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‘You are Just in the Middle of the Beginning’ is a curatorial project exploring ideas of the temporalities of now, particularly attentive to the intersections of technology with politics and their entanglement in our comprehension of time. The project will unfold over a period – researching, developing and ultimately making public both artistic and theoretical articulations, to open fresh angles of vision to think critically about the present.

Focussing on the psychic and social affects and desires that are generated by the constant pressures to perform exerted upon us by an ‘always on’ culture, the project will explore what it means to live a life increasingly mediated through a relationship to the digital.

Globalisation in its development since 1989, through the now ubiquitous neoliberal governance of a victorious West and the development of the World Wide Web, bringing with it the increasing digitalisation of our interactions, has seen dramatic shifts in our understandings of geography. However what is becoming increasingly apparent today is that whilst this territorial shift was happening another potentially more radical shift was taking place in our understanding of time, whether it be the collapse of work and leisure time into playbouring on Facebook in bed or the endlessly fractalising time of the project. This collapse of time has lead to a new set of subjectivities and intimacies emerging. As we are overawed by the amount of information now available and the correlative diminution in the time available to synthesise this into applicable knowledge, we enter into a panicked state leading ultimately to exhaustion.

Technologies once venerated for their emancipatory potentials are now showing their dark side when appropriated into the flows of capitalist production. In the 60s a vision of the future existed in which we were released from the immiseration of work through the development of machines to replace the functions of manual labour. This in a sense has come to pass and the machine has largely replaced the human in production of material goods. However what wasn’t taken into account in those predictions was the wage-labour relation intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production. Now the subject of exploitation within labour has shifted from the worker’s body to the worker’s affect.

Additionally one thing that it is important to state is that this is not a call for a retreat to a romanticised supposedly pre-lapsarian time, but rather an attempt to lay some groundwork towards becoming conscious of the current conditions we find ourselves entangled within.

About the curator

Benjamin Fallon is an independent curator, writer and designer currently based in Stockholm where he is part of the CuratorLab programme at Konstfack. He served as co-director of Embassy Gallery between 2008 and 2010, was a member of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s Artistic Programme Committee from 2006 to 2008, and ran his self-initiated project ONEZERO between 2005 and 2008. Ben is an occasional visiting lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh College on the Contemporary art practice course.

http://www.theopenseas.org

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i@m-o-t-b.net

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Currently WordPress blockquotes are just wrapped in blockquote tags and have no clear way for the user to define a source. Maybe one day they’ll be more semantic (and easier to style) like the version below.

HTML5 comes to our rescue with the footer element, allowing us to add semantically separate information about the quote.

Level One Heading

Level Two Heading

Level Three Heading

Level Four Heading

Level Five Heading
Level Six Heading

This is a standard paragraph created using the WordPress TinyMCE text editor. It has a strong tag, an em tag and a strikethrough which is actually just the del element. There are a few more inline elements which are not in the WordPress admin but we should check for incase your users get busy with the copy and paste. These include citations, abbr, bits of code and variables, inline quotations, inserted text, text that is no longer accurate or something so important you might want to mark it. We can also style subscript and superscript characters like C02, here is our 2nd example. If they are feeling non-semantic they might even use bold, italic, big or small elements too. Incidentally, these HTML4.01 tags have been given new life and semantic meaning in HTML5, you may be interested in reading this article by Harry Roberts which gives a nice excuse to test a link.  It is also worth noting in the “kitchen sink” view you can also add underline styling and set text color with pesky inline CSS.

Additionally, WordPress also sets text alignment with inline styles, like this left aligned paragraph. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum. Cras mattis consectetur purus sit amet fermentum.

This is a right aligned paragraph. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum. Cras mattis consectetur purus sit amet fermentum.

This is a justified paragraph. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum. Cras mattis consectetur purus sit amet fermentum.

Finally, you also have the option of an indented paragraph. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum. Cras mattis consectetur purus sit amet fermentum.

And last, and by no means least, users can also apply the Address tag to text like this:

123 Example Street,
Testville,
West Madeupsburg,
CSSland,
1234

…so there you have it, all our text elements