100 Images: Into The Wilderness

I let the wilderness of images overwhelm me. Sporadic associations, implicit patterns, and unwilled theories arise spontaneously, all without names. I struggle to see everything and know nothing. As always, my trust lies with the great power of the unconscious to reveal the latent truth of the world to me without the perversion of undue preconception.

I cannot name that which I do not know, and surely, vice versa.

The urge to order is too great to resist. The spell of naivety dissolves. As quickly as I’m struck by the distinct similarity of certain groups of images I’m compelled to find ways to fracture these groups along different algorithms. I anticipate obvious patterns and immediately jump toward disrupting them. The simple truth of the associations between figure skaters and photographers, institution interiors and highway overpasses, will need to be tempered by means to render them distinct.

I immediately extrapolate all kinds of mechanisms for disruption. What alternative systems of classification can be brought to bear upon these images that would separate articles ostensibly so alike at first glance? What kind of countervailing operation could offer a new way of seeing beyond commonsense impulses to easy generalization? Should I just give in and embrace Occam’s razor, placing those images which seem so obviously similar into the same group? Both impulses should be accommodated by any good solution.

Strategies for navigating the archive should discover a balance between embracing and challenging the prevailing commonsense.

Production Project: 21 Tags

What can a group do that an individual can’t?

The answer could not be simply about scale or scope, because with enough time and resources an individual can compensate. The project had to engage with the specific advantages of having a large body of diverse individuals all working together to generate a whole larger than the sum of its parts. How do we properly capitalize on our strengths as a group operating together and not simply pound out a greater number of collective hours as a workforce?

Crits: New Media Documents

As always, I was extremely impressed with both the breadth and quality of this final round of critiques. I’ve posted just a few pictures below for those who were unable to see some of the more performative pieces in action. Unfortunately I only had my camera with me for part of the second day, but I would have liked to document everything. Here’s a thin slice of what happened:

Pleasures of the Uncanny in Second Life

Entering into the world of Second Life is an unnerving experience. Fantastical anthropoid forms dart around the screen, flying, gyrating and whizzing along every axis. Avatars radically alter their appearance, cast spells and interact with whimsical virtual objects. But the world of Second Life is not unnerving for how different it is from traditional human reality. It is unnerving in its refracted similarity. Second Life is an unnerving universe of the uncanny.

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.