The Weird and the Eerie of Swing You Sinners!

There's a peculiar feeling one gets when, after a long time absent, one feels oneself pulled into a familiar orbit. Not that there is an inevitability to it; it's not that all paths lead back to the same place, but rather that some regions are like drains for our psyche, threatening to slowly draw us in from a multitude of directions should we fail to keep our distance. So it was for me recently with a return to electro-swing.

The End of Design

In Arthur C. Danto's After the End of Art, he describes his assessment of the state of contemporary art: quite simply, art felt like it had come to an end because it had. Danto is clear throughout his work that by 'the end of art' he does not mean that there is no new art being done, or that this art is not good. Rather, he means something more like what many would consider art history - an overarching narrative under which the large body of 'art' proper could be subsumed¹. No longer was there a clear Gestalt into which art could be made to fit, in its place were many small movements: spurious excitations of ecstatic creativity that dissipated with rapidity. What Danto saw in the contemporary art world was one that had followed the trajectory of the art narrative as far as it could go until at last it was extinguished. This is what Danto called the post-historical moment, in which there was no longer a pale of history into which art belonged (Danto, 1997). This is the world of postmodern art - an eclectic mish-mash of styles all with separate narratives. It is a world that we are still living in - no new modernist artistic narrative has come along, managed to take hold and command the art world as was the case in the early twentieth century.

Totalitarian Capitalism

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes totalitarianism form the more familiar forms of tyranny known to us as dictatorships. Totalitarianism is a term reserved for Nazism and Bolshevism, as seen under Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Arendt stresses that totalitarianism is not to be confused with fascism, and points out that the Nazis themselves were keen to distinguish Nazism from fascism, and looked down with contempt on Mussolini's fascist Italy. While dictatorships have often been driven by totalitarian movements, once they acquire power they seize the power structure of the state. By the very maneuver with which they seemingly take on complete control they straight-jacket themselves; dictatorships are characterized by a complete takeover by the state, but also a containment within the state. They satisfy themselves with the bureaucratic confines and enter into a state of equilibrium. The totalitarian drive is extinguished. Conventional dictatorships are not unfamiliar, and while they are oppressive and brutal, the Western world has never been adverse to dealing with them. Operating as they do within the state structure they offer a degree of stability and predictability¹.

Totalitarianism, by contrast, is what happens when the movement is not contented and extinguished by the state but refuses the structure of the state altogether; it occurs when the movement refuses any structure at all.

Limbic Thinking Extended

Previously I articulated some of my thoughts on a concept I termed limbic thinking wherein I opposed the idea of thought being reducible to language or a language-like thing with the notion of language as merely one type of thinking in a landscape of different kinds of thinking, not all of which can necessarily be translated from one into another¹. Here I wish to sketch out some more thoughts and notes on the concept.

Obsessive Materialism in a Virtualising World

An interesting change began to take hold in the tech industry as the iPhone rose to prominence, eventually dominating the landscape and setting the terms for the way we think about communications technology. In truth, it had already begun with the iPod and was part of Apple’s design ethos at least since Steve Jobs returned to the company. This was a focus on the materiality of the device - the device as object: object to behold, object to be held, object to worship.

Reimagining the Green Lantern Corps

With the box-office success of Aquaman, long-gestating projects based on DC properties are sure to be getting a bit of a boost. One such project, a Green Lantern Corps movie, has been in the air but never solidified since the critical and box-office disaster of the 2011 movie starring Ryan Reynolds. However, what I would like to do here is not to propose a set of inane criteria by which Warner Bros. can "do the property right" or pine for a series of doubtless obscure and ultimately juvenile comic pages to come to "life" on the big screen, but instead to formulate a vision by which the formula and indeed the identity of the Green Lantern Corps might be subverted, perverted, and completely reimagined. I want to use the general concepts introduced in the comics as a springboard from which to delve into more interesting themes in greater depth than is offered by the typical superhero comic or blockbuster movie.

Project: Return to 'Return to Sender' Top-Level Image

Previously I posted about the visual development of an image for a small project titled Return to Sender. That post can be found here. Essentially I walked through the various steps I used to make the image (planning, model-making, photography and compositing) and ended with a note that I was somewhat satisfied with the image but considered it not entirely finished. I have since gone back and revised the image, so this post is meant to document those updates.