The Diane Arbus show currently on show at the Met is an unusual show for a number of reasons. Most obviously and with no obvious consequence, its in the european painting section; secondly, because of an excess of contextualisation, text, and photographic reliqueries the viewer takes on the exhibition as if they are wandering through a catalogue - it is a very literary experience; thirdly and in no doubt because of the former, its the most thorough reconstruction of any artist's life that I've seen in an exhibition.

One of the obvious criticism's that the show opens itself to is succombing to the cult of the personality. It is filled with rooms that recreate her dark room and her 'library', and her note books are liberally quoted. However, what comes across is that Diane Arbus was obviously very intelligent; the stencilled quips are genuinely interesting and enlightening (including most of the usual Arbusisms); and although her life has a melodramatic form with the romantic artist's swan song in the form of suicide, there are good reasons for including her life and her self to such an extent in the work.

The typical criticism of her work is the cold, often facetious position that she takes regarding her subjects. Her subjects are usually from the periphery of society: including the typical freak shows, the retarded, naturists, transvestites but also - and less obviously a minority although undoubtably so - those burdened with an excesss of wealth. She also enjoyed the exact opposite in the forms of stereotypes from the majorities, often photographed in parks in NYC: young lovers, parents and so on. These subjects and the undoubted 'type casting' that she employed, explored or extracted out of her subjects has given her her ambiguous reputation. Protesters to this often refer to her empathy in her defence. They see less a cold critical eye than a deep love for humanity in all its variety, a bittersweet aperture which accepted and strove to testify to the bizarre fates that a silent majority live through.

What this exhibition contributes to this dialogue is an attempt to show through the broader extrinistic information that surrounds the corpus of her work in almost trying to exhibit Arbus herself through the library and private notebooks. This convinces us of her deeply empathic nature and viewpoint, occasionally countered by a sense of selfhood that seemed to swing from the self-aggrandising to depreciating. At times she truly felt she saw things that no one would, and on another occasion that when she found things they were completely unlike how others had described them, which is a very similar sentiment expressed from some fictional others' perspetives. It could be that the empathic part of her saw through the lens people's most inner weaknesses, reflecting her own, and her own human worries; and against this the sarcastic new yorker coldly portrayed the rich as ridiculous. The great problem with Arbus is locating the differences in the temperament to the images, for there is none in the images themselves.

The series of images of retarded people, looking patently abnormal and wearing hallowe'en masks is, in this way, key (a less ambiguous image and something more indicative). The images themselves are deeply ambivalent and provoke the viewer into taking up a clear position. They are images where it is difficult to maintain an open interpretation due to the loaded subject which encroaches on one of society's core roles through people who are simply unable to live independently and require our social animal self to assist them. To represent these people, who often have strange features and freakish gaits by nature, as masked and scuffling along is forcing the viewer to recognise a moral hot-spot in our acts of judgement or the act of judgement of other people and of society at large. But are these images cruel in their representations? The problem is that they are not cruel, but highlight the viewer's own feelings, forcing us to address ourselves. The images can be seen cruelly - as cheap, cold jokes at the expense of those to whom nature has rendered less able than most, or as a terrible empathy for these people, seeing the misfortune that we feel for them, that they don't feel for themselves, and who selflessly enjoy the spectacle of hallowe'en more than most. The denominator of meaning in these images is the compassion of the viewer to the subject (or lack thereof), and to Arbus's own worldview.

Arbus's images fail to direct the viewer leaving us open to complete the imagery with something as difficult and awful as making a decision. They fail to give us an answer which we can extract and hold aloft as 'her position'. Empathy is something quite extrinsic to the formal image, but incredibly binding to the content portrayed, yet this is her principle photographic method. Her position and method was to drag us into a world of consequence, leveraging empathy against us and quite cruelly staring at the viewer through her images and her subjects with a cold eye, and waiting for our response to them, waiting for us to show our humanity through our typically dispassionate eyes.

(Note: the show will be heading to the V&A later in the year.)

Hopefully, this will be the last to be said on the matter, but as I've began following the nikon-adobe-raw saga I feel I ought to at least finish on an intelligent considered note. Fortunately this has been done for me, through an interview with dave coffin, author of the GPL'd dcraw (a free raw convertor), who, as someone who has reverse engineered nearly all of the camera raw formats out there, has something to say about the matter. He also refers to this article which is an article about the economics of the hardware/software industries and their various battles. Its very well written and, for me, quite enlightening.

(As a side note, I downloaded dcraw several nights ago, and have started to tinker. I'll report back when I'm done).

Thomas Struth seems to want to tell us about viewing. At Marian Goodman there are two sets of work; one is a group of his typical museum photographs showing audiences looking upwards in awe, in distraction, immersed, confused or simply following what everyone else does. It is called 'audience'.

These photographs present a bizarre relation to the viewer; you are watching others engaged in an act that other are engaged in. This is not voyuerism; we empathise with our fellow viewers, position ourselves amongst the gamut of their emotions and are frustrated by their (and empathically our) ability to communicate their experience of what and how they are viewing. We want to know but they are finally quite mute. They tell us all the usual ranges that we knew from being gallery visitors from their expressions but not of their understanding. There is a great we do know now from these images about the people and we can extract about their lives but the act of understanding in the sculpture of David that they are looking at is ultimately reflected in the understand that we hold whilst apprehending Struth's images themselves.

The second part of the show is a video which records a guitar masterclass in Lucerne, Switerland. It is most remarkable for the total lack of artifice in it. It is quite simply and without any embellishment a two screen video of a music lesson. In that regard alone, you are confronted with a piece which a makes unsubtle demands of your attitude. There is nothing to see except the content, Struth is making few concessions to his viewers (except in a significant way I'll explain later). The class concentrates on the relationship of the musical text to the act of performance with the guitarist baumgarten coaxing his students into thinking critically, for themselves and through the music (which is to say not the piece on paper, but how it is read and understood).

As Baumgarten concentrates on the music in question espousing to the student, the video I saw was an investigation of the opening bars of a Moorish piece, the music class reflectively opens up the gallery audience to their act of interpretation. What is the role of the text in the music? and reflexively what is the role of the video/photographs in the act of seeing. Struth's point, should it be ground down to a simple aphorism, is this: the richness of the experience of the work lies in the viewer's commitment to rich sight. Related to the creator of images, the role of the photograph to its reality seem to be equivalent to the text to the music. They are both dependent upon a framework that seems initially absolute but depends upon sight and hearing to grant a meaningful role in the world. In this regard Struth isn't being original, this is well known, however where the emphasis is here is lies in the variance of interpretation and although this may only be an avuncular guide and reminder for us all, in the contemporary sphere it is a useful one nontheless.

DPreview has previews of the new Nikon D70s and D50. The typical prime difference between generations of digital cameras - the megapixel count - has not changed and although the performance improvements in other areas of the camera are no doubt significant, it won't inspire upgrades. (I've not seriously considered upgrading from the 10D to the 20D, even though the non-sensor related improvements are quite significant). However, the new cameras should bear the good sale's record of the D70, and perhaps improve upon it.

Nikon has responded to the D2x-encrypted-white balance debacle with this press release. (Strangely, I couldn't find the original reference to the press release on Nikon's site, or elsewhere, only secondary references, so perhaps Nikon's not too keen on this really being a public matter).

Their basic argument is you should be using Nikon Capture, the rest of the text is as thick a smokescreen as you're likely to encounter anytime soon. The tenor of the release beneath all the nonsense makes for interesting reading. There seems to be culture which is stating that because the format is proprietary they should have a say in how others are using it, and this is to the photographer's benefit; they seem to want to justify matters by arguing the encryption 'secures the structure' which I'm not quite sure what that might legitimately mean (although I can imagine severals things that it might be claimed to mean); and there's a 'well there is a SDK available', which isn't the answer that is useful to me. Strange place, Nikonland.

Read here for plenty of discussion, ranting and the usual internet explosions.

Update:here's a different set of comments, which are a little more balanced, and less obviously pro-photoshop. Some people like Nikon Capture although most of them complain about its speed. Canon's software on the other is so slow that I have never considered it, regardless of quality. Perhaps I should spend a little time with all of these different RAW converters.

The venerable bOINGbOING innocently posted this story about some shuttle pictures being taken with the Nikon D2x mega camera. The story rapidly changed tone when somebody contacted the site pointing out the digital rights problems that D2x users are now facing regarding compatibility with PS. Nikon has encrypted the white balancing on the Raw NEF files, which prevents PS's Camera Raw utility from reading it without cracking the encryption, which would violate the DMCA. However, the encryption only effects the white balancing, so PS can read the image data but cannot apply the white balance settings associated with the shot, which means each image will have to be set manually. The problem is that every image has to have a white balance temperature. The PhotoShopNews site article (above) plays this down as a problem but it will be very frustrating for users. Its the equivalent of not knowing what kind of film you shot with and what filters you were using to compensate for the light. If it was film it would obviously be a pain, now that its digital, it might even be more of a pain. Consensus seems to run that this is a ploy for Nikon to sell more of its Nikon Capture software, which few people really use but is a good piece of software - the D70 comes with a 30 day trial, if I remember rightly - and it's pretty sophisticated. However, it's another $100 on top of a $5,000 camera body, which seems churlish of Nikon, and almost everybody will need to do some of the kind of editing that only Photoshop currently offers, and as it already comes with a Raw converter, few will bother - although if not crippled then its certainly been made less convenient to use by Nikon's small mindedness and absence of concern for its professional user base.

The recent update to OS X, 10.3.9, is, in my experience, offering the following 'features': it has had a kernal panic in the last twenty four hours (whereas none for the duration of 10.3.8); safari has become more unstable; and iPhoto is even more unstable. MacRumors mentions the safari issue, offers a Apple link testing the java issue (ironically mine way fine) and refers to the typically anti-mac News.com article that gloats over the prospect of apple problems. News.com and Cnet are historically and continue to be very pro-MS, and are always looking for opportunities to slate any non-MS products. Maybe 10.3.9 will settle down, but it seems .8 was better, and I'm not sure what the advantages are yet.

On the plus side, flickr has come through on its promise of free goodies for its pro users (myself included - thank you to knautia for the early birthday present). These include doubling the pro membership for free, and giving each pro user two pro accounts to give away. Although this is ultimately a self-serving market-growth marketing opportunity with the rise of alternative photosharing services such as google's picasa, its still not a bad thing, and a monthly Gb of space to hurl photographs onto somebody else's servers is pretty good.

I've mentioned GIMP before in postings, and promised to investigate it properly at some point. A good opportunity has arisen as I recently became aware of GIMPshop, which is a hack for GIMP that mimics the menu layout and keyboard shortcuts of Photoshop allowing for an easier transition for PS veterans.

In my very limited experience of GIMP, from when it went 2.0 I noticed some pretty strange interface 'features' some of which this 'hack' addresses. Some derived from the fact that the same items were repeated twice under different headings others from the plain old opacity of the titles of stuff. Scott mentions some of these himself. The reorganisation really helps someone like me, it makes it less like learning an entirely new program to do something that I could before, and more of a change in dialect.

One of the side effects of this that I've noticed in my own behaviour is that I'm giving GIMP a chance. Rather than dismissing a PS feature as nonexistant, I'll hunt around GIMP's interface to try to find something. Often they are there, but not where you'd expect them. (Would you find the unsharp mask under 'sharpen' or the more generic 'enhance'? I know where I'd look first...)

GIMP's UI is one of the worst things about the program. Its ugly, unfriendly and incredibly wasteful with always limited space. One of the things that Adobe have always managed to do (and are getting better at it, unlike apple) is displaying the right amount of information in the right places and in a consistent way. Its not that I believe only in the Adobe way, LightWave has a very different way of engaging the user but it is consistent, very economical on your attention and with its use of space (screen space is even more precious in 3D) and quick to use. Its probably a quicker interface than Photoshop and has considerably more information to process. However, the problem with the GIMP is that the user experience is difficult to understand.

One of the things that GIMP really has in its favour is that the back end programming is very good, and very sophisticated. You can, should you wish, adjust the sub-sampling rate when choosing the compression on a JPEG, something which I didn't realise you could do at all, I thought that JPEG's automatically compressed at 4:2:2. Things like this (which are scattered , publically) through GIMP is an obvious indication of the calibre of the programmers, their abilities and their commitment to producing high end software. What they do need is somebody to translate what these mean to somebody like myself - who isn't ignorant, but isn't an imaging scientist either. GIMP has to be easy for a beginner, and usable for intermediates, power users and specialists.

The main problem or so it seems is that the back end and the user experience has to be more integrated. That balance is no there yet, but I see no reason why it couldn't get there. Its an amazing program and a real poster child of the GNU revolution, and I look forward to the day when it really shines.

I'll watch for updates and keep you informed.

Try this on for size:

Adobe makes industry leading graphics software for print, photo, screen.
Macromedia makes industry leading graphics and 'content delivery' software for the web.
Adobe is going to buy Macromedia.

The ramifications of this one are going to spread and spread. With the evolution of the internet into the primary distribution media - overtaking tv and film (my students spend more time on the internet than in front of the tv), newspapers, alternative content and so on, its difficult to see a 'graphic' market that won't be touched by this.

I'd guess that the short-medium term effects of this will be the 'adobification' of MM products - integrating Adobe's amazing UI, consistency and cross-application usability; the unceremonious ditching of GoLive - it was never even a second to dreamweaver; the farewell party for Fireworks and Freehand or at least the integration of the former's DW and Flash uses into ImageReady (neither of which I'm that concerned with) and of course the expansion of Flash and the content systems (Contribute, etc).

Long term consequences are the stuff of fantasy island right now, but it'll be interesting to see what people are thinking about, if not what will actually happen...


UPDATE: here's a blog entry from MM with a little more detail about what's going to happen

Apparently created in 1996 - which is when, through a poor bzzzzzzt-ting! kunnur kunnur phone modem, myself and aesop started looking at it, Born magazine had floated into the hardwired and under utilised think-banks. However, I was recently promted to drag it out of the memory backlot, and thought that I'd share. Briefly, It engineers collaboration between digital flash artists and poets to create experimental interactive literature, which usually manifests itself in an immersive ambient sound track, rich animated visuals, and some interesting writing.

I'm watching the film horizon, and can see the storm ahead, but the future is not as bleak as it may seem. This message arrived on the alt-photo-process listserv today:

When a bell rings and it has a dominant tone, but the shape resonates in such a way as to produce notes throughout the chromatic range. The dominant note in this is the death of film, it is very difficult to ignore. The 12" x 20" film is being dropped, the 11" x 14" is just clearing shelf space, leaving the 8" x 10". But the other tones say that Berrger, a much smaller manufacturer, may actually be in a better position to keep selling the larger films. Naturally, their market will increase - there are so few people using larger than 8" x 10" that I don't think that the digital revolution will ever effect them, and so I suppose that they will just carry on using Bergger film and pick up the Ilford slack. Bergger, probably, will have greater overheads (due to less volume in the sector's use of raw materials) and the so aggregate price of film will increase, but beyond that I don't suppose they'll stop due to obscurity. They're already obscure. I'd guess that Ilford will probably cease all larger formats soon as it easier for them to close their set-up they re-figure for a tiny market (I'm thinking here of the 8" x 10") and cut their losses.

In short: film has died, long live film!

The site of the completed boxing clever project is now online. Its good to see the work of others, and see how they dealt with the proposition. Naturally the results are varied, and the artists that I know broadly behaved as you'd expect them to. I particularly enjoyed the light touch of both Tom Sowden and Savage; the straight concept delivery of Sarah Bodman's bookshelf and Douglas Hollely; and the very different poetic sensibilities of Cecilia Mandrile and Mick McGraw.

For my own part, I gave the liberty to the photographer to arrange photograph it how they saw fit. I imagined a similar fallen megalith look, but I'd always put the head of the figure upon its shoulders. I guess should have made that explicit, but obvious differences in interpretation that that makes does not cloud the basic elements and poetry.

Part of the piece, for me, is in the rather catholic and punative process of building these poor objects. They are quite difficult to construct and the title in part comes from the sense of demanding labour that is in the building process as well as the almost metaphysical transformation that happens in going from 2D to 3D. In that sense the project only started to make sense when I started to draw the 2D-3D element as part of the piece in terms of the process á la Abbott's Flatland, of which the book is really only a concise C19th. instance of the concept and the trace metaphor is rooted much deeper within Christian and Platonic history. This braided with my usual themes very neatly, but added another dimension (heh), creating the final work.

Some time ago at the National Library of Scotland there was a beautiful and substantial show of the work of the pioneering Scottish photographer John Thomson, who toured china in the 1860 and 70s. Thomson, like many photographers of his time, used the wet collodion process, which necessitates making negatives on location for the moment of the shoot. Most clearly, I remember the portraits of princes, and other aristocrats and one landscape in particular. The image was of a large wall with an embattlement and a figure blurred through motion is hurling something, then towards Thomson and now, a century later, towards the viewer. An event which probably didn't take place then coalesces in the mercury vapour negative because, unlike the other negatives in the exhibition, this one was shattered into 3 or 4 pieces, and it reads as if the projectile actually hit its mark.

What this exhibitions means to be me now, more-or-less a decade later, steeped in realm of digital photography is quite different from then. Now, I see a great deal of reflection in the idea of the photographer that is emerging now. Almost all film photographers complain - and not unreasonably - that their work load has increased drastically and their pay decreased. Previously photographers would shoot images, send them to be developed, make some contact prints for their client, and then later either print the imagery themselves or have somebody else do it. Now, the market insists that the photographer shoots themselves, and either converts the RAW images, or then send them (the digital equivalent of giving away negatives). This means either (but usually both) a loss of income and greater time involvement, plus a massive investment in digital skills and digital craftsmanship (which isn't the reason a lot of photographers picked up cameras to begin with) and financially through the expenses of a good digital set-up.

This is very similar to the idea of the photographer that John Thomson was. Not only an image maker, but a chemist, pack horse, and printer. Not only this but exposure times have gone up and image quality has dropped (hopefully temporarily) - as did with the advent with advent of early film.

Viewed from this perspective our connection to the C19th. seems stronger than ever. Not only through the technical matters and through the change of photographic practices but also through the basic role of photography. Photography - it can be seen and demonstrated - fits into the C19th. model of knowledge and the growth thought in objectivity. The practice of photography offered a metaphor for a promised-land that lacked the vagaries of subjectivity, of emotional politiking, and brought knowledge under the judicial hammer of independent measurable quantities and qualities. Of, course this promise has been both incredibly successful and is the keystone of m-lC19th. and C20th. cultural paradigms and persists today in the majority of fields. However, for the last 30-40 years there have been different notions of knowledge that have been steadily growing, and ironically maturing through the greatest success of the C19th worldview - the computer.

Computers, in many ways, embody the successes of objective knowledge - everything a computer does has to be quantified and encoded in some syntactically strict format. Computers are the philospher's stone, knowledge is dissolved, separated from the material world, into its pure elemental form, where it can be transmogrified endlessly. Computers obviously do not transmogrify anything, but they do model. This process of creating worlds within themselves that replicate 'real world' behaviour becomes a mode of thinking where the model of, a simulation of, the world. The notion of simulation is an epistemology.

Within photography we've seen this transformation from the C19th idea of knowledge as visible to the visible being the end result of the process of knowledge. This is a little contentious, but in many ways contemporary CG imagery is closer to the spirit of C19th photography than current photography. At its best - which it seldom is - computer graphics (CG) is a way of modelling a possible world, not necessarily a world that does exist but a quantum alternative, a 'maybe', or a 'could be'. The rendered imagery in the CG case is the end result of a model of the world, and its an increasingly sophisticated model which draws upon successes in high level sciences as well as from cultural arenas.

-----------

To step back a moment, the digital photographer eternally trapsing the earth with their darkroom upon their back - or rather on their lap (as more sales migrate to laptops away from desktops) - is a return to the C19th model of the photographer, to a form of renaissance in photography at its beginning. This photographer does not create their image in the camera but only cultivates it there, creates a framework of their thinking that delineates, and prunes an infiinity of possible images but leaves open an infinity also, in the darkroom. Sarah Kember once said something to the effect of that it wasn't that digital photography has created the ambiguities in the photograph but has just highlighted that which was always present. And in this regard with the motion towards the photographer as darkroom magician the openness of the (now digital) negative has revealed itself once again and the paradigm of knowledge that the photograph constitutes is opened up again, calling the photographer, viewers and contexts to discuss any and every images meaning without dissolving into final meaning. With CG modelling reality the paradigm of knowledge has also shifted away from the visual as knowledge to the visual representing a modelled knowledge.

Both of these shifts away from C20th notions in photography and draw mostly upon the C19th and the C21st. What they are moving towards has been suggested but I'm not certain with these thinking-outlouds what might be.

(conside this to be a draft - I'll return later)

This morning, I received my first zen spam. There was no subject - but no "no subject", just perfectly blank. The sender was 'mail', and the mirrored recipient also 'mail'. The content of the email was a vast white space. At the very bottom, in the attachments, was a virus -I mean a 'document'- that was called: it_about_you.

I can't help but read this in terms of the history of absence, of shinto silence, of the pure reflection of the selfhood that is nothingness...

Yours,
Militarization R. Saucer &
Delinqently J. Obscenity

(My apologies for the absense of any real content, but I'll be back online when the university goes offline)

I remember once being told how some social Darwinists had conducted research on the 'mutation rate' of names. They'd discovered that 1% of names (in the US) were spelling variants of other names, minor adaptions to the name 'gene' and that an amazing 0.1% of them were totally original. 1 in 1,000 names had no clear link to any prior registered name, which to me is a very rapid rate of mutation.

Now I'm wondering what kind of rococo cataclysm has brought such adaptive behaviour in the spam world to have given me these 'variants' just this morning (I love these):

Airbourne H. Bibliophile
Langour L. Pretend
and
Ideologically H. Kremlin


What happened out there? I nearly feel sorry for those poor people...
Yours,
Rolondo D. Townsend

two truisms: everybody uses bookshelves to judge other people, and everybody has to go to the toilet. So, why not use your toilet material to influence how people perceive you? I was thinking about this after being reminded of a book that I used to have as toilet reading material: The Pschological Moment by Robert McCrum, or, for the more bathroom ambitious, my current choice Ready for Anything by David Allen, which is neatly divided into bite sized chunks. He also authored Getting Things Done: the art of stress free productivity which I feel also has certain je ne sais quoi in that context...

(apologies to those with notions of taste or decency. Its the end of the semester, and I'm completely cooked. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)

Signing off,
Safeguards B. Subspace

(you just know I couldn't make that up)

I've got my mail set up IMAP stylee at work and at home, at home using mail.app and at work on thunderbird. I combed through the mail today just in case my nigerian di3taTor friend has gotten a great deal on rem0rtag1ng my vi8gra. I've been waiting for some time for his reply, so I thought that I better check out the junk mail. just in case.

What I found instead is that spam mailers have been studying absurd theatre and maybe a little Post Modernism and are now coming out with just fantasticly baroque names replete with art gallery irony. I took a selection from the first page, and although they may acuse me of a poor distorted sample, here are the top five in reverse order:

5. Jame J. Subia
4. Boozer T. Monrovia
3. Falseness V. Dependent
2.Cashmere S. Yachtsmen
and
1. Congruity J. Crossbreeding

I think that the point of the names in spam used to be to convince you that might know these people. But, now that we are a little more aware they've become an art form in themselves.

Its not surprising that given the success of the D70 in dragging Nikon back into the DSLR race that they would be keen to maintain that momentum. With Canon releasing their entry level 8mp 350D and upping the ante once again, Nikon is forced to show its hand. In this regard the following press release was not unexpected (via):

Further thoughts: One reason for the success of the D70 is that it is a good low-end professional camera with a metal body, good feature set and so on. From my perspective as a professor watching people buy the D70, they bought it because 1. they could afford it and 2. because they had no prior allegiance to another manufacturers. It is rare to switch brands because of the lens mounts - usually people have more invested in lenses and peripherals than they do in the body. Nikon were smart, they have got people to invest in their line of gear. However, I can imagine that the D70 looked too cheap according to Nikon's Ker-ching offices and by splitting the D70 into two markets, the prosumer and the low-end professional, they may actually do themselves some damage. The D70 is an investment as a professional into a line of cameras, into their futures, that is affordable. If, and I'll make an assumption, that the D70 successor is a little more expensive, and the lower end model is the same or perhaps a little cheaper but with a limited feature set and maybe a plastic body (á la the Canon 350D) then the digital SLR default of Canon may take people away again. From my experience people are buying the 20D if they can afford it (previously the 10D), and the D70 if they cannot. Only one that I know bought the 300D, and I know one other who has invested in the 350D but only because it is only to be used for photographing artwork and so the plastic body is a moot point. Naturally my sample set is very small, but this does seem to be the pattern and splitting the D70's market may not be wisest move.

I've very quickly become a google maps fetishist, and I'm also looking for a new apartment. This site has combined the interface and visual nature of maps.google.com with the democratic utility of craig's list by drawing the data from CL into the google. Its quite a treat in a 2BR-no-pets-utilities-included sort of way.

Recently, I've mentioned the virtues of Cyberduck, flickr uploaders (available in wintel flavours too) and the iphoto library manager amongst other free/share/GNUware programs. In a similar I thought that I'd round up some other programs that I use daily (take two after meals), regularly (like on the Queen's birthday or during royal weddings), or occasionally just occasionally. I'm going to try and break it down in basic categories: back-ups; presentation; web design; web and networks; and then 'productivity' software.

One, which I've found useful to have around as someone who backs up to optical disks as well as onto bling-drives is Sebastian Krauß's Locator which archives the contents of removable media, hard drives, etc. Its a simple utility - only seems to search by file-name but does work well. Silverkeeper is LaCie's freeware backup utility, which is good at drive mirroing and basic scheduled backups although itn't an archiving program, so couldn't be used with a RAID setup very easily.

Useful for presentations and, in my case, teaching are Mouseposé, which highlights the cursor like a James Bond introduction; Deskdoodle and Desktastic both allow you to draw over the screen like a black or whiteboard (both of these are shareware).

For webdesign, aside from firefox - which about 30% (!) of you are using, with its truly wonderful web developer toolbar, there's Taco HTML edit which is a nice little text editor with very useful find and replace functions as well as the ability to save code snippets, automatic indenting, syntax checking, and color tag highlighting, etc, etc. I've used it for a few projects now and its great. SubEthaEdit has a good reputation because of the ability to create documents collaboratively, which could be really quite amazing, but I've never had the reason to do it. Good idea 'though. Free Ruler is a screen rule that's free. Good for figuring out unexpected table and CSS mess. ImageMagick is a secret industry standard for working with large groups of images, often for getting them web ready. Its highly programmable, free and available on just about every platform you've ever heard of.

The best RSS reader for the Mac and the most popular RSS reader on any platform is NetNewsWire. Its really changed the way I consume news on the internets. Their Lite version is too good, and free. Another useful mac internet tool is the safari boomark extractor for getting bookmarks from safari and into firefox, for example. If I remember rightly Opera does it automatically and has integration with the Mac address book, and undoubtably the best browser engine available (although the boot-up time does deter me). Adium is the mac alternative to iChat which I use sometimes. Its got lots of geek-pleasing stuff in it although it is not as neat and contained as apple's own messaging client. Thunderbird is a great mail client and a sister project to firefox, and, for windows users, a good way of avoiding viruses that target Outlook. The last of the these utilities that deserves a mention - although I seldom use it - is Deep Vacuum which sucks pages/entire sites/ftp catalogues off the web.

KisMAC and MacStumbler are both network utilities for finding wireless networks. KisMAC includes mapmaking tools for working with GPS if you fancy doing that whole warchalking thing. MacStumbler has GPS support but I don't think does the whole mapping thing. Not that I have GPS anyway, so I'm unable to vouch for them beyond basic wireless networking - but they both work well at that.

Lastly, a few productivity tools worth mentioning: Voodoopad which creates local or remote wikis; OpenOffice is a full office suite that has been spun off from Sun's StarOffice. I use it at work, but haven't really challenged it to anything yet. I wrote edited and fought with PhD through Word and so I know how to use that. OOo is slightly different from Word in some respects and I miss the outline view that Word has, which is not to say I'm a Word apologist (although at time I am). Word is the most bloated piece of software I use regularly. Its one of the only pieces of software that really asks me to quit other programs whilst its running in a desparate to get some kind of speed out of it. Unfortunately, they are not going to be creating a native mac version of OOo. The current version runs through X11 which comes with all macs with the developers tools (and probably deserves a mention too), which although it is fine for people who are used to digital esoterica it isn't a good sign for a mass mac take up, but its an amazing example of what open source software could do. Along similar lines is GIMP the open source alternative to PhotoShop. Its is very very good, it really is. The problem is that PS is just incredible. It isn't until spending your time wrapping your mind around as capricious a piece of software as Word that you realise just how stunning PS really. I tell you what - I'll spend some time with GIMP, in a month of two and I'll really try to see what it can do.

Aside from GIMP I use all of these daily, some only once every few months, but they are all in my applications folder and have survived various prunings that I go through every spring. When I thought that I'd round up some free/shareware, I really only thought that I had a handful of applications. There are over twenty mentioned here, and there quite a few that I haven't mentioned that I don't use that but are very popular. Most of these are free - completely free, with a minority that demand money for full functionality and quite a few that ask politely but don't rub it in your face if you don't fork out for them. I've given money to a few of these, but not enough. They represent years upon years in the lives of people who really didn't have to give away what they loved to do. These people are helping me through my digital existence, and are the strange and human folk supporting our contemporary lives.

Google's new satellite map service (same address as before but with a little button at the top right), will now pin point any address in TomClancyVision(tm).

Unfortunately, it now unequivocally shows that I live my neighbour's garden...

Although I've recently been a little dismissive of what the aggregate NYC art scene is producing through the lens of PS1's curatorial emphases, but several recent shows in Williamsburg show that the methods and broad feeling are not completely homogenous. The most disturbing thing in the PS1 show was the apparent desire to communicate through languages that were often too easy too consume for a knowledgable reader and unrewarding without a broad but NY provincial understanding of art. This was not the case throughout, and many of the artworks were engaging in numerous ways, but there was more homogeneity to the methods employed, to the dialects spoken, than seems likely for a survey show of NYC.

The method-dialect engaged and addressed the knowing viewer through the last 45 years of art-languages, and required that background knowledge in order to communicate something new. This is very sensible, and should demonstrate an appreciable motion in the kind of ideas that the NYC-aggregate is discussing in relation to a near-half century of artwork. In my view this isn't a simple process of reiteration, or of facile recreation, but of employing subtle nuances and the rebalancing of former statements, premises, assumptions, etc in order to enrichen the historical language and content of that language. This is what every field of knowledge does, this is the reflective self-assessing that is often mis-construed as progress. It is more cyclical, more 'rhizomic' than the notion that progress implies.

There are two other things to mention about methods in general. The first being that because they are a way of viewing work - traditionally viewed as a lens - all objects can be subjected to them but not all obects, works of art, should be. At some point I'll address (or I should address...) the notion of moral imperatives or of any imperative or external and quasi-stable values. For now let it stand that the schema presented here doesn't account for all artworks nor are there schemas which will address all well.

The second thing that is relevent here is that although there can naturally be multiple lenses for looking at works, it is not imperative that the lens is the primary aspect of looking at the work. The notion of looking can inflate or deflate the values and primacy of methods, and the work does have a role in determining that. Again, in order for this to work it relies upon structures extrinsic to the focus and remit of this arguement, and will - probably - be dealt with later.

I often speak of history in my teaching, of the role of language and the 'a priori' nature of languages (in both the philosophical sense and in the non-specialist senses of the phrase), and this method is something that creates a communicable framework, which is useful in the research sense as well. It is, in other words, an epistemology. It is one epistemology, one model of knowledge and one rationale for creating work; assessing and evaluating work, for framing work and so on. It has its boundaries and its limits and when it is presented to you en masse it shows them with force.

The questions in that regard is more to do with role of this method rather whether or not it is applied.

Williamsburg's art scene is both part of the greater NYC scene, its vanguard, and judging, from the migration from Brooklyn to Manhattan the entry card into Chelsea for both artists and their galleries, and with that greater exposure of various sorts. Two of the shows that opened over the last weekend reminded me of different but not unrelated approaches to PS1. Both Caroline Cox's show at the Sarah Bowen gallery, and Eric Heist's at Shroeder-Romero offer alternative ideas of reading, framing and of methods.

Caroline Cox's offers a method which has been seen less in recent years, but draws parts of its framework from Arte Povera and more personally to me from 80s British sculpture - and in that sense can be called upon with the methods above. There's a negotiation between cultural association, the connotive strength of the materials and a poetic sensibility which calls upon a different understanding of the role and meaning of material values. The values are not necessarily called through the use of clothing tags, through plastic netting, through the metaphorical meanings dervied from the usage of the material, but from another source which gathers momentum in spite of that, or even in direct disregard for that. The process of perception, the act of looking, enables these objects and their formal structure to move into an abstract poetry. the abstractions finds its poetry not through the contemporary abstract-sculpture/installation language, but through requesting aspects of ourselves to empathise and imaginatively find connections of meaning through the form. This seems to call upon something else beyond the critical discourse outlined about, and outside of the role of the conscious-language, but stems from another cultural resource that is located elsewhere.

Eric Heist's work differs directly from the PS1 show in a way that is common to most of Schroeder-Romero's output in that it is politically active and sensitive. (Although there was one set of drawings from a war artist in Iraq at PS1). By demanding that we refocus our viewing onto a realm of action we resistantly call pollitics, by opening up not shock but something closer to genuine and almost certainly justifiable outrage, and by reconfiguring that within the context of our implied personal responsibilties through a pun on the word of 'agent' in 'travel agents', the work finds an aggression that is mostly contemporary and widely, I suspect, felt to be due.

Between the two works the process of finding meaning addressed different aspects of myself, not refraining from opening up parts which almost seem vestigial, and asking me questions in languages that I'd thought I'd forgot.

PS: the notions presented here are not final, they are an attempt to open up these notions in my mind and to begin to explore them. I will revise this post as it becomes clearer to me, and build upon it in future entries.

Want to buy an acre or two of the moon? Hell! Why not..?

Be careful not to be duped, so make sure that you read the fine print in the FAQ, ok? For example:

Question #1
Does the Moon have its own laws?

Answer
Absolutely. Mr. Hope, whom we call the absolute and final omnipotent ruler of the entire Lunar surface, or, The Head Cheese , for short, has drafted and introduced a Lunar Constitution and Bill of Rights for the Moon.

I tried to notify blogger of the aforementioned problem and upon posting the problem that I've been having I was presented with this message:

That's not good, I can't complain because their error reporting software has gone pear shaped too...

(although I can still post from firefox, so all is not lost...)

Apologies for not posting, I haven't had too much time to write anything but I have a hunk of something in the drafts box (in fact I have several things hanging around there, some of which are gaining the same status as opened tins that are lurking at the back of the fridge: you don't want to think about them and certainly don't want to look at what's in there).

Its seems that blogger is having a bit of a sulk at safari, and was returning an error saying that blogger was bouncing the calls (network connection reset) because 'the server was busy'. 'Oh yeah?' says me, 'too busy too accept a call from firefox..? Aha! I thought not!'
'Damn you!' says blogger, 'I didn't recognise your number! That's sneaky!'
'Well yeah? You should have answered the phone shouldn't you?' says safari. And so on.

Oh how I enjoy the puerile melodramas between youthful websites and fledgling browsers...

Colour Management is often portrayed like insurance: some kind of necessary evil which we'd all be better off without, but can't quite figure out what to put in its place. Its not well understood what it is or what it does. Its generally felt that things were better 'before colour management' although nobody can really point to a comparable situation to the cottage publishing industries that the digital era has opened up. Because of this most people try their best to 'remove' the colour management as much as is possible - as it is that that is causing their colour and tone shifts, and not the complexity of the printer set up and the general level of ignorance. In other words these people are colour management passive-aggressive.

This is what was highlighted to me - in fact, it is the foundational fact that I have distilled from reading Time Grey's Color Confidence. To give another example, with a lot of people, they either 'turn off' color management in photoshop - "don't color manage" when opening a page, or they "preserve embedded profiles". This when you are viewing information on screen is a bad idea. The first gives you the impression that you are viewing the 'pure' image when you are in fact viewing using the default colour settings; and the second gives you the idea that are staying true to the color profiled image, when you are in fact generating a conflict between the profile in the image and the profile that the monitor uses. You can no more turn off profiling that you can speak without using a language. The idea that you can have a pure image (sans profile) is in this sense the same as saying that you can speak the maker's language. Saying that the computer can't deal with your color problems whilst feeding it bad information is, you will find in the chapters, a problem that you can deal with and grow beyond. Tim Grey's is your personal colour counsellor, and he'll help you deal with your color attitude.

Its a book that lays out several variant systems, tells you what to do, doesn't dwell too much on the technical matters and will get you making better looking images. It won't tell you a great deal about the way colour space works, but it will give you enough to know what to do. I like Tim, he's a pragmatic sort of guy, so it seems, and I like his book, too.

The predicted press release arrived yesterday in my mail box, was roundly dismissed as last week's news, but looked a lot like this. More interesting than that are the feature lists available at PS CS2 HQ, IMHO. While I'm on the topic, here's a blog that is worth keeping your eyes on for all things 'PhotoShoppe'.

Apologies for todays punnery excesses.

Aside from the 'useful' message which my phone now attaches to images sent to flickr, apart from my phone's truly hopeless white balancing, and apart from the fact that I couldn't tell that the image was out of focus when it was on the little screen, this image is a testimony to metal laptop cases.

Yesterday I dropped my laptop onto a concrete floor which, as you can see, remodelled the exterior. As the machine still seems to function fine, I'm not as concerned as I could be. I thought about it this way - if this was a plastic case, I would now be crying and poking needles in my eyes and self loathing at my patent idiocy whilst sweeping up shards from the floor and dreaming up excuses to give to the insurance company whose 'services' I don't have...

I was really quite happy to have made a back up of my hard drive at that point. So, people, get yourself some back up bling, please.

More of that protestant stuff which keeps your sense of self-worth at bay... Yeah, its more residency/opportunity listings!
http://www.ipcny.org/info/info_artists.htm
This time its from the IPCNY.

Thank you civic-minded IPCNY.

Jerry Thompson's Truth and Photography : Notes on Looking and Photographing is a poetic and thoughtful look at the nature photography from the perspective of someone shoots and write, and who studied under Walker Evans. Thompson's critical foundation is unusual in photography in that it doesn't stem from the usual heavy hitting theorists that have supported, dominated and restricted the act of looking at this strange form of imagemaking. He calls mostly upon other photographers to account for themselves, and then he calls upon a deep sense of empathy powered by imagination to expand and generalise upon the photographer's own commentary. It is a hermenuetic approach coloured by a desire to instill a broad poetry to process of photography and to the life dedicated to creating these images.

His exploitation of external information grants him opportunity to ask questions well beyond the frame of the image yet undoubtably attached to it. A Stieglitz image becomes a deep formalist reading which drifts into a meditation upon the life of an aging photographer, and analysis of a Walker Evans image is driven by the lofty literary aspirations, ascerbic humour and ambitions of the artist. The ability to understand in a very subtle way that photography is a practice which produces images and not a form of imagery gives Thompson a rare distinction. His understanding of the immediate physical and mental world that surrounds an image opens the imagery into a poetic realm which functions as a critical context.

All photographs open a small space and time which is heterogenous and frozen. A photograph is deep-linked to the reality from which it came, but is still only a representation of it. Under Thompson's imaginative reading the space broadens and embraces the lives of the photographers shown, and each image becomes a form of portrait.

The role of imagination in photography isn't dicussed frequently. There are artists who create tableauxs, for example Joel Peter Witkin, but it seems that the photographs may require the imagination of the creator but don't require as much imagination from the viewer. Even here, photographs describe a reality. A staged reality of fleshy freaks, scratched negatives and death-and-sex icons, but still all quite real, overly visceral, and leaving little to the imagination... This book opens up empathy as a method and a way to see and draws the reader and viewer into body and mind of the artists he examines.

Early on in his Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images Terry Barrett admits that he isn't a photographer (at least not in the sense of the people that he writes about). He is primarily an educator of art educators, and because of that his focus is on clarity and direct communication. One unfortunate early failure in communication is the title. The title suggests a way of examinging photographs - which it undoubtably does - but does it all under the rubric of writing about photographs. The book title, I suspect, tries to appeal to a broader audience than the manuscript would suggest. It is not, however, a damning criticism as the book is really quite useful for understanding how to think about looking at photographs - but from the perspective of a writer, not a maker.

He sets up a schema involving a four stage method of criticism - describing, interpreting, evaluating and theorising. It is, again, a useful schema, demarcating four different identifiable aspects of criticism, especially for consumption by undergraduates to whom the word 'criticism' is still used in the non-specialist sense of bad-saying, and all to frequently in the mass media sense of unequivocal, morally outrighteous, bad-saying. Even with this crystalline system he acknowledges the limits of his model - he recognises the interpretation that happens with description and that in writing the two are deeply intertwined and for that I am grateful. It doesn't entirely provide a 'drive-thru' approach to thinking where knowledge and understanding is acquired piecemeal; although his notion of knowledge is overall fashionably indistinct from an upscaled idea of information.

The photographs he chooses often predictably - and from a beginning student's perspective, usefully - from the canon of photographs its ok to criticise. Cindy Sherman is thrown into the foray, along with Barbara Kruger, Mary Ellen Mark is in there, and so on. They are all identifiably photographs to write about. They are good to write about because they are images that require strong contextualisation within recognised theories of criticism, in fact they are all images that demand strong theory in order for them to admit sophisticated meaning. Other photographers such as Jerry Uelsmann, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe typically lean to particular avenues of criticism, which is useful although not particularly interesting to someone who is looking for more engaging writing.

Terry Barrett has created a humble and, as its now in its third edition, proven book which is undoubtably needed and will serve beginners well and without pretention or patronisation and remind others of the difficulties that present themselves when trying to understand something as obvious as a photograph.

I got myself some practical geek bling in the form of shiny new hard drive as designed by F.A.Porsche. Hopefully this back up bling will be a little more reliable than my former back up drive (having the unfortunate sobriquet of 'box of death' among its foes). I, on the other hard, still think that the name 'johannes de silentio' is better suited for a drive that sounded like a Ford Fiesta's dodgy transmission.

One of the great things about buying LaCie's drives is that they all come with syncing software. They supposedly come with Retrospect but mine came with something called Silverkeeper which I've not used before. As Silverkeeper is freeware and Retrospect is not, I'm not entirely convinced that the choice was due to the software. On the other hand, I've been using free, share or whatever ware since you had to order it by mail from photocopied catalogues on tapes and single sided 3.5" disks for machines with a fraction of the computational power of my phone, so you would have thought that I'd have figured out by now that the great majority of it is really good software. In fact, aside from a few flagship programs by Adobe and Newtek just about all of my software falls into the other category.

Mental Note to Self: remember that cost is not value, cost is not value. Sometimes I need to decapitalise myself. Maybe I could hire a ninja to assault me occasionally with an easy-wipe copy of Das Kapital.

Sorry for my absence, I was in NYC and then DC over the weekend. Of course, I missed the bus again in NYC, in part due to subway construction and torrential rain but this time by 8 hours, making me half a day late by the time I got to DC. There I thought it would be smart and poetically neater if I enthusiastically made a mess of the whole weekend by losing my wallet.