Jon Taplin’s blog has an interesting post on “Artists & The Crowd”. I’m particularly interested in two quotes he cites in the article, by Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan.
Marcuse says:
In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by society, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of the artist.
and McLuhan says:
To reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
I find both of those quotes interesting because of what they imply for ITP, suggesting a fusion of critical analysis and artistic creation that really does match what we do. (Also, I’ve been meaning to ask Red Burns about McLuhan – I detect a distinctly McLuhan-esque undercurrent to the program, which I am very enthusiastic about.)
Whether or not you agree with him, his writing is certainly colorful:
The George W. Bush administration might as well have used the State Department as a set for the Jackass reality show.
Unlike many other commentators, he does not refer to biofuel subsidies in the US as a factor. I have seen little coverage of monetary factors underlying the food crisis, one of the few exceptions being an article in Al-Jazeera that quotes a UN representative, Jose Graziano, as blaming the food crisis on the weak dollar and speculation.
My friends from Tokyo Art Beat have now launched New York Art Beat! I’ve always enjoyed TAB for the convenient way it groups events by medium and location, and the smart lists that keep you posted on upcoming openings (or shows that will soon close).
Don’t just visit – you can contribute to this website, by submitting venues, events & reviews! You can link to them via handy widgets to put on your blog.
“In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy‘s challenge to, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.”
I get to understand my environment, by making models, by asking “what’s going on here”. For what it’s worth, here’s what I make of ITP. At the end are some thoughts on what could be done differently. (This is not meant to be definitive – I might change my mind by next week.)
When you look back at what ITP has done over time, and its precursors, it seems clear what its mission is: development of a critical perspective on technology and its impact on society, with a very strong emphasis on “learning by doing”. This critical perspective is very much driven by social, cultural and artistic factors, but not exclusively. If you look at the history of the program, it seems pretty consistent. This focus on critical understanding of technology is what attracted me to ITP in the first place, and what has kept me here. Continue reading So, what's ITP all about?
The BBC has a short piece on improvised shantytowns in Los Angeles, set up by people who have lost their homes in the subprime mortgage collapse.
These people aren’t junkies or mental patients: these were homeowners a few months ago! If you listen to the piece, a lot of them lost their homes, not specifically because of the collapse of the mortgage market, but because of illness and lack of health coverage, job instability, and a whole raft of reasons that are probably intrinsic to the current US economic and political system.
The economic’s editor of the UK’s Guardian newspaper has an opinionated take on the whole thing: America was conned. I think I would agree: privatized healthcare, the war in Iraq and now the subprime crisis have all been ways of channeling immense amounts of money from the middle-class to large businesses and the wealthy.
I’ve had the OLPC XO laptop now for several months, and feel I understand it well enough to comment further on it. I’ve spent a lot of time working with it, and feel that it is working as well as an OLPC XO is ever going to work. I’m using a development build of the software, with power management enabled. It reliably dual-boots into XFCE or Sugar, and I’ve installed the applications that I need. On the Sugar side, I’ve made a number of small adjustments, and it does run reliably (it does what it is supposed to, most of the time).
Getting familiar with the OLPC has had its ups and downs. I set out to write a careful, balanced assessment of the device, its software, and the overall program. I thought that it made sense to look at the OLPC from the perspective of an adult user looking for a lightweight computer, vs. a child in a difficult environment looking for an educational device. However, the more I looked into it, the angrier I became about some of the design decisions that have shaped the OLPC, in ways that cripple it for adults and children alike. My conclusions in a nutshell:
The hardware is great: It is really well-designed and fit for purpose. Not really used to its full potential yet.
The Sugar user interface is terrible: It is poorly executed (but that is just a timing issue), but worse, it is based on fundamentally wrong assumptions about children, and the way the OLPC will be used. These wrong assumptions are:
Children need to have a massively simplified user interface
Software needs to be simplified in order to run on limited hardware
For most children using the OLPC, this will be the only computer they have access to
The program has weaknesses baked in: in the way development is run, in the way institutional relations are addressed and others.
Don’t get me wrong: I support the goal of the program. Getting computers into the hands of millions of children, following an educational model that emphasizes exploration and self-direction is a good thing. I am not of the camp that argues that clean water, food, shelter should be emphasized instead. (Those things are crucial – however, insisting that they have to be provided before any educational programs are launched is a mistake.)
However, I think that stubbornness, ideology and arrogance have so influenced the program that it may suffer badly in consequence.
It is possible to save the OLPC program. I think the path to doing this would mean changing the direction of software development to better link with the existing Open Source/Linux movement, and making the OLPC far more inter-operable with the rest of the computing world.
This piece by William Buzzell is a nice little homage to classic old-school hacking. Many influential figures from my formative years are there: Emmanuel Goldstein, Captain Crunch, and even the Morris Worm!
Artists and critical analysis
Jon Taplin’s blog has an interesting post on “Artists & The Crowd”. I’m particularly interested in two quotes he cites in the article, by Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan.
Marcuse says:
and McLuhan says:
I find both of those quotes interesting because of what they imply for ITP, suggesting a fusion of critical analysis and artistic creation that really does match what we do. (Also, I’ve been meaning to ask Red Burns about McLuhan – I detect a distinctly McLuhan-esque undercurrent to the program, which I am very enthusiastic about.)