general

Am flattered but leery of this show coming up at artMovingProjects:

Marcin Ramocki: "blogger skins"

“Online presence” used to be a public relations catch phrase. In the last 3 years this strange concept revealed its very real powers. Google based searches became official introductions, performed shortly after, if not before, the actual handshake.
We have entered the era of identity superstructures: complex sets of search engine outcomes based on our activities, popularity, name itself, purposeful efforts and a whole bunch of random data fluctuation. We are growing second skins, made out of words, links and images: exciting, addictive and sometimes completely meaningless.

“blogger skins” is a project based on time-specific capturing of image Google searches.
The community most sensitive to this new phenomenon, and par excellence conceptually most related, is the world of pro-bloggers. For this project I chose five art bloggers: Tom Moody (tommoody.us), Paddy Johnson (artfagcity.com), Régine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art.com), James Wagner (jameswagner.com) and Joy Garnett (newsgrist.typepad.com) and performed specific image searches on their names. The thumbnails of first 100 images were imported (in the order of appearance) into an HTML editor and compiled into an image map, reflecting the original Google layout and popularity of search items.

The mosaic-like products are super-portraits of bloggers, reflecting not necessarily who they are as human beings, but how the Internet “sees” them.
Special thanks to Paul Slocum, who made me realize that, the only way to reference nonlinearity is through capturing its linear representation.

Leery because I stopped looking at what Google said about me a while back--no, really! Changing URLs and the inevitable, ongoing confusion with a cricket player down under makes the whole subject cringeworthy. This blog is linear and I control it absolutely but any cyber-snapshot of it, especially the divine Google's, is inevitably chaotic and humbling. As an artist who also writes I have a running competition with myself. Whenever the writer gets ahead I do something self-leveling like leave my gig with a national magazine or change a URL I spent years building cred for. Google is oblivious to this struggle, and displays only the wreckage, plus other completely random shit. Having said all that, I like what Ramocki says but vaguely wish I didn't have to be the proof.

Lead paragraph of Joan Walsh's Salon article today (prob. subscription-only):

I loved this story today: Rudy Giuliani, radio host. The New York Times looked at the glory years, when the mayor had his own weekly radio show on WABC-AM, from 1994 to 2001. Mostly the Giuliani we see on the campaign trail today seems to have lost his mojo, and maybe it's because he's trying so hard to suppress the fully alive Rudy of old. Sure, he could be a bully and a braggart, but he also had a damn good time running Manhattan, and it showed. Michael Powell captures Rudy practicing psychology without a license many times -- he enjoyed telling his critics they were crazy in a variety of colorful ways.

My letter in reply (prob. subscription-only--edited slightly here for clarity):

The Mayor on Shooting Kids Armed with Water Pistols
As for the Mayor "loving a good brawl," check out the 1998 recording of Hizzoner intimidating a caller who was concerned about the police shooting of a water pistol-toting 17 year old. Giuiliani heaped scorn and condescension on the caller, insisting the guy was "prejudiced against the police" for voicing his concern. Giuliani bore down with all his cheap prosecutor tricks on this average citizen, who was clearly outmatched but still struggled to be heard over the O'Reilly-esque bullying. The caller characterized the gun as a "toy pistol"--Giuliani corrected him that it was a "toy submachine gun" and then dropped the "toy" altogether in subsequent references. The Mayor spun the pure hypothetical that the youth could only have been riding his bike at 2:30 am with a "submachine gun" because he wanted to "impress the gangs." Sounds good but where's the proof? The caller said a witness saw the boy trying to put the gun down. "Other witnesses said he wasn't," riposted Giuliani, offering no specifics. Instead of considering what the caller had to say, the Mayor loudly and unapologetically defended the killing of a minor. It was reminiscent of the Bush we saw bullying the Prime Minister of Spain in those recently surfaced tape transcripts. Another arrogant narcissist with the means to "win" arguments but nothing good to do with that power.

Good essay on Meet John Doe, part of a larger series on "American heroes." This trope bears studying because it's still very much with us: somehow people got the idea that George Bush was a hero and spoke for the common person. So-called Straight Talk McCain and the manly-smelling Fred Thompson (manly-smelling to Chris Matthews anyway) also tap into this ideal.

Congratulations to family member and friend Andrea Ottesen for her image that graces the cover of the September 28 Science magazine. Here's what they said:

COVER The red alga Chondrus crispus (Irish moss). This image, taken with a digital point-and-shoot camera, tied for first place in the photography category of the National Science Foundation/Science 2007 Visualization Challenge. All the winning entries are displayed in a special feature beginning on page 1857 and online at www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2007.
Image: Andrea Ottesen

The slide show text adds that "the 15 centimeter wide red alga seems exotic in this abstract portrait, but it's one of the most common seaweed species on the Atlantic coast." One reason it's eye-grabbing is the structure reads like a symmetrical pattern but the seven "stems" make it actually asymmetrical. Don't know how usual or unusual that is in nature, or if all the Irish moss have have seven stems. Also, the black space inside the "stems" looks like the petals of a flower, so you get a kind of double image. I'm biased in believing Andrea blew away the other contestants you can see in the slideshow, but I also enjoyed the NASA computer visualizations of stratosphere-high "hot towers" in Hurricane Bonnie.

Update: Andrea answered my Chondrus Crispus query thusly: "Actually they usually have so many 'stems' that it is impossible to get a single clump to lie flat. This one had few enough--it was a tiny mass compared to its neighbors--so I could get it pressed and separated, and its form could actually be seen."