The democratic dilemma

The democratic dilemma as found in The New American Myth – what if the most popular idea isn’t actually such a good idea, or all that popular in reality? People governing government governing the people’s governing of the government that is in fact governing them. Democratic politics is inherently government by tautology.

What we need is something like ‘sophisticracy’, government by un-biased state of the arts – all arts. The real challenge I think is in finding how to navigate our way towards a balance of open progress and wellness without the hierarchies that are required (and they are required I think, to facilitate and implement intelligent co-habitation of the planet) becoming exclusively self serving in stead of serving the state of the world.

Democracy as we see it today will shred itself – and just maybe we will see that the planet governs the planet, best for us if we work for this as much as we can, evolution can be Stern.

Net Art : Without Animals?

artbaseAll25_s354.jpg

After meeting Nathaniel Stern in person today (great!) and engaging in some of his very stimulating ‘collaborative overlap’, I felt inspired enough to take a look at the theme of ‘art’ through the relatively complicated stylistic cum procedural aesthetic that I am developing. The image along side is a compressed 354 x 354 pixel version of the actual work, which in its completeness measures 7087 x 7087 pixels, that translates to 600 x 600 mm at 300 dots per inch (dpi).

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Becoming parents – staying partners?

“I hope this finds you well and that you do not mind me letting you
know about a talk for new and expecting parents and interested
professionals

BECOMING PARENTS – STAYING PARTNERS
What to expect and How to cope

  • Saturday 1 APRIL
  • Time: 9:30 –10:30
  • Cost R30

Venue: my practice on the Norwood Houghton Border
Tea, handout and practical suggestions included
Places limited booking essential
Call Belinda Farre on 728 3406

Antenatal classes help us prepare for the birth and early physical
care of baby, but what about afterwards??????

For more info:Web link:
http://www.wlw.co.za/PROVIDERS/becomingparents.htm
or call 728 3406 or e-mail bfarre at webmail.co.za with any
questions.

Belinda runs workshops for new and expecting parents. Feedback
regarding the original workshop series has been very positive.
workshops aim to strengthen both the partnership and early
parenting. However new parents are met with a barrage of products
and services all drawing on limited funds. The talk covers some of
the ideas and exercises participants found most helpful in the
longer workshop series and also serves as an introduction to the
workshops for those who wish to do some further work.

Please forward to anyone you feel would be interested.

With many thanks
Belinda Farre

Salutogenesis

The broadly single minded pursuit of quality tenaciously:
1. systematically {Manageability}
2. aiming procedurally {Meaningfulness}
3. predictably, repeatably and reputably { Cognition }

See also

Salutogenesis in Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis]
where its arguably present if you bother to look into some of the

Web 2.0 Wikipedia discourse [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Web_2.0]

at peace and prosperity down Technorati [http://www.technorati.com/search/peace%20and%20prosperity%20]

Firm Learning : Salutogenic Perspectives on Lifelong Learning
as a way towards cultivating
Organised Sustainable Prosperity and Well-being
of Learning Organisations and their People, 2004

[http://pixelplexus.co.za/txts/firmLearning.htm#Index]

PS.

More than your average soundbite.

“Kentridge Under Erasure”

Kentridge Under Erasure

Interesting, dense but lucid consideration of some Kentridge related issues, in Art South Africa 2002 by Ashraf Jamal, who didn’t like the idea of a Kentridge ‘Retrospective’ exhibition. It makes for the kind of semantic fuss which I suspect is a practical impossibility everywhere outside of the distinctly intimidating world of arts discourse. I cant resist quoting a snippet from the concluding paragraph, adressing fashionable and popular opinion “…who, knowing better, invariably follow accredited opinion like swine…”

Perhaps a pointless road to go down, interrogating the locus of value, implicit vs. explicit worth etc. That is part of the nature of art, addressing questions so big, grasping the question and its invariably bigger answers, simultaneously, is just not going to happen today and all that you are left with are the occasionally entertaining semantic skirmishes around essentially indulgent artefacts.

New media and art – as (frequency) space

st_art here»

I love that I can hop over to DigitallyImported.com and plug into some of the most sophisticated contemporary music streams thumping in the world today.

Franci Cronje’s 2004 masters paper explains the importance of William Kentridge’s work – particularly for new media. His new book Wiliam Kentridge Prints is beautiful – in fact lets put up its cover in high-ish res as a special treat to the bandwidth advantaged. If you appreciate the finer subtleties of obliquity, also have a look at Nathaniel Stern (the other new media artist featured in her paper)’s Compresionism.
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CMS Notes 001

CMS, or Content Management System, is essentially a dashboard that controls data acquisition, storage, and distribution.

Based on pre-determined user-access-rights (vertical and horizontal dimensions) The dashboard facilitates uploading, browsing, and annotation of documents.

For administrative purposes CMS may have a hierarchical structure:

  • Acounts : E.g. Philips, Aberdare Etc.
    • Users : Eg. Alex(FP), Belinda(FP), JohnDo(Philips)
      • Users are assigned roles defining their capabilities
    • Content Categories: Documents e.g. Logos, Advertisements, etc
      • Documents may consist of single Masters, which contain:
        • various file_type versions, e.g. (CMYK)PDF, (RGB)JPG,
        • each of which has one or more size instances e.g. (350dpi)Print[_Offline], (150dpi)Proof
  • Where it gets interesting is in the organisation of the content, its taxonomy. Taxonomy does dot necessarily mean hierarchical. Hierarchical is just one model of taxonomy. The Object Orientation Model is also a taxonomy, though a taxonomy that starts to lend itself to holarchical perspective. Folksonomy, enough being said about that. I’m curious to look into how relationships can be established via Meta-data, perhaps something like the Dubblin Core Metadata Initiative’s DCMI Abstract Model can be used to create manageable relational protocols flexible enough to allow for the radical demands of disparate situations and contextual complexity.

DCMES={ Title,Creator,Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage, Rights,…}