MARKING A NEW EPOCH: UBU A.D.
DATELINE : 17 OCTOBER 2011
Long live Cultural Farming.
This original eight-year tele-visual media ethnography project (2003-11) entitled Cultural Farming is over, but not finished. For Cultural farming is not merely a project, it is a vital critical method. This site concludes only the first portion of a most ‘necessary’ investigation into the production and dissemination of North American televisual communication, as we proceed into a new millennium.
The simple passing of Cultural Farming is but a micro-event, which will go utterly unnoticed. There will be no eulogies. For many other (not so) coincidental changes are also concurrently, almost silently, taking place all around us; events that should be clear signals of the death of the old -- and the turn to something new. Here is one short list:
iPhone 4s speaks on 4 October 2011
Steve Jobs dead on 5 October 2011
Bjork releases Biophilia on 10 October 2011
Occupy Wall Street spreads on 11 October 2011
Blackberry crashes worldwide 11 October 2011
Dennis Ritchie dead on 12 October 2011
Phones surpass people in the U.S. on 12 October 2011
Apple ‘cloud’ launches 12 October 2011
Kodak report broadcast 13 October 2011
Butchery of the real in the blink of an eye 18 October 2011
John McCarthy dead on 24 October 2011
World population to exceed 7 Billion on 31 October 2011
It is often impossible to witness the turn of an epoch, to see the moment when one era passes into another. But it is happening now as I write this. The pictorial, the computational, the televisual -- in short most all of our communication ‘realities’ as we knew them -- are now artifacts of a past poorly reconnoitered. And with these passings so much of what we know, what we have known, and how we know, is passing with it.
It is now the Year of Our Lord: ZERO.
ZERO (nil): a universal reset, where everyone is now both master and slave of the game. Where even the ‘pataphysical will be dually zero-summed through quotidian absurdist paroxysms. For the real -- our good-ol’real -- which historically anchored and glorified the image as our reference to the known world is now quite perfectly dead... killed both in our theory and in our practice.
Maybe I’ll ‘see’ you in the future. Then again, probably not.
Long live Cultural Farming.
We have exchanged
one Illusion for another. Wise Up!