Here are some additional questions for people in Iran:

Click here for more questions

Breaking news? Or simply broken?

I’m a radio addict. Well maybe not addict. I don’t have the discipline for a true addiction. The reason I bring this up, is that I am currently working on a project for a multi-media news organization. To prepare myself, I am reading up on trends in content delivery and journalism. I am also doing a lot of listening. In addition to talking to people about their news gathering habits, I am listening to the radio.

I am going to post some of the findings I find interesting here. Kevin Cowan who works on future platforms for the BBC World Service discussed what they found when they looked at mobile content usage in Russia, the UAe, South Africa and Argentina.

Essentially people use their mobiles for breaking news and sports. Here are some key excerpts:

Lots of competition on the mobile platform (“BBC is a small player…”)

First stop is Google, then maybe on to other sources, BBC, CNN.

“The good thing with Google is that they are an aggregator so they take content from us. People are still getting news from us.”

The BBC has to fight to get heard. (Wow. I thought I had to fight.)

“In the old days it did just used to be BBC and Voice of America and Deutsche Welle… there are numerous ways that people can obtain information.” (He’s talking about the World Service)

The BBC is moving from being a broadcaster to being a content provider. (Hmm… that’s an interesting distinction. I had already conflated the two.)

Mobile phones have a lot of impact since more people have access to mobiles than to the internet. You can dial a number to listen to BBC and get fm quality sound. (That is really great when you’re talking about regions that routinely block outside sources of information.)

Thanks to Richard Sambrook who helped me track down the program online after I heard it while washing dishes.

From Ghana: a coffin shaped like a Nokia Phone

A friend has told me that only old people (like me) still use email. Twitter and texting are the current ways of keeping in touch. There’s a good program from the BBC on the effects of mobile technology on daily life.

I’ve transcribed a few quotes (didn’t get all the names… listen to the whole program here on BBC World Service):

Sunita Singh:
“People sleep with their mobile phones switched on.” She later discusses a scandal in India that occurred when a 17 year-old boy, angry that his girlfriend had broken up with him, distributed video he took when they were having sex. (I know that this has also been a problem in Iran where young men secretly film young women having sex with them and then distribute it. Kamangir writes about this in Persian.)

Narrator:
“The MTV generation that’s wedded to the mobile phone also wants instant gratification …They zap boredom or loneliness wherever they may be.”

Sadie Plant:
“The mobile phone is the first technology that you need to sort of do some kind of public performance with.” (pdf link here)

Genevieve Bell talks about the way that the mobile phone is used as “a kind of social prompt” in S. Korea. People assign rings according to social status thus ensuring that they answer appropriately and preventing social missteps.

Nina Weerakkody talks about the fear that mobiles will allow “upper class women to have affairs with lower class men.”

We also here about mobiles in some parts of the Islamic world that, among other features, bring you the entire Koran in English and Arabic and a live call to prayer from Mecca.

The pope sends out daily sms messages! He got 3 million subscribers in just two months. “A photo of the pope inside the phone may be a holy religious icon.”

At funerals in Ghana, people send streaming video/sound to family that cannot make it in to the country. They also have coffins shaped like mobiles.

(not the latest news, I know. For that go here)

Bruce Conner, RIP

Jesse Walker | July 10, 2008, 8:30am
The great beatnik filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at age 74. No director has surpassed Conner’s ability to assemble preexisting found footage into something entirely new; in experimental movies rangling from his Zapruder-meets-Owsley short Television Assassination to his Devo video Mongoloid to his haunting dream-film Valse Triste, he laid the groundwork for the current explosion of remixes and mash-ups.

Read the rest at Reason

This should not stop you from taking the 5:10 to Dreamland…

Since the first time I saw a Bruce Conner film, I have been haunted by the images he produced. I am sure that I am not the only one. In fact, I am almost sure that the Science fiction writer William Gibson was haunted by Bruce Conner’s films when he wrote the book Pattern Recognition. If he wasn’t, I was.

How is it possible that 70% of the students in artschool are female and it are mostly the male graduates who succeed?
What does the fact that the fine art department does not have a single female teacher in the permanent faculty say?
Should gender be an integrated part of your work?
Is it possible to be a woman an not deal with gender issues?
Do woman not have the ultimate need to create work because they can bare children, and create life?
Is this a sexist remark?

This are things that I was wondering about, being raised by a single mum in the eighties.

She has very Strong sense of being independent and thinks in terms of us and them. I like to regard myself as a human-being more than male or female. In my experience its however almost in possible not to particapate in the discussion about gender. Twist or turn I am a young woman, and my work will be percieved diffrently once this is known. should I hide, protest or just play along?

I’m curious about your opinion.

ps. Here is the link to the guerillagirls, it gives more statistics and a clear humours take on the curator’s and the art market.

http://www.guerrillagirls.com/interview/index.shtml

He also made a lot of other work, just check the first one, if you like it look futher!!!

This is one of the paintings I like of Martin. The colours and objects are simple. But the way he presents it is very impressive. This is a painting I have seen in London last year. The work that he got on his website is different. (check his website: http://www.michaelcraig-martin.com/) In this painting the use of colour is strong, the colour of the other paintings are bland. But still he uses everyday objects.

One art pieces that I really love is by the artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba.
I saw some of his work on Malmö Konsthall in Sweden 2005.

“Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba is a Vietnam-based artist who works with film, photography, conceptual objects and installations. In a long series of works he has used Vietnam’s complex history as a starting point and created “alternative histories” and “memorial projects”. Since 2001 he has produced a series of four films recorded in water.”
/ Malmö Konsthal - http://www.konsthall.malmo.se/

The films show different things, all under water. In one of them you see young men struggling with getting their bike taxis (and if I remember also wheelchairs further and further out into the sea, dragging them along the sea floor. In another of the films white “tents” are set up on the sea floor. In yet another balls of colour are realized from a “machine” places on the sea floor whilst a huge asian dragon is moveing around in the water above.
The films are totally capturing. It is something with this pointless struggle in the films that is so beautiful, and bizarre. Also the total tranquility is amazing.

I later read that the film title, In Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex – For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards, was a tribute to the millions of boat people who entrusted their fate to the waves, and that Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba wanted to show the suffering and struggle for survival which has plagued the Vietnamese people both during and after the war with the United States.

I personally like the work better without that explanation. It is truly beautiful in itself.

In class I also mentioned Wanås sculpturepark (http://www.wanas.se/). Kind of crappy webpage but fantastic park with works by Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer, Charlotte Gyllenhammar and many more.

You can check it out on their website.

http://www.sunnborisaltar.com/index2.php