Group items tagged

The floating layers of sticky note commentary seems to disrupt the grid rule, and the authority of the Web page. I think the "floating sticky note" changes the architecture of participation. kkb

That's really interesting Karen, it does step out of the document grid. Although I think Focault would argue that it's just another type of grid, one vertically layered perhaps? Certainly the power structure is evident in sticky notes in having defined authorship. I've been thinking today that the way to undermine this power system might be in the editing of each others work. By defying authorship the unseen power grid breaks down into bands of content that competes for attention, but isn't attributable to an individual. In this way perhaps the egos tie to it's output is undermined, and creates a truly collaborative document which is difficult to percieve as an individual. Perhaps the grid becomes the prosthetic by which we percieve the collaboration?

Haraway brings up a Foucauldian critique in her article Situating Locations, and more recent feminist theory does too (Ellsworth for example) in that the power grid between players always exists but it is in the recognizing and exposing the location of power that agency and co-existence of difference is possible. Annonymous collaborations can yield irresponsibility to one another. Allucquère Rosanne Stone/Sandy Stone tried such experiments in 3D worlds. Here's a link to a lecture I heard her speak regarding this issue when I was in Finland in the new media program: http://lumen2.uiah.fi/gamesandstorytelling/Sandy_Stone.html The issues you raise with the grid and text with Foucault quotes concerning social gridlocked, power, authority, ownership, collaboration, agency--are so important to consider, especially as educators who need to understand one's operating theory of knowledge and what it means to be human to be cognizant of what and how one is teaching.

Spivak (1988) critiques both Foucault and Deleuze in her article Can the Subaltern Speak? She notes the "failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire, power and subjectivity" (p. 68). Regarding Foucault she faults his lack of recognizing that his theory of ideology is steeped "in its own material production of institutionality" (p. 68). Spivak argues that desire and subject are connected, a unity, and there is a need for theories of subject formation in two senses of representation (darstellung/rhetoric as persuasion & vertretung/rhetoric as trope)-and that "the production of theory is also a practice" (p. 70). She suggests "the possibility of collectivity itself is persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female agency" (p. 78). It is this issue of agency being foreclosed by institutionalized systems (for example, with binary logic of computer databases) that has troubled theories of collective identity whether that identity is "teachers," "students," "women," or any socially formed category. Audre Lorde's question of whether the master's house can be only be changed with the master's tools is relevant to thinking about what we can do with the grid systems of a clockwork world, and how we go about subject formation, activism or mobilization for changing specific systems of oppression in referencing back to the concern of agency, voice, and authority.

Introducing Opera Face Gestures for Controlling Your Browser http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2009/04/introducing-opera-face-gestures-for.html

This is a different history of the dot-coms than I have heard before. Interesting.

Wikipedia: "A meme is a popular neologism for the term cultural trait; that is, a learned thought, feeling, or behavior..."

Webster's: "A meme is a cultural item that is transmitted by repitition in a manner analoguous to the biological transmission of genes"

I've been interested in how Google can function as a model for nonprofit arts associations. I am curious how this is / isn't re-envisioning consumerism. The third paragraph in this section lays out some possibilities to translate into nonprofit arts.