Images

Andrew "Da-Man" Murray

Can you believe that I almost forgot to tell everyone about it? My friend Andrew has just published his first solo work! Too cool. Andrew’s book is called “The Regulation of Cyberspace: Control in the online environment” and is an excellent mix of academia, anecdote, politics, law, raw power and technology.

He cites examples as varied as the online coffee pot at Cambridge to the Live8 ebay scandals of 2005, draws from academic fields of information technology, law, philosophy and physics. His point? Basically the world of Internet regulation is much more complex than we care to accept. Regulation is neither hierarchical nor a question of social practice therefore we must bravely accept this and come to terms with the uncertainty of the situation…

Andrew D. Murray – The Regulation of Cyberspace is going to be influential and long lived. Get it from Amazon here!

Posted on by mklang

Imaginary Centers

The idea of the center is a powerful one. It somehow denotes the middle, equilibrium, balance and this spills over into an idea of well-being. The classic search for centers is Jules Verne â??Journey to the Center of the Earthâ?? which somehow never really makes it into a good metaphor for soul-searching introspection.

In our local lives we have a middle-point. Actually we have several. We have a geographical center that somehow denotes the middle point of our everyday travels. Most of us would like such a point to be the place of our homes but the reality of real estate prices probably puts this point somewhere we may never have been â?? the tube or bus station in between home and work.

But there is rarely one center. We have shopping centers (sorry about the pun), entertainment centers, and centers related to many other activities (e.g. food). The mental images of our travels to and from our centers overlap the physical city. Centers are also important outside the personal context. Centers of culture, economics, shipping, religion and industry abound. But these are centers of the imaginary kind.

Geographic centers are common. One such center, which has been notoriously hard to pin down, is the center of Europe. First we have to start by attempting to define what Europe is. This is a historic, geographic, political and nationalistic quagmire (oh no, donâ??t go there). So we simplify, the center of the European Union (an entity which is not Europe).

On the 1 January 2007 the EU center shifted. This is because both Bulgaria and Rumania joined. More territory joins therefore the center shifts (about 200 kilometers east). According to the IGN he new center of the EU is the German town of Gelnhausen.

But the title is contested since there are plenty of places which seem to want the title. Here are a few: Bernotai, or PurnuÅ¡kÄ?s near Vilnius in Lithuania; a point on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia; the village of Krahule in central Slovakia; the town of Rakhiv, or the village of Dilove, in western Ukraine; Suchowola in north-eastern Poland; and ToruÅ? in the northern part of central Poland; Babruysk or Vitebsk in Belarus (Wikipedia).

Several of these sites have nice markers to celebrate the â??factâ?? and to point out the reason for the significance of the insignificant site.

To be able to arrive at the geographical center of Europe the IGN have taken into consideration the English and French colonies far, far away â?? proving once again that the center is equally a state of mind as a geographic fact.

Despite the fact that the center is an illusion we still tend to seek it out. The newly declared Gelnhausen center is in the middle of an empty field (Google Satelite image of 50°10�21�N, 9°9�0�E), identical to all the other fields around it.

Thatâ??s it isnâ??t it? We strive to find the center only to discover that it is no different from the periphery and yet we still value the center even when it is devoid of distinguishing characteristicsâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Why the internet is cool: reason nr 324

In February last year I wrote a post about a painting by the African artist Pilipil Mulongoy which has been hanging in my home since before I was born. It is, as I wrote, the stuff which makes me and my home. In the post I included a photo

pilipili

A couple of days ago I recieved an email from a publisher working on a book about African art history. They would like to use a picture of the work in their book. Stuff like this cannot happen in the analogue world, or at least it never happened to me.

Posted on by mklang

Infotoxicated

Somewhere in the end of last year I became annoyed with Flickr. I used Flickr to upload my photos (original, ey?) but since I used too much bandwidth they started limiting the amount I could put online. One alternative would have been to pay for an account. But instead I just stopped posting my photos. Now I have decided to post them somewhere on my own site and stick a few in my blog. Most of my pictures are of street art from different places. Here are two from Stockholm that I took a while back – they don’t really have anything in common.

Gandhi in Stockholm
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Infotoxicated? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

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Posted on by mklang

Guilty Pleasures

During the thesis process I noticed a change in myself. I had less time and patience for many things I previously enjoyed. One such thing was fiction. So naturally I promised myself that I would return to such pleasures once the thesis was put to rest. But I have become largely a restless soul and I am finding fiction difficult to cope with. But this Christmas break a major exception has occurred.

The book I am reading is one that I have been saving for some time. But now I am happily reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie. I have been hooked on Rushdie ever since I read his book The Satanic Verses. I did not â??getâ?? the reason for the chaos it created at my first reading. But was hooked by his use of images, stories and language. Already in the beginning you are met with a man (Gibreel) falling through the air after an airplane explosion:

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity.

The Verses were followed (in order of reading â?? not writing) by his brilliant Midnightâ??s Children and in Grimus where I came across one quote that has never left me: A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

In The Moorâ??s Last sigh (what a name!) another great quote was:

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. Iâ??ll tell you a secret about fear: its an absolutist. With fear, its all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes like a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despots fall, has more or less nothing to do with â??courageâ??. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.

I donâ??t get around to reading as much fiction as I would like but when I do Rushdie is among my most favourite.  So this Christmas I am thoroughly enjoying reading Rushdie â?? its well worth the guilt I am building up by not doing real work.

Posted on by mklang

Search by Colour

Don’t you hate it when you have an image stuck in your mind? In particular a picture of a picture. Thanks to basic information overload, the internet, and not least, Flickr there are more images than I can imagine. Occasionally one of these images flashes past my screen and I think “nice” before moving along. Later I attempt to look for the picture and fail miserably.

I try retracing my steps, thinking where I had seen it, cursing my senility and realising the picture I need has gone forever (again!). The problem is, and I think of it as a problem, that there is no really good search tool for images. Now there is a partial solution to then problem.

The Flickr Color Selectr searches Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr by color. My problem is that after playing with it for a little while I realised that I will now see hundreds more cool images that, a few weeks later, I will never find…

Posted on by mklang

Gathering of the Clan

Right, it’s too late now to avoid it and too close to ignore it. Christmas is here. This means that it’s time for the annual gathering of the family for communal grazing, socialising and extended computer-free time. It usually looks something like this:

Hippos by Andries license by CC

Wherever you are and however you celebrate – have a good Christmas…

Posted on by mklang

Lions among us

Lions have good PR officers. They tend to get put in the best places and are mythically protrayed as being much cooler than they really are. Just think about the four huge lions around Nelson in Trafalgar Square in London. Obviously great PR work. Nelson was a sailor and he still gets surrounded by four of the biggest lions ever.

Unfortunately there is a downside to great PR and that is that reality eventually creeps up. But somehow this does not happen to the lions. Not long ago, the Lion steps were unveiled in G̦teborg. Two large, blas̩ lions lay overlooking the main canal in G̦teborg. There air of aloofness and boredom is brilliant Рthese are not fierce wild beasts, they are city lions. Cool detached and above and beyond mere mortals that surround them.

Among lion statues there is a whole subset of the reclining lion but it is not very often that you come across a lion who is asleep. But of all the statues of lions my favorite is the sleeping lion guarding the tomb of George Wombwell, menagerist, buried at Highgate Cemetery in London. This lion is said to portray his favourite pet lion. To have the statue sleeping peacefully is a beautiful symbol. So peaceful.

But wherever did they get such good PR people?

Posted on by mklang

Resistance Fashion

Resistance to fashion is a topic that occasionally appears. Such resistance can take the form of animal rights activists protesting against the fur trade (e.g. Coalition to abolish the fur trade), it can take the form of protests against the use of anorectic models (e.g. the Spanish Association in Defense of Attention for Anorexia and Bulimia has managed to obtain the world’s first ban on overly thin models at a top-level fashion show in Madrid), or it can deal with protests against the conditions of workers in the textile trade (the most famous example must be Naomi Kleinâ??s work No Logo)

But what about the fashion of resistance? This is can be seen both as a reflection on what is fashionable to resist at any given time and as the actual fashion statement of the resister. The former is a fascinating subject since the world attention is fickle. The focus of popular attention varies even if the reason for resistance may remain â?? maybe a book here for someone to edit? (nudge, nudge).

However, it is the latter which is the focus of this post. Fashion and style can in themselves be both a form and a symbol of resistance. Styles of dress such as punk and hiphop are seen as resistance to the norm â?? punk went even further since its purpose was to provoke.

But even in the less extreme resistance has a fashion. Styles which identify, unite and exclude. Occasionally these styles establish themselves in the mainstream and there ability to provoke/resist are almost lost. One such controversial symbol is the image of Che Geuvara. On 5th of March 1960 Alberto â??Kordaâ?? Gutierrez took two pictures of Che Guevara. In 1967 the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli received two copies of the famous print at no cost.

Che by Korda

Feltrinelli started making posters from the prints with the notice â??Copyright Feltrinelliâ?? down in the corner. The image was on itâ??s way to become an international icon â?? it has been transformed, transplanted, transmitted and transfigured all over the world. Korda never received a penny. For one reason only – Cuba had not signed the Berne Convention. Fidel Castro described the protection of intellectual property as imperialistic â??bullshitâ??.

Since then the image has gone from being a symbol of resistance and revolution to being a fashion statement. Today the image has achieved iconic status and is (ab)used on everything from posters to carpets. The image has even had an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The question therefore, as symbolized, by the Che icon is: How does an iconic symbol of resistance spread to a mass audience without becoming pop-culture and lacking in the symbolic value which was the original purpose? Or is resistance fashion a paradox since once it becomes a fashion it loses its resistance quality?

Posted on by mklang

RTFM

Nobody wants to read a manual. Most of them are written by people with decidedly odd senses of humor since they seem to skip over a small detail which makes most processes impossible to complete. It’s kind of like cooking recipes  which demand that you have  a tablespoon of port wine at home. Simply annoying.

My favorite kind of manuals are the ones which spend an enormous amount of space describing the blatantly obvious such as “this is the screen” or “plug in the electricity” or “insert batteries” but then when it gets to the stuff which is specific (and complex) for the new machine the instructions get very vague.

Posted on by mklang