"How might new technologies and the metaphors of science be employed in the education of the artist? How might the insights of the artist contribute to the advancement of knowledge in science and to technological development? (Ask not what science can do for art but what art can do for science!). How can the accrued wisdom of exotic or ancient cultures be allied to the search for meaning and values in a post-biological society? How might new technologies serve to support and sustain cultures that lie beyond the Western paradigm? How might the Net serve the needs of interactive, non-linear, transdisciplinary learning, and engender creative thought and constructive action?"
Labels: culture, digital poetics, networks, planet, theory
"I believe there is simply ourselves, and where we are has a particularity which we'd better use because that's about all we've got...there is no other culture. There is simply the literal essence and exactitude of your own. I mean, the streets you live on, or the clothes you wear, or the colour of you hair....Truth lies solely in what you do with it....
Put an end to nation, put an end to culture, put an end to divisions of all sorts."
Charles Olson, July 20th, 1965, Berkeley (Causal Mythology, p.36)
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Culture and the Individual
The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
[Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow.]
Culture and the Individual
Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often behave with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.[Aldous Huxley. Culture and the Individual. 1963, Playboy]
