Atemporality for the Creative Artist

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you ... See more

What's needed here is like a kind of atemporality that's like agnosticism. Just a calm, pragmatic, serene skepticism about the historical narratives.

Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don't match the territory, and that's why we are upset.

Becoming 'multi-temporal', rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don't bind us to anything i... See more

It's not a perfect explanation, it's a contingent explanation for contingent times.

We are in a period which I think is dominated by two great cultural signifiers. An analog system that belonged to our parents, which has been shot full of holes. It is the symbol of the ruined castle. "Gothic High-Tech." The ruins of the unsustainable. And the other symbol is the favela slum, "Favela Chic," the informalized, illegalized, heavily ne... See more

We are living in an atemporal network culture, and I don't think that requires a moral panic. I think it ought to be regarded as something like moving into a new town.

You can physically outlive the period in which explaining things in this way makes sense.

This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.

What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of 'Gothic High-Tech' and 'Favela Chic' (as ... See more