John Menick | Archive for January, 2007

A fascinating archive of (mostly) abandoned US airfields compiled by Paul Freeman. The above photo is the first helicopter flight simulator, also featured on the site.

From Errol Morris’ First Person.

Morbid Victorian theatrical effects, phantasmagoria, television before television, and the women of the Moulin Rouge.

Amazing.

I can’t help thinking these two stories have something to do with one another. The first comes from Chris Anderson’s Longtail blog, and concerns his visit to the Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters. Actually, the entry is about random inventory storage: according to Anderson, it’s easier for companies like Zappos to randomly store inventory rather than in some hierarchical taxonomy.

[Zappos] made peace with messiness. The shoes are logged in by UPC when they arrive and assigned a spot wherever there is room available. When it comes time to pick-and-pack, the computers tell the warehouse staff where to go. No single trip is optimized, but the system as a whole works as a minimum-effort machine. Just as random access works best for bits in disk drives, it turns out to be great for atoms in warehouses, too.

The second archive-related story comes via “we make money not art.” The blog points to an article in Deutsche Welle on the work of Anke Heelemann, an artist from Weimar. She’s been purchasing entire boxes of discarded private photos and displaying them in her storefront in Weimar. Members of the public can come and “adopt” the photos. Unlike Zappos, Heelemann is not letting chaos reign, and instead she has “begun categorizing photos and filing them according to themes. “Beach,” “animals,” and “birthday” are among the more obvious ones while others are called “Handbags” or “linked arms.”

In one case, the inventory arrives in a very managed, pre-planned way, and is then stored randomly. In the second, it arrives randomly and is then placed into a somewhat subjective order. Perhaps Heelemann and Zappos should keep their techniques, but switch inventories…

From a description of “New Athens,” a future artists’ utopia in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953):

The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest — and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on “total identification.” The history of cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old “moving pictures” more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become — for a while at least — any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the “program” was over he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life — indeed, indistinguishable from life itself.

Slavoj Zizek criticizes Time’s 2006 “Person of the Year,” and then suffers death by a thousand comments. Whether the flaming he undergoes unwittingly justifies his posting about the nature of online interaction is anyone’s guess.

Henry Jenkins — MIT director, professor and blogger — has a wild blog entry about his trip to Poland that documents, among other things, Polish Reggae, stadium markets, and a Fotoplastikon. Bruce Sterling points to the entry this week, and focuses on the Fotoplastikon, but what caught my eye was the amazing cultural collision that is Polish Reggae:

Keep in mind: There are almost no Jamaicans living in Poland. This is not a case of emigrant populations porting music to another part of the world. Poland is an incredibly homogeneous country with very limited immigrant populations and clearly, there are no cultural reasons for Jamaicans to want to relocate to this part of the world. Reggae emerged here because it served Polish interests and reflected Polish tastes and thus it has taken some distinctly Polish shapes… A group called Izrael was the first to introduce the sound into Poland in 193. [sic] Some members of Izrael heard a few songs and were so fascinated that they started to produce music in this style (at least as they understood it). I gather there’s a good deal of reinvention going on here given how limited their initial exposure to the music was. The name created confusion in Poland with some people assuming this was a Christian Rock group. Indeed, my hosts shared with me stories of older people storming out of the concert, confused and angry, having hoped for a more conventional religious experience.

For more on the Fotoplastikon (aka the Kaiserpanorama), see Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception, which also features praxinoscopes, stereoscopes, and tachistoscopes. The Kaiserpanorama is actually on its cover.

Michael Rakowitz’s The invisible enemy should not exist opens on Friday, January 12, at Lombard-Freid Projects. The show follows up on a few of the Iraq themes Michael started exploring in his project for Creative Time.

This Saturday, “The Nightly News,” a group show, opens at Luxe Gallery. 16 Beaver collaborator Pedro Lasch and Nomads and Residents collaborator Liselot van der Heijden are included. Unfortunately the Luxe Web site is not current, but here is an excerpt from the press release:

“The Nightly News” an exhibition curated by

Kathleen Goncharov and Stephan Stoyanov

LUXE Gallery,

24 W. 57th Street # 505

New York, NY 10019

January 13th – February 10th , 2007

Opening Reception: Saturday January 13th, 2007. 6-8pm.

http://www.luxegallery.net/

Reading by Charles Doria and performance by Pia Lindman. Saturday, February 3. 6 PM.

Artists: Robert Boyd, caraballo-farman, Jody Culkin, Lieven De Boeck, Al Fadhil, Liselot van der Heijden, Dominik Lejman, Ahmet Ogut, Pedro Lasch, Pia Lindman, Christodoulous Paniyatou, Jackie Salloum, Lydia Venieri, Michael Waugh, Fred Wilson, Michael Zansky, and others.

The Nightly News is an exhibition of works by artists from around the world, some showing in New York for the first time. These artists were born in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, Poland, Mexico and Finland, as well as the United States. Current events and issues such terrorism, war, surveillance, xenophobia, racism, religious fanaticism, immigration, nationalism, and the abuse of power drive the exhibition.

Audio and video with Vito Acconci, Judith Barry and others.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. And engineering a video setup that could capture the event and beam it back to Earth so that half a billion people could watch it — that was pretty impressive, too. But the version of the footage that the world saw on TV was muddied and degraded. Luckily, a pristine version of the raw footage was recorded onto 14 inch magnetic tape reels and sent to NASA for safekeeping. One snag — NASA now has no idea where that tape is.