Re: <eyebeam><blast> the museological and the urban

[Greg Ulmer <gulmer@english.ufl.edu>]

Hello Paul

On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, Paul D. Miller wrote:

> post-whatever stuff. There are examples from West African nomadic 
> tribes
> and Arabic traditional architecture (don't forget that one of the core
> Arabic words for describing art, "sina'ah" means both technology and
> art, or even the grid structures that the nomadic tribes of the Sudan
> would construct around the anatomy of camels etc etc etc is pretty
> intense. Not to mention the Japanese tradition of "Sangaku" or "temple
> geometry" that is made into mathematical poems (based on "wasan"
> rather
> than "yosan" (Western cremathematics. Why we still in this day and age
> need to stick to formulaic stuff like Koolhas to deal wth contemporary
> architecture is pretty boring. Buckminster Fuller who could convincing
> create plans of cities that could float in the air?  Iannis Xenakis

> culture that people should focus on. I guess, the narrower you confine
> your search for values, the less information you pick up. Narrow
> bandwidth is boring!
> 
   yes it would be a global culture if one could count on equal
familiarity in one's audience with European, American, Arabic, Japanese,
African, Asian, cultural achievements.  The premise of cyberpidgin is
that this awareness does not yet exist, but is a desirable goal.  To
achieve it we might trade terms, stories, examples.
  The internet seems made for just such a trade.  
  Of course pidgin risks misunderstandings, such as those surrounding
the Portuguese application of  "fetish" to objects in the West African
ecomony that were beyond-price/worthless.  Would you say that this
misunderstanding was fortunate in that it has motivated nearly 400 years
of critical development?  
   Why did "fetish" have such rich evolution, and not some other word
from this pidgin situation?  Perhaps it is time to find another term
from a similar setting, perhaps one just emerging now, in order to jump
out of "fetish"?

Greg Ulmer



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