January 2016

exhibit

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From my distant past, this image, digitally reconstructed from an old photo negative.
A law student friend needed a jury exhibit for a mock trial. In the case, a supermarket shopper rolled her cart over a steel plate in a shopping lane, upsetting the cart and causing personal injury. The plate covered pipes in the floor, and was not bolted down but rested on an inner lip of metal.
The negligence suit hinged on such factors as (i) whether a warning sign should have been placed in the aisle, (ii) whether the plate had the appearance of solidity, and (iii) whether a prudent shopper would have proceeded to roll a cart across the plate.
I made this "jury visualization aid" with ink and zip-a-tone on a large piece of illustration board. I watched the trial from the spectator seats, and when this drawing was pulled out and placed before the jury, the professor monitoring the proceedings exclaimed, "that looks like something from a modern art exhibit."
In real life, an insurer would probably have settled the case. This exhibit was ultimately not very helpful to either the plaintiff or the defense, and it's a measure of its ambiguity that I can't recall which side I was supposed to be be assisting, or who prevailed. The top two panels make the steel plate's placement appear precarious, undermining the more solid impression in the bottom panel.

Hyo Myoung Kim

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...is currently doing a digital residency at Gazell.io (the online space for London's Gazelli Art House gallery), where I'm scheduled to put work up in March.
You can launch Hyo Myoung Kim's show from the artist page. (I also like Laura Brothers' work).
His is glitched-out 3D painting, some animated and some not. One thing I've noticed is the gallery page resizes images to a standard format, so most of his work would occupy more screen space if it was the true size. The files are also large and load slowly, although animations such as this 19 MB gif are worth the wait. Transparentization of all the layers of these complex tangles of digital vermicelli gives a sensual, time-lapse effect. The seductive qualities would be lost if the file was any smaller.

another (flawed) anti-smartphone testimonial

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Here's another person -- an executive at a Silicon Valley start-up, no less! -- who has written an article about how he doesn't have a smartphone. Always good to read (more potential catechism-like phraseology):

I was on my bike, cycling to Stanford, and it struck me that a week had gone by without my having a phone. And everything was just fine. Better than fine, actually. I felt more relaxed, carefree, happier.

But then the confession falls apart when Mr. Silicon Valley admits he uses a friend's phone five times a month, to call... Uber!

This would be like a person in the '90s saying "I don't have a TV but I do knock on my neighbor's door five times a month and ask if I can watch my 'Faces of Death' video."

Just get a burner phone and call a cab, is that so hard? But we'll take what we can get, alternative lifestyle-wise.

Lovink on social media alternatives

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A new Geert Lovink interview has been posted on his site, expressing his ongoing struggle to imagine alternatives to iPhone/Facebook zombie culture. The Q&A below is "curmudgeonly" but still should be read aloud daily, like a church catechism:

Q: Why are you critical of the regular social network sites (SNS)?

A: Because I am part of a generation that fought for decentralized networks, an open internet in which the user wasn’t just a consumer of some product. Developments of the past ten or so years have meant that regular social media users have traded a lot of the earlier complexities and freedom [for] simplicity and speed.

And at the end of the church service, parishioners would read these words of Lovink's in unison, before filing out of their pews:

It is my dream that Facebook will close shop as soon as possible, preferably because its users massively walk away and abandon the service. I am saying this because such sudden exoduses have happened in the past. Amen. [Amen added --tm]

The stumbling block is alternatives. Lovink mentions homegrown attempts at Facebook such as Lorea, Diaspora, Friendica, Crabgrass, and Unlike Us. These are terrible names and that's half the problem. Who says we need another "scalable" connection service? Forums exist all over the web, to this day, for specialized discussion, and there are myriad ways to have conversations using the Net without crawling up Mark Zuckerberg's bum.
Lovink also bemoans "the (conceptual) stagnation of Linux." That may or may not be true, but he shouldn't shrug off that new-ish companies (such as Think Penguin) make it possible for non-geeks to have PCs and laptops that aren't running Windows or the Apple OS. One doesn't have to be "part of a generation that fought for decentralized networks" to appreciate their value. Lovink mentions TOR as an alternative browser; that's a subject for another post but suffice it to say, short of that, there are other ways to increase privacy from ISP and advertiser snooping, such as VPNs, that anyone can install.
The solution is individual choices. Or small groups, making use of available resources. As opposed to another "top down" site that "brings people together."

around the web

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The Atlantic: I went back to a dumbphone. Well, duh. This article obviously isn't aimed at the prescient few who used their dumbphones continuously during the iPhone era. Also, it's an ad for a "new" kind of dumbphone that does what any dumbphone on the market does: calls and texts. Update (related): Another media Einstein realizes that twitter is competing with regular (i.e., his) content. What did he think was happening a couple of years ago when twitter links to his posts started changing to t.co links?

Internet of things home pregnancy kit (hat tip Rene Abythe for this pic).

Matt Taibbi and Roy Edroso make fun of the "crying cowboys" out West. Edroso:

I don't like mandatory minimums and I'm willing to entertain the notion, at least, that the arsonists in this case don't deserve theirs, despite their belligerent history. But that's not what the current protest is about -- it's about seizing government land. Which I guarantee you would not in such a case be equitably distributed among We the People, but would instead get funneled to the usual shitheels whose cries for devolution of government resources always come down to "gimme."