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Given my love of metaphor, juxtaposibility, and “mappingness” (to say nothing of my love of oddball neologisms), I have to report on a particularly intriguing juxtaposition I found for my talk at the 2008 CHEMA meeting in Louisville last week<\/a>. As I was finishing my prep for the talk, I’d pretty much settled on beginning with the Big Bang of Michael Wesch’s “The Machine is Us\/ing Us.<\/a>” Michael describes his creation as “Web 2.0 in Five Minutes,” and the five-million-plus views on YouTube testify to its power and clarity. What better way to start? Then it occurred to me that Robbie Dingo’s beautiful “Watch The World”<\/a> would make a dramatic and poignant followup to Michael’s piece. If, as Michael suggests, the machine is us (and I agree with him totally, by the way), Robbie Dingo’s creation offers a stunning example of new modes of artistic expression and discursive reasoning available to us by way of our machines. Of course, Michael’s piece is itself a work of art as well, something that’s even more obvious when one watches Michael’s and Robbie’s works back to back.<\/p>\n I admit that I was also looking for an affective continuum here–aiming to present varieties of wonder acting on the heart and mind in different but complementary ways.<\/p>\n In any event, the juxtaposition was revelatory for me, and I think it worked pretty well for the audience too. Try it when you get a moment. First Wesch, then Dingo. Then take a moment for optimism, hard-won but necessary, about humanity at its best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Given my love of metaphor, juxtaposibility, and “mappingness” (to say nothing of my love of oddball neologisms), I have to report on a particularly intriguing juxtaposition I found for my talk at the 2008 CHEMA meeting in Louisville last week. … Continue reading