Steven Connor, Rough Magic - broadcast on BBC in 2000.
21 October 2011
Handling
"The more abstract, placeless, and bodiless our existences, the more we come to live beside ourselves, and encounter the world and each other at a distance and through various kinds of remote control, the oder and lovelier things can became, and the greater the importance in our lvie scan be of objects that we can lay hands on, manipulate, transform and do things with. Human beings are such incorrigible fidgets, such manipulators of ;objects, of things we can touch and handle, or think of touching and handling, that it is scarcely possible for us to think dream and imagine without things exerting their shaping force upon us. We think with shapes and weights and scales and textures. We literally keep ourselves in shape by the ways in which we heft and press and handle things."
Steven Connor, Rough Magic - broadcast on BBC in 2000.
Image from here, the site for a research project that to make digital copies of fragile archaeological artefacts, like textiles, which can then be handled virtually.
Steven Connor, Rough Magic - broadcast on BBC in 2000.
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Somehow I was struck by the paradoxical nature of Steve Connor's essay -- the abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction (digital rendition of words, themselves certainly abstract, about objects abstracted and simplified from several/many specific things, ie bags).
And one of the standards of Ranger Talks at the Petrified Forest is to ask the visitors what the four things for existence might have aided the indigenous peoples to settle there: I've forgotten the first three (food, water, shelter?), but the big one was baskets and pots (and by extension, materials to make them with). It seems that agriculture and other food productions demand carrying devices to capture and hold the food, either for the trip back to camp or for the winter.
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