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59 W 12th Street . December 19, 2007 . 12:35 am .
Jubilee is an orphan and he lives in Terra Firme.
His only possessions are a box, some newspapers and a sign.
I've never seen him but have recently read a lot about him.
Jubilee is the avatar for Mensajeros de la Paz, a Spanish NGO that creates foster homes for poor children and old people in Real Life. Jubilee's objective is not exclusively to go after people's money (Linden or other) but to reach out to an audience that's very hard to get to... henceforth he just talks to people, makes friends, sits in strategic locations e.g., the NBC Christmas Tree (very PR of him), and tries to get as much exposure as any other homeless person would. The kid's presence has in fact made many Second Life residents uncomfortable and probably more socially aware.
I'm not sure that I would ever talk to a Manhattan homeless person as I would here if I ever find Jubilee... probably not (the pictures I've seen of him make me want to go out and hug him) but Mensajeros de la Paz in a strange way is achieving its objective and building a whole new layer over the mere concept of fundraising.
Ho, ho, ho!
T
59 W 12th Street . December 4, 2007 . 3:55 pm .
Flying in Second Life is one of the very few magical elements within a virtual world that, according to some users, has become almost too realistic. In the words of Randall B. Smith, animated environments are physical-world metaphors that spring from the tension between literalism and magic. Actions that violate this metaphor (like human flight) and provide “enhanced functionality” are considered magical.
Flying in Second Life had practical purposes when it was first invented: to get to things quicker, to cut corners... I, however, am trapped by the sensuality and efficiency of this technology. When we lift our avatar bodies from the ground we detach ourselves from “reality”; we self-objectify to either analyze the territory better, travel faster or simply disappear. This, for me, has the potential to go beyond merely dodging obstacles.
Human beings have dreamt about flying for thousands of years. I will present a brief historical review of our archaic desire to fly (from Icarus and Leonardo Da Vinci to the ancient Chinese) to contextualize some autoethnographic observations and in-world research and images.
T
59 W 12th Street . November 30, 2007 . 7:01 pm .
As I re-read Stewart's Cultural Poesis in class yesterday I came across a phrase that I had underlined and want to share:
The personal
is political.
Our teacher also made a remark to one of my classmates that I thought was important as well:
Never be
too confident.
T
59 W 12th Street . November 28, 2007 . 9:56 pm .
"The ordinary throws itself together out of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams, and opportunities lost or found."
Kathleen Stewart
New York City is a place constructed upon little pockets of beauty. It's not like Paris where, in my opinion, everywhere you look is beautiful. Here you turn a corner and may find a park - cross the street and get unexpectedly blinded by the sun - glimpse at a couple kissing - remember something important - come across a lonely saxophone player - get caught in a wind tunnel. You can also be woken up by screaming sirens in the middle of the night - witness random public arguments - see (by accident of course) how fellow citizens pick up after their dogs.
These very distracting but nonetheless memorable "Ordinary Affects" make it special because these "Ordinary Affects" are precisely what make it New York.
It was easy to relate to this text as it made me reflect upon the infinite layers of connections and stimulus we're submerged in. My days oftentimes feel like joyrides through landmine fields. Things "erupt" in my face all the time like Stewart describes (I'm almost used to it by now.) More stuff than ever before interests me and at the same time five-minute long conversations are sometimes a challenge. We're being distracted constantly and are masters in wasting time.
She says we're busy if we're lucky,
I say we're lucky if we're busy.
All these correlative and circulating occurrences however -insignificant like a hiccup or politically charged like a flash mob- are our lives. They're everyone's lives. Terms as ample as "capitalism" have become intimate and ordinary enough to have direct impacts on our bodies (Got Milk?) Normality indeed may not be normal anymore but I don't think anyone is to say what was "normal" in the first place.
Great book.
T
59 W 12th Street . November 23, 2007 . 10:18 am .
I think that the underlying message of Michael Haneke's Caché is that paranoia and guilt are the essence behind every surveillance camera: there is no worst prison than ourselves. One must only suggest the idea that someone 'out there' might be watching, to trigger an infinite number of human apprehensions.
The principal quandaries behind technology are still moral in nature. At the end of the day humans continue to be scared little creatures and their fear is the rye that feed the mills. (I indulged in a movie marathon last night and randomly saw the documentary Jesus Camp after Caché... talk about rye that feeds the mills.)
Caché is welded and tightly-packed. It delivers. Every scene is meticulously assembled and for very specific reasons. It's the kind of film that makes me think "yeah, I should do films like that." Its parallel stories and antagonist characters come into play only to strengthen and feed the main narrative. They speak only when necessary and almost never raise their voice. I've always been a fan of discrete editing as it allows movies to happen and Caché henceforth successfully unwinds on its own.
There's a scene in the film that I found particularly interesting. The main characters, Georges and Anne, are leaving the police station and Georges is almost run over by a man on a bicycle. This enrages him. The man is black and, somehow, almost had to be black. Their encounter is a treat that only feeds the layers of ideological tension already felt throughout. Most importantly though, it messes with Georges' accumulating guilt.
We never know who sent the videos. We never know who made the drawings and the calls. We never know if Majid was even aware of them or if Anne was having an affair with Pierre. We never know why their relationship worked in the first place but it did. We never know who was 'out there' watching and don't really need to: Georges was already scared.
Cameras don't destroy our lives, we destroy them ourselves.
Gobble, gobble.
T
59 W 12th Street . November 14, 2007 . 10:23 pm .
"What separates a man from a wolf if it is not that a man wants to make a profit?"
Jane Bowl
(Connected, p. 214)
So I ended up being pleasantly surprised by the book Connected. I also enjoyed the order in which we read it - first middle, then start, then end... very hypertextual of us.
In this section Shaviro goes into great detail about extravagance. He argues that the principal forces behind capitalist agglomeration are waves of massive, uncontrolled spending, and the financial speculations (which he accurately refers to as manic) that also whirl around consumption. He makes very interesting points when comparing and contrasting evolutionary biology and free-market economies: their replication, expenditure, utility, equilibrium... and the idea for example that without scarcity there would be no competition and henceforth no efficiency.
(I can't help thinking about the fast approaching 2007 Black Friday. The sole idea of getting up and going to the mall at 4 am seems beyond berserk to me. In any case I applaud the creation of Cyber Monday.)
Something else that I found very interesting this time around was Shaviro's analysis of the science fiction novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Salt (love the title.) He mentions that the web is becoming a 'new topography upon the cosmos', a scenery which I for some reason envision as a very heterogeneous and jelly-like cloud, sparkling with flashes of data and information. It is yet uneven but pretends to wrap us all around with the same intensity one day. What an overwhelming system of universal equivalences this would be... similar again to Castells' network society... globalization feeding off local affirmations of identity and viceversa.
It seems like an ambitious and rather splashy objective to accustom oneself to such an infinite spectrum of realities, practices, fields, desires (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Salt mentions 6200 different worlds.) We can traverse the network but do we have to become it as well? Have we really moved out of time and into space? Is art imitating nature or is nature imitating art?
Anyway... just some ideas.
T
59 W 12th Street . November 7, 2007 . 1:44 pm .
The idea behind Cuca was inspired by two things: the book I'm reading right now, The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells, and a conversation I recently had with my friend Anaid (Anaid studies Interactive Telecommunications at NYU and is developing a similar project for one of her classes.)
Just as Hallnas and Redstrom do in their article From Use to Presence, I also wonder how best to evaluate, construct and design a new computational artifact in the midst of fast and never ending technological developments. The easiest way to start I suppose could be to ask what this tool exactly is and what it does, followed by the specific goals it aims to reach. We must also consider the importance of its context and its time.
Nowadays initiatives like One Laptop per Child demonstrate that even in third world countries, computers are coming to be part of people's lives from a very early age (and will increasingly continue to do so.) If done correctly, this can yield to the solution of real global issues and to the decrease of certain social disparities from within the same communities. Education provides major economic empowerment and, in the words of Nicholas Negroponte, computers have now become tools to think with. Children's capabilities, skills, senses and intellects should never, never be underestimated.
Thus...
Cuca is a research tool for children. It's an application that can be downloaded for free (always for free) from the Internet. It has the shape of a small magnifying glass and it works hand-in-hand with a map of the user's community that will automatically download with the package. When one places the cursor over the different points marked on the map, Cuca displays a small pop-up window with important information about the location: from its exact address to the services provided there (public bathrooms, transportation, telephones, wireless connection, police, etc.) and the activities taking place at that moment. I use a map of Dallas and its suburbs as a visual example:
Allowing my imagination to run loose here, a more advanced version of Cuca could allow kids to ask questions or post comments about/on the specific places and henceforth make it an interactive experience. This could also be helpful to adults who at times are less knowledgeable about these things. In a rural environment for example, one might need to walk miles to buy milk or eggs. If a child has a laptop at home he or she can "ask" those at the grocery store via Cuca if they have the goods, prior to making the trip (businesses would have to register somehow in order to be included in the system.)
I was raised in a mega-city and I think that a research tool like Cuca could be very helpful in binding the discontinuities -social, cultural, economic, etc.- encountered in spaces like Mexico City. Something like this would allow both children and adults to bypass the impartialities and bureaucratic faults that oftentimes isolate us from one another within our own milieu. We would connect withing the gaps of the Network Society and be the nods of other nods constructing upon us.
And for you Second Life fans out there, I found something that again can remind us never to underestimate kids: www.webkinz.com
T
