YouTube gets a curator

How is it possible to “curate” Youtube? Among millions of choices, of an endless stream of hours of new footage everyday, how can we develop curatorial slants and selection filters in this flow? Youtube has decided to ask personalities to give their 5 best youtube clips, and Pedro Almodóvar gives his selection below. But does his selection say something about Youtube culture?

He chooses a Godard clip and a couple of songs that are meaningful to his oeuvre and meaningful as general cinema and music culture of a particular generation, but how are they meaningful to Youtube culture? There is a difference between selecting clips of bits of films and songs from the past and choosing clips that actually position Youtube and networking culture uniquely in the history of media, and why not, of cinema. I get the feeling that this selection could have been done in any other context, in the context of a television show or a video store, for the Godard and Brel clips can actually be found in other sources of media. The Internet here is functioning merely as an archive.

As far as network cultures go, Almodóvar’s selection is curious, but hardly revealing of the Internet itself, and of interest to those who know his own films and aesthetics. Of course, the way Almodóvar articulates his choices is interesting to see and watch. Apart from reblogs, retweets and facebook postings, one may get lost in the quagmire of youtubings, where users spend, as Lev Manovich once wrote, more time getting lost and trying to make decisions on what to click on the Internet than actually enjoying content.

But his last choice is interesting and relevant in a more reflexive way of understanding Youtube and its structure. The short film “Vecinas Valencianas” has been reenacted countless times on Youtube and thus stands out as a feature of web 2.0. You know when an idea is powerful when you have hundreds of people dedicating energy to filming reenactments of it and posting them online. It means that this film stuck to networking culture.

In celebration of Youtube’s 5 year old existence.

A dog for fleas

As I continue my research on Portuguese culture on East Timor, I remember and reread a few writers who have marked me in the past years:

Fernando Pessoa, Mar Português, a classic:

Ó mar salgado, quanto do teu sal
São lágrimas de Portugal!
Por te cruzarmos, quantas mães choraram,
Quantos filhos em vão rezaram!

Quantas noivas ficaram por casar
Para que fosses nosso, ó mar!
Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena
Se a alma não é pequena.

Quem quere passar além do Bojador
Tem que passar além da dor.
Deus ao mar o perigo e o abismo deu,
Mas nele é que espelhou o céu.

Eduardo Galeano, The Nobodies:

“Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

about the mixture of cultures in art

Scramble for Africa, 2003, 14 figures, 14 chairs and table, mixed media, 52×192 x 110”.

Anthony Downey (…) Which brings me to the notion of ambiguity in your work, not least in your use of Dutch wax fabric. That fabric is a classic example of the so-called signifier of African authenticity, and yet it was produced by the Dutch for sale in Indonesia and then ended up in Nigeria. There is this notion of fabrication in your work—fabric itself, of course, but also fabrication, the telling of stories.

Yinka Shonibare To be an artist, you have to be a good liar. There’s no question about that. If you’re not, you can’t be a good artist. Basically, you have to know how to fabricate, how to weave tales, how to tell lies, because you’re taking your audience to a nonexistent space and telling them that it does exist. But you have to be utopian in your approach. You have to create visions that don’t actually exist yet in the world—or that may actually someday exist as a result of life following art. It’s natural for people to want to be sectarian or divisive. Different cultures want to group together, they want to stick to their own culture, but what I do is create a kind of mongrel. In reality most people’s cultures have evolved out of this mongrelization, but people don’t acknowledge that. British culture in reality is very mixed. There’s a way in which people want to keep this notion of purity, and that ultimately leads to the gas chambers. What I am doing may be humorous so as to show the stupidity of things. But at the same time I understand that the logical conclusion of sectarianism is Auschwitz, or the “logical” in its starkest manifestation. So even though these works are humorous, there’s a very dark underlying motivation.

More on BOMBSite

Pirate Modernity

I grow fonder and fonder of Sarai everyday. Most of their books are on my reading list for the PhD thesis, which will hopefully involve a close collaboration with this  very forward-thinking group. They seem to me like a welcome critical reading of euro-centric discourse, which we, the scholars in the peripheries must grapple with in terms of being able to understand our own complex social environments within the constraints of academic thinking and the legacy of European thought. We don’t need to necessarily break with European thought, but need to critique it, extend and expand it, share it, collaborate it so that we can forge a new form of thinking for the future.

This one is arriving in the mail soon.

Pirate Modernity

Author/Editor : Ravi Sundaram
Using Delhi�s contemporary history as a site for reflection, Pirate Modernity moves from a detailed discussion of the technocratic design of the city by US planners in the 1950s, to the massive expansions after 1977, culminating in the urban crisis of the 1990s. As a practice, pirate modernity is an illicit form of urban globalization. Poorer urban populations increasingly inhabit non-legal spheres: unauthorized neighborhoods, squatter camps and bypass legal technological infrastructures (media, electricity). This pirate culture produces a significant enabling resource for subaltern populations unable to enter the legal city. Equally, this is an unstable world, bringing subaltern populations into the harsh glare of permanent technological visibility, and attacks by urban elites, courts and visceral media industries. The book examines contemporary Delhi from some of these sites: the unmaking of the citys modernist planning design, new technological urban networks that bypass states and corporations, and the tragic experience of the road accident terrifyingly enhanced by technological culture. Pirate Modernity moves between past and present, along with debates in Asia, Africa and Latin America on urbanism, media culture, and everyday life.

This pioneering book suggests cities have to be revisited afresh after proliferating media culture. Pirate Modernity boldly draws from urban and cultural theory to open a new agenda for a world after media urbanism.

Facebook Nation

If we add up all Facebook users in the world, we would end up with the third largest single nation: an estimated 400 million people and counting.

Here are the numbers, and a short analysis based on my point-of-view.

While Facebook’s international audience totaled 34 million people at the beginning of 2008, on the first day of 2009 that number had increased to 95 million – nearly 70% of the total Facebook audience. Today, it’s nearly 300 million of Facebook’s 400 million active users.  More on Facebook Global Monitor

The Statistics – Facebook users per country

Rank	Country	Number of Facebook users	12 month growth %	6 month growth %
1	USA	101,303,240	140.80%	46.00%
2	UK	22,625,300	51.50%	20.90%
3	Turkey	16,943,780	113.60%	36.80%
4	Indonesia	14,681,580	1536.70%	126%
5	France	14,290,700	117%	32.60%
6	Canada	14,228,460	31%	19%
7	Italy	13,272,760	137.60%	30%
8	Philippines	8,387,560	2046.80%	208.40%
9	Spain	7,701,200	196.70%	33.40%
10	Australia	7,611,920	75.80%	25.70%
11	Argentina	7,387,120	227.50%	50.60%
12	Colombia	7,243,520	99.40%	25.80%
13	Mexico	6,505,040	351.50%	78.50%
14	Chile	5,808,020	39.90%	20.20%
15	Germany	5,799,520	361.90%	84.90%
16	Taiwan	5,490,300	4763%	701%
17	India	5,397,480	403.80%	66.80%
18	Venezuela	4,952,340	164.20%	38.40%
19	Malaysia	3,975,640	367.50%	99.30%
20	Sweden	3,066,180	80.70%	34.10%
21	Belgium	2,872,160	73.50%	21.10%
22	Hong Kong	2,727,980	87.00%	30.70%
23	South Africa	2,434,500	164.60%	41.50%
24	Brazil	2,413,900	1052.40%	137.70%
25	Egypt	2,341,880	184.70%	44.70%
26	Denmark	2,262,260	27.40%	15.30%
27	Norway	2,256,080	54.90%	21.70%
28	Greece	2,222,860	122.40%	35.60%
29	Israel	2,149,500	149.50%	49.90%
30	Thailand	1,963,560	1063.80%	181.60%

Undisputably, the US is the largest (and the oldest) Facebook nation, and represents 1/3 of its current population, yet proportionately the penetration of Facebook is greater in Norway where one half of its population are users, similar to Denmark, and the same proportion of Hong Kong users of 1/3 to the total population, likewise in Canada. It is safe to say that the proportion of Internet users in Europe and North America is quite high, therefore, even if we examine these numbers of users to the number of Internet users, it is still quite high.

Facebook growth is tremendous in Southeast Asia and South America, good tropical infusions to this otherwise american and euro-centric world.

In Indonesia, the proportion of users 14,681 represents less than 10% of its total population and likewise in the Phillippines, and Thailand seems to have discovered Facebook only last year as well. Brazil, with a population similar to Indonesia, lags behind at Facebook being used by a little over 1% of the population. It lags far behind its South American neighbors in both numbers of users and relative proportion to total populations, but surprisingly is the second indicator in growth after the incredible surge in the Phillippines in the past year. Brazil might still be stuck in its Orkut phase.

In developing countries, these numbers need to be seen in relation to Internet users, which is not that high. So it could very well be true that relative to the population of Internet users, the numbers in developing countries is quite high as well.

Where is Japan in all of this?

What does this mean?

According to these numbers, Facebook is a nation where:

– Americans are a majority, Brits come in second far far behind, and the other countries represent tiny minorities

– The majority is English-speaking, with Spanish as the second most used language – geopolitically a Western-dominated tool.

– Mandarin may be spoken by majority of Taiwanese, Singaporean and Malaysian users but minorly because of:

– Almost no Chinese members (Numbers have dwindled considerably in the past 6 months), since Facebook is 非死不可 (in Pinyin: FeiSiBuKe) which means Dooms to Die. But lots of Chinese on identical FB spinoffs.

– Also hardly any Japanese users, and also not many Korean. They have their own way of socialising online away from Western standards.

I have always contended that these social media tools contain far more information about people than governments would ever be able to collect. Governments surveil, pressure and chase us  just enough to gather ‘civic’ data needed for tax purposes, but rarely collects any other personal data, let alone knowing who your friends are. The meaning of ‘person’ for a government record and the meaning of ‘person’ on Facebook is completely different. I get a little paranoid over this fact.

If Facebook were a nation, because it very well could, it would mean that immense power lies in their hands. There needs to be an enormous amount of trust in these servers and in this network in order for things not to go awry.

What is your reading of these numbers?

Online World Building

Now there is tremendous artistic intent — within the software. But the software is not visible in the finished generative product. To me, it’s of great interest that these objects and designs and animations and so forth now exist among us. Because they are, in a strange way, divorced from any kind of historical ideology. They are just not human.

There are potential and new forms of collaborative art that have no single authors. Open source arts, multiplayer arts, multimedia collaboration. Online world building is of great interest. That was not physically possible before. It’s something we can do that nobody else can do. Bruce Sterling.

Within the context of Web 2.0, Bruce Sterling offers a piece of his mind on how ideas might work today, or, how you can solve a problem, any problem, using today’s social tools:

Step 1 – write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.

Step 2 – write problem in my blog; study the commentary cross-linked to other guys.

Step 3 – write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted.

Step 4 – open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further.

Step 5 – start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem.

Step 6 – make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.

Step 7 – Create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.

Step 8 – exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media.

And step 9 – find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.” Sterling.

His speech at the Transmediale.10  can be found on WIRED, here.

Some interesting quotes:

“Atemporality is a philosophy of history with a built-in expiration date. It has a built in expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.

“Futurity was expected, futurity is here now, there goes futurity into the past, so long futurity, thank you for an exciting, fulfilling and worthwhile time.” – Sterling

The Atemporal approach asks us to cool things down, challenge the need and desire for a constant, linear future. Proposing not to rush ever onwards, remembering what we have now, reclaiming and rediscovering the qualities we possess rather than feverishly running forward all of the time.

Atemporality for the Contemporary Artist

The last transmediale.10 held in Berlin in late February contemplated the theme “Future”. A wide selection of new media artists elaborated proposals and exhibited projects, held workshops, conferences, seminars – a massive new media event with a prestigious following. The reliable Furtherfield.org has a great review on the exhibitions and talks at this event.

At the conference, cyber-punk futurist author cum historian Bruce Sterling presented Atemporality, a term originally coined by William Gibson, as he viewed it, an approach in understanding and recontextualizing history in terms of the passage of time, “an effort in humanities” to embrace reality, the now, in the context of technology and society.

A confessed post-modernist and lover of contradictions and juxtapositions, Sterling presents an array of examples from all walks of visual and scientific history to highlight this concept, which is defined as an analysis of the passage of time and people’s, especially an artist’s, relationship to time through a quirky analysis of images in order to demonstrate an artistic “atemporal sensibility”, where “futurity, history and the present” are conjoined in the same plane.

His way of looking at some ‘atemporal’ images is not formal, nor is it an aesthetic judgement or semiotic reading. He uses mostly ‘sightings’ from everyday life and examples from history to illustrate his idea of “temporal cosmopolitanism”. From what I understood, he is trying to see glimpses of futurism in visionary objects independent of the time in which they were made, such as a ancient Greek steam engine, or the use of a digital principle of pixellized imaging present in an archaic medium and craft such as cross-stitch embroidery. The examples are far-fetched.

I was fortunate enough to listen to this talk at the European Graduate School last summer where he talks about this approach to “a human standpoint of time” through possible definitions through 28 images.

Firewalling History – Part 3

In the evening, a friend emailed this CNN clip on Ai Wei Wei, Communism, Dissent, and visual culture.

See full transcript here

Fresh from the press. Thanks to fellow EGS’r Vijay for this.

+++++++

As a complement to my lecture on McLuhan’s views on communication and media, I touched briefly on the issue of truth and media within contemporary visual culture. The topics ranged from historical examples of falsifications of historical photographs such as Lenin and Trotsky, the O.J. Simpson Time/Newsweek covers, and several contemporary examples of Photoshop enhancements on some online news magazines. I went on about the responsibility of journalism and photo-journalism and the impact of editorial decisions on how we interpret the information we consume, always trying to push the questioning of the motivations behind the visual choices made. Next, I talked about censorship and media control in Asia and the role of the Internet and digital culture on creating awareness to this issue. With this I hoped to get students thinking about freedom of expression and the pros and cons of and open media landscape versus a controlled media landscape.

Of course, I raised the issue of Google and censorship in China and used the banned images of Tiananmen Square and the Dalai Lama as examples where censorship changes the perception of history and facts and the reasons behind such controls. I showed some Tiananmen square footage, the iconic image of the Tank Man, which many of them did not know – not because this content is banned in Singapore because it isn’t, but because these events are not within their range of interest and does not belong to their historical reality.  In any case, exposure to these political questions enriches their sense of what visual culture is and the power of images, and calls attention to their responsibility as visual designers.

In my classes, I do a mixture of lecture slides to make sure students get the main points across, but generally I show as many media clips and documentaries and websites in order to indirectly show them how to search the Internet for information. Often, depending on where the discussion is going, I flip open websites and search for materials in class. Today, I somehow landed on Abu Ghraib images as an example of how digital photography and the Internet played a huge role in understanding those images, aside from the remarkably cruel content, which was quite tough to see again after so many years. I mentioned in passing Susan Sontag’s ‘On the Pain of Others’, which I hope students will consult if they are interested.

Firewalling History – Part 2

Banning and protecting images reminds us of the great dictatorships of the 20th century and the control of information, literature, and images that could potentially fuel dissent and disagreement with the current status quo. Lenin and his effacement of Trotsky’s images, Hitler’s book burnings and the Khmer Rouge’s execution of intellectuals in Cambodia all come to mind – and they are not nice reminders. In China, two images are extremely sensitive and problematic, and are not easily found on search mechanisms, let alone be shown and carried around. Shane Richmond’s blog in the Telegraph has more information on this.

Two banned images from Chinese search sites. The ‘tank man’ of Tiananmen Square 1989 protests for inciting protest, the second for the Dalai Lama considered as a traitor and responsible for China-Tibet tensions.

Certainly this video would definitely cause the Chinese government to shut down my blog:

So how should Google position itself in relation to these bans? If it accepts to ban one thing and then another, then the list could be endless.

After such horrific regimes and their destructive ‘media politics’, one would imagine that in the now ‘free’ world, one would be able to retrieve lost archives and withdraw bans on all sorts of information, especially through the redeeming quality of the open-for-all Internet if only to follow what George Santayana once proclaimed that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However idealistic one may be in this regard (and I am), we must realise that censorship is still alive and kicking using similar tactics, and will not relax its grip on visual culture anytime soon. Actually, the reverse happens today with the creation of media feuds, censorship laws, and the benefits that such mind-control creates in the name of economic and cultural ‘stability’. Should governments have the ability to control what we see and think?

Perhaps these bans are not even that relevant from the point of view of the public. The interest in history is waining among the young of today and shunned as something that prevents one from looking forward into the future. Perhaps in the West we place too much importance in the past whereas it might be different in Asia – a few comments made by Chinese users on blogs point to that direction. In Chinese contemporary art, however, there seems to be an uncovering of identity and a treatment of archival and historical motifs if only to create a history and Chinese visual culture as a place for critique.

Bloodline: Big Family No. 3 by Zhang Xiaogang via NYT

The greatest example of this is the firewall in China, which, we all now, is bravely trying to protect its Internet against the mongooglian invaders. It is enough to look at history and see that the Great Wall of China, despite being a magnificent construction and the biggest piece of land art ever seen, was at best mildly efficient in its defense of the invaders. Not a very towering wall (much shorter than the concrete wall that now divides Israel and Palestine, for example), the Wall is built on rugged ground which is in itself a barrier to entry, it functions best as a display of technological superiority over its disorganized tribal invaders and thus assumes a greater psychological function than one of actual protection.

The Great-firewall of China may very well be thought of as adopting the same strategy. Even though it is very effective, there are loopholes where one can circumvent the barriers and jump over the fence – one just needs to notice the tactic in order to beat it.

A friend of mine in China has access to the rest of the Internet by paying VPN access at home and can therefore read blogs and connect to Facebook, etc. Even though the barrier is real and Twitter and other social media can be cut off on a whim (remember the recent conflicts in western China last year), China would not make such a sharp cut in access if it is to integrate to the outer world, especially if there are practical gains on the horizon. In fact, mirror versions of Flickr and youtube do exist, albeit with filtered content.

They can’t do without web 2.0, can they?

Creative Idleness

Creative Idleness

But even in Brazil, as everywhere else, the seduction of information is sucking in the best of us into surrogate lives online. Therefore, understanding the value of down time is actually something you have to work for I am a total victim of this, I admit, spending a good chunk of my life connected. For a reason, though. It is the only way that I, as an expatriate on the other side of the planet, can keep my highly-valued friends and family present in my daily life so far away from home. Social media as an extension of family ties? Yep. Worse, information is my object of research and material for my art. Point of no return.)

De Masi, in the interview below, outlines this philosophy. In Italian with Portuguese subtitles – sorry. There is little of his work translated into English, but this could be a start.