Disaster(ous) Logo(s)

Rejects?

I-mage

Inauthentic Hybridity – is that all we can hope for?

“In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.”

– Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice

And with this inspiring remark in mind, I try to motivate myself to carry on designing…

Random thoughts

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Nearly democratized internet access (at least in developed countries) and easy to use web production tools (such as our very own wordpress) make it easier for the average person to make their mark on cyberspace. However, this also facilitates the accumulation of “webjunk” – new media objects that are just a waste of webspace.

But, one person’s junk could be another person’s treasure, right? So, what qualifies as webjunk ? How do we assign value to digital creations? Is there still an implicit hierarchy under which information and content usefulness are categorized and accessed (not just through search engines like Google) ?

What exactly does democratization entail? Free (?) access, free sharing, creative commons, collective [media] intelligence, a free flow of information, a free flowing exchange of creative input, democratization of production tools, globalization, etc ….  ?

Ancient/ Classical Greek is not a dead language. At least not in the academia. Perhaps in parts of the the Greek academia it has already been buried, but not in schools in the U.S. and the U.K. This is not directly related to the ubiquity of the Internet, but it is nonetheless facilitated and accelerated by the advent of global and virtual networking. Now everyone can “speak” Greek thanks to electracy. You can google Greek, translate into Greek, and pretend you know Greek (or at least Greeklish).

But do you? I stumble upon so many misinformed definitions and uses of a language so close (yet so remote) to me, that I can’t help but wonder why some languages are conjured back from the dead.  Does citing Plato and Aristotle or tracing Greek roots legitimize one’s accumulation of knowledge? What purpose does the Greek ancient civilization serve in the academia, besides adding to its pretentiousness? Does it really help “us” understand and explain better? And don’t give me all that “founding fathers of our civilization” crap. Yes, this crap is true, but it is also what is keeping Greek culture from being internationally recognized as part of  a *modern* society. By remembering Greece, you are also forgetting it. Remembering means never knowing it at all.

I can’t really speak my language like I used to. The “native” has migrated to another language, another culture.

Resting on Laurels

STATEMENT

On Saturday night, the Greek police assassinated a 15 year old student.

His assassination was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was the continuation of a coordinated action, by state terrorism and the Golden Dawn, which aimed at university and high school students (with the private universities first), at migrants that continue to be persecuted for being born with the wrong colour, at the employees that must work to death without compensation.

The government of cover-ups with its praetors, having burnt the forests last summer, is responsible for all major cities burning now, too. It protected financial criminals, all those involved in the mobile phone interceptions scandal, those looting the employees’ insurance funds, those kidnapping migrants, those who protected the banks and the monasteries that steal from the ordinary people.

We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society.

There are no excuses, yet they once again try to use conspiracy theories to calm spirits down.

The rage that had accumulated had to be expressed and should not, by any means, end.

Throughout the world we are making headlines, it was about time that people uprise everywhere.

The generation of the poor, the unemployed, the partially employed, the homeless, the migrants, the youth, is the generation that will smash every display window and will wake up the obedient citizens from their sleep of the ephemeral American dream.

Don’t watch the news, consciousness is born in the streets

When the youth is murdered, the old people should not sleep

Goodbye Alexandros, may your blood be the last of an innocent to run

“Shall I project a world?”

(Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49)

Easing myself into the blogging of the disaster. Here we go…

“It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster )

“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing… The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe”.  – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

Yes, but dwelling on the representational and the simulated still does not resolve the identity issue. It does not negate – and does not ultimately discard – the aporia.