Penthesilea
From Penthesilea
I want to build a man to get even with father. He is the paragon of shyness in the body of Adonis.
- Don't forget that everyone hates a tourist.
WHO CARES
WHO CARES
WHO CARES
- I DON'T GET YOUR PROBLEM
no problem just wondering
How much for the website? Plastic exploration by spam creator: Noinf126
In 2006, I was led to the consideration of Greek mythology crystallised in the character of Penthesilia, the Queen of the Amazons. The strength of Greek myth comes from their distinction between reality and illusion. In antiquity gods came from the imagination while farming and fishing were rooted in the reality of the land and the sea. In our present, this difference was challenged first through photography, then film and now through information technologies. As the network and technology evolves, the interaction between the imaginary and concrete is common with demarcations becoming ambiguous. Identity, gender and physical appearance are misleading on a network as there is no way to distinguish a true dialogue from a false, a being from a mythical entity or an authentic voice from an impostor. Illusion is perceived as reality. The metaphor of Penthesilea is replaced by a representational surrogate like Wonder Woman or Lara Croft and in the process, the meaning of myth is displaced by fashion, entertainment and consumption.
In its present state, Penthesilia is a painting of fourteen panels, a written web novella, an interactive wiki website and several associated projects. Penthesilea is accessible on the Internet as I work on it. I invite people to alter its progress through fully interactive blog software that records comments and revisions as well as a history of the project. The synthesis of this process helps determine the ultimate shape of the work.
I am able to invite the viewer to come in to my art practice because the internet permits a tunnel through which I connect directly with thoughts and actions that can fundamentally change an original. The computer monitor is both a mirror and a receiver. Interactivity permits listening, which for me is the activity of collecting thoughts as the other person is talking. What my work offers the viewer waiting there with the mouse to click, is a response.
To navigate: Most lines link to somewhere but this is far from finished. Penthesilea (as a story) is a rewrite of the myth. It is so plagiarised that the term itself becomes irrelevant here. Rhetoric lists some of the original sources and eventually I hope to construct a bibliography. Other links have simply occurred and I have decided to retain them. Some of the entries were generated by machines. (Speaking of plagiarism, this site, like most wikis, was being drowned in SEO spammers who have made an art of theft. I would like to someday work with the notion of greed that generates a closed rather than open internet but that seems to be outside of the parameters of this project. Its when they started putting spam on the main page that I had to do something. So now you do have to register your logon but otherwise the wiki is still open.)
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[edit] Penthesilea (as a story)
[edit] Rhetoric
Good sculpture..
“Penthesilea” is very much about intersubjectivity. One distinguishes the nature of the “other” through communication. As two people are talking, the listener collects private thoughts and organises and defines, all the while that the speaker is talking. She is obliged, as the listener, to turn to her self inside to determine a response. She consequently communicates from within to her perceptive world and the “other” receives what is offered at that level. As a viewer, sitting out there waiting with your mouse to click, you are already considering a response. When we are on line that is the kind of person that we are. Through all of this, we are always looking for responses rather than saying anything. This is one of the more interesting things in the process. Adonis was my father and I am sometimes puzzled at why he behaved the way that he did. This is basically why I am in dialogue here now.
[edit] Penthesilea the Amazon Queen
[edit] People
I said the operator's part in the business had been represented to me as something which can be done entirely without feeling - rather like turning the handle of a barrel-organ.
"Not at all", he said. "In fact, there's a subtle relationship between the movements of his fingers and the movements of the puppets attached to them, something like the relationship between numbers and their logarithms or between asymptote and hyperbola." Yet he did believe this last trace of human volition could be removed from the marionettes and their dance transferred entirely to the realm of mechanical forces, even produced, as I had suggested, by turning a handle.
I told him I was astonished at the attention he was paying to this vulgar species of an art form. It wasn't just that he thought it capable of loftier development; he seemed to be working to this end himself.
He smiled. He said he was confident that, if he could get a craftsman to construct a marionette to the specifications he had in mind, he could perform a dance with it which neither he nor any other skilled dancer of his time... could equal.
From: On the Marionette Theatre by Heinrich von Kleist
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