absent
apophenia

"The Ark"... An expression of optimism over the impact of the Internet on China's future.

While I lived in Beijing, I made as frequent trips as I could to the 798 Art District in the city's northwest. (An aside on the Wikipedia article: note the Bauhaus architecture; ignore the dribble about 798 facing "impending destruction," if I haven't managed to get that bit removed.)

I was fascinated by the paradox of the District's existence: Mere miles from Tian'anmen Square, and the center of the bureaucracy's power, sat a community whose most exalted values included subversive critiques of the government.

Even more befuddling, Beijing's elite businesspersons and political figures purchased and valued the very art that sought to undermine them, seemingly without irony.

The long history of delicate balance between patron and artist aside, Beijing's czars tolerate the District with the implicit assumption that, on a whole, the Chinese art world is a fringe community, with sponsors and buyers restricted mostly to intellectuals whose privileged education usually comes by virtue of success--personal or paternal--in the business and/or bureaucratic world (these two being largely inseparable). Besides the complicit relationship to the government that such success implies, the potential risk posed by the community is rather limited.

In this way, China's artists are surprisingly free to produce critical works that run the full gradient of subtlety all the way from L'avventura ("...What?") to Avatar ("Club me over the head until I bleed green!").

I once encountered the sculpture above, which should fall somewhere in the middle of such a scale. It was titled "The Ark" and, to anyone who hears this and recognizes the procession of Internet Explorer logos, the piece should reveal itself as a rather obvious expression of optimism over the impact of the Internet on China's future.

I guess my point, in light of recent events, is that technology is largely agnostic unto itself. Technology simply amplifies human desire, for good or for bad. I would no more moralize about the Internet than I would about a hammer, even in the wrong hands. (Extending this logic to guns presents more of a challenge, though I'd argue that guns often represent applied technology signally intent.)

Of course, I'm just babbling at this point, because I, too, see a case for optimism where China and the Internet are concerned, but it's become apparent that the ride won't be as smooth as some have predicted.

Note: I've exhausted all of my Google juice trying to discover the artist behind "The Ark," but remain fruitless. Please shoot me any leads.

These days, for better or worse, I'm more and more comfortable proclaiming things like, "Good data visualisation is PORN!"

Last.fm has some goodies for the like-minded.

Sushmita is probably the most ardent user of Last that I know, though Victo gives her a run for her money, as the second linked graphic below shows.

I gifted Sushi Last's VIP services a little while ago; Last allows paid users to fiddle around with a plethora of neat features over at the Playground. She produced some charts with the Trends feature that is, to me, a perfect case of bringing data into the light. I'd love to see more open access to data like this; there could be hundreds of businesses buried in the proprietary data that companies like Last are, understandably, reluctant to expose. (Privacy/liability concerns and opportunity costs are pretty compelling reasons to maintain walls.)

On to the hot lava lamp charts!

(Click through on thumbs for full explicit detail.)

The first here is just a history of the artists Sush has listened to in the past 24 months. She appears to swing between "single band-obsessed" and "ecclectic" modes, which is pretty much how I listen to music as well. I just love seeing bands flare up and die, only to resurface at a later date.

(Note the sexy molten core of Radiohead goodness.)

The second chart is a comparison between Sushi and Victo. There are plenty of very real feedback loops between these two, which comes through well.

The feature reminds me of Digg's own incredible visualization playground at Digg Labs.

Send me any more examples that you know of out there!

Tonight I watched 2009's Moon, a sci-fi film directed & written by Duncan Jones, who is, it turns out, David Bowie's son (which has no relevance to the film, to Ziggy Stardust, or to any of what follows). Spoilers abound, so read on with caution.

As an ardent follower of the genre, I spent the first 30 minutes or so distracted by speculating over what this film's raison d'être would ultimately be; what would differentiate it from 2001, Solyaris, Sunshine, and the like, with whose patterns the film appeared to synchronize neatly. (Man, isolated on a mission in space, with only an artificial intelligence for companionship, gradually shows signs of going mad...)

Eventually, we learn that the main character, Sam Bell, is one of a line of clones tasked with overseeing the mining of helium-3 for energy export to Earth. The unknowing clones are strung along by spoofed communiques, implanted memories, and a false hope of returning to a wife and daughter upon completion of a 3-year contract (whereafter they, naturally, expire).

Faced with this discovery--and another clone like himself--Clone Sam struggles through an emotional and psychological arc of anger, insecurity, resignation, and compassionate heroism. The foil computer system, GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), provides a tempered and patient compassion, in spite of its programming.

Ultimately, the film explores humanity: the full spectrum, through a lens of morality, of what we inflict upon ourselves & others; how we define our humanity; and how we preserve it. Energy-production, as an archetype for man-made problems, could be seen as a sub-theme whose moral preaches that there are no quick fixes to what we visit upon ourselves.

(As an aside, Clint Mansell provided a rather predictable but still enjoyable & appropriate minimalist soundtrack. Mansell is probably best known for scoring Requiem for a Dream; in particular, "Lux Aeterna," re-used in some Lord of the Rings trailers. I recommend the soundtrack for The Fountain if you enjoy his other work.)

Overall I liked the movie, though I felt that there were some missed opportunities. Almost as an afterthought, the first Clone Sam learns that the original, "real" Sam is still living; I'd have liked to see some exploration of the choice that this original Sam must have made in allowing himself and his memories to be used for such a questionable purpose.

I'm also, in the aftermath of Avatar, craving more nuanced & complex villains. Hollywood's (yes, this was from the UK) profit-driven Evil Corporation childishness really needs to yield to some more realistic dialogue about competing values, complicity, and compromise.

A rather cheesy but unavoiable deus ex machina resolution reinforces the optimism of the film. For me, the magnitude by which Moon towers over previous clone movies The 6th Day, Godsend, and The Island gives reason enough to hope.

I will continue to revise this piece, but wanted to just get something up to work from.

2010-01-06

            With their 1997 album, OK Computer, the UK group Radiohead established themselves as serious and introspective artists, to the delight of critics and fans worldwide. In an exploration that parallels Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 Red Desert, Radiohead confronts themes of technology and of the alienation of living in a capitalist world—extending (inexplicitly) Antonioni’s post-industrial critique to the digital era.

            In the release’s opening track, “Airbag,” the narrator experiences salvation and rebirth via what is, fundamentally, a piece of technology invented to save one from another piece of technology. The song demonstrates the groundbreaking production that characterizes the remainder of the album—modulated electric guitars, staggered syncopation, complex layering and effects; the digital world aesthetically distilled.

            The optimism yields to what arguably remains the band’s magnum opus. A titular homage to author Douglas Adams, “Paranoid Android” follows its protagonist’s demented descent, as he lashes out at a shallow world before resigning to helplessness. The implication that the sympathetic victim is an android (real or symbolic) suggests an inversion of roles; this “android” responds in an identifiably human manner to the coldness of his manmade environment.

            The evocative melodies that Radiohead extracts from equipment mirror the minimalist beauty of Red Desert’s industrial spaces. Like the film, OK Computer celebrates the very technology that it finds estranging, in an almost guerilla paradox. Radiohead’s subsequent albums increasingly incorporate “electronica” elements as they continue to grapple with the complex relationship between humanity and our constructs, asking—though, crucially, never answering—the question: “Are we better off for all our clever inventions?”