Skip to main content

the force of the elements

In Nu X G8

Popular posts from this blog

"Estamos em Seca!"

"Estamos em Seca", Cartaz da Thames Waters, Londres Abril de 2012 (foto de Delemere Lafferty ) Danças da Chuva: Austeridade e Abundância Para Todos (Maio, 2012) O que se passa com a água em Inglaterra ajuda-me a entender o que significa austeridade, a necessidade que temos dela e algumas das suas contradições.  Tal como nas economias europeias, a chuva continua a cair, mas não chega onde é preciso. Ao contrario das economias europeias, não existem sistemas financeiros com que se conta para regular a necessária redistribuição e racionalização de recursos. Por isso faz-se uso de campanhas e leis que são iguais para todos. Talvez este exemplo nos esteja a mostrar um caminho melhor. Abril de 2012 foi o Abril mais chuvoso de que há memória meteorológica em Inglaterra ou seja, desde 1910 . Em algumas regiões houve dias que mais do que duplicaram os anteriores recordes de pluviosidade. E mesmo assim, grande parte do país tem estado e continua a estar oficialmen...
Read more

Bodies and media

The circulation of abstract values through global interconnected networks sprawls on the back of the possibility of transporting information independently from its bodily carriers (Bauman, 1998: 14). It is, then, an apparent contradiction that the development in technologies of information and communication has so far contributed to bring people closer to each other. There have never been so many people living in so many and so dense cities as today. Inside most of those cities, financial districts develop and concentrate agents and functions of different markets. We tend to think that the functions of the new economy could be performed at distance. Even if those markets deal with abstract commodities, abstract risks, or serve abstract forms of capital, the actors and the networks through which they connect are real and material, and it takes time and energy to transport through space the people and materials with which they deal. Moreover, the means of transporting people, objects, in...
Read more

Post-..."Tomorrow composts today"

“So it was I had my first experience with the Accelerator. Practically we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things in the space of a second or so of time. (…) But the effect it had upon us was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection.” H.G.Wells, 1901, The New Accelerator in Modern Short Stories, The growth of cities has created bigger opportunities for (and was in many ways led by) the production of new needs. With consequent increase in waste production. Part of this waste is the result of consumption: composed by materials and objects that were destroyed by human use or have decayed over time. But an increasing part of this waste is generated through symbolic processes, i.e., created by the production of consumption, by industries whose main products are new forms of desire. Since innovation is the main drive of economy, commodities are produced for worlds that do not exist yet, worlds which they will help shape. This power of transforma...
Read more