From The Machine Starts:
It doesn’t really matter whether or not you like to think of yourself as a brand, or information about your life as a commodity. That’s what you are within a network like Facebook. Something happens to your personality and your social life as soon as it enters the doors of Facebook which transforms those things into units on an endless product line.
Fiction is a branch of neurology; the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.
From Alex Estes
Usually the attention economy is conceived in terms of a surfeit of information creating a scarcity of time to take it all in. Attention scarcity is a matter of TMI, which has an obvious connection to some of the more salient practices of microcelebrity: confessional writing, oversharing, “radical vulnerability,” exhibitionism, the New Sincerity, and so on. Viewed with maximal cynicism, these are all modes of turning the nuances of intimacy and personal identity formation into a fungible product, an explicitly economic resource. They also all reflect the possibility of a life lived merely to confess it, to share it on social media. Social media functions as a giant scoreboard to confer significance to events that are more or less meaningless in the moment. Getting likes on a photo of the meal you made yourself is more important and more significant than eating it.
Interesting points here, though I suppose one question to ask is how much of this is really “new”: after Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol, is Tao Lin really that surprising?
From 50 Watts:
Many Swedish movie posters from this era must have played off of the original American ones, though I have the sense that the works featured here are original deco confections.
via @geetadayal
Rob Halpern on Robert Gluck’s Jack the Modernist:
… scandal is aroused when one’s writing attempts to go where meaning has been banished. I’m thinking here of that line from Jack the Modernist where Bob writes, as if creating a categorical imperative : “Go where no meaning is to create meaning.” Scandal arouses and pressures the accessibility of its own content, while posing a problem of propriety and property, of social codes and sanctioned subjects: in short scandal provokes the whole problem of proper selfhood and the false division between the personal and the impersonal: in other words, scandal formalizes a problem of politics.
On X Poetics.
From My Modern Met:
Every city has its landmarks and signature aesthetic that sticks in a traveler’s mind, allowing one to fondly recall a location based on these visual characteristics. New York has the Empire State building, Statue of Liberty, and crowding skyscrapers while Paris has the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre amidst its distinctive architecture. Based on memory, Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino documents the great cities he has had the good fortune of visiting and capturing on film by compiling massive composite photographs in his series titled Diorama Map.
Nishino manages to encapsulate the visual essence of major cities across the globe through clever editing and meticulous assembly. The photographer walks all across each city he visits, spending anywhere from one to six months at his destination, capturing thousands of shots per location. He proceeds to construct photomontages that reflect how he remembers the mapping of each place, based on the most notable sights of the area.
The ongoing project isn’t intended to be an accurate depiction and goes beyond basic collaging. The photographer layers his photographs atop and beside one another and then proceeds to take a photograph of the completed image to provide a photographic product for viewers to examine and reflect upon. So far, there are thirteen “maps” but Nishino plans on continuing his traveling photography series, hoping to include Barcelona and Venice in the near future.