I tried to distill the motivation I have for The Boy with Half a Pinky, and arrived at these three paragraphs:
A project to measure the load-carrying capacity of text, an attempt at outright lying without speaking falsely and an illustration of automatic, biological narrative.
How far can one stretch the imagination to accomodate for ones beliefs in the face of contradictory (or inconclusive) evidence, and what is the quality of succesful propaganda (both the quality of the propaganda and the quality of our reaction to it, as well as the mechanisms that bridge the gap between what is presented and our internalisation of a message)?
Where exactly are you lost in the transition between presupposed understanding (unselfreflecting knowledge) and the rest of the world?
The galleries webpage is located here, where you’ll find more info about the exhibition.
Even though I don’t consider myself to be a stuff-junkie, I’ve found myself in a situation where I more or less everyday walk around with a bunch of gear. The stuff itself isn’t all that interesting; An external harddrive, a USB2-stick, compact digital camera, iPod & cellphone.
It struck me that I’m a walking storage facility. Let’s calculate a bit
iPod: 40gb
HD: 80gb
USB2-stick: 2gb
Digicam: 500mb
Cellphone: 80mb (Memory Stick + built in memory)
Not accounting for the formatting, that’s 122.580GB of storage that I carry around with me more or less all the time. (Which is why sewing a really nifty backpack is quite high on my to-do list.)
Ok, so the harddrive is usually nine tenths full, as is the iPod. camera, stick & cell are say one third full.
There’s no point to this post, just that it’s all rather cool. If I could only offset my lazy monkey-brain memory with some on the hd, I’d be set!
And of course, I took a look at my desk and there’s roughly 300 cds & dvds (50% of each), a harddrive from a bricket iPod, one 4GB and one 40GB hd that I used in my bondage-iMac & a DSLR with 512mb. A lot of space.
If all the empty and unused space in the world saved data in a forest and there was no-one there to use it, would it make a wooshing sound or would only the trees shudder because someone sooner or later would try to print all that data?
Yesterday, in spite of the hang-over, I could actually be seen whistling and even humming to myself. Not often that happens; I’m in a sweet spot – I’m not totally broke, I finished my two week stint at the store, the exhibition came together “well” (by “well” I mean “it’s over and no-one has hit me in the face”) and the allergies & accompanying asthma have left me for now.
Here’s the video I’m showing at monumental, followed by the text from the exhibition catalogue.
“The uncontested order of things: A slideshow curated by Google image search.” 2006
More a proof of concept than a finished work, The uncontested order of things was created by following a set of predefined rules applied to google image search.
The search query consisted of each letter of the Swedish alphabet (A-Z + Å, Ä, Ö), and the first forty resulting images were downloaded. Duplicate images were not downloaded, nor were gif animations, although they retained their position in the “top forty”, resulting in some queries resulting in less than forty downloaded images.
One random image per queried letter was then put into a slideshow in the order of the alphabet, and the resulting movie was adapted for the 90-second screen time.
The motivation for this process, of which the resulting slideshow is but one possible combination (let alone one possible way to present the combinations) is:
1) To see how many apparently random images we can fit into a narrative, and
2) Given the omnipresence of Google, how easily received/understood/accepted the images are when
3) A qualitative analysis of the images (and search results in general) shows an (apparently) unproportional US/EU presence, which in turn should
4) Kick us in the nuts for too easily accepting the perceived “freedom of the Internet”, and not reflecting enough on what our online behavior tells of ourselves, but also what actual and very manifest power we are supporting by our actions.
And of course, since Mark actually beat me in ping-pong this afternoon, T don’t command respenct around here anymore, and am thus reduced to making comments in poor taste about people who are dead:
Found this on boingboing.net this morning, and it’s making it’s rounds on the Internets. An unknown cab driver was mistaken for the guy he was driving and was interviewed live on BBC in regards to the lawsuit Apple (the old Beatles record company) had brough against Apple (the computer company). The video isn’t fun unless you know this, and now you know this.
inspired by this, i used up all of five minutes of my employers time to do this:
*Update*
Ok ok, so the guy turned out not to be a cab driver but a guy looking for work at the BBC. Still a case of mistaken identity though, and his initial reaction is golden. Doesn’t matter really, he’ll be “that BBC cab driver guy” and people will argue in bars going “nuh-uh, he wasn’t a cabdriver” “was to”, etc.
I don’t know if I should be surprised, but here are the search strings that have guided people to the blog…
So, two people looking for kiddie porn light ended up on my site, and one whos brain must have been rotting in another way did as well. I Googled it, and the blog shows up as number 9 if you search for the term. The tracker that started it all was on top of the list. Oh dear, how we all leave our marks…
One of my more endearing character traits is that I’m always trying to download the internets. If you’d like to learn how to program in Pascal for paper-mill machinery, I probably have the documents and compilers lying around somewhere.
Before I had a computer with a connection I would go to the library once a week and walk among the shelves and pick out whatever books caught my fancy; When it comes to dedication to books I’m quite the polybookamist – I’d end up having twenty books on different topics at any given time. The only Dewey decimals I wasn’t into were the ones between 796 & 798. (sports)
Now, every time I get my hands on a connection I end up downloading everything that either 1) interests me, or 2) I don’t know what it is but it sounds interesting.
This has of course some drawbacks. For example, I should have looked up what ephebophilia meant before downloading a 200 mb zip-file named epheb with the description “ephebophilia junk“. I end up with a couple of hundred images of some post-pubescent girl looking slightly amused. What the fuck. Although there wasn’t any porn involved (well, I only looked at five or so of the images, so I can’t tell) the sheer volume of images taken from someone who’s obviously taller than the girl is kinda twisted my head a bit; I can see this being sort of gateway-erotica to more overt kiddie porn.
Can’t fucking believe I’ve tainted my hard drive downloading it, and since it was over Bittorrent, I’ve actually helped others downloading it as well. Next time, I’m either looking up any words I don’t understand, or reading the info-page before downloading anything.
The torrent’s info-page is here: http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3457951, and actually describes what he torrent contains. For fucks sake; I honestly thought they were body-modification files. Like, gross piercings and subdermal implants.
My jaw was clicketyclicking and then I dislocated the shit out of it – can’t close my mouth properly and I’m chewing (OK, not really chewing, actually just slightly mauling the food, mashing it up.) with my right side.
I feel like a whale, just siphoning the food through my teeth. And I drool a bit when I talk. Especially when I’m drunk. Which makes me look even more drunk.
Woot! Fina-fucken-ly! The web page that I’ve been working on the past month is finally official. I’m way too tired to write anything about it, so just click on this link to www.guiltyguiltyguilty.org to read more about it.
Yay!
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2009 Update: The above mentioned site is now defunct. Go to monocultured.com for a mirror of the project.
