vilma

EN LT

2004-05-10	Nerijus : digest

Voices in the street, explorations in gender media and public space. I chose from this the social architecture of space and media construction of the social architecture of space, and I have chosen this as somehow related to my dissertation about everyday life. What interested me in this text is the everyday usage of media, indeed this text is mostly focused on older media, with some general remarks on new media, but anyway the examples on older media show me how all these are integrated into everyday life, which is important for me, not just within a theoretical point of view. Everyday life interested me as I was interested in different religious techniques and meditations, and I didn’t know how to combine theory and practice and somehow I found that the everyday life and everyday practices - the small things - can combine these two points. This everyday field is existential, theoretical but also real… probably it could be boring… I try to deal with different fields from that everyday life point of view…For example I have written on the everyday in cinema… Becoming Virtual reality in the digital (virtualizing the body) First of all this chapter directly relates to the concept of collective body that we have spoken on in the workshop, and how the collective body formerly had a religious connotation and now technological… It is extended and connected by means of different media devices… I understood this logic, this body-logic of media is important to me, because the body is something concrete, not abstract, and for me it is quite important to find this concrete way to deal with different medias. I remember that my father always worked with media, and now he is also working with computers, new technologies etc… I remember from my childhood that the brought me with him to his work, and I remember all these huge machines… not computers like today, but all these huge devices and just small monitors… It was quite boring for me then, I didn’t know how to use those machines, as there were no games of course, but it was possible to print something. I even remember pictures that I had printed out. One was a rabbit sitting on a pot. Another picture was a bear, a symbol of the Olympics of Moscow… Somehow I felt that hostility of these machines, and just this way to use them… When I read about how media extends the body, it is understandable for me. I understood that media is not machines separated from us, not just “rabbit” or “bear”…. Producing… The third text is from mapping reality…the chapter “mapping the void”. The book starts from this Baudrillard dictum, that maps precede reality and not vice versa, not territory but maps, that means maps create territory… Of course quite often this notion is treated somehow negatively, even Baudrillard himself - this situation he called simulacram… but for me… it’s the situation when maps precede territory, it is a way to proliferate different spaces. And mapping opens more rich detourne in the city… it offers more possibilities how to deal with the city, physically we see only one city, streets, etc… but there are different maps… we can speak of nostalgic places, that already don’t exist, or some future places that are planned but not still existing… in that chapter mapping the voice, there is no void, physically, especially in the urban space, but there is always the lack, and every person in urban space tries to fulfill this void place, I think that media is a good device to proliferate this maps and cartographies… we have different possibilities such as internet cartographies… it opens heterogeneous urban spaces. The fourth text is a press release of the spokesperson of Vilnius mayor. There is project to restore one of the streets of Vilnius that was destroyed during Second World War. I have chosen this text because it illustrates how maps proliferate the images of Vilnius. Different maps not only contribute to each other, but, as in this case, confront each other. Its quite easy to bind the three, there are there elements, body, domain of everyday spaces, and urban spaces, for me these are in a succession. Our practices in the open space are virtualized all the time. Indeed what I am doing, I think that some years before I did intentional effort to consider how to treat media, because somewhere it was negative for me, I think from childhood, when it was indeed very boring, to see all these huge machines… and now for me I find this way that interests me.