Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age - Softcover

Sequeira, Jessica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785355856 ISBN 13: 9781785355851

Verlag: Zero Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Why do people choose to play with ideas considered antiquated? Why do they elect to act in non-productive ways? Perhaps the question can be asked in reverse: What comes to mind when we think of technology? That which is practical, efficient, invisible, fast, optimistic, constantly updated. So how can one explain the search for the opposite, that which is useless, inefficient, physically present, slow, dystopian, obsolete and governed by chance? The matter of what motivates the search for ‘antiquated’ forms strikes deep into the heart of value. Are people simply following trends? Are they idiots? Are they sentimental? Are they artists? Are they interested in kitsch? Are they uninformed? Are they poets? Other Paradises is a collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology, and is about people who choose to build ‘other paradises’, fully conscious of the alternative they offer to the dominant paradigm of technological progress.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jessica Sequeira is a writer and translator from Spanish and French. She contributed to the Sounds and Colours anthologies on Argentina, Brazil and Perú, and she publishes the collection of stories Rhombus and Oval through What Books Press in 2017. Jessica lives in California.

Jessica Sequeira is a writer and translator from Spanish and French. She contributed to the Sounds and Colours anthologies on Argentina, Brazil and Perú, and she publishes the collection of stories Rhombus and Oval through What Books Press in 2017. Jessica lives in California.

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Other Paradises

Popetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age

By Jessica Sequeira

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Jessica Sequeira
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-585-1

Contents

About this Book, 
Acknowledgements, 
Preface, 
Ghost in the Fax haunting new technologies with old ones as retrotech / Japan, 
Optic Nervous juxtaposing rapid content and slow arrangement / Bay Area, 
Macabre Trunk focusing on process / Mexico, 
Scientific Fictions embracing the alien and life outside the norm / Bolivia, 
Existential Puzzles laughing at modernity and figuring out how to live with it / India, 
Shadow Puppet removing as a part of creation / Turkey, 
Magic Lantern transforming sense data to produce effects / France, 
Warp of a Field folding conceptual topos of history / New Zealand, 
Jars of Preserves saving for its own sake and the corruption of this idea / Netherlands, 
Brandy Cocktail inventing styles and pseudonyms to avoid spectacle / Bolivia (reprise), 
Symbolic Grenade observing as a mode of history and form of action / Pyrenees, 
Here and There imagining utopias in language / Everywhere, 
The Utopia of Satire?, 
The Utopia of Sincerity?, 
The Utopia of Lightness?, 
Epilogue Those Hills Behind, 

CHAPTER 1

Ghost in the Fax

haunting new technologies with old ones as retrotech / Japan

Dear reader, here we are now, you and I. Ghosts, half here, half not. If I reach out and try to place my hand on your shoulder, I won't feel a thing. But I know you're close, so trust me. Follow me into this office, in a place far away. The first thing you'll see is a plaque with Kenji characters in alarmingly bright shades of orange, pink and green, instructing employees on how to receive transmissions. If someone miles across the city presses the right series of buttons, a sheaf of papers will emerge on this side. If the same series is pressed here, the pages will be sent there, in a mirror of the process.

At rest for the moment, the machine calmly hums, anticipating activity. A few muttered complaints can be heard. Better ways exist of going about things, people say. The big box takes up space that might be occupied by a water cooler or Seibo vending machine. But when the admin asks if it's time to swap out the machine, there are protests. The fax, gunslinging hero of electronic devices, resists any attempt at a coup. Nor do his subjects wish to see him go. Despite bureaucratic and logical objections, a barrier of allegiance remains. Big, solid, ferocious, the fax with his beeps and whistles seems far more accessible even in his inefficiency than the inkjet printer that rests in ominous silence, the fiend that jams without warning. 'Alright,' says the admin with a sigh, secretly pleased at the protests. 'He can stay another year.' The fax digs in his heels, Lone Star Ranger defending his ghost town.

Multicoloured neon paradise, glittering city of the future, Tokyo is also an epicentre for the intentional use of obsolete technologies. The fax is beloved, so much so that government reports lament widespread irrational attachment to the technology. Its electronic tones may be endearing, but surely it's not the most efficient way to transmit information? Yet, Tokyo collectors and office workers self-consciously embrace the démodé. Faxes are kept alongside modern computers, and the intoxicating scent of ink and paper perfumes the air. The old technology is present elsewhere as well, in a more complex, hidden way. Conceptually, the fax is nested inside the idea of modern email, and it's not alone. Thousands of widgets, gadgets and toggles are kept tucked away in drawers, anachronistic but unforgotten, haunting the present.

While floating through the office we pass a girl wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt. Perhaps the obsession with retrotech has to do with Japan's kawaii culture, the obsession with cuteness and fetishism of childishness and nostalgia in the form of manga comics, schoolgirls and plush toys. It isn't necessarily part of the national psyche, and 'national psyche' is a myth, anyway. But the elements have been encouraged so heavily in the entertainment and marketing industries that it may as well be. Kawaii Taishi, ambassadors of cuteness, even travel around the world as representatives of the nation. Tempting as it may be to attribute the prevalence of retrotech to the kitsch charm of machines, however, there's something else at work.

Let us drift away now to see other marvels, and try to draw the veil from these mysteries. Leaving the city, we reach an open field, edged in on one side by a dreaming forest. Of course, forests can dream; how else do you explain their clearings, their dappled light and shadow? And there they are in the field, hundreds of them. Balls of blue fire, dancing will-o'-the-wisps. These are the hitodama, ghosts described by Lafcadio Hearn, a writer born on the Ionian islands of Greece. After a colourful life in the United States and French West Indies, Hearn came to Japan to work as a newspaper correspondent and schoolteacher. His impressions of the landscape and eerie tales of the country take up several books, and Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, his first chronicle, is full of the ghosts he sees everywhere in nature. 'The very clouds are not clouds, but only dreams of clouds, so filmy they are,' he writes, 'ghosts of clouds, diaphanous spectres, illusions.' He wrote several books of kwaidan, performed Japanese folk stories: (kai) means 'strange, mysterious, rare or bewitching apparition' and (dan) means 'recited narrative'.

He had much to tell, for there are many different kinds of ghosts in the culture, not just balls of fire that float in the night. You and I can go and meet some of our first cousins, if you like. In the Shinto religion, the kami are worshipped spirits, and include not just the dead, but the qualities possessed by those spirits. There are ikiryo (also called shoryo, seirei, ikisudama), which leave the bodies of living people to haunt others across distances. There are shiryo, which do the same but emerge from the spirits of the deceased. And there are yurei, which roam the city, restless and seeking revenge; these appear in the tale of Bancho Sarayashiki, in which a servant girl is thrown down a well by her master after she refuses to give him love, and he accuses her of stealing a Delft plate from the family. Ghosts are everywhere, busy laughing, crying, loving, plotting, dancing and sleeping just like humans. Whether they lie in tranquility awaiting visits, or whirl about buildings, they remain a link to the past.

But if Japanese tales allow inanimate objects like elements to have ghosts, isn't it possible that obsolete machines have them, too? Technology left behind takes on a phantom presence, both here and not here, physically present yet not considered useful. It isn't simply nostalgia, but a reminder the 'now' hasn't always existed. Incarnations of the ghost-of-technology-past inform and shape the ghost-of-technology-present, in turn creating the conditions for the ghost-of-technology-future. The fax machine at the Tokyo office rests peacefully, but does not rest in peace. Dormant, it is still prepared for a shoot-off, a battle for the high stakes of whether or not it will be forgotten.

Oblivion: such a beautiful word, so terrible when it occurs. When a technology appears, first there is change; then, forgetting. One technology replaces its predecessor with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zero Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1785355856
• ISBN 13: 9781785355851
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 140
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar