May 13, 2004

What is culturekitchen about?
by Liza Sabater

I am a writer and one time scholar-in-training who suffered many years of obssessive research compulsion. I have worked as Latin American languages and literature professor, translator, editor, critic, actor, journalist, marketing communicator, technical writer and corporate training developer. I've covered many topics in my bouts of research (and in no particular order) : Latin American neobaroque poetry, education laws and activism, aesthetics, software usability and design, intellectual property rights, pharmaceutical regulation, allergies and immunology, alternative medicine, etc. I'd research topics to death and until I found no reason to write about them anymore.

That is, until I started blogging.

Blogs are humdingers. They are a bit like journals or diaries --only anybody who stumbles upon it on the web (or through syndication) can read it. Still better they can leave comments about your entry or even create an entry on their own blogs and link back (or trackback) to yours. When people start commenting on other commentators, the blog stops being a publication : It becomes a conversation. Not like the ones you get at a salon or pub but more like the written or graphic conversations you'd find at the bathrooms of a pub.

I came through blogging via the software and not the blogosphere. I knew I wanted to go to the web for the (seemingly) instant feedback I saw net artists getting with their sites. Still,my experience with web design jobs left me wanting as a writer. I just could not get over the repulsion of publishing my writing by banging out HTML on a regular basis.

I am a busy writer. I covet paper. I carry notebooks wherever I go ---yes I even have one that I can carry inside the smallest of purses. Also, as a fan of Nietzsche (or Nietzschebitch, as I like to call myself), my daily writing tends to be short and sometimes fragmentary. I am more interested in the search of the idea, in it's construction than it's certainty and that takes a lot of tantear; of feeling of and feeling for the developing topic. It's about the journey as much as the destination.

That's why I love more and more the word for blogs in Spanish. Bitácoras. A bitácora was basically a kind of office for the captain of a ship. In there he would log into his cuaderno de bitácora every single happening, insight or change he'd experience during his voyages.

The same could be said about my blogs.

The side links are there as mementos of my voyages as an Internaut . Unless I identify the post as an article, most of what I write are daily musings, meditations or ponderings. They are not to be taken as completed essays. For those I can spend months researching and polishing ideas. Even though they are not polished ideas, they are ideas nevertheless and I publish them for the sake of starting conversations.

In a sense, this blog is a very public salon, or as I thought of it when I came up with the name, a very busy kitchen. Some of the most intense conversations about art, culture, sex, politics I have had, have happened in kitchens. To me kitchens are the original cultural centers.

Hence, c u l t u r e k i t c h e n .

Posted by Liza Sabater in About
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Art. Object or Process? From Liza Sabater's post on Rhizome Raw today: "There are different concepts in our work, like when you think of the computer tree, which is basically a stage that we built for people online to perform... [More...]

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Art. Object or Process? From Liza Sabater's post on Rhizome Raw today: "There are different concepts in our work, like when you think of the computer tree, which is basically a stage that we built for people online to perform... [More...]

Found inOctober 6, 2004 12:48 AM

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