online: 27 february 2015
modified: 27 february 2015

11 february 2015 indoors today and thinking...


...of what we used to call systems or environment or other such totalistic abstract things... yes things... not the unending processes of which all things are themselves composed... and also as coloured objects... assumed to be more real than the changes that occur continuously in everything and everyone...

(that is a sample of what i've been thinking all today while my computer is being repaired (and i feel on holiday)... and while i re-read some of the writings that surround me in this little library or archive of books, papers, films and electronic writings... see also longlife archive http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/140073)

...from here i see beyond the grass and cherry trees a road that's busy twice a day... with cars and trucks and buses and pedestrians as we call ourselves when walking among those lethal vehicles in which we travel and obtain supplies of products (and become commodities ourselves... as paid or unpaid workers and consumers)...

but that's enough of criticism

where's the joy in all this?

(or give it up... all of us... as failed people of the life industrial?)

cheap webcams everywhere means that we might enjoy the worldwide spectacle as i did in '96 while looking at the traffic from a window high above a busy street... i called it 'life on earth'*... the movements of people and vehicles anywhere in the world...

*in 'the internet and everyone', ellipsis, London 2000, pages 485 to 490, (available from jcj @ publicwriting net by surface mail)

...young woman walks away in orange coat with black rucksack and long fair hair and black trousers... the colours of everything seem much more significant from here... they seem to count for more than who it is... or why... or anything... the vehicles too (their colour is the first thing i notice)...

...i always like the idea that colour is more fundamental than is shape... less of a construction of mind... less dependent on who perceives...

...then i continue to look at the people, very small from here, but i can just see the colours of their clothes... and of what they are carrying... many carry something...

...a young man with black hair and brown boots and grey clothes is carrying a huge plastic bag of something on his back... is it a suit... or perhaps several hanging in a bag...

...it's the yellow taxis that i notice most... and the rhythm of their movements... and red braking lights showing under the light gray morning cloud... on the vehicles moving away...

...there's more of this in the book... it was filmed and written in 1996 at a window in New York... perhaps anticipating the digital diary...


and now i'm not so sure...




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