Engineer's Daughter

poetic codings

Casey Reas

John Baldessari

Scott Snibbe

Through September 6 - Poetic Codings at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art.  When I was gifted with the very first iPad (still grateful for that, m!) sure the first app I downloaded was Words With Friends.  But after that I started to fill my device with interactive art and sound projects, some of them no more than beautiful time-wasters but absorbing just the same.  I was delighted to see some of those old friends, like Scott Snibbe's Antograph, featured in this excellent group exhibition at the SJICA that examines work at the intersection of art and technology.  A visitor could easily lose an hour or two (I did) messing around with the two dozen+ apps on the iPads in the gallery, where the developers explore new forms of storytelling, music-making, and creative engagement.  Meanwhile artworks are also projected on the walls of the gallery, like Casey Reas's generative software piece that endlessly evolves television signals into a glitched-out collage and John Carpenter's enchanting Dandelion Clock in which a wave of the hand sends the imaginary seeds flying.  The exhibition invites you to compare and contrast the public versus the private art experience, standing in a gallery versus sitting at a table, and to how your body and your brain respond to each in kind.  

from neurons to networks

Browsing through GOOD magazine's online archives recently, I stumbled across an inspiring excerpt from a TED book by filmmaker Tiffany Shlain in which she talks about her family's weekly "technology Shabbat."  An excerpt of the excerpt:

In his book The Sabbath, published in 1951, the Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel describes the Sabbath as “a cathedral in time,” a concept that resonates when you unplug from technology. During our technology Shabbats, time slows down. Albert Einstein said that “time is relative to your state of motion.” With all this texting, tweeting, posting, emailing, we are making our minds move fast, which in turn accelerates our perception of time. It seems like there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t end thinking, “How did it get to be 5 p.m.?”

 

When my family unplugs, time starts to move at this beautiful preindustrial pace. And what is the one day you want to feel extra long? Saturday. So now our Saturdays feel like four days of slow living that we savor like fine wine. We garden, we ride our bikes, we cook, and I write in my journal. I actually read. One-thing-at-a-time. I can have a thought without being able to immediately act on it. I can think about someone without being able to contact him or her at that moment. I have found it’s good to let a thought sit. It changes when you don’t act on it. For one day each week I like letting my mind go into a completely different mode. We are also able to partake in all those activities that seem to get pushed aside by the allure of the network. While being neither orthodox nor Amish we do drive a car, turn the lights on and answer a land-line for emergencies, so it’s a modern interpretation of a very old idea of the Sabbath. But we try to be as unavailable as possible except to each other and our children.

See also:

• Tiffany Shlain
• Connecting Broadly Won't Replace the Importance of Connecting Deeply

tiffany shlain

 

 

 

From TribecaFilm.com:

Tiffany Shlain, director of acclaimed documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology...is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of The Webby Awards. She created disruptive innovation both in the way she made Connected and the way she is using the social media itself to further the conversation about its subject: “connectedness” in the 21st century.

See also:

• Tiffany Shlain
• Who's Shaking Things Up in 2012? Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards Honorees Announced

rankin live! preview

Somewhere in my adult life I have developed an intense discomfort with having my picture taken, and I doubt I would be any more relaxed with a professional photographer more accustomed to shooting models and celebrities pointing his camera at me.  James Anthony recently experienced what it was like to work with the world-famous Rankin as the photographer preps for a project later this year called Rankin Live! in which he will shoot 1,000 British citizens and almost instantly exhibit the pictures, then give the proceeds from the sale of those portraits to charity.  Anthony lived to tell about what it was like to be in front of the intimidating piece of equipment you see in the picture here and the man who wields it:

I am nervous – to put it mildly – but Rankin is remarkably adept at putting me at ease. His sense of humour is, by all accounts, as quick as his eye for a good shot.

In Anthony's case the results are quite hot, and you can see for yourself in the gallery here.  I really do wonder how models do it sometimes, how they can smile so naturally and not look, as so often in my case, like a deer caught in headlights.  Maybe they just have a photographer who can make them laugh.

i google, therefore i have lost the ability to think

While I was doing my customary pre-breakfast blog-scroll this morning, a column by John Naughton in last week's Observer caught my eye.  Naughton takes a recent article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic as his starting-point, a piece in which Carr worries out loud about his inability to focus for long on any given text, citing Google and the easy access to information on the Web in general as the root cause of his newfound ADD.  I have to wonder if it isn't a matter of discipline, however.  I am a bona fide internet junkie, spending several hours each day just surfing around, but I am able to turn off the computer from time to time for the purposes of giving a book or a film my full attention.  Naughton also reminds us that when Tim Berners-Lee designed the Web the computer scientist had his own poor memory in mind and wanted to create something that would help.  It's exactly the moments when I'm trying to remember an actor's previous work or a particular album title that I'm most grateful for that giant repository of data online.  As for concern that the Web breeds poor memories among its users, Naughton looks to history:

But people have worried about this since... well... the Greeks. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells how the Egyptian god Theuth tried to sell his invention - writing - to King Thamus as 'an accomplishment which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt [recipe] for memory and wisdom.' To which the shrewd old king replied that 'the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it... Those who acquire writing will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful... What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory.'

It's true that few of us can sing epic poems from memory anymore, but admittedly the pool of people who can appreciate Homer in the original Greek these days is small anyway.  As humans we leave certain things behind as our technology changes, and new things take their place.  We can remain selective about what works for us personally and what doesn't, and it's even fascinating to watch which new tools take hold while others never quite catch on.  As a firm believer in the power of associative thinking I get excited when the Web encourages me to connect seemingly disparate topics, leading me down paths I would not have seen otherwise.  And then I share my thoughts with you, and here we are.