Following on from last week’s blog, this week we explore one
of the reasons why we are not going to
tell DG CONNECT anything, nor even explain what this means (surely you do
not think that you understand the meaning of this?), and why we will make a
theory of art-science and art-technology practices that DG CONNECT and the
other vainglorious Enlightened ones,
will struggle to understand. And part of the reason lies in this statement:
“He’s too theoretical.”
This staggeringly ignorant remark was made by a European
Commission bureaucrat in DG CONNECT, about the British Artist Roy Ascott,
following Ascott’s stimulating, enlightening and inspirational presentation in
the European Parliament on the morning of November 11, 2013, in the keynote
speaker session that preceded the ICT ART CONNECT workshop (mentioned in last
week’s blog) that was chaired by Robert Madelin, at that time Director General
of DG CONNECT.
“It’s Julia again Robert. I just thought that you and the
rest of the world should know the attitude that prevails in the minds of
technocrats who do not know the limits of their own knowledge. People who would,
quite rightly, think someone ridiculous if they were to suggest that a quantum
computer could be researched and developed without using quantum theory, but
condescendingly think that art can be brought into research, development and
innovation processes without using art and literary theory, and other theories
too. But care you? No you do not, for you are just using art and artists as an
instrument to achieve political ends.
“It turns out that theory is everything, in more ways than
one. Paul and I knew this, and we knew also that those caught-up in the dogma
and ideology of Western science and technology would not accept this. Paul gave
it a name – the Prometheus syndrome. And this is how the Chinese, the Indians,
and others from the non-European world will give Europe
and the rest of the West, the economic thrashing that they deserve. And Paul
and I will help them for we are sorely tired of what we describe as the vainglorious Enlightened ones and their
collective delusions and constructed realities and what they are doing to our
world in the name of that stupid idea that they call progress – that’s theory
again.
“Theory is dead you say! Wishful thinking perhaps? Long live
theory we say, for we are not caught-up in your very strange Western dualities
and your very Abrahamic notions of sole truth and the one best way. A theory of
everything, so to speak, which also includes the plainly stupid things that
people do and say, when, to this mysterious nexus, with their delusions, they do
puzzlingly and momentarily gravitate.
“Come to know us in many different ways …
“Julia xxx.”
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