Inspired by Alice
Dec 2 at 12:12am by wilkins
Gallery of assorted Alice in Wonderland-inspired images.
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Via Strange Ink.
Jockohomo Datapanix on exhibition in NY Times gallery
Nov 24 at 8:08am by wilkins
Jockohomo DataPanik on an installation in the lobby of my homewtown paper:
Moveable Type, a new permanent art installation in the lobby of the New York Times is the ultimate in real and virtual news. Created by artist Ben Rubin and UCLA professor/statistician Mark Hansen, 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens mounted on 2 walls use statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to the paper’s website, browsing, searching, commenting etc. Watch a Video of the installation, read more from Flowing Data, check out a few more shots of the installation.
AAG proposes criterion for evaluating porn: pleasure
Oct 29 at 1:01am by wilkins
Always Aroused Girl, noting
must confess that a whole lot of porn does a whole lot of nothing for me.Not all porn, but some porn shows actors who seem either bored beyond tears or who are overacting to the point that I cannot hope to suspend my disbelief.
[After the jump, AAG gives as examples of what she likes - Comstock Films and Tristan Taormino's's Chemistry Vol. 3 - a porn film in which - after selecting the first few performers - the film was cast by cast members with the criteria being to engage those performers who must turned them on].
You can actually watch the temperature drop (the chilling effect in action)
Oct 27 at 5:05am by wilkins
Lawyers use the phrase “chilling effect” to describe an added perception of risk concerning, or actual deterrence, of legitimate behavior. In other words, you “deter” drug use, forbidden sexual acts, or robbery because those things are intrinsically wrong. But we use “chilling effect” as a cliche - generally in the context of “chilling” free expression. ((The phrase’s use has been recorded in this way as early as 1950: Paul J. Freund. The Supreme Court and Civil Liberties, 4 Vanderbilt Law Review 533, at 539 (1950-1951). See also “Chilling Effect,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect (accessed 287 October 2007)).
Here, “Anthony Comstock,” one of the founders of Comstock Films, discusses his entirely reasonable fears of prosecution in this post:
“Adult sexual conduct is not illegal and it is in fact constitutionally protected. See, e.g., Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). The regulation of visual depictions of adult sexual activity is not based on its intrinsic relation to illegal conduct.”
That’s from the Sixth Circuit Court’s ruling 2257 regulations unconstitutional, and gets to the heart of why I am fascinated by, and passionate about making sexual imagery.
Some few years ago I directed a film about Hutu refugees in Eastern Zaire. The imagery from the camps themselves was appalling enough: emaciated men, women, and children dying as the camera rolled; bodies being stacked into the bed of trucks like cordwood. But also included was footage from the Hutu genocidal slaughter of their Tutsi countrymen (carried out largely by machete,) including footage of a man being murdered by decapitation and the desecration of corpses.
I thought long and hard about what shots I would and would not include this film. I wanted my audience to vividly understand the horrors that had played out, but I did not want to them to withdraw, to down emotionally. I wanted them to stay with the film, through to the end, and hoped that they would find meaning in what I chose to show them. I thought a lot about the line between enough and too much. But never, not even for a moment, did I think about whether or not the footage I chose to include was prosecutable.
By contrast, nothing I show in the films I make about sex is awful. In fact, it’s all quite wonderful! People who desire each other giving and receiving pleasure in the most intimate and delicious ways! Yet in choosing to document and then distributed these consensual, loving, pleasurable, and entirely legal acts, some how through the magical powers of the camera, I may be committing a crime. Depending on where my films are watched, and by whom, what I do may not be protected by the First Amendment, what I do may be considered obscene, what I do may be against the law.
“The regulation of visual depictions of adult sexual activity is not based on its intrinsic relation to illegal conduct.” That’s what the Sixth Circuit Court says. I don’t see how that squares with Miller v. California. I’d like to find out, but I don’t want to lose my house or go to jail.
I thought long and hard about what shots I would and would not include this film. I wanted my audience to vividly understand the horrors that had played out, but I did not want to them to withdraw, to down emotionally. I wanted them to stay with the film, through to the end, and hoped that they would find meaning in what I chose to show them. I thought a lot about the line between enough and too much. But never, not even for a moment, did I think about whether or not the footage I chose to include was prosecutable.
By contrast, nothing I show in the films I make about sex is awful. In fact, it’s all quite wonderful! People who desire each other giving and receiving pleasure in the most intimate and delicious ways! Yet in choosing to document and then distributed these consensual, loving, pleasurable, and entirely legal acts, some how through the magical powers of the camera, I may be committing a crime. Depending on where my films are watched, and by whom, what I do may not be protected by the First Amendment, what I do may be considered obscene, what I do may be against the law.
“The regulation of visual depictions of adult sexual activity is not based on its intrinsic relation to illegal conduct.” That’s what the Sixth Circuit Court says. I don’t see how that squares with Miller v. California. I’d like to find out, but I don’t want to lose my house or go to jail.
Filmmakers should be worried about storyboards, budgets, and the cost of film stock. Not criminal charges for doing what they’re supposed to do - make films.
Porn business model threatened? - OR - Sex, drugs, cops, outlaws, and spies - what they have in common
Oct 21 at 8:08am by wilkins
Reverse Cowgirl - the ever-perceptive Ms. Breslin - has posted about a Claire Hoffman piece in Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com which notes precipitous declines in revenue at commercial porn sites, occasioned by the emergency of three free-download sites, in the nature of YouTube: Megarotic, YouPorn, and Pornotube.
Link to Claire Hoffman’s piece on Portfolio.com.
WNYC’s On The Media - ran an excellent piece in 2002 interview with Jonathan Coopersmith, Douglas Rushkoff, and others making the case that pornography is often the driver of new communications technologies.
For my part, I’d put porn on a plane with two other markets which have different, but no less intense, needs for innovative advantage: illicit markets, and military/law enforcement uses. More my area of knowledge - I can easily name examples:
- As soon as there were phones, organized crime (bootleggers, gamblers) used hijacked phone lines - called “cheeseboxes” in New York - so that when authorities followed a phone line to an address - they’d find an empty apartment - with a wired connection to another phone line - sometimes appearing in another apartment or nearby building - which redirected the calls. They could shut the line down, of course - but by the time the connnections got sorted out - targets and evidence had been moved away.An NYPD source has provided me with an explanation of “Cheesebox” as the name - one of the early such setups was hidden in a closet - the wiring then hidden in what had been a shipping crate for cheese.
- The first mobile telephone I ever saw or used was in law enforcement. (The person I had personal knowledge of using a car-based “radio telephone”was a United States Attorney General; this may be public record now, but not when I came by the information, so we’ll hold the name for the moment, it not being necessary to make the point);
- Let’s not forget what immediate use urban illicit drug-selling organizations made of pagers and then mobile phones;
- The first reported use (that I’m aware of) of a “silent,” vibrating pager was by Richard Helms, then DCI, who was reported in the early 1970’s as been “paged” at dinner parties by the then state-of-the-art “beeper.”
- The FBI was using portable audio recorder hard drives before anyone thought to add “i” to “pod.” Well before.
Sex, drugs, and espionage in the same piece. We’ll try to keep connecting these things as often as possible.
I’m not sure, though - about the extinction of porn as a business - perhaps this is a just a lull before some newer, better porn medium - with some sort of DRM - makes people willing to pay more for better.
San Francisco Armory to be renovated by Kink.com
Oct 20 at 9:09am by wilkins
If this had been attempted in New York - supposedly a loose place - I don’t think it would have happened. But Kink.com has purchased the (former) San Francisco Armory, gotten permission from the Landmarks Commission, and they’re going to renovate and move in. (sorry about the thumbnail, haven’t quite gotten the hang of resizing stills).
Is this the harbinger of a coup? The fact of the matter is, they do have some experience in bending people’s wills, eliciting submission, and inspiring their corps into exceeding physical limits. Many of them are very tough; some of them will do anything they’re told. (Some of them even fall into both categories). They’ve been known to ruthlessly follow orders to physically abuse each other.
The outlines of a sinister plan begin to show themselves …
One from Craig Cooley:
Oct 20 at 8:08am by wilkins
One from Craig Cooley of Abstract Tribal:
“Who’s afraid of an artist escort?” - Placebokatz
Oct 17 at 11:11pm by wilkins
Placebokatz has a piece about ARTOUT which is
ARTOUT is an experimental art service that allows those (with the financial means) to spend time with an artist. To get into their minds and hear first hand what they believe and how they represent it through their work. A novel idea, but not an insane one. Like it or not, we are in the thick of capitalism, which means that any and everything we as consumers can conjure up to ‘need’ have and will be addressed and cured.
…Artistic creativity results from the dialectical relation between the acceptance of the market as the underlying principle of social reality, and the need to escape its imperatives of obedience and consensus; its locus is the individuality of the artist. The artist plays the “messenger” and the “message”, the self-medium that finds its legitimacy through the charismatic negation of conventionality.…Spending time in the company of the artist is a creative act; it reveals power relations within the existing artist-patron paradigm and leads to the mutual liberation of both artists and art-patrons from the condition of simple material production and accumulation to the next level of the direct creative exchange and immediate human solidarity.
This seems like a reasonable thing - from more than one ideological perspective. If you’re a libertarian/extreme capitalist type - it’s an exchange of money for information. If your ideology isn’t so well defined, it’s still an exchange of money for information - but it’s also patronage of the arts - by patronizing (in the non-pejorative sense) artists. If your politics lean a bit to the left - it’s a small-scale redistribution of wealth.
Seems not only unobjectionable - but we’ll go out on a limb here and say that not only is it not a bad thing - it’s a good thing. At the very least, an experiment to see what happens.
However - from the petition to which you are about to be directed, here’s what happened to one guy in Paris:
In September 2007 A. Kozlov, a well respected artist and writer, was accused by Parsons Paris management of associating the school’s name with “an illicit” business, thus damaging the reputation of the school, and forced to leave his teaching position. The reason for such an accusation was his participation in the ARTOUT project. This accusation is groundless, ludicrous and unworthy of any self-respecting academic institution. ARTOUT is an experimental art project in which many of us participate, not an illicit business as the administration of Parsons Paris has declared. By engaging in the act of artistic censorship, your affiliate campus has blatantly violated our colleague’s fundamental right to free speech and insulted not only those of us who participate in the ARTOUT project, but the artistic community at large. We all feel concerned.
I quote only the petition - which you can find here - and which I urge you to read, which I hope will persuade you to sign it, if I have not already so persuaded you - I quote only the petition because Mr. Kozlov’s original post, alas, is not in English.
Here’s an ARTOUT pitch:
We don’t normally like to admit such things - but Sunnydale Recycling’s General Counsel is, in fact, a licensed attorney. But not in Paris. But he wonders if Parsons’ conduct doesn’t violate the spirit and principle of droit moral?
Patronize artists via ARTOUT, if you can.
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