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Traceless takes inspiration from the Lake District, the Gerry
Charnley Round and Gerry Charnley himself. Charnley is little
remembered, but was a prolific fell runner, orienteer and climber
who founded the Karrimor International Mountain Marathon (KIMM),
now the OMM. In his early 50s he tragically died on Helvellyn, his
namesake Round was established in his memory by his friends. The
ethos of the Round is on self-sufficiency and leaving no trace -
the runner is encouraged to plan their own route to visit all the
checkpoints, then navigate that route, creating their own line from
multiple route choices. Inspired by the concept of the Gerry
Charnley Round and its journey over the Lakeland fells, runners
Geoff Cox and Heather Dawe have each spent time exploring and
running the route. They are poets, writers and artists as well as
fell runners and Traceless is a collaboration between them that
celebrates their love for the fells and how spending time in them
inspires them creatively.
Social change does not simply result from resistance to the
existing set of conditions but from adapting and transforming the
technical apparatus itself. Walter Benjamin in his essay "The
Author as Producer" (written in 1934) recommends that the `cultural
producer' intervene in the production process, in order to
transform the apparatus in the manner of an engineer.This
collection of essays and examples of contemporary cultural
practices (the second in the DATA browser series) asks if this
general line of thinking retains relevance for cultural production
at this point in time - when activities of production, consumption
and circulation operate through complex global networks served by
information technologies. In the 1930s, under particular conditions
and against the backdrop of fascism, a certain political optimism
made social change seem more possible. Can this optimism be
maintained when technology operates in the service of capital in
ever more insidious ways?
Great mix of contributors including Esther Leslie Cutting-edge
critical theory - includes an analysis of the film 'The Yes Men'
Explores how & why new technologies - like the internet - have
changed the relationship between mass culture and high art Focuses
on the economics of cultural production - the power relation
between producers and consumers The interaction between culture and
economy was famously explored by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
They coined the term 'Kulturindustrie' (The Culture Industry) to
describe the production of mass culture and power relations between
capitalist producers and mass consumers. Their account is a bleak
one, but one that continues to be relevant, despite being written
in 1944. Today, the pervasiveness of network technologies has
contributed to the further erosion of the rigid boundaries between
high art, mass culture and the economy, resulting in new kinds of
cultural production charged with contradictions. On the one hand,
the culture industry appears to allow for resistant strategies
using digital technologies, but on the other it operates in the
service of capital in ever more complex ways. critical texts that
explore issues at the intersection of culture and technology. The
editorial group are Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, Anya Lewin, Malcolm
Miles, Mike Punt & Hugo de Rijke.
'Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the
thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of
politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the
state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state
activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of
public administration until the first half of the twentieth
century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation.
The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which
has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile
organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself
terrorist.'Following the words of Giorgio Agamben (from his 2001
article 'On Security and Terror'), security has become the basic
principle of international politics after 9/11, and the 'sole
criterion of political legitimation'. But security - reducing
plural, spontaneous and surprising phenomena to a level of
calculability - also seems to operate against a political
legitimacy based on possibilities of dissent, and stands in clear
opposition to artistic creativity. Being uncalculable by nature,
art is often incompatible with the demands of security and
consequently viewed as a 'risk', leading to the arrest of artists,
and a neutralisation of innovative environments for the sake of
security.Yet precisely the position of art outside the calculable
seems to bring about a new politicisation of art, and some speak of
art as 'politics by other means'. Has art become the last remaining
enclave of a critique of violence? Yet how 'risky' can art be?The
contributors to DATA browser 04: CREATING INSECURITY address these
questions at the intersection of art, technology, and politics.
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Haunted Air (Hardcover)
Ossian Brown; Contributions by Geoff Cox; Introduction by David Lynch
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R917
R745
Discovery Miles 7 450
Save R172 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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The roots of Hallowe'en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic
festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and
the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil
separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and
ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not
unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan
festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead
were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or
in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging 'soul cakes' in
exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms
at bay. From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root
and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily
on fresh lore, consuming half-remembered tales of its own shadowy
origins and rituals, Hallowe'en was reborn in America. The pumpkin
supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and
celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival's
intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared
into the faces of the living and the living, ghoulishly masked and
clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back. The photographs in
Haunted Air provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of
this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important
document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the
dead: family portraits, mementos of the treasured, now
unrecognisable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for
pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands
of strangers.
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