“Poverty exists as a parallel, but separate, reality. City planners work very hard to keep it outside our field of vision. It is too miserable, too dispiriting, too painful to look at someone defecating in a park or sleeping in a doorway and think of him as “someone’s son”. It is easier to see him and ask only the unfathomably self-centred question: “How does his homelessness affect me?” So we cooperate with urban design and work very hard at not seeing, because we do not want to see. We tacitly agree to this apartheid.”
1)Alex Andreou is speaking towards the growing lack of compassion for the world’s homeless. As humans, we have become more desensitized to the emotions and circumstances of others. Originally I didn’t consider Brooklyn to have much hostile architecture. But at the mention of bus stops, I did remember the new hardened benches that are uncomfortable, even for those that are waiting for a bus. Even in the rain, the small shelter offers no protection.
” We have thrown out the cry-baby in us. Any infiltration of this kind is candied diarrhoea. To encourage this act is to digest it. What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centres. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous grey entrails. But the suppleness, enthusiasm, even the joy of injustice, this little truth which we practice innocently and which makes its beautiful: we are subtle and our fingers are malleable and slippery as the branches of that sinuous, almost liquid plant; it defines our soul, say the cynics. That too is a point of view; but all flowers are not sacred, fortunately, and the divine thing in us is to call to anti-human action.”
2. I know the quote is long, but Tzara’s piece speaks towards a major issue.
This picture is an exact representation of what the quote is expressing. It has come to a point in which logic is a means of conformity. Many times people are expected to accept the things that are going on. Art is a means of defying this misguided logic. In the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, many artists are starting to abandon logic in hopes of speaking towards a greater cause.
“Despite the ever-increasing complexity of software, most computer environments put users in worlds based on constrained choices.”
3) The Turkle piece, being very straight forward concludes with a very important point. The technological world many have become larger, however the choices users have are becoming more restricted. As with the Andreou article, as people the cultural shifts that technology is sparking has become the breakdown of the current culture. As technology becomes a focal point of an emerging culture, the capacity with which we question things and interact with one another is becoming more complex and desensitized.
I loved your use of art work to connect the “Black Lives Matter” movement withthe Dada manifesto.
Its interesting how reading the article gives you a new look on everyday objects on the city. I wont be able to see those hardened benches and low roofed bus stops as just uncomfortable anymore but as an instrument preventing an unfortunate individual from sheltering himself and putting his tired injured feet up and lay down.