That's a quote from The New York Times of October 29th 1986.
And this image is the project I submitted for the The Occupy Wall Street week at the Art and Architecture Storefront gallery - that was presented in the exhibition that opened up friday.
Also turns out back in 1986 New York Pigeons were already fighting for a new world order of their own (a story noted by the New York Times, here).
Pursuing its mission to archive everything for everything to be accessible to everyone, in Google Books Google scanned library collections for printed knowledge to be preserved and made more available to more people and over more time. The resulting scans, the google books, generally look like books but simultaneously aren't simple visual reproductions of books either. And while the possible affects of this venture on knowledge are unsure, what is certain is that these digital formats are new vessels of knowledge; new mediums that necessarily carry new messages.
Sometimes these virtual books' new messages are very clear and this particular Musée Religieux google book is one such extraordinary example. As the scan above shows, the Google employee's hands covered with pink mini-finger condoms caught scanning chapter 52 reminds us of the mediation that occurs between the book and the google book (or even the physical labor that any medium necessitates to carry its idea). This meta-narration was created during the scanning/mediating gesture and is only present in the new platform. The original book from 1836 never intended to suggest such a notion, nor does the present-day copy in Oxford Library.
Even more amazingly these fingers were caught while scanning "Moïse Apporte les nouvelles tables de la loi" (Moses brings the new tablets of law). According to the first testament Moses spent 80 days and nights to get these tablets (and their message) to his people (the etching on the left side of the fingers represents Moses telling his people where to place the heavy tablets). He had to climb and descend the Mount Sinai, survive up there, wait for God to communicate and inscribe the principles in stone and all this twice, because after having gotten really upset at his brother's pagan ways he smashed the first two tablets. However all this activity is said to have resulted in the 10 commandments which set some the fundamental ethical principles of Judaism and Christianity.
Relative to Moses' approach, Google seems to have something slightly more efficient happening (although not tested on the long-run), but makes one wonder: are google books and the knowledge that they make available today's stone tablets and commandments? are Google employees today's prophets? And of course are those Moses' fingers?
A cineradiograph of a typical normal barium swallow. The semi-solid meal passes over the back of the tongue, past the epiglottis and into the pharynx. Found at Wellcome Collection
"After ICANN initially approved the domain in 2005, .xxx faced six years of legal and procedural hurdles before getting the final go-ahead in March 2011. Since then the ICM Registry (which polices the domain) hosted an initial closed sale for some .xxx domains. (...) While many have opposed the creation of .xxx over the years, the fact is it’s here, with domains for sale at $60 each from GoDaddy and others." - mashable
Last week the American Anthropological Association kicked off its 109th meeting in Montreal’s Palais des Congrès. As the 5000 speakers shuffled papers and cleared their throats, I was among the happy anthro-devotees going through the 632 page program to decide which panels to attend during the five days: Mobile Phones in Papua New Guinea? Favela Tourism in Pre-Olympic Rio? Breastfeeding in a Time of Post-Feminism? The Aesthetics of Egyptian Political Pop Music Videos? The Soundscape of 9/11's Heritage?... Some panels I wish I attended others I am so glad I did.
For example David Hakken from Indiana University presented his talk “From Labor to Playbor: Business Anthropology In the Time of Social Networking.” As a labor anthropologist he discussed the role – from an evolutionary perspective – of computerization on work. Today, similarly to technology breaking down the traditional lines between the private and public, computers are changing how we work, where we work, why we work and what qualifies as work.
Could this virtual collaborative project be the demonstration that surpassing the barriers of face-to-face labour results in better, less costly, and funner systems of efficiency. A sort of Ludocapitalism fuelled by playbor? Or rather is this a form of post-modern Taylorism? A 21st century feudalism – computer feudalism – in which our free bug reports, tweeking of open source projects and fun Google tags feed empires we are never rewarded by?
Leaving the panel I started to think that if technology can enable us to game our way through labor, then workers most probably will start acting like players. It doesn’t seem entirely unlikely that Wall Street traders sell, buy, negotiate and think in a similar fashion to the questing, grinding, hating factions or joining guilds World of Warcraft avatars do.
Both just as removed from the impact of their labor on the ‘real’ world but getting the addictive high of success that industrial Taylorism most probably never provided its workers.
Well it seems like the Museum has been caught off guard by how much Montrealers have found these new urban props comfortable and safe. Skatboarders, in particular. But sadly these types of pedestrians are deemed unwelcome by the Museum and so the institution has hired a night guard to make sure only their ideal art lovers come enjoy their sculptures (with their eyes only). But this wasn't enough to deter the normal human pedestrian from touching and interacting with these public installations so the MMFA has added extra yellow plastic sticks to most marble corners making sure no one ever goes near their "high-quality urban environment". (I'm guessing this yellow plastic repetition is to maintain the aesthetic homogeneity mentioned in the press release.)
It seems obvious that the Museum and its favoring of what they wish their backyard looked like rather than what the reality of urban space is, are the only ones to blame for the sidewalks' current absurdity. And as a pedestrian it's hard not be saddened about 33 million dollars that were put into what the field of yellow poles is trying to protect, in particular while budgets in the arts throughout the country are being cut.
Update of 26/11/11: After the night-guard and the plastic yellow polls, the MMFA has now invested in the panoptican power of the surveillance camera to insure the peacefulness they intended for their newly developed sculpture park. Brilliant.
At the time I remember being struck by the general uniformity of critical response which matched her audiences attitude: either utmost seriousness or profound awe (and a striking lack of humor). The constraints of the institution - the intense security (transgressors could be banned from the MoMA for life), the difficult acoustics, the bright neons - were probably the principle causes for this monotone outcome, but overall the artist's serious form of self-making in the show - with Abramovic replicating herself through her performance and reperformances - was like turning everyone that participated into her (too grim? too dramatic?) outlook.
Pippin Barr recently came up with "The Artist is Present" game, which embodies quite well the qualms mentioned above as well as the weird steps involved in the Marina art experience (although I feel like the art experience in general to a certain extent too).
I'm happy to say my passion for pigeons has finally seen its first material manifestation in this multi-faceted, pleasantly deep and particularly clean issue of On-Site dedicated to dirt.
It's a window into all these lost details and individual destinies and moments that, combined, have shaped the "New World." The 19th century in North America was mostly a time of grimness and doom for the Native tribes, and Squint Eyes's Cheyenne people weren't excluded from the genocide; but his drawings and destiny illustrate the grey zones of when the white men met the North American's land.
Tichkematse (Squint Eyes) was a Cheyenne Indian, raised to a life based on buffalo hunting in the southern Plains. Caught by the United States government between 1875-1878, he was imprisoned and learned to read and write English. Once released he attended school in Virginia before coming to the Smithsonian, as one of the institution's earliest employees between 1879 and 1881, to conserve and display bird and mammal specimens.
In July 1885 and for three years, Squint Eyes enlisted in the USA Army's newly formed companies of scouts. The scouts provided assistance to regular Army troops in patrolling the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation and the Cherokee Outlet. It was there that Squint Eyes completed drawings that depict Army officers, civilians and Cheyenne scouts engaged in hunting - an important part of Cheyenne cultural heritage and a favorite pastime of officers and enlisted men.
During his life he also accompanied a government expedition traveling in the remote Florida waterways to the Seminole tribe. And worked with anthropologist and linguist Frank Hamilton Cushing on Indian sign language (there were many languages spoken on the Plains so the various tribes had developed a shared language based on gestures).
Olympia Le-Tan has created an enterprise, called Olympia Le-Tan, that embroiders and sows with ribbon, string and felt some of the most beautiful clutches I've seen. Following the 'return' of the done-by-hand-with-love movement, all the embroidering is done by a cute Japanese girl in the 2nd arrondissement in Paris, and results in products selling for a month's worth of the legal minimun wage in France (SMIC).
She's also a great extroverted socialite, so if you want any information about her date of birth, who her parents are, when she's in New York or Paris, what she looked like when she was 6, or who her favorite manga character is, just go check out her blog.
In any case earlier this year she worked with Spike Jonze and Simon Cahn on a felt embroidered-based short. Since the clutches' designs are reproductions of vintage book covers and their success based on a lot of socialite hyping, the filming was done in the setting of most Litt majors' and other American tourists's wet dreams, Shakespeare and Co. Like the clutches, while the result is remarkable by its aesthetic and required manual labor, Olympia's unabashing use of her person, socialite connections and stereotypes make it hard for me not to think of this as a marketing strategy more than an honest creation.
The Twitter blog has two time-based mappings of the Tweet flows coming in and out of Japan, to and from the world around March 11th's earthquake. It makes for eloquent visuals on factual matters such as, where networks of information gather and exchange, how technology enables humans to decimate information in seconds and what areas are excluded from these connected hubs (large parts of Africa); or helps you draw more anecdotal multiple hypotheses such as Hawaiians use Twitter more than Alaskans, more Hawaiians have Twitter accounts than Alaskans, Hawaiians have more empathy towards earthquake victims than Alaskans, Hawaiians like Japanese people More than Alaskans, there are more Hawaiians than Alaskans, etc...
But these maps also hint to the ways humans cope, even maybe internalize information in an age where 30% of humans are connected to the internet. In my mind there are two ways to see it: either as a techno-cynic, technology enables people to appropriate content without needing to process it, Twitter is a mean to brag about being part of networks of people in the know; or more techno-philosophically, technology is simply an extension of a 'natural' human trait, by which humans partake in collective trends and happenings rather superficially to simply be social humans. In either versions the information itself becomes second to the process of sharing - be it someone famous' death like Jobs's (6,049 tweets per second), a pregnancy (Beyoncé's baby got 8,868 tweets per second after her MTV video performance) or an earthquake, the actual occurrence matters less than the amount of people that could be interested in the news, and hence the amount of humans the tweeter could impress or connect (be) through.
This summer Barcelona-based production company, El Cangrejo, directed the adorable short "L'Equip Petit," about a soccer team that never scores. Here's the trailer of their latest creation, "The Last Ones," and what appears to be another beautiful looking documentary. The story isn't clear but it hints at their recurring interest in the ones society considers failures: in "L'Equip Petit" it was six to seven year olds that couldn't put a ball through the net, and here it may be a group of store owners that desperately need people to walk through their area (instead of malls and super stores?) - and use plastic bottles and communal imagination and work to do so.
The feature was, I'm guessing, an attempt at merging the glossiness of style with the heaviness of a political critic - an equation, that, although with high potential is difficult to pull; often ending by being neither one nor the other.
In this case the glossy part failed because visually there is no common pattern, recurring theme, resembling aesthetic or conducting feeling: it simply brings together Paris Match-type imagery, celebrity spotting paparazzi pics and street photography with nail art, flag outfits, awkward pedestrians and Japanese women dressed like 17th century Louis the 14th court duchesses.
And as for the political take, granted these three cities had a rough spring/summer 2011 season with unhappy people and civil unrest - Tokyo with its nuclear, Cairo with its ruler and London with its pissed off youth - but otherwise nothing really links them together. And if there was, it wouldn't be style.
Yet the T tied these violent, unreassuring and tumultuous events together, bundling them with random shots taken (we're guessing) during the 'riots' and by so doing draining all meaning from the motivations that caused them: they commodified the 'riots' into a really bad fashion spread.
Recently, on the other hand, I discovered Lucifer Youth Film's music video for their song 'Dirt' that does a much better job at using, and in a sense, commodifying images of pissed off people rioting. I'm not sure where the WU LYF stand with the Egyptians or the British rioters but in their music video at least it doesn't boil down to scarves and weddings celebrations, unlike in the T.
Vitalic is a pretty awesome electro musician. His song Poney Part 1's video with jumping dogs in slow motion gained a bit of fame back in the day - I think it would qualify as an indie success - and has had 2,131,300 views on youtube since its upload in January 2006. Swedish House Mafia's recent Save the World has gotten 29,755,208 views since May 20th, and qualifies - I think - as a Summer hit and house music phenomenon. Both videos abuse the incredibleness of dogs in slow motion although the latter has a little too much cheese in its visual (and musical?) mix for me.
The death of famous people does something funny to the common people left behind. It's not quite like loosing a friend with whom you've actually talked to, established a reciprocal relationship with, it's more like loosing a collective notion, idea or product embodied by a human.
Obviously everyone agrees that death is a sad event - it's difficult for humans to conceive of their own mortal nothingness - but when it comes to celebrity deaths it generally turns out to be this really great opportunity to connect with all the living people left behind. Over and over again similar things occur: facebookers change their facebook statuses quoting their last words (Jack Layton), tweeters tweet #allmythoughtstothefamily (DJ Mehdi), bars play their music again (Amy Winehouse), the highest-grossing documentaries of all time are produced (Michael Jackson), prices skyrocket (Lucian Freud) and solo shows sell out (Alexander McQueen); and all this with the best indications that they were simply geniuses, that success and death are anecdotal....
Overall a virtuous circle gets established through general mobilization: everyone wants to partake in this collective mourning or performative event where the famous person's death and life get washed-down, simplified and commodified into a tasty digestible narration. Unlike those that are still alive, famous dead people can't disappoint. Unlike those that are still alive, famous dead people get closer to home and in a sense become more alive than when they were actually alive.
Consuming a famous dead person is both an attempt to belong to and by those left behind and an honest mechanism of panic in front of oblivion.
Hence, because DJ Mehdi died earlier this week, as a way to confront death and in the hope to be part of a collective CBC played this - I never knew he produced it, but Tonton Du Bled was a huge hit when I was 15 keeping it real in Sèvres:
I went to the Power Coorperation Fellows' talk at the CCA last Thursday, where the three young architects presented their collaborative curatorial project entitled Health/City. Since the beginning of the summer they have been conjunctionally working on ways to present their topic without supporting a thesis in relation to health in cities directly but rather advocate a version of urban health history that, like history in general, is however you perceive it.
It is with this in mind that they chose 100 health related images from the CCA's collection: the low-brow magazine cover from last month with the eco-friendly building, air conditioning industry catalogues from the 1950s, 19th century slum maps, passages from novels discussing military asphyxiation... With this initial (mostly visual) base they mapped out the various thematic passageways between items (such as the 17th c. plague doctor can be linked to a slum map through the theme of epidemics, but also to a toilet bowl through smell). The point here is that this cluster of links and images form a multi-narrative understanding history. While the website isn't up yet, the fellows are planning on putting this network of information online by the end of the month - the website would let the visitor/browser create/curate his or her own version of health history by deciding which images to link with one another.
I enjoyed the talk. I enjoyed the talk because it wasn't a self-congratulatory architect's attempt at philosophy but rather a real try at asking questions about the nature of curating, collecting and knowledge and coming up up with a tangible platform as an answer. Some audience members suggested that the lack of curatorial structure could be disorienting for users or let the project fall flat; others also pleasantly name dropped architects for extra useful images. I think both of these thoughts wouldn't have crossed people's mind if the project hadn't been qualified as a CCA project. Indeed in a way this project's quality and flaw are the same: from the talk it seems that it is more of an exercise in curating and anthropology than an architectural thesis materialized through a curated space. This is obviously totally great by me, and exceptional really because for a discipline - curating - that prides itself for creativity, depth and original-thought, interdisciplinary perspectives and multi-medium exhibitions remain ridiculously too few and avant-gardiste.
Basically it's very exciting to see the CCA promoting such initiatives, and I'm looking forward to seeing Health/City online to get a better grasp of my version of urban health history.
I recently discovered the most insightfully fascinating blog. Written by the good people behind OkCupid, on it they compress their users profiles' data into these simple graphs with powerful one liners: they objectify people, correlate oral sex and eating habits, and activity on twitter with masturbation probabilities. It's amazing!
My favorite so far links beer appreciation with the potentiality of sleeping with someone on a first date:
How amazing?
Weirdly the same day I heard about this blog, I finished an old New Yorker article on online dating that mentions it. In the article we learn about the science and math behind meeting a significant other, potential differences between the photo pauses that attract men versus those that attract women, the OKcupid founders' marital status, and the religious rigor behind eHarmony's experiments. About the blog we learn that the data is based on the analysis of 34,620 couples and that, according to its author, Nick Paumgarten, the blog's purpose "is to attract attention: the findings, like the quizzes [in its early days the site's four Harvard math majors founders attracted members through quizzes] are to lure you."
Not so sure about being lured by OKCupid, but totally lured by human beings.
Mor Thiam is Akon's father. Strong heritage wouldn't you say? Selon Wikipedia on peut le retrouver en Floride, Orlando entre les giraffes et les singes du Animal Kingdom du Walt Disney World Resort. Ça vaut peut-être un retour en enfance?
This is old news (currently it's all about Kate being anorexic and pregnant) but when the princely couple was on Canadian territory I couldn't stop ranting about how after coming up with the "How Canadian Are You, eh?" app in January, Citizenship and Immigration Canada launched their second digital tool the "Royal Tour” app for free on itunes. I too asked myself why the Ministry didn’t go straight for the “Tips on How to Reproduce in A Canoe” app, till I realised that the political answer to the Ministry’s first app's title was another of Canada’s idealised traditions: the Royal Family.
I know that the sense of belonging countries provide are not easily defined notions with clear inputs, straightforward mechanisms and direct results. And I have no qualms with the British monarchy particularly: if anything kudos to them for getting the Britons to perpetuate their feudal capitalistic family. Nor do I have qualms with the newly-wedded royal couple enjoying Canada; nor am I arguing that Canadians should deny the importance the British and the Crown played in shaping the country.
My qualms or rather amazement - I'm French originially so all of this royal stuff is amazing - stem more from the degree of pride Canadians and government took with this arrival and visit - as if Canada needed so desperately to be acknowledged by the royal gaze to feel valuable. And not only has the government taken pride in this, it's also done everything to subsidise the tools to encourage its people to believe that the level of this couple’s happiness in the country defines Canadians' worth.
If a star-savy US Weekly or another tabloid sponsored an app to stalk and discuss Kate’s outfits, this would have been another issue all together, but that an elected staff meant to focus on the delicate issue of heritage, collective memory and cultural identity, finds William’s white cowboy hat and the couple’s canoe trips worth a nationhood's attention - that seems ttally wrong or absolutely amazing.
This is a great BBC documentary on the philosophy behind the evolution of technology. It touches upon the rise, with Ayn Rand's 1950s writing, of an ideology encouraging self-interest, individual freedom and a decrease in State power that would bring about the happiest and most stable collective. Progressively technology was seen as a mean to achieve this. Through technology we all would have equal power and together create the most stable system.
The trusted objective object (technology) was seen as potentially erasing the risk, the unstablity and the helplessness of the human condition.
About a month ago Facebook published a decrease of use in three of its first markets: 6 million Americans, 10 thousand Brits and 1.52 million Canadians commited Facebook Suicide during May 2011. Not much relative to the 700 million monthly Facebook users but still it launched a wave of 'Is this the death of Facebook?' debates - which were interesting since I still haven't understood how Facebook actually makes money.
Since then I've been receiving approximately 3 friend invites from people I do not know (and can’t complain about it to anyone) and if it weren't from a helpful hand I would still be logged on to fb's video chat; as a result I can add at least 2 reasons to why I hate Facebook.
But here's a great list of ten good reasons to:
1. babies
2. here is a picture of what i just ate
3. my mom is on facebook too
4. suggesting i 'like' something that benefits you
5. old cool friends have gone insane
6. getting gifts that are cartoon cows from moo-land
7. tagged in pictures where you look terrible
8. friend suggestions
9. default privacy settings
10. ......
Because Kate and Will are gracing Ottawa with his balding head and her over-tanned face, I thought it would be nice, just for fun, to go over the year 1982. Not because that's the year Kate and Will's Highnessesses came to life, but rather because that's the year things supposedly changed for Canada:
"The Canada Act 1982 (1982 c. 11) is an Act of Parliament passed by the British Parliament that ended all remaining dependence of Canada on the United Kingdom, by a process known as "patriation."
After the publicized success of Ken's breakup with Barbie earlier this month - the revelation her packaging contributes to tropical deforestation annihilating all the lust left in Ken's heart, - Greenpeace has again used the joyful innocence associated to childhood to better reveal environmental horrors. If their use of Barbie was entirely their initiative, their campaign 'Dark Side' is based on Volkswagen's latest ad for their new Passat. In the Greenpeace campaign the young endearing Dark Vador trying to animate everyday objects gets swapped for a young yet evil Dark Vador backed by a float of polluting earth killers that must fight an adorable group with young Leila, young Luke, young Droids, young R2- D2, young C-3PO, young Chewbacca and more...
Pretty cute and pretty successful at attacking a brand with a four start branding history (Volkswagen) and a toy every girl under the age of 60 has played with (Barbie):
After last's post theme that gay rights is all too often a guy's club, I think it is only appropriate to post on two very dude topics - war and coding (see below). Who knew anything about Stuxnet? Who knew anything about this compared to the ratio of those who know the security measures in airports? I'm about to take a plane right now, and as I will be getting my water bottle scanned, I'm going be reminded the great risk my country is at and the great security measures my country is putting in place to save me from this danger. But really a part from pissing me off, forcing me to buy an expensive water bottle and convincing me Western society is going mad, clearly this type of visible security is worth peanuts...
I've recently noticed and become quite self-conscious by the amount of cat-related stories I've posted. I like to think this is a coincidence, but evidence suggests otherwise making me some kind of a cat lover - a human-type which I don't particulalry identify to. This morning however, while exploring the fantastic worlds of eharmony, réseau contact, OkCupid and the other virtual decendants of the personal classified ad sections of news papers I was able to relativise the situation. Thank you eHarmony:
Stella Artois has long tradition of advertising itself as the la bière pour les hommes à femmes. In their past ads women and Stella Artois bottles are interchangeable because both are light and straight out of the 60s, and the male characters are handsome Frenchmen with perfect-fitting suits and ravishing taste. Their latest ad keeps to their manicured nostalgia but changes the narration making the girl the one who switches the boy for the Stella.
Heineken seems to be wanting to go somewhere somewhat similar by presenting an ad with a lovely couple, a touch of humor, choreographed eye movement and 60s beats that calls anything but "beer is exclusively for men who like sports, bawling and junk food."
Girls, not feeling those sugary Smirnoff Ice delicacies any more, well both Stella and Heinken are thinking of you:
I just finished a new necklace. It was named Jane, after the women who commissioned it. For more of these noisy attention seekers click here: http://chloeroubert.com/bijoux
This image is from the google book Musée Religieux ou Choix des plus beaux tableaux inspirés par l'histoire sainte aux peintres les plus célèbres; first tome, published in 1836 by Hivert Libraire in Paris by "Etienne Achille Réveil, un ecclésiastiques du clergé de Paris".* The actual book is part of the Oxford University's history library collection.
On August 15th 2011 the New York Times' T published an interactive feature about the fashion of rioters (quote): "What do you wear when protest and mayhem rock your world? Reports from three epicenters of street style: London, Cairo and Tokyo." (already by this point you sense something deep).
The feature was, I'm guessing, an attempt at merging the glossiness of style with the heaviness of a political critic - an equation, that, although with high potential is difficult to pull; often ending by being neither one nor the other. 
