writing: opinion – Page 2 – Moon Under Water

The Taking Part – Why I love the process of travel

I love travel. Not just travel itself, but the process of travel.

There are many methods that can be taken. I am going to recount some of my personal favourites below.

By Plane

I had my first long-distance air flight in April 2012 on a flight from Dublin to New York. I was heading to Vermont to take part in an artist residency, and chose to detour through the metropolis. The compelling thing about air travel is the series of strange experiences associated with it. For example, the process of moving through an airport requires manners and behaviours that are bizarre in normal circumstances. Unlike other forms of public transport, arriving at an airport two hours before a flight is common practice, even when the flight itself will last less than 2 hours. Security checks, long cups of coffee, window-shopping for nothing in particular – each flight involves these unusual rituals Continue reading “The Taking Part – Why I love the process of travel”

Broadening The Mind – Flying machines and art

In Ancient Greek literature sudden and vast travel occurred regularly. As the nomadic and expansive ideas of the writers of that era sought to understand their world through travel they often created mystical methods of transcontinental journeying. Great waves tore Odysseus and his crew from his homeland, and the wings that Daedalus built helped him soar to freedom from his island prison. Airplane travel in the 20th Century led to unprecedented opportunities for travel and communication that mimic the adventurous nature of these fictional tales. If travel should broaden the mind then broader travel may have stretched the mind even further. The concept of travel has been broached across the arts, culminating in works in the late 20th Century and early this century that create a reality from the myth.

Visual artist Franz Ackermann has made a career from his indefinite nomadism, developing an exciting collection of paintings, photographs, drawings and installations that reflect the idea of skipping to and from urban locales Continue reading “Broadening The Mind – Flying machines and art”

“Blow In” – Nomadic ownership of place

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we killed on it, died on it…That’s what makes it ours – being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.” – from John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939, p38

People move. In the 20th Century, with the invention of the aeroplane, people began to move faster and further than they ever could before. But moving place is something that people have always done. From nomadic cultures and tribes to those who have moved out of necessity (due to famine or crisis), people have always crossed borders and scrambled into unexplored areas in search of a place that they can be born in, work in, and eventually die in.

A photograph of clouds from above, taken from an aeroplane window — The landscape of clouds from an aeroplane window is a territory that we will probably never blow in as far as.

People also “blow in”: the dismissive term blow-in is regularly bandied about in Ireland and other countries to describe people who have moved into and settled in a town or village Continue reading ““Blow In” – Nomadic ownership of place”

Workshop of Pot*ntial Blogging – Avoiding using “E”

It is sad to think on how long ago MUW last had a post, but it is 2014 now, and activity will start again. Writing sank down a priority list in 2013, but is now kicking off with inspiration from a Franco-artistic group of authors, known as Oulipo. For this post, I will avoid all utilisation of that most common of all symbols in our vocabulary, “E” (apart from just now!). In illustrations using a book, film or author’s call-sign, a * will stand in for that infuriating symbol.

A graphic of the word lipogram surrounded by the letters E — A lipogram is a block of writing avoiding a particular symbol

From its foundation on 24 Nov 1960, Oulipo was a group that brought works of writing to our world with strict canons Continue reading “Workshop of Pot*ntial Blogging – Avoiding using “E””

Why I Write – Celebrating MUW’s 50th post

“[W]riting is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very idea of the body writing.” – Barthes, Image Music Text, p 142

Last year I took the time to read Why I Write by George Orwell. This book is a gem in the Orwell bibliography, mainly due to its often brutal honesty and informal tone. It reads like a diary, or like a blog. Orwell’s conclusion (in my own far too shallow words) was that he wrote to help people think differently about politics and society. Orwell’s goal was for people to understand how competition and greed make us worse as a species, and wanted people to see how working together is working toward a more utopic common goal.

Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon, developed in the 1980s by and for computer programmers and users Continue reading “Why I Write – Celebrating MUW’s 50th post”

Reincarnation of Paul Revere’s Lamp – Private communication in public

If you are reading this then I am communicating with you. If you comment below you are communicating with me and anyone else who reads your comment. This is public communication, and you are taking part. Online communication allows public messages to travel across vast distances within seconds. A simple click of a “share” button can potentially bring a message to an entire online world.

The system of lantern-communication is an early form of long-distance communications that could travel far as long as visibility was clear. Lighthouses have used these systems to communicate with ships through code and signals for millennia. Prior to the introduction of modern telephony the most likely method of communicating orally over long distances was to climb to the top of the nearest hill and shout as loud as you could. Continue reading “Reincarnation of Paul Revere’s Lamp – Private communication in public”

Beg, Borrow, Steal – Art, copyright and the internet

When Shakespeare plays were originally performed, it was not allowed for audience members to bring in paper for fear that they would write down and steal the plays. To counter this, furtive audience members would go to performances and each remember different sections of the plays, then meet later and write down all they could remember. Each section was then stitched together, and the works were stolen regardless.

With the development of the printing press, pirated material began to be spread rapidly. Action was taken politically to attempt to stop intellectual property from being copied or stolen. In 1662 the Licensing of the Press Act was passed to restrict the reprinting of material without advance permission from the owners. This act planted the seed for the establishment of copyright law. Continue reading “Beg, Borrow, Steal – Art, copyright and the internet”

Possession 0.9 (Beta) – Ownership in open source

Firstly, let me briefly apologise for the abhorrent lack of activity on MUW over the past three months. Blogging is time-consuming, and sometimes life is too, and unfortunately the latter has been the case of late. Expect posting to get back to normal over the coming weeks; no posts doesn’t mean no ideas and there is a colossal backlog of brainwaves. Watch this space!

An image of a communications tower behind a fence. — Information wants to be free?

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. In the past wars have been fought and families split over possession and the idea of ownership. However, this tenuous law is dependent on the idea that there is some value in ownership – the economic worth of property guides the idea that possession is valuable. People understand that the boundaries that surround owned areas and objects are respected by a sense of possession that we take for granted. In cyberspace, ownership is more ambiguous as spaces are owned or maintained in virtual areas that are often maintained for free. So how does possession work in a community with spaces and services provided free of charge?

In the late 1700s and 1800s the frontier lines were pushed west in the United States. Frederick Jackson Turner famously documented the scramble. Continue reading “Possession 0.9 (Beta) – Ownership in open source”

Catherine’s Journey – What you see and what you get

In the late 18th Century, Russian ruler Catherine the Great chose to visit the villages of her country to see how the peasants were living. Her first minister, Potemkin, arranged to have façades of fake villages filled with actors constructed along Catherine’s route that showed a scenic, peaceful and prosperous country. Actors played the parts of the peasants, and Catherine remained in the confines of her carriage as she travelled through. Potemkin feared that Catherine might react badly if she encountered the despair and poverty that was really being faced by the Russian serfs, and as a result of his actions Catherine saw a healthy, happy nation. The idea of a fake façade built to distort a view became known as a Potemkin Village.

There have been many such illusions created by councils and governments in years since. In his book The New Rulers of The World, journalist John Pilger drew attention to how the council of Sydney had hidden the city’s poorer aboriginal communities from the Olympic Committee during the selection process for the 2000 Olympic Games. Continue reading “Catherine’s Journey – What you see and what you get”

One Down! – A birthday on doomsday

Moon Under Water is one year old! And on the same day that the world is due to end! Great!

Twelve months ago to this day the blog started with no real direction. It began as a series of meandering posts on various topics, with each post designed to respond to the last in some way. It has been a busy year, both in blog-world and real-world, and I just wanted to set aside a post to say thank you to all readers both regular and irregular (or “odd”).

To any who aren’t already aware, all past posts can be found in the archive things in the menu bar at the top of the page, and all new posts are released through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and e-mail (if you follow the blog). I’d just like to round everything up with a quick top-three blog moments of 2012. Continue reading “One Down! – A birthday on doomsday”