Blog Art! The Death of Email (or Death by Email)

>So much unchallenged racism on this list against americans. Is that OK? I’m
>not saying microsoft doesn’t piss me off, but my impression is of list
>members attempting to create their own private virtual Ivanhoe.
>
>Maybe this list was always defined as being concerned with australian
>issues. that’s OK. But as I have been struggling with in another context,
>it’s not possible to be just Australian any more … We have to have dual
>identities as local and global and I don’t see how relying on outmoded
>concepts of national identity as a basis for a flippant critique is a
>progressive move.


Since when was “American’ a race? And when haven’t we dealt with the
local/global. My own work is centred around this question. Sorry, but I am
just Australian and being just Australian is a complex thing, strewth,
always has been. We need to think carefully about what a nation is, it is
more than just a theoretical construct. There is nothing new with seeing
‘Australian’ as being beneath us. It is beneath us, it was built by people
who now prop us up. The middle class in Australia has always seen
“Australia” as beneath them, at least since the 19th Century. We now have
this new-class of cyber-colonials who are part of the brain-drain with out
even leaving home.

I went to the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative conference at the
University of Sydney last week. For those who don’t know about ECAI, I have
enclosed a brief description.

www.ecai.org

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative is a time and placed based
collaborative project led by UC Berkeley and to a lesser extent,
Archaeology at the university of Sydney. ECAI is a GIS based project that
plans to build a global atlas that will link projects from around the world
through time/place interfaces. At the core of ECAI’s innovations are the
ECAI Information Technology Architecture and its central unifying feature,
the ECAI Metadata Clearinghouse. The Metadata Clearing house will allow
data-sets to be re-purposed on other web-based projects on a global scale.

http://www.timemap.net/

The Time-map project is an initiative from Sydney Uni’s Archaeology
Computing Lab and is an attempt to map cultural data through a time-based
GIS interface. One of the time-map projects is the attempt to map the
historical growth of Sydney through digitising all the known historical
maps of the period and layering them with historical images.

I think that it is a much more difficult skill to communicate than to obviate. We already have an enormously sophisticated English language to describe digital media, it doesn’t need it’s own

language. This is why terms such as VR are so devoid of meaning, even though the actual product may not be. I think the term ‘cave’ to describe the new VR thingee is apt. I’ll be sure to throw some chicken bones in next time I pass by.