“The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers….questions of quality on new platforms should be no different from questions of quality on the old platforms. Otherwise a quantitative expansion will result in a qualitative contraction….In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter. Never mind the platforms. Our solemn responsibility is for the substance.” – Leon Wieseltier, Among the Disrupted
“What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline-and instead was taken in by it-was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied.” -Ben Lerner, 10:04
Last week visual artist Tracy Taylor Grubbs and I took our ongoing improvisational practice to the ever-changing streets of downtown San Francisco. Amidst several construction sites and rush hour traffic, we unfurled a long roll of paper the length of a city block. She stood at one end, I at the other. We bowed to each other across the space. Then we lowered ourselves to the paper, markers in hand, and began rolling towards each other. The experience contained much of what Tracy and I explore together on a regular basis: mark-making in response to a shifting environment and what we call “the embodied mark.” Our slowly rolling, vulnerable bodies offered a different relationship to time than that of the task-oriented commuters and construction crews. As the city remade itself toward some vision of progress, Tracy and I luxuriated in doing something meaningless, transient and absurd. Read Tracy’s poetic description of our first slow line here.
See more of Georgia Smith’s photos here.
One Response to tech is not culture
NOVEMBER 14: THE SLOW LINE « HOPE MOHR DANCE OCTOBER 27, 2014
[...] rolling in slow motion towards each other on a long expanse of white paper. Read more about it on Hope’s blog and on Tracy’s blog. Exact location TBA closer to performance [...]