Category Archives: North Oakland

Beliefs: the anthropocene

25 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in journal entries, North Oakland

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

I believe I’m a species of animal born to my parents forty-five years ago in what we call Tamil Nadu. I believe our species, which we categorize homo sapiens sapiens, is very much like other animal species that share this organism, our planet – particularly those in our family, mammalia.

However, I also believe we’ve grown in a unique manner from all living things and we have been inventive.

We invented God.

We empowered ourselves above all living things with this great rationalization, and we alone became intelligent beyond our design.

We then spent the last hundred years dismantling our invention. Humankind is responsible for itself.

We began devoting our time to other inventions: sciences, maths, money, power and all manner of feats of engineering. We’ve launched satellites and a space station that gives us a permanent presence in space. We’ve explored the moon and sent robots to Venus and Mars. We have sent deep space probes so far away they are about to leave the heliosphere.

We’ve explored and mapped our planet in great detail. We have conquered many diseases that used to kill us and have now grown to a population of at least seven billion individual human beings. We understand statistics and our species enough to know we will make it to ten billion, unless we experience a cataclysmic event.

We are the only living thing capable of creating such an event.

I believe the era must be called the anthropocene. The Age of the Human.

It is important to do so because it implies a willingness to take responsibility. It makes our legacy as a species even more important because we are now the stewards of this world.

We connect by use of these machines instantaneously all over the world and can exchange ideas and thoughts with unprecedented speed, which implies the ability to make massive, global change in thinking toward similar goals possible. Corporate culture has dominated such mass media.

The Digital Generation is significantly different from human beings who came before them. I’ve written we ought to consider categorizing the digital generation as a new species of human being: homo sapiens digitalis

I am a father and a son and of a transitionary generation between sapiens and digitalis. Having unmade God and seeing how much of an effect we are having on our world, I feel disconnected from society.

I see this age as the anthropocene and long to take greater responsibility for my fellows, but instead, I grow isolated and separate from most because of my beliefs.

Post-Neo-Liberal Isolation is not an illness. It is a state of awareness. From within it, I compose my expressions in an attempt to work through it, not to escape it. It cannot be escaped. Beyond it lies the future of humanity and indeed, of this world.

That is my belief.

Well, at least, that’s my belief today.

M.T. Karthik, 2012

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in conceptual art, journal entries, North Oakland, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Over the past 200 days, I’ve populated this blog with 200 posts.

Many are backdated – material collected over the past thirty years – but I’ve also posted three to five times a week in 2012, with mostly photographs of baseball games, flora, fauna and landscapes.

There’s a distinct and deliberate difference in the work of these last five years from the work before. In my 40’s, my work is decidedly less political, more image-oriented and produced with and for the plastic, digital fluidity of the inter-webbed world. This is by design.

I do not wish to be known as a political artist.

I promised myself decades ago I would work socially on political matters until I turned 40, when I hoped to turn the mantle of activism over to a younger generation. I have helped this happen and documented its occurrence.

When I was 15 I wrote that I’d make these changes to process when I turned 40, including the addition of filmmaking – which I waited decades to take seriously.

At 15, watching the first of the Macintosh computers come out, I also knew that new media would arise over the years. My generation was the very first to own a personal computer or send an e-mail.

I have tried to be judicious about studying and using tech. I do not play games.

Of new media, Youtube has been the most interesting to me. I started my first Youtube account at 40 and have several now which I use to embed videos to this site.

Continuing my methods over the past year, at 45, I joined Facebook and Twitter during seminal years for both companies. I observed closely as Twitter was given tax-breaks to move to San Francisco and FB created its massive IPO.

I’ve deactivated my account on FB and will not post there again.

I will continue to use Twitter in concert with this blog. I’ve come around on Twitter. I still decry the tax break created and approved by Ed Lee, David Chiu and the SF Board of Supervisors, but I am a Twitterer and will remain so.

The work until I turned 40 is represented here by posts of work I produced between 1981 and 2007. It’s detailed and requires time to sift through. I’ll continue over the years to add work from the past and to edit the contemporaneously written material describing work from my 20’s and 30’s.

I hope to leave behind a sound record of what I consider my work via this blog.

I dream of a reader willing to consider the continuity of thought here as a kind of single expression of a humanistic free radical living in the latter half of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st. I am lonesome because of my work.

I like blogging and after some years of experimentation, I believe in WordPress as the best free way to do it.

Thanks to any visitors in advance; I love comments, likes and interactions. I am blessed that my site gets visits from many many different countries around the world. You are welcome here.

I remain, M.T. Karthik, author, artist, producer and director in pursuit of art, culture and change.