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Category: value

The Agility of the Book in the face of the Digital and the Censor

Published May 4, 2008 by cgerrish

Tim Tate: Video book artist

I have shelves of books, some that trace back all the way to my childhood. A few others were passed on to me from my grandfather, through my father. I expect my long relationship with books will continue throughout my lifetime. However, the book seems to be in transition, and it’s not clear if the current package can survive the challenge of the digital. As a non-volatile storage medium, the book has many virtues, and currently provides substantial value. In the shadow of this looming threat, the book has inserted itself into my thoughts recently through two upcoming shows:

San Francisco Center for the Book
Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship 
In the Gallery: Fri Aug 15 – Wed Nov 26
Opening Reception: Fri Aug 15, 6-8pm

Donna Seager Gallery
The Art of the Book
Third Annual Exhibition of Handmade and Altered Artist Books 
April 25 – May 31, 2008
Reception for the Artist: Friday, May 9, 6 to 8pm

The Center for the Book show will feature artists reacting to the act of censorship and the recovery of texts and thoughts. The show at Donna Seager’s  gallery features artists exploring the form and expanding the meaning of what it means to be a book. When artists engage with books at this level, there is a profound conversation that occurs outside of language. It’s an excellent reminder that substantial thought can occur across many modes of expression.

The artist book is generally singular; it’s not meant to be mass produced as an inexpensive package for text or images. In that sense, it’s the opposite of what has made the book successful as a form. The digital is no threat here. The artist book is singular and original, the digital is a copy at its origin. The leaves of an artist book aren’t limited to text and images; and the book form itself explodes out to its boundaries and beyond. We’ve lived with the classic form of the book for so long that it’s become part of us. A show like “The Art of the Book” reminds us that even with a familiar object, an infinite realm of possibility abides in every moment. And the book reveals itself to be an agile species changing its form to adapt to new artistic landscapes.

The question of banning a book in the age of the digital is an interesting one. One might ask if it’s even possible. Certainly we’ve seen books banned by governments, by school systems, religions and other social collections. And yet, it’s not the form of the book that is being banned, it’s the ideas and stories that are considered dangerous. All books aren’t banned, just certain ones. The digital and the network make it much more difficult to stop ideas through the banning a particular package and delivery method.

Our country’s history of banning books is a series of markers on our trek toward a more perfect union. As we contemplate the banned book, we need to look both backward and forward. In the future, it may not be the book that is banned—and interestingly, that could provide a new opening for a kind of book to route around the ideologically filtered network.

The work at the top of this post is by Tim Tate, and is called “Page 100 of Each Volume of the 1954 World Book Encyclopedia.” Mr. Tate has created a compelling vision in which a book is revealed through cast glass, electronics and video. As the book traces its evolutionary arc, it emerges here for a moment or two as an interesting kind of amphibian.

 

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Learning what else you can do with a Juniper Berry

Published April 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Juniper berry

Clay Shirky’s comparison of Gin and Television as mechanisms by which pain is soothed, and a cognitive surplus created, connects with a number of things I’ve been thinking of recently. The appropriate response to Shirky’s essay is to create another essay, or perhaps a photograph, that comments and connects to it. We live in a consumer society, and thanks to folks like Ralph Nader, we have some rights as consumers. But we are coming to the end of the era where we define ourselves by what we consume. 

With the vast new set of consumption choices flowing through the network, the issue of gluttony arises. You can’t just eat everything. Human beings don’t scale, and human attention doesn’t obey Moore’s law. What happens when our total number of waking hours, and not just for today, but for the rest of our lives, can be filled with high quality “content” programmed by the best curators and editors on the planet? Fill out a profile, push a button, and the entire sequence can be put into a feed ready for your attention. As material is consumed, and new material becomes available, a constant recalculation of your feed will occur assuring that you will always have the highest quality and most appropriate “content” available. Philip K. Dick is smiling somewhere.

The assumption built into this model is that we just need more and better gin. Shirky points out that if we went on the wagon, we’d have a tremendous surplus of time on our hands. And if we look at what the digital natives are doing, we’d see that 100% consumption is boring. They want all transaction to be full duplex, read/write, consume/produce. At its origin, Tim Berners-Lee created a 2-way web, but the conversation shouldn’t be limited to the network.

If we become a nation of producers as well as consumers, won’t there even be more content to consume? Yes, but there will be no obligation to consume it all. It’s also important to remember that all conversations don’t happen with words (written or spoken). A photograph can speak to an essay, so can a melody, a video, a dance, a scribble in a notebook or a painting. With a whole new set of tools and media widely available, I see a nation returning en mass to their parlor pianos and singing a song about “gin and television” and then uploading a video of it to YouTube.

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Gesture Bank Robbed: Clues Point to an Inside Job

Published April 20, 2008 by cgerrish

Bank Vault

It’s just been reported that the Gesture Bank was robbed, and officials tell us that everything is gone. The complicated security measures, the armed guards, the thick metal walls, the alarms, the hidden cameras and the lasers were all overcome in this daring daylight robbery. Some form of military-grade explosives were used in the dramatic breach of this highly-secure vault. Local law enforcement officials, however, speculate the perpetrators were amateurs, “when we arrived on the scene, there were gestures everywhere. Man, they were scattered from hell to breakfast. It doesn’t look like they actually got away with much.”

Portable Eye Tracking

Thousands of ordinary Americans had deposited their hard-earned gestures into accounts using the portable attention recording equipment supplied by the bank. The promise of fungible gestures growing tax-free in their accounts fueled dreams of early retirement and a life of leisure for many.

Clockwork orange

In recent years, the Gesture Bank had faced controversy with its compulsory attention collection proposals. A number of politicians and advertising executives believed that achieving critical mass in the gesture market was a necessary step in transitioning to the new economy. Deposit growth was falling short of projections and some felt stronger measures were required for the safety and security of our nation.

Gesture experts have been puzzled by evidence at the crime scene, it appears all the gestures that have been recovered have been uniformly sliced into 140 character strings of hypertext. The recovery has been very difficult as the gestures seem to be re-absorbed into the the network through the web, IM and SMS. The gestures that have been traced inside the network seem to have formed into a continuous stream of 140 character units; investigators provided this visualization for the media.

Gesture Bank officials are concerned that it will be impossible to identify all these gestures and connect them back up to the people who originally made them. “What people don’t seem to understand is that without a bank and accounts, there’s no way to know who made what gesture.”

Some believe that the Gesture Bank robbery was an inside job, that the unidentified suspect wasn’t working alone. There’s a growing political movement that believes gestures should not be kept in vaults, that gestures should be out in the world and circulating among the people. Highly-placed sources within the bank have reported that this new political idea was spreading like a virus at the highest levels of the organization. One member of the Board of Directors hasn’t been seen around the plush executive suite in many months. Some felt that he signaled his intentions when left this image pasted to the door of his office as a final gesture.

You don’t need a weather man

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Rhizomatic strategies: MSFT, Silverlight, the Link, the Fragment

Published April 3, 2008 by cgerrish

Gilles Deleuze

The giants, finding the limitations of growing to be the tallest tree, have started to look for other modes of expansion. Even the tallest tree can’t encompass the world.

Arborescent: growth by extension of mass and branching.

Rhizomatic: growth by linking and become part of the other.

From the definition on Wikipedia: “A rhizome works with horizontal and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and linear connections.” For near monopolies like Microsoft, companies that seemed to have the whole thing within reach, a new model of dominance has emerged. Google set the pattern, search is in the middle of everything.

The myth of the totalizing whole has been exposed. Not only is it not possible, it’s not desirable. For Microsoft to operate in the new order of things, they must accept a mixed operating environment. Rather than swallowing Yahoo whole, they must link to it and put themselves inside Yahoo as a fragment. Silverlight is the path toward that future because it doesn’t need to play Microsoft’s traditional zero-sum game. It can link to, and become part of, the other. The goal is to be the dominant fragment, the most aggressive weed in the garden.

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