Local to Local

Local to local is what this blog is about.

In a context of international exchange between artists, and other actors, livestreaming video has become more than a part of the everyday life of skypeworld in a series of projects involving skyped encounters. This blog is about exploring, probing, trying to find out about how this tool is shaping space in the context of making art, and how this activity brings about a radical questioning, a possible re-thinking of what is really important in the arts now!

It is also about the local and the global, but with the proviso that for this blog space local > < global as a navigational frame looks a bit worn out, a cliche perhaps? and certainly very abstract; a geometry that lacks the stretch of a body, of a limb, of a muscle, perhaps in the act of reaching out, or across a space.

For the ancient Greeks geometry and space had that certain tactile quality that comes from the experience of space and so is essentially inseparable from the sense we have of space defined by the movements of limbs that carry bodies through spaces, or for the reaching for things, or the formation of gesture.
This kind of geometry is concrete! 

Proprioception is relevant here. The term is coined from the Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, used to refer to the sense we all share  of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body. Unlike the exteroceptive senses by which we perceive the outside world, and interoceptive senses, that have to do with pain and movement of internal organs, proprioception is a third distinct sensory modality. It provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally. It is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other.

Global, and globalization are terms that seem to increasingly belong to the conditions that tend toward an abstraction of space, an abstract geometry for the abstraction of information, a blank container for the free-floating, infinitely translatable stuff of actually existing capitalism. 
This kind of geometry is the geometry of the colonial spirit!

Since the publication of Apollo 8's revelatory image of the blue planet rising above the Moon's horizon, the shocking realization of our cosmic condition has softened somewhat, has become absorbed into the everyday, the ordinary.  
The poetry of the image, even the terror and anxiety of the existential essence of the image remains immanent, in potential, but it has become a cliche!

Looking at earthspace from space dissolves boundaries! Marshall McLuhan chose a fuzzy scanned image of the earth viewed from a satellite in the pre-NASA Apollo mission years, and uses it with a portentous warning quote from the philosopher A. N. Whitehead in the last pages of his book;

There is a tendency, an assumption to think of boundaries in space as necessarily visual in their character, just as we think about space itself as defined in visual terms. Actual boundaries may, however, include in-visible edges, limits, horizons, with liminal properties ranging from the ultra permeable to the hermetic.

An Inventory of Effects is as good a way as any of exploring how spaces are diversely configured in multiple dimensions!

This Apollo mission photo of Earth shows the interactive vortexes of atmospheric layers. Predicting, or seeing how dynamic weather systems behave only became possible in the middle of the 19th century (1849) with the use of the newly invented electric telegraphy, and the beginnings of our present electronic environmental and global envelope.

The Smithsonian Institution began collecting atmospheric information from an observation network across the United States, with 150 observers via telegraph, under the leadership of Joseph Henry in 1849.

In 1860 Robert Fitzroy, erstwhile Captain of the Beagle and founder of the Met Office, started using the new telegraph system to gather daily observations from across England and produced the first synoptic charts. He also coined the term "weather forecast" and his were the first ever daily weather forecasts to be published in this same year. By then 500 U.S. telegraph stations were involved in making weather observations and submitting them back to the Smithsonian.

The whole point of the use of this technology was being able to correlate information from multiple points on the Earth's surface simultaneously. Only then is it possible to map the barometric contours and "see" what is going on.