Way My It Did I is a 2019 film by Maria Anastassiou commissioned for New Geographies, an arts project which highlights overlooked or unexpected places in East Anglia
Category: Culture
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What is Culture?
Listen to linguist, anthropologist, philosopher, and author Dan Everett talking about his theory of culture. He discusses exactly what it is, how it exists on a macro and micro level, how it affects our language and our cognition, and how without it, we would die.
Everett spent many decades living with hunter-gatherers in the Amazon jungle. The language of the natives who he lived with, Piraha, is unlike all other known languages in that it has no words for numbers, colours or the future. He explains what his knowledge of the Piraha language, tells us about the intersection of language and culture.
He also talks about the practice of the science of linguistics, animal vs human communication, universal translation, and what unites and what divides us as humans.
The Emoji Movie is a story of rebellion and co-option. This video shows the parallels that this story has with the nature of the culture industry as a whole. When the profit motive completely takes over society, cultural innovation and rebellion are transformed into another commodity that is sold back to us to be passively consumed. If Adornian critiques of trashy kids’ films are your thing check this out.
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The Tyranny of the New
In art and everyday life are we dominated by an endless quest for the new? Composer Claire van Kampen, film director Sophie Fiennes, music journalist Ammar Kalia and musician Brian Eno discuss and explain their ideas in this 40 minute debate.
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Music and Rebellion
Can popular music be subversive? According to the critical theorist Theodore Adorno the answer is firmly, ‘no’. The reasons for this are related to the structure of contemporary society itself; “We live in a society of commodities—that is, a society in which production of goods is taking place, not primarily to satisfy human wants and needs, but for profit. Human needs are satisfied only incidentally, as it were. This basic condition of production affects the form of the product as well as the human interrelationships.” – A Social Critique of Radio Music – Adorno
Art is a reflection of the society that produces it. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Europe had turned itself into a vast slaughterhouse. In Zurich a group of artists gathered in the Cabaret Voltaire and set about a total rejection of the values that had produced the First World War. The irrationality and absurdity of capitalist society was mocked and satirized in an iconoclastic and nihilistic style that was as irrational and meaningless as the times that had produced it.
“The cinema too must be destroyed”
Not many films are made to deliberately discourage passive consumption. Instead of trying to entertain or seduce the viewer with aesthetically soothing shots this film deliberately interrupts itself and pauses to criticise the institute of cinema itself. It is a commentary on the fractured and fragmentary nature of everyday life with all its discontinuities, contradictions, hopes and frustrations.
Donde Nada Ocurre (Where Nothing Happens) is an artistic project conceived by Ibiza born Irene de Andrés. First shown in its totality at Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, north-west Spain. The project consists of five films, and other models and architectural structures.