Liz: November 2004 Archives

the art of documentation

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I'm trying to put together a lecture for the class I'm teaching on the art of documentation. I'm trying to focus on two approaches that I think are especially rewarding - documentation as residue and as distillation. But brain is apparently not in discourse-production mode today; I'm just recycling art and artists we've already discussed to death over the semester. And we've discussed quite a few projects, from Fluxus to Amsterdam Realtime.

Right now, I've got about three examples:

1) Gordon Matta-Clark's videos about his building projects

2) Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear's Traces of Fire

3) Richard Long's textworks


...But I really need more. I've talked about Robert Smithson so much that even he'd be tired of hearing about himself - but maybe another artist who works with landscape? Andy Goldsworthy, maybe? Suggestions? Say, before Wednesday afternoon PST?

On hard work

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The Knees of James Brown

James Brown does not, as a matter of routine, perform without begging, repeatedly. Not being one for half measures, he does not beg without falling to his knees. He falls to his knees half a dozen times in every show: on soft wooden floors like the Apollo's, on hard concrete stages, on carpet, on stone, on metal, on earth. Four or five shows a day, three hundred days a year, in the early years. A hundred or more shows a year, even now that he's in his seventies. Fifty years in show business. Imagine James Brown falling to his knees for his audience tens of thousands of times, probably hundreds of thousands of times. Imagine the scar tissue, inches thick, on the knees of James Brown.

From Live at the Apollo, by Douglas, who also brought us the soon-to-be-completed NaSoAlMo.

Destroy all monsters (except Godzilla)

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aging monster movie actors Godzilla again

I’ve never seen Godzilla before, but this weekend I went to Godzillafest, a 50th anniversary celebration for big lizards and the people who love them. I went with my friend Ingrid, an anthropologist. And as we waded through the merchandise booths in the lobby, we decided that maybe culture is, after all, just the creation and circulation of “merch.” The next day, at SFMOMA, I saw a Polish movie poster for Godzilla – merch again. All is merch.

But anyway.

Many of the original actors were there, all old men now. I think they were surprised and flattered by the size of the audience and frequency of the applause. Or at least they were doing a good job of acting. There was a panel discussion before the show, hampered a bit by awkward translation and the fact that at least one of the actors had recently had a stroke.

But one of them (who had actually played Godzilla — ooh!) said something unexpected: Godzilla, he said (through the translator), continues to be popular because he’s a “dream monster.” That surprised me, as I had imagined Godzilla more as a kitsch monster.

But when the monster (at least in this new version) appeared, the movie was surprisingly nightmarish. It doesn’t matter that the special effects are dated and the city is obviously made of balsa wood. The emotional intensity makes the destruction affecting.

Explicitly described as a consequence of unrestrained H-bomb testing, Gozilla rains fire on a Tokyo inhabited by survivors of Nagasaki. One woman, on a train, actually says: “First the black rain, now this!” And then she says, “I was at Nagasaki. I’m glad to be alive.” Later on, we see her dancing on a pleasure boat in the harbor. Then Godzilla sinks it.

Godzilla the movie — kooky love triangle and all — remains a potent allegory of mass trauma (there’s some interesting writing by Robert Jay Lifton on this). The mistakes of the past always return (in spectacularly changed form) to haunt the present. The story is simple, and there’s one like it in many places: a monster comes out of sea, outraged because of a sacrifice unmade or an accidental offense, and ravages the countryside. Then a hero emerges and kills the monster. Good, Golden-Bough-style stuff. In this case, the mistakes are technological/military and the heroes are (mostly) scientists.

Early in the movie, the Japanese parliament debates the correct response to the threat. One side wants to keep the threat secret, because the seriousness will just panic the populace. The other side wants to expose the existence of the monster, because the people deserve and require the truth. After the “tell the truth” partisans emerged victorious, the audience in the movie theater spontaneously broke into applause. We had just found a story that resonated for this moment, now, in San Francisco and in America.

In the end, Godzilla is destroyed by the same people who created him: military-led scientists. He dissolves in a dreamy swirl of bubbles, dying alongside the scientist who kills him. Of course, he’ll be back for the next movie. He always is. How could we let him go?

hello can you see me?

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Over in NYC, Lia is running her master's thesis today and tomorrow: constant moblogging by 24 people for 48 hours. Yes, you can get a similar experience from a full-on Flickr addiction. But Flickr is sprawling and continous. "Hello can you see me?" is deliberately constrained in participants and time.

Right now, the posts are coming fast and furious -- sometimes as many as six in two minutes. I feel like I'm watching time-lapse blogging. Blogging concentrate. It actually reminds me of those '80s-'90s "A Day in the Life of..." coffee table books. Photographic evidence of the diversity and simultaneity of everyday life.

(Oh, and -- another nice thing about Lia's piece is that it's entirely based on hooking up Flickr to MT. Speedy, efficient, and free.)

Where I went

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If this blog has seemed a little empty and silent, it's because I've been teaching twice weekly (with Ali Sant) at the San Francisco Art Institute on wireless networks and site-specific art. The syllabus and lecture notes are here. The readings are password protected; let me know if you want any of the pdfs and I will mail them to you.

Technology and assumptions

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Some advice just posted to a listserv by Tom, who consistently gives the best and most useful advice to the perplexed:

The point is, don't start by assuming the technology. Start by assuming the action, and looking for a technology to sense the action. When you're brainstorming with others on the project, give them enough information so that they can start with the same assumption... That way, they can suggest ways of solving your specific problem, rather than suggesting technologies that are similar to the ones you're thinking of, which may or may not be the right choice.

It doesn't sound so difficult, does it? Yet we keep on assuming the technology, instead of beginning with action...

Accountability, conversation, pr0n

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Two Christian pastors have created a kind of opt-in spyware called X3Watch, which forwards lists of questionable websites visited by the user to a designated "accountability partner." The idea is to make browsing behavior not just visible but discussable. Whatever you think of their mission, it's an interesting exercise in trust and surveillance that has interesting social consequences for the culture of filters:

"Filters don't work," Mr. Gross said, speaking of programs that block Internet pornography. "Kids are smarter than that. Filters don't bring up conversation. A filter avoids the topic. Accountability forces you and another person to talk about what you're looking at. That's hard. We would have more downloads if it was a filter."

{NYT}

Election Day: interactive coverage

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New York City's Konscious TV is running a live interactive broadcast of the voting process at 9:30pm Eastern time tonight. They're using Shawn's interactive tele-journalism software to interface a roving reporter with a webcam and a Mini-ITX to an online viewing community, who can then communicate questions, comments, and complaints to each other and to the reporter/moderator through a chat interface.

I'll be watching the polls - and Konscious TV - at 6:30 (Pacific time) - to see how the network TV/ITJ experiences compare.

Election Day: self-portraits

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Robin Hunicke is collecting a gallery of voting self-portraits.

You can snap yourself before marking your ballot (keeping the results to yourself), during the vote (perhaps posing deep in thought?), or after (flashing the horns, tongue out?). I really don't care. In fact - I don't care who you vote for. I just want to see you, in the booth, doing the deed. Voting, that is (no nudity, please).
Seriously. If you have a digicam or cell phone cam - bring it along. Shoot a quick portrait and then shoot it to me by uploading your photo here. If you fill in valid info (no reason you have to - x’s will work, too) then the pix will sort by name for easy location. I’ll post the “results” in a special Election Portraits gallery a couple of days after the election.

Obviously, as she points out, you can't do this if your polling place does not have curtained booths, as potentially taking pictures of OTHER people - or of the polling place itself - is an invasion of privacy.

Now go use that cameraphone for what it was, in some sense, meant for: documenting the democratic process.

"Electronic devices gone bad"

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The TV - like refrigerators, shavers and vacuum cleaners - was simply doing what all electrical gizmos do: emitting energy. On this particular Saturday night, however, some hidden bit of the television's electronic innards simply went on the blink. And while the set appeared to be functioning normally, it was suddenly oozing energy at a frequency - 121.5 megahertz - that happens to be reserved for international distress signals.

{NYT} via Anthony on {telecom-cities}

This raises the inescapable question of what happens to electronic devices gone wild, and whether there will be a series of best-selling videos documenting their crazy antics in Miami, Palm Springs, and Jamaica.

About this Archive

This page is a archive of recent entries written by Liz in November 2004.

Liz: October 2004 is the previous archive.

Liz: December 2004 is the next archive.

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