image: Laurel Ptak
From Manystuff:
David Horvitz’s Sad, Depressed, People looks at a set of images circulating within stock photography collections. These photographs, in which actors are photographed holding their heads in their hands, ostensibly depressed, are here shown to contain a bizarre tension between their status as stock images and their supposedly emotional content. It also includes an introduction and glossary of terms by Laurel Ptak.
via Jesuisperdu
From Cyborgology:
We are accustomed to books being heavy with time. On some level, it’s unnerving when they aren’t – or at least not in the way that we’re used to. This is not to say that all people find ebooks unnerving but simply to account for some of why some people expressly prefer dead tree books on a visceral level. When we hold an ereader, we are aware – if only subconsciously – that time is not there in the same way that it is with a dead tree book. It doesn’t connect to all the temporally-laden ideas of Bookness that we carry around in our collective cultural memory.
…
Literature is in a state of ruin. It is even explicitly identified with ruin. It’s rich, vibrant, unquestionably alive to the people who love it, but it also crumbling and fragmentary. We can see the mark of time on it, just as we can with physical ruins. If the Book is temporally-laden, literature as a whole is even more so.
Digital information storage is also fragile. But again, that fragility is different and experienced differently; time in digital space is marked by the absence of change, not by its spectre. When the experience of books – and of literature – is mediated by digital technology, our experience of it alters, and in ways that are both subtle and, for some, profoundly discomfiting.
From Creators Project:
The play was broken down into six parts and told using six different installations which took up residence in a disused shop in Hackney, east London—the installations were augmented further by using online videos accessed through RETZ’s website. Turning up in the evening to watch the performance—the shop became a cafe in the daytime—you could become part of the play, enjoying a game of foosball or get served a drink at the bar from the characters. The online videos could then flesh out the story and entice people along to the next performance. The project culminated in the last three days where the play spilt out onto the streets of Hackney. Episodes of the performance are now online, starting with The Wrack above.
Perhaps we’re all getting used to the (potentially) surveiled life, or maybe it’s nothing new. But both of these instances follow Google Street View, security cameras, and drones into the category of system-as-photographer.
This isn’t just prevalent, it’s influential. Increasingly, picture-taking people behave like systems: Capture tons of images, upload them all, expect that plenty will be seen no more, and quite possibly less, than once. The cloud is a contact sheet.
In Derek Jarman’s 1978 film Jubilee, 1970s Britain is in a post-apocalyptic state when Queen Elizabeth I is transported to see the future of England. Groups of punks roam the city of London, and early on in the film, we get to watch what appears to be a lecture in a feminist autonomous classroom. Amyl Nitrate offers the female students a lesson on making one’s desires become reality. She points out that if one does this, art is no longer necessary, but of course, what the film actually reveals is that art is the very thing that drives political and social transformation.
From The Irish Times, “A history of Ireland in 100 objects”:
This seraphically beautiful Buddha, now in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, is imperial loot. In the Mandalay style, which dates it to 1857-86, the statue is of marble, with the drapery painted gold. It represents the dying but beatific Buddha, preparing for his death and ascent into Nirvana. Col Sir Charles Fitzgerald, an Irishman in the British army in India, stole it while on a punitive military expedition to Burma in 1885-6. In 1891, Fitzgerald sent it, along with other looted Burmese statues, to the museum.
Audrey Whitty, its curator of ceramics, glass and Asian collections, identified the statue as the one that is mentioned twice in perhaps the most important Irish work of literature of the 20th century, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (set in 1904 and published in 1922). The novel’s hero, Leopold Bloom, thinks of “Buddha their God lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy with hand under his cheek.” Later, Bloom’s wife Molly recalls him breathing “with his hand on his nose like that Indian god he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare Street all yellow in a pinafore, lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes sticking out”.
via @juliapanko
From Hyperallergic:
“Transatlantic Passenger,” that depiction of a surreally shortened horse and a jaunty, giant-nosed man shows Magritte working out one of his strictly controlled compositions, keeping each element of the picture separate. A single ball rests on a small brick wall, which rests at the border of a cliff looking out over a blank horizon. It might be a work in progress or just a plan for a larger piece, but the drawing itself is remarkably crisp and consistent, logical even in its strangeness.
From The Creators Project:
The latest project created by UK-based digital artist, designer, author, and maker, Brendan Dawes entails an idea rooted in both concepts. His project, entitled The Happiness Machine is an Internet-connected printer that is sensitive to the buzzword “happy.” When a large black button on the device is pressed, it prints out randomized blips of information and thoughts from people across the internet who mention the word, “happy.”
Though The Happiness Machine uses content from We Feel Fine, the printer objectively prints the data it picks up. The weeding out of information is done on a server through which Dawes can control the type of data that could come back.
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
via @brainpicker
I love that Edgar Allan Poe is credited with legitimizing the word “pants.” I recommend the other entries in this series as well, especially Mysteries of Vernacular: Assassin.
via @faketv