<nettime-ann> PERFORATIONS 30: Hut / Tech and bare life CFM

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

.



Public Domain, Inc. is pleased to announce the
call for PERFORATIONS 30: Hut / Tech & bare life

As usual with perforations, deadlines are
somewhat fluid but please notify  Robert Cheatham
or Fehta Murhana of your intent by February 15
2007 in order to be included in the release
notification.

Article length is at your discretion.
Experimental hypertexts are especially welcome.
Other forms of media, video, etc., may have
length restrictions, please cc media editor Chea
Prince or technical editor, Jim Demmers.

If you have any questions please query one of the editors.

       -------------------------------------
Hut Tech and bare life


"When the shack dweller lays in supplies, she is composing a politics."
Lisa Robertson

This issue of Perforations was generated because
of papers found during a reconstruction of Fehta
Murghana's hut. She had constructed it herself as
a writer's retreat but was fond of calling it a
'witch hut', always fantasizing putting it on
legs as the famous hut-on-chicken-legs of the
Russian witch fable Baba Yaga, creating an image
of inner mobility only seemingly at odds with the
the apparent rooted nature of the hut.

This issue/node of Perforations will concede the
perimeter to the hut and hut dwellers everywhere,
but also examines the oxymorons of thought which
the hut generates at the center (potentially),
such as the 'rooted nomadism' of the hut dweller
and perhaps even the 'revolutionary
conservativism' of such, including its modern
anti-modernism. Murghana herself was well aware
of the uncanny nature of the 'hut,' seeing it as
enabling portents and revenants, neither of which
are wanted in the modern world, yet both are
continuously courted through the hypermodern
technical networks which course through
contemporary life, binding and separating at the
same time.

We begin with Murghana's musings on the hut, but
several writers have lately taken to heart, (not
forgetting Rykwert's history of the hut), the
enigma of the hut, such as Anne Cline, Lisa
Robertson, and most lately Adam Scharff in a
recently released book on Heidegger's Hut. We
have enabled the basic text along the way with
quotes from the above.

What is 'Hut / Tech', that such frabjous entities
can be held together by a stroke, a dividing line
between the nether poles of a magnet? Another
oxymoron? Who are the dwellers of huts, either in
thought or corporeally? Does the hut embody some
sort of midway point between homeless and home?
Between presence and absence? Is there any future
for the hut or is it to be relegated to economic
end-zones of emergency and to the camps of the
coming era? Is there the 'hut of last resort' and
then the freely chosen hut? Or is the very nature
of the hut a last resortŠand hence a resort to
primal potentiality, both ending and beginning?
(After all, the three most notable hut dwellers
in recent memory are Henry Thoreau, Theodore
Kacynski, and Martin Heidegger, all of which
would seem to be problematic for the modern
cultural inhabitant --besides being white,
western males -- of the current wave of
hyperdevelopment in re: to lofts, townhouses,
tract Macmansions, all examples of a certain form
of maximalism and neo-liberal justifications of a
new economic order. And of course with the above
dwellers, the hut is often seen as a breeding
ground of primordial darkness in its willful,
almost-Nietzschean separation from culture,
civilization, and society.:

"What we crave is not Rosseau's solitude but the
excellent series of origin dwindling on ahead
into the future. Thus we love shacks. Each leads
erotically to the next. One sojourns, or starts
out, rather than settles, in a shack. Domestic
duration, like childhood, is transient, serial. A
shack is always timely. Typically an account of
the history of architecture will begin with a
shack."
Lisa Robertson

But the hut also seems oddly timeless in its
aspect of catering to bare life, which exists as
a possibility everywhere and everywhen.
Is there any place left for the minimalisms of
the hut? For its limitations, its 'insect
politics,' its dark broodings, its centrality in
a haunted, uncanny landscape? Or are the
compacted maximalisms of favelas, the psychic
densities and thickenings and potential new forms
which they seem to prophesy, more exacting? In
all cases the 'hut' avers between opacity and
transparency, justifying both, on different
occasions, preserving both as trans-temporal
exigencies which advance, retreat (and sublime)
into spiritualities, goblins, ghosts, ethers, and
materializations at the drop of a hat.


Please fell free to send us your hut life, even if it only resides as a dream,
a whistle in the dark.

Please feel free to send us the minimals that you
are able to squeeze out of everyday,
  the disguised trans-temporalities that make up hut life
in the middle of empire,
that make up hope in the middle of loss and abandon,
like lotus seeds found in the bottom of a three thousand year old pyramid.


notes
(1) Robertson quotes From Playing House: a brief
account of the idea of the shack Lisa Robertson
in Occasional Work and Seven Walks From the
Office of Soft Architecture


Robert Cheatham
Atlanta January 2007
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hut / Tech
Fehta Murghana

1) How, now, could anyone possibly advocate the
'weakness' of the hut or the shack, its glaring
idleness, downtime, bricoleur-ness, and embrace
of decay? Like difficult or impossible speech,
its perceived weakness (the weakness of opacity
in the one, the weakness of the minimum in the
former) is actually a form of strength.

2) The hut/cabin/shack is the epicenter of
'experimentalism,' even if 'only' vernacular.
Always successful and always a failure, both at
the same time; the necessity which the hut
represents is precisely that: "The economy of the
shack enumerates necessity, or more exactly it
enumerates a dream of necessity, using what's at
hand." (Lisa Robertson 1)
[....]

more here:
http://www.pd.org/~zeug/perf-30/huttech1.html

----------------------------

Guest Editor:
       Fehta Murghana
                fehta@pd.org

Senior Editor:
          Robert Cheatham
                   zeug@pd.org

Technical Editor
           Jim Demmers
                   Jdemmers@pd.org

Media Editor:
           Chea Prince
                   Chea@pd.org


Perforations raison d'tre here:
http://www.pd.org/~chea/Perforations/perf1/perf-intro.html

Perforations index page:
http://www.pd.org/~chea/HTML/perforations-index.html

podcasts, videos, and other projects here:
http://www.pd.org

--


                            --------------------------------------
"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,
and then the different branches of arithmetic --
Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and
Derision."
          The Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland

                             ------------------------------------
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