"The Plague," Street addresses, and robotic raven masks - Dinner Table Digest № 4, March 29, 2020
Dinner Table Don’ts is a curation of News, Commentary and Analysis from Peter Thurley, a conversation about all the topics you were told to keep away from the dinner table.
I’ve got three links for you today, one of which leads to a multimedia presentation, another of which is a .pdf of a book by French philosopher and author Albert Camus very much worth reading right now. But first, on to names and numbers we often use, but rarely think about - street addresses.
The Inequality of Street Addresses
“Street addresses tell a complex story of how the grand Enlightenment project to name and number our streets coincided with a revolution in how we lead our lives and how we shape our societies. And rather than just a mere administrative detail, street names are about identity, wealth and, as in the Sonny Carson street example, race. But most of all they are about power – the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.”
Why should we care about Street Addresses? Because these numbers and names mean that we can communicate effectively with the outside world. Take the slums in Kolkata, for instance:
The slums seemed to have more serious needs than addresses – sanitation, clean water, healthcare, even roofs to protect them from the monsoon. But the lack of addresses was depriving those living in the slums a chance to get out of them. Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money or receive a state pension. Scandals had exposed moneylenders and scam banks operating throughout Kolkata’s slums, with some residents reportedly killing themselves after losing their life savings to a crook. With their new addresses, more residents of Chetla can now have ATM cards.
The next piece is a melding of indigenous traditions, digital art and robotics. This was included in the ‘readings’ for the Philosophy of Art class that I was sitting on this past semester, taught by the wonderful Shannon Dea. I’m really sad that classes are over, but I’m happy to engage with the content from home.
The Raven, the ultimate trickster, has become a cyborg. In this Creative Collab, Shawn Hunt moves away from engaging with the handmade; exploring authenticity and our expectations of what it means to be indigenous through the removal of the hand-carved surface. The work Transformation Mask, features Microsoft HoloLens, creating an experiential sculpture piece that engages with mixed reality.
The Plague by Albert Camus
Here is the English translation of the 1947 book ‘La Peste’ (The Plague) by French existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus. The text is uncomfortably prescient:
From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us. Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible. And no doubt he would have continued doing so. But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life. Thus, for example, a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and, together with fear, the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead…
This drastic, clean-cut deprivation and our complete ignorance of what the future held in store had taken us unawares; we were unable to react against the mute appeal of presences, still so near and already so far, which haunted us daylong. In fact, our suffering was twofold; our own to start with, and then the imagined suffering of the absent one, son, mother, wife, or mistress.
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