A small segment in which she recounts digging through files and requesting government data to figure out what a sore-thumb building was doing in her hometown of Thiene, Italy. It's stainless-steel, in contrast with a "fascist-looking ivory-coloured building" in the same area. She writes about getting a Nokia phone and hyperconnectivity, the anxiety and strangeness that has come with it, dependence and attachment both reassuring and dreadful, all-consuming. The last two descriptors were moreso my interpretation.
"(2009) When I was little I could not text when eating. It was almost a sacred time. No phones in your hands. It was not respectful of others nor was it of food. That rule annoyed me. I could be reached everywhere, everytime, still not at my kitchen table, not at dinner or lunch time. The same applied to Sunday mass- another sacred space, a bubble, where it seemed like messages could be forwarded to. No signals there.
(2021) Now, it is as if that very signal actually propagated everywhere. No more remote locations, no more 'holy' spaces to get to. I can text anywhere, anytime. I was dreaming of that when I was a teen. I feel oppressed now about it. Do I really want to be available at all times, by just everyone?"
"Drawing on the central topic of this issue, is aesthetic, artistic, or political radicality in art still possible under the neoliberal condition?" < One of the primary questions of this roundtable of eight, and a question that has been gnawing at me for some time after reckoning with neoliberalism alongside Han and Berger. Admittedly didn't get to finish read the whole today, as my eyes couldn't focus and everything i read slipped out of me like slime (complaint of a covid positive in early September). "If action presupposes intentionality, teleology, act, an interest that conditions and holds together a movement occupied and preoccupied with things (pragmata), then mutation, whose only possible event is that of the continual variation of nature, constitutes the nonbeing of the pure heterology that becomes without arriving at anything, nor at anything's beginning, because it does not set out from any particular thing. Mutation performs the absolute pause of the horizon of action, of the act, of being. Nothing can act where the only event is that of variation, the open wound of becoming that does not act, does not arrive at declarations, borders, edges."
Freeform radio and the ethics of radio at large are absolutely fascinating to me, beyond that they tend to mean the world to me. It's such a glittering field and interest in my eyes i often get overwhelmed... An approach to radio programming in which a station's management gives the DJ complete control over program content...Their ideology tends to be liberal or radical, though their program content is not usually overtly political...Many DJ's mix diverse musical styles, engage in monologues between music sets and/or accept callers on the air...The only rules that free-form DJ's are bound by are FCC regulations such as station identification and restrictions on foul language."
Freeform has also been altered in the sense that, today, some radio stations exist soley online... and thus are free from the restrictions and regulations. They are rarely listened to as often as broadcasting/traditionals are, though- you kinda have to know they exist before you can listen to them. A great example of this is BRAD, Bennington College's radio station. It goes silent pretty often because monitoring and upkeep is slim to none, but those rich kids can say whatever the fuck they want and it can be pretty entertaining.
I applied to a job as a library page and talked big game about my primarily aspiration, becoming an archivist. This thread reminded me to get back on it, meaning studying and digging into what archiving is, does, means [to me and others]. Here archival work is in my favorite form: utterly detached from institutions. The big trouble with this is suddenly we can't really gather all of this practically, host it anywhere practically. There's gotta be something out there, a way to do so without relying again on a corporation/etc like Google Drive, but for now i don't know what that is, or how it would be possible to get that space big enough and known enough to shelter and preserve what all rogue archivists save.
Just... browse. Nearly any term you could wish for within the web revival movement's grasp.
This is moreso for me to remember; i went to a reading hosted by Sinister Wisdom, a trans-inclusive multi-cultural lesbian journal. It consisted of three writers/readers, Rachel Edelman, Ari B. Cofer, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. All three had works that spoke to me, but i found Sycamore's website as i was relaying my thoughts on the readings to a new friend. I really like how the first quote, from a review by Sam Sax, describes her book... it really got the nail on the head, frankly. She's an archivist, a researcher, a collage artist in words, information, feelings. "[Touching the Art] blurs the lines of genre convention and polyvocality by assembling a multivoiced collage of texture, feeling, and evidence. Sycamore works with archival materials, resuscitated and reconstructed memory, and interviews to produce a collection that's part art history, part art theory, and part memoir, collapsing the spaces between authorship and authority, and between knowledge production and inheritance... "
I learned of her work from the same Sinister Wisdom reading that Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore presented at. The spreadsheet is self-explanatory, and has a categorization system that includes whether the author is a person of color and/or queer.
Tonight isn't the night for deep dives and introspection, only for sweeping. I need to return to this- the point of this page is to return to all these links at some point, but this one is web-specific. The ABC Glossary "is part of a framework and glossary for An Anti-colonial Black Feminist Critical Media Ecology, or ABC Glossary for short, a growing reimagining of computing terminology from hardware to software - beyond the conditions of e-colonialism and toward abundant relationship between humans, technology, and nature." It's got a handful of useful questions to get you to start understanding your place in computing, literally, physically, and whatever the in-between that could describe the internet's precarity of immaterial and material, who knows... again, not really a thinking night for me. I'm blanking hard. We'll come back soon, though. The website's two primary inspirations (a website is a room and chimeric worlding) are also very compelling.
"Le Guin's website is a relic of an author attempting to gain control over how she was remembered on the internet—history's largest documentation project. For that reason, it is a small archive of her dreams: a restless imagination looking for new frontiers; a model of age and regress; the essential quality of which is change."
The word "tasteful" always kind of puts me off, as often it's used as an insult, as something a queer cannot be- but here it's normal, i think. It's a nice concept but really, really hard to condense any further than it's been condensed without stumbling over my words, as i just discovered by trying to relay it to my best friend on facetime and my high roommate. Again, nice concept. I constantly feel the need to rearrange my phone and its stupid miserable little apps. I usually only use instagram and tumblr over web browsers now. Anyway, tangent- at the bottom of the article it links to an are.na collection of people's "PBS of the internet"s (really of the phones), which i think is really cute. It's intimate, to me.