I mentioned the other day that one of the rooms in the Elephant reminded me of the scene where the Nostromo spaceship explodes at the end of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979).
This room is very large across both horizontal axis but only the height of a normal, smaller sized room. This has the effect of exaggerating perspective. The last time I was there, as I entered the room the lights were off. The windows at the other end were sending in a white light which was reflecting off the floor and the ceiling, the full length of the wide, flat space, towards the doorway I was standing in.
After thinking more about the passing comment, I remembered that the 'star gate' sequence (below) from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) is the seminal version of the image I was reminded of.
Also, I think that an influence on me coming to this connection was that the external (and to some degree, the internal) architecture of the Elephant is reminiscent of the architecture of spaceships from that era of cinema.
UNUSELESS JAPANESE INVENTIONS
Portable Zebra Crossing
The pedestrians best friend
The tyranny of the automobile makes life increasingly tough for eco-conscious pedestrians, and finding a safe place to cross can result in inconvenient diversions and wasted time. Now the pedestrian can fight back. When you've found the crossing point that best suits you, simply roll out the Portable Zebra Crossing in front of you and cross confidently and in safety at your own pace.
WARNING: On busy roads where there is no break in the oncoming traffic, attempting to roll out the Portable Zebra Crossing can be hazardous.
Portable Stoplight
Puts traffic control in the hands of those that need it most
Children do not always remember how to apply the traffic safety code, and this is an increasing source of anxiety for parents. But now they can relax again- provided they have equipped their children with the Portable Stoplight. The child in charge just switches it on and, regardless of whether he or she remembers to look both ways, a bright red light beams in both directions, halting the oncoming traffic. Despite its authentic design, the portable stoplight only shines red. The danger of carnage resulting from an accidental green light is thus cleverly avoided.
Portable Countryside
If you can't take the country out of the boy, let him carry a bit around town
Big cities mean intimidating, towering skyscrapers and a puzzling maze of subways. Worst of all is the lack of natural sights and smells. Armed with a personal Portable Countryside the simple farm boy or born again naturalist need never feel too urban when weaving their way through the concrete jungle. From now on, the walk to work or school will always be pleasantly scenic and familiar. We recommend using the backstreets whenever possible. Exposure to exhaust fumes will kill your plants.
Gift of the Gab Glasses
A social leg up for the strong silent type
Some people just aren't good at talking, and the problem is that, despite the technological revolution, speech is still the most popular form of communication. If you're shy or silent, don't put yourself at a disadvantage. Our Gift of the Gab Glasses enable even the most tongue-tied talker to give give his audience the impression he's said at least three times as much as he actually has. But that's not all. They also render the listener speechless, making the wearer's conversation seem all the more skilled. Walking around in these can be difficult, and glancing into a mirror downright scary. But it's good to talk.
Portable Armrests
With these in place, life's one big armchair
At the end of a hard day, luxury is a cushy recliner with padded armrests. Dining- chair uprights just done give the same relief. So if fifty percent of that easy feeling is down to laid back arms, give your biceps a break even when walking. With Portable Armrests walking has never felt so good. While your legs take the strain, and your shoulders complain, your arms will be in paradise.
Participation & Geography of The Internet
This post relates very much to Hannah's post about Participation and the Internet. The following map data has been produced by Matthew A. Zook. His research interests focus upon the technological change and shifting geographies of globalization.
Sports Centre
I recently had a meeting with Richard Parker from the spots centre. He showed me around the various spaces that they have which range from blank hall spaces for meetings and events to squash courts etc. He forwarded some photos to me and I also have a few from when me and Sam visited.
This is the Olympic pool not sure what you could do with it just found it an interesting space.
This is one of the squash courts.
This is a mezzanine space near the entrance, it would probably get good footfall but there would probably be too much light. Richard mentioned that events have used it as a space to lead people into the main event.
This is the main sports hall which is huge it also has lots of different lighting systems such as spot lights used for boxing. It also has a viewing balcony.
This is one of the hall spaces again pretty big. There are some smaller blank event spaces available, the images are just the more unusual possibilities.
This is the Olympic pool not sure what you could do with it just found it an interesting space.
This is one of the squash courts.
This is a mezzanine space near the entrance, it would probably get good footfall but there would probably be too much light. Richard mentioned that events have used it as a space to lead people into the main event.
This is the main sports hall which is huge it also has lots of different lighting systems such as spot lights used for boxing. It also has a viewing balcony.
This is one of the hall spaces again pretty big. There are some smaller blank event spaces available, the images are just the more unusual possibilities.
images from the pamplet of the Berlin Biennale- The layout enabled the audience to easily find the random locations across the city, i think this layout could be replicated with this city wide program.
Future privacy
Hannah's quoted reply to Joanne's post on CCTV cameras mentions, at the end, "questions the basic notion of privacy". This made me think of an artical I read the other day on Idiom : The Poverty of Privacy: Google, Facebook, and the New Jeffersonians. In particular, the way the writer envisages the gap between the optimistic and sceptical projections of current digital trends ...
The end of the Google horizon is not the Orwellian nightmare of complete dossiers, available at the touch of a button, on any person in the world; it is rather the old social-scientific dream of universal quantification, prediction, and generalization.But if the objectives of Google diverge so widely from what privacy crusaders think they are, why does the debate keep returning to the same familiar set of rails? What leads critics to evoke, so strenuously, the specter of Orwell’s telescreens? This is a question than can be answered only from the perspective of the privacy debate’s third aspect: Facebook, or the publicization of previously private data. On the surface, this controversy, which is perhaps the loudest and most visible, is also the least comprehensible. People who have deliberately given their data—their “likes” and “statuses,” their photos and self-descriptions—to somebody else, according to the norms of pre-Internet communication, cannot expect to have much control over it in the future. Enough old proverbs (for instance, “three can keep a secret if two of them are dead”) testify to this that demanding the contrary seems absurd.
And yet, of course, to an increasing number of people it is not absurd. Unlike Internet communication, pre-Internet communication presupposed the existence of separate, variably permeable spheres, which could be maintained with little effort and fantasized about with even less. (There’s an old Eudora Welty story about a man who leads a double life, with one life ultimately as restrictive and conventional as the other. Historically, I’d venture to say, this has been closer to reality than the utopia of closets evoked by some privacy activists.) For the privacy activist, unease with Facebook is usually founded on something much more mundane than Nineteen Eighty-Four: quite simply, the increasing difficulty of telling the little white lies that help most of us keep our spheres apart.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, the proposed solution in the privacy debate has not been to bow to historical inevitability and join in a mass experiment to remake our idea of the boundaries of social experience. Instead, the suggestion that permanent and omnipresent Internet access will in fact remake these boundaries whether we like it or not has been treated as seedy and disreputable, something like a trendy contrarianism possibly spread via dirty corporate dollars. The virtually universal resistance among privacy advocates to such a line of argument—which, corporate-funded or not, would at least recognize the Internet as a space of potentialities rather than simply of threats—has strongly narrowed their rhetorical field.
Collateral Murder
Overview
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=player_embedded&has_verified=1
Surveillance: The unknowing participant
Reading all about spies has got me thinking about surveillance & voyeurism. There is an interesting photography exhibit about this is the Tate from 28th May - 3rd Oct.
Denis Beaubois's In The Event of Amnesia the City Will Recall, from Tate Modern's Exposed exhibition
I think surveillance seems all the more interesting when considering the participation without consent. The article can be found on the guardian site: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/may/28/tate-modern-surveillance-art
The Lives of Others trailer
THE LIVES OF OTHERS/
DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN
New Historicism
As much as I know about 'New Historicism' is that it "is an approach to the interpretation of texts that attempts to combine anthropological and historical methods with the insights of post-structuralism. Initially a school of literary studies in America (Stephen Greenblatt identified and named it in 1982), its influence is now felt in many areas of cultural studies. New Historicists aim to 'ground' the meanings (note the plural) of texts in the particular historical conditions of their production, distribution and consumption."1
1 Ward, Glenn (2003) Teach Yourself Postmodernism, page 111 (Hodder Education) ISBN 978-0-340-85970-4
2 Veeser (1989) The New Historicism, "Introduction", page xi (Routledge) via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Historicism
H. Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989), noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicist discourse; they were:
- that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
- that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
- that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably;
- that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature;
- that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.2
1 Ward, Glenn (2003) Teach Yourself Postmodernism, page 111 (Hodder Education) ISBN 978-0-340-85970-4
2 Veeser (1989) The New Historicism, "Introduction", page xi (Routledge) via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Historicism
Looky Loos: Jeremy Deller
Jeremy Deller: The Battle of Orgreave
17 June 2001, Orgreave, South Yorkshire
A live re-enactment, filmed under the direction of Mike Figgis for Artangel Media and
Channel 4.
In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike. The dispute lasted for over a
year and was the most bitterly fought since the general strike of 1926, marking a turning
point in the struggle between the government and the trade union movement.
On 18 June of that year, the Orgreave coking plant was the site of one of the strike’s most
violent confrontations. It began in a field near the plant and culminated in a cavalry
charge through the village of Orgreave.
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, staged seventeen years later, was a spectacular
re-enactment of what happened on that day. It was orchestrated by Howard Giles, a
historical re-enactment expert and the former director of English Heritage’s event
programme. More than 800 people participated in the re-enactment, many of them former
miners, and a few former policemen, reliving the events from 1984 that they themselves
took part in. Other participants were drawn from battle re-enactment societies across
England.
The Battle of Orgreave was filmed by Mike Figgis for Artangel Media and Channel 4,
and aired on Sunday, 20 October 2002. The film intercuts dramatic photographic stills
from the clashes in 1984 with footage of the clashes re-enacted in 2001, together with
moving and powerful testimonies, to tease out the complexities of this bitter struggle. 1
1 www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2001/the_battle_of_orgreave
Looky Loos: In a Death Seen Around the World, a Symbol of Iranian Protests
TEHRAN — It was hot in the car, so the young woman and her singing instructor got out for a breath of fresh air on a quiet side street not far from the antigovernment protests they had ventured out to attend. A gunshot rang out, and the woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, fell to the ground. “It burned me,” she said before she died.
The bloody video of her death on, circulated in Iran and around the world, has made Ms. Agha- Soltan, a 26-year-old who relatives said was not political, an instant symbol of the antigovernment movement. Her death is stirring wide outrage in a society that is infused with the culture of martyrdom — although the word itself has become discredited because the government has pointed to the martyrs’ deaths of Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war to justify repressive measures.1
Neda Agha-Soltan’s death triggered reverberations of shock around the world. There was a video taken of her death: showing the ubiquity of camera phones and we are adopting the role of spectator.
1 New York Times 2009
Looky Loos: BA and union talks stopped by protesters
Talks between British Airways and union leaders were brought to an abrupt end when protesters stormed the meeting.
Dozens of demonstrators from the Socialist Workers Party breached security at the London offices of the conciliation service Acas. It is not known how much progress was made in the last-ditch talks aimed at averting strikes by cabin crew.
The latest strikes follow a long-running dispute over jobs, pay and working conditions. The two sides sat around the negotiating table for more five hours on Saturday before the protesters interrupted the meeting. More than 100 demonstrators gathered outside the building, saying they were there to show solidarity with BA cabin crew.
Banners and shouting
Those who made it to the 23rd floor, where the talks were taking place, came face to face with BA chief executive Willie Walsh and Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite. Mr Woodley angrily remonstrated with the protesters telling them to "shut up". 1
Press as Spectators
During the fracas the press turn their attentions to the protestors rather than Walsh, the role of spectator is emphasised when video footage is then broadcast over the Internet, one becomes fascinated by the tribal actions of the protestors.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10140911.stm
1 BBC News, 19:53 GMT, Saturday, 22 May 2010 20:53 UK