Electracy4Kids

"Kafka," by R. Crumb  To continue the theme from Nietzsche and Moira, the two worlds and how they relate (chance disrupting plans in the Dice Box aphorism). This theme is central to our project, organizing our introduction to electracy. Hannah Arendt provides a second example, based on a parable by Franz Kafka, "HE," from the Zurau Aphorisms. He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from his origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. Actually the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but also he himself, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment--and this it must be admitted would require a night darker than any night has ever been ye...

While we are discussing synchronicity, I should report another example in my own case of the retrospective loops and repetitions of time, an effect associated with fate, destiny, meaning. Perhaps part of what our inquiry is about is how one life and career more or less concluding offers lessons or paradigms from which younger generations might learn, at least to notice the kinds of patterns that might operate in their own projects. The question is how knowing such models in advance could be useful for directing one's own choices.   Daybreak , 130   I will discuss my recent remake of mystory in a separate thread. It updates Noon Star, itself a remake of the original Derrida at the Little Big Horn . In the remake I discovered the primary gesture unifying my Image of Wide Scope (IOWS) (terms and methods to be unpacked later). The gesture is the throw (throw down), blow, stroke, cut, all gathered in the term coup (in both its French and English usage). Researching coup, I t...

 While we are following this thread of choragraphy, it is necessary to include some of the relevant theory.  A related theme is another fundamental lesson of my education, is that imagination is inscribed within an archival order (the Symbolic), a network of potential resonances and repetitions produced through synchronicity, the simultaneous atemporal existence of the historical record. Part of the project of choragraphy is to explore a logic of "conduction," a poetic practice that brings these heterogeneous materials into relation, to form constellations of potential meaning. A primary example in my own case is chora. Miles City Sand & Gravel Plant   Composing my first mystory in the mid-1980s, “Derrida at the Little Bighorn,” I discovered a match between Family and Career that produced an epiphany I have developed ever since. One of my first jobs when I worked at the plant was to clean the grids of the screens used to grade the gravel into sizes. Eventually the scr...

Night , Composite Dream Map  Susan Hiller's Dream Mapping is just one example of the genre or mode of mapping appropriated by artists for expression, inquiry, invention, experiment. The "map" as one of the modes of annotation available for choragraphy. Hiller's example is collected in an anthology, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. by Katharine Harmon Map of the Internet  Kevin Kelly asked people to draw a map of the Internet, this being one example. This example is in a collection of artists' maps, Mapping it Out: Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartography , edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cinemap: North by Northwest  Alternative cartographies and maps of the imagination combine in "cinemaps," representing the mise en scene of movies.  In Andrew DeGraff,  Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies . Bambi , Infographics   Related to cinemaps are the infographic reductions of movies, as in the example of Bambi . These are ...

View of Norwich    Chorography is a mapping, practiced at      least since the time of Ptolemy, combining features of geographical data and mimetic representation. One of its practical applications was to aid ship captains to identify seaports; also for overviews of townscapes. Choragraphy (with an A) is a recent innovation based on the collaboration of Jacques Derrida with the Architect Peter Eisenman, adopted for my updating of cogntive mapping, the mental geographies people create for way-finding (more later). Hundred Acre Woods  Children's books often include chorographies of the place or Umwelt of the world of the story, such as the Hundred Acre Woods of Winnie the Pooh . The importance of literature for developing imagination is that the scenographies of the Other World created in stories inform human fantasy with instructions for how and what to desire.  Uncle Remus, Song of the South  I still have the book of the Disney (controversial) ve...

Map: Waldon Pond  The Frogs appeared in my scholarship eventually, in a chapter of Avatar Emergency  (2012), entitled "Frog." It was published as an essay orginally, as "Walden Choragraphy: Frog Maintenance."    ( Discourse , 2009). The method was to approach Thoreau through inventory and commentary on all the "frogs" present in Walden : not only the actual frogs reported, but any object or thing associated with the name, whether in slang or otherwise. Jacques Lacan, for example, discussing the structure of joke-work in the discourse of the unconscious, advised always to look for the "frog" in the tracks, that is the "switch" that jumped a train from one line to another. The railroad line near the pond is a motif in Thoreau's meditations, representing the presence of this switch frog in the text.  Walden is a well-defined site, showing how a real place corresponds with imagination, how it may become a receptacle or chora for imagina...

Tootsietown Miniature World  On a dresser top in my bedroom is a miniature world called Tootsietown, a map holding together my imagination. It is an assemblage from several related sources, constructed magpie-like from Kathy's collectibles. Perhaps the force of assemblage began with several Chinese mudmen sages, which I recognized as an ideal in fantasy, first glimpsed in a scroll painting viewed in the Harn Museum, of sages conversing in a garden. A bridge creates a pond which is filled with the smallest frogs available. The garden is mostly Christmas trees. A Pogo Possum figure that belonged to my Dad (Walt Kelly's Pogo was his favorite cartoon) is present. Possum  is a keyword, evoking the Latin saying, vele est posse , where there is a will, there is a way. The scene revolves around the protagonist, the baseball player, my "avatar" in this scene, standing next to the Tootsietoy car, which requires another post.  The Hitter and Tootsietoy with Frog Pond

  Table of Frogs The Collector The red line I am tracing through my life is retrospective, Nachträglichkeit, allowing for deferral and delay ( differance ), the time of understanding. Here is one of the challenges of electracy, with its collapsed dimensions of space and time in lived conditions (the dromosphere of light-speed technology). We are learning to tell our stories as we live them. The Philosopher warned us that life is told backwards (narrated in past tense), but must be lived forwards (with hope and fear of what is to come). The Other World emerging in virtual real time is replacing everyday life experience. We are tracing here how form-making develops first in imagination, in order to take over the design invention at some point.  I began collecting frogs in mid-life, this totem chosen randomly I believed, as something to do while accompanying Kathy on her visits to antique malls and junk emporiums during the years she spent as an antique dealer. It is obvious now ...

Pond in the meadow Mother West Wind "How" Stories  I became aware of the Other World through story time when my father read books to me at bedtime. There were many wonderful books, but the one that most engaged me was a series by Thornton W. Burgess about all the creatures that lived around and about the forest and meadow with its pond. It was during the reading of one of these books that I interrupted my father to ask him how he was doing this, how when he held this book these stories appeared (his style was to dramatize all the different voices, to express the personality of each creature). He showed me the page, the letters all neatly aligned across the pages, page after page, and explained that these were words that we speak every day and he was reading them, with the promise someday soon I would he able to read them also. Later I came to understand that this Other World makes tangible the human imagination, and it is a prodigious archive of How stories, instructing us ho...

The Four Kids Mondialisation Perhaps the most basic lesson I learned about the imagination from my research and teaching is that it is a faculty of worlding. Finding ourselves thrown into existence, as the Philosopher says, we become who we are by finding and interiorizing those bits and fragments of reality that we recognize as our own, according to our respective dispositions and intuitions. Jacques Derrida used the term "mondialisation" in French to name the collective process of world formation underway in our time, as alternative to "globalization" with its imperialist implications of economic and technological power. Mondialisation is more humanistic approach to this historical dynamic, concerned with justice and community. The argument of 4Kids is that this more just formation of colledtive worldwideism must be undertaken by individuals becoming what they are, each in her own unique experience. It begins with understanding how we form this first world, how we...