discussion

I heard about this article listening to the radio a few days ago, which I do often to get my news so that may be a common link to my posts, sorry about that. If you are interested in hearing the commentary, you can access what I heard at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19341657&ft=1&f=1057 

I am including the article below which is what the news radio segment was essentially about. If you can hear the interview with the author of the article…

Here is the article from the los angeles times

Leave Britney alone

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The young star is in a fight for her life against mental illness.

By Asra Q. Nomani
February 12, 2008

I’ll never forget the first time I saw my brother strapped to a gurney. I was just a teen, and he’d been diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, an illness akin to schizophrenia that causes mood swings, psychosis and violent outbursts. Our family had just committed him for psychiatric treatment, and I wept, shouting into the air, “I want my brother back.” At home, my parents sobbed. But at least we went through this anguish in private.

So it’s impossible for me to find any entertainment value in the public harassment of Britney Spears, who was released from the psychiatric ward of UCLA Medical Center last week. And as a journalist, I doubt there is news value in it either.

Mental illness doesn’t always elicit compassion; it’s hard to see, so it’s hard to understand. Perhaps in the wake of Spears’ breakdown, California mental health advocates will lobby to change the state’s involuntary commitment laws so that those who are sick get treatment, even if they don’t realize how badly they need it. In the meantime, all of us should reflect on the fact that we wouldn’t be so cruel to somebody diagnosed with another disease. Would we make a sideshow of someone with a brain tumor?

It’s easy to blame the paparazzi and celebrity gossip websites, and, granted, they are the worst. TMZ promoted a video of Spears crying with the headline, “Britney Spears on Suicide Watch?” Over a photo of Spears sitting on a curb after her fight with her manager, PerezHilton.com scrawled “Britwreck.”

But the mainstream media are complicit. After Spears’ release (over the objection of her family), A.J. Hammer, host of CNN’s “Showbiz Tonight,” stumbled over the pronunciation of Spears’ supposed medications; the words “Burning Britney Questions!” rolled across the bottom of the screen. “Britney’s Mental Illness” was the cover of a recent People magazine. The Daily Telegraph’s website featured this headline: “Mad Britney Spears detoxed by doctors,” with a link, “See pictures of the drama here.”

By exploiting Spears’ moment of vulnerability, media companies have crossed the line of basic moral decency. To me, this includes Wenner Media, owner of US Weekly and Rolling Stone, which just published an expose of Spears’ mental illness, and even Barbara Walters, who recently reported on Spears’ mental health issues on “The View.”

Enough. Time Warner Inc. (parent of CNN, People, AOL and Entertainment Weekly), News Corp. (the Rupert Murdoch firm that owns Fox News and papers around the globe) and others should halt all coverage of Spears until she is healthy. Let’s leave Britney and her family alone.

Responsible journalists long ago came to the ethical determination not to publish the names of rape victims or to air the most gruesome of terrorist videos. We can do the same here. We can get off this maniacal roller coaster that is Britney Spears coverage to remember one important fact: This is a 27-year-old in a fight for her life.

My role model in this debate is photographer Nick Stern, who quit his job Feb. 1 with the Splash news agency because he couldn’t stomach shooting the Spears story any longer. “It’s not journalism. Sooner or later, someone’s going to get killed,” he told the Independent in London. “Possibly Britney herself.”

Even aspiring journalists are making the right call. At Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, where I’m a journalism professor, senior Erin Delmore walked off the set of a campus TV talk show. “I’m so done with the Britney coverage,” she said. “End it.”

Last week, I wrote to my editor at People and told her that I couldn’t continue working as a stringer for the magazine. I’m not being holier than thou. I wasn’t always kind to my brother about his illness. I scolded and nagged him. I called him lazy when he didn’t make his bed, unmotivated when he didn’t get a job and uncaring when he forgot our birthdays. It’s taken more than 20 years for me to understand, deep within my soul, that his mental illness is like a brain tumor, or cancer, or diabetes. It is a disease. It has symptoms such as anosognosia, which means that a person doesn’t think they have an illness, and flat affect, which saps emotional expressiveness. Right now, there is no cure.

When I realized not long ago how cruel I had been, I told my brother what I now tell Britney and her family: “I’m sorry.”

Asra Q. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of “Standing Alone in Mecca.”

“La Tour Montparnasse offre la plus belle vue de Paris : c’est en effet le seul endroit d’où on ne la voit pas…” - The tower offers the best view of Paris, as it is the only place from which you cannot see it.’

Eiffel Tower from the Montparnasse Tower

Montparnasse Tower from the Eiffel Tower

David Goldblatt

Windmills for sale, Ventersburg, Free State, 6 August 2003

I saw the above photo at the Stedelijk Museum on Monday, and I suddenly was puzzled as regards to the relation between these windmills and the infamous wind turbine electricity generators –

Somehow these tiny things look so delicate and refined, and do not seem to disturb the grey, dull landscape. They are for sale, indicating people actually do want to go out and buy them, and will use them for something – It is doubtful those shown in the photograph will do anything but turn, but will rather just amuse people and show how fast and from where the wind is from.

We will never entirely rely on wind power or completely green energy, so if we all had a couple of these things, and perhaps even a solar panel on the roof, wouldn’t that spare us the need for massive controversy in our ‘backyards’?

Who decides on whether massive turbines can or cannot pop up and whether people want them in-their-backyards? – My thoughts lead me to think: let’s put a few wind turbines on the front porch next to Granny, or in the living room next to the sofa by the window – the kids will love it!

I found some more interesting articles one is in dutch.

http://www.episode-publishers.nl/newsletters/REHAB_EN.htm

http://www.cascoprojects.org/text.php3?lang=nl&pid=1686&tid=1697%20-%2018k%20-

Press Release from the Stedelijk

Those of you who were interested in the subjective atlas of Palestine lecture or the use of subjective maps I listened to a good radio broadcast that you can hear online. The text below is also taken from the website with a description of what the broadcast is about.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1211

110: Mapping

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps
the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories
about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste.
The world redrawn by the five senses.

Prologue.
Ralph Gentles and five other people spend each summer creating a map
of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole in
the sidewalks of New York City. We hear why, and we hear all the
things their map does not include. Mapmaking means ignoring everything
in the world but the one thing being mapped, whether it’s cracks in
sidewalks or the homes of Hollywood stars. And, according to
cartographer Denis Wood, we live in the Age of Maps: more than 99.9
percent of all the maps that have ever existed have been made in the
last 100 years. (5 minutes)

Act One. Sight.

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he’s made of his
own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They
include a traditional street locator map; a map of all the sewer and
power lines under the earth’s surface; a map of how light falls on the
ground through the leaves of trees; a map of where all the Halloween
pumpkins are each year; and a map of all the graffiti in the
neighborhood. In short, he’s creating maps that are more like novels,
trying to describe everyday life. See some of Denis’s maps.

Denis Wood is author of The Power of Maps. (8 minutes)

Act Two. Hearing.

TAL contributor Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, who has mapped all the
ambient sounds in his world: the hum of the heater, the fan on the
computer. (11 minutes)

Song: “Way over Yonder in the Minor Key,” Billy Bragg and Wilco

Act Three. Smell.

A story about a device that charts the world through smell—and only
smell. TAL producer Nancy Updike visits Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena,
California, where researchers are creating an electronic nose. (9
minutes)

Act Four. Touch.

Deb Monroe reports on how she has been mapping her own body through
her sense of touch. (9 minutes)

Act Five. Taste.

Jonathan Gold goes to the places on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that
he visited back in the early 1980s. He tells the story of how he
decided to map an entire street using his sense of taste, and how
doing this changed his life.

This an article I found about the two designers that are giving a lecture wednesday, february 20. I think it’s good to know something about them and their work before they give a lecture. Their work and ideas are really interesting!

Text by Kirsten Algera

The studio of Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal is a home for ideas. These ideas are about relationships, representation, desire, public space and all the sort of issues that raise controversy these days. Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal welcomes these ideas by integrating them, and forging them into other designs. Sometimes, by leaving the door open, it is possible to discard some ideas. Basically, they are not very much alike. And when they do have something in common, then it is that they are surprising and confusing all at once, providing an experience rather than an answer. That they are beautifully made with reference to a society that balances spectacle and mediocrity, mixing up lifestyle with values, and in which material comfort keeps pace with an increase in malaise. However, it is far from sombre in the studio. The magnificence of the world around us is warmly embraced, after all it is an immense space without paradigms, and this is received with generosity and presented with love.

BL/DP’s works are disturbing and fascinating. They raise issues that are topical in this wide, media-controlled world of today, touching upon, as Sloterdijk points out, “[...] the disorder of the western world that has tamed its civilians so as not to have them listen to the fundamental notes of boredom, stress and moral panic.” (1) In this chaotic world the concept of meaning has become lost. It is from here Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal begins, having shaken off the idea that the world can be considered an objective and progressive project. Complacency never brought enlightenment, with or without the capital E.

There is no clear distinction between autonomous work and applied art. Moreover, in BL/DP’s ‘functional’ designs the studio ideas are filtered and translated into other, actualised images. This conceptual approach keeps design far from the retrospective, modernistic form; graphic tools always being ultimately utilised, and not just to clarify the world. BL/DP’s designs do not promise understanding, but they may offer the hope of revealing the relationships that control our lives and undermining them.

In the kiosk I have laid 6 jackets of magazines side by side. All pictures show watches: TAG Heuer, Cartier, Rolex, Breguet, Baume et Mercier. Is it later on Newsweek than on Paris Match? One could be forgiven for thinking that it is a designconcept, each magazine its own time.
‘Would you put them back as before, please?’
‘Do you fancy the jackets any more?’
‘You’re not being serieus, nobody looks at the cover.’
Not clever of these watchmakers. A cover advert can cost as much as $ 600,000. Perhaps there are people who prefer their magazines on a pile lying face-up, showing Brad Pitt on a couch wearing a watch rather than New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Catherina. Since I have seen Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal’s cover sketches I cannot resist turning magazines upside down. Never quick enough though, I am unable to harmonise the front and backsides like the sketches do. And especially the interaction with engagement and trendiness in representation forces me to lose myself in these sketches. Besides, they have been done with a technique that has nothing to do with the fast world of journalism and advertising. BL/DP’s devotion shows how little attention is paid to the originals. The contours of the front and back cover have been outlined with a fine stylus. I see uncertainty, briefly, at the A of BANLIEUE. One can feel how it is made. They compel as well as question the relationship between the French riots and Eau de Toilette, the front and back, news and catastrophe, engagement and consumption, tragedy and desire.

Four flags in a row hang quietly in the empty white room of Casco’s in Utrecht. They are made of transparent, blue silk and almost look like a projection. These images, that are meticulously tacked on, fade away when light reflects from behind. Light is deflected more by the colour blue than by any other colour. It was John Tyndall who discovered this in 1859 as he wondered why the sky was blue. Is it for this reason, perhaps the most anonymous and intangible colour?
The manufacturing process of the flags forms an important part of the design just as in Front and Back covers. The time and effort it took to embroider the motifs on the expensive cloth contrast sharply with the casual imagery of the street. If it is a street at all? Do these misplaced, white sneakers belong to the dozy, anonymous man? An invisible fugitive? Or to the man with the beer in his hand? Is he a labourer? An Australian tourist? Who plays the lead role? Where is this anyway? What is available?
Usually flags have symbolic, recognisable designs on them. And they themselves symbolise a nation, a mutual goal or an identity. Flags are objects that express confidence, calling for people to feel the same. However, the flags I see here do not show any territorial claim or security, at most only the desire for them. Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal’s images on the flags are uncharacteristic and ambigious. What they refer to might not be that important after all. They resemble images of other worlds that possibly exist. They can appear and disappear, as projections do.

At the busstop an enchanting poster is placed in a shiny frame. The image reminds me of a magic box with a sparkling starry sky. The poster says EVERYBODY-THING and BODYEVERYTHING. Everybody is a thing. Everything is body. A few letters of the other words on the poster have been cut off: friend has become fr and on a second poster uck is changed into fuc. Jeremy, Tariq, Michael, Babak, Florian, Steve. Do I know them? Are they intimates? Are these posters actually meant for me? Probably, hanging in a busstop. It is impossible not to look at them. Just as it is impossible not to be confronted with, real or imagined, the private life of others in the public domain. The letters on the posters seem to have been drawn by a sign writer with a steady hand. Behind the glass window shimmers some kind of reflection. It is difficult to see if it is me. When my nose is practically pressed against the windowpane the man standing beside me is no longer able to contain his curiosity, and asks: ‘What’s in it?’
‘Just a poster, sir.’

I always had difficulties with ‘nature’. The only nature I had met with in the village I grew up were lost, migratory birds. They mostly got knocked down because they came from Siberia, where they did not know cars. ‘Wring their necks, straight away,’ my friend, a farmer’s son, advised, having seen these helplessly flapping geese on the asphalt: ‘that’ll put them out of their misery.’
In the stamps that Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal designed for the centenary of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Natuur Vereniging1 , I see the awkward, culturally defined relationship between humans and nature looming up again. Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal has combined images from the Jac. P. Thijsse’s Verkade-albums, who was one of the founders of the association, with pictures of naturalists and silhouets of flora and fauna. The sheet of stamps looks like a graceful dance of lines, dunes, people, animals and plants. Who is deceiving who?
The Verkade albums of 1906 were considered the first successful marketing campaign in Holland. Thijsse’s pictures of nature in packets of biscuits and Dutch rusks seemed to have doubled the sales for the biscuitmaker. Without Thijsse the Marie biscuit would have long become history. So the consumption of nature literally becomes the subject of the stamps. However, I wonder what it actually is what we see. Does something like nature really exist, or is it already substituted with a picture on the wall, with what we want to see? Or is this imposed on us?

The jacket of the publication Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2003/2004 is made from grey velvet. It is impossible not to touch. On closer inspection it turns out to be an annual report. On the inside the report is as plain as the museum itself : a space for art and art-related information. The text is placed like a bookmarker between the pages, while images fill the white pages. The report gives Jozef Israël’s work a place next to museumworkers dressed in hippie-style at the outdoor festival for culture and entertainment, and a desk chair that is being rehoused is placed in front of a Sheila Hicks installation. The catalogue informs us of one year of the life in the Stedelijk Museum, and it also shows that Ben Laloua/Didier Pascal do not restrict the equal treatment of form and concept to autonomous work. Even the design of an annual report - usually not the most exciting publication - can in an accessible way offer comment on its own being.

Note: (1) Peter Sloterdijk, The Crystal Palace, a philosophy of globalisation, Nijmegen 2006

You might remember that Dirk Sijmons mentioned that they use the Martijntje Smits analysis of the impact of new tech on society when they consider solutions to tech issues. Here’s an excerpt from an explanation of that theory:

From Ton’s Interdependent thoughts:

Smits monster theory starts with the notion that a monster is a two-sided being, that within itself unites aspects that seem impossible to unite. (e.g. Frankenstein, with human traits and aspects, but also an artefact built from inanimate parts)

Monsters in this way challenge cultural boundaries. (e.g. genetic modification challenges the distinction between man and animal, cloning challenges the boundaries of natural progenation) At the same time because of that challenge it cannot be dealt with in terms of existing norms within those cultural boundaries, it’s sort of outside the system, which is likely to frustrate debate and discussion. This also creates the space for both fantasies of doom, as well as of imminent paradise, without being constrained by reality.

Smits then goes on to define four forms of dealing with monsters:

killing the monster

adapting the monster

assimilating the monster

embracing the monster

Read more here and in dutch here.

…and others interested in what fashion designers are doing, here is a link to some REALLY interesting podcasts. I thought the interviews with Timothy Greenfield Sanders (photographer) and Ozwald Boateng (designer) were particularly interesting.

You might also want to listen to this clip about John Galliano’s new torture-inspired fashion line.

I hope this makes up for not including any fashion designers in the series.

I found the article about our lives as Sims. It’s available at the New York Times and I am reproducing the whole thing here:

August 14, 2007
Findings
Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
By JOHN TIERNEY
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”