Wishes

My wish is that everyone should have a day in the sun without bombs or attacks or violence.Here is a link for a ceasefire in the Middle East- if you feel inclined add your voice to the growing discontent with our political inadequateness to save human lives.

I have caught the flue that my children had- so all is inert apart from the dripping nose. I do have to wait for the glue for foiling to dry on the lutradur I am working on- which is taking longer than expected. I did do a little more poking around about the art and memory thing ( I am still compiling a document of internet sources for those interested - but there is some way to go) but for some unknown reason ( well to me anway) keyed in the word haptic visuality ( now I wish I had done this when I did my masters- I never thought to associate the cinema with touch or haptic though I was aware of exploration in the area of computers, having a friend in Paris who has just done a Phd in this area)- and can now see I might have done better to take digital images or digital video of the work I was doing and somehow playing with that. I am still thinking of this as an option for some of the work I intend to do- it seems that the just if, ie not quite textile but the impression of textile on digital may be more than what the real textile can offer,which I can drape around me, lie in, clothe in, actually totally submerge in , if I realy wanted to. The reviewer Donato Totaro, of the book Deleuzian Film Analysis; The Skin of the Film by Laura U Marks says at the end of one paragraph of the review "but(she , the author) makes the more sensible claim that haptic visuality is a strategy more common to alternative visual traditions (tapestry, weaving, decorative arts, textile arts, embroidery, decoration, metalwork, etc.)." So ok- we practice in alternative visual traditions but actually doing it in that tradition is somehow not acceptable? I must admit to feeling a similar sort of response when looking at the work of Nancy Friedemann who is drawing lace on mylar as metaphor for her cultural heritage( stated simply I realise)- that somehow that is better than making the actual lace- and I really do like her work. Do I sense a touch of the emperor's clothes in these examples? Can the virtual world really replicate the phenomonology that Merleau-Ponty had in mind - the responsiveness of touch as perhaps memory? I don't know- what do you think?