I belong to the campus life. Typically my classes are one design studio, and one or two theory classes. Most of the time I enjoy experiencing how the students coming up to the studio or classes. They’ve been going through different obstacles; the resistance of the traffic, public transportations, the necessity of breakfasts, the ‘panda-eyes’ due to the traces of sleepless gaming or Korean-drama binging. But sure, I know the truth, they’ve been doing their assignments.

I teach architecture. We usually begin from Vitruvius triads; venustas-utilitas-firmitas. You might have doubts that Vitruvius’ idea of the bases of architecture is a necessary thing to learn in our contemporary lives, but yes, it is necessary. Architecture is about shared ideas and knowledges that comes to the construction of buildings; of forms and spaces. Architecture is about sharing space, as well as sharing time...

Sulit memahami Žìžek? Mungkin. Maka dari itu saya bermula dari karya terbarunya yang ternyata tidak sesulit yang dibayangkan. Berikut adalah catatan saya ketika membaca bukunya Pandemic: COVID 19
Shakes the world. Pembacaan ini kemudian dilanjutkan dengan diskusi yang dilakukan pada tanggal 4 Mei 2020.

Di sini, metoda saya sederhana, saya membuat grafik ‘mind map’ yang memudahkan saya pribadi untuk membaca tiap chapternya. Peta ini sederhana, ia menyampaikan kutub-kutub yang ekstrem dari hal-hal yang disampaikan Žìžek. Dia suka membuat paradoks, dan membuat pembaca/pendengarnya kritis terhadap para ekstrem itu. Semoga peta ini juga memudahkan yang lain juga.

Let’s start,

Intro:

“Touch me not” >> bentuk semangat kecintaan pada kemanusiaan adalah dengan menghindari sentuhan…sebuah keniscayaan keinginan untuk mengapai keintiman yang tidak dapat diraih dalam bentuk keingintahuan...

the students can be categorised upon two axis. the conformity and the energy , . . curious to see what’s coming up from this.

Tonight I’m struck by a text by my favourite author: Vilem Flusser.

He wrote a fascinating chapter regarding the gesture of photography. The last sentence of the chapter is spot on:

… photography as a gesture of looking, of “theoria.”

So simple, so true, so elegant.
But that last sentence is only becoming a beginning of something bigger.. the very heart of the problem of looking. … the very problem of attention … the very problem of consciousness, the very problem of knowledge,.. the very problem of channeling ourselves between the outer and the inner world… the very problem of our spirituality; the very problem of our soul.

Theoria (θεωρία) is Greek for contemplation.
It corresponds to the Latin word contemplatio, “looking at”, “gazing at”, “being aware of,” … theologia, as “reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity”

Tonight, is going to be a very valuable reading night for me.

… of reality.

“How can we panic about the loss of the real when we know (tacitly or otherwise) that the real is always already lost in the act of representation? Any representation, even a photographic one, only constructs an image-idea of the real; it does not capture it, even though it might seem to do so.”

Sarah Kember
Kember, Sarah (1998) Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity, Manchester University Press, Manchester
pp. 11, 17

these three images are what remains in my memory about my childhood…
not much photos I could collect… well … these are small bits and pieces.

Today, everyone is a node ready to be connected with the world.
Photography as an art is broadly accessible and practiced as the extension of human memory. There is no time in history when events are easily dematerialized as social-media shared memories. The world is filled with a plethora of memory-nodes connected through the networks. Together, we make a fused sphere of converged memories.
Yet, that doesn’t mean that the world has a unified value of memory. The way we look at photographs is always filled with inner connections between us and the image. The photograph of my 1st birthday party consists of my personal connections. The photograph itself become the material memory of one-year old me and my mind is constructing the formal memory of the event. The connection between the material memory and formal memory of that photograph is a kind of journey. A journey in time and space. A...

it’s a good time for photography in Indonesia these day. So many good opportunity for publishing photography related stuffs.

Today I got some books on photography journalism and street photography. They’re all in Bahasa Indonesia. So no English edition for that matter.

anyway, here the covers:

enough said …

what’s the definition of order?

what’s the nature of chaos?

can we really differentiate both of those?