June 2008

All mainstream media stories have the news about the first Martian soil tests. Guess how they spin it. (Answer follows this excerpt from an LA Times article.)

A sample of soil about the size of a sugar cube was delivered to the lab by the lander's nearly 8-foot-long robotic arm and mixed with water brought from Earth.

Analysis showed that the soil is alkaline, with a pH between 8 and 9, Kounaves said. This was a surprise to the many scientists who had argued that Martian soil was probably too acidic to support life.

With that level of alkalinity, "you might be able to grow asparagus very well," Kounaves said. Strawberries, on the other hand, require more acidic soil.

The test also turned up magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride, all of which are useful in organic processes.

The test did not turn up the prize that the $420-million mission was sent to find: complex organics indicating that the cold, dry planet once was, or still might be, habitable.

Organic compounds, made up of carbon in combination with nitrogen, hydrogen and other elements, are necessary to build the elaborate chemical scaffolding of life, at least as we know it on Earth.

Furthermore, even though the soil chemistry would provide some nutrients for life, any future crops would have to be grown underground, because the meager atmosphere lets in too much of the sun's destructive ultraviolet rays.

If the story were told in true inverted pyramid format (most important info first) the headline and lead would be:

No Life on Mars

NASA's $420-million mission has not found the complex organics indicating that Mars once was, or still might be, habitable.

Instead, the headline and subhead are:

Mars soil capable of sustaining plant life

Surprisingly alkaline, it could support green beans and asparagus, say Phoenix mission scientists, who are 'flabbergasted' by the findings.

We all know Mars is a dead world, but newspaper articles always tease us with the possibility of "life" because most people will not want to pay $420 million for some boring old data about rocks and stuff.

Slightly connected links in search of a theory:

1. Urban Meanderthals and the City of "Desire Lines":

The Meanderthal, a new species of urban flâneur. No longer merely out for a stroll through the streets, the Meanderthal has become a threat to the efficiencies of urban life and to the flows of pedestrians, vehicles, and capital taken for granted in the urban everyday. Whether he/she is chatting on a cell phone, standing on the wrong side of an escalator, cycling on the sidewalk, or dangerously jaywalking, the Meanderthal obliviously causes that most frustrating of urban traffic jams: the pedlock

2. Joe McKay has reconstructed the Google Street View van from reflections in shop windows, passing vehicles and various shiny surfaces.

3. Damon Zucconi found a photo of himself on Google Street View. (A virtual flaneur of the Surveillance State, not a Meanderthal.)

The following was originally posted as a comment to the somewhat fruitless Net Art 1.0 vs Net Art 2.0 discussion at Rhizome.org. The "old guard" Internet art crowd has been characterizing the art on the newer group blogs such as Nasty Nets as "ironically posting links to existing media on a group blog" and asking for more explanation of why this was art, or Internet art, while at the same time saying that NN was just a later version of stuff they'd been doing for years. You can't really take both positions. The following stabs at the issue by examining a specific post from Nasty Nets on April 1. It's been rewritten slightly.

Petra Cortright had this post by Javier Morales onscreen for a while during the recent Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel, and I think it's brilliant. Using very simple means (screenshots of Google search results and some html scrolling), it tackles sexual content in a very distanced, fetishistic way--the words "penis" and "vagina," in boldface, slowly move towards and away from each other in a configuration that is both a mirror and conflict. It is a snapshot of current culture: some earnest websites such as democraticunderground.com, cybersleuths, and cvcorner are captured only because they use the word penis or vagina and google finds them. There are accompanying thumbnail images that seem to have no connection to the words underneath them--did google do this or the artist? Plus snippets of text, moving just slowly enough to be read: "or is the penis a very large clit?" "the craze for designer vaginas" that somehow have to be accounted for in the overall clash of contexts. And it's nice to look at, with its suprematist squares collapsing into each other.

This was not submitted to Rhizome for institutional sanction as far as I know. It existed "out there" with 4Chan and all the other mashup sites. It's true that Rhizome gave approving coverage to Nasty Nets but there is no link on NN to Rhizome or any other signifier that it exists in an approved stream of processing "art" content.

Perhaps you hate this piece but I don't think you can reduce it to "ironically posting links to existing media with your friends on a group blog." Perhaps you like it but I don't think you can claim it is what Net Artists have always done since the means (blogs, Google caches exploding with content) didn't exist in the early days of the web.

I personally believe this is a new taxonomic class to be evaluated. The fact of it being on a blog, a blog that blends into the Internet "street," existing "outside" the world of grants for technological innovation, where the surrounding posts may very well be found material (but you have to figure it out), the fact of it using Google to generate a snapshot of the present moment, using search features (images, etc) that were not commonly available in 1999, while maintaining old school simplicity, means it is different, and I think better. More complicated, more real than XYZ tech art where algorithm Y converts raw material X into social solution Z. Morales can't be blamed if some Rhizome staffers think what he is doing is important enough to rate a new version.

But regardless of whether I'm right about it being different, you can't both claim it and repudiate it.

In response to this one of the commenters said, in effect, "yeah we already did that" but continues to characterize the piece as "ironically posting links to existing media on a group blog." I officially give up.