Eno-phile

Update: The Beeb made YouTube take it down. Booh!

On a hypothetical list of people I’d like to spend a day with, Brian Eno goes very near the top.

Watch all six segments.

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

Frank Rich, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care”
The New York Times. March 27, 02010

Twice in the Morning

Bad at Sports linked to a Chicago Tribune story about a University of Chicago grad student who has taken it upon herself to document the graffiti at the university’s Regenstein Library.

twice in the morning
(photo Quinn Dombrowski)

Quinn Dombrowski, the documenter/compiler in question, has a blog, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur, and a dedicated Flickr set. The image above is of one of my favorites and proof that whoever is teaching Middle Egyptian is doing a good job.

Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV

Kill me now

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

Jeremy Page, “Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV”
Times Online, March 19, 02010

Anti-writing and Yukio Ota’s Exit Sign

exit

In the late 1970s, Yukio Ota designed the “running man” symbol above to mark emergency exits, a symbol the ISO later adopted as the recommended exist sign. As part of a Slate Magazine series on signs, Julia Turner wrote about the details of that story and the slow adoption of the symbol in the U.S. What really caught my attention, however, was the following paragraph about Ota’s grander scheme for a universal pictographic language.

Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe's increasingly industrial economy. Neurath used pictograms—for man, woman, sugar, wheat, gunship, etc.—to produce infographics that he displayed to packed crowds in a convention hall in Vienna, Austria. Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. In 1964, Ota even invented a symbolic language called LoCoS, the Lovers' Communication System, which supposedly took just an hour to learn.…Ota's colleague and fellow icon designer Aaron Marcus recalls that LoCoS was intended to “bring human beings together and … help them love each other a little bit better.”

Julia Turner, “The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man” Slate Magazine, March 8, 02010

After having spent the better part of this (academic) quarter researching anti-writing (or free writing, or asemic writing; “anti-writing” is art historian Wu Hung’s term which he applies to contemporary and historical Chinese calligraphy) I was pleasantly surprised to find this new connection between graphic design and anti-writing. Idiosyncratic pictographic systems like Ota’s are a peculiar form of anti-writing but they do play a part in that visual redefinition of language I was looking at in my research. For instance, Ota’s work reminded me of the work of Xu Bing, a contemporary Chinese artist who has, on occasion, used AIGA transportation and wayfinding signs in conjunction with his “Anglo-Chinese” logograms. Xu’s and Ota’s intentions are not the same but I think it’s fair to see Xu’s work as a comment on both graphic designers’ ambitions of universality—which Ota shares—and our individual expectations of cultural singularity.

You can read it.

Neither Xu’s nor Ota’s writing systems are really asemic though since they do convey a specific semantic meaning. (Xu’s work is sometimes purely asemic, but that one example above isn’t.) In fact, you could argue that Ota’s wish for a universal visual communication system is the opposite of Michaux’s, Twombly’s, or Ferrari’s cryptic, personal scribbling. But all of them share a desire and a capacity to change language through form and that’s what interests me in their works. So while Turner describes Ota’s belief in the “power of symbolic communication” as “romantic,” what I have found in studying the work of anti-writing artists is that Ota is only romantic perhaps in believing that others would join him in adopting his system but that his work is otherwise no more romantic than Ferrari’s or Xu’s.

Harmony

Ricardo Cabello, whom I do not know but who seems to be a pretty talented web developer, released Harmony yesterday, a web-based (html5 & javascript) drawing pad. I had a few minutes to kill this afternoon so I gave it a try and drew this funny looking bird with it.

Now you try it; it’s fun.

bird

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

David Cope
(photo Catherine Karnow; reproduced without permission)

Don’t let the dumb title (“Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”!) stop you from reading this story about David Cope’s research on computer musical composition, part of a field called “artificial creativity.” And make sure you listen to the two pieces embedded in the article.

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because [Cope had] managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Ryan Blitstein, “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”
Miller-McCune, February 22, 02010

Cold Cut

backyard · february 02010

A few weeks ago I came across an article by Peter Stark detailing what happens to the human body when it’s exposed to progressively colder temperatures and, conversely, what happens when it is—and can be—revived. It’s a fascinating read, especially if, like me, you have a slightly morbid fascination for death by exposure to cold.

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau's cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it's lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived.

…

But for all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike--and whether it will kill when it does. The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

Peter Stark, “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow…”
Outside, January 01997