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Invention Intervention, edited by Mick Douglas, Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2004.

“Desire for the new is deeply inscribed in the momentum of industrial modernity. The value attributed to the new is reflected in the current uptake of the word ‘innovation’ in so many different settings, and in the rise of a global culture being ever more powerfully re-formed through the provision of novelty. Modernity coupled processes of change with the ideal that those processes of change would bring progress. At our historical moment early in the twenty-first century we have increasingly compelling accounts of global warming, ozone depletion, loss of diversity of species, increasing global investment in military spending and rising social fear. Even those of us with an optimistic persuasion can be led to consider that forces of destruction are advancing more quickly and further than forces of creation and construction. I recently heard a visual artist recount that after spending twenty years working in war zones, it was only last year that an Iraqi civilian was able to capture for him the reason why he did this work: that out of all this destruction he is able to create. And so questions might insist for us all: create and invent what? For what purpose? For whose benefit?”

Invention Intervention, edited by Mick Douglas, Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2004.

(view introduction)