[design] re: world design

[this is an emptying of my brain of angst of the current
situations that i needed to let out, and it may be in-
comprehensible, it probably is, and yet i send it anyway...]

hi Cheryl, you remind me of a friend who was an artist and teacher who opens things up and keeps imaginations moving and exploring ideas. very nice.

about emerging art in china - present day artists - and my inital impression from this art in america slick magazine article was that freedom to be western artists was supposed to be a positive step forward for them? my question is - is it just a matter of time before this brilliant explosion of creativity mellows into the spiral of western mundane?

these are huge questions and i think worthwhile to enter into further as i think the .US reality-distortion mechanism is part of a doctrinal world-view that no longer reflects the situation accurately. culturally, China could probably swallow the world whole, compared to the .US which has grafted itself into infrastructures of other societies. yet China would also likely have to eject the world just as it swallowed it as no matter how big a nation-state gets and tries to become a world-state/the world-estate, it would likely have to survive and succeed beyond the same situations the .US finds itself in now, with a particularized universalist ('modern') rhetoric yet a finite view of what that is and a rigidity that does not scale as well as it is locally believed.

for instance, consider the .UN global organization that attempts to politically represent the world today. it is a type of consensus based on appointed bureaucrats (not elected) who mediate international, regional, and issue-based affairs and policies. yet whole segments of the world are outside of its current workings, the representation is modeled in a type of nationalism that is to become global consensus of competing views, when or if it can work. the idea of rhetoric is often of 'world community' that this .UN is said to represent or to call to. and yet, what 'united nations' are actually represented of the world as a community? is the United Nation an organization that scales internationalism beyond specific states and into another scale of interactions, or does it reside operating within separated statehoods, a finite multidimensional chess games that gets stuck over time, and begins to wind-down in its ability to function, to represent 'nations' and instead 'nationalism' in the world-scale, ... the point being that there is a United Nation today and its name is the USA. not nations, nation. what the .UN is trying to do, the USA cannot do, and that is represent the World Community beyond competing nationalisms, as a cooperative and collaborative state based on shared principles. yet if looking at, say, .UN websites, much of the middle-east is not represented online in the way western countries are in the .UN structure. if memory serves, Palestine does not even have an official website, other states lack them or choose to not represent themselves in this way, which reflects something amiss in the even distribution of such organization.
why are their ghettos and ghosttowns in .UN webspace, or wars in certain .UN districts while others play 3D Nukem games about killing everything and anything that moves while living in a hothouse suburban world theater complex.

the inability of the .UN to function beyond nationalism, considering the goals of the .UN to be some kind of ideal beyond the nation-state yet bounded by nation-states- yet the next level of evolution may have been solidified in its workings for the past 50 years, the constant aim of achieving 'world community' as a common reference/referent. world community as an idea begs for peace, common interests, shared policies. 'united nations' begs for competition, war, leverage, ideological struggles of the centuries, and unshared assumptions and goals and issues of power, weak and strong, dominance and submission, etc.

with this in mind, the role of China's development in a broken .UN context would be a further reeling back of advances into a hyper competition, world war, machined ethics for automated state, and ideologies battling for the portrayal of the better of horribly worse situations as an extension of this decrepit situation of ill-governance which is pseudo-representative of the nation as world-state, with contenders, defenders, and issues of misguided empires, etc. it is hard to imagine anyone except hard-core extremists believe this as an appropriate pathway into new days rising. except, that is, if no other alternatives arrives to allow options for new world developments.

maybe the .EU (euro-union) could be seen in this (supra-) national-state organization, a larger organism in which to operate, seek leverage, compete, maneuver for goals. and the vote against the (social) .EU constitution could potentially be considered as a vote by its constituent parties against some institutional belief that this is the way to work through the unfolding future, that instead it is a failure of 'theory' that further bureaucratizes or even obfuscates the clarity that develops from the failures of institutions built around this level of scale: that is, that maybe there is something to not creating a supra-nationstate to compete with others as one of the major 'united nations' - it may pay to be nimble instead to be able to adapt and not only be able to grow but to change and balance/sustain even if unstable, it may be worse to be rigid, unchangeable, -- i.e. the quickest way to defeat is certainty. the United Nations should function a certain way, but cannot. now what?

will the world community vote upon a sovereign state to speak for all in their name, to represent the new world order in a cultural diversity, by fiat of superpowerness? even a trillion dollar war machine can be stopped, by the world. that's powerful. China probably is taking notes on the .US' failures to determine world events by force and not diplomatic and other persuasion, the limits to the .US worldview, ... the mistaken belief of having .CN or all others having to 'conform' to .US cultural views (thank goodness they don't) - that's no longer the shared hallucination it seems. and if that is realized without a 'world-war' (of nuclear variety) the world will be lucky if the current situation stands down, regroups, reorganizes relations based not on this 'internalized' world-nationalism, the .US as .UN, and instead reestablishes a common and shared order in the world scale, developing an equitable world community, with new relations and limitations that prevents the attempts at future takeover and takedowns by internationalism's-at-war. the .UN as it is now is the .US as World Community, which obviously it is not. or that is how it operates with budgets, sanctions, and ideological turfbattles and toxic warfare where ideas cease to mediate situations and force and power instead are tools of leverage to make structural changes.

the .US is the united nation. whatever is the .un today is at its best the World Community, if it stands for decreasing poverty, humanitarian aid, health initiatives, and self-sustaining development goals. it should not be a tool of nationalism, nor to serve the purpose of reincarnating a specific brand of democracy - instead this architecture of laws, structures, organizations could be constituted around principles that are not in disagreement between places now at odd with issues as serious as genocide, nuclear weapons, terrorism, etc.
the reality outmatches the rhetoric of nation-state perspectives, of the .UN as it is constituted, it is instead bounded by the past, by the limits of vantage points, by subjectivities that never stop adding complexity and false progress and instead wind-down the watch, until the alarm rings and then goes silent. it has been silent for awhile now, and what is next and what happens when the nation-states try to one-up eachother even further into this enigmatic state of the suspended past? the twilight zone has arrived.

even issues with Iran, post-election, could be made to work on a level of world community, where rhetoric to date could still be reorganized to address a changed reality of oil consumption, global warming, development, autonomy of nation-state goals and cultural development, and cooperation and collaboration to move things in directions that mutually benefit core principles and check-and-balance others yet through other means than war, death, hatred, evil. the artifacts from Persia that are in the local fine-arts museum have especially captured my imagination as it seems there are different times/places that things correspond, certain beauties that overlap, and understandings that may be excavated with new perceptions. for me this has involved an archaeological view and greater appreciation of the stories of those who came before, and the great lineage of the past and the importance then and now of everyplace on earth, and yet someplaces in particular in relation to others. what if in a globally warmed/climate changed world- it gets hot as hell and the clothing of the middle east actually makes a lot more sense (maybe it is Arab dress in particular) with such materials made of UV protective advanced nanofabrics so that one can wear something that protects the skin and yet stay cool while outside and totally covered from the sunlight. what about these flows of desert cultures and benefiting (in fashion too) from them (especially Libya, Morocco too) in evolving to better solutions for such conditions. such a 'trade' or 'commerce' is intangible in the way things are with a model of a world as a united nation, through as a world community maybe there is some level where it is out of respect, to transmit this cultural (inter-civilization) information, to better the whole and also seed new ideas and ways to change things for the better, through design no less.

so too with China, which is why I am writing this (and apologies for lack of clarity, these thoughts are all related and i need to write some of the logic to make it make sense to myself, which is to get to the following point:)

the art of China represents something that is vital, probably unique for the booming developments, transformations of cultural consciousness, it is tangible in the works. and yet, so too are realities of China and other countries dealing with the issues of industrial development, paradoxes of governance, world relation, etc. lessons have been learned by others countries that came before and are today working through these (or not!) such as with pollution. if China were to follow the .US pattern as a future paradigm it would self-destruct most likely because of the issues are so important and scale so immense that there is no luxury to ignore pollution or energy efficiency in medium-term planning, it is assumed. maybe China is terraforming the earth in its own image, eventually, yet maybe most countries/societies/cultures do this in some way already in their existing, manifold. for instance, Africa never leaves us, from anthropology of human genesis to issues of neighbhorhoods, ethnicity, racial demographics and the reality of issues that are not unreal, irrelevant, and ignorable for the eternal present of these influences among peoples- outside the western euroamerican worldview (subsuming China, India, Africa, South America), this idea of 'lifestyles' as propagated in the gated continental commune that is the .US today.

what would be enlightened, imo, was if the .US made an unlikely call: to draw-down forces, stabilize the situation in Iraq by drawing down forces and forming a compact with regional allies and their forces to take their place, for the health and sanity of the Iraqis, to plug the whole in the dike and to reconfigure a grand strategy for world relations that reconsiders the questions of world community beyond the model of the united nations, and a global strategy that is not based on methods and models of the past, that a weak middle east is preferred, or other weaknesses, if some kind of architectural stability can be designed by collaboration/cooperation in the world scale, in the psychological disposition of states in relation in such a scale, within shared interest.

bogus, one might say. and who is stupid enough to believe it is possible anyway. one would have to be an ego-maniac to think the world should conform to such mandates dictated by nobodies. and that is exactly the point, that unless such changes occur, there is high-probability that only worst-cases (with nuclear aims/games) are predictable because there are limited outcomes and choices and the stakes are the highest -- nationalism in the united nations is using a particle accelerator to collide particles and make enormous energies (in scale with those of the nearest star, the Sun). such energies released on Earth is not a model of ideal governance- it is an apocalyptic mess of the failure of ideologies to meet the foundations of a new world and new relations-- the ideas that are necessary to transcend that past have not yet existed in language, in logic, in psychological identity to make the changes possible, even an option- and there must be a better option than winding down the world, no?

for this to happen the .US both needs to save face and face humiliation for its failures to transcend an impossible condition of the historical fall from grace. everything is now transformed, the cards have been used up and the only choice is, beyond continuation and running down the physic machinery even further, is to allow the uncertain possibility of change, chance, potential, the improbable center, the paradox and transformation to exist as a viable movement that recontextualizes the present in a presence of ideas related to situations as they actually exist, or moreso than the pulp-fiction that is the national-movie played afar that is hard to differentiate except that people die in those explosions and human devastation versus Hollywood's normal fare. the true cost of this production in human lives, in economic, but also national and international devastation is well beyond survivable in terms of the status quo operations-- they are forever transformed, the .US lost the mantle of righteousness and now operates as if it were Gulliver's Travels, the giant, pinned down, is to be transformed.

a new relation, new respect, reorganization, fuzzy, superposition, complex, intricate, elegant, policy of the ideas which are to be held in common, served, could allow the world itself a chance to regroup, reconsider, and not continue the malfeasance of nation-states writ large upon the world, as if a game of capture the flag. if .CN does this the world would possibly end, that is a fear. though the world economy would disappear rather quickly and so would most inhabitants of the world as it reeled and shrunk, compacting and reconfiguring itself until relaunching another version of world survivalists. if it was instead human beings, we the chinese, americans, euros, russians, south americans, indians, we may be able to function as a world community. if it is chinese, .us americans, russians, euros, etc. we may not live to know what happens, if war is going to be the only way towards a more shared evolution, shared principles, compromise, mutual interests, and aims of peace and prosperity.

if .CN is of the future, the .US is of the present, and all are past present future along with these, the .US may have added and will continue to add its intelligence and creativity and imaginations to be absorbed by the world organism, by the scales- i contend this influence is actually infrastructural, that that is the greatness of the .US contribution to architecture (in the western tradition, roads/baths of rome, bridges/aqueducts, etc). yet all of this is archaeological, so too was/is Iraq's, Egypt's, Russia's, Ecuador's, and others contributions, and to realize these, foster these inter-civilization transfers of knowledge, understanding, perception, culture, peace. yet also differentiate between the publicness of the world community, and the privateness (and also, internal /autonomous publicness) of the nation-states, and on and on (down to neighborhoods, city councils, etc.).

the first move would appear to be a change in consciousness for the .US to avert its total disaster, and an introspective look at its relation to itself and the world: to look in the world mirror, national mirror, local mirror, and take an accounting of the situation and make the necessary changes to achieve transformation. with such a move, China's relation to the .US in the world community may be beneficial, another steward of the whole yet in an impossible situation that may only be bounded, constrained by the world, and if or when it overreaches, to spit the world back out and stabilize a public world relationship rather than to try to privatize it with a too narrow/limited worldview that would lead to an insurgency of a group of 'united nations', as seems to be the case with the .US in .IQ, and maybe for as horrible as this situation is, it may help prevent worse events by forcing changes in 'superpowers' by requiring new concepts for a recontextualized state of affairs.

i have been looking to collaborate
with a choreagrapher on a dance of the big bang to the inter-
net, a short story interpreted with music and movements. for
instance, the radiation and particles of the early universe,
their movements, in relation to the rise of artifice and the
machine age, and the digital flurry and fury of the present,
in clothing, in staccato movements and sounds, emotions.

this sounds like a spectacular project and appropriate to its subject. dancers would be radiation and particles and digits? they could float in the sky in plexiglass bubbles and fiberoptic tunnels and sound bites and fireworks and flashes? does u of m have a dance/choreography school?

exactly. yes, costumes could be using throbbing LEDs, and those
photos by the Hubble of gas and plasmas of the early universe
could be dancers with large fabrics, while digital telephony
could be tapdancers frantically scotching across a wireline.
your ideas are great. yes, i assume dance school yet i prefer
to talk with individuals and see their work first so will see.


idiocy of slang, of
celebrity culture, and hierarchies, popularity contests, and
the embedded stupidities of the reigning cultural consumption.

yes. its just like the other worlds we've had...condemed to repeat as you mentioned in your earlier post today. the masters teach the students to repeat themselves....maybe its the fault of defective transmission of culture and aesthetics of progress and undefined present as perspective for past and continuance. but what can we do to change it? our audience is the elite who don't need to learn or who refuse to learn. if those we teach become or are the elite and those who are there but don't learn are the masses, which is the master?
cheryl


this is another huge question, which obviously you've pondered.
and i do not know the answer for others, yet themes have arisen
over decades and years of personal efforts that seems to focus
upon the role of communication, language, freedom of thought,
institutional structures, opportunities given or denied, etc.
my approach is through architectural education, as outlined in
a conversation never realized, the architecture of the .UN, at:
http://www.electronetwork.org/bc/ (2 .pdf files)


Folow-ups
  • Re: [design] re: world design
    • From: Cheryl McGrath
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    Re: [design] reading lists (was: question), Cheryl McGrath
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