<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">If people did not produce objects to be sold, we'd all be working very very hard to food, house, and transport ourselves. All too often, intellectuals who have never had to meet a payroll -- or face failure to meet a payroll -- fail to distinguish between a multinational corporation and a mom and pop store. <DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>Howard Rheingold</DIV><DIV><A href="mailto:howard@rheingold.com">howard@rheingold.com</A></DIV><DIV>www.rheingold.com <A href="http://www.smartmobs.com">www.smartmobs.com</A></DIV><DIV>what it is ---> is --->up to us</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On Mar 31, 2007, at 4:15 PM, Cecil Touchon wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"> <DIV class="Section1"><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">If artists are to engage in any dialog of a public nature such as exhibitions, publications, performances and whatnot, how shall they build enough wealth and capital to sustain their activity and carry on a home life (support a family)? Capitalism as in produce objects to be sold? The public dole? Maintain poverty? Work for a corporation?</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">If artists wish to engage in helping to shape the world to come, toward what are they moving in terms of a desired result?</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">Is it enough just to complain about, point out the problems of, or screw with the things you don’t like? Assuming the answer to be no, what else should one’s time be spent doing in order to feel that one is making a difference or helping to move the world in a better direction?</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">I notice that universities are training a lot of people to work for corporations and show them how to find ways to screw the general public out of small enough amounts of money to avoid calling it criminal behavior, yet we all know it is and are being screwed over regularly.</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">How do we train ourselves and our children to shape the world into a place we are not afraid to live in? </SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">How do we establish and honor higher standards of living our lives so as to generate joy and peace?</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">What ideals should we establish among ourselves that we can all support together? </SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">Why should we merely accept the ideals that organizations and governments and corporations want to instill in us for their benefit?</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">Why do we allow ourselves to be thought of as corporate consumers and properties of a state?</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">What would it be like if artists decided to shape a world where artists would want to live in? What would be important to them? How would they do it?</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV> <DIV><P class="MsoAutoSig"><FONT size="3" color="navy" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt;color:navy">Cecil Touchon</SPAN></FONT></P><P class="MsoAutoSig"><FONT size="3" color="navy" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt;color:navy"><A href="http://cecil.touchon.com">http://cecil.touchon.com</A></SPAN></FONT></P><P class="MsoAutoSig"><FONT size="3" color="navy" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt;color:navy">817-944-4</SPAN></FONT><FONT color="navy"><SPAN style="color:navy">0</SPAN></FONT><FONT color="navy"><SPAN style="color:navy">0</SPAN></FONT><FONT color="navy"><SPAN style="color:navy">0</SPAN></FONT></P> </DIV><DIV><FONT size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><FONT size="2" face="Tahoma"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma">-----Original Message-----<BR> <B><SPAN style="font-weight:bold">From:</SPAN></B> idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net [<A href="mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net">mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net</A>] <B><SPAN style="font-weight:bold">On Behalf Of </SPAN></B>Alan Clinton<BR> <B><SPAN style="font-weight:bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> </SPAN></FONT><FONT size="2" face="Tahoma"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma">Friday, March 30, 2007</SPAN></FONT><FONT size="2" face="Tahoma"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Tahoma"> </SPAN></FONT><FONT size="2" face="Tahoma"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma">9:02 PM</SPAN></FONT><FONT size="2" face="Tahoma"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma"><BR> <B><SPAN style="font-weight:bold">To:</SPAN></B> <A href="mailto:dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk">dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk</A><BR> <B><SPAN style="font-weight:bold">Cc:</SPAN></B> <A href="mailto:idc@bbs.thing.net">idc@bbs.thing.net</A>; <A href="mailto:dewharrison@yahoo.co.uk">dewharrison@yahoo.co.uk</A><BR> <B><SPAN style="font-weight:bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Re: [iDC] Art, Lifestyle & Globalisation</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV style="margin-left: 0.5in; "><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV> <DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt">A couple of thoughts here related to the questions you have posed. First, the rhetoric of purity (is there an outside of capitalism?) can be, I think, an endgame producing the sort of corporate artists Stallabras describes and those who are overly concerned that they may make a mistake with their art (or their theory)--no one wants to be called a hypocrite. </SPAN></FONT></P> </DIV> <DIV><DIV style="margin-left: 0.5in; "><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV> </DIV> <DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt">The problem of artists, intellectuals, and capitalism is a real one. Should I refuse to teach at the Georgia Institute of Technology because of its ties to the military industrial complex? If I had refused, when I was just out of graduate school, I would have had little opportunity to critique the system in anything resembling a full-time way--I wouldn't have had those impressionable students either. But then, if I had gone too far in my critiques, I would have been fired. Artists, it strikes me, are in a similar position. How to survive in an organism long enough to destroy or recreate it? </SPAN></FONT></P> </DIV> <DIV><DIV style="margin-left: 0.5in; "><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV> </DIV> <DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt">Rather than attempting to start from a position of purity, perhaps we should recognize that people will find themselves starting out from various positions of impurity within the system. And, there will be many ways of working against this system, of speaking to it in ways that I call, borrowing one of Derrida's metaphors, "Tympanic Politics": </SPAN></FONT></P> </DIV> <DIV><DIV style="margin-left: 0.5in; "><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV> </DIV> <DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt">"In his elucidation of marginalia as a discipline unto itself, Derrida gives a poetic anatomy of the tympanic membrane and its surroundings. The ear is swirling, labyrinthine, and cavelike. Penetrating its depths presents a difficult, frightening prospect. In addition to traversing a maze of passages, one must confront the wall of the tympanum which has the capability to muffle the loudest of noises. If normative discourse/art does not reach the inner ear with the proper sense of volume or urgency, then how is one to suggest the political or historical importance of a particular issue? For the alternative would be to shock the system in such a way as to puncture the tympanum altogether, effectively dismantling the apparatus so that nothing can be heard at all. It would be as if Constantin Brancusi, on the verge of rejecting Rodin's method of clay modeling with taille directe, had shattered The Craiova Kiss with the first hammer strike into formless stone. Derrida's answer to such questions, of course, is always a more specific anatomy of the situation at hand. He suggests that since the tympanum is oblique with respect to the ear canal, its subversion requires an oblique approach as well (taille indirecte?), some form of rhetorical ambush. How does one 'unhinge' something that cannot be shattered?" </SPAN></FONT></P> </DIV> <DIV><DIV style="margin-left: 0.5in; "><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV> </DIV> <DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt">Alan Clinton<BR> <BR> </SPAN></FONT></P> </DIV> <DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><SPAN class="gmailquote"><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt">On </SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN class="gmailquote">3/28/07</SPAN><SPAN class="gmailquote">, <B><SPAN style="font-weight: bold"><A href="mailto:dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk">dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk</A></SPAN></B> <<A href="mailto:dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk">dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk</A>> wrote: </SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt"> Dear IDCs,<BR> <BR> I have been enjoying the recent discussion sparked off by the passing of Baudrillard and would like to move the debate at a tangent to this, but continuing with ideas surrounding forms of social control, power and politics. I am concerned with the domination of the corporate within the cultural and wonder at the position I find myself placed in as an artist and academic working in an educational instituion. <BR> <BR> > Digital media and new technology is reconfiguring our relationship with the world and is also affecting how artists relate with their public. Now, new locative technology can position art in the everyday of people's lives and activities outside the gallery space. Although psychogeography and mobile media enable the 'interactive city' for artists to key into, they also promote ideas of corporatised play in an urban space and tend to be interventionist and intrusive. 'Big brother' media and cctv surveillance allows for few informal, ungoverned social meeting places. This means that artists are having to find interstices between the formal constructed and observed social spaces where unorthodox art can happen to engage with its audience. Just how is such practice being supported within the neo-liberal economic structures of globalistation? Julian Stallabrass suggests that this only produces artists (in Brit Art particularly) who posture as edgy, risky individuals but who are in real terms busy establishing market positions for themselves. The answer lies somewhere in the inter-related issues of art, lifestyle and globalisation. <BR> ><BR> > In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan predicted a technologically enabled 'global village' and issued the warning -<BR> > "Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence." <BR> ><BR> > I would be extremely interested in your thoughts on the extent to which we are 'aware of this dynamic' and offer some questions which might help probe the territory -<BR> ><BR> > Corporations are rebranding themselves around lifestyle, is this influencing creative practice or vice-versa? <BR> > How do the principals and aesthetics of open source and democratic media sit alongside corporate products (iPod etc)?<BR> > How should arts organisations and institutions respond to open networking and ideas exchange, what is a node and a network in cultural terms? <BR> > Are artists the software for the corporation hardware, or the activists in sheeps clothing?<BR> > Where does government funding for the arts sit in the global cultural mix, or is corporate money driving the cultural agenda? <BR> ><BR> With thanks and kind regards,<BR> <BR> Dew </SPAN></FONT>Harrison.<BR> <BR> <BR> <BR> _______________________________________________<BR> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (<A href="http://distributedcreativity.org"> distributedcreativity.org</A>)<BR> <A href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</A><BR> <A href="http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc">http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc</A> <BR> <BR> List Archive:<BR> <A href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</A><BR> <BR> iDC Photo Stream:<BR> <A href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ </A></P> </DIV><DIV style="margin-left: 0.5in; "><FONT size="3" face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="font-size:12.0pt"> </SPAN></FONT><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV> </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc">http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">List Archive:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">iDC Photo Stream:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>