http://challengerpart2.wordpress.com/

I have also spent some time listening and watching some documentaries and talks relative to control and causes of human behaviour.

Pinker, S. [Internet] The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 1 hr 52 min 25 sec – Apr 26, 2007 <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5328790388262397286&q=steven+pinker&total=26&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1> [Accessed 7th August 2007]

Curtis, A. [Internet] The Century Of The Self – Part 1 of 4 – By Adam Curtis, 58 min 25 sec – Aug 8, 2006 <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151&q=adam+curtis&total=298&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1> [Accessed 7th August 2007]

Curtis, A. [Interent] The Century of the self, 2 of 4, 58 min 37 sec – Aug 6, 2006, <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-678466363224520614&q=adam+curtis> [Accessed 7th August 2007]

Curtis, A. [Internet] The Century of the self, 3 of 4, 58 min 34 sec – Aug 11, 2006, <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6111922724894802811&q=adam+curtis> [Accessed 7th August 2007]

Curtis, A. [Internet] The Century of the self, 4 of 4, 59 min 0 sec – Apr 1, 2007, <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1122532358497501036&q=adam+curtis> [Accessed 7th August 2007]

I have finally managed to find some time to work on the images from the exhibition in June at Gallery HOT. These are only a selection of some of what was shot but these at least give some idea of how the exhibition was presented and set up. There are documentary videos of the images on  the actual frames but i will post these later.

Nathan, J. (1999) Sony: The Private Life. Harper Collings Publishers. PP27-28

“Numerous external influences- ideas, artefacts, technologies, styles of dress- have been incorporated into Japanese culture, so much so that Japan has often been called a country of imitations and imitators. But such as designation is misplaced, because a central aspect of Japanese historical experience has been that most such borrowings, while very influential, have been thoroughly ‘Japanized’, that is, organized or structured to principles specific to the Japanese experience or modes of life.
This capacity of the Japanese to absorb, in their own way, many external influences, has been vividly described by Endo Shusaku, in his novel Silence, in the powerful metaphor of the Japanese swamp. This ‘swamping’ capacity can be identified in many arenas- those we have analyzed above, as well as the transformation of Christian beliefs and sects analyzed by Robert N. Bellah and recently by the eminent Japanese psychoanalyst Kawai. On a more mundane level this capacity for Japanization can be seen in the transformation of baseball practice- vividly described by Robert Whiting- or of the basic premises and organization of the Jamaican Rastafari movement in Japan.
But the Japanization of foreign artefacts, ways of thought, and patterns of behaviour has been carried out, as is the case with regard to processes of change and movements of protest, in a double-pronged manner. On the one hand, these foreign influences, insofar as they are incorporated into Japanese life, are often consigned to segregated areas; at the same time, their basic premises are radically transformed on both an institutional and an ideological level, so they become congruent with the basic ontological vision and conceptions of social order prevalent in Japan. On the other hand, under the impact of these foreign influences, new, highly developed modes of discourse and collective and cultural consciousness have developed in Japan.
Among the most important and dramatic such transformations were, as we have seen, the Japanization of Confuscianism and Buddhism- two major Axial civilizations. We noted the transformation of orientations that stressed the chasm between the transcendental and mundane orders in a more ‘immanentist’ direction, and the parallel transformation of some of their basic premises and concepts of the social order- manifest, for instance, in the change from the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, a remarkable change in view of the obvious dependence of the Japanese tenno emperor (ten= heaven) on the Chinese model, but without the Chinese version’s conception of authority and implication for the accountability of rulers. Unlike China, where the emperor was, in principle, ‘under’ the Mandate of Heaven, in Japan he was seen as in close touch with heaven- and heaven itself was on the whole conceived in sharply transcendental terms- and not accountable to anybody. Similarly, the strong universalistic orientations inherent in Buddhism, and more latent in Confuscianism, were subdued and ‘nativized’ in Japan.
Thus, the Japanization of Buddhism and Confuscianism entailed, not just the addition of local color, but the transformation of the basic conceptions in line with the basic premises of Japanese civilization. The same processes have been operative in the modern period with respect to Western ideologies and forms of social organization. One interesting aspect of the Japanization of Buddhism, Confuscianism, and various Western univerlistic ideologies has been that the Japanese bearers of the ideologies have not attempted to reexport their versions; this in itself attest to the weakening of their universalistic, often missionary orientations. Japan has, however, attempted in modern times to put itself at the head of an Asian counteroffensive against the West, which has entailed an expansionist turn. This constituted, as Johann Arnason has observed (in private correspondence), ‘a radical transfiguration of particularism, in which Marxism played a very ambiguous, complex and intriguing role: on the one hand, Marxism was- as Mauyama has argued- the symbol of consistent and uncompromising opening to the West, but on the other hand, it was indirectly instrumental in the radicalization of particularism.’
Nevertheless, it is probably Japan’s continual encounter with China, with Confusciansim and Buddhism, and later with the West, and the continual necessity to distinguish itself from China and the West without either denying the outside values or admitting their superiority, that has led to the development of the intense, complex and sophisticated mode on ideological discourse that distinguishes Japan from most other non Axial civilizations. This highly developed discourse has paradoxically constituted a conscious and highly reflexive denial of the type of ideologies grounded in the premises of Axial civilizations; but at the same time it has been couched in terms derived from these ideologies.”

Eisenstadt, S.N. (1996) Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. The University of Chicago Press. PP305-307.

“Japan has always lived with these other civilizations but never been one of them- continuously maintaining its conscious collective distinctiveness and the distinctiveness of its civilizational premises.”

Eisenstadt, S.N. (1996) Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. The University of Chicago Press. P308.

Books that were scanned:

Hendry, J. & Raveri, M. (ed.) (2002) Japan at play: The ludic and the logic of power. Routledge.
Cortazzi, H. (1987) Victorians in Japan: In and around the Treaty ports. The Athlone Press, London.
Nathan, J. (1999) Sony: The Private Life. Harper Collings Publishers.
Massarella, D. (1990) A world Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press.
Sugimoto, Y. (1997) An Introduction to Japanese Society. Cambridge University Press.

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press.

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture.

Manchester University Press.
Both deceptively old looking by account of their dust jackets being removed to look like all the other old books. Yes, this was a library, which appeared to despise dust jackets.

There is little else to report really because of other pressing matters but I hoped to get somewhat on track soon. Need to produce a working abstract of my academic paper in the assailable future.

“Victorian society promulgated revolutionary social and technological processes but feared the disorder it expected it their wake. Consequently it imposed on itself a regime of conformity and prudence. On one hand it could promote both social and global mobility as its central myth (Gay 1985:65). On the other it could represent itself as a hierarchical social order fixed by tradition and by moral and even biological laws. It was a culture torn between the retentive values of work, savings and self-restraint and the sensuous prospects and fantasies of spending and consuming which wealth made increasingly possible. In the realm of travel Victorian society could generate both the most fearless and remorseless adventurers and the most timid stop-at-home daydreamers. Each was equally representative of their world.
Many of these oppositions are condensed in two singularly modern conditions which became common in the Victorian period and were immediately catered for by the new culture of travel and its imagery. They were boredom and the yearning for novelty.
Boredom was a word almost unknown in English speech until the eighteenth century (Spacks 1995). It became ubiquitous as the routines of mass society became widespread. While boredom was normally seen as a listless and uncreative state of mind, in some instances it could be regarded as a form of psychic opposition to modern life’s repetition and conformity or as a defiance of the bourgeois enthusiasm for work and productivity. Boredom  could also be seen as a creative expression of dissatisfaction which might drive the individual towards change, as in Baudelaire’s 1859 poem Le Voyage (see Petro in Petro 1995).
The pursuit of novelty was in part the solution to the problem of boredom; in part it was the product of the commodification of the idea of progress. Moral and social evolution were replaced by the illusory transformations accompanying consumption. This created an existence passed in a state of both permanent curiosity and managed dissatisfaction. Boredom and novelty each became a function of the other.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP57-58.

As ‘The man needed the home to put himself back together’ (Osborne, P.D. 2000) Osborne continues to cite the Victorian home as the conduit of an opposition based in patriarchy whereby:

“This space, the home, was as much a part of the institution of photography as the studio or the camera. In the process of receiving photographic images into the home the two modes of repression and denial- the domestic and the colonial- were brought together. They spiralled inseparably around each other like the two helices in the structure of DNA one transmitting the principle of the integrated male subject, the other that of social dominance. In a very particular manner, the outside world was being domesticated.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP66-67.

What Osborne describes as a feature of the Victorian Home could also be applied to the modern day perspective of the commutational car. Osborne himself refers to other ‘vessels’ when talking of Jules Verne:

“Rather than indices of adventurousness, Verne’s fictional vessels- the ships, submarines and rockets- embodied for the reader an inclination to be enclosed and, as Barthes writes, ‘of having at hand the greatest possible number of objects, and having at one’s disposal and absolutely infinite space’ (Barthes 1972:66). ‘A ship’, he adds, ‘is a habitat before being a means of transport’ (Barthes 1972:66). […] Yet, for those who did embark, travelling might still be undertaken in a variety of enclosures, in vehicles such as the coach, the steamer, the railway car, each extensions of the house, mobile homes from which the world could be observed by the lonely and untouchable consciousness in detached and leisurely mastery through the frame of a window.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. P61.

With regards to the act of tourism, Osborne looks to the photographs of Martin Parr and refers specifically to the image of two tourist groups in front of the Acropolis in Greece. One group is Japanese, the other European or Western. To me the Japanese group of tourists are most significant here. As Osborne notes:

“The Westerners, abstracted in tourism’s word, have their backs to the camera as they attend to the discourse of the tour-guide. The Japanese, given up to tourism’s optic, face forward, arrange themselves for the group photograph under the monument. Perhaps by means of this global and yet so Western setting they wish to demonstrate their desire to conform to the practices of the world system to which their wealth admits them, and at the same time display their difference within it. They too are being seen seeing; their presence on the world stage is also being confirmed, legitimated, by the all seeing global subject, the imaginary eye of world culture through which tourism peers. Perhaps they look towards an absent Japan, their families, their future selves in a domestic posterity recalling the moment back home.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. P71.

This comment is particularly interesting because it suggests that the Japanese have a different relationship with the medium of photography and inevitably tourism:

“As tourists, we seek authenticity, an object, a truth somehow precedent to all representation- and then take photographs, lapsing back into the realm of image.
This modulation between the hope for the encounter with singular authenticity and the actual immersion in a plurality of representations is a constant in tourism. In the accidental Classicism into which they have assembled themselves, in which they come to resemble and thereby identify themselves, in which they come to visit, Parr’s Japanese on the Acropolis seem to express a desire to come to rest in something beyond tourism’s unstable representations. […] Like all tourist, his tourists are caught up in, and revel in, a global entertainment of ever-shifting bodies and iconolatry- and yet appear to yearn for stasis and fixity, for meaning, for certainty. In this the tourist system iterates the old Romantic promise of authenticity, of the rediscovery of the unity between subject and object, of an intimacy between the object and it representation. Its historical roots lie primarily in that promise.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP72-73.

The word tourist could arguably be synonymous with the word photographer:

“Tourists use the photographic images of tourism, including their own photographs, as both proofs, records and mementos of tourist actualities while accepting these same actualities as set-up performances, idealisations or romanticisations- fictions. Photography uses actuality- a view, a national type- to produce fictions for tourism; tourism uses these fictions to produce its own actualities which lie beyond truth and representation. They are akin to Kermode’s ‘necessary fictions’, fictions that permit actual events to take place. The fiction zero, for example, permits us to begin counting. They might also be likened to Pierce’s ‘performative metaphor’, a sign which makes something happen.
As with the enjoyment of all types of fiction, much of the pleasure of tourism lies in its text- in the symbolic forms that construct its worlds which are at once actual and virtual. Tourists read the images, play with the signs, disdain them or are seduced by them, and add a few of their own to the system. All over the world, as Jonathan Culler writes, tourists are ‘engaged in reading cities, landscapes, and cultures as sign systems’ (Culler 1989:155). Playful sign-surfing and casual textual analysis now form one of the apparent freedoms of our reflexive cultures. Like the right to reverie of the nineteenth century’s post-Romantic culture, it represents the apparent triumph of individual subjectivity, that is freedom. Here, perhaps, we can locate the clearly ‘postmodern’ character of the tourist’s activity.
But tourism if not entirely the preserve of the consumer-flaneurs, chilled ironists content to drift in the wakes of the Situationists or Baudrillard’s fan club. And the ‘pleasure of the tourist text’ is not without a certain desperation. Once again, as with the viewer of the photograph, the desire for he authentic eternally returns, unrenounceable. Some will be seeking in tourism the reassurance of a world re-ordered by the cliché, hoping to pass through the fluidity of fiction to the solidity of myth.”

Osborne, P.D. (2000) Travelling Light: Photography, travel and visual culture. Manchester University Press. PP77-78.

Iwata Nakayama’s photographs from the 1930’s haunt me and seem out of place within my world. They remind me of old photographs of famous Hollywood stars during that time and it is for this reason that they disturb me. The lighting and posing of the sitters are typically western in my mind and I find it difficult to view them in any other way as appropriation of the western style. Much of the style might have been towards the practicalities of the medium at the time but yet, it feels like that mirrored world which William Gibson spoke of. The technology was available everywhere at the time and so similarly styled images give that sense of familiarity with unfamiliarity, particularly if the style was not appropriated or influenced in some way by the west.

Some interesting points on the cherry blossom:

“The soul is objectified as a mirror, a pebble, a rock, or even an empty space. However, Yanagita states that there is no definite historical or ethnographic evidence to claim that the Japanese conceptualize the soul as having a definite shape (Yanagita, ed. 1951:677-78). Although not formless, the soul is extremely fluid in its mobility- it departs the body, of humans and deities, and the Japanese soul may even be given to non-Japanese…”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. PP27-28.

Ohnuki-Tierney reflects greatly upon the symbolic equivocation of Rice and Cherry blossom. With rice in particular, she identifies its first recordings in the Kojiki (712AD) and the Nihonshiki (720AD).

“These ‘chronicles’ were commissioned by the Tenmu emperor (r.672-86) in order to establish a Japanese identity distinct from the Chinese, whose ‘Great Civilization’ was engulfing Japan at the time. He did so by adopting folk oral traditions in which rice, introduced from the Asian continent, was appropriated as indigenous to Japan. That is, rice was grown in heaven by Japanese deities, whose names all bear references to the ear of rice. Thus, a foreign element, rice, was turned into the marker of Japanese identity. This cosmogony, drawing on folk agrarian cosmologies at the time, established the official agrarian cosmology, which became the symbolic foundation of the political economy for centuries, and in fact even today.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P28.

Interestingly enough, the cherry blossom, known for its temporality bears a distinct association:

“Ultimately, cherry blossoms celebrate love itself- an intense relationship between a man and a woman. If men used the metaphor of cherry blossoms for women, women too used the flower in their expressions of love. The practice of wearing a cherry branch with its blossoms on one’s head or of placing it on top of a bamboo pole in the yard has been recorded from ancient times as an expression of courtship by women.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P33.

Geoffrey Batchen also notes how photography could have been motivated and driven by love. Interesting how both share a common bond in such a temporary character. Daguerre and Fox Talbot’s intentions were to fix the image and yet the Japanese adaptation of it and development of it into digital forms inherently embody the love which so inspired the attempts to capture the image anyway. Perhaps Japanese culture can deal with loss a great deal better than the Europeans.

“Symbols ought never to be understood as floating in the mind of social agents alone. They are always grounded in the day-to-day lives of those who use them. The notion of aware and its symbolic representations developed precisely because the aristocrats were enjoying the grandeur of life and yet sensing that it would not last forever. […] In this context, we appreciate that the emphasis on pathos over the impermanence of life developed precisely because of the grandeur of life. Pathos over evanescence does not take on a significance unless it is predicated upon the grandeur of life, expressed as power, wealth, or the height of love. Only when one loses them does one begin to appreciate their ephemeral nature and feel pathos over the loss. The mutual predication between the two holds the key to the choice of cherry blossoms as the master trope.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P43.

Cherry blossoms are photography:

“The universe represented by cherry blossoms, then, is full of paradoxes. The flowers represent life, predicated on death, and vice versa. Pathos over evanescence derives from the juxtaposition of the height of glory and vigor of life and pomp, on the one hand, with the ephemerality, on the other. The night cherry blossoms of the geisha represent the height of ‘life’, or ‘desire’ in a moiré fashionable parlance today, underscored by its emphemerality both in the temporal sense and in the sense that it is divorced from ‘real’ life. By representing both the temple boys and the geisha, cherry blossoms stand both for the intensely heterosexual (geisha) and the non-heterosexual (temple boys). Yet, the intensely heterosexual world of the geisha represented in Kabuki is in fact performed by all-male actors. We see multiple layers of subversion of the norm- all symbolized by cherry blossoms.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P51.

What is the Japanese identity? Ohnuki-Tierney bases her theory on the significant other:

“A social group’s sense of the self-identity is almost always formulated and reformulated by the presence of, or a threat from, another social group. In the case of the Japanese, the Chinese became the dominant Other, and their presence prompted the Japanese to eagerly adopt and absorb the Han and Tang ‘High civilization’, which in turn compelled them to come to terms with their own sense of identity as distinct from that of the Chinese (Kawasoe [1978] 1980:253-54; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993a).

The temporal nature of the cherry blossom even takes root in the land that Tokyo is built on:

“During the Edo period, there were a number of shoguns, including Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616), Hidetada (1579-1632), Iemitsu (1604-51), and Yoshimune (1864-1751), who ordered the planting of cherry trees in various locations in Edo, whose fertile soil of volcanic ash was idea for the tree. […] The Edo capital, representing Japan, was transformed into the land of cherry blossoms, which in turn led to the construction of ‘Japan as the land of cherry blossoms,’ since Edo represented Japan.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P55.

“Most importantly, the Japanese sought their uniqueness in cherry blossoms, as the episode involving Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714), an esteemed Confucian scholar-botanist, testifies. He declared in 1698 that according to a Chinese he questioned in Nagasaki there were no cherry trees in China. In his celebrated Yamato honzo, a book on botanical species of Japan, published in 1709, the Chinese, the source of this information, was identified as Kaseiho. Since Kaibara Ekken was the most revered botanist, his proclamation excited warriors and merchants at the time, who transformed this report unto ‘cherry blossoms are unique to Japan’ (Saito 1982: 28-29).”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. PP55-56.

“Together with a few other ‘symbols of Japan,’ such as the fan and sumo wrestlers, cherry blossoms, rice paddies, and Mount Fuji became the powerful symbols with which the Japanese represented themselves to Westerners who in turn saw Japan through these symbols, as in the well-known 1887 painting of Le Pere Tanguy by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) at Musee Rodin in Paris. Here the subject of the portrait is surrounded by cherry blossoms, rice paddies in winter, Mount Fuji, two geisha figures (to the left and right of the subject), and morning glories. Through these symbols, especially the cherry blossom, the Japanese wished to construct their own identity as a time when the threats of Western civilization and of modernization were encroaching upon their culture.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P56.

Again, like photography, the same rings true:

“What cherry blossom shows us is that we must get out of our vision of a grid classifying symbols and meanings in isolation- the dog means A in one context and B in another in culture X. The rich and complex meanings of cherry blossoms constitue a matrix of interrelated concepts- not life alone, but predicated by death and rebirth; woman in relation to man; the self underscored by the destabilized self. In other words, a symbol stands for processes and relationships, not isolated concepts. Furthermore, at the ontological level the flower also represents forces that challenge, undermine, and destabilize the normative world, thereby offering new possibilities.”

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. The University of Chicago Press. P57.

The inherent dangers of Internet Communication Technologies, well, psychologically speaking.
Text: Gary McLeod

Flying was the dream of man. For some reason, the bird was a mystery to the human species in that it could do something we could not. A few centuries of attempts and we have reached a stage where our way of flying depends on a stream of air that scarily keeps us above ground in a way we shouldn’t be. It has allowed us to travel and travel we do, at ridiculous prices at times, but this could change. The danger to air travel and most other forms of travel is of course Internet technologies. Connecting at a distance without physically being there is a wonderful thing: no more landscapes to look out the window at; no more having to find a book to read; no more accidental encounters with strangers. We are living the age of instant contact where these kind of technologies affect businesses, education and personal relationships because they enable us to get everything we want as soon as we want it; It allows us to be nowhere and somewhere at the same time and it’s a good thing, right?

Lets take the businessman who wakes up one morning feeling very sick. He has a very important meeting that morning and feels completely unable to attend. The video conferencing in the office and his fast broadband connection at home enable our businessman to be on time for the meeting, hear everything that is being said, contribute to the bullet points and discussions of the meeting; all without coughing and spluttering over the other businessmen inattendence. Perfect for him and perfect for his colleagues and yet can he have lunch with them? No. Of course, he is sick and this of course would stop him anyway from attending but what if this became a daily thing, and not only for him, but for his colleagues as well? The company would save money on transportation costs as well as many other expenses. All of the employees could work in this manner and in fact some employees in some companies already do. When you have to go from A to C, who needs B?

Lets take an English school, which on one day decides to use the Internet and video conferencing technology to allow it’s students to study from home. This is very convenient for the school because it gives them a new target base of students and its great for the students because they can study when it suits them, no matter how hot the weather is or how wet it is. Rain or shine, they can feel assured in the knowledge that they can study at home no matter what, and they are then encouraged to feel that they will get better at their English ability because they would be more relaxed. There is a key moment in a child’s life when before they can walk properly, they try to run towards their parents and they fall over. Learning how to walk is fundamental to learning how to run. Switching from watching the TV one minute to studying English online the next, only to get on with cooking the dinner afterwards is easy for everybody but where is the preparation? I don’t mean getting the vegetables ready, but where’s the time to focus the mind on the studying at hand. It doesn’t exist unless the student sets that time aside. And then there are the teachers. With students at something of a safe distance there could be a tendency to indulge in mannerisms, which might otherwise be considered unprofessional- what the student doesn’t see, doesn’t hurt them. Of course, then there is also the potential for voyeurism completely unbeknown to the student. Such a system could allow a teacher to see the student long before the student sees the teacher. If there were unhealthy people in the company’s midst, this all makes for a potentially very scary environment, and not just for the student, but also for the teacher. Caution then is obviously needed in these situations but as we know from childhood, falling is part of learning.

Messenger programs are another segment of the current technologies and as everyone knows allows people to keep in touch with old friends, long distance friends and of course family. The former nuclear family is now essentially an atomized one where geographical distance only rules out the reassuring hug or pat on the back. Who needs them though when you have emoticons, which can make people smile, give praise where it might be needed. A simple clap of the hands by a smiley face and your problems will go away, right? Perhaps Internet communication technologies like Skype are the right balance of space and contact? Perhaps they are the answer to being in 2 places at once especially when you need help? Or perhaps they contribute to the problem? The software tells you if that person is available or not, so here’s a question: why do people sign in to the software only to set themselves as ‘away’ or ‘busy’? If you were truly busy, wouldn’t you have no time to be logged in? This is the consistent dilemma with these technologies. They increasingly encourage us to expect an answer from the person and we all know what happened when the little boy cried wolf and expected an answer. No answer came and technologies such as Skype , Yahoo messenger, iChat and MSN messenger all could potentially create an epidemic of depressed, or worse still, bi-polar people who find themselves thriving on the presence or non-presence of other people online. People would lose sight of where they are from and where they are going. Dislocation in virtual environments is nothing new as extreme cases have been well documented with chat rooms being blamed for virtual bullying as well as other cases of extreme and often false behavior. Chat rooms are a risky environment as everyone knows but there is still the sense of caution when one walks into a chat room, the same as there would be in any bar with a bunch of strangers. The silent problem lies in the programs that we all, especially when so far away from our families and old friends, use to stay in touch, a concept that would 200 years ago, would have entailed a letter traveling for maybe 6 months. These ‘comfortable’ programs really do ensure that the only difference between being with or without someone is the time zone as geographical space becomes merely symbolic and potentially traumatic when you naturally want to see a person physically. It is then that the reality of distance kicks in.

So, what to do in all of this? Turning it all off and removing programs from computers would be a drastic measure because, as have we have seen, the technology is beneficial in some cases. Complaining, as some may think I am doing, is perhaps the ludite’s response and using the technology less is maybe the therapist’s response. The most problematic aspect from these technologies, as is the case with most digital technology, is the need for immediate impact. We want everything quickly. Somehow, we have all lost that ability to take time to learn to walk. Immediate technology is difficult to throw away and we all appreciate its conveniences, but learning, in all its forms takes time. Perhaps learning to walk before we can run is not necessarily the answer. Perhaps we should be concerning ourselves again with learning to fly? Farcical perhaps but if we can no longer remained fixed to the ground, and communication technologies which allow us to roam and stay in touch suggest we can’t, then at some point we are going to theoretically float off the surface. And if that happens, there is more of a chance of falling so we must learn how to float in the right direction.

“Toward the end of the year 645, Emperor Kõtoku abandoned the Asuka region to occupy the newly built of Nagara Toyosaki at Naniwa. Archaeological evidence of this first effort at planned urban construction was inconclusive until after 1952, when excavations revealed that an imperial palace and public office compound of considerable size were indeed erected. Without doubt the inspiration was Chinese, and, while the outer dimensions of the city cannot be determined, the existence of a full-fledged Official Compound (Chõdõin) with an audience hall and office buildings is now archaeologically verified.
    After nine years, the capital at Naniwa was given up. Presumably the pull of religious bodies and influential families entrenched in the Asuka region proved too strong. Under Emperor Saimei two successive locations in Asuka were adopted and evacuated. Emperor Tenchi, who succeeded, erected his capital in 667 at õtsu on Lake Biwa, even farther than Naniwa from Asuka. Four years later this establishment was destroyed by fire, and shortly thereafter a war of imperial succession broke out. Emporer Temmu, who fought his way to the throne in 672, retuned to the Asuka region, building on one of the sites used by Saimei. This was the first capital of the Kiyomihara, best remembered as the location of the first major effort at codification of laws and institutions. Excavations of the site reveal a Ch’ang-an style plan with a division of the city into left and right halves.
    But Kiyomihara was cramped, and Temmu planned a larger city somewhat farther out onto the plain. The resulting city of Fujiwara was not entered until 694, after Temmu’s death. Fujiwara was obviously better situated, having more room for residential expansion and being surrounded by a more extensive agricultural region. We know a good deal about Fujiwara through references in the official histories. Some thought was given to the justification of the site in terms of Chinese principles of geomancy. The city faced south and was divided into left and right halves. Seven avenues ran north and south, twelve ran east and west. The squares created by the intersection of these streets demarcated wards (bo) of which sixteen at the north center were reserved for the palace enclosure. Fujiwara attracted twenty four temples into its confines, and a passage in the Nihonshoki claims that the common residencies in the city numbered 1,505 “columns of smoke,” that is, 1,505 houses as counted by the smoke coming from their roofs.
    Three Emperors reigned from Fujiwara, but the city soon proved to be too small, and so Heijõ was planned. This time a clean break was made with the vested interests of Asuka. Set in the middle of the Yamato Plain, well placed to communicate by water with the port of Naniwa and by road with the provinces to the east and west, Heijõ was the boldest effort so far to create a lasting capital city. Begun in 708, Heijõ had external measurements of approximately two-and-two-thirds miles by three miles. A later addition attached a mile-square bulge to the eastern side of the city, pushing its limits to the gates of the great Tõdaji temple complex.
    Heijõ-kyõ has disappeared except for recent archaeological excavations of the office compound, but it still lives as Japan’s “first permanent capital” through many surviving temples, some of which retain their original buildings from the eighth century. By the time Heijõ was built there was a conscious effort to avoid the necessity of constant movement from one location to another. Every effort was made to give the city permanence and to draw to it the appurtenances of stable political power. The families of rank were assigned plots of land and induced to build residencies in the city. The institutions that served in Asuka as family temples for the noble lineages were also transferred, though some left their headquarters  behind and two refused to move. All told, Heijõ attracted forty-eight temples. Members of the aristocracy, priests, artisans and service personnel eventually swelled the population to an estimated 200,00 at its zenith. For seventy years Heijõ was the active center off Japan, its sinified specifications reflecting the many features of T’ang civilization that the Japanese sought to emulate.
    Yet even in Heijõ the ties between the imperial buearcracy and the foundations of political power were unstable. Between 741 and 746 Emperor Shõmu made five hasty shifts in the location of the capital. Leaving Heijõ in 741 because of an armed uprising by Fujiwara-no-Hirotsugu, he first established the capital Kuni in the hill country to the east. But Kuni was soon abandoned for political reasons, and Shõmu was again on the move. Twice Naniwa was adopted as capital, and each time pricipal buildings were dismantled and hauled to the site. After much uncertainty and disruption of the court, Heijõ was reentered. It was Shõmu who put the final touches to the political balance of power in Nara by drawing the Buddhist establishment further into the government as a balance to court factionalism. His attraction to the Kegon doctrine and his adoption of the Kokubunji system of officially supported provincial temples was a significant step in the ffort to use Buddhism to buttress the imperial reign- a reaction no doubt to the uncertainty of reliance on court families whose interests were in competition with those of the imperial family.
    This reliance on the Buddhist priesthood created problems of its own and led to the abandonment of Heijõ in 784 following the near seizure of the throne by the priest Dõkyõ between 766 and 770. Under Emperor Kammu the capital was removed first to Nagaoka, a site northeast of the present city of Osaka. There the arduous task of transferring government facilities and rebuilding official residencies was begun. But political intrigues, the murder of the Fujiwara official in charge of construction, and the counter pulls of court interests delayed the construction of the city, and work was stopped in 791. Yet another site was now proposed, namely the one presently occupied by Kyoto, and the plans for Heian-kyõ laid out. Construction of the city that was at least to become Japan’s enduring capital took several years and drew upon the fiscal and manpower resources of all the country’s provinces. The emperor left Nagaoka for Heian in 794 despite the fact that the new Great Audience Hall (daigokuden) would not be finished in time for the New Year’s ceremony of 795. Facilities for the ceremony were complete by 796, but the government’s official Office of Construction was not disbanded until 805.”

Hall, J.W Kyoto as Historical Background, in Hall, J.W. & Mass, J.P. (ed) (1974) Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History. Stanford University Press. PP5-7.

“While it took the court a century and a half to settle its Heian base, it is significant that, once having decided on a plan for the imperial capital, the Japanese planners used roughly the same overall design from beginning to end. Japanese historians routinely claim that this design came from Ch’ang-an. But historic Ch’ang-an was different enough from either Heijõ or Heian that one must assume the Japanese either had another model to follow or used an idealized version. Among the planners of Naniwa were men who had presumably visited T’ang Ch’ang-an. Yet somehow the result was quite different, not only in size but in the placement of buildings and the arrangements of function within the walls. Nor did the Japanese appear to seek out more exact models at a later date, for once the Japanese Version of the capital city plan was adopted, it was reproduced thereafter with little change other than a progressive increase in size. There was but one major exception to this uniformity of plan: while the early Japanese capitals made liberal provision for the building of temples within their confines, Heian-Kyõ excluded all but two temples from its plan. The reason for this was, of course, strictly political.
    In contrast to whatever continental model might have inspired them, the Japanese made one noteworthy change. From the outset they never adopted the large outer wall that could serve as a military defense. The reasons for this are not known, but we presum it was due to a lack of need. Warfare in Japan had not begun to involve sieges by masses of troops, and there were no foreign enemies against which to defend the city.”

Hall, J.W Kyoto as Historical Background, in Hall, J.W. & Mass, J.P. (ed) (1974) Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History. Stanford University Press. PP11-12.

“’If anyone thinks I paint too fast, they are watching me too fast,’ wrote Van Gogh. Already, the classic photograph is no more than a freeze frame. With the decline in volumes and in the expanse of landscapes, reality becomes sequential and cinematic unfolding finally gets the jump on whatever is static and on the strength of materials.”

Virilio, P. (Rose, J. trans) (1997) Open Sky, Verso, London. PP26-27.

This comment by Paul Virilio in Open Sky is of particular interest to me regarding the situation with compact cameras. What situation is that? Well, compact cameras disguise the mechanics of the process so as that people are no longer aware of how the process takes place. One can be aware of the camera’s functions through the names presented on the menus, in other words: one can be aware of White Balance without knowing where it comes from or what it means. However, this isn’t the process that I am referring to. The process to which I am referring is how the image is created on the screen instantly. People are obviously aware of the digital technology involved but are they aware that it isn’t even photography any more? The eye is increasingly viewing in a cinematic fashion, which reduces the concept and object of photography to a word in a much bigger language. That word is a still. The danger with viewing all of photography as a word in another language would create rife amongst the photographic unions leaving me vulnerable to attacks in self defence. However, acceptance of such an idea is a reluctance to identify their art in relationship to a more vague umbrella. No one wants to conform their ideas into a bigger picture even though we consistently have to in order to justify that which we are doing. The point in all of this is that Video although a medium in itself (and wrongly titled at that) is a good definition for the whole practice of art and not just a specific kind of tape format. Deriving, as I have said before from the latin ‘I see’, the term applies to all forms of art which stem from seeing. Perhaps the problem lies in the classification of art by the medium. Perhaps the art should be classified by its source. For example a work derived from my perspective would be classed as video; another work that derives from anybody’s perspective would be considered as videre; and so on. The difficulty here is that the medium then becomes relational to the subject and the object. Instead of art being defined by what it is made of, the classification of a work of art becomes much more vague and perhaps even unnecessary. For example, to describe Van Gogh’s work, we would have to say it is for him video, but as he is now dead, it might become the latin term for ‘he sees’ or even ‘he saw’. If we see his ‘painting’ as a symbol that we read as part of a larger indexical set of signs then the classification of his work may yet be once again video for ‘I see’ or the latin for ‘what they want us to see’. If that happens then Van Gogh has not only has no physical ownership of the work but also has no symbolic ownership, as it would become part of everyone’s associated language that is called culture. This I feel illustrates how irrelevant a classification of a medium can be and that to call photography photography is to try and make it special when quite clearly it isn’t.

If we stand back way from the camera though, and look with our own eyes, what do we see? Stand still and watch and everything is an image where only touch can relieve the sensation of a projected simulated environment. Move your head slowly from one side to the other whilst keeping your body fixed and the image becomes no longer a still one but a panned one. Step sideways slowly and the image becomes a tracked one. Like the tool that was the extension of the hand which the hand then symbolized; Like the machine that was the body which the body then alluded to; the camera and specifically the cinematic image presents what the eye sees and how it sees it, and only now do we begin to sense that the eye is alluding to the camera. This is a change in perception and a process which cannot be altered all the time that compact digital cameras blur distinctions between the photographic and the video image.

There is one more aspect to consider and that is no moving image is complete without sound. Introduced by ipods and other personal music players, the music is entered directly into the mind in accompaniment to the image. This strengthens the allusion of the moment experienced to a cinematic moment. The audio essentially acquires the role of the soundtrack for the personal experience that is taking place in that moment. Walk down the street on a busy sidewalk with hundreds of people walking towards you and Damien Rice’s The blower’s daughter in your ear could very well leave you wondering who you might bump into. I don’t necessarily mean that you would bump into Natalie Portman but the effect of which, if you were to allow your imagination to do so, could leave you getting the wrong impression from someone who might happen to look at you and smile. Experiences are increasingly becoming cinematic through sight and sound, and without any self control over one’s imagination, could result in many miscommunications and misunderstandings. The effects of those may well lead to trauma and disfunction in the social sphere. The word ‘dramatic’ is very much appropriate for such situations and could lead inevitably to disorders such as bi-polar, where mood swings would be aplenty and perhaps attributable to 90 min narratives. ‘Dramatic’ would have derived from the theatrical plays of action, sadness and emotion and modern entertainment films are not dissimilar to this. It would be easy then to affiliate with various films more closely and it has been often noted that obsession could become plausible, whereby reality is difficult to separate from fiction. Such a separation is easier to spot because the characters would not exist. Yet, recognizing a distinction between the real and the cinematic real is a much harder prospect.

Before we had a narrative- a straight timeline- but now we are loaded with multiple narratives and a time that is no longer fixed at the point of entry and the point of departure (Virilio, 1997). This means that our narratives are fragments randomly floating around on the surface of the planet, occasionally going up and down in mood with the music and images we hear and see. The only way that these narratives don’t get out of hand is by setting them limitations; a country, a car, a cell, a capsule.

Perception is relative. When perception is relative, does that mean that objects surrounding one’s perception are fixed? To be relational to your surroundings is perhaps indicative of the effects of the cinematic image. The way to deal with it is to keep it at a distance and merely enjoy it. Perhaps it is not wise to allow it to consume you.

“if you place a thing at the centre of your life that lacks the power to nourish, it will eventually poison everything that you are and destroy you. A simple a thing as an idea or your perspective of yourself or the world. No one can be the source of your content, it lies within, in the centre.”

Liontamer, by Faithless from the album Outraspective. Lyrics by Rollo and Maxi Jazz.

“Still, if one of the most salient aspects of our postmodern culture is  the presence of an insistent feminist voice (an I use the terms presence and voice advisedly), theories of postmodernism have tended either to neglect or to repress that voice. The absence of discussions of sexual difference in writings about postmodernism, as well as the fact that few women have engaged in the modernism/postmodernism debate, suggest that postmodernism may be another masculine invention engineered to exclude women. I would like to propose, however, that women’s insistence on difference and incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern thought. Postmodern thought is no longer binary thought (as Lyotard observes when he writes, “Thiking by means of oppositions does not correspond to the liveliest modes of postmodern knowledge [le savoir postmoderne]”). The critique of binarism is sometimes dismissed as intellectual fashion; it is, however, and intellectual imperative, since the hierarchical opposition of marked and unmarked terms (the decisive/divisive presence/absence of the phallus) is the dominant form both of representing difference and justifying its subordination in our society. What we must learn, then, is how to conceive difference without opposition.”

Owens, C. The discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism in Foster, H. (ed.) (1998) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York Press, New York. P71.

When he speaks of learning to conceive difference without opposition, this is something which I personally can’t seem to achieve and I wonder if this is simply a western problem or whether it is actually a global one which signifies a massive difference between men and women.  A misconception of Japanese people is that they tend to think of opposites, for example, you are either one of them or not one of them. But the thinking is deeper than that. There are aspects of both inherent in each other and this really goes someway to illustrate my differences.

I need to continue to think about my PG essay this week as I need to produce some kind of abstract but there is more moving to do this week as well. I will have something of a week off work the following week, which I plan to use to really get going on the studying. Moving to Tokyo means finding more resources and more libraries that I will be able to use and this is fairly important.