i will kick off a new category during the month of April: hyperreality.
while hyperreality is an enigmatic theme familiar to many regular reader, i will begin an earnest look into what exactly i mean by hyperreality and why it is important to our daily lives . . .
One theme that will commonly reoccur during this investigation is 'mediation'. the manner in which we experience the world is imaginatively (for good or for ill) mediated to us. through mediation (i.e. the difference between writing a letter with a quill, a fountain pen, or a ball point . . . on parchment, post WW2 bleached high bond paper, or on email) we are shaped and shape. Some mediations can be life affirming and others can be alienating.
However, during the Enlightenment the myth of progress proclaimed that mediation (and imagination) was a thing of fancy that could be done away with. Progress is a system of outmoding. 'Out with the old in with the New!'. New things were only important to us in that they were new . . . (no attention to their effect on the mediation of reality). the old is not to be revisited unless it could be economically exploited or treated with a certian amount of ironic disdain . . . kitsch
But new is not always better . . . and new for new sake is immoral in countless ways.
Sometimes, like jazz, the artistic/imaginative value is found in the rough edges, the textures . . . the flaws? is this aspect of our lives being erased by technological sophistication? is this the murder of real?
"I was talking to a guy the other day who was trying to convince me that CD's were better than vinyl because they had no surface noise. And I said "listen mate, life has surface noise." --John Peel
post script: the Trace(s) photo album has been updated
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