Photographs show you the thinness of reality. For even though there is a lot that the photograph does not capture there is enough to convince us of the similarity, of the correspondence. Yet this is not the important part of the photograph. The significant part is how we are with the image, and everything that the photograph contains and shows us with our consent but is not of the material world is its spirituality; in that sense photography is the act of recording the spiritual. But the greatness of photography is finding the spiritual and the physical together.

There's a new series of images uploaded onto the site which are currently, and a little tentatively, falling under the rubric of 'structures of knowledge'. There's a link on the left navigation bar here and the images are also floating on the flickr sea.

The images are all shot RAW, and bar a little tonal work and desaturation are as shot. The images are simply long exposures with first curtain flash, with the snow and trees frozen in place. The camera was deliberately hand held so that some motion could be introduced into the backgrounds where the flash couldn't reach and create secondary images in the fore.

No surprise its snowing again here in NJ, for the third time this week, with 10" promised by the morning.

The gates at night exist in a different landscape from the gates at day. The gates at day live in the wooded meanders of Central Park, describing the topology of the park personalised as Christo's and Jean Claude's. It is their park that we are walking in, it is still the public space it was before but we now feel their routes through the space, the time that they have accrued manifesting itself with these flags. The space is different from the city around it, it is different from the park's space, it is different from the sky it lies beneath.

The gates at night belong to the city. They belong to the urban space that encloses the park more than the park itself. The park loses presence except at its boundaries where the typical gridded lights of the city impose themselves. The mass of the buildings diminishes the heraldic effect forcing the viewer to examing not the 2D topology landscape but the full force of the air and height of a city. The gates performed its trick by finding a vertical element in a rolling landscape. The landscape obviously has a mass to it, but it is a thin mass, like paper. Christo's flag popped out from that land asserting themselves, and showing the viewer a form of extended sight, much as a standard bearer would have done in old battles, proving a conquered or held position in a battlefield.



In this way the gates at night are defeated but gain elsewhere. There is a new palette, the trees glow silver grey or orange depending upon the light and the spaces open or close based upon the monofilament or halogen source. The orange lights compress the space and bring the land, tarmac and trees in close alignment to the orange of the gates whilst the blue lights open up a space based upon hue where snow is pared with silvered trees and leave a new aesthetic against the orange spaces. The gates at day are unified and continuous; the gates at night have broken allegiance to different colours. The citynightscape lobbies for one sort of gate; the moonlight associates with the snow. The politics of colour and light assert themselves and unlike the gates at day where the purity of distinction that the orange has in the greys and browns of Central Park is lost in the similar orange of artificial light. The gates are reclaimed as part of the city.

Just an introduction to more late night shooting, except this time with company.

This series is an attempt to understand the basics of what I do, partly because of seeing a wall of images (of mine and of others) all clustered together, with flickering shadows, projecting themselves from the plane of the wall.

It is also partly time to look at these things. Part of the reason that I make images, is because I do not believe in them. I believe they are thin, I believe they lack of dimensions, and they are incomplete. But I also believe in the power of this, their ability to add meaning -a form of thinner ambiguous meaning- and their obstinence.

My phone's camera has a similar image quality to niecophore niepce's first photographs. However there are differences the obvious being that he created his photographs in the 1820s before the word 'photograph' was even coined.

Related: Current digital scan backs have returned us to the 'exposure' times of Daguerrotypes 1840s and 1850s.

It seems that the digital revolution is either a retrogression in image quality or we are only just at the beginning of the photograph again but perhaps as something else...

Mr eason and I were in the city today. We had fun. The exact quantity of fun we had is recorded in this photographic image.

Point 1.
I recently looked through the site browsercam and saw to my horror that opera was a problem. All of the other problems caused by browsers various I did not care about, but opera seems like a sensible proposition, and I wanted to ensure compatibility.

Point 2.
I could not be arsed sorting out point 1 until point 3.

Point 3.
I recently read Drunkenblog, a blog with innumerable virtues. (Innumerable in the sense that I don't want to think about it, not in the sense that they are unquantifiable, which they probably are.) The gentlemen proprietor had written an article discussing some recent browser benchmarks ran by another. Plasteredblog pointed out some of the problems of the tests but even so, one thing was obvious: opera is very good. Curious netizen that I am, I downloaded opera.

Point 4.
I checked opera against my site. Its seems almost exactly the same as anybody elses. No substantial glitches at all. There is a slight problem with my new recent reading iframe, but that wasn't even present when I ran browsercam. In short I'm not sure that browsercam was using the same version of opera as I am now, but it did run it on 6 and 7, but the advice seems to be don't trust browsercam, it doesn't seem to be doing very well. Shame, nice idea.

Point 5.
Opera is a great browser. very quick, and seems to do sensible things. Nice mail client, good integration with OSX in the form of automatic import of safari bookmarks, and address book. Really good stuff.

Point 6.
The problems that previously existed with my site, regarding this blog, still exist. Yes, I will sort it out. No, I don't know when.

cocoalicious is a very nice del.icio.us utility for mac people out there. It loads your del.icio.us into a application window, with tags as a sidebar and a (i presume) webkit panel in the window so that you can see the content of a selected bookmark. Very neat.

It also has a nice feature that allows it to call up the current page from safari and post that with one click. A well thought out application.

Typepad has this natty feature where your reading material is displayed in the sidebar. I, with my meagre tools, and even more meagre skills does not have the ability to figure out this one. However, I do have a little creativity and an eye for a half-assed hack, which to be quite frank is what holds this virtual tome together. (Think of it as one of those books which ends up in the 'free!' basket of a second hand bookshop, soaking up drips from the leaking ceiling, and would crumble in the hands of anyone who tried to pick it up.)

Regardless, I will proffer my 'wisdom' and 'ingenuity' upon you. I know that you didn't ask, and probably wouldn't but this is a monologue, ok?

I use Bigbold's very elegant rssdigest. This provides a RSS summary leaving you with a line of JS or an iframe to insert into your site which generates a nice little list. I've used this to generate live bookmarks for my site by combining this with del.icio.us (long may she live). Still with me? (Do i care?) del.icio.us uses tags and descriptions and rssdigest can be formatted using its custom tags and regular HTML. This can, amongst other things, insert the del.icio.us description into the rssdigest entry. You can tell del.icio.us to restrict the feed to just one tag by one user through the format http://del.icio.us/'username'/'tagname', or for the RSS http://del.icio.us/rss/'username'/'tagname'. Simple, non? Nearly there.

So, I can post the Amazon URL to del.icio.us and create a tag called recentreading creating a link between del.icio.us and the Amazon page. But what about the nice little thumbnail? Remember you can format rssdigest, and that this accepts regular HTML, and that as well as tags you have the description field in del.icio.us? So, I inserted the URL of the bookcover's JPEG from Amazon into that spare field. I then formatted rssdigest so that rssdigest's description field was surrounded by a img tag with the code src=" immediately preceding it and " /> closing the src and the tag after it. This parses the description, i.e. the JPEG's URL, into the feed giving me little icons of the books.

And it is relatively easy to use. 1> Find your book on Amazon, 2> right click (control click for mac folk) and copy the location of the little JPEG you want to use - I use not the one at the top of the page, but the one half way down where you have the 'buy two and get a discount' offer, 3> hit the 'post to deli.cio.us' button on your browser's toolbar, and finally, 4> paste the URL of the JPEG into the description field and type recentreading into the tag. All done! Easy! (ish).

Cool! Well, ok, I was pleased with it.

I went, I saw, I documented badly. (There are a few more on flickr. but I wouldn't bother if I were you.) This one, however, I feel has something:



I'll go again...

At the post-reading party [terminology?] I started shooting a little, and a little drunk too. This photo has got some of the strange artefacts that are captured in the photographic world (apologies, aaron) and a slender insight into what an objective document might contain. The poor dissolved subject.

However, I need help with this second one. Why is this man's lower lip glowing green? Roll on the pseudo-science before I come up with a Kirlian explanation, please!

There would be no point to my question if it wasn't explicit in the 'neg', so discount that one, thank you.

Here's an amazing little tool for flikr users. It allows you to examine the social network of users, call up their images etc, and all using a beautiful interface.

Here's the photos and for a more historical perspective there are selected highlights to be enjoyed.

My god.

My god.

or maps.yahoo.com? Nor me.

The off-the-shelf argument about photographic manipulation is simple. It claims that any manipulation is destroying photographic truth, severing the umbilical cord between the image and its referent, and introducing the human factor into the image's construction. This, of course, is a bad thing. How are we to believe the photograph once that delicate purity has been tainted with the wilfull, capricious, vested interests of the human subject? Of course a lot of manipulations are presented this way, but some recent work at Toronto's police dept. has created something much more interesting, saddening, disturbing and significant.

Oops.

Here's a natty illustration showing the evolution of Apple's products, and the changes in their appearance. Shows fashions, evolving technologies and affects nostalgia all in one little jpeg. not bad.

Not knowing about something is a really good way of streamlining your workload. Only this morning I came across browsercam which gives you a breakdown of how any given URI/URL works in many different browser and OS combinations. This site, as I already knew, is fugged in IE5 for mac. I might try to do something about that, as about 1-2% of my audience is from there, and might not because its a dying browser and except for its XML parsing has few virtues. Undoubtedly it saved apple's platform from missing out on the popularisation of the internet, but that was then... (cue the inexorable and heartless clanking armour sound effects of the rank and file of the march of the time.) When it was released, I was a convert to IE5 and it was definitely better than Netscape's 4.x series, if nothing else because it was only a browser.

(As a side note, there's a CSS escape hack for IE5.x for mac here that I could use.)

However, those days have come to pass, and Macs now have Safari, a good little browser, and the Mozilla/Gecko variants for people who are more likely to eat environmentally sound food. I prefer Firefox (as you may have noticed), but its a crying shame that its so ugly. Really. I keep threatening to make a better interface but I really don't have time for that. Its one of those things that is a real possibility, but also really attached to the future and will remain there for some time to come.

The real problem is that it doesn't work with Opera. Arse. I like Opera and wish to support it in my own half-assed way. Opera 7 seems to render it worse than 6, which isn't good. Maybe my code is way off. Could be, I wouldn't be that surprised. I get less viewers from Opera than I do from IE for mac and about the same as I get from netscape 4.x. But, unfortunately I still don't give a monkey's about that dinosaur and so that ain't gonna change.

Unfortunately, now I know that the site is buggered on more platforms that I wish it to be and so I have an extra task. Lovely.

A beautiful and brilliant friend of mine, Yasmin, is going to be reading from her novel-in-progress, The Builders. Come Along, drink and be merry. And quiet at the appropriate times, too.



Here's the skinny:

Yasmin Dalisay reads from The Builders, a sci-fi novel in progress.
Alison Paige reads from her recent poetry.
Cornelia Street Café, Cornelia street north of Bleecker, Sunday, Feb 13th, 6pm, $6 admission includes drink.

(or so it says).