Filed under: Bric-a-Brac
How is Blackle saving energy?
Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.
Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002
In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.
We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.
Filed under: what's going on
23.05.2008—05.07.2008
Projection Window
KOTOE ISHII
SPINNING
Red wool is a material used constantly in Kotoe Ishii’s work. Through knitting, sewing and tangling the red string tensely by hand, Ishii personalises it as a part of her body. In her video work, Spinning, a girl endlessly pulls a strand of red string from her mouth. The action is one of expulsion and discovery. As she pulls on the string, the girl draws out childhood memories and experiences trapped inside the body, exposing her true self and exorcising her past. While this act appears childish, there are both sinister and sexual undertones to the performance. The red thread is representative of femininity; its extraction symbolic of the uniquely female acts of birth and menstruation. The calmness of the protagonist through this enigmatic action challenges traditional notions of femininity, replacing them with an uncanny speculation on identity and embodiment.
Spinning is presented in association with the 2008 Next Wave Festival.
SEVEN NIGHTS A WEEK AFTER DARK
Image: Spinning 2007 (video still, detail)
FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: http://www.ccp.org.au/exhibitions.php?f=Projection_Window
http://www.ccp.org.au
Filed under: Bric-a-Brac
Every one is part of a target group.
Why does Sonic Youth release a Starbucks Hit Compilation ? (you’ll find more pretty commodities on that webside)
“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
(Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, New York, 1977, foreword p.3.)
–> We are all affected/concerned —-> hence the interest in series on medical practices
Visit Gunther von Hagens’ unique Plastinarium and find out how you can donate your own body.
“the juxtaposed couple” on display at the Plastinarium in Guben, Germany
___________________
“Witness how the perishable bodies of humans and animals are preserved for posterity and aesthetically formed through the unique method of plastination, so that you may experience the beauty and fragility of our existence. Nearly 25 million people worldwide have been fascinated by the reality of the specimens in the BODY WORLDS exhibitions. Come and take a look behind the scenes!”
(http://www.plastinarium.de/en/plastinarium_e/plastinarium_what_is_it.html)
–> People are generelly pretty curious. TV plays on that in that it gives the viewer what he/she wants: It grants an insight into people’s realtionships with each other, it allows to see through the fassades people put up. In the particular case of TV series on forensics or medical practices people even get to see what they normally couldn’t see: the inside of their own physical body.
In the anatomy theaters the body was not only demonstrated but also performed; it became transformed into a universalized sign reflecting back upon each viewer as the uncanny unveiling of their own insides, of a universal, humansistic , corporeal condition.”
(Eugene Thacker, digital anatomy and the hyper-texted body, p. 2)
What does watching a body being dissected or operated on most possibly cause in the viewer:
- disgust
- nausea even
- critique (in that he/she thinks this shouldn’t be presented on TV, unless maybe in the context of a documentary…)
- fascination
- satisfied voyeuristic needs
THE SECRET
- Grey’s Anatomy
“As doctors we know everybody’s secrets, their medical histories, sexual histories, confidential information. We keep secrets. We have to. But not all secrets can be kept.”
(Character Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh)
- CSI MIAMI
conversation between Lt. Horatio Caine (David Caruso) and Eric “Delko“ Delektorsky (Adam Rodriguez) on the scene of a potential crime (A man just died in the arms of Eric Delektorsky who for his part is devastated for a minute because he couldn’t save that man’s life…):
ED (excited and disappointed at the same time):
He could have told us something!
HC (in a calming all knowing tone):
We don’t need him to. We’ve got the whole story right here. (He scans the site with his thorough gaze…)
________________________
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE BODY?
He turns into:
- a ‘raconteur passif’,
- a means of evidence,
- a human container that is inscribed with traces of the soul/body that it is filled with.
BODY WITHOUT ORGANS:
I take it as:
- a state of being,
- a critical approach,
- perception, potential, becoming,
- constant flux,
- an experiment rather than an interpretation and a set of practices (Deleuze, Guattari).
Filed under: Bric-a-Brac
this is only a very quick note as I need to be going very shortly:
Germany sticks out with its coverage on the bomb attack that took place in Jaipur/India yesterday as it is instantly relating the incident to the on-going conflict between Muslims and Hindus (being subtly accusatory towards Muslims…)
http://www.netzeitung.de/politik/ausland/1018197.html
America:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=4845009
England:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7398989.stm
India:
http://www.hindu.com/2008/05/14/stories/2008051460640100.htm
Australia (ABC Network):
hasn’t reported/commented on the bomb attack so far.
________________________________________________
Without taking one or the other’s part I wonder why we only seldomly hear about attacks on Muslims?
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2002/04/30/india3885.htm
Filed under: Bric-a-Brac
It’s not about music this time (–>… movie…) Too easy?
Maybe some of you might also do “Migrant Nation” this semester, so you might already know about the book launch this Friday. Most probably Pi O will not explain his concepts about language on that occasion.
As we have been talking a lot about deterritorialization lately I couldn’t help wondering whether this concept is also applicable in the case of Pi O ’s poetry.
As he pointed out himself during the lecture he gave today he experiments with language, minimizing it, shuffling it, shuffling grammar.
“work” by Pi O
He also touched on concepts of Oral Poetry and how he himself tries to incorporate the body (meaning gestures and so forth) into language.
Pi O who was born in Greece and migrated to Australia in the 1950s is and has been predominantly concerned with the experiences of people with migrational background within the Australian Society.
As far as I remember some of the readings from a few weeks back dealt with the notion of dreamers and rebels. Without going into the details here I would just quickly like to draw on how he conceives of migrants as constructive rebels. Coming from the outside they see things differently and bring with them a potential alteration.
In fact Pi O draws analogies between bilingualism and schizophrenia saying that living between (two) languages creates some sort of own space that belongs to neither of the two. Thirdness is what he called that space.
Ultimately the question is whether what Pi O by tries to captivate and express in his poetry can be understood as a form of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of language.
Are virtuality (understood as potential interrelations and changes inherrent to a system/ see week 9 readings: “The Universal Viral Machine” by Jussi Parikka, p.14) and deterritorialization mutually exclusive concepts or do they go together?
Find more information on Pi O and the book launch here ( ABC Radio Podcast).
Maybe see you on Friday.
Filed under: Reading Notes
I couldn’t help thinking of him, when I saw the images of ‘Frank Gallagher’ on screenmachine: In retrospect it seems that the dude-character appealed to quite a lot of people. Some even invested their time in tracking down the very origins of this dude’s ‘view on the world’. 
The similarities between those two characters {a) Frank b) dude} go beyond their outer appearance and their use of coarse language. Just as pointed out by Felicity during the lecture FrankGallgher doesn’t seem to believe in the existence of some kind of paradise. Neither does the dude. In fact, if we have a closer look at “The Dude Attitude” as outlined here we will find that
“‘The Dude Abides.‘ But against the terminal upheavals of mankind’s history, true dudes have always abided. The reason for this is plain: Life is full of strikes and gutters. So fuck it, let’s go bowling.[...]It might be said that dudes are realists who rebel against excess idealism…” (Oliver Benjamin)
It should be stated that the term ‘dude’ has undergone a shift of meaning over the time. The Merriam Webster online dictionary comes up with the following:
\ˈd(y)üd-ish\ adjectiveWhereas Frank is a frequent visitor of the neighbourhood pub the dude spends most of his time in the bowling hall and is depicted as someone aswho is at one with his “doing drugs” routine. In fact it might help him to keep his distance from “the real world out there”; the societal system he doesn’t approve of. The dude’s apparent refusal to be called by his actual name gives evidence of that as well. The dude doesn’t negate the existence of a dominant reality he rather tries to live his life as uneffected by it as possible for he is more of a realist than a dreamer. Is the dude an unintended ( I would maybe not call him unconsious) rebel in the sense that he denies the capitalistic machine access to his microcosm or molecular world? Unintended since he not being sucked into the streams of desire endorsed/created by capitalism’s machines? (simply put)
