Armin wrote:
>As I have tried to point out in the past, without much success, the
>material layer of networking also matters. Arts and humanities
>scholars have a tendency to ascribe too much importance to what you
>could call the semantic and symbolic layer. No email from Serbia
>would have found its way to the syndicate list withoute having a
>route to travel on. Those routes are provided by people who also
>have cultural and political ideas, so that those human-technical
>assemblages also have meaning, if you so want, something that should
>also be considered, hwever, without tipping over into a one-sided
>materialism
This is an excellent point, and one we've been trying to make through
our work at Lighthouse in exposing the material infrastructures on
which our experience of the internet is built. We're currently
exploring this in an exhibition called 'Immaterials'
(http://is.gd/immaterials), and the notion of infrastructure, how we
perceive, understand it and act within it, was a major topic of our
Improving Reality conference last month. When the talks are up, I'll
post them here.
Thanks for raising these excellent examples from the
former-Yugoslavia, Armin. Have you got any references you could
point me to for further reading?
best,
--
Honor Harger
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: +44 7765834272
http://about.me/honor
Work
Artistic Director, Lighthouse, Brighton, UK
http://www.lighthouse.org.uk
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