David Barrie

Body scribbling: a new alphabet of sensation

It's a familiar human condition to find yourself in a space of communication but unable to string a sentence together.

But it's strange to find yourself in a space of communication that invites, say verbal communication, only to find, say, writing a message on a card and flashing it up a more effective and viable form of expression.

On the Net - and especially Flickr - there's a sub-genre of expression/exhibitionism/conceptual photography that involves creating and uploading images of things - but often yourself or your mate - covered in scrawled messages. 

This marker madness stretches from people saying hello, to declaring love or giving instructions on how to cook them.

As ever, Yoko One must have fluxed this years ago but in the context of the net and all it's supposed to be doing as a platform for seamless communication and exchange, it's puzzling - but interesting. 

Why the need to 'self-billboard' and send scribbled messages in a bottle if you're part of an epic, happy, super-friendly media party?

Plain old exhibitionism?

Experiment?

Or  evidence of the boundaries of the Net and ways people are trying to escape its isolationism.

In other words, a new language of Robinson Crusoe-isms?

Couch image by danske.  Come clean me by titania*A.

Someday it will happen...

The speed with which it's happening is worrying.

But the politics may be pleasing...

Exposure of the contradictions and fealties of the triumphalist capitalism we've lived through over the last ten years.

Newspapers in the UK are starting to fill with stories that demonstrate how the new money order is in crisis and political relationships and value systems are going up the Kyber.

First, the London Financial Times reports that the Russian government has made $50bn of state aid available to help finance the external debt of the country's oligarchs.

But then ES Magazine salivates over the opening of a new branch of Gagosian in Moscow.

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is caught soliciting money from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

But at the same time his party is pushing itself forward as compassionate conservatives devoted to social responsibility and fraternity -  and going to work on a bike, not a yacht.

As Charlie Leadbeater writes in a brilliant article in this week's Spectator

The crisis may make us turn away from cosmopolitan connections.

It may also turn us towards

a simpler, back-to-basics capitalism.

But in its wake will also come all sorts of stuff like exposure of sham values of honesty and humility, of lazy media punting exuberant capitalism and posh people posing as friends of the pauper.

The challenge has got to be to get ahead of all of this.

As Charlie says

We should be searching for a new kind of capitalism.

He's right.

But the question is, what's the currency?

Here's a list

• Cash
• Energy
• Food
• Online social networks

Take your pick.

Image by Kent Rogowski.

What is a transformational designer?

Architecture writer Arjen Oosterman has collected a brilliant series of essays in the current edition of Volume magazine.

'Engineering Society' is a wholesale investigation in to the vogue for popular/citizen/'service user' involvement in the making of cities.

What interests me in particular is an essay by Peer 2 Peer theorist Michel Bauwens.

Bauwens surveys the basic business models emerging around peer-production - what he defines as the ability to create value in common - and attributes the success of Linux and Wikipedia to our need for third parties - platforms for bridging or strengthening ties between people.

Now the neeks out there will know that all sorts of mechanisms and vehicles have been created in recent years to try to bind people together to the cause of social progress, ways other than command-and-control government, war or other forms of peer-group pressure.

And there's much discussion going on in the U.K. at the moment to experiment with how the Net might play a role in acting as a network agent of change in poor communities - and next year, I'm planning to give it a go in my own social media project.

But one question nags...what does a third party look like? What are its constituent parts? What does it do?

Here's one answer, scribbled on a scrap of paper by my friend Ben, after three hours of professional therapy and East 8 Hold Up cocktails at Milk and Honey:

The mix might help define the role of 'cultural broker', 'transformational designer' and/or what we have in our heads when we use the phrase 'enabling government':

2 parts - Thought Leadership
4 parts - Stakeholder Management
6 parts - Social Entrepreneurship
8 parts - Project Delivery, not Consultancy

What do you think?

Picture by Zhao Bandi, Laid Off, 1999.

Gerhard Richter speaks...

Here's another antidote to the daily news of irredeemable credit default swaps and synthetic collateral debt obligations that don't, er, add up.

It's a call to arms to the visceral by German artist Gerhard Richter:

I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.

So there.

Picture courtesy of Jorge Franganillo.

An accidental Christo in Cardiff

This is an abandoned Victorian workman's hut - wrapped for preservation - on a vacant development site that I am currently working on in Wales.

It's a brilliant piece of accidental art that's taken on totemic qualities over the past week.

Either by design or accident, I'm trying to let a fabulous existential thing kick in before reading grim financial news and am reading J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition on the London underground on the way to work.

And it's to be recommended:

Beach Fatigue

After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with a collection of mud-stained documents and a Coke bottle.

Though next week I think that I'm going to turn to steamy Sidney Sheldon.

Sovereign wealth chic

 

One of the major cultural effects of economic catastrophe - a moment when it seems, as J.G. Ballard once wrote clock time is no longer valid - is what it does to wealth, its perception and celebration.

In their support for the part-nationalization of British banks, it's heartening to hear the leaders of the British Conservative Party calling for curbs on executive pay and bonuses - even if just a few weeks ago they were against a ban on short-term selling.

But what is - and will be - further revealed as the nightmare progresses is the total incongruity of all existing value systems of aspiration.

No less than three of ten 'news' pages in this week's Sunday Times newspaper in the U.K. told stories of the super-rich:

    * Lakshmi Mittal's paper loss of £16bn in the credit crunch
    * Charles Saatchi backing protest art in the Middle East
    * Roman Abramovich's new super-yacht

The previous week, the magazine carried four pages on the spending habits of Princes and Sheikhs - letting us know the amazing detail that in billionaire circles concierge services are known as my outsourced wife.

Look around you and filthy rich sovereign-wealth chic is everywhere.

It drives attention to Damien Hirst and Kate Moss.

It fills all of CNN's commercial breaks.

It's maidservants have played a big role in popularizing raunch culture.

And it provides acres of tidbits in the margin that we are supposed to buy and aspire to - like London-based organizing service Practical Princess who provide, according to a recent edition of W Magazine:

folding templates for sweaters, thin rubberized hangers that save space and prevent slippage; plastic boxes for off-season storage; clear cases for stowing costume baubles; and suede drawer liners for protecting fine jewelry

The stuff is needed, according to the company's founder because

Clothes are like food: if you make them look appealing, you're more inclined to reach for them.

Clients: Camilla Al Fayed, Melissa Odabash, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and the poster-girl for all this, Tamara Mellon.

But what happens to all of this as we enter an age of the super-rich selling up and disappearing from vision and the chic-est thing about sovereign wealth is the brown manila folder containing the $1bn cheque from the manager of the firemen's pension fund in South Korea?

Why bother to ask the question?

Because culture has been obsessed with excess capital and how to spend it over the last ten years.

Because early-adopting Notting Hillbillies have (ironically) driven consumer markets for ethical life values, such as sustainability.

And a key pivot of celebrity - as well as cures for loneliness - has been the Balenciaga handbag.

We love it. I love it. But it's not going to float boats any more.

Time to become a South Korean fireman?

Or just gloat at New Conservatism and the right-wing press tie itself in knots, celebrating the filthy rich while equally donning the mantle of austerity?

What the f*ck have you done?

If you're faint-hearted, don't read this post - and simply follow the instructions given on the TV news before a sports highlight show: if you don't want to know the results, look away now...

In his almost incomprehensible - but actually quite good - book of essays, British artist Liam Gillick writes about

frustration with an art world which seems content to merely re-process an overload of cultural signifiers in a state of hypnotic reverie...

He's right. We're frustrated.

But for a moment, as banks risk collapse, Sarah Palin is treated as some kind of babe and Angola launches a $6bn expansion of its agricultural production to feed the developed world, there's a piece of installation art that seems spot on...

...for a world of hypnotic reverie.

I think it's by Mexican artist Stefan Brüggemann - but I may be wrong.