Steven J LeMieux's blog

Coffee Robots/Service Humans

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 04 May 2012 15:04:21 +0000

Image Credit: Briggo.com

There’s a coffee robot upstairs. I have never used it. Sometime earlier in the year—maybe over the winter break—a new, brightly colored store-front popped up in the Flawn Academic Center. It seemed to be selling coffee. It also seemed to be a robot. Rather than a counter with cash register, tip jar, and human barista, all the trappings we’ve come to expect , its front façade has screens and cups and coffee spouts. From what I’ve seen you can order right there, off to the side on a touch screen, or online. Think about that, you could buy a cup of coffee while you read this. If the coffee robot teams up with a fleet of delivery robots we’d really be living in some kind of future.

Image Credit: tacocopter.com

I’ve walked past the coffee robot maybe half a hundred times. There are always people milling about—ordering coffee, buying coffee, receiving coffee from the coffee robot. They must, too, be drinking coffee, but my focus is on the robot, not the humans. It bears mentioning, though, that even while my focus is on the robot I’m curious about the human element involved here. And so while I’ve never actually tried the robot out I have heard about the experience from friends and colleagues. Apparently the coffee robot has service humans at its disposal. They blend into the crows—well, at the very least, they don’t stand out. I haven’t seen anyone in a bright orange Briggo shirt, anyway. But I believe that they’re there. In a world with coffee robots service humans seem necessary.

Image Credit: Briggo.com

These human underlings seem to fill a necessary niche in the consumer chain. While most of our economic practices involve some blend of human/machine interaction—we might buy something online that’s built by robots and humans both then packaged, shipped, and delivered by humans and machines both, or we might buy a machine produced item from a human. With the coffee robot, though, the humans seem positioned to, rather than mediate the consumer/product relationship, simply facilitate a smooth interaction with the robot. They might be only temporary; perhaps they’re there to help nudge things along until we, generally, become used to our new coffee robot. But as it stands now they’re there to service its needs, to make excuses and provide support for human error.

Video Credit: Briggo.com

I’m intrigued by the coffee robot. I can’t help but wonder if it’s really doing all this work itself. Is it roasting the beans? grinding the beans? steeping the grounds? foaming the latte? That seems like a lot of work for a robot. Maybe the coffee robot is really a collection of coffee robots. We’re dealing with a robot community here—a machine multiplicity. It’s a bit disappointing that the Briggo coffee robot video doesn’t show us the meaty heart of the coffee robot itself—the video seems full of human created coffee. I suppose that its necessary to gently nudge people toward recognizing a robot as a competent barrista. Still, it does little to quell any suspicious that there might be humans hiding in the coffee robot.

Image Credit: Briggo.com

While walking by I’ve noticed that there’s a door into the robot. Truth told, I’d much rather a robot have an access panel than a door, but you can’t win them all. People enter doors while they only interface with an access panel—you could feed milk and beans and water through the access panel. With a door I have to image that rather than simply feeding the robot the raw materials it needs the service humans have to fully enter and configure the raw materials within the robot. This is some sort of symbiotic relationship we’ve got going here. It would be as though our micro-flora and fauna not only helped out with digestion but took the time to gather food and bring it back inside us. Coffee robot has got it made—doesn’t even need to chew.

Conspicuous Radios

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Before creating the “Patriot” radio, Norman Bel Geddes had long been involved with traditional, cabinet radio design. And while many of his cabinet radios follow the robust, furniture-esque aesthetic common to radios of the day this radio, created for the New York World Fair, 1939, breaks that mold. The “Patriot,” rather than simply blending into the décor of a room, forcefully makes itself known. This radio, rather conspicuously, embodies a particular patriotic flair. Most prominently, it features the seven red and six white stripes of the United States flag. Its knobs feature stars, and in most models red, white, and blue are the predominate colors.

Image Credit: Tube Radio Land

It would be unfair, though, especially in retrospect, to label the “Patriot” radio as something like nationalistic kitsch. Even if it was produced in order to “create an optimistic and useful emblem of American technology, industry, and identity” (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History) it carries with it an unabashedly forceful design that cannot be brushed aside. Rather than merely carrying the trappings of or a symbol for a nationalistic spirit this radio operated, specifically as an object, to promote itself more than any nationalism. So that while a flab might be mobilized to act as mere symbol this radio carries with it more weight. And unlike the various wood-paneled cabinet radios that worked to hide themselves, to blend into parlors, the “Patriot” radio works actively captures a user’s attention. The music it relays becomes a sideshow.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Geddes also designed a portable shoulder radio for Philco in 1946. This predates the mass production of transistor based devices by roughly ten years. That it still relied on vacuum tubes rather than the significantly smaller transistors accounts for its relative size. Even taking tubes into consideration, though, this shoulder mounted radio imagines a future where music is nearly ubiquitous. In some ways, though, this imagined future isn’t ours. While our current musical commonplace is almost painfully private—headphones on every head and earbuds in every ear—Geddes’ shoulder radio trends toward both a publicly embodied object and a public sound. The radio, with its brilliant white speaker, draws the eye, so that publically it works on multiple senses. It presents mobile music and spectacle both, and we can begin to see this radio as the ancestor to the shoulder mounted boom boxes of the eighties.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Turning toward our current musicscape, though, and the exceedingly common iPod (and its progeny) there’s a vastly different design principle in play. These devices are conspicuously inconspicuous. For all of their sleek lines and glossy screens and solid weight they shrink away as objects. Instead, they present themselves, present their use, as accessories, devices, prosthetics for a particular attitude. They work exactly as they should, beautifully when used how they are intended to be used, but they do so underhandedly. These are objects that bottom from the top.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Upending the familiar hierarchy of use these objects become the users and the humans are cast as device. And while it isn’t anything uncommon for human’s to be used by objects—I think the case could be made that the outcome of good design is that the human user becomes the used—the iPod, especially, and its descendents are particularly pernicious in their deception. They order not only a specific relation between object and human but organize a breadth of relations. Our encounters with music (economically, situationally, emotionally, environmentally) are shaped now, in large part (whether or not you use an iDevice), by the force of Apples music player. And they do it by simply tucking into things—your pocket, palm, car, stereo, desk. They elide their own presence and appear as nothing more than a ‘natural’ extension to an already configured human body.

Becoming Animal: Feeling Horsey

Steven J LeMieux — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

While in Star Wars, Lonesome Dove and True Grit we saw particular examples of the relationships humans have with horses —relationships that always seem to oscillate between recognizing horses as companions and treating them as bare property. And while with Jasha Lottin (NSFW) we saw in her slaughter and photo shoot the extent to which these animals are splayed out as props for both viewers and those actually interacting with actual horses. With a piece titled Que le cheval vive en moi, May the Horse Live in me in English, and created and performed by Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin (together they compose Art Orienté Objet) we can begin to see the emergence of a differently possible relationship between humans and horses.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via plastik

What is especially interesting about Laval-Jeantet’s transformation is that it is largely hidden from view. As spectators we can see her prosthetic hooves and her interactions with the horse. We can partially see the process she has undergone; she presents that process as a documented and material aspect of the performance, but if we consider the actual performance the intimate relationship she is building with this animal, then we must admit that not only is her transformation private but that the core of her art is too. May the Horse Live in me, then, is ultimately an unseen piece of performance art that can only be gestured toward. The action of it, her feelings, her blood, the relationship (material and immaterial both) formed between her and the horse can only be speculated at. Unlike every other piece that I’ve considered over the past several blog posts looked at where and how the horse is deliberately captured as a spectacle upon which humans act. Laval-Jeantet does not seem to capture or use the horse; instead, she only hints at her relationship with it.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

About the performance they note that “As a radical experiment whose long-term effects cannot be calculated, Que le cheval vive en moi questions the anthropocentric attitude inherent to our technological understanding. Instead of trying to attain ‘homeostasis,’ a state of physiological balance, with this performance, the artists sought to initiate a process of ‘synthetic transi-stasis,’ in which the only constant is continual transformation and adaptation. The performance represents a continuation of the centaur myth, that human-horse hybrid which, as ‘animal in human,’ symbolizes the antithesis of the rider, who as human dominates the animal.”( Art Orienté Objet via BuzzFeed)

By slowly taking a horse’s plasma into her body Laval-Jeantet began to engage a very particular sort of becoming. Toward forming this new sort of relationship with a horse she had to acculturate her body to the particulars of the horse’s. And even while something like 95% of the cells (by count, not weight) in a human body are nonhuman and while our DNA can hardly be called our own—so much of it matches other organisms’, and it is streaked through with the remains of viruses—the process of welcoming more cohesive aspects of another’s body—the plasma and immunoglobins in this case--is still a violent act. It’s tricky enough just transferring blood from human to human, but interspecies transfers add another layer of difficulty.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via we make money not art

So that when Laval-Jeantet began welcoming in the horse’s plasma and immunoglobins she performed a peculiar kind of autoimmunity. Looking toward autoimmunity broadly we can see an event where a body turns on its own protection and ultimately allows others entry. This occurs in cultures and institutions and bodies of all sorts. And in this case, where Laval-Jeantet underwent a months long process of slowly introducing horse immuniglobulins to her own bloodstream, rather than deliberately destroying her immune system she pulled the wool over its eyes—or, more generously, convinced it to play (nice) with the horse.

Image Credit: Miha Fras via plastik

About the entire process she notes. "I had the feeling of being extra-human… I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous and very diffident. The emotionalism of an herbivore. I could not sleep. I probably felt a bit like a horse.' (we make money not art via Centre Presse)

While Laval-Jeantet worked at an intertwined horsey becoming HumanimalAlex, a youtube user and member of the ongoing art group HumanimaL, performs a different kind of transformation. If Laval-Jeantet’s relationship with the horse seems bound in blood Alex’s is skin deep. Through a blend of exquisite full body makeup, a mask and tail, and deliberate movements Alex, rather than appearing horselike, appears to appear horselike. So that even with the tail and hooves and mask his humanness shines through (with the explicit dominance of the human being, I’m sure, purposeful). Rather than moving toward a relationship with the horse this sort of transformation invokes the horse as an inspiration for particularly human behaviors. It’s noted on HumanimaL’s website that these performances are for hire and that “this undeniably unique act is guaranteed to turn heads, no matter what the occasion so use your Humanimal to show the wild side of your event, conference, opening or launch.” Here the specter of the animal is mobilized for the distinctly human designs. Like in Lottin’s photos the horse, here blended into human forms, is reproduced as a prop. Unlike Marion Laval-Jeantet’s private relationship with the horse Alex’s is formed entirely in the public eye. And while his work turns heads Laval-Jeantet’s gives us the opportunity to imagine what a differently organized relationship might look like.

Eating the Golden Calf

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 21:41:37 +0000

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center

Eric Gill’s Calf is currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center as part of their new exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The calf first appears in the King James Bible in the following verses. “Make us gods, which shall go before us... And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me...And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:1-4). In both the statue and in this chapter of Exodus we can begin to consider the relationship between these humans and gods and animals.

The molten calf, bought and paid for with the recently freed people’s golden jewelry, isn’t an idol intended for the veneration of animals. Instead, it seems as though this golden calf is taken up and used by humans just as an actual calf might be. The calf remains a beast. Derrida’s in his recently published lectures The Beast and Sovereign proposed that culturally both the beast and the sovereign have been perceived as operating outside the scope of law--the sovereign because his actions operate as the law and the beast because it is incapable of stupidity, and without the ability to respond it only ever reacts.

Image Credit: Steven LeMieux

We see this same configuration played out upon the body of the golden calf. It is rendered as both animal and god, doubly beyond the scope of the law (and it was precisely when Moses was receiving the commandments that his errant followers took up with the calf). And with both gods and animals outside the scope of the law they become null spaces. Humans then build law, desire, impetus upon their bodies. The calf is constructed not so that they might follow it but rather so that they might drive it before them. Even as they chase it its flight and footsteps are rendered as guidance. The golden calf is caught up in human use just as much as its fleshy fellows.

Image Credit: Eric Gill via 1st-art-gallery.com

Gill’s statue plays along these lines. It is both innocent and virile. The calf’s outstretched head with its slight frown and large, vacant eyes gives it the look of a newborn creature. It sees all the world in a dull wonder. The statue also prominently features its penis and set of still gilded scrotum. The statue, made of hoptonwood stone in 1912, was originally gilded. Over time, though, most of the gilding has flaked off. Gill’s involvement with the calf, though, didn’t follow the same purpose as much of his religious works. He designed the calf for the newly created avant-garde nightclub the Cave of the Golden Calf.

With this we might begin to look at the decadence heaped upon both the images of the calf and its representation in Exodus. “And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it” (Exodus 19-20). Moses, displeased with the tenor of the celebration surrounding the calf, forces the people to eat their calf—one use is simply turned to another. And with the calf eaten he replaced the nascent path built upon the body of the animal with his textual commandments.

Horsing Around: Inside and Out

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:49:48 +0000

Image credit Unknown via f*** yeah, wild horses

Last week I wrote about the curious dual-natured relationship we seem to have with horses. In books and film and popular media horses are situated as both friend, companion, partner and as disposable beast, object, mere chattel. Last week, too, I teased the case of Jasha Lottin and the relationship she had with a horse. Her story is surprisingly simple at first blush. Lottin and her friend bought a 32-year-old, near-dead horse already scheduled to be euthanized. They shot it in the head with a high powered rifle—apparently killing it instantly and painlessly. Then Lottin, a nudist and Star Wars fan, staged a photo shoot featuring her and the now-dead horse. Throughout the following post I’ll be discussing her pictures with the horse. They are excessively gory; there is some nudity. Discretion advised. Not safe for work content after the break.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin is tucked into the now emptied out horse—Skywalker style. Its organs and blood are splayed out on the ground; she has replaced them. Her smiling face pokes out near its back legs. There’s no certainty of the horse’s sex, but in either case she takes the place of its genitals. These photos, especially those with Lottin tucked inside, trend towards neither horse nor human but instead a combination of the two. They’re, together, an inverted centaur composed upon and within the body of a horse. The combination is, as we must be sure to remember, not equal. Even though she has positioned herself within the horse, in its belly, its Lottin that consumed the horse both figuratively and literally.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

There is something strange about these images of her eating some bit of the horse. Last week I wrote about Daenerys’ ritualistic consumption of the horse heart. She was glistening and bloody, and while she and the heart were prominent there was no horse to be seen. Lottin’s consumption, though, doesn’t have nearly the same pop, the same flare. Her bloody hands look like they were dipped in red corn syrup; the piece of horse she tugs on seems small and insignificant. The banality of her representation forces the viewer to actively recall the embodied reality of her act. These photos point toward an actual woman and an actual horse and actual death.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Throughout almost all of the photos Lottin wears a broad grin. Here Lottin and her unnamed friend are posing with the horse’s heart. Both grinning, they hold the heart up in what must be a pretty common hunter’s-fresh-kill-trophy pose (I’ve taken any number of such pictures while fishing). Her constant grin is one of the most intriguing aspects of these pictures. There’s no sense of gravity, no notion of sadness or remorse or really any hint that this entire event is anything but lark. It should be noted that after posting these photos Lottin was reported to the authorities; after investigating they found that she broke no laws. What I think people found so shocking, though, was her smile. Because of that smile—a fixed photo smile, unconscious, reflexive, ubiquitous—there isn’t any real room for anything but the snap acknowledgement of these photos as simple snap shots of (what many saw to be) grotesque activity.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin stands naked and covered in blood, perhaps having just emerged from inside the dead horse. This photo, though, subverts any sense of hybridization or actual relationship between Lottin and the horse. She has killed the animal and eaten it and played within it, but still there’s nothing but a facile connection. The blood remains on the surface as she looks down at the dead horse as nothing more than a hollowed out prop. What is there here to separate her from the spectacle of the films written about last week? Her horse, though specifically killed in order to make the photos, is little more than a prop.

Image credit Ars Electronica 2011 via New Scientist

Next week I’ll be looking at a different kind of horsey performance. In 2011 Marion Laval-Jeantet undertook a piece of performance art that explored the possibilities of a more substantial, embodied, relationship with a horse.

Horsey Beginnings: Setting the Stage

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:34:28 +0000

Image Credit the Bureau of Land Management

In George Lucas's Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo rides a tauntaun out into the frozen wastes of Hoth; he needs to find his friend, Luke Skywalker. In George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Deanerys Targaryen, a princess in exile, takes center stage in a ceremony for the sake of her child-to-be. She has to eat a raw, fresh horse heart. In Washington County, a Portland woman and her friend buy a near dead horse, shoot it in the head, cut it open, and take pictures, lots of bloody pictures. The following post does not contain these images (a future post will, though).

Image Credit Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Han Solo has to find his friend. He saddles his tauntaun and rides out into the rapidly freezing night. He's told that he won't get far. His tauntaun will freeze before he reaches the first marker. Han doesn't care. Han doesn't care about his tauntaun, and there's no real distinction made, on his part, between this living transportation and his normal mechanical means of getting around. The tauntuans are pretty strange; they look like a kangaroo-dinosaur blend. What almost instantly endears them to the audience, though, is that he saddles the animal; it has reins. Han's a real space cowboy now. He, for a moment, has a real live horse. These tauntauns, too, have perhaps the most pathos filled utterance of any creature in Star Wars. They are filled with emotion. Well, that's the case until Han cuts his now dead tauntaun open and we see that it's filled with guts. Han, as he stuffs Luke into the tauntaun, notes its stink. The tauntuan--dead, sliced open, and stuffed with Luke, is left without a shred of dignity.

Image Credit Game of Thrones via Nerdy Gamer Girl

[A slight note to the reader. While I didn't feel terrible about spoiling a thirty year old movie Game of Thrones (show and book both) are slightly more recent. So, (slight) spoiler warning.]

Deanerys, still pretty much a child, is married off to an older man, the leader of a people dependent on horses. He frightens her, but she learns to love him, and she learns to love the horses. When she discovers that she is pregnant she is taken to some elders and told to eat a horse heart to prove that she's woman enough bear her husband's child. In the book, Martin doesn't spend terribly much time describing the horse eating, but in the show they give us a lavish scene. We don't see the heart cut from any horse, and in some ways it's presented as its own object, free of any horsey connections, much as you might buy from a store. Well, not quite store like. The heart is still, seemingly, full of blood, and as Deanerys works her way through the several pounds of flesh she gets covered. The scene is hard to watch; she, covered in blood, shiny and slimy, nauseous. She chokes down every bite.

Image Credit The Searchers via Gone Movie

We don't, as a general rule, eat horses in the United States. Wikipedia has a nice run down of various historical reasons horsemeat is taboo in different cultures, but one of the most convincing reasons that I have heard for the American distaste of horse meat is that horses are looked at less as beasts and more as companion animals. People talk about cowboys and their relationship with horses as fundamentally ingrained in an American imaginary. And while I don't know if there is any particular research to back up these claims, having grown up watching westerns as a little boy they strike a chord with me. But the horse, the cowboy's companion, is always still an animal. It can be killed, but its killing, while not a damning act is at least worrisome. Horses occupy the curious double space of both means of transportation and friend.

Image Credit Lonesome Dove via American Bedu

[My post is full of spoilers today. Both Lonesome Dove and True Grit are pretty old, but with the new True Grit getting released recently I thought that I'd give a heads up for anyone that is about to watch it.]

They have personality when the story demands and none when it doesn't, and these switches seldom need justification. In Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove there are named horses and unnamed Gus cuts his unnamed horse down and uses it to hide from gunshot--neither McMurtry nor the reader skip a beat in killing the animal. A good portion of the first chapter, and throughout the rest of the long novel, Captain Call interacts with a horse; he has a relationship with the Hell Bitch. She's as tough, tougher maybe than he is.

Image Credit True Grit via The Diplomacy of Kasey Driscoll

Han's search for Luke and tauntaun sacrifice mirrors Rooster's race to save Mattie's life in True Grit. Throughout the story (equally held up in both films, and I assume the novel) horses are front and center. They're haggled over, argued about, praised. And though different characters approach them with different intensities, Mattie’s care and affection for the horses isn't played off as a little girl's whims. Her strength, throughout the story is apparent, and her relationship with her horse Little Blackie is presented as genuine and admirable. But Rooster sacrifices Little Blackie--sacrifice cleans things up too much. He brutally rides him to death. In the more recent film this point is amplified. Rooster rides Little Blackie as far and fast as he'll go, then stabs him to push him further. Once Little Blackie falls Rooster shoots him. But Mattie is saved. The climax of the film revolves around this horse. The characters are forgotten and we feel for the horse; Rooster disgusts us. Minutes after the horse is dead he is forgotten, though. The film ends firmly focused on Mattie and Rooster, neither are disgusting.

That horses are disposable and relatable for many people raised on westerns and American horse culture is why the story of Jasha Lottin is so strange. In next week's post I'll be focused on her actions and pictures.

Staring at Shoppers Staring

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:10:09 +0000

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.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Chicago, IL 2003

For all the grief poured upon malls and big-box stores they are often still held up as great places to people watch. Go to the mall and see the suburban dad in his natural habitat. These photos, though, don’t imagine people seeing people; the lens is not a stand in for our eyes. And one of the most intruiging aspects of Ulrich’s work is that more these photos actively work against a human gaze—they’re an environment’s gaze, a pillar’s gaze, a toy’s gaze. Because there’s no readymade anthropomorphic gaze that a viewer can enter into there’s no real sense of familiarity in these photos. So even though nearly any viewer has been and most probably is the people featured we cannot find a point of recognition.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Gurnee, IL 2005

While it’s easy to read a certain smirk into the photographs, I think that we should resist the impulse. Ulrich, or perhaps more properly, the objects watching us aren’t mean spirited. By finding a spirit in them at all (other than mean it’s exceedingly easy to read pity into them) I think that we miss the mark. So rather than attempting an interpretation of the image we can instead, see it as an active flattening of the objects in play. The boy and the miniatures and the landscapes as objects in relation to one another.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Untitled, 2006 (0621)

Copia has been an active project since 2001, and eventually Ulrich shifted from malls and big-box stores to thrift shops. And while many of these photos capture people in the same way he did before the resignation is compounded. Five years on from the project’s beginning and the heaped objects have taken on the empty burden of the shoppers. They are worn out, used up.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Rose, Northridge Mall, 2010

Ulrich continues to move and nine years into the project his focus has largely shifted to the stores themselves. Amidst the busted out, weary, empty malls and supercenters is the above photograph of an abandoned mall’s parking lot. The parking lot has slowly gone to seed. The once neatly trimmed planters have overgrown, and grass and weeds have begun to poke through the concrete. With this Ulrich, rather than playing on something like a hopeful return-to-nature, instead shows the naturalness of the mall. These environments, supercenters and malls and big-box retail buildings, are inhabited by people and plants and products.

Journey to the Center of a Triangle

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:38:36 +0000

I don't often get terribly excited about geometry. But in the case of the above video I just can't help myself. My first impulse, after viewing the entire clip was to blame my sense of wonder on the soundtrack. By layering music from Inception Robert Mikhayelyan and Alex Gill are hitching their wagon onto an incredibly carefully manicured experience. Inception was sold as, and sold itself as, this evocative, mind-blowing experience. And whether or not the film actually accomplished that for any given viewer hardly matters in the face of a sale we could so easily read. Inception, both in and out of the film, sold its sense of wonder so blatantly that it's the sales pitch that sticks--slightly Pavlovian, we hear the music we prepare for befuddled amazement.

Image credit: Bruce & Katharine Cornwell Journey to the center of a Triangle

This geometry, though, moves past this simple explanation. The editors of this video have created another with the same music, and while fun enough it doesn't have near the same result (neither does, for example, something like Inception Cat). I don't think that we can pin everything on the effects of synchronicity either. There is a tangible pleasure in finding patterns and meaning in seemingly disparate events, and as exampled in things like The Dark Side of the Rainbow we work hard at experiencing these blended experiences as potent. Soundtracks, unplanned ones especially, invoke audience participation; they ask the viewer to create wonder for herself. It's easy with this video to line it up with different tracks, and I tested out several different pairings (Justice and Battles both work fairly well). What I found, though, is that I had been shifting the blame. It wasn't the audio, synchronous or otherwise, that produced the sense of wonder I experienced; it was clever pedagogy and the facts of the matter.

Image credit: Bruce & Katharine Cornwell Journey to the center of a Triangle

And while geometry as a general concept doesn't elicit much more than apathy from me nowadays (my ninth grade geometry class was an exercise in apathy and frustration) the specifics of it can be shocking. The underlying video, Journey to the center of a Triangle by Bruce & Katharine Cornwell, is more than just some visuals behind a soundtrack; it confounds our perception of reality. It shows that there are four distinct centers to any given triangle--the majority of which different than common sense would lead us to believe. As the video progresses through the different centers, performing each on different triangles, it deepens the world; it reveals an understanding of the world, perceptual truths about the world, that in the day-to-day are unthought. There is something deeply satisfying about the fundamental multiplicities espoused here.

Image credit: Protious at en.wikipedia

More than simply presenting the facts of the matter, though, this video, true to its name, takes us on a journey. It begins by moving through the expected center of triangles. The centers are telegraphed to the viewer through the lines and circles it uses to find them. Throughout each method the viewer is able to see how, exactly the center is found, and the methodical pace gives him or her time to project a particular center ahead of any reveal. These projected expectations, though, are continually subverted, and it's that subversion that creates a lasting sense of wonder. While this could result in frustration there are so many triangles and examples that by the end of any given method we can catch up so that finally we project correctly and understand where and why a center appears. The video, in some ways, follows the example of Socrates and Meno's slave. The reader and slave both (well, in my experience) make the same common sense mistake while trying to find twice the area of a square. When Socrates then points out the error made and proper method we're both able to perform and understand the world in a new way.

Feeding Machines, Eating Machines, Digesting Machines

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:49:24 +0000

(Image Credit: liberallifestyles.com)

Our encounters with food are wrought through with machines; we eat alongside them in human-machine collaboration. Almost any moment of consumption has at its conception this collaborative process. Simple tools like knives and forks and plates and cups when combined with hands and mouths as well as concepts like etiquette form complex eating machines. Dinning, even absent any consideration for the bodies that are actually being consumed (and hose bodies, of course, have perhaps even more drastic combinatory consequences for the human body), always involves this sprawl. The body is expanded, splayed out, so that any particular point--tongue, teeth, fork, fingers--act as a discrete component of a larger machine.

In this scene from Modern Times we see a new (75 years later and it's still new to us) kind of eating machine. It leaves the worker standing at his post, hands free, while it brings the food to his mouth. It even takes standards of cleanliness into account, taking care to wipe his mouth every so often. Like much of the film the machine is played up for uneasy laughter. Even as the machine seems to appropriate the Tramp's body, sucking the agency and pleasure out of his relationship with the food, we're given to a nervous laughter that is equal parts schadenfreude and relief that this specter hasn't yet materialized (for humans, at least. There is, of course, a long history of force feeding the animals we consume.). We have to ask ourselves about the differences between this eating machine and the ones we normally are engaged in.

(Image Credit: Modern Times via The Sill of the World)

The Tramp is strapped in; he is explicitly a component in a larger system, and we see his relationship with the food externalized. It's a transfer of an agency that perhaps has always already been external. Our tastes, desires, hunger, etc. have never been feelings that we control; instead they are forces we encounter. And while the machine does eventually go haywire, overworking the Tramp-as-component, it isn’t necessarily strange. Who hasn't had an unfortunate encounter with a fork or spoon or chop sticks? We're not just involved as components in sprawling eating machines, but as components in glitchy eating machines. Frictions abound as we bite on tines and tongues and cheeks and drop morsels and spill soup and choke. Soon after this scene we see the Tramp, himself, eaten by a machine. He is wormed through its belly, touching and working on various portions, before he's eventually vomited out. Now partially digested, he's depicted as a machine with a loose screw; desires unhinged he works every screw in sight.

(Image Credit: Auger and Loizeau)

These feeding machines incorporate the human body as a key component in their sprawl; no matter how they’re splayed out the human body continues as the eating, energized component. James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have conceptualized a series of robots that eat without any human intervention. The Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots are designed as self-serving loops that power their consumptive practices by eating common household pests. The robot's relationship with humans can be seen as a secondary characteristic.

(Image Credit: Auger and Loizeau)

Auger and Loizeau liken them to pets like lizards or snakes and various television shows that we keep and watch (that we consume) only so that we might witness the consumptive practices of other bodies. These robots, designed with entertainment in mind, eat pests so that they can continue to eat pets while we watch (while we visually eat them). These eating machines--table, lamp, clock, decoration--make disturbingly apparent the sprawling, tangled quality of mechanized eating. Eating and feeding machines encompass not only those bodies that enact the consumption but also the consumed bodies as well; eating machines are always already eating themselves

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Last week, alongside his pigs, I mentioned Wim Delvoye's digestion machine Cloaca. Cloaca is ultimately a brand name for a series of machines that seek to replicate human digestion and defecation. These shitting machines, like the feeing and eating machines are also human-machine-food collaborations. With these, though, the human is put into what could be a curious position; the machine co-opts the human. It makes humans the mechanistic portion of its eating practice; they ready the enzymes and digestive juices, feed the machine, and maintain it alongside its computer guidance system. Cloaca machines have to be continuously fed and powered (unlike the small conceptual robots above Cloaca isn't powered by what it eats) or it will dry out; the bacteria that enable its digestion will starve and die. Cloaca is a living machine. But this mechanized roll as caretaker isn't strange or foreign to humans, though. We fed pets, children, ourselves. Our own digestion and especially indigestion, already separate our consumptive practices into a concatenation of many, disparate parts. Cloaca not only forcefully manifests us in that roll it exemplifies the machine-food-human hybrid that eating entails.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

In the early, large Cloaca machines we can see the long multiplicity of digestion--gasses, bacteria, food, enzymes, salts, pumps, fluid, containers, tubes, acids, shit. Delvoye, in an interview, mentions the importance of bacteria in human and machine digestion. "In these intestines are living bacteria. Without these bacteria, you cannot digest your food. A baby, for example, is born with no bacteria in his body because he comes from the placenta. But then immediately, once he is born, he receives these bacteria." (lacanian ink) These bacteria, as an addition to the human body, deny any notion of solitary consumption. We cannot not consume with others. We cannot not shit with others. Cloaca, as its end result, produces waste indistinguishable from human waste. And while it's the Cloaca machines that are displayed in museums ultimately it's the feces they produce that humans consume. Delvoye notes in the above interview that "The product is bottled in silicon and sold as posthuman cyber-shit... We sold all the shit."

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Drawing on Pigs: Wim Delvoye's Art Farm

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:48:02 +0000

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

It's pretty easy to understand (and probably join in) the outrage surrounding Wim Delvoye's work with pigs. Tattoos aren't exactly taboo in any real fashion anymore, but even as commonplace as they've become they still seem to provoke discussions about the use of bodies as writing platforms. In casual conversation clothes don't have nearly the same effect; though, it could be argued that they write on the body just as much as any tattoo. Clothes, though, seem to be commonly taken up as transient while tattoos are (mostly) permanent. I doubt there would be nearly as strong a reaction to these pigs if they were just dressed up on a daily basis.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Of course, dressing a pig everyday would surely, almost undeniably, have a more noticeable impact on a pig's life. Clothes, no matter the degree to which a body has been naturalized to their presence, always remain external; through a thousand tiny hitches they make their presence known--they bind, sag, ride up, get caught, twist, shift, shuffle, flap in the wind. We put them on, we take them off; they are a forceful presence in our lives, but we do change them (What does this say, then, about, the 1% of America that isn’t allowed to change their prison uniforms?). And while there's lots of fun poked at animals wearing clothes (and at the people that dressed them) I don't believe there is anything near the response these tattooed pigs elicit. It's worth interrogating this difference.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

"To tattoo a pig, we sedate it, shave it and apply Vaseline to its skin" (Delvoye in a 2007 interview in ArtAsiaPacific found at Sperone Westwater). And then the pig and tattoo grow together. Grow, as Delvoyne imagines, in both size and value together. Pigs, posits Delvoye in the same interview, are largely thought of as having very little value. And even though these pigs may be spoiled they aren't co-authors in this project. Delvoyne states that "Yes, we name them; the name is often tattooed on the pig. It’s part of the personalization of the industrial product" (Delvoye). The pigs are breathing canvases. They shift and alter the tattoos they carry, but they are always still, fundamentally, written on. The pigs are eventually slaughtered for their skins. In the end they are either stuffed and mounted, or the skins are displayed.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Wim Delvoye worked his way up to live pigs. In the 1990s he began tattooing dead pigs, just working with pig skins he acquired from slaughter houses. It wasn't until 1997 that he worked with a live animal. In the late 90s he worked with and on a number of different pigs in different places. In 2004 he moved his practice to China and subsequently established Art Farm, a pig farm where raises and tattoos his pigs. It's worth noting that the other project Delvoye is known for is “Cloaca” a 39 foot long machine he built that eats, digests and shits.

(Image Credit: Wim Delvoye)

Delvoye is a vegetarian, but he both consumes and offers these pigs up for consumption as art. He's particularly apt in describing that "I prefer to show the pigs alive. In a perfect world, I would just show the Cloaca shit machines and live pigs—eating and excreting together" (Delvoye). The constructed shitting machine and the thoroughly marked pigs are rendered equivalent, both flattened out as spectacle. The tattooed pigs are conceived as part of an industrial machine, a machine made up by human, animal, machine, and conceptual bodies. Taken together the pigs and machine reposition the viewer as also taking part, "eating and excreting" pigs and machines both.

Next week I’ll be writing on an already thoroughly inscribed upon birthday-present-pig that’s part of The Harry Ransom Center’s exhibit The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925.

Finger Discipline

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:32:48 +0000

(Image Credit: Techanbob)

Typing, for me, has long been tied up with game playing. Before keyboards were tools for productive labor they were complex controllers for beating monkeys in vine races to bananas and outrunning pirates to the buried treasure. When I first encountered computers in the early 90s my parents, and later the public school I attended, took care to teach me how to type. I was told stories about aging businessmen that floundered when forced to type their own memos and warned about the impending importance of touch typing. So, in what seems to be a fairly common experience, I spent afternoons at home and computer sessions in school playing lots of Mavis Beacon. This ongoing utilitarian interaction with games, though, wasn't an early form of gamification.

Typing wasn't gamified for me. It was a specific physical interaction that I hoped to wrap my head and hands around so that I could drive my word-car faster than the computer; it was a game. Generally, when we look at gamification we’re considering an overlay that resituates our desires toward particular interactions and activities. Gamification overlays divert our attention so that rather than focusing on the relationships and interactions germane to particular activities we are shaped by our position on a leaderboard or the siren's song of a new badge. The gamified experience is always first with an abstract goal system and second with the activity at hand. So that while gamified systems situate users away from matters at hand and toward abstractions, games situate users toward a particular direct engagement with the matters at hand.

(Image Credit atypingtest.com)

I learned to type so that I could beat that damn monkey, but I didn't want to beat the monkey to achieve a badge. Even with all the talk about needing to know how to type to make it in the world today it was always about winning the game at hand. What I didn't realize, though, were the particular ways that these games were disciplining my relationship with the keyboard as a tool, an object, a body that I've developed a deep relationship with. Perhaps most noticeable is simply how I rest my hands on the keyboard. asdf jkl; each finger not only has a particular place but more unsettlingly feels out of place when resting elsewhere. The realization that your fingers are on the wrong row--a realization made apparent by the mangled words the configuration produces--is uncanny. I can't help but look down to see if my fingers are still my fingers and if the keys are still on straight.

(Image Credit: Shane McGlaun Slash Gear)

That's not to say that I don't or that you can't relate to the keyboard in different ways. These early typing games worked hard to cultivate a specifically productive relationship between the keyboard and my fingers. They focused on speed and precision and largely situated the keyboard as a tool to be mastered. The dissonance between the keys and fingers, the utter unnaturalness of it all, was something to be smoothed over--from my mind to the computer's screen with nothing in-between. This same effaced immediacy is disciplined through other games, as well. After years of playing first person shooters resting my right hand fingers on wasd, left hand on the mouse, almost feels as natural as the home row. More than any particular intent that I carry with me it is where my hands rest on the keyboard that dictates what I will be doing with my computer. Different games, of course, situate keyboard interactions differently. Hotkey heavy games like Starcraft (and I am awful at Starcraft and even worse at keyboard use in Starcraft, so take this as an unfamiliar and awkward perspective) configure the keyboard less a controller and more a console or instrument panel. The perspective shifts from key presses contributing to the creation of a word or action and similar presses performing concrete actions. In some games every key carries the weight of punctuation.

(Image credit: Steven LeMieux, QWOP screenshot)

And while some games, amongst other practices, work to naturalize our relationships with the keyboard through disciplinary practices there are other games that highlight just how strange these relationships are. There's nothing natural about the home row. QWOP, created by Bennet Foddy and launched in 2008, drastically breaks with common productive interactions with the keyboard. The game, named after the four keys it demands you use, asks the user to run a simple 100 meter dash. But rather than typing out words to move forward like early typing games or simply pressing W to move like in first person shooters the player is offered more direct control. Q and W control your runner’s thighs, and O and P his calves. Rather than controlling a runner you end up attempting to control a runner's legs.

(Image credit: Steven LeMieux, QWOP screenshot)

Attempting is the key word. It is a hard game, and the majority of my time playing has been spent sending my runner sprawling forward and backward. What the game highlights through these displays of muscle mangling is just how utterly unnatural this whole affair is. While I play I am constantly looking from the screen to my fingers to my legs attempting to wrap my head around how my fingers can relate to my legs. Standing at my desk I shift in place, fidget, work to control my legs with my fingers as I mime pressing the keys. How do my calves relate to my thighs? And how on earth do both sets work together to move me forward? Half the time I spend playing QWOP the runner stands there waiting for me to make my move. The keyboard becomes distinctly unproductive and explicitly foreign. I have never run more than five meters in QWOP, but some people have. They talk about achieving a rhythm, machine human synchronization (imperfect and ugly but a synchronization all the same), and in that moment of success I can't help but wonder if the game is closer to falling back into common disciple practices of naturalization than ever.

(Video credit: PEROLINN)

Videos of these successful runs, though, make me think that Foddy has not only snatched victory from the jaws of defeat but has compounded the deeply disturbing experience of playing QWOP. The runner shifts and jerks awkwardly along the track. His halting gait is punctuated by brief moments of almost graceful performance. When both feet leave the ground I can't help but see the possibility for fluid motion, but then he lands with a shudder. These glitchy shudders and squats betray any possible rhythm that the player may have reached with his or her keyboard, and they point not only at the ever present friction between user and keyboard but at a complete lack of naturalness in the human. Thighs and calves and feet and running are bizarre. QWOP hints that these inborn connections and technologies aren't any more natural than the home row.

Branding Occupy Wall Street

Steven J LeMieux — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 16:11:06 +0000

(Image Credit: Michael Nagle, Getty Images via In Focus)

During the past week Occupy Wall Street has gained increasing media attention. The movement, initially called for by the group Adbusters, began in earnest on September 17th when protesters first began to occupy Zuccotti Park. This initial act seems to have largely been met with bemused ambivalence, and while there was originally a single demand articulated by Adbusters in their July call to action—that “Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington” (Adbusters) –things were quite murky by the time the occupation took shape. Much of the media attention that the movement has gained, especially during this surge in participation, has focused on the apparent lack of concrete demands set forth by OWS. This confusion is misplaced. While the list of hopeful outcomes is amorphous a clear sense of oppositional branding has been developed from the wealth of signs and images created through the movement. OWS demands that we put a hold on our love affair with notions of prosperity that put us in a double bind.

(Image Credit: Adbusters)

This early poster by Adbusters does a nice job of simultaneously crystallizing and confusing the movement. By asking about a single demand it offers the possibility of a unified, concrete protest while leaving that single demand open to interpretation. And while the question broadens possibility the image suggests a possible outcome. Raising above clouds of teargas and crowds of appropriately gasmasked protesters a dancer postures serenely on the Wall Street Bull. She rides the bull when most visitors pose for pictures as they fondle the bull’s balls. The bull can be more than a system by which the 1% (to use the popular 1/99% split that the movement has espoused) cows the other 99%.

(Image Credit: David Shankbone via In Focus)

The Charging Bull, a sculpture created by Arturo Di Modica in the late 80s, has become an icon for Wall Street. Originally created to represent the “strength and power of the American people” the bull has come to stand in for the strength and power of a particular system. What Occupy Wall Street is demanding is that we stop worshiping that system. That all this symbolism has been poured into a bull makes a certain amount of sense. Bulls are domestic animals that never feel quite domestic, yet even with all their power (and perhaps because of it) they are kept under strict control by the humans that own them. Bulls have largely been turned into a tool of reproduction.

The movement has, in some ways, twice enacted a barrier around the bull. Fearful of any particular harm that could befall the icon it was quickly fenced in. The fence and the guards prevented both protestors from nearing the bull and tourists who flock to the bull daily for lucky rubs and pictures. And by enforcing the cordoning off of the bull the OWS protests have perfectly created a visualization of their message. By enforcing this barrier the bull (and, more importantly, what it has come to represent) is show to be something that we cannot access. The above video by BLUCHEEZ accurately portrays some of the frustrations inherent in this sudden distance between the bull and its followers.

(Image Credit: Erin M via Fast Company)

Gaps have value. And creating distance can be a goal in and of itself. Through this distance we can begin to recognize the multitude of relationships that are manifest between the economic and political systems in this country and the people that inhabit them.

Seeing the First Photograph

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:20:47 +0000

(Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center and J. Paul Getty Museum)

The first photograph is hard to see. Though, really, that shouldn't have come as a surprise. The Harry Ransom Center makes it exceedingly clear on their website that not only will the image be difficult to make out, but that each viewer will in some sense be reperforming its discovery. Their instructions for viewing the photo include a short epigraph by Helmut Gernsheim, a photohistorian that rediscovered the piece in 1952. Of his first viewing of the photograph he writes "No image was to be seen. Then I increased the angle—and suddenly the entire courtyard scene unfolded itself in front of my eyes. The ladies were speechless. Was I practicing black magic on them?"

(Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center)

My encounter was the opposite in some regards. The Ransom Center was hosting a local field trip when I went to take a second look at Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's photograph (my first look at the piece was little more than a quick glance during a hurried round through the collection), and there were two girls sitting in the photo's viewing room diligently working on some field trip assignment that involved drawing multiple versions of the photograph. I stood square in front of the piece, looking down at it through the several plates of glass, tilting my head this way as I attempted to shift the glare somewhere less bothersome. They stood less for my unseeing than I did, and I was quickly instructed by a helpful, if somewhat exasperated, voice behind me to look at it from different angles. I obliged.

(Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center)

I wasn't, though, magically greeted with something like the reproduction. Instead, as I twisted around the piece as best I could, I was given only the slightest hints of the image that the pewter plate had captured. Having seen the clearly defined reproduction I could, to a degree, reinscribe it upon the object that I was viewing, but the more that I changed my perspective the more that began to get the sense that it was resisting that simple reinscription. It refused my simple attempts at situating it as a simple representational image. I could only ever take in a portion at a time; the image was fleeting as it moved counter to inescapable glare and the difficulty of its physical properties.

It wasn't just the glare and polished pewter that disturbed any fully formed viewing. The image I was hunting for is, itself, impossible. Due to the incredibly long exposure time required to capture an image it presents an eccentric space. The first permanent photograph of nature is unnatural; rather than presenting a moment it contains a day long duration with the confused shadows to match. It asks the viewer to view it as it views the world—slowly.

Any attempt at taking this object as merely representational image, though, is sure to be frustrated. The intended viewer, before even laying eyes on the pewter plate, is thoroughly situated by the exhibit. You can hardly make it to the object itself without seeing an image of the reproduction. And the reproduction, rather than an image of the pewter plate is itself an imagining of what the photograph could have captured. So that while the reproduction shows us what the plate perhaps saw what we see is not a representation of nature. The first photograph doesn't represent anything; it doesn't point toward some point in space and time. Instead what I saw was an object viewing the world. It, as it sits framed and under glass, invites the viewer to share with it a particular way of seeing.

The Changing Face of Media Consumption

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Ad Age, MBA Online, Magid Generational Strategies)

This cutesy inforgraphic from Ad Age and MBA Online presents the reader with a breakdown of media use by type, time and generation. The initial study was performed by Magid Generational Strategies. At first blush this seems to present a thorough overview of how different populations consume media, but on closer examination there are some signifigant issues. These issues aside, and in some cases because of these issues, this long image (I've broken it into several pieces for readability's sake. See the full image here) raises a number of questions about not which types of media we consume but how our methods of media consumption are changing to the degree that this infographic doesn't quite make sense.

Some of the choices apparent in the key are pretty interesting. First, we have activities broken into strict online and offline portions. And while this initially might feel like a reasonable position to take, especially if you're concerned with the marketing to specific demographics through specific types of media, it brings to light the question of just how various forms of media are percieved by consumers today. Increasingly discreet artifacts, songs, shows, articles, games, etc are seemlessly available across a variety of media types without any appreciable difference. What we might consider is that rather than consuming any kind of blanket media people gravitate toward consuming particular artifacts.

(Image Credit: Ad Age, MBA Online, Magid Generational Strategies)

This, of course, raises the question of how exactly we should begin to classify these artifacts. What exactly are we to make of an article initially written for a print magazine, though probably first published on the magazine's website, and finally read on facebook? There are several clear answers. We can look to the context of an artifact's creation. In this case it was created for a print magazine; it was constrained by a monthly publication schedule, the phsyical space available in the magazine, the cost of producing the magaziine (pictures, etc). You could say, though, that all these constraints mean little to the end user, and their experience is shaped by the context within which they consume the artifact. That several people have liked and commented on the piece, that it was shared by a particular friend, the ads running down the side of the screen create more meaning for the consumer than the specific reasons behind its length.

(Image Credit: Ad Age, MBA Online, Magid Generational Strategies)

These issues have, in some part, been played out in discussion surrounding MLA's decision to require that citations include the source's medium of publication. These generally break down between Print and Web, though according to the Purdue Online Writing Lab, "other possibilities may include Film, CD-ROM, or DVD." The question of just what a works cited is supposed to perform for both its author and subsequent readers is a slightly different question than how we should appraoch the blended mediation of various artifacts.

In the end the infographic doesn't really tell us terribly much. I would have liked to see a nod toward the differences between social and personal mmedia consumption. And many of the categories, especially in the online section, are either too broad (entertainment, what isn't entertainment online?) or to specific (Facebook, rather than social media in general) to give any clear picture of how people are spending their time. This, coupled with the lack of total time breakdown, makes drawing any sort of concrete conclusions other difficult. It is charming, though, and the rough strokes it works with have been useful in generating discussion.

Coloring 9/11

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:25:08 +0000

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

It didn’t take long for a media storm to emerge around Really Big Coloring Books new title We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids' Book of Freedom. It was quickly and roundly criticized for its heavy-handed portrayal of Muslims. In the face of these criticisms Wayne Bell, the publisher at Really Big Coloring Books, has steadfastly argued that the book only shows the truth of what happened. It’s fairly clear though that the book slips easily into the popular narrative of freedom-hating-Muslims attacking freedom-loving-Americans because they hate our freedom. We Shall Never Forget isn’t an especially smart piece of propaganda, though. The play between the large amount of text and the inconsistent images make it hard to pin down how, exactly, its message is delivered.

In a video on their website Really Big Coloring Books reminds us that this is a pedagogical tool. And as such first we have to ask who the intended audience is. Who exactly is this book supposed to be teaching? 9/11 happened 10 years ago. I don't believe that it's unfair to state that almost anyone that can actually remember the day has outgrown coloring books. Unlike the ill-received coloring book Something Scary Happened, put together in 2003 by the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team, We Will Never Forget is ultimately intended for an audience that cannot forget in the first place because there is nothing to remember. So perhaps the audience then isn't necessarily children along but parents with young children. As such, it might be best to look at We Will Never Forget 9/11 as a textual and visual history book geared towards parents looking to teach their children a particular 9/11 history.

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

One of the more interesting aspects of this page is the extreme dissonance it presents itself with. Many of the images in this coloring book are created in a kind of realist style. There is an attention to detail that might require a colored pencil rather than the standard crayon. The bin Ladin kill shot, though, looks thoroughly cartoonish. The subject matter, though, is anything but. Coloring books are no strangers to violence. There are plenty of books featuring superheroes fighting villains in standard comic style. You'll often find the two foes frozen in mid-punch. What isn't so common, though, is the level of immediate violence presented here. This is, of course, compounded by the fact that this book attempts to present actual events rather than imaginations.

We are presented with somewhat more than a final showdown between Osama bin Ladin and the men that ultimately killed him. The first thing a viewer will notice is the armed SEAL staring down his rifle at bid Ladin and his wife. This isn't an unfamiliar image, especially to anyone who remembers the Elián González debacle in the late 90s. And while there are only so many different ways to display an armed man aiming at two unarmed people I can't help but draw a connection between the two images. Their image is, to a degree, undermined by the broad cultural memory of their audience--parents with young children. At this point it isn't too terribly different from the above mentioned super hero books. You've got the valiant hero about to take out the cartoonish bad guy. But we're not looking at a standoff.

(Image Credit: Alan Diaz)

This isn't the Elián González picture. Instead what we're seeing is the bullet as it flied toward bin Ladin, as he hides behind his wife (this human shield narrative, though, was almost immediately backed away from by the White House). So that in the end, when the full image is taken in, we're privy to not only violence, but imminent death wrapped in the worst kind of cartoon veneer all while the coloring book editorializes the event and instructs children to "ask your mother and father, your teacher, your preacher what it really means. What does it mean to be Free? Why are we a FREE people?"

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

The level of text in this book is pretty curious. It almost makes it hard to imagine exactly how this whole thing functions. Is there a combined action where the kid furiously colors burning towers while their parent plows through the text? Perhaps first they sit down to read through it--although the text is clearly directed at children as they are frequently asked to ask their parents about various issues--then, with the story in their memory they color things in. In the end it feels like this book was less intended for any real practical use and more that it is just an attempt (a successful attempt--this has been Really Big Coloring Books fasted selling book ever) at cashing in on the 9/11 anniversary with a clumsily delivered political message.

P.S. While looking for images of We Shall Never forget I stumbled across many from the above mentioned A Scary Thing happened. This one offers a particularly nice commentary on 9/11 media coverage.

(Image Credit: Something Scary Happened)

Texas Wildfires and Nonlinear Disaster Narratives

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 03:14:48 +0000

Image Credit: Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Since this past Sunday the local wildfires have been a dominant force in the Texas media. Over 1,000 homes and 35,000 acres were destroyed in the Bastrop area alone, and while the Bastrop fire has been contained there are more and more reports of fires springing up north of Houston and throughout East Texas. It would be a mistake, though, to consider this rash of wildfires an isolated event. As the months long drought has continued wildfires have been nervously anticipated alongside cracked foundations and the flooding a serious rain could bring. The images that surround this disaster carry with them that sense of inevitability. The standard series of disaster photos, though, cast confusion around the event—by forcing the fires into a basic linear narrative we are given the impression that things have settled down even as dozens of blazes continue to advance.

This photo, from Monday the 5th showcases the kind of impending doom that the fire offers. Huge plumes of smoke obscure the horizon and sky as it moves through the trees and brush. Online galleries covering the disaster are full of these smoke-on-the-horizon photos. The Austin American-Statesman has galleries for both user-submitted and professional photographs that contain an organized record of the events. These photos, though, betray the nonlinearity of the fires. They advance a notion of impending danger while hiding the current and previous destruction that the fires cause.

As regular consumers of disaster photos we have come to expect a linear progression in our imagery. Disasters either begin suddenly and thus burst onto the scene immediately, or they are tracked as they advance. In the latter case the disaster is visible before the fact; people anxiously await landfall. There is a striking similarity between images of hurricanes as they descend on a coast and the smoke covered horizons of the Texas photos. Tracking maps featured on sites like Weather Underground (a fire map and ahurricane map) highlight these differences.

Once the disaster strikes we are greeted with images of its initial impact—the disaster in action, videos and pictures of broad destruction as it occurs. The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan earlier this year were accompanied by a huge number of these images. Then, most commonly, the secondary after effects and destruction are captured—buildings and trees laid flat, piles of debris, stranded animals and people. Finally we see cleanup, rescue and reconstruction.

Image Credit: Eric Gay ASSOCIATED PRESS via HOUSTON CHRONICLE

These before and after shots of the smiling water tower near Bastrop (which, it should be noted, have been taken by two different photographers. The after-shot, as an AP image, has been much more widely circulated.) act as the classic before and after of the disaster. They tell its story in two shots through familiar themes in children’s movies. The little tower that could was blithely unaware of the horror about to engulf him, but through pluck and determination he has emerged unscathed and still smiling. But this truncated linearity can only be plucked out of the deluge of images after the fact. It has not been so easily formed as in standard disaster narratives.

Video credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife

Because of how the fires move through the environment they create heterogeneous activity across the affected area. This results in the jumbled picture of the disaster that has been displayed so far. Even on the first day of the fires there were images of impending disaster, destruction and after effects. Alan Taylor collected a wonderful set of images in his blog In Focus that show this kind of jumble. The Austin American-Statesman’s photo gallery, arranged in a chunky chronology, is also a great example of this.

There is a tension at play here, though. As the central Texas fires are contained we are presented with more and more standard clean up photos. Disaster images demand a resolution. While fires continue to burn throughout Texas we are on the recovery phase of the narrative. Initially what was considered a single, widespread event is broken down into a set of linear narratives.