corset where the individual can not be itself, concentrating only on breathing, surviving.
Tomorrow, January 21st, 2012, NY
As I walk towards my office, I see an ad that makes me sick (as a matter of fact, I see many, but this one points to something other that the consumerism-sexism-excess that we are so dangerously getting used to).
The ad says “Turn now into memories”. How wrong is that?!!
Now is now. Now has to be now. Now should be now. Now has to remain now.
When you strive to “turn now into memories”, you are missing out on the real now.
