Monday, May 10, 2004

Singapore is a wild collision of color and image. Crowded streets filled with bright azure and the rainbow which follows hot rain.
Have been in the company of Don Bosco today as we discussed the possabilities of long distance collaboration on digital projects and theory. The new international blog on cybertext and theory Fast City should be launched tomorrow and will be linked here.
I am on my way to the land of the earliest narratives...the Australian Aboriginal people have direct cultural memory of what has been classified the pre-historic by Euro empirical authorities. They are still telling their stories on the escarpment of the Arnhem plateau. As a complex textual source there is nothing which really compares to this tradition.
As an aside I found a link today on the web for one of the best books about the didjeridu I have ever seen...Karl Neufeldt's From Arnhem Land to Internet is a good place to start if you want to contextualize the didge in the broader perspectives of it's origins. Today I saw a young Chinese guy doing a dot-style painting on a bamboo didjeridu in the markets here in Singapore. I almost took a photo as it stuck me as a great but somehow disturbing image of cultural appropriation.

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