Back from the lovely city Budapest where I picked up this this scene which got my thoughts spinning about time, history, attention, technology, composition (yes…!), clothes; relations as human-technology and human-animal, about the wild and the domesticated; about tourism.
Back from the lovely city Budapest where I picked up this this scene which got my thoughts spinning about time, history, attention, technology, composition (yes…!), clothes; relations as human-technology and human-animal, about the wild and the domesticated; about tourism.
At lunch, a large, loud American man leaned over and asked Masse and me “He, what are you guys here to learn”. I instantly felt the word “learn” somewhat strange in this conference. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the word ‘learn’ is connected with the task of [...]
At lunch, a large, loud American man leaned over and asked Masse and me “He, what are you guys here to learn”. I instantly felt the word “learn” somewhat strange in this conference. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the word ‘learn’ is connected with the task of acquiring facts in the traditional western education system. And that’s how I interpreted his question s:”What facts are you here to acquire?”. As John Maeda said in his talk yesterday:
‘Eduction’ is a dysfunctional concept.
Traditional learning is tightly connected with traditional education. I’m at this conference (Web 2.0 Expo) to acquire viewpoints of things more or less familiar to me, I am not here to acquire facts. I think some programming freaks might pick up a factual tip or two, but the sessions I’m looking for are about viewpoints about the interface between technology and ideology. This is learning too of course, but does the western educational system aknowledge this? No, not generally. Perhaps that’s what’s making it dysfunctional.
I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Right now, I’m listening to Douglas Rushkoff. I shoot a photo with my Canon G10. Of course I wanted to be able to write the name of the person on the image and send it directly to Flickr. This is easily done with the iPhone, but [...]
I’m at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Right now, I’m listening to Douglas Rushkoff. I shoot a photo with my Canon G10. Of course I wanted to be able to write the name of the person on the image and send it directly to Flickr. This is easily done with the iPhone, but the image quality in complex light is not that good on mobile phones. Please give me social features on my digital camera!
The iPhone version below is shoot in the app “mobile photos” and uploaded directly to Flickr, with added title and tags…
I will uppdate this post with the G10 photo during the day. I have to listen to Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia now. He is talking about ‘location’ – my favorite word right now…
Update!
The corresponding photo from my Canon G10, with the flash turned off:
The most beautiful piece of technology on this earth? Well, it has to be the absolutely dazzling fire trucks embellishing San Francisco. In the photo below I was lucky enough to catch a fire truck in its womb… I strongly suspect a lot of calls to the San Francisco fire department are false calls from the Mayor [...]
The most beautiful piece of technology on this earth? Well, it has to be the absolutely dazzling fire trucks embellishing San Francisco. In the photo below I was lucky enough to catch a fire truck in its womb… I strongly suspect a lot of calls to the San Francisco fire department are false calls from the Mayor himself, just to fill the street with these beauties…
When Voltaire’s fictional character Pangloss stated that “we are living in the best of all possible worlds”, he gave root to the concept ‘Panglossianism’. Panglossianism means that everything happens for the best, which could be viewed as an optimistic view of determinism. The viewpoint is given in the novel Candide and the character Pangloss is [...]
When Voltaire’s fictional character Pangloss stated that “we are living in the best of all possible worlds”, he gave root to the concept ‘Panglossianism’. Panglossianism means that everything happens for the best, which could be viewed as an optimistic view of determinism. The viewpoint is given in the novel Candide and the character Pangloss is an irony of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It has always baffled me that this view is called ‘optimism’. Leibniz asserted that God had created the world in the best possible way and since God is good, this way must be good in the sense that a better world is out of the question.
I find this view of optimism repugnant. Optimism has to do with the possibility for change. Feeling happy or content with a predetermined society, has to be the ultimate slave mentality. Panglossianism is the death of creativity.
Once, someone labeled me as a technological optimist. Technological optimism is generally understood as the doctrine that a growing number of technological improvements in such areas as food production, environmental quality and energy will sustain life as human population soars. I am a technological optimist, but only in the following sense:
I am a technological activist and hopist. An optimist in the panglossianist sense, is a person who are against both technological progress and reduction.
The structural flatness of web 2.0 represents a hope for a better future. This hope does not originate in technology, but in communication. Communication is the key to the future, and flatness is the key to communcation, and web 2.0 technologies are the key to flatness.
To exemplify, in an academic mindset the paragraph above might lead to resenting questions as “who are saying that web 2.0 represents a hope for a better future?”. This resenting question has to do both with the objectivity problem and the hierarchical viewpoint. Since an academic voice is supposed to be the voice of objectivity, the claim does not have any location and therefore has to be referred to a “real” location. In the hierarchical play this usually means looking upwards, or sideways, for a location. The problem is that the reference is also a voice of objectivity, and so it goes on in an endless play of empty locations. There is a simple remedy to the inclination of a “culture of no culture”, simple and still so almost unbelievable difficult. The remedy could be to view the spokesperson as a person, instead of mr Nothingness. It would seem like a person would be a reasonable location for communication. It would also be reasonable to regard features as gender, age, race and religion as objectivity striving, intrapersonal features instead of viewing them as destabilizing parameters in a cult of ostensible objectivity.
The video below is made by Tim Lovett.
LUNATIK is my final submission for uni this year. It’s an experimental animation that explores the
human mind – how we can subconsciously drift from one stream of thought to another.
I was thinking of the modernist poets, and writers as James Joyce, when I watched this movie. And still [...]
The video below is made by Tim Lovett.
LUNATIK is my final submission for uni this year. It’s an experimental animation that explores the
human mind – how we can subconsciously drift from one stream of thought to another.
I was thinking of the modernist poets, and writers as James Joyce, when I watched this movie. And still it’s a very long way from the spoken and written words, modern poets used to visualize a stream of consciousness. If one of the dadaist/surrealist poets, or a film maker as Luis Buñuel, would have watched this film, s/he would probably have understood it quite well.
The film also has some relation to the common field between the disciplines of digital film, sound and writing. Does it visualize the implosion created in the center of these three disciplines? Is this a deeper layer of media technology reception (or perception)?
[vimeo vimeo.com/2286161]
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