Tag Archives: individual

looking into Che

greenpeace-che-guevara-original-50060

i don’t know that much about Ernesto “Che” Guevara — no more than you can read up on Wikipedia with just a quick Googling of the nickname Che that most people know him and his iconic image by — but its really interesting to see how much he’s been creeping up in my subconscious lately, as you or anyone can witness in my last 2 — and now my last 3 blogPosts { if you’re including this one }

i believe in embracing my subconscious, in going with my gut — and its not just because i’m typically overweight or officially obese as some physicians might point out at a check-up

its interesting, too, that on many levels i’m very much attracted to learning more about people that are considered to be counterCultural

if you take a quick peek at his Wikipedia entry you’ll notice that he seemed to accomplish an awful lot during the course of his lifetime — and sometimes his involvement in political arenas were influenced by the direction of US government, at other times he acted and spoke on his own behalf and on the behalf of the people he loved

in many ways Guevara’s political ideologies were actually formulated by his direct participation in the sort of strange global manipulations our US Government involves itself with as a means to push and pull power — instead of working in more diplomatic and authentic ways as part of a diverse and healthy international community, one might say that The United States constantly strives for a sense of total global supremacy and alignment

i think of it as The MacDonaldization of The World

macdonalds-worldwide

lots of the companies i’ve worked for, too, seem to push toward The Concept of One

and its not about The Myth of The Melting Pot, unfortunately

its more of a total control thing

{ for the most part, its almost always a way to save money by reducing corporate costs through human downsizing, sometimes including an attempt to simplify an organization and maybe increase efficiencies — there’s a lot of corporate speak and ‘business logic’ behind all of this Oneness, i’ve practically heard it all and its a very predictable, unsurprising internal brand trend, believe me }

and its all pretty transparent to everyone at this point

we can just smell it now

anyone that can’t feel the current and increasing creepiness over the years — this push toward Total US World Domination — is probably:

  • totally delusional;
  • completely mesmerized and hypnotized;
  • doesn’t want to admit its happening and its been happening for quite some time now;
  • just doesn’t care or isn’t paying critical attention to our current events in the news;
  • is just a vampire, zombie or robot { ever wonder why our entertainment is currently so obsessed and oversaturated with allusions to the undead? its probably because we’re all feeling that way — like a nation of citizens that’s only allowed to wander the earth in search of sweet bargains at the mall — either that or it might be a bit of a subliminal suggestion for how to actually best behave as part of our society };

and this MacDonaldization of The World — or as some might say, this One World we’re pushing for — is definitely more about homogeneity over inclusion or mutual betterment for all The Peoples of the World — we’re trained for robotic agreement and quasi-involvement through mere complicity and laziness

the push of American Consumerism for our citizenship only allows The People to participate in government and major decision-making through a dream-like Freedom of Choice — that’s the new American Dream, that we are free to choose between this elected representative or that one, both of which, are in fact, basically the very same choice

they’re not that different actually

and the other Freedom of Choice we’re so graciously allowed is which corporate brand of products or services to purchase — unless, of course, you get more directly involved and somehow keep your moral standing along the way

i really like this Greenpeace poster depiction of a little boy portraying the marxist revolutionary Che that i put up as the standard intro-visual at the top of this post

there’s no way we look at this little boy as evil or marxist or dangerous, right? if you do, you’ve affiliated some sort of US public relations-driven fear of The Other with this remarkably innocent-looking image — if its not something you can make in the MacDonald’s production line, it must be different, evil and anti-American, right?

its not really that simple, though

and i hope we can all see that this dynamic has been vastly oversimplified for political reasons — there are personal motivations that go far beyond the desire to protect The People of a nation from the big, bad world of terrorism and evil

power and profit reside at the core of our current issues in the world

we need more inclusionary and respectful, collaborative means of working with the world and not against it any longer — and that world that i speak of not only includes the beautiful variety of people we live with in the world, with all of their interesting and eclectic perspectives and ways of seeing the world, but also includes the world itself — we need to literally work with the world to behave in better accordance with the limits we’ve been given, with the rules and regulations of a higher power that has nothing at all to do with God or what Republicans want, but all to do with the realities of our Mother Earth

yes, i said it

Mother Earth

{ you don’t hear that phrase all that much lately — and i’m not exactly sure why, but i have the sneaking suspicion it might have something to do with sovereignty of a Christian maleness established and promoted during The Age of the Enlightenment over the more supposedly Pagan femaleness of our pre-Christian beliefs and behaviors }

we need to start listening to Mother Earth and start working with her again

happy-pregnant-woman

our energy needs to move away from the power of man over natural destiny — this sort of destructive set of energies to control each other and conquer the natural world at all expense — and move toward the collaborative creative destiny and positive potential energies alive in all of us, in all of The Peoples of The World

i don’t think the answer resides in one ism over another

its more of an individual, ethical choice we all need to consciously make and then act upon on a daily basis

we can have no faith in our representatives and the dangling choices we’re given as a means to participate in how we’ll ultimately really change and govern the world

let’s just stop pretending

the experiment in all of these isms show us nothing but failure and pain and corruption so far

and there’s no longer any need to force it — it does us no good

let’s not put any more of our faith and energy into any of these shadowGames and pretenses

if you see me at the mall, just give me a smile and a nod — let’s just acknowledge we’re part of the same open and inclusionary humanness { no new isms, please } and that we’re all now individually fighting the good fight to do right by The People, not just of our nation, but for The Peoples of The World living in collaborative destiny with Mother Earth

on Bataille

 { and other near-future writing project works }

39524828-GBataille

a week ago Carol, Maceo and i were out on Moody Street in Waltham, catching up on some amazing work out at The National Poster Retrospecticus at Lincoln Arts Project — just phenomenal visual design work in the tradition of the handmade rock poster, i highly recommend it

we sort of naturally wandered into the next store space which just so happened to be this cool, independent bookstore called Back Pages — a nice display on Steampunk artwork up at the front of the store, nice jazzy music in the backdrop — it was nice to find a real bookstore again, no nooks, no toys, just shelves and shelves of books with no promise of there being ‘everything under the sun’ in their inventory

anyhow, i picked up 2 books of interest — Slavov Žižek‘s ‘iraq: the borrowed kettle’ and the book ‘Georges Bataille’ by Michael Richardson

at first i thought, ‘huh, super hard to believe that Cosmo Kramer wrote a scholarly tome on this edgy, semi-Surrealist philosopher and fiction writer, really interesting’ but then i realized the author wasn’t Michael Richards, its Michael Richardson

anyhow, i think i want to write something about Georges Bataille eventually — this will be the preliminary research, this little book from Back Pages { thank you }, that and reading ‘Story of the Eye’ by Lord Auch about 5 times in the course of my lifetime — reading the introductory chapters to the Richardson examination of Bataille’s life, work and thought rings a lot of bells with similar thinking i’ve had over the last decade and a theme of ‘interdependence’ might be nice to elaborate on

according to Richardson, Bataille believed that ‘being can never be dissociated from social circumstance’ — in not so many words, that we all need to recognize and live within the greater cosmos, to realize our effect on the universe and likewise the effect of the universe on the individual

individual and the system — the system in this case being the universe, or the more social integration of the individual into the technohumanic ecosystem of other people and the environment, both the natural environment and the one we create for ourselves through development of: new tools; new thoughts and concepts; new self-reinventions of the individual and this cyberSurreal ‘system’ that keeps evovling

at this point in time i think we’ve lost all control — the ideas seem to invent themselves at times, right? or rather, once a new tool is created and released into the mediastream layer of existence the evolution of that tool is either implied or almost automagically invented and released

another topic that comes to mind, and perhaps this is an extension from my DMI thesis ‘confounded: future fetish design performance for human advocacy,’ would be to simply expound upon the concept merely implied by this rather confounding subtitle — i want to talk about using performance art, humor, user experience design and usbaility research practice as a form of activism, as, i guess, a means of social force to test and redesign a more optimal ‘experience’ of the world for real people — i never got to that point in my thesis book, at least i never got to clearly express this concept behind using persona play acting in an active way in real world settings as a way to discover areas of unintended usage in the found systems of the world — or if i clearly articulated on this concept, i don’t think i got to zoom in and focus on just this concept for all that long in the writing and project work

flying back from Valley Forge yesterday i bumped across this passage in ‘Storyteling for User Experience’ by Whitney Queensbury and Kevin Brooks:

‘Anthropologists talk about contextual observation as a way of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar’ 

i see a lot of these flip paradigms subconsciously surfacing in my work, and specifically in my more performative play investigations and in my curatorial endeavors — for instance, for ‘Provocative Objects: the extradition,’ the original call for work, as lifted directly from the website, says:

We are looking for pieces that instigate the viewer-participant-gallerygoer or blur the line and leave the audience wondering. Physical traditional art objects — dynamic prototypes — video, performative and conceptual work — we’re looking to collect an eclectic body of work to provoke viewer-participant exploration, thought, discussion and interaction. There will be a vaguely-defined ‘stageSpace’ for certain event-related ‘performances’ throughout the evening as well as numerous ‘objects’ or installations.

we made it seem like we were simply looking for ‘provocative work’ for the show, or at least that was the almost overt implication — but, i think my theory behind the show was to put together an amazing gallery exhibit that inclusively involved any and every mediatype — all the works you might find along the continuum of creative human expression — and to set up an eclectic body of work in a traditional ‘white box’ gallery space, mix the social factions together, these wonderful little cliques of musicians, artists, poets, performance artists and others, and sociologically see ‘what happens’

the exhibit-event was actually more about the artists and gallerygoers being the quote-unquote ‘provocative objects’

it is my belief that we are the most provocative and unpredicatable creative medium — flesh and blood and feeling — this is why, time and time again, i return to performance art as my primary form of personal expression — and this is why almost everything i do, as i have come to realize, comes from this fundamental core practice of using my own body, my own mind, my own movement and momentary experiential thought as the primary focus of my life’s work — this is how i empathically design through contextual consideration, through imagination, through performance or through imagining my own performance { as myself or as someone else } of a set of activities, tasks, goals, etcetera — it is how i participate and contribute to the world i live in and ultimately to the greater good of a collective conscious life in the world — life, our ultimate time-based medium