Beijing-based photographer Jasper James has a wonderful series of portraits of people reflected against cityscapes. The images are all composed in camera—no compositing or Photoshopping beyond simple contrast adjustments. The result—giant humans superimposed on tiny buildings—inverts the usual urban experience, where the buildings dwarf each individual.
The author of How Proust Can Change Your Life discovers that religion can too.
Religions, he thinks, have the buttons and know how to use them. His book considers the Catholic mass, early Christianitiy’s ritual of agape or love feasts, and Jewish Passover rituals to explore how religions encouraged us to overcome fear of strangers and create communities. He then tentatively imagines a so-called “agape restaurant” where, instead of dining with like-minded friends, you would be invited to eat with strangers. It would be the antithesis of Facebook.
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has an exhibition running through the end of this month at the Taipei Fine Art Museum—his first large-scale solo show, apparently, in the Chinese world. The show features a wide range of works in the border zone between sculpture and found object assembly. The knockout piece is undoubtedly this one, a layered vertical labyrinth of 1200 bicycles (sans seats and handlebars). The exhibition, incidentally, is titled Absent because Ai remains under a travel ban in China and won’t be able to attend.
I’m pondering why this example of book-carving seems more attractive than the standard version. I think it’s because the books wind up resembling not just a landscape, but also an architect’s model of a landscape, with its stairstep topographical-map layers.
One of the key figures in the creation of the Internet suggests we should be careful about enshrining any technology as a human right. That it is tempting to do so says a lot about many technologies' ability to enable incredible (and deeply humanizing) things, but also about their tendency to seem more irresistible and permanent than they really are.
[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.
From a list of folk singer Woody Guthrie's 1942 New Year's resolutions: a collection of low and high goals. The second page gets more metaphorical and far-seeing ("19. KEEP HOPING MACHINE RUNNING"; "31. LOVE EVERYBODY"). The item before "PLAY AND SING GOOD" strikes a pang: "SEND MARY AND KIDS MONEY", a reminder of the family he'd left behind for the rambling' lifestyle. Culture-making, however great, always comes at a cost. This July will mark the 100th anniversary of Woody's birth.
Is a composer like an architect, directing every detail of the music, from its structure to its finish? That, says Brian Eno, is the traditional view (never mind my architect friends’ complaints about the impossibility of getting builders to fully follow the blueprints). As you might guess, Eno prefers another approach, less about wresting control than laying a groundwork and then seeing what grows.
And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn’t necessarily exactly what you’d envisaged for them. It’s characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I’m really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I’m deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included. So there’s something in the notes to this thing that says something about the difference between order and disorder.
Ephemera from the radium craze of the mid 1920s. A friend of mine wrote his doctoral dissertation on this stuff. In the first years after radium was discovered, the initial reaction on the part of both laypeople and scientists was basically, Wow this is amazing and powerful. It must be the stuff of life! Sure, a plant will die if you put it next to some of it, but that’s just because it can’t handle all the LIFE radiating out from it. There’s a sobering lesson in this, but I can’t quite decide if it’s that wishful thinking (or perhaps duplicitousness) will conspire to foist all manner of perils upon the unsuspecting, or simply that even those of us who know better, don’t always.
Some languages are making a comeback thanks to a strong desire on the part of speakers to send one another text messages in them. For endangered scripts, the revival will be longer in coming, till smartphones work their way cheaply into the right eager hands.
“For a long time, technology was the enemy,” says Inée Slaughter, executive director of the New Mexico-based Indigenous Language Institute, which teaches Native Americans and other indigenous peoples how to use digital technologies to keep their languages vital. Heritage languages were being killed off by increasing urbanization, the spread of formal education and the shift to cash crops, which ended the isolation of indigenous communities. Advances in technology seemed to intensify the decline. “Even in 1999 or 2000, people were saying technology killed their language,” Slaughter says. “Community elders worried about it. As television came into homes, English became pervasive 24/7. Mainstream culture infiltrated, and young kids want to be like that. It was a huge, huge problem, and it’s still there. But now we know ways technology can be helpful.”
The work of German art-technology collective robotlab (Matthias Gommel, Martina Haitz, Jan Zap) revolves around programming industrial robots to do rather human things, like draw people’s portraits, play music with their servos, or pick up a calligrapher’s pen and, over the course of seven months, write out all 66 books of the Bible. According to the artists’ statement (as best I can figure out the German), Bios [bible] is concerned with questions of faith and technical progress, with particular attention to the role of writing in the development and transmission of both realms. Bios, of course, has allusions to scripture as the word of life, but also encompasses the more mundane computer-scientific acronym, basic input-output system—the code that underlies the liturgies of every robot monk.
