Re: <nettime> Live Your Models

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

Hei Brian --

While the discussion is interesting, I think for me, the crux of what you have 
written here is the subject line, which I am sure you chose with that in mind.

It is our daily moment-to-moment practices (praxis!) that most affect the nature 
of reality and how the world goes. How we *live*: where we 'work', what we are 
working on, who we work for, how we treat the proximal Others who circulate 
around us, what we consume, how we consume, how we move around, how we treat our 
embodied selves,

As I look around to friends, colleagues, and the various Others I run into, I 
often see a deep dissonance between the models they have in mind and how they 
actually live. The same pertains to the Self. Very few people go beyond dominant 
paradigms as it is locally understood to live a life that goes beyond lip-service.

I have in mind a friend here in this small town at the end of the road in rural 
Arizona -- his daily practice is (literally) built around "DWAM", that is, 
"Doing With Available Materials" as a former urban planner, and now an 
alternative home designer/builder, (water harvesting) landscape architect, and 
all 'round handyman. Given local conditions, he implements his alternative 
biilding work through (many times) innovative techniques in the DWAM way. It's 
inspiring to work with him precisely because he has taken a wide range of ideas 
and brought them into a consequent lived praxis. I love the fact, for example, 
that he keeps a hard pressure up on the local building inspection regime, 
pushing them to accept alternative techniques (that they are blissfully ignorant 
of in the best case) and that are 'no-brainers' for this desertified region. 
Pressuring the dominant is best accomplished when the model is fully aligned 
with praxis, and vice-versa.

Of last import is how we speak, what we say -- as the symbolic, while it may be 
the social source of profound actions and practices -- remains symbolic and is 
in constant need of being transformed into embodied action, us giving our 
energies back to reality in more-than-symbolic ways.

Cheers,
John
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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