Morgan Adamson just left. She stopped over to chat because we’re talking about producing some publications, talks, and whatnot around the histories, writings, and thought from past publication / network ideas such as Radical Software and Guerrilla Television, among others.
One idea which we considered was a primer of the writings within RS of the network theorist, Paul Ryan.
Everyone is now talking about networks . It seems we need to avoid the “massive encompassing one” or “the one” that would destroy autonomy . If you begin at a particular point with an expertise (Lloyd Kahn and doming) you should work towards orienting your network around that existing interest. (Paul Ryan; Towards an Information Economy: RS Vol. 3 Fall 1971)
Ryan’s interest and ideas around networks is particular interesting to me in that, similarly to how one might think about publication in an expanded form, it subsumes media in favor of method, looking at HOW we move information and desire around, and with WHO, instead of favoring the tools we use, the WHAT.
I’m very excited to bring these ideas – and individuals who played a part in energizing them at the time of inception within Minneapolis – into the larger, growing conversation here at the shop.
“Social Practice and so-called Place-Making place prominence on ‘social linearity,’ as if real life had a story, a trajectory; that’s the joy of it – life is chaotic and random. History is a fiction of facts. To employ the tools of ‘history making’ within socially engaged art relegates individuals into objects, chess pieces, as opposed to complex subjects allowed to grow and change. The great trick that is neo-liberal thought is to convince the world that people cannot achieve any betterment or understanding of themselves in relation to another without quantifying our relationships, figuring out where love and death begin and end.”
On Sunday the Food Enough? group met at the shop and proceeded to move out to the park with frequent Food Enough? conversant, Monica Haller to discuss her on-going collaboration with University of Minnesota soil scientists, Soil Lab.
The discussion centered on how we can arrive at discussions around things like soil straight on, purely through a lens of environmental effects and degradation, but that by widening our lens, looking at soil allows us an avenue to think beyond purely the organic landscape to a space of questioning that opens us up to consider the social landscape as well.
This guy was roaming around the block today. From house to house, investigating. I can help but think of Ben Weaver’s ideas around encountering “wildness,” or ones ability to inhabit the same. I suppose encountering this lady also made me think of The Situationists, how the chicken broke through my regular understanding of my surroundings, who and what inhabits it, its possibilities.
Almost here… the first edition of Publics and Publication Nº1; Emory Douglas. Rumor has it that our neighbor, Marlon James, is going to write the forward to it as well!
Wake up tomorrow morning, for the sake and justice of the world you truly want to live in and ask, “what can I do today?” We would argue, nine time out of ten, “getting arrested” is a likely consequence of those very thoughts if you are really thinking about the well being of yourself and ALL those around you. If you equate “good works” and “legality” as one in the same you need to sit down for some long thought. They are not. More than not they are mutually opposed. Throughout history, never more than now, has free thought been so compromised. Act as an individual for the sake of all individuals. Free yourself to free us all.
