Gestures Towards the Digital Maypole

• Main Authors: Christian McRea, Felicity Colman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Humanities Press 2005-01-01
• Series: Fibreculture Journal
• Subjects: communications and affect; mobile communications
• Online Access: http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-034-gestures-towards-the-digital-maypole/

To paraphrase Blanchot: We are not learned; we are not ignorant. We have known joys. That is saying too little: We are alive, and this life gives us the greatest pleasure. The intensities afforded by mobile communication can be thought of as an extension of the styles and gestures already materialised by multiple maypole cultures, pre-digital community forms and the very clustered natures of speech and being. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that the information selection process at the heart of communication is one of the fundamental activities of any aesthetically produced knowledge form. From this radial point, "Gestures Towards The Digital Maypole" begins the process of reorganising conceptions of modalities of communication around the absent centre and the affective realms that form through the movement of information-energy, like sugar in a hurricane.