For the last three Novembers, I’ve coordinated a project called DrawMo!, whereby persons around the world, both known and unknown to each other, draw every day for a month. Some people post their work to Flickr, some blog it either on their own sites or on the group blog, some work only offline; but everybody draws, separately, in his or her own special way.
Continue reading Distributed Drawing
I completely spaced the ICM homework last week, which is sad, because it involved a language I actually have some experience with: PHP. I know just enough about it to fiddle with WordPress templates—and once, in 2002 or so, I spent a few days trying to rebuild the ColdFusion-backed poets.org in PHP, just for kicks.
Yeah, I didn’t get very far with that, Continue reading PHPhun
Yeah, what Jason said.
To follow up on my pointless rant from last weekend, one of my first thoughts after the election was called—a few hours after Oh my god, I so wish that my grandma/grandpa/great-godmother/great-grandparents/great-great-grandparents/father, etc. were alive to see this day—was, Now I want a do-over on every trip outside the country that I’ve made in the last eight years.
Continue reading Hello, again!
I’m working with Dimitri(o)s, Diego, and Jason on the video project du jour, and this week we had to draw storyboards for our piece. The guys wrote a script on Thursday, while I had a prior engagement. Today we split the script up into four chunks, and each of us drew the panels for one section. My first four panels are above. The whole storyboard is in this PDF that Diego made. As a bonus, doing this assignment also got me off the hook for missing a few days of DrawMo!
The gist of the story is that this guy (ML, aka Male Lead) discovers that his headphones allow him to hear other people’s thoughts—but only negative ones.
Next week, we’re somehow going to try to shoot this thing, in the subway. Fortunately, it looks like videotaping in the subway, even with a tripod, is not illegal, as long as you don’t block access or passage. Basically, as long as we don’t act like those film crew assholes who’re always redirecting me around my own fucking office building, we should be fine. Cops often have interesting misconceptions about the laws they’re supposedly enforcing, though, so I’ll try to remember to print out a copy of the rules before we go.
P.S. We used a cleaner version of the storyboard form, which I made because the one Spencer supplied filled me with sorrow.
I don’t have time to keep up with the various ITP discussion lists—yet another reason for my general feeling of not being a part of this program, no doubt—but I do try to glance at them now and then, especially the topical ones, such as phys-comp and ICM. I’m never qualified to answer anybody’s questions, and I’m not working on anything ambitious enough that I need to take advantage of the advice that’s given there, but I do think it’s useful to keep an eye on the list, so that when I do have a question, I may have an inkling of how to look for the answer.
So this morning I was skimming the latest phys-comp digest and saw that gracious Tom Igoe had addressed a comment by the tedbot about this, in which he castigated “clueless people” who use flash when taking photographs, as well as tourists in general, who apparently are “consumers of the misery of the past.”
Never mind that the example image in the Core 77 piece is of the Mona Lisa—hardly a picture of misery, unless you want to get all Marxist about it. The money that Francesco del Giocondo wasted on that portrait of his wife should have been in the hands of Florence’s working poor!
Anyway.
Tom’s response was to take the high road of assuming generally good and intelligent intent on the tedbot’s part. He chose to (a) poke at this random lump of spewage by asking if tedbot had never been a tourist, the reply to which included the elaboration “I guess it’s just the sort of thing that strikes me as tasteless… taking crappy snapshots of the remnants of a painful history,” and (b) say something relevant and thoughtful on the matter, citing personal experience and reframing the tension between tourists and locals as an “art opportunity” and matter for consideration by “physical interaction designers in the tourist industry.”
I always admire that kind of graceful and classy redirection. Whereas my response to the tedbot’s comments would have been, “Oh, shut the fuck up, you pretentious git,” Tom’s was more like, “Oh, go make some art, you pretentious young interaction designer.” Kind advice, assuming you’re not already drowning in phys-comp wretchedness.
But I’m still not satisfied with sidestepping the basic assumption that tourists and tourism, in general, are bad.
What is a tourist? NOAD says it’s “a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure.” So, isn’t that something we want to encourage? Isn’t a big part of The Problem with this country right now that there are too many people who’ve never ventured outside their native zip code, have no interest in doing so, and think that everyone outside that line is Other? Travel is not always but often broadening.
I think that if you took ten ignorant, isolated/isolationist Americans and dropped them in the middle of, say, Rome, at least five of them would learn something. For example, they might learn that people in other countries don’t just talk differently—a common misconception about foreigners seeming to be that they’re just like us, only they’re doing everything in Italian/French/Chinese/etc. and they’re dumb—but they also dress differently, drive differently, design signs differently, shop differently, build differently, use public space differently, think differently. Some of our hypothetical tourists would undoubtedly go home confirmed in all their ignorant assumptions about people not like themselves, because there are always some people who can see only what they expect to see. Hence all those people who still believe that the 9/11 hijackers were I-raqis, and that Barack Obama is one of them A-rab muslins. But others would realize that some of the assumptions on which they’d based their assumptions were unfounded. It might take them a while, but the experience would make some permanent dent in those people’s ignorance.
Of course, the best thing that could happen to our hypothetical tourists would be for them to have the good fortune to ask for directions from somebody kind and generous, who in addition to pointing out the way would also engage them in conversation. Maybe they’d even have a meal together. Maybe they’d exchange e-mail addresses and stay in touch after the trip—for example, to send a crappy, flashed-out snapshot of our tourist standing in front of the Colosseum with his or her arm around the friendly Italian. Tell me you’ve never seen this kind of photo.
That kind of exchange—random and rudimentary as it is—humanizes both sides of the relationship. The funny-talking Italian becomes a specific funny-talking Italian; the stupid American tourist becomes a specific stupid American tourist. And forever after, those two people will probably think of each other, whenever they’re tempted to generalize about the other’s country, linguistic group, race, whatever. And that kind of thinking is what makes people less stupid, right?
So maybe instead of trying to fuck with the clueless, tasteless tourists by sneaking stupid messages into their crappy snapshots, we should fuck with them by talking to them. Fuck with them by trying to belie the stereotypes about the people in the place that they’re visiting, wherever it may be—such as that New Yorkers will probably run off with your camera if you ask them to take a photo of you standing in front of the whatever. Or that, if they don’t do something outright illegal like that, they’ll probably fuck up your snapshots by projecting crap into them, and then deliberately give you wrong directions.
Being kind is a little more work than simply sneering at people, but it might also be a tad more constructive.
Photo: Mona Lisa by See Wah Cheng; some rights reserved.
I think Marshall McLuhan makes a lot more sense if you add the direct address “Dude,” followed by a comma, to the beginning of each paragraph or pithy sentence. As in,
Dude, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace,
or
Dude, the essence of automation technology is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.
or
Dude, the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are cool.
or
Dude, we are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.
Yeah, like, totally, dude. But please, sir, do not bogart that joint.
McLuhan’s writing is more comprehensible than the Walter Benjamin piece, which still deflects every attempt at comprehension, but this is likely because it’s easier to dismiss as simply incoherent nonsense. As with the Benjamin, I feel like we are entering the discussion in medias res.
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.
What in the Sam Hill is he talking about? Is there an antecedent missing somewhere? How does electricity extend “our” central nervous system? And who you calling “we,” white man? Apparently it doesn’t include me, because two pages later there’s
It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.
I’m sorry, but “the Negro” has always been involved in my life, thank you very much.
I know, I know, he was writing in a different era. But still, presumably we are being asked to read this because it has something relevant to say to our current studies. Okay, what could that be?
It’s got to be something more profound than the simple “Wow! It’s like he wrote this yesterday!” section on page 30, where we learn that (a) violent movies and video games engender real-world violence, and (b) living in Orange Alert all the time is completely meaningless. It’s also got to be something more germane than the assertion that
A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets and hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. . . . Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tencing to happen as a result of TV in America.
which is expressed more clearly and concretely in Here Comes Everybody.
Is it the litany of hot and cold items, which is exactly as useful as (though significantly less amusing than) the game of dividing everything and everyone into “punk” or “goth”?
| waltz | courtly and choral dance styles |
| radio | telephone |
| movies | TV |
| photographs | cartoons |
| ballet | speech |
| phonetic alphabet | hieroglyphs |
| paper | stone tablets |
| lecture | seminar |
| book | dialogue |
| steel axes | stone axes |
etc.
How does any of this relate to what we are doing? Is this a connection that’s obvious to everyone else in the program—are they all, like, Dude, that’s so profound? Am I alone in having a block against finding anything useful in this kind of free-floating jive? Is it simply meant to be provoking? If so, then it’s not working—every week, we seem to have less and less discussion about the reading.
I read steadily, if slowly. Mostly nonfiction, and novels from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I don’t think I’m a lazy reader; the kind of book I like best is one that helps you see things from a different perspective. But this kind of writing makes me want to pitch the book across the room. Every article we’ve had to read for this class is of the sort that causes my brain to completely shut down. These readings bring out in me what one of my friends calls “Republican moments”: they make me want to start hollering about those elitist, arugula-eating people who always have to go and use those ten-cent words.
It is, as I said weeks ago, precisely the kind of writing that made me decide, after suffering through plenty of it in college, not to apply to graduate school in English. Yet here I find myself, again. Is this merely the result of sleep deprivation?
In any case, since you asked, here’s my response: This is bullshit.
The one thing I did get out of this reading is a list of other—and, I hope, better—books to read that may be more illuminating. These include,
Get it now! Detailed, full-color documentation of the famed MC Squared midterm project!
MC_Squared(fin).pdf (14.68 MB; sorry, it contains a couple of embedded videos)
We gave our presentation today, the thing mostly worked, and it wasn’t too embarrassing. And, unlike some people in the class, my group actually got two or three hours of precious, golden sleep the night—well, morning—before. (We closed down the floor at about 3:30 a.m., but a few of our classmates relocated to the library or some such place to keep working. Everybody seemed pretty crispy by 9:30 this morning.)
So, . . .
I didn’t have a partner because apparently everybody else was already working with someone. This meant I could work on the video at home. BUT I don’t have a tripod or copy stand at home, I couldn’t find the data cable for either of my cameras, and I didn’t feel like blowing $50 on an iStopMotion license. So I shot each frame by hand, aligned them in Photoshop, tweened more frames in between some of them, and strung them together in both the demo of iStopMotion (which leaves a watermark—hence the slight letterboxing) and iMovie HD. The last chunk of frames are not aligned—it’s amazingly laborious to do so—which is why they wobble all over the place.
In a word, it sucks.
But, hey! I learned so much.
