Lifespeed's Millennial Paradox

The Dalai Lama warns that living in time skews our perception of time and the value that time has in our lives. We have all the time in the world, in lifetimes which disappear in a blink. The Internet further confuses temporal priorities. It is a time-sucking black hole. Virtual reality has made killing time and squandering countless hours a way of life. Web surfing presumes that time is a cheap, a boundless commodity.

Because plugged-in society is wasting so much time, we never have time to spare, especially at work. Work-time also accelerates due to mechanized standards of production. We are expected to achieve ever-expanded goals within shorter and shorter time frames. This is time's Millennial paradox: it is the most abused and most precious aspect of our lives.

We are on what Troy Blackford calls, 'a journey to death at lifespeed.' Every Web procrastinator will want years of wasted time back. Every workaholic with no time needs to procrastinate and explore time in a creative way, without obvious material outcomes.

Below, see a series of photographs by Adam Raasalhague (aka Adam Hassnal Sulaiman) which address the Dalai Lama's words. The Flickr blog reports that Raasalhague became a photographer after he struggled in a company job in London:

"[I]n 2007, I started taking photographs to find a way to express myself and escape the constant negative pressure at my job. I was frequently threatened with being let go. This was when I realized no amount of money is ever worth such treatment.” Adam spent the next few years in a holding pattern – unsure of his next move. Despite feeling like his career path was crumbling around him, Adam slowly discovered his new passion and freedom as a photographer. He poured his heart and soul into his photography and it allowed him to find a bit of peace and solace.

“By 2012, I was incredibly unhappy,” Adam recalls. “But I made the most personal photo I ever had to date called The Sextuple Theory.”

You can see more of Raasalhague's photos here. Seize the day, he insists, in the name of personal evolution. It is a frightening but liberating path, where the Millennial lifespeed paradox can be resolved.

All image copyrights belong to Adam Raasalhague and are reproduced here non-commercially under Fair Use.

The Sextuple Theory. Image Source: Adam Raasalhague.

Generation X Goes Back to the Future 13: NeverEnding Pasts and Futures

Barret Oliver, who played lead character Bastian Bux in The NeverEnding Story (1984). Image Source: Suzy Turner.

Yahoo, among other sites, has posted a 'where are they now?' article about former Hollywood child stars. Favourite targets of this unwanted attention include the actors who starred in the 1984 film, The NeverEnding Story, a late Gen X favourite based on the 1979 German fantasy book by the same name. Ah, for the pre-CGI days when puppets were serious effects creations on movie screens. You can hear the film's sugary pop theme song by Limahl, here.

Barret Oliver more recently. Image Source: Showbizgeek.

Then-and-now articles focus on Barret Oliver, one of the lead actors in the above-mentioned film, and Yahoo is dismissive in the most superficial way about Oliver's occupation today:

Barret Oliver
Better known as: Bastian Bux in The Neverending Story
Last seen: Working as an arty photographer specialising in 'historic techniques'.

I especially like the scare quotes around 'historic techniques,' as though it is bad enough that Oliver became an arty photographer, let alone one experimenting with a style that is not considered contemporary. But is he really so out of step with the times?

An example of Woodburytype in a late 19th century photograph: Woodburytype of Octave Feuillet (1876/84). Image Source: The Art Institute of Chicago via Wiki.

In 2007, Oliver published A History of the Woodburytype, about a photographic technique and style that is synonymous with our vision of the modern past. The book's blurb reveals the background on the technique and its creator, Walter Bentley Woodbury:

In 1864 Walter Bentley Woodbury introduced a process for mechanically reproducing photographs that changed forever the way the world looked at images. Aesthetically beautiful, permanent and infinitely reproducible, the Woodburytype was the first process used extensively to photographically illustrate books, journals, museum catalogues, magazines and even campaign materials. More than a century after its heyday the Woodburytype stands as a pinnacle of photographic achievement. This book traces the history of Woodbury's process from the early technology and experiments to its commercial success and domination of the illustration field, and further attempts to adapt it to industrialized methods, and finally, to its eventual disuse. Also covered is the story of how Woodbury overcame daunting personal odds to bestow this beautiful photographic process upon the world. ...

Though the process continued in use for several years, the key period of its popularity, especially in terms of later being replaced by the half-tone process, was the 25 years after 1870. The Woodburytype has been noted by curators and librarians for years, but very little has been published on it or about how to identify the prints. Oliver is an independent scholar, and this is the first in-depth study of this process and of Woodbury. ... This book, beyond its technical aspects, broadens understanding of how photography became a truly modem medium of mass cultural import.

A deeper look at Woodburytype reveals that Oliver's famous movie role and his recent artistic preoccupation reflect each other. Like the meta-story The NeverEnding Story, there are layers of reality in Woodburytype. Imitations of Woodburytype today create a 'historic' look: there are sepia-toned quasi-Woodburytype photo apps on smartphones, cameras and image manipulation software. In short, Woodburytype is today's meta-photographic style, signifying early photographic technology and past times.

Archaeologists use Drones to Study 1,000 Year Old Desert Village

Source: CNN.

Farewell to H. R. Giger

H. R. Giger in 1978. Image Source: IB Times.

Very sad news today: Swiss surrealist artist Hans Rudolf 'Ruedi' Giger died on 12 May 2014. He was 74. Giger was a Posthuman visionary who glimpsed an uncomfortable future, where humans and machines would combine biomechanically around sexuality. In the 1960s, Giger contemplated grotesque human bodies, twisted by nuclear radiation. Other influences on his work included H. P. Lovecraft, Samuel Beckett and Edgar Wallace, all of whom created fantastical worlds which were metaphors for layers of human consciousness.

Giger with alien design. Image Source: Twentieth Century Fox via Guardian.

Giger gained worldwide renown for his design of the monster on Alien (1979). Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon met Giger and saw a book of his sketches during Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated film adaptation of the novel Dune. Giger's images helped inspire O'Bannon's earliest Alien script; on O'Bannon's urging, director Ridley Scott asked Giger to design the alien, based on Giger's painting Necronom IV. Giger also designed the Facehugger, the Chestburster, the Derelict spaceship, and the Space Jockey. He and fellow Alien production artists won an Oscar. Giger worked on later movies in the franchise as well as other films.

The Necronom IV (1976), inspiration for the alien. Image Source: IB Times.

Live Tweet Audio Spy

"Brian House and Kyle McDonald’s creation, the Conversnitch, impersonates a lightbulb or lamp while eavesdropping on and livetweeting nearby conversations." Image Source: Kyle McDonald via Wired.

Wired reports on a lamp called Conversnitch which eavesdrops on the conversations of passersby. These objects automatically retweet the conversations live on Twitter:

Kyle McDonald and Brian House say they hope to raise questions about the nature of public and private spaces in an era when anything can be broadcast by ubiquitous, Internet-connected listening devices.

“What does it mean to deploy one of these in a library, a public square, someone’s bedroom? What kind of power relationship does it set up?” asks House, a 34-year-old adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. “And what does this stream of tweets mean if it’s not set up by an artist but by the U.S. government?”

The surveillance gadget they unveiled Wednesday [23 April 2014] is constructed from little more than a Raspberry Pi miniature computer, a microphone, an LED and a plastic flower pot. It screws into and draws power from any standard bulb socket. Then it uploads captured audio via the nearest open Wi-Fi network to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, which McDonald and House pay small fees to transcribe the audio and post lines of conversation to Conversnitch’s Twitter account. “This is stuff you can buy and have running in a few hours,” says McDonald, a 28-year-old adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts. ...

[A] video they’ve posted online (embedded below) shows two people with obscured faces planting Conversnitch in a light fixture in a New York McDonald’s, disguised as a desk lamp in a bedroom and a bank lobby, in a library, and inside a lamp post in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. A glance at the Conversnitch Twitter feed shows fragments of conversations about topics as private as a failed course, a job interview rejection, someone’s frayed relationship with his or her boss and criticisms of a politician.

You can read the Conversnitch demo Twitter feed from one operating device, here.  Is the feed real?

“We recognize that this device can be used in an illegal way, and we will not admit to using it in that way,” McDonald says cagily. “It has potentially been deployed in various places. ... I think you have to make things provocative or even dangerous if you want people to pay attention. ... You can’t make this stuff up anymore,” says McDonald. “Here were Brian and I trying to make something kind of scary, something that makes you wonder if someone’s watching you all the time. And then Snowden says, ‘They are.’”

Conversnitch's inventors argue that their device is something between a warning bell and a piece of technological art, rather like a similar work about which I blogged earlier this year, which is unambiguously fictitious. The motto for Conversnitch is: Bridging the gap between online and IRL.

"Conversnitch being planted in a library. House and McDonald obscured the individual’s face to avoid legal issues." Image Source: Kyle McDonald via Wired.

Meta-Time Lapses: Faking History for a Good Cause

The actress in Fund B92: One photo a day in the worst year of my life. Image Source: Best Ads on TV.

The blog is back from a break! I'm still facing work demands, so this blog will feature new posts on Mondays only until those demands clear. This blog has profiled the work of Noah Kalina (here and here), one of the original Millennial film-makers to take a photo of himself every day over a long period of time and turn it into a compressed flip-book video. The technique was also explored in the pre-Internet Age. Lately, the time-lapse-on-Youtube meme has become a meta-meme, where the time lapse the film-maker depicts isn't a real history, but a staged one.

In an earlier post on a time lapse video created by Ben Blennerhassett, the lines between history and metahistory began to blur. What happens to the higher integrity of reality when technological interpretations dominate how we think? Manipulated depictions of reality become subject to the conventions of fiction:

If we turn our lives into videos and self-marketing film sequences, will these works become subject to the tropes of cinematic narratives? Will these Millennial documentaries of the Self be viewed with the same expectations that we bring to watching movies?

We are on the edge of not minding that distinction between history and cinema. Will faked accounts of reality become more important or more credible than reality?

B92's staged domestic abuse still. Image Source: De Wereld Morgen.

A good example came in the faking of history for a good cause. In March 2013, a time lapse video entitled One photo a day in the worst year of my life went viral. Created in Belgrade by B92 and Saatchi & Saatchi, it depicts a woman who has been repeatedly assaulted by her boyfriend. Viewers believed the video was real and it went viral. But the video was faked; it was a guerilla marketing campaign to promote awareness of domestic violence. Fund B92's video description and credits confirm the intentions behind this believable, yet fake, meta-history:

Confronted by alarming statistics on domestic violence in Serbia we created PSA to shake public out of lethargy and put this issue into focus of society. Idea: Use YouTube’s popular format in which a person takes one photo every day, but with a twist. Result: In less than a week, video hit 3 million views and entered top 5 most popular videos on YouTube. It generated tens of thousands of comments and extensive global media coverage.

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, Belgrade, Serbia

Executive Creative Director: Veljko Golubovic

Creative Director: Zarko Veljkovic

Associate Creative Director: Dragana Petkovic

Managing Director: Sonja Milovic

Account Manager: Zorica Marjanovic

Agency Producer: Ivan Zornic

Designer: Ana Cvetkovic

Planner: Tatjana Milnovic

Published: March 2013

See the video below the jump.

Boomer Legacies: End of the Vietnam War

The blog is on a break right now, but for today, see some images and music commemorating the end of the Vietnam War, 39 years ago on 30 April 1975. This day is celebrated in Vietnam as Liberation Day or Reunification Day to mark when Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) from the South Vietnamese and the Americans.

Views of the war, also known as the Second Indochina War (1956-1975), are skewed by the fact that it stands at the crossroads of a huge counter-cultural revolution in the west. For the American government, participation was part of a strategy to contain Communist states. But the more complex causes of the war involved local Asian and anti-French conflicts exploding after the post-World-War-II revival, and subsequent collapse, of French Indochina in the First Indochina War (1946-1954).

Away for Easter

Image Source: Z. Scott / We Invent You.

I will be away from the blog until May 7 due to other work demands.

Image Source: Z. Scott / We Invent You.