Archive for March, 2007
Response to Jean Buadrillard’s “Screened Out” and Critical Art Ensemble’s “The Question of Access”
Before Spring Break I picked up a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s “Screened Out,” at the Strand Bookstore. The book is a collection of essays, whose topics range from AIDS as the savior of mankind, to the catastrophe opportunity of total positives, and to formula one racecars exemplifying an almost divine symbiosis between man and machine. I had recently become familiar with Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra—the phenomenon of that which is unreal disguising all traces of it’s own evidence, so that the unreality is disguised or canceled out. I particularly identify with J.B.’s rants on the Disneyland and the surrounding Los Angeles. Having lived in Hollywood for five years and then left the world of audio post-production for New York City—which Baudrillard coincidentally also sees as a failure of a place—I can now point people to a useful text, when they ask my reasoning behind severing myself from Hollywood and all of it’s simulacra.
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Lawnboard: Wiring It Up
I spent many hours cutting, stripping and sodering 96 pieces wire into the the lawnboard. The vein-like arrangement of the wires are visually interesting and a bit more cluttered looking than I had anticipated! A future version should include a prefab board, where all the power and ground connections are linked, and the joystick returns are flat against the board–total wires = 0. For now though, this will be useful for testing purposes, once I hook up the analog multiplexers.
Haiku News Beta!
A collaborative effort between ITP’s Nick Hasty and myself, this application generates Haikus based on writing entries found on different environmental issues in Wikipedia. The results are frequently ironic and serve as a sort of chance commentary on the natural world and it’s relationship to mankind. Java concordance trees and regular expressions were used to extract key words to form a database. A future version will rely on RSS feeds, to continually update the public on current environmental and political affairs; a series of poetic hyperlinks. For now please demo the Beta version we’ve made in Processing here. Refreshing the browser will result in a new Haiku.
Poems that Haiku News has turned out so far…
