Goldsmiths: The Fourth Week
Fourth Week (19/10 – 23/10)
First tentative forays in student radio. 15 minutes of cheese. Nic Clear (of The Bartlett) talking about his ‘Architectures of the Near Future‘ project. Insomnia. Successful NHS registration. Mouse in the Matrix. My continuing inability to buy a winter jacket. How Like a Leaf, an excellent book-length interview with Donna Haraway.
Photo of the Richard Hoggart Quad:
Goldsmiths: The Third Week
So, I’m shifting these MA updates from a fortnightly to a weekly format. The ideas and theories are coming thick and fast, and – frankly – I’m struggling to hold them in my mind. Here, blogging & note-taking are tools to pin down the vague and the evasive … forcing permanence, turning thought-processes into texts …
There’s a need to trace the trajectories of meaning, the superimposition of ideas, as you can mark the trail of a star in long exposure photography. Highlighting the unexpected links and parallels, I can hope to trace the genealogies of resonance // the ideas I find myself returning to (unconsciously), time after time … invariably, the things in which I’m most interested.
Strong with the photography metaphors, this week. As a loosely linked aside, here’s a photo of Deptford Town Hall, from my increasingly temperamental Nikon camera:
Ace. So, what happened in this, the third week (12/10 – 16/10)?
Goldsmiths: The First Fortnight
At the end of September, I left rural Sussex for the bright lights and concrete decay of southeast London – where I’ve just finished my first fortnight at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I’m studying for an awesome Masters degree in new technologies and digital-type-things. To balance the relatively hardcore heart of the programme, I’ve also picked some contrasting (slightly “lighter”?) option modules, which I’m hoping will help me slant the degree towards something a bit more engaged with issues of representation, narrative and political economy …
Assuming I’m not distracted by something shinier along the way.
Here’s some spiel about the courses I’m taking this term, and what we’ve looked at so far. I hope it’s of some interest …
Games Politics/Economics Real Life Speculations Visual Culture
by Justin
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Stateside Superstructing, Some Notes
I return from the mirror world with a surnburnt nose/forehead combo; a bag bulging with books, papers and wallcharts; and a brain almost literally humming with new inputs. Along with @mathpunk, @rtgarden, @stevepuma and @genebecker, I was representing the Superstruct game community at the Institute For The Future‘s 2009 Ten-Year Forecast in Sausalito, California.
Through communicating & mediating my experiences of the game to the other conference attendees (representatives of some of the big organizations in the economy and public sphere), in an environment heavy and humid with ambient information, I was able to link up some ideas that have been floating in the recesses of my consciousness, assembling and superstructing them in interesting ways.
Before the event in question, I was in San Francisco for a good 6-7 days – immersing myself in the city, and scoping out the lay of the land. At once strange and familiar (embodied above and beyond my experience of the city through film and the media), the real San Francisco threw my mediated experiences into focus – the American sitcoms syndicated endlessly on British TV are now five, ten years out of date. This, then, is an emerging social imaginary; a land of corporate bail-outs, green-collar jobs and (as @mathpunk was later to tell me) hybrid hypermiling – in which we can see the overwhelming drive of the competitive, of the concrete challenge … even when it risks endangering the self.
Lifedump
What am I doing? What’s on my mind?
Listening to The Airborne Toxic Event‘s self-titled studio album – a physical CD in brown paper and clear plastic. None of that newfangled digital paid-for download nonsense. Incidentally, my first proper music purchase since … November? Enjoying it in a non-threatening, sounds-a-bit-like-everything-else-I-own way.
Tracking comments about the freshly (re)launched Wired UK on twitter and the blogosphere, with the heightened susceptability to criticism (and taught innards) that comes from spending January with the editorial team as an intern. London launch party on Tuesday was something else, with familiar faces and – in retrospect – a truly disconcerting number of strange conversations.
Digesting notes and fragments from a weekend in Manchester, at the 4th Oekonux Conference. Bit of a mixed bag, with quite a lot lost in translation (both from various Germanic and Scandinavian languages to English, and from jargon-heavy engineering/programmerspeak to plain English). Still, I took a lot from the brain-shatteringly awesome presentations of Smári McCarthy and Vinay Gupta – the latter a key player in Superstruct. Key observations: scarcity is an illusion, transparency and openness are good, Manchester feels a bit like Moscow.
On being well-rounded
You’ve probably all seen this before, but … well, what the heck -
Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster‘s revenge plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.
- Bruce Sterling
2008 in review
So, that was … well, a surprisingly good year! I spent some of New Year’s Eve trawling through twelve months of tweets and blog posts, trying to organise the happenings of 2008 into some kind of order. It took a bit longer than I expected, but here’s the potted version – more »
Life since Guy Fawkes Night
Superstruct finished in a crazy webcast thing, which was the most (and the weirdest) fun I’ve had in ages. I wrote the 33,000 word beginning section of a surprisingly elegent sci-fi novel, and am now seriously struggling to maintain momentum and self-discipline. I submitted a speculative job application, and am at peace with the fact that there’s a 95% chance that nothing will happen as a result of this. I discovered The I.T. Crowd, and wondered why I hadn’t done so sooner.
I went to a Goldsmiths open day on four hours sleep, managed to sustain a cogent and upbeat conversation with a member of their Business Development Office, and thoroughly enjoyed the vibe and atmosphere of the place. That said, I have – thus far – failed to submit a Masters application, and am in the process of working out to compress my aims and academic interests into a page-long “personal statement” that doesn’t make me sound like a twat.
I bought a new jacket. I finally read Brasyl, by Ian McDonald. In Brighton, I was “turned” by vampires in SoHo, but didn’t find Mr. Smith. I went to Cornwall to see a friend from university. I learned why – as a woman – it might not be a good idea to accuse your housemate of shortening your menstrual cycle, and marvelled at the windswept desolation of the University of Exeter’s Penryn campus. I spent too much time on trains.
I discovered the concept of the cloudworker, and have embraced it a viable and desirable life goal. I attempted to talk my parents out of investing in property. I met Paul in London, and hit a public lecture at UCL about “feral cities“. I’m currently ordering some jottings for “notes towards a genealogy of alter-urbanism”, a tangetial ramble through history and fiction which really needs be to decide on a format … be it blog post, article, wiki, or pamphlet. I speculated on how capitalism is like nature, colonizing those volcanic islands that pop up from time to time in the North Sea. I bought a copy of Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, which I fully intend to devour over the next couple of days. I cried at The Devil’s Whore in the same way as I once cried at Ken Loach‘s Land and Freedom, and thought a great deal about constitutional reform.
What have you been up to?
