Jo (Joachim Scholzat) at the blog academiPad invited me to write about my experiences with Reeder, a multi-platform Google Reader/RSSclient, and here goes the final product of my guest post there: “Reeder: RSS Readers for iPad, iPhone, and Mac.” I have been using Reeder apps for a while, and I would absolutely recommend the apps to those who have never used RSS readers: it is very easy to use and its design is so minimalist that nothing can distract you from going through all the RSS feeds. Please check my guest post there.
This YouTube video is obviously part of a promotion for the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine as you see the product at the end of the video. As my handwriting is so messy, I have no desire to import the content of my scribbles into my iOS devices and computer. You can also check the blog entry on this video by Moleskine here.
Anyway, I found this video interesting. Whether or not you use Moleskine notebooks or not, this video points out some way of differentiating paper from gadgets.
The Loughton Candidate in Cremaster 4 (1995) by Matthew Barney
This semester, I am taking a course on contemporary art, and I have been thinking about the relationship between contemporary art and postmodernism. I have an essay due in about a week, and I’m (still) brainstorming for it right now. I thought that writing down some ideas that I have in my mind might be useful, so bear with me and my cluttered thoughts.
Both terms, contemporary art and postmodernism, have various issues and historical connotations, and this condition seems to make it difficult to elucidate their relationship. Liam Gillick, for example, attempts to use “current” art in lieu of contemporary art in his essay “The Good of Work,” and further illustrates the issues surrounding contemporary art in “Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place.” For me, these essays are reflecting a typical symptom of postmodernism: a difficulty in identifying exact meanings. Compared to Gillick’s writings, contemporary art seems to be one step ahead by negotiating with this unstable condition of significance. Part of the main issue in contemporary art, for Gillick, is its inclusiveness of various types of art work, or its lack of differentiation among them. Taking “artist and activist” Paul Chan as an example, Gillick suggests a way to resolve the issue of contemporary art:
A recent solution to the way the contemporary subdues differentiation has been to separate the notions of artistic and other political engagements, so that there can be no misunderstanding that only the work itself, in all its manifestations, might be part of the “contemporary art context.
As the distinction between high and mass cultures has gradually disappeared since popular culture dominated society in the early to mid-twentieth century, political factors have clearly resurged in the domain of art. By distinguishing artistic engagements from political engagements, art can, in some sense, exploit political elements in itself. Participatory art, including relational art, is representative of this process of distinction, and Rirkrit Tiravanija‘s installation Untitled (Free/Still) is such a participatory art work:
What are the political factors exploited in this installation? Eating curry in quotidian settings does not make the activity of eating curry or curry itself art. Making and eating curry in the space of an art institution can, however, label such an activity art, and this art work is thus highlighting the institutional condition of art. By preserving the process of making, serving, and eating curry in an art gallery, this installation is also playing with the dichotomy of public and private spaces. In daily life, the average person consumes food in relatively private spaces with the exception of dining out at restaurants or other eating establishments. The placement of food consumption in an art gallery, museum, or an exhibition site, makes food preparation and consumption undeniably a public act. Tiravanija’s Untitled as art work is itself a mere act of eating curry in an art gallery space. By exploiting the institutional condition of art, this installation can clearly make both participants and viewers aware of such a condition. The context of Untitled then fully foregrounds its nature and value as an art work.
The preserved process of curry eating in Tiravanija’s Untitled is tracing the constantly passing present moment, and I sense that his desire, often obsessive, of preserving the present is a constructive threshold of understanding the current trend of art. Not only in the domain of art but also in our society, we have constantly encountered new information and experiences through it, and it seems to have become really difficult to engage with such preserved elements because of an overwhelming amount of information that we constantly attempt to preserve digitally. In order to unfold the condition of the contemporary, current, postmodernist or whatever-adjective art of our time, we need to make sense of these often never-looked-back-at elements in digital archives. In 2004, artist and computer scientist Jonathan J. Harris launched an interactive website called 10×10™:
10×10™ (‘ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.
This website functions as an archive of encapsulated moments through images and words, and provides us with a site for reflection. By reflecting upon the passed moment, we may finally be able to understand and genuinely engage with that moment. This way of engaging with images in the public domain can be easily available to us: we just need to select all of the folders of images on our computer or external hard drives and create a slideshow. In this sense, our obsessive impulse to constantly capture moments with cameras and to create our private (and public) archives of passed moments through images may be an indication of our inability to engage with the constantly passing present moments, which then requires us to reflect back on the passed moments if we wish to involve fully with them. By the way, the oldest set of images and words available on this site is from Wednesday, November 3, 2004, at 10 pm EST:
While Harris’s 10×10™ exploits images and words from the news, the following video clip by Robert Ellison, Time Zone Time Lapse, consists of live webcam videos from around the world:
Here is the description of this video:
Time lapse video showing webcams from around the world for the twenty four hours starting midday UTC on June 7, 2010. Most of the webcams are in the northern hemisphere so long days and short nights. All the webcams are from the Catfood WebCamSaver database.
You can read Ellison’s detailed description of this video here in his blog I Thought He Came With You. Although this video does not create its own archive, it does provide us with one way of looking back at passed moments. Since this way of exploiting archived videos does not involve any direct use of words like 10×10™, we can freely interpret the video and situate ourselves within its context without much restriction of signified connotations. Here is another time-lapse video based on the Catfood WebCamSaver:
The postmodernist (and poststructuralist) condition of destabilized meaning and displaced originality through the dominant sense of pastiche and schizophrenia can, at least, explain some aspects of the cause for society and culture’s obsessiveness with archiving the present moment. The lack of originality has led us to focus more on styles than on ideas; in other words, the context of art has taken over the content of art and become the dominant factor in shaping the domain of art. In a sense, contemporary art must have been highlighting an artistic shift from the content to the context, while the larger context of art controlled by (hyper-)capitalism has been attempting to prevent a further progress in this development of contemporary art. While the traditional sites of (post-)modern and contemporary art have been much more willingly open to the appropriation and exploitation of earlier art works (for example, Elaine Sturtevant’s work based on Andy Warhol’s creations), the commercial and corporate sites of art, particularly those in music, video, film, and TV, are not just resisting this development but preventing an artist from exploiting their sources of financial gain. Remix culture has definitely situated itself between receptivity and resistance and has been struggling to secure its position against capitalist, corporate greed. RiP! A Remix Manifesto (2008) by Brett Gaylor, for example, is an instance of such a struggle. This documentary explores and investigates the grey area of copyright. Here is its trailer:
If you are in Canada, you can watch this film on the NFB (National Film Board of Canada) web site; if not, you can watch it on YouTube. What interests me most in this film is its engagement and play with the grey area of copyright. This documentary makes its viewers further aware of the cultural condition of image and sound arts controlled by a handful of global corporations. By revealing this condition, the film then highlight both the politics of art through hypercapitalism and the art of politics through remix culture. “A Remixer’s Manifesto” that appears several times in the film actually lays out not only the condition of postmodernist society through articles 1-3 but also identify a potential way to overcome such a condition in article 4:
Again, this manifest takes us back to our obsession with nowness. During the period of modernism, society and culture strived for originality by negating the established norms while preserving potentially original elements as the representation of the permanent moment that would become part of our history. As the postmodernist sensibility has taken over this modernist stance, however, society and culture have felt constrained within this modernist domain of the permanent moment so we have explored the established domain of the past while not knowing if we can actually find any stable significance in it. At the present moment, or for about the past decade, we have been attempting to break away from the dilemma between modernism and postmodernism by focusing on the constantly passing present in order to identify the elements that allow us to differentiate our time from the past and the future.
I am not sure if building free societies that do not restrain us from anything is possible. The further public and private spaces merge into each other, the more vulnerable our life becomes to the authoritative power of a select few people from a select few corporations. In this sense, art and culture that appropriate and exploit the services, products, and ideas of such corporate entities may have indeed become the only means for us to be aware of the current socio-cultural condition surrounding us and to overcome schizophrenic and nostalgic feelings cultivated in postmodernism. Our society is definitely shifting away from postmodernism and entering into a new era. No matter what we denominate this era, post-postmodernism, re-modernism, neo-modernism, or meta-modernism, the present, or nowness, is the factor that can take us to this era.
Since the Apple iPad Mini media event on October 23, I have been debating if I should stick to my iPad or replace it with an iPad Mini. Especially, reading this review by Megan Lavey-Heaton on TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) tempted me to reconsider an iPad Mini and to open up my wallet for it. Here are some thought on this new iPad monster.
1. The not-so-Retina Display is actually good. Many reviews like this one by the Verge point out the iPad Mini’s not-so-Retina, lower-resolution display. When I went to an Apple store last week, I tried an Apple Mini and I did actually notice the resolution difference between my iPad (3rd generation) and an iPad Mini. This impression lingered while I was playing with it at the store, but I am guessing that I would eventually get used to the lower-resolution display.
Based on this test result, iPad Mini has a much higher resolution display than the 2nd generation iPad, but this display is not as good as Retina. For those who have never used Retina displays, an iPad Mini’s display looks great. I can’t remember exactly where I read this, but this review was pointing out that playing and watching HD videos will be still fine on an iPad Mini, so for those of us who are already used to Retina displays, we could easily get used to iPad Mini’s not-so-Retina display very quickly.
2. The size and weight of an iPad Mini is like a paperback. Although I knew that an iPad Mini is smaller and lighter than a regular iPad, the size and weight of an iPad Mini surprised me when I actually held it in my hand. It weighs 0.68 lb (308 g) and it is as light as a typical paperback and less than half of the iPad’s weight (1.44 lbs [652 g]). I often read articles on my iPad, and my wrists feel sore after holding it for a long time. The feather-light weight Mini version will definitely make a big difference when you need to keep holding it while reading articles, books, or magazines on your iPad.
As Lavey-Heaton happily voices, “it fits in my purse,” an iPad Mini is much smaller than a regular iPad. The front area of an iPad Mini (7.87 in [200 mm] x 5.3 in [134.7 mm]) is about 40% smaller than that of an iPad, and the height of an iPad Mini is just a little taller than the width of an iPad by 0.54 in (14.3mm). And yes, an iPad Mini is 0.9 in (2.2 mm) thinner than an iPad as well. This size is a little bigger than the smaller size of a paperback (A-format: 4.33 in [110 mm] x 7 in [178 mm]), but it is most likely smaller than the majority of paperbacks B-format: 5.12 in x 7.8 in [130 mm x 198 mm]; C Format: 5.31 in x 8.50 in [135 mm x 216 mm]).1This feather-light iPad Mini will feel like just another paperback in your bag!
3. The price is the issue… or not. For those of us who have been using and buying Mac for a long time, we know that we are paying premium prices for Apple products. With this mentality, iPad Mini’s staring price of $329 seems decent. Since some rumours were indicating that the potential price could be $299 before the media event, $329 was a little disappointing. For me, an iPad Mini is to an iPad as an iPod Touch is to an iPhone. If the price of an iPad Mini had reflected this relationship, it would have been about $213, which seems too cheap for the capacity of an iPad. Obviously, an iPad Mini has better speed and performance than an iPod Touch, whose starting price is $299, so I guess it really makes sense that an iPad Mini costs $329.
4. An iPad Mini can replace a Moleskine notebook. As you can see in the above image, an iPad Mini is as big as a large-size Moleskine notebook. (I tried to print out the image of an iPad Mini at real scale and the printout ended up being a few millimetres short, though.) Many people who use Moleskine at school must be using it as a tool to create and develop great ideas (and to take notes), and an iPad Mini can definitely replace a Moleskine physically and functionally. Although I have never liked writing on my iPad with a stylus, we can engage with an iPad Mini in a Moleskine way by using great apps like Penultimate and Notability. If you want to stay loyal to Moleskine, you still have the option of using the Moleskine Journal app. You can even take a picture of your old Moleskine and use it as your wallpaper, or put an iPad Mini in a case like DODO case Classic!
At this moment, my iPad is still working fine, so I will most likely to wait until my iPad Mini fever goes away. For those who have already bought ones or planning to do so, I am jealous of you!
Maybe, some of your “friends” on Facebook have already declared that they are going to write a novel in a month while participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). NaNoWriMo is “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word (approximately 175-page) novel by 11:59:59 PM on November 30.”1 The website claims that 36,843 among 256,618 participants in 2011 achieved the goal!1 Last year, Charlotte Frost, the founder of PhD2Published, declared the month of November as AcBoWriMo (Academic Book Writing Month) Beta. In 2012, AcBoWriMo is back as Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo)! As with NaNoWriMo, your goal is to set a target word count (most likely, 50,000 words) and work towards it in the month of November. For both NaNoWriMo and AcWriMo, you publicly declare your participation and share your progress and experiences with other participants.
If you’re a graduate student under pressure to make a dramatic progress in your thesis/dissertation writing, or a faculty member who has been delaying finishing a book manuscript, you may want to participate in AcWriMo! For others who are still taking courses or in an early stage of sharing research topics, Digital Writing Month (DigiWriMo) may be a great alternative to these other two approaches. If you’re curious of the background of DigiWriMo, you can check an interview with its creators here. In DigiWriMo, you can write blogs entries, tweets, and update your Facebook status. Based on what I understand from “What is Digital Writing?” on the DigiWriMo website, all you need to do is to make full use of digital and online writing channels in order to engage in collaborative and communicative writing.
Am I participating in any of these approaches to write 50,000 words in this month? While I am thinking of participating in AcWriMo or DigiWriMo next year, I decided to take a pass this year. Why? I have a few reasons:
I am such a slow writer that writing even one blog post a week has been already overwhelming.
If I really tried to achieve 50,000 words in any way, I would most likely need to skip all of the readings for my courses and even stop attending classes.
Writing one blog post a week is my modified version of DigiWriMo!
If I start counting all of the school-related e-mails, proposals, assignments, and notes, maybe I could likely reach 50,000 words by the end of this month. Since I prefer setting a more specific, productive goal if I am going to write 50,000 words, I should rather spend this month coming up with one. You know what, we can do NaNoWriMo, AcWriMo, or DigiWriMo in a month of our choice. Or, we can modify the length to a week, a day, or even an hour. To some degree, all these writing approaches are an extension of the Pomodoro Technique®:
For those who have decided not to participate in any of these writing approaches or are hesitant to do so, why don’t we just focus on how productively or efficiently we’re doing our academic work and consider how we can improve our productivity from there? I guess this is my really modified version of DigiWRiMo/AcWriMo!
Unruled Eyes | Masaki Kondo's Blog 