From page to screen, a conversation on the unrecorded history of online publishing.
The uneasy death of print media, one Cheap Trick song at a time.
For translucence, against transparency: an account of conceptual art and its mediums.
A series exploring the politics of urban sound in Bangkok and beyond, through first-person reporting, field recordings, and analysis. In this episode, Tausig reports on Songkran, the Thai celebration of the New Year that takes place each April; this year's festivities were more raucous than most.
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The Internet is taking a beating these days. Nicholas Carr believes, and in his recent book, The Shallows, cites plenty of research to buoy his assertion that, the Internet is reconfiguring our brains, making us worse thinkers. Yes, the Web puts vast amounts of information at your fingertips, but its functionality has made it possible to do what scholars and scientists and just about everyone who’s ever studied anything have always wanted to do: cross-reference everything. So we flit about, moving from one article to another as quickly as we can click on hyperlinks—the mere presence of which greatly reduces reading comprehension. Carr argues that our brains are actually being rewired as a result. (The blog Three Percent
has been taking up these ideas recently in a series of posts derived from the first Future of Reading conference, where participants seemed split between “claiming that reading is just migrating to a new place and form, to claiming that technology can help improve close reading, to a belief that the belief in a constant decline in readership has been around since Gutenberg Day One and nothing has really changed.”)
In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brooks wrote, “The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian.” This is a long-standing claim, and is on one level true: Internet access offers (near) universal freedom to create and disseminate information, and to consume it on the other end. But on another level, this assertion is complete bullshit: We all know that the Internet has its own hierarchy, that the virtual equivalent of the crazy homeless man ranting about UFOs shouldn’t be—and, generally, is not—taken seriously.
Consider design. Books, for several hundred years, have not changed much at all. The paper is nicer. The covers last longer. And the evolution of printing technology has allowed for prettier pictures. But the format has remained static since the letterpress days: One reads from left to right, top to bottom, turning the pages to make progress. The Internet, on the other hand, is almost infinitely malleable—but you need a good blacksmith. Which has led to a hierarchy: the nicer, the more professional looking a site is, the more respected it is. Which sort of negates the egalitarianism.
But where do these two notions intersect? If there is a hierarchy, and if we now know why and how our brains are being rewired, can’t the blacksmiths behind the curtain counteract this effect? There is no single answer, of course, and much trial and error (along with a fair amount of hand wringing) will occur before designers—and information aggregators—find workable solutions. Despite Brooks’ pat assessment of Internet egalitarianism, there is an element of democratization at work, which allows individual concerns—preventing the dumbing down of the populace, for instance—to be articulated and amplified to the point where they might effect change (in this case, to the structure and function of the medium). On the Internet, there is no Tyranny of the Majority. —TOM ROBERGE
Many of us are currently in Berlin, undertaking our Sender, Carrier, Receiver program series. So it was a revelation to happen upon this recent Sugarhigh interview with Javier Peres, the proprietor of Peres Projects in L.A. and Berlin.
Ana Finel Honigman: I am really glad that people are taking Berlin seriously.
Javier Peres: Berlin, in many ways, is more serious than just about anywhere.
AFH: It’s more serious than London or New York because seriousness requires levels of authenticity and reality, which haven’t existed in either city for decades.
JP: I can’t exactly pinpoint when it started here, but suddenly now there is this place, and Kimchi Princess and all those little cute Mexican places popping up.
Read more here.
British author Tom McCarthy’s new novel, C, will be published in August in England, and the following month in the U.S. But before that happens, McCarthy’s activities as the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society will be laid bare by Triple Canopy in Berlin—which the INS has declared “the World Capital of Death.” On July 29, as part of its Sender, Carrier, Receiver program, Triple Canopy will present inteligence related to the INS’s efforts to “map, enter, colonize, and eventually inhabit the space of death.” The INS’s activities have long been a concern of Triple Canopy: In the first issue of the magazine Peter Schwenger’s "The State of Inauthenticity" investigated the INS’s “Statement on Inauthenticity,” and ultimately revealed the New York presentation of that document to be a reenactment of an event that probably never occurred. (Sources suggest that Schwenger’s claim inspired the INS to replace its members with actors in future reenactments.)
McCarthy recently wrote the script of Johan Grimonprez’s film Double Take, which is largely composed of archival footage dealing with Cold War paranoia and a Hitchcock look-a-like contest, among other acts of doubling. (“Hitchcock gets eliminated in the first round,” McCarthy notes in an interview with Triple Canopy editor Alexander Provan last year.) For McCarthy, doubling is an act of repetition analogous to death itself, one embodied by the form of cinema; the reel is destined to return to the same terminus each time it is played, but is nevertheless wound and played again and again. How might we confront this fate? “If you meet your double,” Double Take advises, “you should kill him.”
Or, see George Gallo's 2001 ontological comedy, the eponymous double of Grimonprez and McCarthy’s Double Take—itself based on a 1957 film adapted from Graham Greene’s Across the Bridge. In it, Orlando Jones plays a fugitive who steals Eddie Griffin’s passport...only to discover that Griffin is also a criminal, at which point the two inexplicably trade identities. In Greene’s story Griffin’s character is a dog; Jones’s character dies while trying to save the dog’s life. The narrator observes: “Death doesn’t change comedy to tragedy.” —JORDAN LORD
Last month in San Francisco, Subtopia founder Bryan Finoki led a workshop at the conference Toward a Just Metropolis: From Crises to Possibilities, which elaborated upon his contribution to issue 7 of Triple Canopy, “The Anatomy of Ruins.” The workshop, titled Decoding Military Landscapes, was organized in collaboration with Javier Arbona and Nick Sowers. Finoki’s essay for Triple Canopy found in the post-disaster landscapes of New Orleans and Detroit “the spectacle of ruin,” spaces that reveal “the degradation of state power and the heightened role of sovereign corporations in the production of space.” Decoding Military Landscapes extended this thesis to explore how military and corporate entities dominate not only physical space but also information about them, through the archives that store our collective memory. The Internet itself, Finoki and his colleagues argue, is “the archetypal example of military-industrial-complex archival practices”; its preeminence should push us to develop an alternative archival form, one that is transparent, open-source, mutable, inward looking, a document of its own creation—"not just a measure of space, but a new public production of space.”
Unmarked Box on a Counter Jordan Crandall with Caleb Waldorf Shadow, Glare Erin Shirreff
