we harmless pine

New Blog

2008-03-10T21:34:00.000-07:00

I have been Blogging/Studying with some friends at our new wordpressblog. Don't worry, we're upgrading to something more robust soon! :)

Photo's from the Library of Congress part I: The Lomax Collection

2008-02-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

The Lomax Collection:
Asheville Music Festival, Louisiana Plantation, Fiddling Bill Hensley Music Festivals, Camp Hospital and African Americans.

1934-ca. 1950. Snapshots documenting sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax for the Archive of American Folk Song, including African American and Latino musicians, singers, and dancers, primarily in the southern United States and the Bahamas

The collection includes 400 snapshot photographs made in the course of sound recording expeditions carried out by John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, between 1934 and ca. 1950 for the Archive of American Folk-Song. The photographs, which were transferred to the Prints and Photographs Division from the Archive of American Folk-Song in 1950, depict African American, Mexican American, and white musicians, singers and dancers, primarily in the southern United States (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) and the Bahamas (Nassau, Andros Island, and Cat Island). In addition to posed portraits, the images show musicians performing in various settings: at home, in concert, and while performing prison labor outdoors. Views of children engaged in singing games, scenes of daily life, and some landscape views are also included. Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who assisted the Lomaxes on expeditions to Georgia and Florida, has been identified in a few photographs.

---------------------------------
I spent some time searching through the Library of Congresses HUGE database of images, a portion of which are in the public domain. There is some really amazing stuff there, in many very extensive collections. This is part one of a series of images I found (continue to find) there, which stood out to me. As a footnote I would point to the possible curatorial aspects of such endeavor as pursued in any manner.

Things That Do Not Freeze

2008-02-17T17:21:00.000-08:00

Oceans
Vodka
Cake icings made with egg whites
Gasoline
Maple Syrup
Fog
Baking Soda
Helium
Penguin Feet

No Escape

2008-02-14T14:15:00.001-08:00

Sun came up. It was a nice day spent putting the cold into various jars and sacks for storage. I could make a million dollars. A million fucking dollars. Why, you ask? Well, I invented symmetry. Yep, came up with that one. Putting things next to each other in an equal way- now there's a million dollar idea. Making things symmetrical. Sun went down. It was a pleasant evening spent packing the day up in between my teeth, leaning back in a chair, chain smoking cigarettes, chugging down coffee, and talking to Bryan about how fucking rich we are going to be. "Million fucking dollars." We invented that idea and then we decided to give it to the world for free, just because. Not a million dollar idea, so we decided to scrap the whole project and start over.

The Heat Will Come

2008-02-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

It's a cold one and the car got towed. One-hundred seventy-four dollars and ninety-six cents. Snow that crushes and slops at once. This is the only town in the state that has every kind of winter in one day, every day, for the whole month. This is the only state that has every kind of city, two hours apart, in the whole country. This is the only country. There's just one big country on the whole planet now because of the plates. They moved so far apart that they went the other way around and made just one country. There was a huge earthquake and lots of people died and so even though there's only one country there is a lot of space. This state is on the outside so it had only taken some water damage on the coast, and for the most part it's a lot like it used to be. Cold. All those plate tectonics and the weather hasn't changed a bit. People still have dreams and listen to music and get their car's towed for one-seventy-four, ninety-six. Everybody knows it's pretty fucked up, but they're waiting for the heat.

Where it would have gone

2008-02-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

The first time I went to visit Bryan in New York I had to pay to cross the bridge twice. I drove through the tunnel, the big one that’s maybe underwater. This was the first time I went to visit Bryan in New York. I saw some girls on Fifth Ave. who had heels that were so high they made their knees lock and their butts stick out. I had to pay twice to cross the bridge. I did not get lost, it’s just that the exit on the bridge is the first exit. I needed to go 20 ft., but made a mistake, so I had to go back and forth, and pay to cross the bridge twice. I left in the evening, so it was late when I got there. I did not make the mistake on the bridge the second time I went to New York to visit Bryan, I did not have to go back and forth, and pay to cross it twice. I smiled at the man in the tollbooth. He knew that I would only be paying to cross the bridge once this time. He was happy for me because this time, unlike the first, I would not be paying him twice. The second time I crossed the bridge on my way to visit Bryan in New York I only paid the toll once and smiled at the man in the toll booth and wanted to tell him that I was glad to not be going back and forth, and paying the toll twice. He already knew so I just said, “thanks.” No reply. It was New York and people were busy not paying to cross the bridge twice.

OPL and Tabblo

2008-02-01T22:46:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote about HP's Tabblo Print Toolkit, which I utilize on this site, for RIT's Open Publishing Lab.

Read the article here.

Silence

2008-01-08T13:25:00.000-08:00

Information proliferates by incorporating a greater diversity of cultural codes and worldly sources, and generates still greater variety by internal means; the sheer volume of information increases as words, sounds and images become freighted with multiple, shifting allusions and meanings. In this way, information itself takes on multiple personalities, and the very nature of information becomes less “natural.” However, through the redundancies trafficked by means of mass culture, much information pushes so far beyond this boundary as to become “naturalized,” and effectively muted, devalued, and take on the characteristic of interference, which is contrary to the necessary communication inherent in the word, “information.”

-Paraphrased from Douglas Kahn’s Noise Water Meat

Douglas Kahn made a brilliant statement concerning the evolution of sound within a mass culture, which I have above changed to suit the wider spectrum of information theory. I draw my understanding from Claude Shannon's theories of information, and information entropy.

  "Information is a degree of order, or non-randomness, which can be measured and treated mathematically much as mass or energy or other physical quantities are. A mathematical characterization of the generalized communication system yields a number of important quantities, including

1. the rate at which information is produced at the source.
2. the capacity of the channel for handling information.
3. the average amount of information in a message of any particular type.

To a large extent the techniques used with information theory are drawn from the mathematical science of probability. Estimates of the accuracy of a given transmission of information under known conditions of noise interference, for example, are probabilistic, as are the numerous approaches to encoding and decoding that have been developed to reduce uncertainty or error to minimal levels."

"According to the second law of thermodynamics, as in the 19th century, entropy is the degree of randomness in any system always increased. Thus many sentences could be significantly shortened without losing their meaning. Shannon proved that in a noisy conversation, signal could always be sent without distortion. If the message is encoded in such a way that it is self-checking, signals will be received with the same accuracy as if there were no interference on the line. A language, for example, has a built in error-correcting code. Therefore, a noisy party conversation is only partly clear because half the language is redundant."

HP Tabblo Print Toolkit

2007-12-17T23:37:00.000-08:00

the weather

2007-12-10T21:31:00.000-08:00

sun bleached my eyeballs, now everything looks acid washed.
reminds me of the last time it snowed and a whole bunch of songs i can't recall. funny how it bends, there's nothing to remember. sometimes it really makes me laugh, depending on the weather.

Anagram

2007-11-28T17:49:00.000-08:00

Some Possible Anagrams for my name, Robert J Whitney:

By Whiner Jotter
Be Her Wintry Jot
Brother Tiny J. We
Rob When Jittery
Brother Jet Winy
Brethren Wit Joy
Trite John Be Wry
Byte Writer John
Better John Wiry

Spot, Pilot!

2007-11-24T17:00:00.000-08:00

beat.{ effectively suspending the relevance of the moment: we are born with every heart beat. "what are you doing here?" depends on your notions of incarnation, while "all these years" result in a context no more relevant than gallons of blood. this abstract rhetoric will never amount; while the subsequent birth of every step and the image of something vested i will never understand, and can not shake for the death of me, is also born in every beat. } beat.

Wholphin

2007-11-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

For those who don't know, Wholphin is a new project by McSweeny's
which features great, often hilarious film. Like McSweeny's, the films are all shorts, and the work is well edited so that the selection presented for viewing on-line often carries a style that will appeal to most fans of the McSweeny's vein of satire and wit.

Wholphin is a new quarterly DVD magazine from McSweeney's, lovingly encoded with unique and ponderable films designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learned that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it.
[WholphinDvd.com]

The greatest part about the website is of course the fact that you can "watch stuff" via streamed video. The saddest part is that you can't embedd it. To take it home, order it on the website or in select stores (I found it at my local campus bookstore, actually) available for subscription ($50 for 4 issues, 1yr), but even just visitng the website is well worth having a peek what some really smart, creative, and hilarious people have been up to.

What's the deal with that name you ask? The website has this to say:

A NOTE ON THE TITLE:

What, you may ask, is a Wholphin?! Photographic evidence can be found languishing in the nooks and crannies of the internet, but those too busy to visit Google for the 28th time today can trust us that it's the lovechild of a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale. A beautiful hybrid born of invention and exploration.

God bless you Dave Eggers.

Roman Signer

2007-11-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

"Signer’s 'action sculptures' involve setting up, carrying out, and recording 'experiments' or events that bear aesthetic results. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions, and the projection of objects through space. Video works like Stiefel mit Rakete (Boot with Rocket) are integral to Signer’s performances, capturing the original setup of materials that self-destruct in the process of creating an emotionally and visually compelling event. Signer gives a humorous twist to the concept of cause and effect and to the traditional scientific method of experimentation and discovery, taking on the self-evidence of scientific logic as an artistic challenge."
(cmoa.org)

David Foster Wallace

2007-11-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

There are many reasons why you should check out the work
of David Foster Wallace, but suffice it to say that he is
arguably one of the best writers working today.

His bibliography is vast, he has done work for many
magazines (Harpers, Esquire, etc.),written a number of
prolific books, and can be found quietly featured all over
the web.  Paste Magazine said of his most recent book:

"David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is a big, irresistible shaggy dog of a book—muddy-pawed, it never stops barking, but it’s abounding with enthusiasm and love. And just when you think it’s more trouble than it’s worth, it surprises you with a noble act or tender gesture."

Also quite recently, Mr Wallace was selected as editor of The Best American Essays, and his amazing introductory piece "Deciderization 2007" really reveals so much about culture, self, and the process of editing. I couldn't recommend it more.

-----------------------


Excerpt:

Part of our emergency is that it's so tempting to do this sort
of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed
positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature.
The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy
amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's
continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance
and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and
literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to
need help. That's about as clearly as I can put it. I'm aware
that some of the collection's writers could spell all this out
better and in much less space. At any rate, the service part
of what I mean by 'value' refers to all this stuff, and extends
as well to essays that have nothing to do with politics or
wedge issues. Many are valuable simply as exhibits of what
a first-rate artistic mind can make of particular fact sets
'whether these involve the 17-kHz ring tones of some kids'
cell phones, the language of movement as parsed by dogs,
the near-infinity of ways to experience and describe an earthquake,
the existential synecdoche of stage fright, or the revelation that
most of what you've believed and revered turns out to be
self- indulgent crap.


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I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art

2007-11-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

29 seconds of
I Am Making Art by John Baldessari
(1971)

From vdb.org:
"A good example of Baldessari's deadpan irreverence is the 1971 black-and-white videotape entitled I Am Making Art, in which he moves different parts of his body slightly while saying, after each move, 'I am making art.' The statement, he says, 'hovers between assertion and belief.' On one level, the piece spoofs the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium. The endless repetition, awkwardness of the movements made by the artist, and the reiteration of the statement 'I am making art,' create a synthesis of gestural and linguistic modes which is both innovative (in the same way that the more serious work of his peers is innovative) and absurdly self-evident."
—Marcia Tucker, "John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable," John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)

28 seconds of
I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art by John Baldessari
(1971)

From vdb.org:
'I will not make any more boring art,' John Baldessari wrote over and over again in a work done in 1971. The impulse for the piece, he says, came from dissatisfaction with the 'fallout of minimalism,' but its implications are far greater. It is typical of Baldessari's work, for not only is it extremely funny, but it is also a strategy, a set of conditions, a directive, a paradoxical statement, and a commentary on the art world with which it is involved. Like all his work to date, it addresses, on many complex levels, issues about art, language, games and the world at large."
—Marcia Tucker, "John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable," John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)

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Beginnings

2007-11-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

"The irritation of doubt causes a
struggle to attain a state of belief"
- C.S. Pierce

This is a way of establishing a history- no a mythology. A mythology that dehistoricizes.

What is history? Even that which we experience, we are forced to view through context. We must, in some manner, interpret the world in order to move through it physically and metaphysically. Context is the place from which this understanding is created, but context is a fluid thing. Redraw a memory, and you will find it continually existing through a new context, and a new conscious self. Furthermore, where is context created? From where do we draw our understanding of this notion? Is it, in part, an arbitrary thing?

We build histories for everything we encounter, not in the active linear sense necessarily, more often passively, through our minds pre-occupation with understanding, with believing. The mind has great need to make sense of the world, to believe in, to organize it, and so we impose structure on that which has no need and no wish to be structured. To constantly be awake to all things would render us useless; frozen; dead. We have need for forgetfulness, so we create memory that we may set things aside.

"...creating one path into the infinitely manifold path necessarily eradicates all other possible paths. In this way, remembering is also a creative forgetfulness, a necessary fiction that allows a person to carry on."
(Marks, Art Journal Summer 2007, 22)

What I am getting at is that we don't know, don't try to know, and actually are incapable of conceptualizing the histories of countries, people, or anything really. There is no history, only events viewed through context. Whether this context is drawn from an attempt at understanding or not is, at best, self-referential. We create these mythologies for that which we consider other (that from which our mind has not found rest). The ability of anything to forge its own identity is inconsequential, because we necessarily supplant these other identities with an image built on the abstract notions of rhetoric. In this way, our notions of memory, our histories, our beliefs are, for all intensive purposes, arbitrary assertions that create a fiction. Things that we replay for ourselves whenever nessicary, whenever belief meets doubt. There can be no difference between myth and memory, and no linear progression which is not an imposition.

Beginnings:
This is an attempt at creating a fiction and a myth. This is memory. This is willful forgetfulness. This is a history with no real purpose. This is empty rhetoric. This is exercise. We harmless pine, pine to believe so we may stop believing- and meanwhile, press on.

This is a proposition.