Urban Sensing: Data Commons Versus The Cyclops

“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” – H.A.L. 9000, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

Within the deceptive security of their sound-proof space pod, Dave and Frank discuss how best to deal with an omniscient A.I. run amok. Being the consummate lip reader, HAL quickly learns of his impending demise. With a single red eye and an insatiable desire for absolute knowledge, HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) represents a modern manifestation of the Cyclops myth referred to in Cuff, Hansen and Kang’s article on “Urban Sensing.” Like Kubrick’s epic human-machine meditation, the article postulates an anxious distrust of emerging technologies of knowledge generation and data collection.

Should we fear the “Cyclops” of ubiquitous sensing technology?

Databases and Authorship: Redefining Authority

The Author is Dead. Long Live the Author.

Despite much hysteria to the contrary, the author is not dead. But shifts toward collaboration, participation and viewer or user empowerment have certainly rearranged dominant conceptions of what it means to author. In exchange for a multiplicity of modes of authorship we forfeit certain long-standing expectations of control and containment of artistic expression and meaning.

Databases and Authorship: Virtual Difference

There is seemingly no limit to the excited claims surrounding the possibilities of databases to reconfigure authorship through data liberation and social empowerment. But of course, the database is not new. It just becomes more interesting when it’s integrated with network capabilities and virtual systems. These new tools let us play with how databases are used and what they do, and let us do more than just access the discrete documents they love so much to store.

Changing the context changes how we derive meaning from data, but with each new liberty we must admit a corresponding forfeit. Will the database really set us free?

Appropriating Documentary Material: Heaven

This is a video for “Heaven” by Health. Although it certainly perverts one of the greatest documentary moments of all time, the opening from Werner Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, it’s quite an effective music video. The context offered by the rest of the film, filled with Herzogian preoccupations with existential struggle and human conquest, greatly enhances the already immense pleasure of this decontextualized version.

I’ll take ecstatic truth over accountant’s truth any day.

Social Acupuncture: Documenting Live Engagement?

Where does documentary practice get radical?

Probably not in the well-meaning discourses of earnest, yet deeply entrenched, traditional leftist activism. There’s something to be said for shouting about what’s wrong with this world as loud as you can. But there’s a point where the audience goes deaf, assuming they were not born this way. Radical documentary practice will look like something else, and that may be much different than what we’ve come to expect.

Eduardo Kac: Mad Scientist for Mad Times

The first sight of Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent rabbit Alba provokes a predictable response. Confusion overwhelms quickly, displaced by disbelief. Followed by horror. Awe. Curiosity. And finally acceptance. Green bunnies and other GFP (green fluorescent protein) “glow-in-the-dark” creatures exist and there is no going back. The last step in dealing with Kac’s biological witticism will surely become boredom as the novel becomes commonplace.

Get a glofish for your desk.

New Media / New Ideology

Science vs. Art. Artist vs. Audience. Author vs. Subject. Form vs. Content.

Hierarchy vs. Democracy.

Even the most cursory attempt at putting a box around “new media” immediately plunges the conversation into some of the most enduring discourses of art theory and social organization. Long-standing binaries vibrate against each other and start to unravel. However, the difficulty with the term “new media” goes beyond the inadequacies of existing taxonomies. It has less to do with what you make, and more with how you think.

Appropriating Documentary Material: Dayvan Cowboy

This is a video for “Dayvan Cowboy” by Boards of Canada. It recontextualizes found footage of the 1960 “space jump” undertaken by Joseph Kittinger as part of USAF “Project Excelsior.” I don’t know what it means, and the whole transition to surfing is a bit much, but I do know it makes for great music video.

How far can a poetic interpretation be taken before it lacks the expected gravitas of “proper” documentary?

Toward a Discourse of Vibrancy: A Manifesto for Liberated Documentary

No more shall the specter of sobriety cast its long shadow over the documentary worker. Where are those who oppose fear, those who stand up for the beauty in truth, those who throw the shackles of the past to the ground in an effort to see the world with their own eyes? Documentarians! Let us move unencumbered by the rot of apprehension always toward honesty, always toward discovery, always toward the bursting vibrancy of life!