Yesterme Yesteryou Yesterday
Stevie Wonder
________

What happened to the world we knew
When we would dream and scheme
And while the time away
Yesterme yesteryou yesterday

Where did it go that yester glow
When we could feel
The wheel of life turn our way
Yesterme yesteryou yesterday

I had a dream so did you life
Was warm and love was true
14 kids who never followed the rules
Yester fools and now
Now it seems those yester dreams
Were just a cruel
And foolish game we used to play
Yesterme yesteryou yesterday

When I recall what we had
I feel lost I feel sad with nothing but
The memory of yester love and now
Now it seems those yester dreams
Were just a cruel
And foolish game we had to play
Yesterme yesteryou yesterday

Yesterme yesteryou yesterday
Sing with me
Yesterme yesteryou yesterday
One more time.....

This looks interesting. As this is the first I have heard of this could I
just ask a couple of questions?

You say 'played back live to the Great Hall'. Do you envisage the playback
to be on a college machine arranged by your dept. as a display, a private
machine to display or via wireless access? Obviously this has a bearing on
the BBG 2 end.

You said that the BBG2 venue cannot be changed, I assume that this due to
room bookings. We would need to know the actual times, as any changes would
have to be installed prior and then restored to the normal teaching
environment afterwards.

We will need written permission from your Head of Department as you are
wanting to set up a webcam in a public place.

If you would like to talk to me I am on 020 **. If I'm not at my
desk it will divert to my mobile.

Regards

Ian B

Ian Biss
Network Officer
ISC 115

Just cleanin' out ye old camera.

Trying to find snippets here and there that maybe useful...

Side note on Agamben and “The Coming Community”

1) as summarized by Michael Hardt (who translated it) in an interview about Multitude:

"(the coming community) not being based on belonging. He was experimenting with the notion of a non-identity way of thinking and making social organization. That too is the project of multitude. In philosophical terms, like Agamben, we are trying to displace the contradictory couple identity/difference and instead work with the common, singularity, and multiplicity.

But our notion of "not-yet" is really very simple. In addition to aluding to Bloch's notion of utopia, we merely want to emphasize that multitude is a project, a political project, that must be brought into existence through collective struggle."

2)From a philosophy website overview of Agamben (cant remember which one maybe princeton's??)

The Coming Community
-he develops the notion of “whatever singularities.”
- In taking up the problem of community, Agamben enters into a broader engagement with this concept by others such as Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, and in the Anglo-American scene, Alphonso Lingis.
-broad aim of the engagement is to develop a conception of community that does not presuppose commonality or identity as a condition of belonging.
-Agamben’s conception of “whatever singularity” indicates a form of being that rejects any manifestation of identity or belonging and wholly appropriates being to itself, that is, in its own “being-in-language.” Whatever singularity allows for the formation of community without the affirmation of identity or “representable condition of belonging,” in nothing other than the “co-belonging” of singularities itself. Importantly though, this entails neither a mystical communion nor a nostalgic return to a Gemeinschaft that has been lost; instead, the coming community has never yet been. Interestingly, Agamben argues in this elliptical text that the community and politics of whatever singularity are heralded in the event of Tianenmen square, which he. He takes this event to indicate that the coming politics will not be a struggle between states, but, instead, a struggle between the state and humanity as such, insofar as it exists in itself without expropriation in identity.. Correlatively, the coming politics do not entail a sacralization of humanity, for the existence of whatever singularity is always irreparably abandoned to itself; as Agamben writes, ‘“The Irreparable is that things are just as they are, in this or that mode, consigned without remedy to their way of being. States of things are irreparable, whatever they may be: sad or happy, atrocious or blessed. How you are, how the world is—this is the irreparable....”(CC 90)

WHATEVER (singularity)
-amal

are we moving towards the "unworking" of the community to a degree that it ceases to be a "workable" concept altogether…..???

Fragments from the last meeting with Taru:

- The Inpoerative Community=
Less target led
Not based on an identity
Moving away from the core essence

-Interesting thing about failure is when omething comes out of it in a constructive way

-Agamben on community:
Doing away with ideas of the essential community and rethinking all other terms

-Negative Vibes
-Idea of fake utopia
-Circles etc undermining a hippy ideology
-calling squatting fake etc

-moving things fast (our community)
-microwaving intimacy

-the group has been testing out different modes of the intimate community
…following methods of intimacy, tracking methods/methodologies for creating community/intimacy
…exploring what comes out of these practices, whether they are forced, real, effective

-INOPERATIVE COMMUNITY concept can be a loose hook for us to frame and push our research further…
… should continue with our highly practical work method “EXPRESSION GIVES US A METHOD”
a “stammering” practice
stuttering, cut ups

- at the presentation we NEED TO DEMONSTRATE A CRITICAL ARMATURE
-statement
-presentation
-discussion
(the discussion is a vital part of the overall presentation and requires us to back up our presentation with ideas, concepts, methodologies)

q. Taru asked us:
How do you describe this work as a research?
What is the relationship between our practice and theory?
How can you describe your practice as a research method?

In order for us to answer her questions we will do a divination ritual/a mapping/a rearrangement, arrangement of our ideas, research, ephemera….

Her final words were: Keep on doing stuff, keep on reflecting

See you all tomorrow
BRING LOTS OF STUFF
-amal

Dear All,

Please find below the minutes of our last meeting.... ALL THINGS GO

Cristobal DRAWS THE TIME LINE
Our presentation everyone is 17th MArch
WE have the following thursdays to complete

THURS 28th FEB
THurs 6th MARCH
Thurs 13th MArch

between the last two dates we need to create THE STATEMENT

Cristobal begins the meeting with a quick summary of the miniature feedback we received from Pe and He.
They introduced the notion that maybe we are using the concept of NETWORK as a FORM OF CONTROL (I still think this is worth exploring and could be very interesting)

David suggests that this is because we are the only group that are looking inwards rather than outwards.

Liliana says that what we are about is introspection rather than extrospection but why is that about control?

Orianna reminds us that initially there were personalities within the group resistant to the idea of Network in the firstplace and so we began with the notion of network as a negative anyway. She then also suggests we are an ideological network rather than an a group investigating actual networks.

Liliana says that the way we work is very fre flowing one action to another and is very confused about why and how 'control' fits into what we are doing because it was all spontaneous...

Flavia suggests that maybe what they mean by control is that we are creating some kind of border around ourselves...

Andrea comments on how other groups showed a very finished end product not revealing how they came to be at this point. This illusion of a united front presenting an idea or concept related to networks without showing us how they came to this point is a defining feature of all the other groups. We have been discussing what a group/network means and trying to illustrate it in our presentation. (side point that came to mind while writing this: actually i think one other group is exposing their procces too... the one that is not really working as a group but as sub groups)

David said that other groups' presentations were annotated bibliographies, we went in a different direction...

Cristobal said how he was somewhat confused by the other groups... they allseemed to have an object of study and work together as a group. We dont work like that... the others all decided to present adn research on a field. we are different. There are blurred boundaries between our OBJET (A) OF RESEARCH and THE GROUP

He then drew the amazing diagram and I cannot recreate it here on the blog but it was 3 circles tha overlap, he called them The SYMBOLIC (CONCEPTS- community of the group, gift, intimacy etc) The REAL (ARCHIVE-dinner parties, videos, blog, ephemera, postcards) and THE IMAGINARY (PRESENTATION) asking HOW? Which Way?????

He then used the example of the suggested BOAT idea by Sophia as a way of illustrating a possible final presentation.... THE BOAT idea is an example of how we could maybe use one idea or one symbol that EMBODIES ALL THE THREE FIELDS OF Symbolic-real-imaginary / concept-archive-presentazione

He said we need to MAKE A STATEMENT
THE statement will reference the presentation itself as well as referencing the previous concepts and archive.
BUT to arrive at a simple thing it is like mathematics...
complexity arrives to simplicity...............
(then i made lots of drawings of boats and circles with Lacanian terminology on them)
(as a side note while writing i have to say publicly HOW IMPRESSED I AM BY CRISTOBAL--- isnt he great everyone??!! )

Lili and Sophia explain in detail the concept of the Boat for those who need more info please READ THE BLOG and previous posts...

Orianna voiced worries of us Pushing a Concept rather than GROUP INTERACTION

Cristobal stresses the need to decide to be PRACTICAL .... and for that we need one or two concepts...the boat for example is not enough by itself we need a conceptual thing to allow us to be free in relation to boat.
We cannot avoid the proccess, the conceptual.
Idea of Boat as crossing borders together, taking journeys and the interaction that the boat has on us.

Then we split into groups and came up with ideas.....

Group one:
How the group came to be a community....
moments of the community, dynamics, functions of the community
BOAT as already filled with meaning
maybe doing a workshop on the boat?

GRoup two:
Sleep-OVer
Gift
Our group as a love story: arguments, exchange, love letters, intimacy, dinner party as first date
Andrea: A romantic date between 13 people
David: Our first night together

Then my notes turn into something else and I guess I was too involved in the reality to continue documentation.........
There were some key words (by that i mean big scrawled out words) written at the end of my last page though:
NOTION OF COMMUNITY, NOTION OF GIFT
HOW can we show the group without being therapeutic
country walks
SElf-portrait, arrow self-portrait

not sure what that all means.

LOVE TO ALL MY PEEPS
especially BARNABY ADMAS. M. Barnaby ou-est vous???? Je besoin du vin et l'inspration.... Tu me MANQUES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

See y'all later,

Amal

(which by the way means hope for all you nonarab speakers out there and I would like to spread some esperanza, sprinkiling it like glitter dust on all your heads this fine morning so you all to have a little Hope and faith that we will make it through these difficult times TRIUMPHANT.... and more info on the namegame: "for fun and games, type my name in predictive text on your mobile phones and be in for a dirty surprise (please do this later on, not first thing in the morning, and only if you are not offended by horrible words)

Why dont we invite our audience to THIS LECTURE!! Actually I was thining we go but its too little too late.... anyway for anyone interested... amal

Clay Shirky + Brian Eno on the Power of Networks

17 March 2008
Everywhere we look, it seems, companies and organisations are trying to harness the alleged wisdom of crowds – the power of groups of people to come together through the internet and share with one another, work together, or take some kind of collective public action. One of the world’s leading experts on social and technological networking, Clay Shirky, Professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations, comes to the ICA to talk about how the idea of networks, and particularly online social networks, is changing everything around us.
Clay Shirky will be in conversation with Brian Eno, musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.
£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

And Here is some info from the publisher on Clare Shirky's book...

A revelatory examination of how the wildfire-like spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'être swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger socialimpact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

Me & Nancy

A Lovers' Tale

I haven't eaten for three days Nancy had said. I'm menstruating and I'm sick of the sight of you. Moreover I'm sick of this tiny apartment...there's no room: it's cramped and I'm cramped and a television is no substitute for a window. I can't see outside and I can't breathe the air, or see the sun she had complained.

Nancy missed the sun. She was from a part of Europe where the weather was usually glorious in the summer, and mild in the winter. How she hated the Northern climate where the winter days seemed microscopic and the nights intermidable and seemingly permanent. It played havoc with her mood, and worse with her digestive system.

I tightened the belt on my cotton robe with the silk outer edge. Nancy ran her finger over some salt grains on the kitchen table, licked her finger

"I'm supposed to be taking these salt pills, but..." she wrinkled her nose "they make me feel like throwing up"

I switched on the television, hoping for a diversion from the tone of the room, without putting my thoughts into words. Images of a forest filled the screen as a camera plunged through thick growth to focus in on a small animal.

"Urgh" Nancy sighed, "Boring. I'd rather swap places with a wild animal than watch it on telly. At least they get a chance to roam around...maybe even have a fuck once in a while."

The small fluffy grey couch shifted slightly under my discomfort, I exhaled noisily while Nancy picked up the remote control and switched channels, to one featuring an underweight young woman whose skin had stretched taught over her bones, like a lampshade.

I reached over the arm of the couch and picked up a bottle of Fanta orange drink, that had been there since the evening before.

I could think of nothing to say. Perhaps there was nothing to say. I felt miserable and irritated with the room. Nancy's prescence felt like an imposition, as if she were somehow surplus to requirements. She must have felt my thoughts as she abruptly got up from her chair and exited the box-like room through the small kitchen door just behind my position on the sofa.

"I'd like to be famous, you know" she parted with, "In another life I might get my chance you never know"

I could hear her conversation continue from the small space behind my head,

"I wouldn't still live with you, if I was. You're useless in bed since you've been taking those pills and my social life would get better, Marsha and Sheila reckon that too."

I could hear her rummaging through the rack of kitchen utensils and pans through the open door.

"Since you haven't been working, we haven't gone out at all. You're no fun. And we don't talk when we're in...I might as well be on my own..."

The tone in her voice was rising now, and I recognised the inevitability of what was about to come, yet even so had to resist the temptation to just turn the sound up on the telly, and drown out her nagging.

Suddenly her voice beame clearer as she left the kitchen, yet her words made no sense,

"So this is the last present I'm going to give you."

I tried to turn my body around, my neck stiff and still aching from the uncomfortable night of insomnia I had had the night before, my brain trying to make sense of the impossiblility of the prospect of a gift, when I caught a glimpse of the dull grey steel of the kitchen knife. Blunt, as most things in the apartment had been for a time, it nonetheless made a shattering, nervous, sound as Nancy brought its point down right at the top of my skull, splintering it, pushing the blade deep into my brain with an angry, menstrual force.

As she released her grip,the knife shuddered slightly as if experiencing its own sense of its coldness, and I felt a curious sense of singularity, as if I were alone and that the presence of Nancy were no longer there. Or at any rate, no longer bothering me.

At the same time the blood from the ruptured vessels, mixing with the grey matter from my brain pushed out through the wound and started to blossom in slow, rotating, coagulations.

I sat, still, embracing the silence of the television station which had paused. The flowering at the pinnacle of my skull continued, massing terribly, feverishly slowly into a scarlet orchid bloom. I was transfixed by erotic excitment, my skin prickily at the sensation of its slight rupture. Meanwhile the flicker from the set-slowed by the pause in transmission to a beacon pulse- mixed with the greying light reflected from the kitchen window and its counter surface onto the organic growth, now larger than my head, shining wetly... a vegetable carousel.

(Community of Lovers...February 2008)

LAB GRUP! SO THERE IS SOMETHING OF AN ISSUE WITH HAVING THE MEETING AT MY HOUSE TOMORROW.
I WON'T BE ABLE TO HOST US THIS WEEK.
HOWEVER I HAVE A SUGGESTION.
THERE IS 'MOONBOW JAKE'S' COFFEE BAR WITH A LARGE 'CONFERENCE' STYLE TABLE WHICH I THINK WILL WORK NICELY AND ANOTHER LARGER TEA-TABLE IN THE BACK IF THAT ONE IS FULLUP.

IT IS NUMBER 325 BROCKLEY ROAD.

I'LL GO TALK TO THEM TONIGHT ON MY WAY HOME.
SO SORRY. WILL EMAIL AS WELL.
SOPHIA