Mercedes Bunz has written a pretty sharp article on the current situation of creative people in Berlin. The old “OMG, the rents are so low”-thing, you know. If you’re able to understand German, you should read it since it’s a good analysis of the Berlin lifestyle and raises some issues which, judging by the comments, are slightly unpleasant.
Rocketboom is being recorded in High Definition video from now on. As I was watching it, I had the impression that it’s (despite the lower eventual resolution) looking way better than TV.
Now that’s really funny: since you don’t have to have a new computer for watching HD-material, all the amateur podcasters are likely to make a far quicker transistion to the new standard than traditional TV-stations. In addition to that, TV in my experience is such a bureaucratic medium and I can almost hear the stations’ technicians argumenting for the blessings of traditional standards while all the podcasters are happily buying their cheap HD-cams and start shooting. I love the internet!
Saw “Drawing Restraint 9″ by Matthew Barney yesterday. Very beautiful movie. Gorgeous images, truly amazing sound and wonderful music by Björk, great rhythm and the typical barneyesque imagery of otherworldly rituals. But yet so tiring. It’s so long and so much about him and him and Björk and his imagination and his jelly. so from some point on, this gigantic question mark appeared in my head. Then there was a talk at the end of the screening, which was more of a Q&A and yes, the A was M.B.
Unfortunately, the man has absolutely nothing to say. Many of the audience’s questions were stupid, one must admit, but his talking about his art was so completely unsatisfying and uninteresting that I can’t help but suspect that no one can grasp his secret masterplan just because there is none. Not that an artist has to have one, more than anyone else, but his body of work is met by so much awe and interpretation that it always made me wonder who would be behind all that. I deeply admire his visual imagination and his perfectionism, but otherwise it really doesn’t touch me. And I felt that I was not alone at all in the auditorium with this impression.
When Chris, Harm and Ruairi were in Berlin last week, one night we ended up having a fabulous time at the Berghain/Panorama Bar. At the entrance, there is a very charming, yet determined guy who will search your bags and take into custody any kind of photographic device he might find. He seems to be doing a good job, since there’s only one picture of the place on flickr from the outside at daytime.
I find this policy quite interesting. Of course, the main reason is that they are afraid that someone might accidentially take a picture of someone taking some drug, which would put the owner in a lot of trouble. On the other hand, they might be to some extent deliberately imposing this policy in order to in a way guard the discreetness of the nights. This is probably one of the most ecstatic clubs on the planet and as such plays a very certain role, as a heterotopian place and possibly also one of Marc Augé’s Non Lieux. It exists on the map but at the same time it creates a deliberate bubble with a world within, made of blissfully monotonous music, various drugs and abandonment. The very nature of such a night seems to dictate that there should be no (not only?) visual memory of it.
This puts the bouncer who I mentioned earlier in an interesting position. Any bouncer is a kind of human firewall who looks at what’s coming in and decides. But, by filtering out the technology, they also control what’s going out of the place in the form of visual data. This, especially combined with the fact that they obviously don’t primarily care about copyright violations, tells some interesting things about how parts of life are adapting to the proliferation of certain cultural techniques and devices.
While at the Eurolab future-scenario workshop in Girona, we had these bold ideas about everyone being equipped with tiny digital cameras. So when everyone almost always records images and makes them publicly accessible, you eventually would get something like an enormous cultural heritage. In the future you could search the web for some event or incident or person and you would get an infinity of perspectives and personal takes. A memory palace for the world to share.
Well, looking at the photos tagged with 22C3, the recent event here in Berlin, it occured to me that this has already happened. You could argue that the hackers are probably super-early-adopters but just give it a short while and your dog will do it (or does it already).
Back to using Plazes, I was wondering if the geodata wouldn’t be better used in a mischievous way? After all, you don’t only know where people are, you also know where there are not. So, instead of the buddy list, it should be easy to hack something like a baddie’s list which shows all of the users that are currently not at home.
While on my way to buy mum’s christmas present in Cologne, I came across a shop that does these 3D images inside glass cubes. As usually, I was pretty amazed by the images and because they do portraits too, I dropped my original idea and went for that. They take a stereoscopic image of you while also projecting a pattern that allows the computer to perform an estimation of the shape of your head.
Yes, it is tacky but she loves it and, actually, so do I. Threedimensional images of the Eiffel tower are pure kitsch, but having an actual representation of a person frozen in glass (with all its cultural connotations) has something magic to it that you just can’t deny. Funny though, how we get fascinated by a very low resolution image etched in glass when we have all the world’s megapixels at our command. Because it’s physical? Also interesting how the shop emphasizes on the claim that the glass cube would be “non-ephemeral” other than chemical negatives or digital data. So maybe it’s just another instance of sculptural portrait then.
Historically, the technology comes from the cold war research into laser weapons in the eighties and was apparently one byproduct of the development of focused high-energy lasers. While the U.S. used acrylic for their tests, the Russians went for optical glass. With the rise of Perestroika, the Russian scientists allegedly got unemployed and were looking for commercial applications of their developments. The U.S. patent for the technology called Laser-induced damage image is held by Igor Troitski since 2000. There’s an interesting article about LIDI at the Society for Optical Engineering.
Meeerry christmas!
Just in from Fixr, no other info provided but it’s more than enough, I guess:
tags: “london”
Okay, yesterday I decided to have a new try on putting this blog to use.
Since i cannot decide on whether I want to have a platform to share my findings and my progress in work, I will do both. Photoblogging stays at my space on Flickr, though.
And it’s gonna be in English, for the sake of internationality and avoiding the, let’s call it orkuting.