Making Pasts

How are we recording our family stories?
How are we making use of technologies, both analogue and digital?
How does digital technology encourage our story telling?
How gendered is the activity surrounding the capture of our lives?
What technology are we using?
Questions, questions, questions...to be uncovered through interviews, focus groups, video diaries and case studies over the course of the next few months

Making Futures

Exciting times...the paper is finished (almost!) and has been presented at Making Futures 2011 http://makingfutures.plymouthart.ac.uk/

It was a fantastic and inspiring day, so thank you to everyone for your interest and support.

The Aesthetic of Renewal conference in Canada have also accepted my paper and invited me to attend and present. Unfortunately funds are too limited, and my job as supermum will not allow any annual leave for travel to Ottowa. Such a shame but we are in discussion about a virtual presentation. After all, in a global climate that should be aware of minimising environmental damage through unecessary air travel, it would reduce my carbon footprint if I were to communicate via the Internet!

Lots more work in the pipeline that will be shared soon!..but for now here's a new picture to share.

So I need to write a paper...

It seems that spending time thinking about 'stuff' can lead to activity like actual research and writing!...i wrote an abstract, submitted it for a conference (Making Futures), and, after blind peer review, it was accepted!!!
Now it seems I need to actually write a paper....what was previously a dabbling with theoretical ideas / discourses / texts now needs to become an exciting 20 minute presentation and super funky paper! In a moment of madness I also submitted two further abstracts to International conferences so who knows...I could be trying to find a way to get out to Canada next year to present at the Aesthetics of Renewal Conference!
The title of my paper is Making Pasts: investigating the sustainability of family stories in a digital age
You can see how it is a culmination of some of the work here on this blogsite, and I guess the idea of the blog was to try to evidence that there was some kind of research going on during the last academic year, however crude it may have appeared!
So I need to write a paper...watch this space...

oh and because a post wouldn't be complete without a picture, here's an awesome photo by Tony-Ray Jones, taken in Brighton...love it!

“We are all chimeras"

“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” (Donna Haraway)

How is our writing mediated and motivated by considerations of gender and hybridity? 

Homi K. Bhabha’s diasporas and new definitions of hybridity, showing how colonialism is far from 'in the past' but continuing to be apparent in our 'presents', demanding we transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations. (See Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Derrida, Lacan)

How has the “democracy” of the Internet opened up floodgates of “untested” material? What effect has this had on information consumption and information generation. How much sh*t do we need to sift through in order to find what we thought we were looking for (which has itself since changed to something new that we discovered on a googling tangent!)
And what of the promise of Deleuze and Guatarri's rhizomatic thought; multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation? Is it just going to confuse my head.

my current favorite RHIZOME ...

 Growing about 5cm a day and won't stop til they reach my waist!

My little girl's namesake...the margarita (Daisy) 

What of the cult of blogs, everyone’s story, confession, the manufactured memoir? What is interesting? Can pschoanalysis explain this voyeurism/exhibitionism? Or is it merely self-conscious posturing?

Do our bodies become speedier and more mechanized as we plug in? Is this all about efficiency? The "human resource" being pushed to it's speediest limits in order to be more financially viable? Are we becoming imprisoned/static by our own technological advances.

What capabilities are gained in the age of the ebook and text message novels? What is lost? When the original texts only exist digitally how valuable books will become!

Thank you Naropa University for inspiring me to revisit cyborg theory...now, how can this inform future teaching/research projects?

Peripheral Vision

pe·riph·er·y

/pəˈrɪfəri/ [puh-rif-uh-ree]

–noun, plural -er·ies.

1.  the external boundary of any surface or area.

2. the external surface of a body.

3. the edge or outskirts, as of a city or urban area.

4. the relatively minor, irrelevant, or superficial aspects of the subject in question: The preliminary research did not, of course, take me beyond the periphery of my problem.

5. Anatomy . the area in which nerves end.

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Origin:
1350–1400; < Late Latin peripherīa  < Greek periphéreia  circumference, literally, a bearing round, equivalent to peri- peri- + phér ( ein ) to bear¹ + -eia -y³ ; replacing Middle English periferie  < Medieval Latin periferīa,  variant spelling of Late Latin peripherīa

—Synonyms 1.  circumference, perimeter.

—Antonyms 1, 2.  center.

vi·sion

/ˈvɪʒən/

[vizh-uhn]

–noun

1. the act or power of sensing with the eyes; sight.

2. the act or power of anticipating that which will or may come to be: prophetic vision; the vision of an entrepreneur.

3. an experience in which a personage, thing, or event appears vividly or credibly to the mind, although not actually present, often under the influence of a divine or other agency: a heavenly messenger appearing in a vision. Compare hallucination ( def. 1 ) .

4. something seen or otherwise perceived during such an experience: The vision revealed its message.

5. a vivid, imaginative conception or anticipation: visions of wealth and glory.

6. something seen; an object of sight.

7. a scene, person, etc., of extraordinary beauty: The sky was a vision of red and pink.

8. computer vision.

–verb (used with object)

9. to envision: She tried to vision herself in a past century.

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Origin:
1250–1300; Middle English < Latin vīsiōn-  (stem of vīsiō ) a seeing, view, equivalent to vīs ( us ), past participle of vidēre  to see + -iōn- -ion

—Related forms

vi·sion·less, adjective

—Synonyms 2. perception, discernment. 4. apparition, phantasm, chimera. See dream.