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Category: culture

ManhattanHenge And The Real-Time Moment

Published July 12, 2009 by cgerrish

After spending a day at the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp and listening to the companies and people converging around this new sector, I thought it would make sense to invert the question. Investments will be made in the technology of encoding and relaying, filtering and finding, and reading and writing into streams. But what is it that the real-time web should be focusing its camera on? How does what we pay attention to change when we move from the corpus of stored data to what is happening right now.

There’s a sense in which real-time retrieves older patterns. Before time was flattened into a linear sequence by the clock, it was primarily present as rhythmic cycles. We lived within the cycles of our bodies, the seasons and the movements of celestial bodies. The recurrence of an event was an affirmation of our perdurance.

ManhattanHenge is a biannual solstice event that occurs each May 28 and July 12/13. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, brought it to the world’s attention.

The recurrence of ManhattanHenge is a kind of modern-primitive event. Its immediate appeal is the emotional satisfaction of the visual event– it’s like witnessing a hole in one. And while the traditional news media may treat it as an oddity, as a bit of fluff for the end of a broadcast— this event resonates at a much deeper level for those who take the time to unpack it.

In his later work, Wittgenstein turned to the construction of language games as a way to engage in the activity of philosophy. In his excellent book, How to Read Wittgenstein, Ray Monk describes it like this:

It seems the best way of understand the use Wittgenstein makes of language games is to see their role in the construction of Übersicht, and thereby their role in producing ‘the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections.’

ManhattanHenge is a way of seeing a connection between the linear Euclidean thought that results in the architecture of the city of Manhattan and the circular activity of time expressed into the movements of heavenly bodies. And while Stone Henge was built to specifically capture that connection, ManhattanHenge emerged out of the unconscious elements of a Euclidean landscape to make the same connection. This fleeting image encapsulates so many strands of thought– nature/culture; web/real-time; language/forms of life; and linear/circular.

That point on the horizon, the blaze of light at the end of 42nd street— that is the real-time moment, the connection between our technology and the natural world unfolding around us.

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Pina Bausch: Poet of Performance (1940 – 2009)

Published July 1, 2009 by cgerrish

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The difference I suppose is one of presence—of the energy field that envelopes the performers and the audience for the duration of the performance. It must be felt directly, it can’t be translated into video or text and transported for decoding and consumption at a remote endpoint. My first experience of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal was the piece called ‘Palermo Palermo’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I’d read about her work extensively, but this was my first taste.

Pina Bausch passed away yesterday, she was 68 years old. Bausch had just completed a new work, and was preparing for upcoming performances. She was one of the few artists who was required viewing in my book. If you could see a performance, there was no alternative, you must go. Now we must try to do the impossible; conjure a semblance of what it was like to be in the presence of a performance.

‘Palermo Palermo’ began with the stage completely obscured by a floor-to-ceiling wall of cinder blocks. As the lights in the auditorium dimmed, the audience was confronted with this wall. Slowly one detected movement, something was happening to the wall. It was falling backward onto the stage, and it struck with an incredible crash. The air was filled with dust, the stage was covered with broken cinder blocks, the music started up and dancers appeared—running madly across the field of broken stone.

My last encounter with Bausch’s ensemble was in Berkeley, at Zellerbach Hall. I happened to be sitting in the first row, and during a particular sequence in the performance, Dominique Mercy was asking people in the audience to make a snoring sound. This was my one contribution to Bausch’s body of work— a loud snore from the first row.

Cafe Muller

The Rite of Spring

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Walzer

Il lamento dell’imperatrice

Pina Bausch settled in, and lived her life, on the boundary between dance and theater. Her interest was not in how people move, but rather in what moves people. Her pieces were without beginning or end, constructed from the real-time lives and emotions of the dancers performing the piece. Standing at the edge, or perhaps a bit beyond it, there are no hard and fast rules about what can and cannot be included in a performance. It’s a rare artist who can consistently create passionate, engaging works from that position over a long career.

Lee Yanor’s short film on Pina Bausch captures the movement of the choreographer’s hands. Her works often had a mythic scale to them, but they began, perhaps, with her hands thinking through the movements that moved her dancers through the dance.

Pina Bausch, may “…flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

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Ink, Trust and the Electronic Vote

Published June 23, 2009 by cgerrish

Dumbold

It probably passed unnoticed by most, but an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times contained this phrase:

Electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted.

The Times stated its support for Representative Rush Holt’s Bill which would ban paperless electronic voting in all federal elections. Of course, it’s the combination of ink and paper that supplies the level of documentation for which the congressman is looking. It is asserted that a physical manifestation of the vote is required to establish trust. A mark upon a ballot that can be plainly seen by anyone in the broad daylight of a town square.

While the documentation of voter suppression can be digitally captured and distributed via the real-time news network, the act of voting itself, apparently, cannot be trusted to the digital. The low cost of change damages the digital’s credibility here. It seems too easy to hack the vote.  And yet, we trust our finances to purely digital systems— and our medical records will soon move from ink and paper to databases.

What would electronic voting have to be in order for it to enjoy the level of trust accorded to voting through the medium of ink and paper?  And what change would that level of trust signal?

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Her Explicit Intention Was a Signal Of Something Else Entirely…

Published June 22, 2009 by cgerrish

Listening to John Cage talk about music, sound and silence causes me to think about data. We talk about data in similar terms, we think of it as structured, semi-structured and unstructured.

I don’t need sound to talk to me…
– John Cage

We often talk of trying to capture the intention of a person’s activity on the Network. Google has done this through providing the mechanism through which a question about the location of something is asked. In our age of quantification, it seems rational to dedicate our efforts to locate the consumer’s stated intention to buy. The rational engages the rational in a structured transaction where the best feature/function/price ratio is determined by auction in real time. This is a vision of humanity as a population of buying machines.

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There’s a magic trick that’s often used to sell the non-verbal within the corporate environment. A series of visual illusions are displayed to prove the point that each person brings something of themselves to every situation. Usuallly a test is then given— and a  person’s set of answers are then mapped to a psychological profile. Colors or archetypes predict what each person might bring to the party. These maps are then provided to make visible the invisible threads running through our everyday interaction. Magic, of course, is entirely rational. Diverting our attention between the Turn and the Prestige is its art.

Image advertising works at a lower level, it creates a personal connection to the economics of a person’s psychological ecosystem. The image asks for completion: I want to be that; I want that social status; I think that’s sexy; I think that’s funny; That thing is practical, like I am; I’m frightened, that thing looks safe. Is it really possible that advertising on the Network could be all ego and no id? Can brands survive as pure feature/function/price sets to be compared in a data matrix?

Crusades are being launched to structure and link all the data on the Network. The age of enlightenment strives toward its completion. And yet, I wonder, as I listen to John Cage talk about the sound of the traffic on 6th Avenue in New York City, how much of what goes on between people works at the level of the rational, unambiguous signal? How much more can we learn about what’s going on right now by listening to the sound of the traffic?

Take a moment, what is the sound of the traffic on the Network from your particular vantage point?

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