Category Archives: Uncategorized

Is “world music” still possible?

David Murrieta at A Closer Listen:

Is ‘world music’ still possible? After all, the premise of it runs closely to that of colonial pasts, to the image of the 19th century anthropologist that turns cultures into curiosities, into preconceived slideshows of noble savages merged into natural landscapes, a straightforward appropriation of that which is being possessed. Mixing Western instruments with African chants can still reek of the new-age, in which integration is implacably forced, mis-translating myths into styles and lives into unique products.

via thenewobjective

Literary texts reinterpreted as architecture

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J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace:

“Ultimately, I wanted this model to be interpretable from two perspectives: one, the perspective of the walker going through the path who cannot know what to expect next, and two, the perspective from above that is able to see the model in its entirety: to see the knife cuts, the single-minded yet zig-zagging path, and the reflection in the water at the end of it.” —Joanna Yao, J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

From the Paris Review write-up on Matteo Pericoli’s workshop on Literary Architecture at Columbia. See also Pericoli’s own description of the workshop, “Writers as Architects.”

Data and the problem of the archive

Amanda S. Gould:

Big Data is encountering the problem of the archive: the archive is only as comprehensive as the comprehensiveness of its record. What is absent is as notable as what remains but it is sometimes impossibly difficult to know what is absent. The unknowns remain unknown. Even the most diligently unbiased archives are limited by the availability of material(s) and the fluency of its searchability. Likewise when it comes to big data, we know only what we record and we record only what we can knowingly capture. Further depths of problematics come when we try to read what we’ve recorded, and when we try to understand what we’ve read.

Bikini Kill’s archive and riot grrrl after Spotify

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Laura June on The Verge:

The movement was physical: an essentially pre-internet band, Bikini Kill’s shows were small and visceral, their mailers were hand-lettered and often came with unasked for goodies — little handwritten notes from the KRS staffers (there were only a few of them) and stickers — reminders that you were ordering from human beings.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the release of their first record, the band has re-issued the Bikini Kill EP, on its own, brand new label, the first of a series of reissues of its back catalogue. The records — available digitally and on vinyl — are just one piece of evidence that riot grrrl has left a lasting and still relevant mark on American culture. NYU’s Bobst Library recently acquired, from Kathleen Hanna and others, documents, photographs, notebooks, and zines for its Fales Riot Grrrl Collection.

Bikini Kill is, according to Kathi, doing things in much the same way as they did back in the ‘90s: Tobi Vail (also the drummer of the band) is handling mail order of the records and t-shirts, and each package includes a note. But the world that those packages are sent into is very different than it was in 1992. Most people don’t actually buy records or CDs, or even MP3s: a growing number of people simply stream music through services like Rdio or Spotify.

Also highly recommend the photo collection on the Bikini Kill Archive’s blog.

Surveillance paintings sourced from found photographs

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Prosthetic Knowledge on Rhizome:

Enda O’Donoghue’s work presents a forensic interest in the medium and process of painting and an ongoing dialogue with the mediation of images through digital technology. Hovering between the realms of abstraction and representation, between the mathematical encoded and the organic, O’Donoghue’s paintings are the result of a process which is highly analytical and methodical and yet inviting of errors, misalignments and glitches. The imagery comes almost exclusively from found photographs sourced from the Internet, where O’Donoghue plays with random throw-away moments of everyday life, merging them together in various interconnected themes. In O’Donoghue’s work, the painterliness of his technique works with the disposable nature of his subjects to make the work sometimes poignant and melancholic, or alternatively brittle and harsh. His work is deeply influenced by our digital high speed reality and he transports these seemingly meaningless sound-bite images from a place of apparent futility to one that questions and searches for meaning through the transformative act of painting.

Daniel Schwarz’s art from glitched images on Google Maps

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i like this art:

Fach & Asendorf Gallery is running a new exhibition called Juxtapose by Daniel Schwarz consisting in a series of images taken directly from Google Maps that expose distant places, far from society, shown simultaneously under the force of contrary seasons and weather phenomena at varying times. The images arise from glitches which are created automatically when Google Maps’ algorithm stitches images of updated photos with prior recorded ones together in a grid- like view. The glitched images force viewers to interrogate how technology changes our understanding of time, space and place.

James McGirk on literary writing and the “Internet Age”

James McGirk in 3QD:

If the mechanical dreams of the Diesel Age were exuberant and colossal, those of the Internet Age are effervescent and charming. I remember the feeling of logging into the Internet for the first time, of making a million weird discoveries as I traversed space and time from behind a monochrome display. It felt glowy and golden. The way swiping an iPhone does the first time you try. The chirping, friendly infrastructure of the Internet has been scorched into our brains. Our literature has been extruded through its cheerful strictures. As mundane as our glowing Apples may seem to us now, they have changed the way we think and the way we write.

Literature will slide back on the continuum. The next wave of novels will slough the Internet. They will be dark, bitter and angry: like biting down on a hunk of coal. But a trace of the Internet’s tinsel will remain.