faraway

how far back do we have to dig to find the roots of exotica? les baxter? the 1931 exposition coloniale? robert stacey-judd? the aztec palace? orientalist painting? mestizaje? marco polo

ahuizotl

méxicocity is constantly unearthed. latest one: the probable tomb of ahuizotl, next-to-last tlatoani of the mexicas (aztecs) found in downtown mexico city. the name ahuizotl comes from a sort of mongrel underwater dog monkey creature with a paw for a tail. kewl.

* detail of josé guadalupe posada's cover for: "the mountain of skulls, or the cruelties of king ahuizote", part of the biblioteca del niño mexicano (mexican child's library) series.

via archinect

split

"architecture was deeply affected by the separation of surface and substance. up until the nineteenth century, formal architecture made regular use of ‘load-bearing walls’, walls that –in addition to any decorative motif they might have–provided the support system of the building, held the building up. even though it was common to apply neoclassical or other facades to brick wall surfaces throughout the eighteenth century, walls served an important structural function. in designing them, an architect had to combine purposes of engineering and ornamentation simultaneously… there was a connection, a symbiosis, between the intricacy of the image and the method of craft being used to fashion that image...(by the nineteenth century) there was an intrinsic tension between the look of a building—which attempted to reproduce a style originally achieved by the chisel of the preindustrial craftsman—and a method of construction which was only hastening the degradation or annihilation of the decorative crafts. style architecture was becoming a matter of pure appearance..."

stuart ewen, all consuming images. the politics of style in contemporary culture

camping

45. detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so camp is the modern dandyism. camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

46. the dandy was overbred. his posture was disdain, or else ennui. he sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (models: ees Esseintes in huysmans' à rebours, marius the epicurean, valéry's monsieur teste.) he was dedicated to "good taste."

the connoisseur of camp has found more ingenious pleasures. not in latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. camp -- dandyism in the age of mass culture -- makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

47. wilde himself is a transitional figure. the man who, when he first came to london, sported a velvet beret, lace shirts, velveteen knee-breeches and black silk stockings, could never depart too far in his life from the pleasures of the old-style dandy; this conservatism is reflected in the picture of dorian gray. but many of his attitudes suggest something more modern. it was wilde who formulated an important element of the camp sensibility -- the equivalence of all objects -- when he announced his intention of "living up" to his blue-and-white china, or declared that a doorknob could be as admirable as a painting. when he proclaimed the importance of the necktie, the boutonniere, the chair, wilde was anticipating the democratic esprit of camp.

48. the old-style dandy hated vulgarity. the new-style dandy, the lover of camp, appreciates vulgarity. where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of camp is continually amused, delighted. the dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.

49. it is a feat, of course. a feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. the relation between boredom and camp taste cannot be overestimated. camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

susan sontag, notes on camp

network(ing)

"today, networked connection replaces abstraction. information is less the product of discrete processing units than the outcome of the networked relations between them, links between people, between machines, and between machines and people. contrasting the physical sites in which the digital and the network operate illuminates the difference between the two. the site for the former is the desktop microcomputer, displaying information through a heavy crt monitor, connected to the network via dial-up modem or perhaps through a high latency first generation broadband connection. in our own day, there is no such dominant site. to be sure, the wi-fi enabled laptop is now the most popular computing platform, but the mobile phone, keitai, and smart phone compete with and complement it. what unites these machines is their mobility and interconnectivity, making them more ubiquitous companions in our lives, key interfaces to global telecommunicational networks. in a prosaic sense, the turing machine is already a reality. a supercomputer, smart phone, laptop, ipod, wireless router, xbox game platform, mars rover, video surveillance camera, television set-top box, and automobile computer are essentially the same device, running—or capable of running—operating systems derived from unix such as linux or vxworks and becoming specific only in terms of scale and their mechanisms for input and output, for sensing and acting upon the world. instead, the new technological grail for industry is a universal, converged network, capable of distributing audio, video, internet transmissions, voice, text chat and any other conceivable networking task."

go read the rise of the network culture @ varnelis.net

* cute little painting by milos manetas