Into the Neverlands

"Networked culture has yet to ar ticulate itself clearly in spatial terms. The real change happens when networked communities and data manifest in spatial terms." (Headmap Manifesto, p. 50)

I must say that in terms of these processes in Utrecht, I haven't seen much of this happening lately. The manifesto being 10 years old... Please point me into the right direction.

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Preparing for the seminar on performatvity and locatedness of media and performance. This time the subject is Performative Subjects with Foucault's Panopticism and De Certeau's Spatial Practices as the main texts.

While we were discussing the texts prior to seminar, as a possible example worth mentioning within the framework of panopticism and performativity I remembered London cyclorama.



BBC report gives quite a clear explanation of how the cyclorama functions if you haven't heard about it before. Foucauldian paranoia of surveillance remains, yet the fact that the observers can render the flow of time by moving within it leaves room for practising spaces. Consider if somebody went for a walk within the scope of the cameras and then entered the cyclorama to play with time and their traces in/on it.

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For the past few weeks along with other few students I was brainstorming about the term ‘mapping’. After looking at Deleuze’s ideas on maps and mapping as a continuous practice I came to realise that in fact our quotidian practises are all about mapping and embedding ourselves within various maps.

I weave my thoughts within this blog (as of the last weeks of November) in a certain manner, which is different from the practice employed in my previous non-academic blogs. I’ve been treading certain virtual spaces for the past couple of months augmenting my folksonomies, compiling the blogroll and developing new networks. When I talk with my professors I maintain a slightly different lexicon than the one I use with other students of Utrecht University and they do not hear the vocabulary I use with my best friends after a couple of glasses of wine or a few biertjes. Deleuze and Guattari argue¹ that ‘we are composed of lines.<...> They compose us, as they compose our map' (Deleuze&Guattari, 2004: 224). We blend and intersect with new ones on a daily basis. And we emerge out of this matrix.

Consequently I was explaining to a friend of mine the idea of our participation in network culture as a practise of mapping ourselves within them. danah boyd calls it defining ourselves and our context in which we are operating ². The matter is as vast as the virtual web within which we are entangled together. But the more research I did on it, the more discoveries I encountered. In a week or two I'll know if I have to remap my thoughts...

In the meantime - contemplating on Gambling, Gods and LSD - a visual meditation on being I thoroughly enjoyed in IDFA in Amsterdam yesterday.

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1. Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. & Massumi, B. 2004. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum International Publishing Group.

2. boyd, d. 2006. Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites. First Monday 11(12), December, p. 7

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Few thoughts cross my mind. Among them questions like where have I been before and in what plateaus have I been treading previously. What have I been doing with the time given to me and what has time produced out of me.

Despite the fact that I only spent a few months in my new Alma Mater yet, I have already discovered myself swamped by the flood of information and the fact that the field I have chosen to study - new media - is so terrifyingly dynamic that it is quite possible I will not necessarily stumble across anything new with my research. Once again I find myself on the first step of the ladder of competence - unconscious of my incompetence and stunned at how much has already been done.

By Lithuanian standards of blogging I am no newbie - I've blogged for over two years and quite successfully some might say: with quite a few 'thank you' letters from across the globe, constant comments, a bit of media coverage, a part time job proposal in the Irish media once I started to blog in English and even my grandma's keenness to purchase online newspapers she heard of writing about her granddaughter - only later on I explained to her that they were online. Oh the vanity of self-ordained fame!

For the past couple of days I have been brainstorming myself for a paper proposal I have to come up with for the course Spatiality/Temporality that would touch upon the aspect of mapping. The ideas are still in the metaphysical stage, but while thinking I realised how much is out there to be discovered and deciphered through the matrix of the hypertext. Moreover, how much has been done already... Last night I came across Danah Boyd's blog , which she started ehem 11 years ago. Christ, where was I then? :)

I was 15 and I didn't have a computer yet. My first encounter with surfing was in a parsonage. :) I remember desperately trying to log on to this new space and after successfully dialling-up with the information abyss I didn't know where to go... One of the first things I did was to set up an email. I chose the domain europe.com. I identified myself with belonging to wider terrains than my minuscule and relatively new country had. In other words, it was the sense of belonging and simultaneously a certain degree of escapism that drew me into the whirlpool of the world wide web. Driven by the same motivation I started my blogs which mainly focused on emigration/immigration issues as I found myself asking why and whether had I become an (im)migrant. As with many endeavours women launch, it was a self-exploration and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Those who might want to know more about the whys can go to my previous English blog emigration-etc where I have spend lots of time and energy on discussing the matter publicly and ultimately identifying myself as a voluntary nomad.

I started this blog with a determination to continue to post my observations about life (a)broad, yet I can't keep up to date those more or less creative cultural rants and ponderings as I find myself immersing into the research subjects of my studies deeper and deeper. On the other hand, they are not that far from exploring certain neverlands and positioning myself within them. I'm particularly interested in networking, social networks, locative media, identity representation, power relations.

I humbly bid a warm farewell to those who discovered the Neverlands as another blog with random tirades on cultural differences and I am grateful for being found and for your kind comments. Cultural differences will always remain there - it took me a few years of living abroad to realise they would never disappear, yet the beauty lies in the diversity of shades. However, from now on I would like to designate this blog for tracing my research and findings within the infinite field of media and us in it, because 'we live in media, as fish live in water'¹ . Recently I have discovered too much exciting new material in order to leave it within the footnotes of my previous musings and I need more logic in organising my folksonomies. I decided to keep the title, because I am still treading the Neverlands - the discourses that are still fresh to me, perhaps vaguely touched upon by my empirical approach yet without definitive conclusions. I'll see where this takes me. You are very welcome aboard. Please comment, suggest, argue and immerse yourselves in other forms of participation. We are all in this together, as Ben Lee sings (a rather cheesy melody, but the message is correct).

PS As for creative content, one day you might encounter it assembled in a book, yet it has to be written first. I might have the first page.

1 Nelson T. (1974) Dream Machines. In N. Wardrip-Fruin and N. Montfort , eds. The new media reader. 2003. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

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