More on Colossal, via Bruce Sterling.
The experience
[Christo, sitting down with three workers to discuss his proposal to wrap the iconic Pont Neuf with fabric.]
Worker: “Paintings are witnesses of the evolution of a certain era. But here there will be nothing left in the end…”
Christo: “But wait. Each era has its own means. We now have electronics. There is a camera filming us now. Imagine if under Louis XIV there were cameras. That would be extraordinary. The 20th century has developed new means of memory, and all this is a question of historical memory.”
Worker: “It gives me a feeling of uselessness because it’s temporary."
Christo: "Because it’s going to disappear after 2 weeks? But in the end, the experience, you can never take that away.”
From the documentary Christo in Paris, 1990
Engagement
Good day, sir. I am Christo. I am Bulgarian. Excuse my French. I am a sculptor. I make large-scale projects in the landscape. Temporary projects. And I would like to cover the Pont Neuf with a silky cloth for 14 days.
— Christo, from the documentary Christo in Paris, 1990
[Later in the film, an argument breaking out on the wrapped Pont Neuf.]
“It’s pure art.”
“This is free art.”
“It’s pure art, there to express what you feel.”
“And this is art?”
“It’s not art?”
“If you tell me this is art, then we’re not speaking the same language.”
…
“Explain to me what art is then! Explain to us what art is. Tell me what it is.”
“It’s very complicated. I can’t tell you in two words. But it is a creation of the mind, a creation that transposes reality."
"It’s an idea!”
“No, a creation which transposes reality in such a way that will express something in a sensitive way to others.”
“I don’t know you. You don’t know me. If the bridge weren’t wrapped, we would have never spoken to each other. Ever."
A tour guide observes, "Nothing will stay, it’s ephemeral. But people will look at the Pont Neuf in a different way.”
This is what engagement looks like.
"Everybody here is a part of my work"
“The work is not only the fabric, the steel posts, and the fence. The art project is right now here. Everybody here is part of my work.”
— Christo, at a Marin (or Sonoma) county zoning hearing for the construction of Running Fence, 1976.
From a film about the project:
[Waitress, making hamburger patties]:
If you just look at it, the poles and the guide wires, it looks nifty, because it just swirls and turns and dips. And when he gets his curtain on it… it’s not pretty in the sense of pretty… it’s different, and it looks kind of nifty, this thing just winding all around. I imagine to some extent it is attractive. I just think the poles winding, you know, around the natural contour of the land is … it’s not pretty in the sense of pretty: it’s nature pretty.
Customer: He’s the one who put that across some canyon and the wind blew it down or something like that?
Waitress: Colorado.
Customer: Yeah.
Waitress: He says if it stays up one day - - the whole thing - - he’ll be happy. Can you imagine? One day?
Customer: Three million dollars?
Waitress: I don’t know how many years he just toured all over the coastline. California, Oregon, the whole coastline. And he finally decided on this one little area he decided was the most beautiful area in the whole coastline.
Customer: Is that right?
Dialogue and stills from Running Fence, a documentary by Albert and David Maysles.
I’m working my way through a boxed set about Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s public projects. There’s a lot of cheap talk about “engagement” in museums, the arts, culture… But Christo takes it to people where they live. Christo is the master.
The people's tool
“Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.”
— Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei.
Photo and bio: wikipedia
Quote: from Is Twitter a Human Right? One Chinese Activist Thinks So.
Saying he spent a minimum of 8 hours a day on Twitter, Ai Weiwei said that Twitter was well suited to a language where each character is an entire word. “With 140 characters in Chinese you really can write a novel,” he quipped.
Ai Weiwei, who sustained a serious head injury after he was beaten by police while attempting to testify at a colleague’s trial, made it clear that Twitter was a lifeline for Chinese activists eager to get their message out to the world. Access is limited to approximately 50,000 people currently, however, due to both a strong firewall and to the need to register in English.
“Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what’s on his mind. A fairy tale has come true.”
Quote:
After first learning how to type, Ai Weiwei soon discovered the benefits of blogging, spending more than 10 hours a day uploading pictures, posting interviews with other modern artists and making comments on the latest hot public affairs.
"Expressing oneself is like a drug," he said. "I'm so addicted to it."
Whether or not a person can become a free individual totally depends on whether that person can obtain information independently and whether he has the opportunity to express his own voice, according to Ai.
This channel of communication did not exist in the past. Most people never made themselves heard from cradle to grave.
"Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what's on his mind," he said. "A fairy tale has come true."
“Before blogging I was living in the Middle Ages. Now my feelings for time and space are entirely different.”
“It’s really based on an analogy, if you will: that seemed to work in other times - that the idea of having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win.”
The full quote:
Ken Garrison: When I was telling my wife about what I was going to be talking with you about, she had a naïve but kind of profound question, which is “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to archive the entire world and the entire internet?”
Brewster Kahle: It’s really based on an analogy, if you will: that it seemed to work in other times - that the idea of having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win. So, we all look back to the Library of Alexandria. And by going and pulling together the works from all over the world and translating them then into Ancient Greek, they were able to come up with fantastic discoveries. They knew how big the world was. They knew it was round. They knew how big it was within a couple percent. Euclid authored “Elements,” which is what it is I still studied as geometry in high school. So, fantastic things can come of it if you can leverage the works of other people. And the reason why I got involved in the whole area of building the library back in 1980 was just kind of on that analogy and the thought that technology allows us to do this and it seems like a good thing to do.
Dark Matter
“The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/write—and it’s the future of museums”
From my essay for the Code | Words project.
https://medium.com/code-words-technology-and-theory-in-the-museum/dark-matter-a6c7430d84d1
Image: Vera Rubin’s rotation curve for galaxy M-31, via “Dark Matter and Galaxy Formation” by Joel R. Primack, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.2021.pdf
“The costs were tremendously high. Just one image could cost several hundred dollars, and even that would only buy us clearance for a limited period of time.”
The whole quote:
A third major challenge concerns clearance of photo rights. This became evident when we began to request image files from other museums in order to show them side by side with our own works within the new Art Stories universe. The costs were tremendously high. Just one image could cost several hundred dollars, and even that would only buy us clearance for a limited period of time. The labor involved in writing to each rights holder, asking for files, describing the intended usage, and so on, turned out to be a major drain on our manpower. What is more, the use of images from other collections prevents us from posting Art Stories videos on YouTube, where they could gain much wider exposure than when shut in and restricted to the museum'ss own website..
“The vision of presenting art history on the terms set by the Internet had made good sense to us. It looked like the perfect medium for unfolding the paradigm of diversity. But then we came up against something that limited our options: copyright.”
Merete continues,
The costs were tremendously high. Just one image cost several hundred dollars, and that would only buy us clearance for a limited period of time. The labour involved in writing to each rights holder, asking for files, describing the intended usage, and so on, turned out to be a major drain on our manpower.
Dark Matter
“The open, participatory, read/write web is the ‘dark matter’ of the Internet.”
My opening video for the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, May 7, 2014.
[Correction: the Triangulum galaxy is 400 million billion *kilometers* across, not light years. 400 million billion km = about 42,000 light years.]
A mega-documentary, without script or director
“The photo-universe created by hundreds of millions of people might be considered a mega-documentary, without a script or director.”
Image: The Worlds Largest Photo Libraries is from How many photos have ever been taken? September, 2011.
Asimov to Muppet Magazine
“My own feeling is that science fiction, of all the different forms of literature, is the one that most easily accepts the notion of change. Things are changing very quickly, and any kid who thinks about it knows that the world in which he or she will be a grown-up — which he or she will be helping to run — will be considerably different from this one. Maybe better, maybe worse, but different. Science fiction explores the future world.
I think more and more young people are beginning to feel that science fiction is the kind of literature that a person interested in reality should be reading.”
Brain Pickings calls this quote “science fiction as lubricant for change.” More/context via Brain Pickings, Isaac Asimov on Curiosity, Taking Risk, and the Value of Space Exploration in Muppet Magazine
“...Written history was fallible”
“Unless a person was willing, as Chatterton and Kohler were, to ditch work, and sneak off to Washington, chisel away at mountains of opaque original documents, sleep in fleabag motels, eat street-vendor hot dogs, and run outside every two hours to shovel quarters into a parking meter, he would presume the history books to be correct”
The Shadow Divers is, unintentionally perhaps, a testimonial to the value of having passionate, dedicated, amateurs involved in the exploration of history.
It’s a beautiful story about how a group of deep sea salvage divers who, in 1991, discover the remains of an unidentified WWII U-boat off the coast of New Jersey. The wreck should not have been there, and figuring out what it is and where it came from becomes an obsession — even to the point where they were willing to become real scholars to solve the mystery. And they discovered a universal truth: experts can be wrong.
Over the last half century, various assessors had ascribed three fates to U-879: they first pronounced her lost without a trace; then sunk off Halifax in Canadian waters; then sunk off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. As the divers studied further, they recognized that the current assessment by German naval historian Axel Niestlé - - that U-879 had been sunk off Cape Hatteras - - was correct. But the lesson was stark and by now familiar: written history was fallible. Sloppy and erroneous assessments had been rushed into the official record, only to be presumed accurate by historians, who then published elegant reference works echoing the mistakes. Unless a person was willing, as Chatterton and Kohler were, to ditch work, and sneak off to Washington, chisel away at mountains of opaque original documents, sleep in fleabag motels, eat street-vendor hot dogs, and run outside every two hours to shovel quarters into a parking meter, he would presume the history books to be correct.
Amateurs like these aren’t bound to established orthodoxies, they don’t play by the rules, and they’re driven by curiosity, frustration, and a sense of moral justice for the truth. These guys are heroes to me.
"And I was just, like, why would anybody pay $35 for 11 sheets of paper?"
— 15 year old Jack Andraka, at the White House Champions of Change event on June 20, 2013.
Jack said,
Essentially, what I did was, In 9th grade I created a new way to track pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer that costs 3 cents and takes 5 mins to run. It’s 168 times faster, over 126,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than current methods of diagnosis. And, currently, it has close to 100% accuracy in diagnosis, and it can detect the cancer in the earliest stage when the patient has close to 100% chance of survival. [applause]
I did my first science fair when I was 11 years old. I had a bowl cut and glasses… And that was the first time I ran into open science, because I ran into these pay walls, and I was just, like…it asked me for $35. This was the first time ever. And I was just, like, why would anybody pay $35 for 11 sheets of paper? And it turned out that that would be me, because I couldn’t find it anywhere else. And then it asked me for my login info, so I typed in my email login and it said it was invalid. And then my 7th grade self took immediate offense and thought “you’re invalid.” And eventually I begged my mom and my dad to finally pay for that article and it turned out it had nothing to do with the research I needed. And the unfortunate thing is that these articles don’t have return policies.
(Jack is second from the left in the photo.)
“But I speak to many people whose organisations have not even considered what digital transformation looks like. Not considered a world where customers will always have better technology and communication abilities than they do.”
Paul Taylor describes the disconnect between the abilities of a tenant with a new smartphone and the capabilities of the property managers.
Welcome to a new breed of resident. Residents who live digital lifestyles that are completely out of sync with the operating system of the landlord.
Paul is the 'innovation coach' at The Bromford Group, which supports innovation for a British housing association. @PaulBromford
72 million people with 500 million voices
Jared Cohen, co-author of The New Digital Age with Google’s Eric Schmidt, was recently asked a question about the degree to which technology will undermine autocratic regimes in the future. Cohen replied,
…Let’s take a country like Iran. 72 million people, roughly 25% of the population connected to the Internet. When everybody in Iran is connected - - everyone has a Gmail account, everyone has a social networking account, every one of them has various voice-over-IP services that they use… The population of Iran in the physical world may still be 72 million people, but in the virtual world it may look like half a billion people. And this presents a serious problem for the regime in Tehran: how do they account for 500 million voices online that are coming from the same 72 million people?
I’ve been trying to find a way to understand and explain some of the non-obvious ways in which it matters that our formerly only-bricks-and-mortar customers are online and connected. This helps.
Video and event information: Book talk with Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen [quote starts at 5:00]
“Ideas are tools for thinking with.”
"And I love that dark bird you hold in your arms"
Courtney Johnston, from the NZ Digital Forum, 2012, at 28:30, here