So here's the first entry.
Why's it got that wierd name? well, I guess i've had a long, and extremely shallow fascination with Albrecht Durer (1471 - 1528) for ages. That sounds pretty pompous - what I mean is that I've had a passing acquaintance with a single one of his woodcuts of a Rhinocerous. (If I can find a copy and work out how, I'll post it). Meanwhile, see it here.
Apart from being beautiful and detailed, it's amazing because, so the story goes, he never actually saw a Rhino. He was amazed and enthralled by the adventurers of teh day, and their incredible accounts of the exotic. He created woodblock prints such as this as the equivalent of tabloids, which allowed others to visualise what those travellers had seen. He mediated and interpreted. Sort of like an identi-kit artist in the police department...
It's sort of a meme, a way we relate to everything now that we see, hear, feel, understand, think. Just about everything has been gathered from elsewhere, edited, interpreted, re-interpreted and spun in a particualr way. So we're always removed from the actual or the source.
I don't go much for those French post-modern theorists - too much self serving jargon. But there's real currency in the idea that we're pretty much willing guineas pigs waiting for media and meaning to be delivered to us, and without critical sensibilities, we will not be able to get through at least a couple of the layers that surround the possibility of the truth.
Of course, the "onion analogy" is probably misleading, as it assumes that if you just keep peeling, there'll be an actual centre at which all will be revealed as actual. More likely, you keep peeling until everything's disappeared, and there's no truth, as there's no anything.
My friend George says that one of the most valued commodities of this new century will be authenticity. People, should they remain corporeal, will want actual experiences... real stuff. To travel and see with one's own eyes. smell and taste with one's own senses. The better vuirtual technology becomes, the higher the value of the actual experience it seeks to replicate. Anyway, that's the theory.
Maybe I'll develop it as I go along.
Maybe I'll just put up pictures of my beautiful kids. (Maybe they're the same thing)
Is there anyone out there?
Why's it got that wierd name? well, I guess i've had a long, and extremely shallow fascination with Albrecht Durer (1471 - 1528) for ages. That sounds pretty pompous - what I mean is that I've had a passing acquaintance with a single one of his woodcuts of a Rhinocerous. (If I can find a copy and work out how, I'll post it). Meanwhile, see it here.
Apart from being beautiful and detailed, it's amazing because, so the story goes, he never actually saw a Rhino. He was amazed and enthralled by the adventurers of teh day, and their incredible accounts of the exotic. He created woodblock prints such as this as the equivalent of tabloids, which allowed others to visualise what those travellers had seen. He mediated and interpreted. Sort of like an identi-kit artist in the police department...
It's sort of a meme, a way we relate to everything now that we see, hear, feel, understand, think. Just about everything has been gathered from elsewhere, edited, interpreted, re-interpreted and spun in a particualr way. So we're always removed from the actual or the source.
I don't go much for those French post-modern theorists - too much self serving jargon. But there's real currency in the idea that we're pretty much willing guineas pigs waiting for media and meaning to be delivered to us, and without critical sensibilities, we will not be able to get through at least a couple of the layers that surround the possibility of the truth.
Of course, the "onion analogy" is probably misleading, as it assumes that if you just keep peeling, there'll be an actual centre at which all will be revealed as actual. More likely, you keep peeling until everything's disappeared, and there's no truth, as there's no anything.
My friend George says that one of the most valued commodities of this new century will be authenticity. People, should they remain corporeal, will want actual experiences... real stuff. To travel and see with one's own eyes. smell and taste with one's own senses. The better vuirtual technology becomes, the higher the value of the actual experience it seeks to replicate. Anyway, that's the theory.
Maybe I'll develop it as I go along.
Maybe I'll just put up pictures of my beautiful kids. (Maybe they're the same thing)
Is there anyone out there?
posted by michael at
12:10 AM
