August 2007

...literally at our expense. Can't solve a problem? There must be some gear we can throw at it. American knowhow and all that. The top photo came from antiwar.com--not sure where they got it. It almost looks like the soldier is a quadraplegic riding the robot but he appears to be squatting behind it, possibly adjusting it so it doesn't spray wild bullets at American soldiers. The bottom photo is from Wired, putting the "all tech is good tech" spin on things as usual.

The military fascination with robotics is mirrored in the art world: from VVork comes a link to this Dutch psych-test-cum-conceptual-art project where viewers mull over whether to stick their hands inside a device mimicking the scene in Aliens where the android stabs a knife between a man's fingers at lightning speed. People are afraid to put their palms down on the template and don't entirely trust the device. Well, duh.

To quote Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, "the perfect marriage of technology and the human form is death."

Everyone was talking today about "the bridge, the bridge." My stock response was "You mean the one in Baghdad?" The Minnesota bridge collapse is horrible but it's a local story, amped up for the 24 hour cable cycle for maximum tragedy value. We Americans only care about our shit, not the shit we initiated half a world away. The media offers very little perspective regarding these two almost simultaneous major urban bridge collapses, with comparable death tolls. Here's a possible link: Republicans cause bridge collapses in the US because lowering taxes is their insane religion, and maintaining bridges costs money*; they cause them abroad by instigating civil wars in countries that pose no threat to us. The Republicans are, in fact, agents of chaos and darkness. (With assistance from wormy Democrats.)

* digby's take

Unofficial installation shot of my exhibition last year, "Room-Sized Animated GIFs"--artMovingProjects gallery director Aron Namenwirth talks to unidentified foot. These two GIFs aren't room-sized, obviously. I hate to pat myself on the back too hard but you gotta give us credit for having the balls to use the words "animated GIFs" in a New York exhibition title. Most writers, curators, and collectors here are very, very elderly and think GIFs are something you give each other for Christmas. Of course, these 2 were burned to DVD rather than appearing on their native Internet, so I'm at least as guilty of fogey-ism as MOMA, which recently did a "Web 2.0 show" despite a museum policy barring use of the Net in the galleries--that is to say, there is no actual Web art in the show. The guards might be tempted to surf porn during those long, lonely hours of standing.