la trahison des images

Via Boing Boing, we are introduced to a pacifying, surrogate social network called Binky that fulfils every compunction, range of motions that one has come to expect from such a platform and delivers the satisfaction of being so engaged and focused on one’s device—except that the application is a meaningless one and the “content” streaming by that one can re-bink or otherwise endorse or scold (it doesn’t matter) is randomly generated before being cycled off into oblivion.
Communication and sharing is important but it’s not necessary to telegraph one’s fidgety compulsion to one’s future selves, perhaps, as indiscriminately as those we feel obligated to do for those in between times. Comment is encouraged but punching keys—deliberately or not—returns auto-complete gibberish for as long as one cares to type. What do you think? Two decades after Bill Gates declared that content was king, we have to wonder what it’s to signal when content becomes wholly optional and perhaps even too taxing sometimes. Meaning can be burdensome, obliviously, and our habits are surreal—ceci n’est pas une pipe.

twitch and tantra

Though I’d venture that the benefits of yoga don’t come in the form of a perfect pose and could even prove harmful (I embrace the fact that I’m an awkward mess and don’t get discouraged), a wearable technology clothier is introducing (with consultation by instructors) a pair of leggings—yoga pants and the athleisure industry comprise a multi-billion dollar market—that has a suite of sensors embedded within the textiles that can detect in conjunction with one’s mobile device the position that one is trying to assume and gives feedback with battery-powered pulses to correct one’s posture and stance. The company is designing other interactive sports apparel (which would be a potential leveller of handicaps for other games) and though I have a few reservations concerning the appropriateness of bionics in yoga, I’ll bet that the system would be beneficial for a beginner without the ability or means to seek out a yogi.

point source on a stick

Hoping to raise awareness of water pollution, a trio of art students in Taiwan collected sewage and wastewater run-off from a hundred different sites across the island, froze the samples in an ice pop mould and encased the results in resin. The display really has a bleakly beautiful æsthetic and is sure to heighten the profile of waterways in plight.

docket and drawering

Via The Vault, we discover that the US Library of Congress is curating a collection of nearly five decades of courtroom drama as recorded by various sketch-artists, who laboured to capture the emotion and anguish of attorneys, juries, judges, defendants and plaintiffs.
Though all US jurisdictions have permitted still-photography since 2014, cameras have been traditionally banned from the courtroom in order to protect the privacy of parties and prevent distraction and I wonder how relevant that this tradition and talent might be in a future when everyone is accustomed to posing for posterity at all times and in all places. This extensive exhibition began with the donation of illustrator Howard Brodie who captured the proceedings of the 1964 trial of Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald while in police custody charged with the assassination of John F Kennedy.

umwelt-bibliothek

The White House’s systematic approach to censor and compartmentalise narratives that run counter to its message in removing websites and historical records are of course not without precedent and symmetrical responses to ensure that that data might live on, but it was particularly striking that there was a meeting space reserved for the resistance in East Germany that was also the repository of verboten knowledge—specifically of an environmental nature.
The pastor of East Berlin’s Zion church donated a suite of basement rooms from 1986 on to activists and organisers that became known as the Umwelt-Bibliothek, the Environment Library. Accruing more oppositional forces and eventually becoming the only free press outlet in the country, the environmental roots were important ones as documentation on safety studies of chemicals and impact-assessments of this heavily industrialised nation became suddenly inaccessible and the public were kept in the dark about very grave and immediate risks that production posed—not only to workers but also to those who lived in the footprint of factories. Despite repeated raids and operating in a police-state with mass-surveillance, the organisation survived East Germany, folding in 1998, but the archives as well as their newsletter is still maintained.

separate and unequal

Prior to the series of Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates whose interlocutors of course became the presidents of the United States and the Confederate States of America respectively, the notion of interracial relations—socially and contractually, was referred to as amalgamation. Democratic party pundits, ahead of the election, tried to convince the voting-public that Lincoln and his Republican party were strong proponents of the mingling of black and white society and progressive integration was a dangerous and unwelcome thing, but were less than wholly successful in their campaign with Lincoln winning but the nation divided in civil war, beginning in April of 1861 just a month after his inauguration.
The message was that being anti-slavery automatically equalled surrendering one’s job to emancipated slaves, but because the Democrat’s ploy fell short of defeating Lincoln the first time (despite the ensuing bloody conflict, divided families), they redoubled their efforts to bring down the president and the supporters of the Union for second term. A sympathetic, anonymous provocateur published a propaganda pamphlet that took the notion of amalgamation and nuanced it as a more threatening and insidious concept called miscegenation—a bit of dog-Latin for to mix miscere and kind, genus—suggesting that not only was to vote Republican potentially a way to jeopardise one’s own financial standing and security, furthermore such political-leanings exact an ever higher commitment. Though perhaps the subtext that race is a fiction is a good and positive thing, surrogates attempted to frighten voters by proffering that miscegenationists—Lincoln and his party, not only felt that the mingling of the races is permissible but should be mandated, intimating that a hapless voter would see his daughter betrothed to a black man, the party believing that evolutionary progress (also a contemporaneous idea) might only be achieved by the off-spring of intermarriage. This facetious exposition was responsible for informing the destructive ideas of eugenics that we are familiar with and entrenched resistance to accepting relationships that look different from our own.