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martian: there's nothing utopian about that image.
people imagine "utopia" as a state--it wouldn't be, and that isn't a coherent way to think about social reality, either in the present or in the future. if you like the idea of heaven, that'd be a state. our world is process, like it or not.
the image provides alot of information and there's no reason to go outside it, really. representational pieces like that are self-enclosed and self-enclosing. so you can read off from that material it provides you.
and if you look at the information, the center of the image is not the city and not the museum of rusticity arrayed around the lagoons of god-knows-what that pour out from underneath this city (about which you know nothing except there's some strange affinity for pointy things abroad in it)--it's the pipes.
i read the whole piece from the pipes outward.
the organization of the piece is a series of prompts as to how to read off from it.
if you don't take them into account, then you're not talking about the piece at all.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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