An overdetermined world will necessarily be an overinterpreted world as well (Todorov)
“Mostly when we say “medium” we mean something of a pretty high order of complexity: TV, say. Or, saints preserve us, ‘digital’ (I once wrote a book called Digital Aesthetics: hubris, to believe that there was only one aesthetics for the whole digital realm). These media are constructs, not just feats of engineering but imaginary engines, imaginary in that we ascribe to them a coherence they do not actually possess. Convergence is the tip of the iceberg: so many elements which comprise the digital (and TV) are shared with other media. Take lens technologies for example. There are no analog or digital lenses.
Each medium is already a dozen technologies arranged in a system. To label one assemblage “photography” is almost silly: we have to look a) at the elements from which it is composed and b) the commonalities it has with other media. The term ‘medium’ would be better reserved for, say, a type of screen. And then we might be able to find some new results: coherent light operating in scientific instrumentation, fibre optics and a Jean-Michel Jarre lightshow has certain common characteristics but we rarely understand laser as a free-standing medium like print – and yet the commonalities are significant, as are continuities with pre-laser techniques for disciplining light waves.
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The Wilderness Downtown
This is quite possibly the best music video ever; a haunting atemporality mashup.
via s-ak.buzzfed.com
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space (Mies van der Rohe)
A pervasive medium is always beyond perception (McLuhan)
RT @samplereality: It’s curiouser and curiouser how we use the art terms “landscape” and “portrait” to describe configurations of our e- …
RT @georgelazenby: While assholes everywhere fight over mosques and homosexuals, issues about which history has already formed its opini …
RT @JPBarlow: When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a thumb. - Mike Hawley
Coffee
In the 1990s,
because we associate our coffee with our identity, we need it to be ‘authentic’
but one important thing about coffee is the way it ties in with our culture of productivity
Enter coffee, stage right. Caffeine is perhaps the most widely used stimulant in our general population. It helps us get through those non-optimal periods for productivity when we compelled to be productive anyway. Caffeine makes us feel alert and attentive. It is a highly lipid soluble, so it tends to cross from the bloodstream into the brain quickly and we feel its effects relatively quickly. In animals, caffeine has shown that it reaches peak accumulations in the brain within minutes of ingestion (Ryan et. al. 2002: 68). And it hangs around in the brain, stimulating the regions that control sleep, mood, and concentration, slowly dissipating over three to four hours (68)—which is plenty of time for you to get through your morning inbox, survive the staff meeting, return a few calls, and then get ready for lunch.
The office coffee machine serves two purposes: it’s a convenience for you, the coffee drinker, but it’s also a productivity booster for employers who want employees to get down to work when they arrive (instead, perhaps, reading blogs about anthropology and coffee).
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