<eyebeam><blast> postscript

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi@interport.net>]

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky

It's at times like this that you realize the beauty and fluidity of
electronic culture, and how if its done right, it can truly open up
areas of discourse that  in the "real world" people have problems moving
beyond. In the last several weeks several of the core issues of the
symposium:

1) can we apply theories based on electronic networked culture to the
real world?

2) What sylistic syntax can the discourse be funneled through?

3) Can people ever get over ethnic/class/racial ideologies based on
geographic identity and historic accidents?

Symposiums like this give young people like me some degree of hope. I
remember several years ago during the height of the protests on campuses
in the US for more diverse faculty, taking a mix tape containing
fragments of music and spoken text to my philosophy teacher. At the time
we were working on papers relating to Hegelian dialectics and the "Young
Hegelians" versus the rest of the univeristy structures of their times.
The teacher couldn't understand that mixes were occuring in society in a
way that philosophy and art can, if they are used as tools for thought
expansion rather than methods of containing discourse, and narrowing
people's ideas of what culture and art can be. My teacher, I realize, in
"astronomical hindsight" simply didn't have the fluidity to deal with
contemporary thought where cultural "signifiers" can shift in the blink
of an eye and transform into many levels of representation. I realize
that similar things are happening to students of all ethnic backgrounds
in univeristies around the world. Maybe forums like this can be places
where ideas are allowed to flourish - and change. The network as
"sythetic garden" rather than cultural mausoleum. That is what eyebeam
taught me. I'll miss the posts (although I won't miss debates on style
and method of textual presentation - if anything - the web has shown us
that there's room for all styles...). Good luck to everyone in the real
world!




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