Suggestions and Themes for Transmission
***ViDEo"tApE" People Talking; Up-LoAd He(A)re!<-->;)***
Here's a brief list of suggested themes I've come up with. Use them as you see fit, maybe as connectors to one or more of the infinite possibilities they inspire. Please take a few minutes to comment at the end of this post with your own suggestions. Let's move forward together in the creative process!
Keep in mind, it is not necessary, nor is it advisable, to attempt to answer all the subtopics associated with any particular topic you may choose to address. These ideas may be further explored through a creative exchange, where there is no mandated form. I am not particularly set on the magazine being limited to include only ("academic") "papers," since such an exclusion would seem to limit the scope of its perspectives. Therefore, freedom of expression in form and content is encouraged.
* Where is abbreviation taking us? Trace the history and origins of the abbreviation trend, using examples in language, in collective thought, in business, etc., and weigh its value against sacrifices made. For instance, it seems that with one technological advancement after another, the mechanization movement has meant making our culture move faster (e.g., a progression from the Industrial Revolution to the present reveals sudden changes transitioning a culture, one may argue, from a slow-paced age emphasizing quality over quantity into a fast-paced age emphasizing quantity over quality, a culture that promotes ease of use over hard work, introducing in rapid succession the railroad, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the freeway, the television, the computer, e-mail and internet, the text message, the i-phone app), as it seeks immediate gratification. Advertising in the past hundred years also reflects the rapid progression in the collective psyche: from the lengthy text ad that was once common to the minimalist pop image of today. What have been the psychological effects on the individual caught in this wave? What are the pros and cons of this trend? Is it indefinitely sustainable? Is this trend facilitating a movement into a new paradigm?
* Examine the ideas of "political correctness" and "tolerance." Do these social pressures establish whatever their assumed agenda is? Are they responsible for reinforcing old prejudices?
* Pick a popular expression, word or ad campaign and examine its viability. It may be old or new, as long as it's still in popular use: for example, one may argue that the overwhelming popularity of anti-drug campaigns and breast cancer awareness campaigns, while benefiting their specific target audiences according to their respective agendas, overlook and promote ignorance of other epidemics, such as heart disease, which is the number one killer of women, and alcohol, which causes more health problems, arguably, than marijuana.
* What kind of information has priority in the dominant (Western) culture? What kind of information has priority in other cultures? Compare and contrast. For example, examine the top news stories from different sources, from American media and elsewhere. One may find it useful to inform one's argument by examining concepts such as media conglomeration, imperialism, and marginalization.
More than observing what we perceive to be ingrained social problems, the purpose of ob(li)fious is to discuss and suggest alternatives for creatively re-envisioning our world.
Each issue of the magazine we publish may explore a certain theme, representing a diversity of critical perspectives.
01 July 2009
29 June 2009
One's Treasure
The Ob(li)fious portfolio, which I have been compiling since my third year at Webster University, was in a messenger bag that was stolen earlier this month from an anti-profit coffee house in Portland. I am excited that the portfolio, a packed museum of notes, relics, nonlocal articles, paper topics scrawled on post-its losing their adhesive, and ideas for meetings and the collective, in general, was recycled back into the cosmos, so ideas can be born fresh again. I sincerely hope whoever has found it has found some use for it.
Please contribute.Ob(li)fious is a site intended for gathering together an active movement that seeks reassessment of traditional constructs and ideas through peaceful dialog, emphasizing the necessity of responding to concepts conveyed through various languages and media with our own language and media. The group promotes awareness and intelligent though not elitist dialog, rather than doctrine or dogma, and is driven by the idea that the world is invented by an array of people and ideas that are sometimes voiceless due to suppression or lack of an arena in which the voices can peacefully assemble and come to recognize a viable agreement. All perspectives are encouraged, as we seek information through careful research. The group will conduct its own research, which will be documented, synthesized, and explored through various creative projects that the group will determine autonomously and collectively. In accordance with the group's intention to share information freely, one of its outlets will be an independently published magazine, seeking neither notoriety nor profit.
The Ob(li)fious portfolio, which I have been compiling since my third year at Webster University, was in a messenger bag that was stolen earlier this month from an anti-profit coffee house in Portland. I am excited that the portfolio, a packed museum of notes, relics, nonlocal articles, paper topics scrawled on post-its losing their adhesive, and ideas for meetings and the collective, in general, was recycled back into the cosmos, so ideas can be born fresh again. I sincerely hope whoever has found it has found some use for it.
Please contribute.Ob(li)fious is a site intended for gathering together an active movement that seeks reassessment of traditional constructs and ideas through peaceful dialog, emphasizing the necessity of responding to concepts conveyed through various languages and media with our own language and media. The group promotes awareness and intelligent though not elitist dialog, rather than doctrine or dogma, and is driven by the idea that the world is invented by an array of people and ideas that are sometimes voiceless due to suppression or lack of an arena in which the voices can peacefully assemble and come to recognize a viable agreement. All perspectives are encouraged, as we seek information through careful research. The group will conduct its own research, which will be documented, synthesized, and explored through various creative projects that the group will determine autonomously and collectively. In accordance with the group's intention to share information freely, one of its outlets will be an independently published magazine, seeking neither notoriety nor profit.
08 February 2009
Judge it by its Cover
"Loosen a rivet from the lapsed mind
and out pours the obvious like thick rain."—Noah Eli Gordon, Novel Pictorial Noise
The cover of Ob(li)fious, like the cover of my personal journal, is a collage of everyday symbols, words, clichés. I am a cliché. “I” “am” “a cliché,” where “a cliché” is a cliché itself. A phrase seems to begin to approach cliché when it is recognized by the collective consciousness as representing something which seems true. This collective consciousness, perhaps, perceives itself vaguely as an abyss, rather than as heaven; if this were true, it would seem to follow that a cliché, just like a belief, sinks into this abyss (what Jung calls the "unconscious"), and informs the popular collective worldview. This collective consciousness may be either supraconscious or subconsious, heaven or hell, depending on what position one chooses as one's perspective. Like Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Although it's considered cliche to quote Nietzsche these days, as his name is hugely iconic and misrepresented, his ideas are nonetheless relevant. As I hope will become apparent, this example of a cliche, however irritated one is by it, illustrates an argument I touch on here but would like to argue further at a later time; that is, that cliches should not be avoided just because of the cultural taboo surrounding the use of the cliche. When something is labeled culturally as cliche or archaic, there is an implication along with this categorization that the "old" ideas and images are to be strictly avoided. This seems, however, to be a modern concept, and I would like to question its viability as we move toward a less, in my opinion, short-sighted temporal awareness that values the archaic, not just what is viewed as "new" (although, perhaps, as these modern values themselves, too, become archaic, they can be reasonably justified).
Logically, some clichés are based on assumptions which are just beliefs, some of which may be true. For example, Kai Chang states in his essay “The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of ‘Political Correctness,” “What's striking about the repetitive droning complaints about "PC" (from both conservatives and liberals) is that the expression itself — not to mention the concept it invokes — is as sloppily unexamined as it is pedestrian.”1 However, there is such a thing as “anti-cliché,” which is a device commonly used by writers to free the cliché from the absurd back into the realm of viable ideas. A cliché seems to work as a symbol. As one becomes aware of the prevalence of basic shapes and images detached from contexts, where one adjusts one's assumption from believing these images to be exclusively Capitalist symbols (when in the market), or exclusively natural symbols (when found in nature), these symbols begin to situate themselves for the observer within a macrocosmic context which keeps everything alive with meaning, rather than cliche. For an instance of this, there's evidence to suggest that the extinct Mayan civilization based their economy on a currency of cacao beans, demonstrating direct connection to their ecosystem, their source of food and well-being, promoting a sustainable lifestyle and a subject-subject consciousness paradigm.
It seems that one possibility, if reduced, for the vestige of empirical civilization we're experiencing now is that when a people--tribe, community, civilization--begins resisting its cosmic-global worldview, it starts limiting itself by defocusing from life as a cosmic phenomenon. In place of an image located within a cosmos, people born into this new culture may start viewing an image or concept as something which exists as if in a vacuum, having no value or meaning apart from a limited historical perspective (that history which the culture has written for itself as a way to insulate the people--who see themselves for the most part as inseparable from the proscribed culture itself--from any history before or after it). Instead of things having living value, therefore, being integrally embedded in all time and space and therefore informing a paradigm for a people who believes itself likewise to be situated within an infinite cosmos of free and creative possibilities, symbols in such a disconnected culture would be dead metaphors (by definition, isolated from their origins). Symbols, therefore, might take on the shape only of the meaning applied to them within a limited historical perspective.
Words may form just as beliefs do, from concepts assumed to be absolute, unquestionable truth. If a language, then, inherently within its very structure, carries limited beliefs, which, through the language, are repeated or maintained by everyone within a certain nation, this language is impelling every individual who hears and speaks it into accepting an entire system of assumptions. This idea is further realized when the technology becomes available to broadcast such repeated messages into every home, to every car, to every person's ipod, to every movie theater, etc. Society is an artifice. It is possible, then, for the people of an entire nation to believe their choices to be their own, without realizing that even they are part of the artifice.
There seems to be a necessity, therefore, to question the fundamental truths. It seems there has been a mass erasure, inherent in the artifice of Western society, of origins. There also appears to be a great dismissal of the necessity to analyze simple concepts. An analysis of origin, though, tends to inform the thing itself, reclaiming its meaning and taking it out of the realm of cliché. There, in its proper environment, an idea that has been expressed as a dead phrase is in a better position for one to decide if the idea is something one wishes to adopt, abolish, or reinvent in(to) or from one's own life.
This independent magazine seeks this, and related challenges as its mission. It is a project intended to increase awareness by being a medium through which anyone can critically discuss and challenge ideas. While deconstruction of existing beliefs is at the forefront of this publication's goals, the magazine's contributors will also seek constructive alternatives. All who are interested in participating in this challenge are welcome.
1 Chang, Kai. “The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of ‘Political Correctness.'” Zuky: Open Mind and Open Hand Strike. 2006. Kai Chang..
"Loosen a rivet from the lapsed mind
and out pours the obvious like thick rain."—Noah Eli Gordon, Novel Pictorial Noise
The cover of Ob(li)fious, like the cover of my personal journal, is a collage of everyday symbols, words, clichés. I am a cliché. “I” “am” “a cliché,” where “a cliché” is a cliché itself. A phrase seems to begin to approach cliché when it is recognized by the collective consciousness as representing something which seems true. This collective consciousness, perhaps, perceives itself vaguely as an abyss, rather than as heaven; if this were true, it would seem to follow that a cliché, just like a belief, sinks into this abyss (what Jung calls the "unconscious"), and informs the popular collective worldview. This collective consciousness may be either supraconscious or subconsious, heaven or hell, depending on what position one chooses as one's perspective. Like Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Although it's considered cliche to quote Nietzsche these days, as his name is hugely iconic and misrepresented, his ideas are nonetheless relevant. As I hope will become apparent, this example of a cliche, however irritated one is by it, illustrates an argument I touch on here but would like to argue further at a later time; that is, that cliches should not be avoided just because of the cultural taboo surrounding the use of the cliche. When something is labeled culturally as cliche or archaic, there is an implication along with this categorization that the "old" ideas and images are to be strictly avoided. This seems, however, to be a modern concept, and I would like to question its viability as we move toward a less, in my opinion, short-sighted temporal awareness that values the archaic, not just what is viewed as "new" (although, perhaps, as these modern values themselves, too, become archaic, they can be reasonably justified).
Logically, some clichés are based on assumptions which are just beliefs, some of which may be true. For example, Kai Chang states in his essay “The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of ‘Political Correctness,” “What's striking about the repetitive droning complaints about "PC" (from both conservatives and liberals) is that the expression itself — not to mention the concept it invokes — is as sloppily unexamined as it is pedestrian.”1 However, there is such a thing as “anti-cliché,” which is a device commonly used by writers to free the cliché from the absurd back into the realm of viable ideas. A cliché seems to work as a symbol. As one becomes aware of the prevalence of basic shapes and images detached from contexts, where one adjusts one's assumption from believing these images to be exclusively Capitalist symbols (when in the market), or exclusively natural symbols (when found in nature), these symbols begin to situate themselves for the observer within a macrocosmic context which keeps everything alive with meaning, rather than cliche. For an instance of this, there's evidence to suggest that the extinct Mayan civilization based their economy on a currency of cacao beans, demonstrating direct connection to their ecosystem, their source of food and well-being, promoting a sustainable lifestyle and a subject-subject consciousness paradigm.
It seems that one possibility, if reduced, for the vestige of empirical civilization we're experiencing now is that when a people--tribe, community, civilization--begins resisting its cosmic-global worldview, it starts limiting itself by defocusing from life as a cosmic phenomenon. In place of an image located within a cosmos, people born into this new culture may start viewing an image or concept as something which exists as if in a vacuum, having no value or meaning apart from a limited historical perspective (that history which the culture has written for itself as a way to insulate the people--who see themselves for the most part as inseparable from the proscribed culture itself--from any history before or after it). Instead of things having living value, therefore, being integrally embedded in all time and space and therefore informing a paradigm for a people who believes itself likewise to be situated within an infinite cosmos of free and creative possibilities, symbols in such a disconnected culture would be dead metaphors (by definition, isolated from their origins). Symbols, therefore, might take on the shape only of the meaning applied to them within a limited historical perspective.
Words may form just as beliefs do, from concepts assumed to be absolute, unquestionable truth. If a language, then, inherently within its very structure, carries limited beliefs, which, through the language, are repeated or maintained by everyone within a certain nation, this language is impelling every individual who hears and speaks it into accepting an entire system of assumptions. This idea is further realized when the technology becomes available to broadcast such repeated messages into every home, to every car, to every person's ipod, to every movie theater, etc. Society is an artifice. It is possible, then, for the people of an entire nation to believe their choices to be their own, without realizing that even they are part of the artifice.
There seems to be a necessity, therefore, to question the fundamental truths. It seems there has been a mass erasure, inherent in the artifice of Western society, of origins. There also appears to be a great dismissal of the necessity to analyze simple concepts. An analysis of origin, though, tends to inform the thing itself, reclaiming its meaning and taking it out of the realm of cliché. There, in its proper environment, an idea that has been expressed as a dead phrase is in a better position for one to decide if the idea is something one wishes to adopt, abolish, or reinvent in(to) or from one's own life.
This independent magazine seeks this, and related challenges as its mission. It is a project intended to increase awareness by being a medium through which anyone can critically discuss and challenge ideas. While deconstruction of existing beliefs is at the forefront of this publication's goals, the magazine's contributors will also seek constructive alternatives. All who are interested in participating in this challenge are welcome.
1 Chang, Kai. “The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of ‘Political Correctness.'” Zuky: Open Mind and Open Hand Strike. 2006. Kai Chang.
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