viz.

Image Credit: Passive Aggressive Notes

Last Friday, the DWRL hosted an RSA webinar featuring Dr. Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English and the University of California Santa Barbara.  The webinar, which was broadcast over Google Hangouts thanks to our audio/visual team here in the DWRL, encouraged interactivity via social media and generated a lively discussion.  I wanted to follow up on Dr. Raley’s talk about tactical media as speculative practice with an example from this week’s headlines: the “hacking” of a San Francisco based gym’s website by the site designer himself.

Fitness SF contracted Frank Jonen, an independent web developer, to design their website in May of 2012.   On February 15, after nine months of non-payment, Jonen took action by re-claiming the website he designed as a means to “out” Fitness SF for non-payment. 

"A Tingle Table used by the IRS" — Image Credit: Eric Paul Zamora/Associated Press (at nytimes.com)

A peculiar find in David Foster Wallace’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center points to the intersection of two threads in Wallace’s thinking: questions of fraudulence and authenticity, and the notion of procedurality. Wallace frequently engaged and struggled with the former throughout his career, asking what it means to authentically engage another person and inhabit another consciousness without the needs, addictions, and deceptions of the self getting in the way. That is, what does it look like to operate outside of those mechanisms that turn us back inside of ourselves and translate our experience into the logic of the self?

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Elkhart, IL 2003

Over the holidays I stumbled across Copia, a series of photos by Brian Ulrich. Throughout them he resists the packaged narratives we have for our consumerism. In both critique and support it seems that the act of shopping is pushed toward two extremes. There’s shopping as glitzy exuberance and shopping as a soul crushing slog. In Copia we can see a different perspective. He writes that the project “began as a response to the heated environment of 2001.” In the aftershock of September 11th any possible community driven healing process “was quickly outpaced as the government encouraged citizens to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy thereby equating consumerism with patriotism.” His photographs show, more than anything else, a deadening sense of resignation. The people in his photos are grimfaced; they are doing their duty as they move through the various middleclass shopscapes. In these photographs we see shoppers as the products experience them.