general

The writing on Curbed consistently cracks me up:

Coney Island Stocking Up on Cold-Blooded Killers

Thursday, September 17, 2009, by Joey

We don't get to run aquarium renderings that often here at Curbed HQ, and when that opportunity presents itself, you bet your dorsal fin we're taking it. Coney Island's New York Aquarium has announced a $100 million "Sea Change" plan that will turn its single shark tank filled with 90,000 gallons of water and eight sharks into two tanks filled with 600,000 gallons of water and 30 sharks! There will also be other refurbished areas and new exhibits and blah blah blah. Sharks!!! Just over $40 million has been earmarked for the project by the city, and additional fundraising is about to kick off. Mayor Bloomberg sees this as another part of the ambitious Coney Island redevelopment plan (revised estimated completion: 2326), with the bonus being that he doesn't have to pay off a greedy land speculator to get this step accomplished.

Recommended: "Hubris/Nemesis/Whatever," a web essay by the artists AIDS 3D, in Paddy Johnson's IMG MGMT series. The piece recalls Mark Dery's writing in its mix of interest and skepticism about where new tech is taking us. Dery (who has written for Bookforum and many other mags, was briefly editor of artbyte magazine in the Dot Com era, and now intermittently blogs), is solidly a writer in the print tradition, whereas AIDS 3D takes advantage of the "good bad" graphics and YouTubage of the current Web (with excellent taste in same) to tell their story. This audio/visual/interactive content adds its own flavor or spin: it seems both the medium and message of the failed Singularity they adumbrate.

Update, put another way: The Singularity is supposed to be this big cosmic mind meld that occurs as more brains connect in cyberspace. Yet as we know the Internet is dancing hamsters and your parents on Facebook. By telling their tale in the debased language of tacky 3d graphics and links to old movie clips Keller and Kosmas show as well as tell what has become of utopian dreams for the Internet. (Adumbrated down after complaints by AFC commenters.)

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Sally McKay has written a thoughtful paper titled "The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)." The venue is art&education, a website for art writing co-sponsored by e-flux and Artforum. I'm flattered to have my OptiDisc GIF featured on the front page and discussed in depth.

From McKay's text (footnotes are in the article):

Brian Massumi describes affective intensity as a "state of suspense, potentially of disruption. It is like a temporal sink, a hole in time... ."[27] This is a moment of incipience, before action is taken, before emotions qualify and retroactively determine the affect. In animated GIFs, the gaps in action between frames extend the affective suspense. They are small enough to suggest motion, but large enough to create a perceptible gap, which means there is plenty of time for the affect to take hold. As Mieke Bal might describe it, the animated gifs function like cinematic close-ups — "abstractions isolating the object from the time-space coordinates in which we were moving as if 'naturally.' A close-up immediately cancels out the whole that precedes it, leaving us alone, thrown out of linear time, alone with a relationship to the image that is pure affect." [28] Unlike close-ups in cinema, however, animated GIFs function without a "whole" — there is no ongoing narrative for them to be juxtaposed against. If, as in OptiDisc, the affect is strong and virtually uninflected by signification it can induce a light trance, taking over the perceptual system by temporarily shutting down emotion and cognition.

This kind of cognitive stupor can be pleasurable, but it does raise some concerns. Amy Herzog talks about the political potential of the affective pause in feminist film as a moment of becoming.[29] But what if the becoming never comes? What if the affective intensity remains arrested, and is never collapsed into action or emotions? Granted, many animated gifs carry more signification than OptiDisc and even in this piece there are references — such as an allusion to Jasper Johns’ target paintings — that may eventually emerge and break the spell. But the endlessly looping structure does enhance a kind of "anaesthetic" state, as Susan Buck-Morss might describe it. "The problem," Buck-Morss suggests, "is that under conditions of modern shock — the daily shocks of the modern world — response to stimuli without thinking has become necessary for survival."[30] In a culture that depends on citizens' passivity — and the contemporary context of late capitalism would certainly apply — aesthetic products and media may be designed as phantasmagorias, which, as Buck-Morss explains, have the "effect of anaesthetizing the organism, not through numbing, but through flooding the senses."[31] The zoned-out state of mind induced and extended by digital media such as OptiDisc may be an affect that mitigates against the agency of enhanced perceptual engagement.

Some thoughts on this to come.

Update, Jan. 2018: Substituted an Internet Archive link to the article.

Questioning the official 9/11 narrative ("19 men, armed only with boxcutters..." etc) will get you fired from the Obama administration, we all recently learned. And deservedly so. To suggest that those 19 foreign nationals evaded a superpower's intelligence-gathering by any means other than their own native cunning and guile, or that anyone in the US stood to profit from the 9/11 attacks, or that the subsequent investigation avoided key areas of inquiry, is the height of folly.

The "one lone nut" theory of the Kennedy assassination was upgraded for 9/11 to "19 lone nuts plus some people in caves in Asia." Accept it or be banished from political life in the US.

Update: And if you consider it a contradiction that the US fought (and continues to fight) the most expensive military campaigns since World War II in response to the boxcutter cave guys, that is just a sign of how deeply crazy and unworthy of a job in DC you are.

Per a Walter Pincus story in the Washington Post, "as the United States withdraws its combat forces from Iraq, the government is hiring more private guards to protect U.S. installations at a cost that could near $1 billion, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. "

For installations, read bases (which aren't permanent, of course). Also from that article:

The Central Command study found that of the armed private security personnel working in June, 623 were Americans, 1,029 were Iraqis and 11,580 were third-country nationals. Most of that group "were from countries such as Uganda and Kenya," according to the inspector general's report.

These aren't mercenaries but "contractors." The US is in Iraq not for the oil but to spread democracy.