Baudelaire Was No Visionary

There's a Reason I Don't Post Very Often

2005-04-28T14:42:00.000-04:00

It's because Blogger is always slow, or having problems, or deleting my posts. Hmpf. It might be time for Moveable Type.

Grokster Eve

2005-03-28T15:02:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting little article in the Economist regarding the Grokster hearing scheduled to start tomorrow: Grokster and StreamCast Face the Music.

Mark Your Calendars

2005-03-22T12:18:00.000-05:00

One week from today, MGM v. Grokster is going to be heard before the Supreme Court. In a nutshell, close to thirty entertainment behemoths sued various companies (Morpheus, Kazaa, and Grokster) who wrote P2P file-sharing software for copyright infringement. The defendants held up rather well thus far, but the plaintiffs appealed, and the case has ended up in the hightest court in the country. If the Supreme Court overturns the lower court decisions, life as you know it will change. What do the plaintiffs seek? To make any technology that could possibly allow a user to infringe upon copyright illegal. P2P computing aside, just think of all that affects. Stumped? Go here: www.eff.org/legal/cases/betamax/countdown/index.php.

On a similar topic, I'm currently reading Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. I just got it, so I'm not very far into it yet. I imagine I'll have a lot to say about it once I'm finished, but if this blog continues as it has been of late, I'll make some huge post and then save it as a draft and never publish it. I have dozens of posts "saved as draft." I have a fear of publishing without extensive editing. I'm trying to get over that.

This Weekend, You Can See Contemporary Art on Sunday

2005-03-10T12:22:00.000-05:00

First of all, the Armory Show is this weekend. If you've never been before, get ready for a whole lot of people packed into the gigantic space of two entire piers on the Hudson to see the work of a couple hundred contemporary artists. It's a lot to take it, and it will take a few hours to go through it. If you miss it though, you'll regret it once you find out exactly how much you missed. Runs Friday through Sunday, noon to 8pm, and Monday, noon to 5pm.

And since you'll already be in Midtown on the west side, there's another showcase just a few blocks away, as the Scope Show NYC moves north this year to Flatotel on 135 W. 52nd Street. It's your chance to see international emerging artists in hotelrooms cum exhibition spaces. Each participating gallery must devote 80% of the show to one artist, which is nice. Runs Friday through Monday from noon to 8pm.

Get to both if you can.

Teach the Kids How to Program, or at Least Tell Them what Programming Is

2005-03-09T16:29:00.000-05:00

In the American education system, there are certain things that every student must study: English, math, history, etc. My question is, why aren't children being taught how to use computers? I understand that there are a lot of economic issues involved here, but I've heard so little about the necessity of integrating computer literacy into traditional curricula. If technology continues to dominate culture, why are today’s kids not being prepared for the future?

Where I went to school, computer classes were optional, beginning in the second grade. Once a week, those of us who took the class (for which our parents paid about $150 an academic quarter) were pulled out of regularly scheduled classes and escorted to the attic of the school where a bank of sixteen Commodore 64s awaited us. It was 1985, and the first time I'd ever seen a computer, although I had no idea what computers did. Sadly, most of our classes consisted of playing Lemonade and other games, as well as learning how to make hearts, spades and the like appear on the screen. After six class of the former, and five classes of the latter, I asked my parents to please not sign me up for computer class again, claiming that "it's boring, and all we do are the same things over and over again." They said that I had to learn how to use a computer, so I had to keep taking the class.

The next quarter went exactly the same. With one exception, we played Lemonade and made symbols for eleven weeks. On the exception week, our teacher told us to write a poem, which we could then print on the gigantic monstrosity in the corner of the attic. Admittedly, I thought that printing something was cool, but mostly because I got to tear the sides off the paper.

Second grade was the first and last time I ever took a computer class. I mistakenly thought that computers were only good for playing games and typing things. As a result, I loathed computers for years—thirteen years, to be exact—simply because I didn't understand of what computers were capable or of what I was capable of making a machine do. No one ever explained why there were computers, so I never understood their importance and simply refused to be bothered with them.

I bought my first computer in 1996. I was seventeen, was just accepted to university, and strongly advised to bring a computer with me when I arrived. I asked my then-boyfriend—who was several years older than me, worked in an IT department, and a complete asshole—to help me pick one out; he interpreted “help me” as “pick one out and order it.” Three days later, he handed me an invoice for the computer he pre-ordered for me. Not being eighteen yet, I did not have a checking account. I remember very vividly going to the bank that day to withdraw $3,600 to pay him. It had cost more than my car, and to this day remains the most cash I’ve ever physically held at one time.

I went away to college several months later armed with a pre-G3 PowerMac 6400/180, with every imaginable extra that I, a computer illiterate, would never need. If I recall correctly, most people in my dorm came to college with computers but without printers. Such was not my case. As a result, for the first couple of weeks of class, those who did not configure their computers to print on the dorm’s shared printer, printed from my machine, and were running into and out of my room every night. Besides becoming annoying, the constant printing quickly drained my ink supply before I ever printed anything of my own. Conveniently, the ink-outage was discovered a few hours or so before I had a paper to turn in. Someone suggested that I actually hook my computer up to the network so that I could use the shared printer.

Network? What the fuck is a network?

Over the next couple of years, my circle of friends grew to include a good number of people “involved” with computers. I couldn’t participate in their conversations because I didn’t understand exactly what they were talking about, but I listened. With limited knowledge based on nothing more than hearsay, I applied for a position in an IT department on campus as a “technical office assistant,” which basically meant that I had to help the technical office manager (who, admittedly, was my friend, but he wasn’t allowed to hire me—I had to be approved by the department) order hardware when machines broke and take broken hardware out of machines. I remember my interview there. I was asked one question: “What is a motherboard?” I knew the answer and got the job.

Over the next couple of months, the department experienced a high attrition rate. Before long, the IT department was reduced to four, including myself. While my pay never went up, I got a lot more responsibility. I had become the “technical office manager,” whose job description had just expanded to include software-sided tasks. I was happy to take it on, though. When I didn’t know how to do something, there was always the internet and O’Reilly there to help me. Then one day, the database architect left for good. The next day, my boss was informed that we were being audited and had two days to pull a report together for the university. The only problem was that all the information was in the database that we could all access, but could not manipulate. My boss said, “How well do you know SQL?” “Sequel?” I responded. “Uh, not well, but I’m sure I can figure it out.”

At this point, mind you, I had just figured out a few weeks earlier what html was and for what it was used.

I have a problem. I like challenges. I like them too much, and consequently, I often get in way over my head, but I always get out. I was determined to get myself out of the SQL hole I had dug for myself. I headed to the bookstore, but could find no books about “Sequel.” I called my friend, the guy whose job I now had, to ask him about it. He informed me that a) it was “SQL” not “sequel,” and that b) I was royally fucked. He went on to say that not even he, a skilled computer professional, would be able to figure it out. That, of course, just made me want to prove him wrong. Thirty-nine hours and a case of Pepsi later, I did.

That event was an important one in my life for several reasons. First, it showed me that I really did work well under pressure. Second, I finally understood how computers could be used. That was my first taste of anything resembling programming, and somehow, it just all made natural sense to me. Something had clicked, and it was suddenly as though the entire world was different. The last thing that I discovered was that I liked making the computer do what I told it to. I liked figuring out what to type to make things happen. I may not have gotten most things right on the first try, but for having no background or training in what I was doing, I got things right pretty damn quickly. It all just made so much sense. I was actually upset when I was finished. My boss was elated, but I was more than a little disappointed that I had to go back to installing harddrives and recovering papers that grad students swear they saved.

Granted I’m no wizard, but I can now safely say that I know my way around computers. I’m fascinated by them, by various programming languages, and a slew of other ubergeeky things along those lines. Had I only known this years ago, I am certain that I would have gotten a BS in ComSci. It’s not that I regret getting a degree in cinema, it’s just that I wish I did both. I wish that in the second grade, or sometime in my formative years, someone had just said, “You can do more with computers than just play games,” but no one did.

Things have obviously changed a lot since 1985. Preschoolers today would laugh at the Commodore 64 and the dot-matrix printer that amazed me the first time I saw them, just like kids twenty years from now will laugh at us for using ridiculously oversized and under-powered machines like the MacMini. I can’t help but feel that if kids were just taught that computers could be used for more than just the internet and gaming, and, if at all possible, how to use them for such purposes, this country would have a chance to compete academically with the rest of the world. As it goes though, the future is not ours.

Thrill-O-Meter

2005-02-17T08:32:00.000-05:00

Brendan Walker at the Royal College of Art created a device which, when mounted to one's self, will automatically take a picture of the bearer when emotional levels are heightened. Go here to see a diagram of the contraption. How did he do it?

Walker worked with Media Lab scientist Dr James Condron to develop the microprocessor algorithm at the heart of his machine. The algorithm identifies the moment of thrill by analysing GSR bio-signals measured at the [user]'s fingertips, and searching for specific arousal signatures.

A two-volume set entitled The Taxonomy of Thrill and Thrilling Designs is due to come out when the exhibition opens this coming Saturday. The show will run until February 27.

2004-12-29T11:25:00.000-05:00

Susan Sontag is dead.

Reality Publishing: The Case of Re-Magazine

2004-12-27T12:18:00.000-05:00

Before I say anything, I just want to point out that Rem Koolhaas stated about this magazine: "I am a fan." Rem Koolhaas, people.

Re-magazine, which can be found at www.re-magazine.com/, is, in their own words, "A magazine about one person." And it's not about a famous person whom everyone knows.

In the past couple of months, I've become increasingly interested in the phenomenon of reality television. I'm not interested in it for purposes of entertainment, and not even why it's become so popular, but rather the reason for it being in the first place. I have this crazy theory that modern history has been assessed incorrectly for the last fifty years or so, that television plays a key role in that incorrect assessment, and that reality television should be a clue that something's wrong. It's not quite as straight forward as that, but it's a start.

After reading about Re-magazine on BoingBoing this morning, I haven't been able to stop thinking about how "reality" has begun to spill over into other modes of information dissemination.

There's so much more I'd like to say, but it's all jumbled in my head. Exciting (really, really exciting), but jumbled.

Paying for Less

2004-12-12T01:16:00.000-05:00

Fork over $8.95, and you too could own the coaxial cable that blocks all FOX News brodcasts. Advertisement here. Genius. My question is, do you think enough people would fork over enough money to either make a difference, or even to bring attention to the fact that people are willing to spend their money blocking something that is offered to them for free? Not turning it on is one thing, but this is really taking it to another level.

IFAR on Photography

2004-09-22T15:09:00.000-04:00

Last night I attended the lecture "Authenticity Issues in Photography," given by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR). Some of the speakers were spectacular. Denise Bethel, who's the directorof Southerby's photogtaphy department, gave a talk on the problems that arise with photography due to the lack of catalogues raisonnés, which are available for other mediums. She discussed the case of a Man Ray photograph whose subject and date of production were unknown (also unknown was whether it was actually made my Man Ray). She explaind the process she and others went through to authenticate it.

Bethel was followed by Man Ray scholar Steven Manford who discussed various issues surrounding posthumous prints. I don't want to go into detail here due to time constraints, but if you're interested, let me know.

And then, there was conservator, Paul Messier. His presentatation was, to me, absolutely fascinating. It dealt with the photographs of Lewis Hine, and their saturation of the market. Essentially, an issue was raised as to whether the prints were actually made by Hine. It was like they performed forensics of the prints, using paper fiber samples, chemical samples, brightening ageints, etc., to determine scientifically if the prints could have been made before Hine's date of death. They were not.

When I was an undergraduate, shortly after I made the decision that I would pursue an academic career, I came up with an idea for a class I'd like to teach one day-- the history of photographic chemistry. I suppose I was about tweny years old at the time, and quickly became enthralled with the subject. I couldn't figure out there was so little information about it. I recalled every book from libraries all over the country I thought might contain some historical information regarding the progression of chemistry used. In all, I think I only had 20some books, none of them what I wanted them to be. I played with the idea of writing my BA paper on the subject, but then thought, "But where would I find the information?"

For future scholars, Messier is in the process of compiling just that, complete with images. I can't wait.

"Mark on Punk"

2004-09-19T20:54:00.000-04:00

I like looking at people who listen to the music I like. I like looking at people who make the music I like. I don't mean that I judge a record by its cover, but rather that I am intrigued and often seduced by it....I was seduced by punk. Not at first by the sound, but by the visual noise that came from it, from the scene, from the different styles of the bands and the style of their fans." --Marc Jacobs, Introduction to We're Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy, powerHouse Books: 2002.

My photo project is pretty much the opposite of this. I was attracted to the music, but had no visual references. I'm trying to make them now.

It's a great book. Exene Cervenka and Thurston Moore, in addition to Jacobs, offer the sole words found in it.

Where can I find a disused high school gym?

2004-08-23T12:35:00.000-04:00

I have an idea that I would like to pursue, but it involves the use of a gymnasium. Not for a few hours, but for a few days, at least. It will require major setup and an even more massive clean-up. It will also involve a large noctournal gathering. I would prefer it to be in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Queens, but beggars can't be choosers. I would also like it to no longer function as an institution of learning. Hell, I'm no MoMA, but there's got to be someplace. I mean, there's a theatre company on Second Avenue that's in an old public school. I just need something like that. If anyone knows of anything, let me know.

Martha Colburn

2004-08-22T22:10:00.000-04:00

On Friday evening, I went to see a selection of short films by Martha Colburn, which were being screened in a garden on Houston Street as part of the 2004 Howl Festival. All I can say is, if anyone can get his or her hands on some, it would be a good thing. She makes short animated pieces, with the animation coming from magazine cutouts. I think if I were to describe them, it would do them, and Colburn, a great injustice.

Controversy over Chicago's "Cloud Gate"

2004-08-02T13:48:00.000-04:00

"I'd just as happily do without a title, actually, except that it suggests a possibility of interpretation. In this case, the work is clearly reflecting what's around it, picking up the Chicago horizon, the Chicago skyline -- bringing it into itself, in a way. And it is a gate -- a gate to Chicago, a poetic idea about the city it reflects. To call it something else damages the potential for a different way of thinking about the piece." --Anish Kapoor (Chicago Sun Times, July 14, 2004)

Kapoor created a 66'x33' reflective sculpture to sit in Chicago's newest park. As he did not name it Cloud Gate until after it was in place, the press named it for him. They called it "The Bean."

I can't decide how I should feel about the media's naming or Kapoor's reaction to it. On initial reaction, I'm completely in agreement with Kapoor. Title/ text is crucial to a piece, it accentuates an author's intention. On the other hand, Kapoor states that calling it "something else damages the potential for a different way of thinking about the piece." Didn't the media already create a different way of thinking about it when the nicknamed it? It may not have been the "different thinking" that Kapoor envisioned or welcomed, but it nonetheless accomplishes that. I think I'll still have to side with him.

There's more to the controversy, of course, than the "what's in a name" issue. "Cloud Gate" has been placed close Frank Gehry's latest, the Pritzker Pavilion, as it also has an enormous scale and is clad in shiny steel. The problem here is that "Cloud Gate" was created as a large-scale sculpture to stand out as a large-scale sculpture--the Pavilion's magnitude dwarfs it. As sculpter Tony Tasset put it, "They're both these big shiny things, so the sculpture looks like the baby of the bandshell; the relationship with the Gehry seems a little clunky."

On a personal note, I'm amazed that Millenium Park finally opened. I moved to Chicago somewhat naively in 1996. Construction for the park began shortly thereafter and as I recall, it was supposed to open in 2000. The date kept getting pushed back further and further. When I left in 2002, opening date was kept simply at indefinite. In all the time that I lived there, I never saw the downtown landscape without the construction cranes (it looked kind of like Berlin in the 1990s on a smaller scale). I wonder if I'd feel any differnt about the city if I saw it now.

Sim City

2004-07-30T11:52:00.000-04:00

Yesterday in Sammy's class, Sim City came up during our discussion about virtual reality. I wasn't quick enough to get my two cents in, so I'm putting up here. Sim City did not begin as a game. It was a program that was developed by urban planners in Detroit in an attempt to determine how to revitalize the city.

I read about this in an introduction to one of Bob Thall's books (Thall makes photographs primarily of the urban landscapes of abandoned or crumbling Chicago). I can't remember which book, or who wrote the introduction, but it was definately a Thall book. There is a square-block smack in the center of downtown Chicago, Block 37, which had never been able to support any flourishing endeavour since approxametly the 1910s. Several movie theatres had been built on the site only to be host to a riot, or burned down (at least two burned to the ground). Arcades sprung up in the 1970s, but were often the centres of violence and drug deals. Many of them closed due to decreasing economic stability. Basically, everything that had been built there was unsuccessful.

In the late 70s, the city of Chicago commissioned a team of urban planners to figure out what was wrong with this block, and how to make it successful. The Chicago urban planners contacted Detroit urban planners who had developed a program called Sim City, in which they could program in the history of that piece of land to get the most successful scenario for the future. After three years of using the program, the Chicago urabn planners determined it was best to demolish any and all structures on the block, and make it into something recreational accessable to the public. Since the early 80s, Block 37 has been just that. Every winter, the city builds skating rink. In the spring, there is an outdoor art festival, which shows the work of Chicagoland artists and that of current students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (which is directly across the street). At other points of the year, it is host to a sundry of festivals and concerts.

After ten years of playing with Sim City, the Detroit urban planners came to the same result they had after just one year with the program: the only way to revitalise Detroit was to burn it down and start over.

It's New Media

2004-07-29T13:51:00.000-04:00

Math geekery and art meet at last!

The people at Complexification do with JAVA what I wanted to do with Mathematica for our new media assignment a couple of weeks ago. Oh, it's so cool.

Go to the site and click on the icon on the upper-left side of the screen. Position the mouse in the white screen and wait for titles to appear. Click to see what that particular applet does. Bubble Chamber is my favorite, in that I find it most asthetically pleasing (kind of like Kandinsky paintings) although I have to admit that Offspring is pure genius. Genius, I tell you. Here's how they describe it:

Offspring is a visualization of the pair bonding process of a theoretical robot colony.

Each robot is assembled, ages through youth, comes into a reproductive stage, and eventually dies of fatigue. If a robot is lucky enough to find a mate during it's reproductive stage, baby robots may be assembled.

Visually, the Offspring image is a historic graph of robot colony size and distribution. Males of the population are represented by single horizontal lines while Females are shown as double lines. The vertical position of the line indicates the robot's time of assembly, and the horizontal position of the line shows it's location in an abstract physical space. Faint diagonal lines connect parent and child. In this manner, older generations of robots are shown on the bottom of the image while their descendents are supported above them.

Robots can only mate with robots near them in both space in age. To encourage dissimilar permutations, robots are not allowed to mate with siblings.

Not all robot colonies survive. Harsh extraplanetary conditions and a reproductive period overcrowded with work and government keep the robots from flourishing...

Genius.

If you click on "launch applet," there another link to "view sourcecode." Yeah. Great, amazing stuff.

Yet more from the NYT on Blogging

2004-07-29T13:40:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/technology/circuits/29hoax.html

I'm sorry. I'm tired and do not have the will to write anything about this.

The expanded idea of the press

2004-07-27T07:11:00.000-04:00

"If the 1952 Republican convention was the first television convention, and the 1924 conventions were the first radio ones, the 2004 election will be remembered because of them, the bloggers insist....'It will be interesting to get around the televised spectacle and see it as a meeting place for the different factions of the party.'"

Yesterday's NYT article, Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps, discusses blogging as a means of media coverage, specifically in this case, political coverage. It does not, however, paint bloggers in the best light, as it refers to them as "diarists" suggesting that their views are personal and therefore somehow petty (as if professionally published sources don't do that on occasion?). Don't take that the wrong way, though--the article isn't out to bash bloggers. That's just how I feel the tone could be interpreted by the NYT-reading public. There is, of course, this quote by a media studies professor halfway through the article: "I think that bloggers have put the issue of professionalism under attack." (I can't help but feel that quote was edited for publication.) Just because someone blogs, doesn't imply that he or she is not a professional journalist, or otherwise an expert on the topic about which he or she blogs. For all we know, Greta Van Sustren could be blogging under a screenname when she gets home from work.

And now back to the DNC. In Chicago, I worked with Barack Obama for a few years. He's delivering the keynote speech tonight. I think it's slated to be on around 9:45. Watch if you can.

Critical moment

2004-07-26T20:06:00.000-04:00

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again..." - William Faulkner

The above quote was taken from a 1956 interview published in Paris Review. Admittedly, it is taken slightly out of context here, as Faulkner continues and comments on man's mortality. (As brevity in writing is not necessarily something that comes easily to me, I decided to skip the philosophy of mortality part and just write precisely what was on my mind.) I read this interview first in high school while studying Light in August. I have a hazy recollection of thinking that the quote had some relation to photography, but I dismissed it ("interdisciplinary" is not a word that cropped up in my high school's curriculum). After that, I largely forgot about it. Until today, at least.

As I finally made my way to the top of Pitchfork's Top 100 Albums of the 1970s list, there was the quote, at number two, right alongside the Clash's 1979 London Calling, working it into the review by stating: "25 years later, the record still moves-- an astoundingly diverse, ambitious and inspired bit of politically-charged punk rock, as relevant and revolutionary today as it was in 1979." As I was reading what the reviewer said, I wasn't comprehending it, but rather thinking back to high school. Remembering that the quote reminded me, at the time, vaguely of photography, this time, it reminded me more concretely of photography. Of a photograph, actually. Of this one:

(Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare," 1932)

Revelations of today:
1) Memory, while it can put you on the right path, is deceiving. The image in my head, while it resembled the print, was largely different from it. I pictured an Ataget albumen print, with the jumper much father in the distance, when in fact it was a Cartier-Bresson gelatin silver print. When I saw it, I knew it was what I was looking for. That sent my mind immediately to the Supreme Court's "I'll know it when I see it" attitude toward obscenity. And then to Oliver Wendel Holmes, then to the stereoscope, then to the composition of the human eye, then to color-blindness, and then on and on.

2) I am a postmodern being, and no matter how much I try to escape that fact, I cannot. How do I know this? Because this post reads like a poor imitation of an abridged excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest--if I could easily footnote on Blogger, I would. Everything relates to everything; interdisciplinary is the norm. I can't think of anything else to write--in fact, I do not believe that there is another way that I think--other than to compare one thing to another thing, which inevitably leads me to another thing, and so on. See #1.

And now I have this question: Are the minds of those who live in the Age of Information a slower, less comprehensive form of a search engine, returning results that do not necessarily refer to the query, but which are nonetheless related through a complex web of synapse-linked neurons? Are our brains starting to process information like computers have been programmed to?

The Future of a Database Nation

2004-07-26T16:17:00.000-04:00

This ACLU video clip (the sound needs to be on) speculates on what could be the next step of the information age. While the June issue of Reason magazine says nothing of stopping the capture and exchange of personal information, it provides a counterpoint to the "big brother" attitude adopted by the ACLU. While I think that Reason is probably the best English-language print magazine around today discussing contemporary culture, I have to side with the ACLU on this one. For now, at least.

Modern Dystopia

2004-07-22T09:34:00.000-04:00

Below is an excerpt from a Salon.com interview with graphic novelist Alan Moore:

One of the reasons we singled out media in "V for Vendetta" was because it is one of the most useful tools of tyranny. We invite it into our own home every night; I'm sure that some of us think of it as a friend. That might be a horrifying notion but I'm sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they'll probably believe the television set in the end. It's an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves. I mean, I think that television is one of the most diabolical -- in the very best sense of the word -- inventions of the past century. It has probably done more to degrade the mind and intelligence of its audience, even if they happen to be drug addicts or alcoholics; I would think that watching television has done more to limit their horizons in the long run. And it has also distorted our culture.

TV and politics have always made inevitable bedfellows, but the results have been disastrous. Look at the situation we have now. Let's say that tomorrow someone who is a political genius were to emerge -- and I'm not expecting this to happen, but say that it did. Say that a politician emerged who seemed, for once, basically competent, who seemed to be able to do their job as well as the average cab driver, comic writer or journalist. If they were the most intelligent, visionary, humane political thinker in the history of mankind, but were also fat, had some sort of blemish or something that made them less than telegenic, we would not be able to elect them. All we're able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good. I suppose it's too early to go into my rant on Ronald Reagan? That would be tasteless.

I believe it's possible to argue either way as to whether television corrupts society and distorts culture. Before I do that, however, I'm interested in hearing what other people think. I'll put my argument in another post by Monday.

Organs and iMacs

2004-07-20T05:19:00.000-04:00

I don't know where this post is coming from, or even where it's going. It's not about photography, but technology's influence on music, I suppose. Maybe I just think you should all listen to Momus, I don't know. I'll explain, or at least I'll try. I apologize in advance for this post's randomness. I just have some scattered thoughts in my head I can't seem to organize. I'm not going to provide a lot of commentary, but am just going to throw out some things that I can't seem to get out of my head.

The past couple of weeks have been crammed with reading and discussing technology and society, how technological advances have changed the means of production, societal reaction to and consumption of technology, etc. At this point, minimalist composer Philip Glass (who obtained undergrad degrees in both mathematics and philosophy before going to Julliard, and who is totally awesome (there's also a South Park episode in which the boys do an interpretive dance to his music, while his cartoon-likeness plays the organ))has come up several times. My mind snapped to two other people upon hearing his name: John Cage and Momus.

I'm not going to go into too much detail about Cage, as it would be very long and not necessarily pertinent to whatever it is that I'm writing about (I still don't know). Cage composed a piece entitled Organ2/ASLSP, a piece to be played over the course of 639 years. The linked AP article has a brief overview of Organ2/ASLSP. A more comprehensive site can be found here, but be forewarned that it's in German.

Momus is a musician who composes with an Apple computer, with lyrics also often addressing technology (or debauchery, but I'll stick to the technology ones here). He introduces his 1997 album Ping Pong by stating:

It's 1997. Sony's PlayStation dominates the console world...[h]e releases Ping Pong, his 'new concept in electronic song systems'. Snap one of the characters (supplied) into the neat handheld console and enjoy many hours of gaming fun in role. Who will you be today?

On the album itself there are two songs which provide commentary on technology and popular culture, "Tamagotchi Press Officer" and "Age of Information." The former is a humorous look at electronic pet sensation that existed at the time the album was released (lyrics here). The latter comments on communication and information exchange in the digital age, to which the refrain reads:

X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an E-mail and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming world war three

Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go

(Full lyrics can be found here. They're pretty interesting and innovative if you just imagine that they're set to music. If you have a chance to actually listen to it, it's worth it. At least I think so.)

Three more Momus things (although there's so much more), then I swear I'm done with this.

1) The introduction to the next album, Little Red Songbook, is the following:

In UNIX speak, the year 1970 is called The Epoch and considered the beginning of all time; so it is too in Analog Baroque. The electronic age starts there. That's when the task began of telling the computers about our human cultural heritage. The music, literature and architecture of the past was shovelled into the mainframes. It came out the other side all bleepy and warped, like western pop when it comes out the other side of Japan, or a sine wave after it's been passed through the VCO [voltage controlled oscillator] filter on an analog synth. Data in the service of decoration, old culture being fed into the computer, historical garb reproduced in hi-tech fabrics ..... it all seemed to add up to something: Analog Baroque. (link and bracketed text added for purposes of this post)

2) The next album, Stars Forever, contains songs about people who requested to have songs written about them (read the whole album creation/ concept story here). Quite a few of them discuss individuals' relationships with work, the corporate world, and computers. In the following case, the computer's relationship with its owner is explored:

I am Mai Noda's strawberry iMac
Switch on my screen
A strawberry coloured Apple computer
Also in green
I sit in the gloom of this little room
Emitting a luminous hum
Deep in my pink
Translucent sleep
Waiting for Mai to come home
(full lyrics here)

3) He maintained a website for a while entitled Electronics in the 18th Century which he described as a "webcast cabaret spectacle." Upon opening the page, one of the titles reads, "Songs Goethe will want to programme into his Palm Pilot!" The introductory paragraphs reads:

Thanks to techno-pollution by time-travelling salesmen from the last four decades of the 20th century, cultural historians are beginning to discover electronics in the 18th Century. Did you know, for example, that the French revolution really was televised (though only on PBS, so nobody was watching), Benjamin Franklin was a big Gary Numan fan, and the Marquis de Sade had a really sick website?

Go on and read the rest. It's intellectual technocratic pop-culture science fiction music parody at its finest.

Additional reading for anyone interested:
Zannos, Ioannis. 1992. "The Momus Music Generation System." Computing and Musicology, 8:111-113.

Just a Blogger Update

2004-07-19T16:06:00.000-04:00

Blogger now supports rich-text editing, meaning, in short, you don't have to create HTML tags to create links, format, underline, etc., unless of course you want to. Wysiwyg away, kids.

Numerical representation

2004-07-14T08:22:00.000-04:00

My original idea for the assignment based on Manovich's definition of new media involved the creation of algorithms, and therefore numerical representation. There's a program called Mathematica in which one can write strings of code to produce algorithms which can be applied to a graphics system to produce mathematically based images. They can also be applied to existing digital images. I learned about Mathematica not too long ago from a friend who was a fashion designer, but now currently getting a PhD in systems science engineering. While she's learning about it for science purposes, her interest is in its applicability to visual arts. I got a quick rundown of how to write code for it (not too difficult at all for this language (if you can call it that), if you just want to do basic things, if you know the basics of a few others), and how to apply it late last year while she was home for winter break. When we got this assignment, I was enthused to try it again with a practical end in mind. I, however, could find no one who actually had the program, nor was willing to shell out the $140 to get it.

And that's how I ended up with my sectional variability image. Much less exciting.

When does information become too much information?

2004-07-14T08:19:00.000-04:00

This is an issue that has been on my mind for a long while.

For years, I read everything I could about a show before I went to see it: artist's statements, reviews, interviews, etc. Shortly before I graduated from college, however, I came to a small epiphany--the information extraneous to what was actually "on the wall" distracted me from the work itself, but it took me a while to figure out that it was indeed distracting. While looking at a piece or body of work, I was constantly searching for the elements and ideas extrinsic information claimed the work contained, as finding them would somehow legitimize the art. I either found myself frustrated with myself because I couldn't find what the artist/ author wanted me to; disappointed with the work because while I found everything that I was "supposed" to find, the work still didn't accomplish the goals the creator had outlined; or dismissive because the everything was too easy to find, and therefore too simplistic. This approach clearly had its problems. At some point, while I kept reading about work before I saw it, I made a conscious effort to stop searching for themes and details written works pointed out, but the desire to find them was so ingrained in me that I did not know how to comprehend the work otherwise. Shortly thereafter, I stopped reading beforehand, which actually broadened my appreciation for and my acceptance of art.

In doing this, I stopped basing my judgment on the author's intention. For purposes of school, and the guidance needed to structure and produce work in accordance with one's vision, I understand the importance of author's statements and project proposals, but once something makes it to a gallery or somewhere similar, I honestly believe that they can be dangerous things. They can limit what the spectator sees to what the author directs him or her to see. It is the goal of the artist to shape and design a work to steer viewers to see what he sees, but stating how an observer is supposed to look and what he is supposed to see, unless it is intrinsic to the work itself, the breadth of the work can be severely limited. The work should be judged on the work itself, not the creator's intention, idea, goal, production cost, or working method, even if considered in conjunction with the final product--let the work stand alone. Go back and read extrinsic information later if needed, but form your own ideas about and own opinions of the work first.

Ideally, I would like to see work for the first time without the name of a creator attached to it. Just a name alone can conjure up gender, racial, economic, political, or cultural connotations that can affect how one sees his or her work. Take the Michal Rovner In Stone show, for example. Several people remarked that they thought the artist was male at first. My question is, why should that matter? Does the gender of the artist, in this particular instance, affect the meaning or acceptance of the work? Referring back to the example, a visit to the gallery will reveal the following information: "Michal Rovner (b. 1957, Israel)." Knowing that Rovner is an Israeli woman, my mind immediately wants to fit her work into the category political art, feminist art, or both before I even see anything that she has done. By subtracting the name indicator, the work can be opened to a wider spectrum of analysis and criticism as there are fewer connotations that can often drive criticism into a particular and specific niche.

A bit more deconstructionist than Barthes' "death of the author" proclamation, no?

Camera phone exhibition

2004-07-12T07:07:00.000-04:00

The Downtown Standard Hotel in Los Angeles is currently hosting an exhbition in its lobby of photographs originating from camera phones. As the press release states, the goal of the exhibition, sponspred by Motorola, is to explore the "impact of wireless consumer technology on art." While reading about the show, I began to think about this show would weigh upon the public conception of photography. Talking to people in the class recently, someone said that many people think that anyone can take a picture and make a photograph. Now that there is a show of camera phone photography, have the means of art production finally been given to the masses? Does this new, widely availible technology offer more people the opportunity to produce something that could be art? Does it further support a long-standing mentality claiming photography cannot be art because anyone can do it? Does it do both things?

This is something that I want to explore further. These are just some preliminary thoughts for now.

Digitally Mediated Urban Space: New Lessons for Design

2004-07-07T19:54:00.000-04:00

Here is a link to an article written by Anthony Townsend for Praxis. The .pdf dowload takes a while, but the material inside is interesting, and is pertinent to our discussion yesterday regarding architecture, computer technology, and design. While not updated regularly, Townsend's whole blog is actually rather worthwhile to read, if only for purposes of this class.

Know you rights

2004-07-06T07:19:00.000-04:00

The Photographer's Right- Your Rights When Stopped or Confronted for Photography

Something bad happened to me on Friday while attempting to photograph buildings in Brooklyn. Now that it is in the past, and that I am less emotional about it, I just want to post the link above. Read the pdf file therein.

Literally everyone I know is either an artist or a lawyer. The above link comes from a trusted legal source. As far as anyone could find, the only things that are illegal to photograph are, as they always had been, military bases and nuclear power plants. Just so you know.

Francois Hallard

2004-07-05T12:28:00.000-04:00

This past Friday, I went to see Hallard's Casa Malaparte show at Remy Toledo (529 W 20, 8th Fl.; show is up until July 30). When reading about the photographs, I have to admit that I was not particularly excited to see them. However, upon arrival, I changed my opinion. Before seeing them, I couldn't fathom why they would be at all interesting--they were only photographs of a house that had a back-story. I am not a huge fan of back-story when it comes to its role in art, as I believe that it should add a dimension to work, but that work should not be dependent on it. Whenever I see something written by a gallery, or artist, that tries to explain the work, what led to its creation, how a viewer should look at the work, etc., I become suspicious. Actually seeing the Hallard's prints immediately quelled my fears--whose house he photographed was largely irrelevant compared to the stark composition of each piece; lines were rarely parallel, and while the house itself never employed any vibrant hues, there was color to be found through the windows. There was something about them which I can only describe as pleasantly unsettling, something which I hope to bring in to my own work.

1000 Year Camera

2004-06-30T20:01:00.000-04:00

Sam Raimi wants to build a camera that will take an aerial photo (I assume aerial) of major America metropolitan areas every day at noon for the next one thousand years so that people will be able to watch the progression of urbanity when all the frames are projected together. Time lapse photography on an extended basis, really. Full story here.

There are two things that immediately spring to mind, although neither are related. First, Warhol's 1968 Empire, a six and a half hour film consisting of nothing but a shot of the Empire State building. Second, the Twenty-Four Hour Film Festival during which contestants get a theme at midnight, and have to submit the following midnight a finished film.

Cataloging

2004-06-30T07:09:00.000-04:00

I checked out a digital camera yesterday with the intention of taking it to Red Hook, shooting some post-industrial landscapes, and figuring out how exactly it was that digital cameras worked. Work duties quickly got in the way of that. Before I headed to the office, however, I took some pictures of my own neighborhood, prompted by this article published yesterday in the Arts section of the Times. I had photographed DUMBO last autumn, as well as earlier this year. I went back yesterday thinking I could get some better shots of things I had already taken. Many of those things, be they buildings or bathtubs, were no longer there. The bathtub (yes, a bathtub, see below), which had been there for years, had been removed, and a large number of buildings, many federal style (built between 1780 and 1830), had either been replaced with shells of more modern buildings, or with pits ready to support them.

After I discovered the absence of three large things that were previously there, sometimes for centuries, I thought about the August Sander show at the Met--not necessarily of his photographs per se, but more about the idea of cataloging. While the photos I had taken last year and this past winter were certainly no great works of art, I'm glad that I did it. Objects and buildings are not permanent, and for me at least, a record of things that used to be is precious.

I sent this image to my sister in January, and she asked, almost instinctively, "What's going to become of it?" I responded, "Of the bathtub? Who knows? Someone planted tulip bulbs in it last spring, so maybe someone will again."

Images from yesterday are coming.

Digital photography and criminal law

2004-06-29T11:18:00.000-04:00

Posted below is a link to an interesting article about the implications of digital photography's role in the criminal court system. It also discusses the validity of digital images. Best quote from the piece, made by Philadelphia public defender: "I thought digital was better, but apparently it's not. We're definitely going to take a look at it."

Digital Photography Poses Thorny Issues for Justice System

Socially responsible art?

2004-06-29T06:55:00.000-04:00

"One of our perennial fears about technology is that as technology gets better at telling stories (through meas like virtual reality and special effects), people...will be increasingly unable to distinguish reality from illusion. But to my mind, the danger isn't technology; it's the stories of our times that post the greatest threat to our...future. Stories are tools for knowing and judging. Change the stories, and you change how people live." -Brenda Laurel, Utopian Entrepreneur. (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2001)

In the above quote, Laurel advocates responsible "storytelling" for the benefit of society. Photography has, however, since its invention been a means of manipulation. It is not a new phenomena that suddenly occured with the the invent or advance of digital technology. Take for example Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, which depicted the carnage left after battle. Below is an image from that book:

("Harvest of Death," Photographer: Timothy O'Sullivan, Printer: Alexander Gardner, 1863.)

As this book started as a commercial venture, the photographs were made to sell. Bodies were arranged after battle in this photograph, to render a more interesting composition. Other photographs depicting live soldiers were often staged. The one hundred photographs in the book were supposed to create a narrative of war. The manipulation in the creation of these images, however, distorted reality, thus contributing to the creation of a false story. If stories are tools for "knowing and judging" as Laurel claims, what do we really know about the actuality of this war? How is this example pertitent today? And lastly, are we, as artists, responsible for telling accurate or socially responsible "stories" with the images we make?

A brief note about my blog title

2004-06-28T14:29:00.000-04:00

After attending the Salon of 1859 (an annual juried art exhibition sponsored by the French government) in Paris, Baudelaire composed a reaction to the photography exhibited there entitled The Modern Public and Photography. In it, he stated that photography was merely technology, and that technology could never be a means through which art could be produced. Baudelaire believed that photography was a practical invention in that it "freed the hand" of the artist. Painters would no longer be confined to producing landscapes and life as it was because there was now a machine that made a duplicate of reality. No creativity, in his view, was involved in the mechanical process that was photography, and could therefore not be art.

Baudelaire was not alone in his attitude. There were many other critics in Europe and the United States who held the belief that photography merely copied nature. They believed that accepting photography as an art form would corrupt society, and hoped that it would never catch on.

I cite to this essay because of its applicability today in terms of attitudes toward new digital media. Upon explaining this MFA program to several people with whom I work, the remarks were all similar to the following: "But why would you want to do anything digitally? Film looks better." I can't help but think that the digital reproduction of today is something that will be looked back upon in the next century as something primitive, and the argument as to its status as art ridiculous.

Day

2004-06-23T15:27:00.000-04:00

post