Jim, everything you use to create your work--including the audio--was
developed and facilitated either by a government agency or by a
corporation or by both. You're buying in to all of that when you make
your art--which I'd go so far to say is not really yours at all. I'd
suggest--if you haven't already--that you take a look at the whole
range of what's happening these days with computers and computer art
and you'll see that bigger is better and that corporations have the
last word--and the last laugh, I guess,--over individuals of limited
means. I'm afraid that you're at the mercy of your tools, which are
busily surpassing and supplanting you even as you "create". You could
argue that literatures of the oral or written kind also have their
technologies, but writing a play, a poem, a story, requires the tools of
paper--and at the very least--a burnt stick of wood (so I guess the
technology of fire-making can and should be brought into our
conversation), and the final--necessary tools--of a vital imagination,
talent and a clear mind. But here's the point (yet again)--when
you're writing with that burnt stick and paper you are not
automatically thrown into a foot race with a BMX that requires the
either or choice of paying big bucks to continue to be relevant (if you
were at all relevant in the first place), or of screwing yourself into a
hive of "creative" individuals backed by a corporation headed by a
Gates or a Jobst, or [name your rat] here.
The operative word is human freedom and the power of the Imagination,
which is taking a beating with the rise of computer games and computer
game "thought", Pixar, and all the other junk that floods the brain
from a zillion ports, aps and plug-ins, and all the future orifices that
corporations will cut into our consciousneses, if we allow them to.
You don't have to give up your privacy, and your individual freedom with
a burnt stick and a piece of paper, but with a computer and the net you
are subjected daily to a trillion little cuts to your privacy and
ultimately, to your self and your future selves.
I'd like to think that burnt sticks and pieces of paper are not actively
plotting to subvert, redirect, outthink, use, tag, rob or harness us in
the way that computers and the net seem set to do.
So you were an English major, Jim? And you have a degree in it? And you
think you've read more poetry than I have (at least?).
You've given all those old crusty poets a proper read before you gave
them a kick in the pants? David Jones? Basil Bunting? Shakespeare??
Blake's Jerusalem? (Gasp!)
You must be very clever indeed.
Here's a little poem rumored to have been written by Durac:
Age is of course a fever chill
That every physicist must fear
He's better dead than living still
When he's past his thirtieth year.
(Farmelo, Grahme, The Strangest Man, pg. 131)
Well, James Clerk Maxwell he's not. Humphrey Davy he's not. Both of
these physicists were actually pretty good poets.
I'm sure you've read those gentlemen, already, Jim, so this is no real
news for you since you've read at least as much as I have.
Jess
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