another point i wanted to mention is what kind of news do we get? call me cynical but it does seem that tv news is overwhelmingly negative in its outlook. i don’t think we need just the good news but a balance of emotions promoted by the news services. it is also true that rolling news services from BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc do have items that promote positive happenings within countries but these tend to be lost in a maze of redundant graphics, in house advertising, amplified business coverage and repetitious dialogue. sorting the wheat from the chaff becomes a very laborious and frankly boring task.

so here are two suggestions for news that you can check out in conjunction with the places and spaces that you already visit.

ON THE TELLY : CURRENT TV
http://current.com/

CURRENT TV is an oasis of sanity amongst Sky’s daily diet of guns, cops, corpses, clichés and more guns. Whether you agree with its documentaries or not at least they are provocative and contextualise pertinent issues around our fragile globe. of course you can argue that mainstream tv news is too short to go deep in its subject matter whilst Current is a series of full on documentaries, but for me it is the choice of story that is important and the fact that it is contained on one channel that broadcasts throughout the day. there are plenty of documentaries on tv – and i must be clear i am talking about tv in italy – but the vast majority are one an evening or a week. to my humble mind Current is closet to an internet news service.

here is more info : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_TV

the station’s title suggests not just topicality but a flow or stream of information, very net-like.

sky italia : channel 130
u.k and ireland : sky channel 183
u.s.a : direct tv channel 358, comcast channel 107, dish network channel 196
——————–

ON THE NET : GLOBAL VOICES
http://globalvoicesonline.org/

there are plenty of online newspapers that are still give us free content, but my limitations with them stem from those actually writing the content. from hacks to highly regarded journalists the voices are still mostly from people outside of the cultures from which they write about. it is good to get first hand thoughts from people intimately connected to their own culture.

and allied to this there is another way of keeping up with the ton of info produced on the net each day, which is to use an aggregator like ‘popurls’.  in general net terms, a news aggregation website is a website where headlines are collected, usually manually, by the website owner. in computing, a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader, rss reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, pocasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

trouble is that a lot of these aggregators  go for the sites that are simply most popular and in themselves do not strive to reflect a global vision. they are narrowcasting and often aimed at an English speaking European and North American audience. so here is my next tip…

Global Voices Online is an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists that follow, report, and summarizes what is going on in the blogosphere in every corner of the world.

they take stories from countries that have less technological access and/or less international profile and translate stories from original language into a number of western languages and more.

the great thing is that you are basically hearing the voices of those that live in the country day to day. they have family, friends, pets, roots there. we are sharing an intimate knowledge of a place we might never visit. this is the special vibe that the Global Voices projects brings.

these are two suggestions on how you can enhance the quality of info appearing in your cranium, and as such Current and GV can happily run parallel to any media world you have already created for yourself.  at the very least they are platforms for expressing and exchanging ideas whatever your cultural or political point of view as both take a dialectical approach to paradigm shifting.

Victor I. Stoichita is professor of the history of modern and contemporary art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His books include Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (Reaktion, 1995), The Self-Aware Image (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and A Short History of the Shadow (Reaktion, 1997).

Christopher Turner is an editor at Cabinet and is currently writing a book, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came To America, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

a short history of the shadow

Victor I. Stoichita, Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, is the author of A Short History of the Shadow (Reaktion, 1997). In exploring the writings of Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Piaget, Stoichita explains how the shadow has always been integral to theories of art and knowledge, and investigates the complex psychological meanings we project into shadows. Christopher Turner spoke to him by phone.

komarmelamid

Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socalist Realism, 1982-83. Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Courtsey Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

Your book is the first study of its kind. Why do you think the subject was previously so overlooked?

I actually started my research with that very question. Just before the publication of my book, an exhibition on shadows was organized at the National Gallery in London, accompanied by a short but interesting text by the late Ernst Gombrich. But previously art historians took a long time in paying attention to shadows because shadows are, so to speak, heavy, dark, and ugly. Perhaps this is because for the Greeks, the shadow was one of the metaphors for the psyche, the soul. A dead person’s soul was compared to a shadow, and Hades was the land of shadows, the land of death.

In Plato’s story about the origin of knowledge, which contributed to this negative validation, you have to renounce the world of shadows before you can accede to true understanding.

The prisoners in Plato’s cave were incapable of gazing directly into the light of knowledge. They had their backs to this bright light and saw only the shadows cast on the cave walls. Plato’s point was that they saw only the shadow of reality, not reality itself. The image had a tremendously negative charge for Plato and he linked the image with the shadow—both were copies of reality. And so, from the beginning on, to attain true knowledge one had to renounce the shadow stage and progress out of the cave, into the sun.

Why do you dub Plato’s origin myth a “sadistic scene”?

Plato’s story is so well-known—apparently well-known—that I tried to read it with fresh eyes and fresh thinking. It seemed to me that it was unnecessarily cruel to imagine, as he did, the people in the cave as bound, their legs and necks fastened. They were unable to move, forced to stare only at the projection of the world on the cave walls. It seemed to me that the philosopher was being blatantly sadistic. He has the perverse vision of a philosopher who enjoys the spectacle of ignorance as much as he enjoys the quest for knowledge.

If, for Plato, the shadow is at the origin of duplication, imagined in a negative way, why are myths about the origin of painting so invested in the shadow?

I was struck by the strange parallels between the Platonic story of the origins of knowledge and Pliny’s story about the origin of painting. Maybe one of the most important differences between them is that, in Pliny’s story about the origin of representation, the shadow wasn’t charged with a negative aspect: the story of the maid of Corinth tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall and thereby giving birth to painting is a wonderful story, a love story, and not at all negative, unlike Plato’s story about the origin of knowledge. But interestingly, despite the positive approach to the shadow in Pliny’s story, the myth was slowly forgotten.

I think for the western mentality, accepting that representation originated in the absence of light, in a dark spot, was difficult to accept.

stoichita

Illustration from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Athanasius Kircher’s seminal 1646 treatise on light and shadow. In explaining the principle of the camera obscura, the illustration associates the image and the shadow with the devil.

FULL INTERVIEW HERE:

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/stoichita.php

MoNoCHRON is my site for looking at the overlooked, detailing stuff that  i am temporarily obssessed with. MoNoCHRON wants to remind us to do the small stuff we enjoy as one day the will come when the day will not come…