This question feels especially intriguing at World Wide West, surrounded by people who work in or with technology (so often postured as the rich bad guy in the fight against gentrification and skyrocketing rents in the Bay Area), in the golden open fields of Point Arena. Courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. What do we make, then, with this one?Ī photograph by Robert Landau in Doug Aitken’s The Idea of the West, 2010. We are not living Kyger’s life or time, Warsh’s time, Ginsberg’s time. What interests me more than whether a pre-phone era was somehow better than now is what we do now with our phones, our jobs, our different positions in relationship to privilege and work. “If the nostalgia is a longing for something concrete,” writes Valeria Luiselli, “it may perhaps be weakened by eclipsing the memory of what was with the overwhelming presence of what is.” And my friends do have to work, so things are different for us. It doesn’t make her a bad person, or any less of a good writer, he smiles, she just wasn’t writing under the conditions of someone who has to work. I don’t think she ever had a job.Īnd this settles me in its way - his practical assessment in contrast to the romantic charm of Kyger’s life. I mean, Kyger just wasn’t hustling for money, Alex says a few days later when I whine about how I want her life. Too often being busy wraps this mysterious disempowerment around us, and I find myself wanting to poke around in there for the specific. But I bore easily with it, the way it collapses those who can afford expensive, distracting phones with those who work multiple jobs to survive. It’s an easy argument to make, and not without significance. “Our phones keep us too busy to live Kyger’s life. “It’s our fucking phones,” Jay says, and raises hers in her fist as we walk out of Moe’s to the damp Berkeley night. We long for a California in which we do not have to work three jobs, do not have to wait three weeks to schedule a coffee date with our closest friends. ![]() ![]() ![]() It is this yearning for a different sense of time that I feel in the sighs at the Kyger reading, and also in the tenderness of the roped-in Slack channel. The word nostalgia - which comes from two Greek roots, nostos meaning “return home,” and algia, “longing” - could be problematized as not only a simple “longing for a place” but also a yearning for a different time or, even more abstractly, a different “sense of time.” In her introduction to the exhibition catalogue for ENERGY THAT IS ALL AROUND, a survey of San Francisco’s Mission School, curator Natasha Boas writes: Peterson, Eric Peterson and the Aipa Stinger, in Doug Aitken’s The Idea of the West, 2010. These small status updates drifted across shoulders and arms some fluttered down to the ground, lost to the dust. One participant arrived late and we managed to include him without verbal instruction, and when post-its and pens materialized, I used my hands to form a writing surface. Every motion rippled through our circle and caught as each of us tugged and gained the slack we needed. We slung the rope and giggled as it grew quiet and the sound of swallows and wind floated in. “Instead of ‘jibber-jabber’ and ‘flimflam’ like Slack uses,” she told us, “feel free to put your hands on someone’s shoulder to communicate care.” Should we need to get the attention of the team we could tug on our section of the rope and participants would pass it on. Our job was to loop a round of the long nylon rope around our waists and attempt to communicate wordlessly with one another. She described feeling that she’s expected to be always on Slack and receive messages instantly, and wanted to model this experience with bodies and rope. ![]() I was also drawn to Nancy’s strong stance, muscular arms, and repeated assertion that though she’s a graphic designer, it’s crucial to her to “show up with a body.” Artist Nancy Nowacek was leading what she’d announced as an “Alt Slack Channel,” and though I’m not a user of the team organizational tool Slack, I was curious. On day two I crawled out just as the damp was peeling back from the fields, and walked over to a pit dug into the ground with wooden benches sunk just inside its circumference. We awakened each morning with the amniotic sac of the fog around our tents. Everyone cooked and cleaned and camped out in a clump around a fire pit. Most of the weekend was run un-conference style people signed up to lead virtual reality drawing in the living room, painted with smashed computer innards, and held domain-hoarding self-help circles. A few months ago I attended the third annual World Wide West summit, a gathering of about fifty artists, writers, technologists, and other people interested in new media arts and digital culture.
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