A talk I did in the New Art Bar, Tbilisi, Georgia, 07/09 about climate change, water shortages, cycling around Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal.
This audio was extracted from a video, linked here. Its not very good quality though.
I am off to a remote corner of South West Ireland next week for some walking in the rugged mountains and lakes of the area. I am looking forward to making a fire and sitting by it after a long day outside with wind burn on my face, completely exhausted.
There are numerous walks in the area, and I will be taking a camera to document the journey. I have many new ideas for filming since studying my MA course that have changed since I filmed my solo bike trips. I have explored different areas of making and I found myself still intrigued as much by film as I did when I first got my hands on a second hand video camera back in 2007.
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Play is intrinsic to the human condition.
Play is defined as:
Voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities normally associated with recreational pleasure and enjoyment. Read more…
Learning through adventure and exploration tends to reap rewards in terms of experience and unknown assistance but it surprises me how these ways of being sometimes mean I am framed by others in a certain way. I would say that anyone can benefit from being a little more adventurous and I think this starts with the following:
- Breaking the social relations and habits (and leisure past time) of consumption – e.g. shopping as a hobby and talking with others about it expecting reassurance for actions
- Reducing the amount of owned objects which do not serve any everyday purpose
- Getting into the outdoors and making proper journeys
- Cycling as a way to move about and see the world differently, breaking the connection with technological speed and reducing the cost of mobility
- Understanding some of the underlying functions of how capitalist society and (psychology behind it) works and therefore developing a critical approach to it
- Being aware of the gap between what society considers morally correct and what is ethically true Read more…
In order to be understood as a world of sense – of ‘absent sense’ or exscribed sense – the world must also be understood in accordance with thecosmicopening of space this is coming toward us: this constellation of constellations, this mass or mosaic comprising myriads of celestial bodies, their galaxies, and whirling systems, deflagrations and conflagrations that propagate themselves with the sluggishness of lightning, the almost immobile speed of movements that doe not so much traverse space as open it and space it out with their motives and motions, a universe in expansion and/imposion, a network of attractors and negative masses, a spatial texture of spaces that are fleeing, curved back, invaginated, or exogastrulated, fractal catastrophes, signals with neither message nor destination, a universe of which the unity is nothing but unicity [unicite] open, distended, distanced, diffracted, slowed down, differed and deferred within itself.
Jean Luc Nancy – The Sense of the World.”
I do not at all believe in what I call automatic democracy. I believe in reflection, not reflex.
Paul Virilio.
The irrestibility of ordering and the restraint of the saving power draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. But precisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side of their nearness. When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology.”
What is travel if not a geographical way to break up routines of movement and be opened up to unfamiliar environments, people, places, objects and networks?
Anyone who feels like they want to experience the world more directly ‘as it really is’ as opposed to just a ‘world’ within a world; the private flat, the office ‘world’, the bar, the coffee shop, the infrastructure of a holiday resort created for leisure, a package adventure holiday, the business world, will need to create a ‘vehicle’ and support structure for themselve; a mental and physical support structure that allows them to exist outside of existing and preceding structure, perhaps albeit temporarily. Changing your world will feel strange and take effort. Read more…