Globalisation and the way we understand it’s micro and macro
relationships and processes related to media is difficult to describe with
certainty, as you finish typing a sentence it has changed by the time you look
up.
The concept of scapes developed by Appadurai (1998, p. 33)
will be discussed here which came from the alternate idea of Global Flows being
too vague in describing global movements but includes, similarly, 5 terms: ethno,
techno, finance media and ideo –scapes.
Appadurai
writes:
The
suffix -scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these
landscapes, shapes that characterise international capital as deeply as they do
international clothing styles. These terms, with the common suffix -scape, also
indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from
every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival
constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness
of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic
communities, as well as sub-national groupings and movements (whether
religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such
as villages, neighbourhoods and families.” (Appadurai 1998, p. 33, cited in
Rantanen 2005, p. 13)
This idea of globalisation as an observable landscape or
irregular shape being understood differently according to perspective in time
and space, cultural, political and economic position sounds similar to me to
the appreciation of modern art. Sculpture especially.
The 3-BEE printing project (a pun on 3-D printing) brought
together a master bee-keeper, a sculpture artist and 80, 000 bees to create a
pretty outstanding example of a visible 3D –scape made up of the individual
micro efforts of the bees under control of a human designed enveloping bubble
producing a big picture macro level structure.
Interdependency developed between bee and artist through a
lab simulated environment for the conditions for optimum hive growth by the
bee-keepers design. Temperature control as well as food supply encouraged the
bees to build within the shell of the desired sculpture.
The industrious bees
continued to work as they would under natural condition witless to their contribution
to a sculpture. Changing perspective, the bee’s home becomes the artists
sculpture as mediated by the beekeeper.
REFERENCES:
Rantanen, T. (2005) The Media and Globalization, Sage,
London, pp. 1-18
