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7/29/03: Wired globalIt'll be interesting to see how The World Votes shapes up. This Internet venture by three wired Dutch activists seeks to create a certain global mandate in the next US presidential election, a "what if?" tally of votes opened up to all other populations - of course still just the tiny fraction of those with Internet access. I'm interested to see if this effort gets momentum and how it may change views of the election. I'm also very skeptical of finding any value in the skewed demographic (however "global") that it may come to represent - way more so than the recent phenomena of MoveOn.org and Howard Dean's connections between politics and online culture. An aside - I noticed that the names of the Democratic candidates are listed in alphabetical order except for Carol Mosley Braun's, which would have been placed first over Dean's. [link via blogilization.] posted by jeremy @ 8:46 PM :Some context from stare for the following image -
[via woodsLot and elsewhere.] posted by jeremy @ 8:30 PM :Okay, I've finally hit my stride - my exceedingly precious but lovingly crafted black and white prints from Vancouver are now up and ready for your eyes. posted by jeremy @ 12:42 PM 7/28/03:Well, the weekend of finally tying up this here website didn't go as planned. (Actually the whole damn summer isn't going as planned either). So, I was supposed to complete the portfolio section of Betacorpo.net, but due to unforseen job-related events, got only as far as fitting the old Charrettes and Tracades projects into the new design, while all those other files still languish in a tangled mess on my hard drive. You might've seen the photosbefore, but have a new look at the new photography section anyway, and I'm doing what's damnedest to erase the eternal "coming soon" tag by the end of this week. posted by jeremy @ 10:20 PM : Most dangerous places
Meisalas comments on the image. See also this profile Meisalas on the ethics of photographing war. posted by jeremy @ 9:59 PM :Coleccion Cisneros is an amazing site for an amazing collection and a great primer on 20th-century Latin American art. [via artrkrush] posted by jeremy @ 9:25 PM :I can't quite make out whether or not Wooster Collective is more than just a weblog, but it's certainly packed-full daily read mostly on graffiti- and stencil-style street art, mostly around NYC. This is where I found the many delightful little public interventions of Chicago's you are beautiful, a light and whimsical take on the more often ragged and confrontational aesthetics of instant urban signage. See also these less clever, but potential-full, remixed Chicago Sun-Times (found via consumptive). Oddly enough, I vaguely remember seeing the "JESSE JACKSON DECLARED EMPORER OF AFRICA" hack last week or so and somehow didn't quite muster up the appropriate double-take. posted by jeremy @ 9:15 PM 7/24/03: Dai-nos senhor a poesia de cada dia.So I'm down to just a few weeks away from wrapping up my early-20s Chicago scenes and aiming to bust out of here before September. I've had pretty steady 80-hour work weeks going since last April and now I'm piling on all the organisational odds and ends that involve dropping into a strange country with no home, job, or friends with wide eyes and fingers crossed. In the middle of all this crap, however, I have made arrangements to do my damnedest to get all of my photo portfolios loaded up onto Betacorpo.net before my beautiful little G4 trots off to its new home (sniff sniff). Yeah, I should be ashamed for letting those frames go empty for so long - but I'm stretched thin and beers and friends after so many menial work hours makes any other endeavour nada. Anyways, please be sure to check back here this coming Monday for some brand new photo work, with yet-unprinted frames from Vancouver and Rio de Janeiro, and all sorts of other treats for your art tooth. Until next week - passe bem! - and now I'm signing off and cranking up the Photoshop. posted by jeremy @ 8:12 PM 7/23/03:Protest posters from 1965-1975 from the US, Cuba, and Viet Nam.  [via vignaMaru.] posted by jeremy @ 9:17 PM :Translocations - is the latest (post-)exhibit of globally-scoped networked art now at the Walker Art Center. [via blogilisation.] posted by jeremy @ 8:54 PM :
posted by jeremy @ 8:49 PM :Disconted Americans consider moving to Canada.
...yeah, that dual-citizenship of mine will be a nice way to avoid having to live in the damage of Bush junta. posted by jeremy @ 8:35 PM :September 19th will be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, yarrrrrrr!! [via traveller's.] posted by jeremy @ 8:23 PM 7/22/03:Congress to bikers: Get a car! -
That is so seriously fucked up! [thanks, derek.] posted by jeremy @ 2:27 PM :
posted by jeremy @ 1:24 PM 7/21/03:randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed.... More here [via consumptive and stare]posted by jeremy @ 7:47 PM :New findings between biologists and linguists in inter-species communication -
posted by jeremy @ 7:37 PM :France has banned the word "email" from all government documents. In elusively purebread French, it is now courrier electronique, thank you. posted by jeremy @ 7:25 PM :
posted by jeremy @ 7:12 PM 7/18/03:Portuglish - Belo Horizonte students list the foreign words they've absorbed. Considering the limited necessity for many of them - gay, funk, palm, - is amusing. Some others - blisters, relax, flat, - make me wonder what they're exported versions actually mean.. posted by jeremy @ 7:50 PM :From an open letter to Tony Blair -
Read the rest. [Thanks, Joerg.] posted by jeremy @ 7:39 PM 7/14/03:Prentiss Riddle's found some excellent Portuguese worksheets aqui e aqui that have already cleared up a bit of my confusion as I'm still tackling this language issue mostly on my own with some intermittant help from a very good paulista friend here in Chicago. posted by jeremy @ 10:29 PM :When I was at Hirshhorn and saw the show, there was one particular guard who was standing with the big candy floor piece Untitled (Placebo), and she was amazing. There was this suburban white, middle class mother, with two young sons who came in the room and in thirty seconds, this woman - who was a black, maybe church-going civil servant in Washington, in the middle of all this reactionary pressure about the arts - there she was explaining to this mother and kids about AIDS and what this piece represented, what a placebo was, and how there was no cure and so on. Then the boys started to fill their pockets with candies and she sort of looked at them like a school mistress and said, "You're only supposed to take one." Just as their faces fell and they tossed back all but a few she suddenly smiled again ad said, "Well maybe two." And she won them over completely! The whole thing worked because then they got the piece, they got the interaction, they got the generosity and they got her. It was great. posted by jeremy @ 12:22 AM :DJ Spooky's faculty page posted by jeremy @ 12:14 AM :Porn without skin. [via artkrush.]posted by jeremy @ 12:03 AM 7/13/03:How to make Radiographs (X-rays) on Polaroid film. [via metafilter by way of chicha.]posted by jeremy @ 11:49 PM 7/10/03:I haven't checked out all of designer David Lu's web portfolio, but the Physical Interaction Design section is amazing. While always presenting his work in the dry and pragmatic terms of engineering or industrial design, the actual products convey a sense of whimsey and a Chindogu-like play with uselessness. He makes software that transforms a laptop into an etch-a-sketch, a webbrowser that pulls sites by the user (physically) entering the server's IP# with a rotary telephone dial, or the X screen which creates digitised screensaver-like visual forms that are viewed through a cardboard box. Throughout, Lu never tries to appeal to a sense of aesthetics or irony, though the work is dripping with both. All of these cracking tiny nuts with huge hammers (in reverse) creates a stunning sense of the span of sophistication that technologies cross in dizzying seconds, but also ironically conveys how blase we are about it at the end. posted by jeremy @ 10:40 PM 7/8/03:POV #8 is devoted entirely and exhaustively to Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire - The best of [Scorcese, Tarantino, and Coppola's] films are made by pioneering directors who bring consummate skill to their filmmaking, and contribute to the renewal and vitality of the medium.... They fall short, nevertheless, of a kind of storytelling which aims even higher by calling upon the viewer to live his or her life more fully. Wings of Desire is the purest example we have of a film that does just that, while at the same time providing a cinematic experience unequalled in its originality and beauty. It is a film that makes great demands on the viewer, requiring a degree of sustained attentiveness to which we are generally unaccustomed. [via conscientious.] See also this conversation with Wenders in Doubletake .posted by jeremy @ 9:23 PM :From Wex Files - excellent advetures in Sao Paulo - Learning a foreign language can be extremely difficult. New words, pronunciation, and of course all those grammar rules. However, I am not talking about portuguese, I'm talking about english. Yours truly has been shaping and molding the next generation of english speakers, and it hasn't been easy. Did you know you that you can have conjunctions, relative clauses, and auxiliary verbs all in one sentence. Me neither! How the hell did we learn all this crap? The good news is my students don't understand these mucked up grammar rules either so I can just usually make it up. Every once in a while I get some prodigy student that asks a really intelligent question and stumps Professor Wex. In these situations I just simply inform them that they asked a really stupid question and never to interrupt me again. posted by jeremy @ 12:43 PM 7/6/03:Simply Red - a run down from Atom Grid on those little daily RedEye/ RedStreak tabloids posing as alternative weeklies that've been equating the hipness of Chicago twentysomethings with a crudely stunted intelligence for almost a year now. Yet, they're somehow so hard to not flip through when they inevitably turn up on the table in the break room every morning. posted by jeremy @ 4:25 PM :Wired on flash mobs. An archive on flashmobs on cheesebikini. More photos on Satan's laundromat. Scary Santa's. And another long mob category on Daily Blah. posted by jeremy @ 4:08 PM 7/4/03:
posted by jeremy @ 7:34 PM 7/3/03:Pass it on... From Google's start page, type "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. (Thanks to Inebriantia for that one). posted by jeremy @ 10:29 PM :Cities of the World (and the impoverishment of corporate aesthetics) is actually a very funny piece on the pseudo-struggles of an overblown neo-Expressionist holdover, despite its disparaging title. (There's something disturbingly Kostabi-ish in all this). posted by jeremy @ 9:41 PM :A lesson from an interview with D A Blyler, author and expatriate (who once had one of the funniest cush English teaching jobs ever) - While overseas, Blyler makes an effort to embrace the local culture and not be content to hang out with the other expatriate Americans, whom he often feels have no respect for the new social environment. ?I meet expatriates who don?t know about the country (they?re visiting or living in), they?re not there to learn anything about the world around them,? Blyler said. ?I start learning the language and go around with my dictionary. I?m not some arrogant westerner who thinks everybody should speak English.? The rest of the inteview is sharp rants on seeing American from all the many outsides. Blyler's first effort Steffi's Club is certainly on my list. posted by jeremy @ 8:52 PM 7/2/03:Pois nao Once again, I have to apologise for my increasingly intermittant posting to La beta corpo. July's here and my transition to life in Brazil is switching to higher gear (despite a few current setbacks). Here's a bit of what I'm in for. Much of my web time for the next while will be spent scoping out jobs in Sao Paulo, tearfully releasing my record collection to eBay, and other related relocation chores, so of course I'm not expecting to turn up a whole lot of interesting material for this place. Check back every now and then to keep me from loneliness, and definitely give a few of the many fine sites on la beta blogroll a look. Lastly, if any photographers out there are interested in purchasing a 2-year old, very occasionally used Bronica SQ-Ai medium-format camera (a complete kit with 80mm lense, waist-level view finder, two 120/220 film backs, and lots of free accessories including an old but still good Minolta digital spot meter) quite significantly below retail, please contact me for details. As I'd prefer to try to deal with any aquaintances first, I'll let the offer sit here on this site for a couple of weeks before offering it up to the dogs on eBay. posted by jeremy @ 7:58 PM :Cheesedip provides us an interesting commentary and relevant links on the ten most popular Brazilian tunes according to a Folha de S?o Paulo poll. I'm glad to see Caetano Veloso's "Baby" on the list which brilliantly, when exported to the English-speaker, turns from achingly sentimental to bitterly hilarious once the Portuguese lyrics are translated. posted by jeremy @ 7:29 PM :I'm amazed at how much this highly complex video-installation piece - Trigger by Jordan Crandall which intertwines cameras, weapons and male bodies - reminds me of the similarly gorgeous film Beau Travail by Claire Denis (whose latest Vendredi Soir I'm also eagerly enticipating.) posted by jeremy @ 7:06 PM :A Wired overview of "tech art". posted by jeremy @ 6:54 PM :Are state quarters cursed? -
posted by jeremy @ 9:39 AM 7/1/03:
Interestingly, current near-future predictions, like nanotechnology and self-cleaning building materials, seem well-anticipated by these earlier notions.
[Radebaugh link via idletype.] posted by jeremy @ 10:51 PM :posted by jeremy @ 2:54 AM |
portfolios:jeremy wellsla mujer gallinapalomarQ:
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Although it has been amended, formally as well as by judicial interpretation, the Constitution written in 1787 has ordered the affairs of this nation for more than two hundred years. We have become so accustomed to it that we might take its longevity for granted, but it is, in fact, remarkable, especially when compared with the experience of other peoples. There are more now, but when I last had reason to look into this matter?in 1983, as a member of the American delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva?there were 164 countries in the world, and all but six of them (Britain, New Zealand, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Libya) had written constitutions. But of those 158 written constitutions, more than half had been written after 1974, and, if the past is any guide, many of them will be rewritten or replaced in the future. France, for a conspicuous example, has had five republican constitutions in the period when we have had one, and, to update the old joke involving the cynical Paris taxi driver, "there'll be a sixth."
