Ever wondered where technology – and by extension society – is headed?
An observation: read wikipedia. Example given, landlines are on their way out entirely; they will be ubiquitously replaced by mobile phones within 10 years. A fair number of people will say “duh” but where’s the proof? Evidence: read the wikipedia landline article then glance at the wikipedia mobile phone article. You can actually read the landline article in a couple minutes – but the mobile phone article has as many links and citations as the landline article has words!
It’s not to say that landlines aren’t or won’t continue to be extremely useful, merely that their purpose or even consideration is being increasingly replaced and usurped. Imagine if you had a fire in your building, would you think first to reach for the landline where you would be stuck as the fire approached, or reach into your pocket for your mobile where you can keep moving, escape the fire, and still talk with emergency workers at the same time?
Mobility makes sense.
But the argument here is that if you’re curious where society is headed, Wikipedia can be used as an observation tool. As the trend of a tool or resource becomes increasingly popular so its Wikipedia article becomes more complex in citations and increases in length; it’s competition does not necessarily dwindle proportionately, but merely becomes stagnate, confined to historical reference.
Paul McCarthy’s HEAD SHOP/SHOP HEAD is currently up at S.M.A.K., the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst. Gent in Belgium. A visit to the exhibition page on their website reveals a fair number of “web2.0″ options: users can create accounts with the museum website; embedded audio and flash video; the ability to leave comments; etc. Scrolling down to the bottom of the images available for McCarthy’s show, one sees a YouTube embedded video. My immediate reaction was ‘thats great!’ Someone at the Stedelijk was smart enough to embed some moving images into the webpage to make the content a little more dynamic and interesting!
Clicking on the player however one is confronted with the message: We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.
Sure enough a visit to the actual video page on YouTube lets you know:
My argument here is I’m curious who made the call to YouTube to report the video as copyrighted or owned by a specific party? Was there no agreement between McCarthy, his studio or gallery representation, and S.M.A.K. (a well-known and prestigious museum)? The video was not deleted by the uploader, it was removed by Google!
McCarthy is well-known for his video work, so it would make sense to have a video of some sort to tease audiences into coming to the museum! I don’t recognize the video thumbnail image, so I can’t speak for the importance of that specific video, but I remember once watching nearly every monitor of a row of McCarthy videos at the ICA in London and literally hogging the monitors! Each monitor only had one pair of headphones and it was my first encounter with some of the videos. I stood, watching each one all the way through, some 40 minutes long! I was laughing my ass off and I wouldn’t let anybody else have a go to know what was so funny, after all I paid to watch this stuff and I wanted to see it desperately! Of course putting a video on YouTube isn’t the same quality or standard of installation as seeing a work on monitor at the ICA, but it would help facilitate an awareness of what the artist is really known for, and generally just make the website more exciting!
But I’m mostly interested to know what the argument against having a video on YouTube was all about, who were the parties involved and who ultimately made the call. And why an artist may be potentially involved in the decision to restrict access to their work.
(Of course you can always watch a good number of McCarthy videos online over at the ubu web film archives)
I’ve always loved looking at the cracks in paintings, sometimes they’ve been more my concern than the actual work itself (I am thinking specifically of Malevich’s Black Square. Most images on the Net don’t show it, but this seminal painting is highly fragmented – the Tate have a good example though, simply scroll down a bit). Seeing a painting break down, it’s meaning crack apart and it’s image shift around like continental plates!
I will probably never be one of the many many thousand+ visitors who flock to see Leonardo’s The Last Supper painting, and one could argue now why would you need to. Considering this new scan, racking up a whopping 16 billion pixels, will let you zoom in and view the gap between someone’s fingers, or if you prefer, peer into Jesus’s gob.
It’s official, my ‘old’ Sony camera is officially out of the picture – pun intended.
One of the first things I do when acquiring new hardware is to tinker with it. Rattle it around, shake it, to dis- and re-assemble is key. Okay I didn’t disassemble the G7 but I tinker with these things a whole lot. I don’t like reading manuals and I prefer to see what the hardware can do that is intuitive or native thinking for me. If I think there is a way that something should be done, or that a camera – in this case – should be capable of a certain function or feature, then I just start pressing buttons, scrolling up/down menus and changing options until I find what I want.
First thoughts are ‘YES!’ With two dedicated dials up top and the scroll-click-wheel type thing on the rear, most functions are available within one or two tiers of a menu. Much more efficient than my V1 where I had to click into a menu, scroll left, then up or down and click again; or where some camera functions where hidden depending on what shooting mode you were in. The G7 is more standardized, in other words.
What I was initially averse to that I’m now finding to be extremely useful is that the G7 is much more restrictive on the types of photos it can take. Or, what the G7 lists as ‘Functions Available in Each Shooting Mode’ are much more limited than the V1, which in a way forces you to think more about your shot and in effect, to take a better photograph. The V1 was more ‘open’ in this respect, which is pleasantly welcome in some moments, but these aren’t no point-n-shoot cameras in the first place.
The G7 is a few ounces heavier, and doesn’t fit my right hand on its own as well as the V1. It’s either a camera with a strap for protection against dropping it, or its a two-handed camera. With the V1 I could grab onto the grip on the front, and use my opposable thumb – you know, that important odd-out digit that distinguishes us from so many other creatures – to grip against the viewfinder on the rear, allowing my other fingers to access most of the buttons; with the G7 I can’t do this, because it just doesn’t fit my fingers like so. But the G7 is a delight otherwise, and has some beautiful built-in features, including…
Native widescreen photographs! I actually hadn’t recognized this as a listed feature, because I glossed over “3648×2048″ as just another format size. I love the 16:9 ratio. It’s how my eyes see. They’re side to side and see across a horizon that is nearly twice as wide as it is tall, not 4:3. 4:3 makes sense for portrait photography or anything vertical to me, as your image plane is about an up-down sensibility, or in the case of portraits because of the composition of the human face, but for most other shots… woot! 16:9 widescreen! Niiiiiiiice.
Here are two semi-identical shots, that illustrate this comparison:
Obviously it will always depend on the image you are taking, but where and whenever possible I’m likely to think in landscape-widescreen format.
Also a 2Gb 150x SD card was way more cheap than memory cards for Sony cameras have or probably ever will be, because they’re a more accessible card format. For this I am extreeeeeeemly thankful.
Oh, and did I mention it has an accelerometer in it!
I hate to think the blog is a stomping ground for materialist rants, but what else is new.
I’ve long-been a proponent of digital photography. I understand some of the arguments in favor of analog film-based photography, having trained in it myself for multiple years, and still turning to it every so often to provide certain solutions that digital cameras still can’t provide (not in my price range anyhow). On that financial note, I also understand the affordability of these digital technologies, and their ease-of-use and immediacy – and the ability to manage images digitally is a truly astonishing feat, and something I won’t give up as long as I don’t have to.
Way back when, in 2000, I bought my first digital camera, a Sony Mavica, the FD91 model (I still have it somewhere). A hefty many many hundred dollar investment, it was a sub-1 megapixel (.8MP) camera that recorded to floppy disks. Yes, you read that right, floppy disks! It was physically massive, a burden to take anywhere so forget about being able to pull it out of your jacket pocket – the only place big enough to hold this thing was the trunk of your car.
More than three full years later in December 2003, I bought an upgrade, a Sony DSC-V1, in preparation for a trip to Germany and to document my expected last six months of living in London. Again, a hefty investment – these things usually are – but well worth it. A brick as it might be, being an all-metal body (one of its selling points at a time when many cameras were being pressed out with plastic bodies), I’ve carried it with me nearly everyday everywhere I went. My Picasa program now manages over 15,000 images, or over a dozen images a day, something unachievable with 35mm film.
People who know me know my camera has gone through some damage – what you see up above I refer to as ‘battle scars’. Not so much abuse but rather constant use and travel have meant my camera is on its last leg. I don’t carry my camera in a bag or pouch else that’s another thing to keep track of and slows me down when most of my shots are spontaneous, so the constant in-out of the pocket and rubbing up to whatever else I’m carrying means scratches are inevitable. Recently, the camera, only under certain conditions, started to develop a spot.
At first I thought it was just the lighting conditions of a specific day, then I started to notice the spot in the same location on completely different shots (i.e. one outside, one in studio, etc.).
The timing is right, same three years and several months later. Time to upgrade.
My first two digital cameras were Sony, but don’t get me wrong I’m no Sony enthusiast. At the time however they made the best hardware for the market, so that’s what I went with. This time around I still thought I would see what they have to offer. The W90 seemed an obvious upgrade, with most of the same features, still in the Cyber-shot family, and an increase from 5 to 8 megapixels. ISO 3200 could prove useful, and a burst function of 100 images would be fun to mess with. But what’s this? No Manual control, and I would still be stuck with the highly proprietary Memory Stick format (the only thing off-putting about the V1). Shopping in the same megapixel range and higher consumer end of options, I’m now looking at the Canon PowerShot G7. The ISO only goes to 1600 but the chassis is much-more in tune with my sensibilities and would grip better with my hands, plus I don’t need my cameras to be as small as my credit cards! And Canon are another company whose products I’ve always admired (my current inkjet printer is a Canon, well-pleased with that piece of hardware).
Another very hefty investment, right under the $500 mark not including a memory card with lots of capacity, but as I’m preparing to go to Europe I can’t imagine this trip with spots in every photo, so in a way it’s a necessary investment. (oh and the G7 is 10MP, so I’m effectively doubling the amount of information in every shot! woot!) Unless anybody has any other recommendations?
i bought a new mp3 player today. it should arrive mid-next week. i’m really excited with this thing. I’m in the ‘anythingbutipod‘ pool of consumers, so I settled for a Clix from iRiver.
I spend around 6-8 hours a week travelling on subways, and while most people who travel listening to mp3 players are simply listening to pop music or music in general, I’m much-more looking forward to listening to those BBC radio broadcasts, podcasts and lectures from the Walker Art Center and other podcasts from artists, art institutions, etc. and other archived audio programs that I don’t otherwise have the opportunity to listen to when I’m busy in my own studio and need to focus. I have to travel, so I figure its time to multitask my commute and my cultural excitement (of course, I am also of the belief that it’s not a good thing to be plugged in all the time, especially when walking on the streets – you can’t hear anything around you! you’re vulnerable and unaware! but when sitting on a subway seat for 40 minutes, I’ll make an exception).
Additionally, this player which only measures 2.7â€? x 1.8â€? x .6â€?, can also view basic .txt files, has a built-in FM tuner, can view standard image formats such as JPEGs, has a mic for voice-recording, and also plays movies at 320×240, and can run for 25 hours on a full charge. So we’ll see if it is simply another device to consume time, or if I can find a way to put its hardware to applicable use and create some work from its functions and capabilities.
