| People need to cultivate skills in here-to-there perception. The evolutionary images I'M FORMING ON MY WEB SITE, produced by a throng of artists from around the web, evolve in strange ways. But we can look at them again, perceiving the changes, registering sequences. Committing to memory a sense of how they changed over time. Returning to the best for review. These experiments in depth, memory, and creative practice are an anachronism, perhaps, since today popular philosophy and general discourse array themselves in a scattershot flatness -- all linked together, but gliding past history on the surface. The goal of the exercise is to inculcate a skill which, like addition and subtraction, should be paramount in the education of the young: the acute consciousness of how one thing, or state of affairs, anticipates another. Transition. Knowing it better, how many matters might be attended to that currently languish in seas of bureaucracy, turmoil, and incomprehension? This is the sort of change a society must undertake,-- whereas a society such as I am describing values only transitions to "greater personal safety," to an absolute and total surveillance, to the split of culture into caste polarities of servitude and exploitation, to the sustenance of the stock markets rather than humans, to the quickest possible depletion of forests, fishes, ozone, youthful spirit, historical consciousness, empathy, and truth. |
Dec-31-1997