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In an article on wearable computers or body(nets) Ana Viseu writes that:

Lifestyle applications are believed to be the ‘killer app’ that will turn wearable computers into everyday apparel…. [and later on cites Barfield and Caudell from their article “Basic Concepts in Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality”] “[the networked] computers [on our body] will monitor our physiological state, perform the duties of a secretary and butler in managing our everyday life, and protect us from physical harm”.

This made me think that in the future we will all become as helpless as rock stars. People around rock stars often describe how they lose the ability to perform the most mundane duties as shopping, buying a ticket and so on. And since a lot of people perform in reality music shows, there seems to be an opportunity of becoming just as helpless and stupid as your favorite rock star.

One bigger problem is though that Barfield and Caudell seems to believe that because we can do something it inevitable means that we will do it. This is not at all obvious, but something that technologist (of the utopian kind) often believes; I think this uncritical belief in the dissemination and uptake of new technology stems from the fact that they view technology as only a means to an end (as a tool that is), and not as something generative or even promiscuous as Latour would say it.

mosaic of four o’clock hunger

Originally uploaded by stilleben.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility Walter Benjamin writes on the film camera that “with the close up space expands, with slow motion movement is extended. The enlargement….reveals entirely new structural formations. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones.” Once again it seems reasonable to pull out Benjamin, and use his essay to interpret something new - as have been done so many times before - perhaps to many times, but so be it.
What the film camera were for moving images and art, I would say that the camera phone is for everyday life. Everyday life – if we ignore the structural parts – is just as slippery as water, almost impossible to grasp in its mundane nitty-grittiness. But with the ubiquity of camera phones in everyday life and practices of moblogging, we now have a technology to expand the space and time of mundane situations. What this technology and the relations it, without a doubt creates, will come to mean for the structure and situational character of everyday life we will have to see.

In response to the official Danish cultural canon, the monthly newsletter Sunday Evening has gathered some people to make a canon of digital art works/culture. A colleague of mine Lisbeth Klastrup was invited to join, and I’m truly satisfied with her choice to include tagging in the canon. Overall the canon looks as it should most, of the usual choices are there. Actually I remember seeing a list in the mid nineties of the 10 best net art works and quite a lot of them are on the canon list as well – making me think that nothing happened I net art since or? – but there are two major works missing:

I cannot believe that Entropy8zuper not are on the list. Aureia Harvey is there – selected by Ida Engholm – but not to include her collaboration with Michael Zamyn is unbelievable, since the two of them as e8z have made the best net art ever in my opinion. The density and texture of their work, along with the play with interactivity – buzz word number one of the early net art scene – is awesome. The integration of their privat/public lives in the god love museum and their live performances plays along just fine with a lot of the themes in cyberculture.

Mouchette.org – just because it is Mouchette.

Once again someone in the news today commenting on the Mohammed drawings said something about how surprising it is that Denmark are losing its good reputation in the world, as a helpful and tolerant country, since Denmark is considered as one of the most tolerant countries in the world. Danes loves to say this to one another, usually the argument is that since we were the first country in the world to allow publishing of pornography, we are also supposed to be the most tolerant and liberal. That is a total joke (one could even argue a very fascist one) since pornography is one of the most stereotypical things in the world, so it is very hard for me to see that allowing pornography is an act of tolerance. It is not that I have anything against pornography at all, but using it as an argument for tolerance, is like saying that the Israelis by building a wall around the Palestinian areas, are showing respect and acceptance for their culture, because the want to preserve it!

PS: Lets also not forget that Denmark ususally is regarded as one of the most racist countries in the world - now where is the tolerance in that?

The Mohammed drawings are an excellent example of the problem of context. According to theorists such as Lawrence Grossberg and Bruno Latour context is never stable and has to be created through analysis. This point is nicely illustrated by the fact that the drawings show that context also can be used as a weapon in what ever agenda you might have. The Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten used Kaare Bluitgens book as a context for publishing the drawings, the Danish muslims who went to the Middle East to travel around telling people about the drawings used a picture from a French pig festival depicting a man posing as a pig, and told people he were posing as Mohammed – and so on – the list of examples are endless. And what do people say when confronted with this? They often use a very modern saying, stating that “this is out of context”. I would say that this statement surely is out of context! Because, in the world today – call it postmodern, amodern, latemodern or whatever you will – there is not such a thing as “out of context” (some would say that this saying never has made any meaning, for instance Bruno Latour). Context is continually constructed and cannot be used any more as a counter argument, because argument equals context. What should we do instead? Perhaps ground our arguments on ideas or opinions, and not on an old reference to context as something warranting reality and truth – there is no such thing as truth, only ideology, ideas and religion used for creating mediated contexts! So lets drop context and talk about the real thing instead - it’s there anyway.

out for a walk

Originally uploaded by stilleben.

Transmediale this year was a bit disappointing. The theme [reality addicts] was not really clear in the conference program, there were tracks on mundane technology, new media and humour - seems very fortuitous - but hey, perhaps that is the point, since reality sometimes seems very casual - but that is a weak point. The art exhibition was a usual blend of video/web/robot works. There was one video that were really good though. It used a circuit board as a metaphor for a city, and people were walking around on the board as they were walking in a city. Pretty simple but it had a terrific texture to it which made it amazing.
The session by Matthew Fuller was interesting though, especially Jordan Crandall had some nice deleuzo theorizing on affect as readiness. I will have to look into his work along with the Fuller books that I bought - I am really looking forward to reading them, and will post something on it. Ohh almost forgot Lu Jie were reporting from the chinese art project The Long March - interesting!
Still last year was better, but perhaps that is only due to the fact that I got to build my own robot and take it home with me.

Went to the Gerburg thing (see below) and tried for the first time in my life synchronous translation from german to english. I must say that I now have a better understanding of why anything in the EU takes so long time - there must be a lot of misunderstandings. I certaintly did not understand alot of what Gerburg was saying - this could also be due to the fact that I got the flue. Anyway her talk took us from the use of vacuum cleaners today and to the biblical symbols fore vacuum cleaning = the snake. It was vivid and mindblowing but also a bit too much. Usually I like those kind of analysis when they are from the hand of eg. Donna Haraway or Sandy Stone, but Gerburg did not seem to be able to connect all her associations with anything other than the vacuum cleaner - but perhaps she did by the end of her talk, I left half ways since the translation for some reason stopped.

one more reason not to buy a dell computer

Originally uploaded by stilleben.

The theme for this years transmediale and trip to Berlin must be translation so fare. Thursday I had the trouble of getting juice on my computer, and spend a couple of hours trying to get my Danish power cord translated into something that I could plug into a German power plug. But not only electricity needs translation, not surprisingly speech also needs it. It did come as a surprise though, that keynote Dominique Noguez spoke in French. I was looking forward to his talk on humour, since he is supposed to be one of the persons in the world that knows the most about humour, so I thought the talk would be at least fun - it probably also was, but in French! Seems quite oldskool that a new media festival has keynotes in French and German, since the netlingo for good or bad is English. But anyway I will give my german a shot this afternoon.

Been in Berlin for a couple of days and Transmediale started yesterday, so apparently now reality kicks in. drum drum this years theme is reality addicts and I am looking forward to how this theme will be integrated into the conference. I lost my program so don’t know what I will see today, but know that tomorrow the Reality Addicts sessions moderated by Matthew Fuller starts, which I’m looking forward to. There is also a talk tomorrow on vacuum cleaners by Gerburg Treusch-Dieter - one and a half hour on this subject - should be fun…..