Month: May 2011

Seasilt Saltsick

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Streaming 1 (2007), Carl Douglas

And its old and old it’s sad and old and it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.

James Joyce, (1992 [1939]) Finnegan’s Wake London, UK: Penguin. p.627-28

This is one of the finest passages of writing I know of. I’ve barely managed to penetrate the surface of Finnegan’s Wake, but the opening (“riverrun, past Adam and Eve’s…”) and the closing (Away a lone a last a loved a long the”) are imprinted in my textual consciousness. The sense of the river’s exhaustion as it returns to the ocean (from whence to cycle back to its beginning) is palpable, mixed with the fear of the ocean as a cold father, and the longing for it as a lover. Drawing to the close of a lecture series that has been exploring the condition of ‘thrownness’ into the world, this passage has a resonance for me. The vastness of a strange, active world opens up in front of us like the expanding grey of the sea. As fluids ourselves running through the countryside and city, we could be forgiven for thinking of ourselves as the animate ones passing through a static world. But at the end of our journey, after a moment of seasilt saltsickness, the banks peel back, and we spill into the ‘moananoaning’ ocean.

Dark Ecologies – Morton / Kahn

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Auckland: Wednesday May 25th, 10.30-12pm, Lecture room WS 114, City Campus AUT University, 34 St Paul Street

How do we sense and make sense of immense phenomena, such as climate change, or radiation, which are real, but real in ways which most of us do not directly experience? As ecotheorist Timothy Morton puts it, “It is very hard to get used to the idea that the catastrophe, far from being imminent, has already taken place”.

Morton, together with media arts historian Douglas Kahn, will discuss ways in which we can think about the challenges to humanity of nonsentient entities, like climate change and radioactivity, phenomena Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’. They ask, how can we productively respond to these challenges with the energies available to us? How do we radically question the ways in which we understand and interact with what used to be known as ‘nature’?

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales. Until recently, he was Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis. He is the editor of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde. and the author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, which has been highly influential and remains the benchmark text concerning sound-based art. Forthcoming books include Mainframe Experimentalism, a collection on early computing and the arts, and Earth Sound Earth Signal, on the geophysical trade of acoustics and electromagnetism in communications, science and the arts. www.douglaskahn.com

Timothy Morton is Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at UC Davis. His interests include literature and the environment, ecotheory, philosophy, biology, physical sciences, literary theory, food studies, sound and music, materialism, poetics, Romanticism, Buddhism, and the eighteenth century. His two most recent books, The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, April 2010) and Ecology Without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007; paperback 2009), have had a wide and transformative impact on how ecology is conceived within the arts and humanities. Tim blogs at www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com

Brought to you by Now Future, in conjunction with Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, AUT University, the ADA Network, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the National Institute of Experimental Arts, UNSW, Sydney.

Paolo Portoghesi, Islamic Cultural Centre (1974)

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Paolo Portoghesi, Islamic Cultural Centre, Rome (1974). Portoghesi is interesting – his best details approach Scarpa, and the intensity of his relationship to Borromini is clear; but some of his work is clunky and kitschy. The mosque of his Islamic Cultural Centre is amazing – sinuous and dense. But then he’s also responsible for this. Ignore that and look at these:

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