nevermind the bricolage

Brain

What does your brain look like? If you talk to a neuro-scientist you'd get one perspective, a biologist would give you another. Douglas Coupland would offer a personal aesthetic view of his own brain. Coupland is probably best known for his writing but art has always been a part of his creative arsenal.  For a retrospective he created a room filled with 5,000 objects he collected over 20 years and carefully arranged in a masterwork called The Brain. Coupland is a collector, maybe even a bit of an obsessive one and the articles he put together aren't random, they are carefully curated ojects that offer insight in to his personality, likes, desires and drives. The layout of the items was designed to represent the contents and organization of Coupland's physical brain, not that the viewer would necessarily know that. Humour is a big part of it-with pieces like Seat of Consciousness (“the elusive site of self-reflexive awareness that scientists have yet to pinpoint”).

Coupland has been writing a lot about the effect of technology the  “new neural reality,” and the technology that “relentlessly colonizes the planet and our brains.” One of Coupland's big themes is that the Internet has deleted the idea that our lives our made up of stories and instead is now made up of tasks and that we need to consider how we are to restructure our lives in light of that. He also said the nostalgia for the 20th century brain won't do you any good--couldn't agree more.

 

Allure of the Selfie

I started thinking more critically about the selfie, last time I was teaching on theology and media culture. The Institute of Network Cultures has a small book you can download by Brooke Wendt entitled, The Allure of the Selfie. Given the pervasiveness of selfies and their culture-shaping contributions to body image/focus/obsession, it might be a worthwhile read for many. It's less than 60 pages so not going to be too big of a commitment but will be beneficial if you are thinking about this stuff.

clouds illusions

I've been teaching a class on theology and media, focusing primarily on television and digital media, exploring the acceleration of change and the theological implications of living mediated lives. As I come to this class every eighteen months or so I am aware of how quickly things shift and change. We now find ourselves in the era of 'cloud' technology, the digitality of the present/future seems to be this strange notion of the cloud-our information, our lives, disappearing into internet vapour and no longer living on our computers.

Surely one of the more interesting dynamics of digital living is the growing disconnect with materiality when it comes to our stuff--our music library is made up of files rather than tape or vinyl, our photos are digital, our letters and communications are e-mail, text, tweets-seldom tangible, mediated via machines--mobile devices, laptops, ipads etc. And then there is the cloud-we are intensely suspicious of this sudden appearing, because like much of digital technology it appears to us in a finished form and we are caught up in it before we even know what's really go on and our thoughts about it are usually retroactive-it's only when it works against us rather than for us that we realize its dark side--the recent leak of celebrity nude pics, hacked from the cloud basically--you might delete something from your phone, but it's not gone, nothing  is ever 'gone', it's stored in the cloud which surrounds us, consumes, subsumes us in its vaporous nothingness.

Now it seems to me that there is something of a connect here with some forms of theological reflection. There is a history of 'cloud theology,' be it works, like The Cloude of Unknowyng, the anonymous Middle-English book on contemplative prayer, or Nichols Cusa's 'cloud of impossibility' which addresses the concept of learned ignorance (not-knowing to put it in contemporary terms perhaps), a sort of return to Socratic inquiry.

Cloud computing places everything within our reach but removes it from our grasp-we have to access it through a process, it doesn't live on our devices, they become tools of access. 

The interesting thing about cloud technology is that it’s not a place or location, it’s a highway system. Look at the Google data center in the image above-it's all tubes and pipes. The Cloud contains loads of information and files, but that reality only articulates itself when I go to my computer, launch a programme and resume work on something at the point I left it on my ipad earlier. And we are not really supposed to be thinking about this very much, even though every digital outlet from Apple to Google to Amazon is championing its benefits, we’re simply meant to realize that we can have our data where we need it, when we need it.

Socrates declared that "All I know is that I know nothing," which was the inspiration for Cusa's move to learned ignorance, the premise being that what we know is contingent and we cannot know things precisely because what we know of anything is through relations. For Cusa, the cloud is defined by blindness, darkness and ignorance (an apt metaphor it seems to me for our understanding of the digital cloud), and it is this cloud that we must deal with when we consider the sacred--the darkness itself, if you like, is illuminating.

 

The cloud confronts us with contradictions-both the theological cloud of unknowing and the digital cloud---we don't know enough but we are in relation, and we need to reflect on our not-knowing, our ignorance rather than jump to conclusions and simplistic answers.

In his wonderful book, Nudities, Giorgio Agamben writes,

"The ways in which we do not know things are just as important (and perhaps even more important) as the ways in which we know them...it is possible, in fact, that the way in which we are able to be ignorant is precisely what defines the rank of what we are able to know and that the articulation of a zone of non-knowledge is the condition and at the same time the touchstone of all our knowledge...The act of living is, in this sense, the capacity to keep ourselves in harmonious relationship with what escapes us."

It's virtually impossible not to enter the digital cloud these days, unless one opts out of all connectivities related to the Internet, but avoidance and resistance has seldom seemed the right move to me, and when it comes to digitality I think it is not possible, better then to take some time to frame our ignorance. The same would be true for me when it comes to issues of the sacred-a learned ignorance, and informed not-knowing might just be the pathway not only to fresh understandings but also out of old cul-de-sacs.

 

 

the currency of the selfie

I've been thinking a lot about photography lately. Partly I'm sure, because of my love of Instagram and my almost obsessive posting of images and delight on discovering what others choose to disseminate.

I am not big on selfies, which seem to be one, if not the, biggest category that the images I see fall under, so I've been wondering what it represents. 'Selfie' was declared International Word of 2013 by the Oxford Dictionary, signalling both its ubiquity and perhaps its philosophical and cultural import.

I hear all the surface critiques, the narcissism-culture comments, blah blah blah, and I don't buy them. Much like updates on Facebook and Twitter, I think they represent more than the sum total of their parts.

A book group that I am involved in has been reading Mark C. Taylor's book, Hiding, which is both a critique and a celebration of surfaces. In a world where 'depth' has all but disappeared, surfaces become signposts to much more than superficiality. As Taylor says, "Depth is supposed to put an end to the play of surfaces by securing their foundation. Thus when depth disappears, surfaces become infinitely complex. This complex superficiality and superficial complexity is both disorienting and energizing--full of creative possibility...Surface has never been accepted and embraced as such but is always justified in terms of the heavens or the depths. When height and depth collapse, we are left with nothing more and nothing less than the proliferation of fleeting surfaces. To insist that these surfaces obscure more secure depths is to flee the creative-destructive effervescence that is our condition."

Representation by photography is nothing new. Since the dawn of the camera-age, we have been inundated with self-portraits (and self-portraits have been around since the Middle Ages, gathering steam of social acceptability during the Renaissance), but it seems to me that selfies represent something of a shift, or perhaps I should say, herald a shift in the way we use images and words in our world today.

And I think the difference between traditional self-portraits and the selfie is by considering it not simply as a form of photography but as a medium of self-identification.

When photography first emerged it not only freed visual arts from obligations to reality-hence the rise of the various forms of painting that came after--impressionism, abstract etc., no longer did we need painting to record our lives literally, photography could now do that, but it also became a means of recording 'truth'--pictures don't lie-except they do, but that's for another time perhaps.

Self-portraits have always made room for performance, you can dress-up as a cowboy and get your photo taken in a vintage-style so you look like a wild west character etc., and selfies seem to trade on this particular dynamic of photographic potential.

Technology is one of the keys to understanding the selfie I think. Firstly, there is the advent of digital cameras which made photography both cheaper and quicker, then came mobile phone technology and very soon after the mirror option, which is might be the key to selfie-mania. These dynamics met the cultural, or social need for selfies--working out when that moment occurred is a bit like trying to date the birth of post-modernism or virtually anything else, there are so many threads that came together, but suffice to say that it was a collision of technological capability mixed with social desire and opportunity.

There is one more factor that accounts for the rise of the selfie I think and that is celebrity. And a particular kind of late 20th century celebrity-the kinds of celebrity that have emerged out of 'reality tv' culture and online access-whether it be the rise of someone like Kim Kardashian on the back of a sex-tape, or Paris Hilton, or any number of other celebs who has emerged over the past couple of decades in the era of digital and social media.  The celebrity selfie is not an innocent and unguarded photo of a generally inaccessible celebrity, it is PR, pure and simple, it is the canny marketing of a branded life, and that branded life is dependent upon these moments of 'reality' to connect with an increasingly global audience. So we get Kim Kardashian's famous 'booty shot' showing her hard at work on regaining her post-baby body. Also there is a focus on the body, not just the face in 'selfie-world', and we shouldn't under-estimate that dynamic. 

"Photos, once slices of a moment in the past — sunsets, meetings with friends, the family vacation — are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue. The cutting-edge crowd is learning that communicating with a simple image, be it a picture of what’s for dinner or a street sign that slyly indicates to a friend, “Hey, I’m waiting for you,” is easier than bothering with words, even in a world of hyper-abbreviated Twitter posts and texts.

“This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are “turning photography into a communication medium.”

By extension, in a globally increasingly inter-connected world of digital presence, we all seek to brand ourselves in some way and the selfie has become part of that process. We follow suit, the face, and body become currency, creating a kind of image-currency--not just for celebrity, but for us as well. These self-portraits are a means by which we transmit information (currency) about ourselves.

The selfie has also attracted the attention of the academy. Lev Manovich of Cuny, has launched a project called Selfiecity analyzing selfies taken from five cities – Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Paolo – with the objective of understanding how these self-taken portraits differ across age, gender, and culture. The results are pretty interesting-youth and females tend to offer up the most selfies, although the actual percentage of selfies is lower than expected in the cities they investigated.

Social media are vehicles of interpersonal communication, and they are voluntary opportunities and by virtue of both those elements they become a site where we can study human behavior, so regardless of our personal views on the worth or value of selfies it would seem that they represent some clue to the ways in which we both understand represent ourselves in the 21st century.

Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud and can see lots of holes in my thinking, but I wanted to throw it out there and begin the process of doing a bit more focused work on what it might mean-meanwhile, time for an Instagram fix.

 

back in the future

Edward Snowden and Beam technology

At the Trade Show during the tech section of SXSW, I spent a fascinating afternoon exploring the various technologies, software solutions, inventions and other tech paraphenalia on the convention floor. Much of the stuff on display was connected to data management and analysis, and scattered amongst it all were innovations from all over the world. Down one particualr aisle we came across a crowd of people talking and laughing and generally making a big hubbub. Turned out that they were interacting with a new mobile video-casting technology called Beam. Essentially a big monitor screen set at eye level on wheels, it was a remarkable experience to chat with someone ocated elsewhere, have them 'walk' along with you and interact in a very relaxed way. It sorted of reminded me of something that might have been utilized in Spike Jonze's Her.

The device showed up again yesterday at the TED conference in Vancouver. Afriend of mine who is attending, posted a picture of Tim Berners Lee interviewed Edward Snowden, and Snowden was 'on stage' via a Beam device.

Of course web-conferencing is nothing new, what is new is the recovery of partial mobility. Given that communication is more than a 'talking head' enterprise, it is still surprising how much of a humanising element the simple mobility, size and height of the device offers--it represents something of a communication shift in my mind, probably more in the mind of the reciever than anything, but a shift nonetheless. There has been chatter of late, that we have come to the end of an invention cycle in terms of new devices--i.e. with smart phones and tablets etc., there is not much else we need in terms of device innovation. I don't know if that is true or not, who knew we 'needed' what we have now, and I feel that we are never as sure of what is ahead of us as we would like to think. Regardless of that conversation, it seems to me, that innovation, at least in the immediate, will be focused a bit more on making our interactions with technology more 'real.'

For instance, Apple's shift away from skeuomorphic design (Skeuomorphism is a catch-all term for when objects retain ornamental elements of past, derivative iterations–elements that are no longer necessary to the current objects’ functions), the opting for a more flattened design approach to our interface with it's technology would seem to represent an awareness that our familiarity with it no longer requires a referencing of old technologies to make us feel comfortable. Beyond this it seems we might be getting a slew of things to make us even more seamless in our interactions.

Now let me say that I am not a 'singularity' disciple, the idea that one day artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence radically changing human civilization and nature seems a little much to me, and smacks of an apocalypticism that threads through much of American culture, like the ghost of a particular religious influence. So when I speak about this, I do so with a bit of a amoral perspective, I try not to be a Luddite or blind appropriator, but as I look around I simply see more and more ways in which technology is being woven into the fabric of our lives and ultimately perhaps, under our skin. Like most technological shifts we will probably do our best thinking about it after the fact, once we have embedded it and experience both the losses and gains. In the meantime, Beam is a remarkable device that allows for a more flexible and fluid engagement with human and machine.

As for Edward Snowden, he said something about surveillance and Internet freedom. The right to data privacy, he suggests, is not a partisan issue, but requires a fundamental rethink of the role of the internet in our lives — and the laws that protect it. "Your rights matter,” he say, "because you never know when you're going to need them." You can follow that conversation here.

 

Maps of the Internet

I find maps quite fascinatng, they are documents of our limitations, the boundaries and borders of our perceptions as well as the charting of our knowledge. Maps aren't always necessarily geographic and in recent years as we have shifted our horizons toward the digital, cartographers have emerged with charts and maps of the new geography. Works by Martin Vargic, executed by hand in his spare time using Photoshop were some of the earliest attempts, and now comes a new piece by him and another artist, Jay Simon. Together they have created a map with an old world feel to it, but it is anything but old, hundreds of net ventures are charted and mapped, fascinating. You can buy a copy here.

You can also check this link out for another, and ongoing, approach to mapping digital space.

flat guitars

Guitarist Dave Navarro has a sweet little hobby/project, Flat Guitars. Perhaps I should have put a geek warning on this post--obviously, this will not appeal to everyone, a site devoted to 'flat' graphic versions of famous guitars and guitarists. Illustrations come with a little blurb and a couple of links.

I have been fascinated with the shift to flatness on the web, so that probably figures in my interest with this site--I like guitars but am not one of those people for whom a particular instrument holds some enchantment. The flatness thing is, in my mind, a significant development of the past couple of years. Apple, amongst others, turned away from its original design maxim of attempting to imbue their products with a sense of the 'real world' and has flattened everything with iOS7. So flatguitars is simply another representation of that idea on some level.

It would seem that flatness itself heralds a growing change in our understanding of space and time. I think that we learn to look at the world through the dominant technologies we embrace (an idea I drew upon many years ago from the work of Erik Davis), and this shift to flatness heralds, or at least, nods, toward that dynamic. As we have become increasingly embracing and dependent upon digital technology, and the new sense of the world that it brings to us, we no longer feel the need to replicate the sense of the old reality upon it. In other words, the world of the web, no longer needs to feel like the world shaped by text, it is its own reality, and is also re-framing how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Flatness would seem to point towards a more materialist understanding of the world-surface is depth, and what we need is found there. jeez, that's a bit long-winded for a quick post about bloody guitar illustrations!:)

 

misunderstanding misunderstood

 

The commercial above for the iPhone 5 has been garnering some critique. As you've seen it's a typical teenager, moping about...but not really, turns out said mopey-teen has been documenting family celebrations after all and has used amazing editing chops, great music and his life-altering mobile device to create a moving chronicle of his families Christmas. One of the critiques I read complained that the boy had to 'adopt an anthropological remove,' to be outside all the events he recorded, and would have been better off participating. This is a critique I hear a lot about technology, 'it stops people from being present...they aren't participating etc.' While I'm sure there are valid shades to that argument, mostly I think its stretched a little too far, and fits too nicely into a preconceived view of things.

The funny thing about many of the critiques of the ad is that the critics are completely caught up in the creators web--they immediately identify with the bored, mopey teen, and tun immediately to their arguments about voyeurism, obsessive disconnection etc., except that on this particular occasion, said teen is playing a role, and is, in fact, paying attention to the larger story going on around him, and he is fully present.

I think the moral of the story is twofold. Firstly, I resist the idea that one cannot be present and capturing moments at the same time (which, of course, is the point of the video, well that and selling you a device!), I do it all the time. People who know me give me Moleskine notebooks because I always carry one and make notes, write down ideas, quotes I'm hearing etc. and in order to do that I pause, and I often 'sit slightly outside' events, it's part of who I am--there is a fine line between voyeurism and observation.

Secondly, I do agree with the old exhortation to moderation in all things, and there are times when particiaption and engagment should be prioritized and anthropological remove negated, but sometimes I think the naysayers are just a bit too quick to critique and are in fact, not in the moment themselves, they are standing outside in a posture of anthropological remove with a preconceived idea ready to lay over whatever comes before them, just like mopey teens.

where the gods hide: thoughts on skin and microsoft surface

 

“I think of tattooing as scratching off the surface and revealing what’s really under there" Mr. X

A bus went past me this morning with a huge ad plastered all over it for the Microsoft tablet, Surface. I have never used anything but Apple products, so I have no idea of it's quality or functionality, but I do think it's name captures something of the times in which we live in a canny way. I mean let's face it, the whole 'i' this or that feels a little dated to me. Steve jobs had a fascination with skeuomorphic design--bringing unnecessary elements from one iteration of a design into a new version in order to naturalize the experience--so the notepad app on your device looked sort of like a yellow legal notepad, etc. One of the big complaints about the iOS7 upgrade was its 'flatness.' That skeuomorphic tendency continues to be reflected in the names of Apple products--I doubt it can or will change because it has become the brand marker, but again, your iphone isn't really a phone, its a mobile device that has phone capabilities but it's not a phone--nor for that matter is my ipad, a pad--its a surface. So kudos to Microsoft for capturing what's going on in the name of a device.

 I think I probably have a heightened awareness to surfaces at the moment because I have been reading Mark C. Taylor's Hiding, in the theology book group I participate in. Taylor views his work as 'a surface play' rather than a book, and it is a celebration and critique of the surface of things.

"Surface has never been accepted and embraced as such but is always justified in terms of the heavens or the depths. When height and depth collapse, we are left with nothing more and nothing less than the proliferation of fleeting surfaces. To insist that these surfaces obscure more secure depths is to flee the creative-destructive effervescence that is our condition." MCT

My interest in surface goes back a long way, it crystallized during my PhD work, where I explored the  new cultural implication for Christianity. I used this term, rhyzomic sacralization, to mark the way in which ideas move across the surface of the culture, linking, and forming webs of connectivity as we attempt to negotiate the new digital realities. My thinking on this was influenced by things like Kevin Costner's Waterworld, and the work of artist Mark Tansey, and other explorations of things that flat on the surface of culture, often viewed as inconsequential, but in my mind, of import both in terms of reflection and reaction to how the world shapes us even as we shape it.

I'm also fascinated by tattoos and, as part of my field research component, explored tattooing as means by which we could understand the cultural shifts that were literally being inscribed upon the surface of us, upon our skin. I think the broad embrace of tattooing by mainstream society, and the use of dermis as a site for inscribing meaning is very interesting and again, comes back to this shift to surface idea. Of course, it is more than tattooing on the surface of skin, there are other elements that go deeper--body-piercings, modifications etc., but those still remain slightly further on the margins than tattooing. I was inspired to this by the work of shelley Jackson, whose Skin project I came across in Cabinet magazine. She had a story and wanted to write it on skin, so she invited people to volunteer to be tattooed with a single word from the story. Only those who signed on would know the whole story, and they had to be willing to get any word they were given tattooed on the body in a classic book font and in black ink--over 2000 have participated,

I am not dystopian, surprising given my tendency toward depression and melancholy, but I pursue a positive trajectory across the cultural surface--surface is depth--and meaning is made here. That doesn't mean I am optimistic, because optimism is hard for me. But this resistance to dystopian positioning has often put me at odds, or at least on a different trajectory, with many of my peers who approach culture through the lens of religion. There seems to be a tendency to lead with critique, a product of certain religious conditioning I believe, whereas, to echo the other Taylor, I go with celebration. It's not that I won't, or don't critique, it's that I won't hold up the past as a model for something to return to--I see no benefit in reaching back, reflecting back sure, but the times are what they are, and they need to be critiqued and celebrated on their own terms, and critique is easy-the making is the hard part. Celebration has 'respect' as part of it's definition, so perhaps I should say, I respect and critique.

"What I am trying to do is to articulate the conditions of alternative cultural practices. I'm convinced that in the twenty-first century, the domain of social and political contestation will be the symbolic order or the imaginary register. That is where what once was called "reality" will be constituted. I see it as incumbent upon us to understand these structures and processes and to develop strategies and tactics that will enable us to intervene effectively." MCT

This fascination with surface has also affected the way I think about the inner/outer components of religion. The positing of going inward as going deeper versus allowing the surface to be the site of religious interface. What I mean is we tend to what to plumb the depths of our humanity by ignoring the skin, the flesh, the surface, in fact, we don't just ignore, we demonize, negate and repress the surface in the quest for religious depth and authenticity and I am not sure this is either necessary or helpful in the interplay of surfaces which is life in the 21st century. In Waterworld (I know, but it's good:)), Kevin Costner's character has developed a set of gills, which enable him to go below the surface and bringup artifacts that can still have life on the surface. There is a whole world down there, under the water, it used to be the 'real world' now it's the ghost of a past that is no longer viable. He doesn't want to live there, he just brings up what can be used on the surface. This for me is the shift we must make with our religion, we cannot live in the depths, submerged in an old world, we have to find ways to live on the surface in new ways, floating across the seas, building new networks of being and relations. some artifacts from the old world can be utilized, most of them can't--this is particularly true of religion for me.