http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7871256.stm: This links to an excellent mini report on the Saucepan Revolution as reported by Icelandic Bloggers: a major part of the discourse surrounding the collapse in Iceland has been shaped by bloggers. An excellent example of sharp, sardonic blogging from Iceland on the disaster is The Icelandic Weather Report: http://icelandweatherreport.com/. These bloggers enact a more “traditional”, “journalistic” electrate praxis: see news, report, foster dialogue in the cracks left open in official discourse, get people angry, etc. Truth be told, public inssurection is much easier to incite, model, and conceptualize when you’re working with a nation with the population of my hometown in northern Alabama.
But this project– usually– is oriented differently towards the disaster– rather than forcibly revealing “its truth” as an object external to this series of nattering posts about which some “truth” can be discovered, this blog seeks to listen to the images and sounds coming in from the disaster and to hear what it says not about Iceland, Icelandic politics, or even the future of blogging as political praxis, necessarily. Instead, the hope is that the blog embodies and enacts (the two are necessarily linked) a kind of receptiveness and self-reflexivity towards the disaster. The disaster will speak through me, through this blog, and to the larger concerns of the human condition– but as channeled through my own existential orientation, as determined by my primal scene. I’ve noticed, however, that many of the blogs from iceland about this crisis, while less fragmentary and still preoccupied with the idea of the disaster being primarily meaningful in and of itself rather than illuminating of “life in general” (the two are by no means mutually exclusive).
Part of this task is trying to make the disaster into a graphic nugget of affective information: an emotional/intuitive one two punch of “damn” and “now what?”. Klingman argues that one of the more noteworth strategies employed by architects in Las Vegas is their ablity– their need in this placeless, anonyous globalized economy–to reduce a place and hisotrical moment into a series of iconic features, dehistoricized, decontextualized, but nevertheless potent in their ability to be instantly understoood. And so, to communicate the disaster, I must find some iconic features to play with. Earlier posts have described the natural scenery of Iceland and the means by which we explain the economic meltdown to ourselves: images from the protests themselves– not actually the disaster but a manifestation of it, a reaction to it– follow below:
