with me, Rhizome’s Senior Editor Joanne McNeil and New York Times tech reporter Jenna Wortham. Tonight. 8 pm. On Google+—the universally-available Facebook 2.343624. There will be rose and kale salad and talk of the Internet. Beyond that, I can’t make promises.
I interviewed publisher and cultural polyglot James Bridle for Rhizome. He did not want to talk about images. I, however, do. Next time around, perhaps!
SH: The role of the image in electronic book publishing is a complicated one, as each e-reader presents a particular set of challenges in terms of color, resolution, and scale. Given the primary role of the image in many artist-produced publications, how are you responding to these challenges within your own project?
JB: I don’t have much to say on this, sorry.
Art people, let’s take this party over to MLKSHK, shall we? Not in an “abandon Tumblr” kind of way, but, well … more soon on the subject. Until then, have a go at this San Francisco-based photo and video sharing service, whose community is still developing and very hopeful. Launched with precisely $0 in VC capital—in remarkable contrast to Color’s $41K in kindling green—MLKSHK is distinctly scrappy, with near-constant updates and rollouts announced via Twitter and the company blog. (See previous re: hope.)
The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor ‘Paradise Lost’ was dashed off by a party animal.
—
Susan Cain’s op ed “Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?” is one of the more careful considerations of introversion I’ve seen published in the the mainstream media. While the differences in social perception of shyness in men and women is merely implied within the piece (and effectively so, I think) Cain heralds “sitter” behavior as a common trait among many thinkers, writers and innovators. Even more salient, however, is her argument against the tendency—in American culture, most markedly—to misconstrue a predilection for introspection with that of depression or mental illness.
Or, in other words, why should I (or you, or anyone) even consider the possibility of popping a Xanex before a party because you (yes, you—the social masses) can’t effectively STFU long enough to read a book, watch a film, or gaze at a painting for longer than thirty seconds?
Foucault would be proud.
Via anticipatedstranger, Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster” (1957):
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am…
Into the White: MGG kindly sent along some live Pixies tracks from a 1989 show in Nottingham, thereby effectively pulling me out of the black. Thanks, lady.
More and more this constantly worked subject starts not only consuming constantly around him but starts consuming his or herself.
Just added Slovenian theorist Renata Salecl’s Choice to my summer reading list. I’m interested not as much in her identification of capitalism as the purveyor of anxiety on the individual level—that much is obvious, here in New York—but more in her consideration of how socio-political paralysis sets in on a much greater ideological scale when the fatted calf is as so. See also: Good Old Neon.
Just Launched: Lost Library is a new social media project by painter, thinker and Newsgrist mill Joy Garnett. She writes, in today’s Newsgrist newsletter (which I’ve subscribed to since its inception and still adore as a stalwart of the very best days of Internet culture-gone-by, as they do.):
I am sharing the library that I’ve been accumulating for 15 years by giving some of it away. Every day I will pick a good window well in Soho, deposit some books, and immediately tweet the location with a photograph and the hashtag #LostLibrary.
These are books for people to browse and to take away if they like. Documentation is archived on flickr and tweeted photos are posted to tumblr. Begun on June 19th 2011, Lost Library is an ongoing social media performance.
I want the Smithsonian Books volume of Space Time Infinity, which could ostensibly still be languishing on Grand between Broadway and Crosby. But probably not!
PS: Also new by Joy: Virilio Now, which I want to have an exclamation point at the end but sadly does not, being the title of a book and all!
Was this meteor ordered on E-bay? There was no one to ask; all bodies were in cars or behind the fenced pool, until one small blonde child rode by on her bicycle.
Mary Walling Blackburn’s slideshow, Des Plaines Distuburbance, (a narrative about just that) is now live on Paper Monument’s website—which is all the better for it.
Personally, I’m into the 1960s.
Only a matter of time before someone developed this web app. I’m having a blast playing around with the year 1995.
May I kindly rally the troops (a.k.a. you) to back Triple Canopy/Light Industry/The Public School’s 155 Freeman project on Kickstarter? This fall, the triumvirate moves to a new space at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint. Help support their first year of programming by backing the project at any level for incentives by Cory Arcangel, Paul Chan, Rivka Galchen, and R. H. Quaytman. (NB: a $150 donation garners free admission to all events for an entire year. Light Industry screenings alone are $7 a weekly pop. Math time! Deal.)
Do it for the love film, publishing and pedagogy! Do it to score art for well below market value! Do it because you love Greenpoint and want to see it grow the right way! Back the project. And pardon my enthusiasm, but if Spencer Tunick can rake in $96K via Kickstarter ($60K from a single backer!) to roll out his show in the Dead Sea, I feel confident that the rest of us can scrape together some loose change for three of New York City’s most promising nonprofits. Yeah, I just went there.
Fragmentr is a collaborative image remixing site designed by Ryan Weafer. Users can upload up to five images, which are fragmented into 30 “shards” and shuffled at random; the site also auto-archives images at regular intervals. It’s a beta site, and I’ll be curious to see how it develops, which is to say,that I don’t think it’s entirely there yet, but I see a lot of potential.
Museum websites (because I work on one whatever sorry) are tasked with articulating works of art—their physical and intellectual properties—to an audience that may never set foot in the galleries. No small task! Image quality (and moreover, the user’s experience of said image) is of paramount importance in the development of these kinds of sites. Preciousness ensues, necessarily. We’re a museum. I love a big, gorgeous, authoritative slideshow. What I love even more though, are projects that expose the precarious state of the digital image.
Just in time for The Rapture, we released a series of videos on whitney.org in celebration of the museum’s new building in downtown Manhattan which oh, hai! we’re breaking ground on this coming Tuesday. Wyeth Hansen and Ryan Dunn of the creative firm Labour designed and directed these five shorts—Reflections, above, is my personal pick (here, I can play favesies!)—and Ben Sterling of the Cookies/Mobius Band(s) scored them.
A Small Linkdump of Recent Smart Things Written About the Internet/IRL Dichotomy:
+ Thankfully, someone at the Times had the good sense to publish an effective rejoinder to Bill Keller’s hysteria piece, The Twitter Trap. Jenna Wortham’s Does Facebook Help or Hinder Offline Friendships? takes a nice, smart, even tone—and a realistic portrayal of the way most of us actually roll.
+ Oh, to be a real academe. Here’s a Twitter link to Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick’s paper-in-progress, Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies. I would like to write the “adult” version of this paper.
+ From Yale’s Law & Technology blog via the site of one Max Cho (a post that deserves a link if only for its title alone): Unsell Yourself — A Protest Model Against Facebook. I feel like this piece fails to account for the prevalence of irony in Internet humor (and how certain social logics emerge to form new stratas of power—we see this in the art world all the time). But hey, sure—go ahead and “like” Lady Gaga and call it protest. It’s just Facebook, after all.
GIF by Dump.fm user Timb.
