vilma

EN LT

2004-05-09	Zivile : digest :

I thought about communication and identity.. because there are some kinds of and some ways of communicating and it depends on your identity… The first A. Lingis text is about the noise in the message – the noise of life. I am afraid that the new technologies are only one part of our reality, and when I can express myself, my identity through this new media, I am afraid that sometimes we are losing this “noise”. Of course new technologies make some kind of new noise, but we are losing… some singularity, the feeling of our own bodies or the bodies of others… When we spoke in the last workshop meeting and the recorder was working I felt that an important part of the dialog wasn’t recorded. The new technologies are lacking the part of life that is in a dialog between a few people… missing the exchange of energy. Technology has the tendency to reduce and I am afraid of it. The second Lingis text refers to chance… I read the whole text and I found this smaller section within, and decided to add it here. By chance... In this aspect it is good to consider identity, because we are by chance, our communications are by chance. I think that the new technologies are very handy while talking about the chance. This H. Arendt text is not new, but it is important for me personally. I feel that the lack as well in new media is the depth of the memory. That’s why the books are an important part of my life. Books give me this sense of depth, a feeling of being able to go back again and think in a different way. All these books that I have read, these construct my identity, as part of me… Communication with people, but not only with those who are living, but those who have lived in the past, and so I can speak with them in this larger way of communication. The new technologies don’t have this relation. There is a difference. Arendt text is important concerning Roman thought in understanding this world… there is a part where Arendt writes about Romans, about the nature of authority which came. It is important in relation to memory, because authority forces the power without violent force… The old man, he has an authority not because he is old and such, but because he is closer to the portraits of ancestors, so it is a way of the Romans of creating an identity. It is important to make a beginning, if you can speak about a beginning… For me, to talk about new media, it is important to consider the origins in old media, in our life… this is the depth. The last text, R. Brague, is originally a French text, which I read in Lithuanian. It is about European identity, which he calls “eccentric” (the idea of taking from the outside to the center). It means that the past for European people was never the past, which they can say it was their own. It can be their past only when they construct it… it is not something that naturally belongs to the identity… It is something that needs a lot of effort to construct. For the European civilizations, the names of people are empty frames and we put the content, the meaning…(It’s different in most civilizations, there names refers to something what is expected from a child who is given that name). European people have to made their own identity and the content of the name... as in case of VILMA... So, it is not some subjects made the identity of European people, this process of making the subject is important… I think that it is very important that the texts are very different, that they contradict each other, just as my own identity. I think that…the main idea is to make new media in such a way that it could put all of this different aspects but not only some of them, but all… and to show the contradiction… if you show only one aspect or another you restrict… you can’t show the full picture. It is very important therefore to find a way to put all together. I think that the world is a lot of contradictions, and new media should be the same. In these texts for me is important tensions and contradictions between memory and oblivion, between what is “our own” and what is “alien”, between the conscious efforts and the chance, between the meaning of the words and the noise in the meaning. That’s how I imagine the VILMA’s psyche.