The Dioramic Imperative and the Incremental Taxidermy of the Self
October 13, 2005
Like most of us, I think, I was particularly struck by Wendy Brown’s chapter Specters and Angels, and have been thinking about the idea of hauntology since then. I went back and read Derrida’s piece on Marx where he introduces the concept. What a striking and new meaning the opening phrase of the Communist Manifesto takes when read in that light. A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. If we are to follow Derrida and Brown it seems there are specters haunting us all; haunting and cloaking all epochs, all grand narratives, generations, and civilisations.
There is a computer game that is more popular in Japan than North America called Fatal Frame. Fatal Frame is not like other computer games where you chase and kill endless enemies with an impossible-to-carry array of weaponry and an endless supply of ammunition that happens to be lying around everywhere. In Fatal Frame the only tool or weapon you have is a camera. As the game progresses you can trade up to a better camera with a higher level of functionality. The purpose of the camera is to capture and repel ghosts. The scene of the game is an old mansion, and your character needs to traverse the dangerous nooks and crannies to rescue a lost sibling. The ghosts do not appear to you except through the view finder of the camera, and when you capture them on film you disperse them.
So I started to wonder: what technologies or techniques can we use to cause the ghosts and specters of hauntologies to appear? Or, more importantly, where can we look for them? Where do they emerge most clearly, even if that emergence or becoming visible or sensible is an accident, a by-product of some other process or technology, an unintended consequence of some other project, perhaps even a project that aims at the opposite, a project that does not seek to illuminate ghosts and spectres but to conceal and naturalise them? Perhaps we can call this capturing, whether intentional or unintentional, hauntography. I realize I’m pushing Derrida’s original and much punnier trope to its limit, but what the heck.
I was thinking about this concept as I read Donna Haraway’s essay Teddy Bear Patriarchy. I found the technologies behind dioramics and taxidermy fascinating, not so much for the representational techniques but rather for the total effect of capturing and displaying more clearly the auras and misty edges of these specters and ghosts that haunt the specific grand narrative Haraway so successfully teases out of the dioramas in the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.
Is there something unique and powerful in the technology of the diorama? Is the diorama more successful than other modes of representation at capturing and depicting hauntologies? Perhaps it is more dependant on the creator of the diorama, but these aspects all come together and provide Haraway the opportunity for a profoundly insightful close reading of the African Hall, its architecture, its displays, statuary and specifically, dioramics and taxidermics. [Read more]
Betamania!
October 12, 2005
The whole world is catching the beta bug. Beta this, beta that. Soon there will be no release versions at all. The family car will be beta, your fridge will be beta.
Blurt.info is now beta as well. Get with it people.
Beta: the great way to never have to say your sorry.
The Terminator is Coming
October 9, 2005
We already have drone aircraft that can engage ground-based forces and kill them without human intervention. Currently under development are nuclear versions of same, which could “loiter in the air for months without refuelling, striking at will when a target comes into its sights.” A more complex problem - ground-based drones - is inching closer to a reality with the successful completion of a 132 mile race for driverless vehicles yesterday. I’m glad to see we have our priorities straight. [Read more]
Only in Bolivia, you say?
October 8, 2005
Yesterday the Republicans pulled a really disgraceful, nasty move in the US House of Representatives. The Neocons were trying to push through another bill in favor of their Oil Friends. It didn’t go very well on the vote. 212-210 NAY was the first result. No wonder:
H.R. 3893 would authorize new programs and spending related to the supply and use of petroleum and other energy products. It would provide subsidies to small refiners, make certain federal lands available for siting new refineries, and revise the terms and procedures for approving these and other energy projects. The bill also would modify various standards in the Clean Air Act, direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to issue and enforce regulations regarding gasoline price gouging, and create two new funds to cover certain costs incurred by energy firms. Other provisions would authorize appropriations for the construction of a refinery for the Armed Services, for several energy studies and conservation initiatives, and for a Commission for the Deployment of the Hydrogen Economy. Finally, H.R. 3893 would authorize the Department of Energy (DOE) to increase the capacity of the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve and allow oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to be sold for new purposes.
As usual, pork for friends and, ahem, study for alternatives.
So, in the tradition of great democracies, the Chair held the vote open for nearly an hour until republican goons and hacks could get out the rubber hoses and strong-arm a couple out-of-line representives into changing their votes. That’s right. You read that right. They voted, and then they changed their votes. Keep counting until you get it right, right? The final “vote” was 212-210 YEA. Watch the QuickTime movie below to see the chair recieve the acceptable vote on a slip of paper, read it out and immediately close the vote. Amazing. This kind of stuff should be seen only in historical newreels.
By Your data Shall They Know You
October 7, 2005
We are our data. This is the message of a really great paper I read today coming out of XTech 2005: XML, the Web and beyond by Leigh Dodds of Ingenta that talks about social networking and web services. It seems to me that developers need to pay close attention to web services if we are to realize the dream of powerful distributed collaboration networks, as defined by my friends a socialsignal.com.
The key point Dodds makes is that its the data, stupid. She defines a “social content” service as:
A service whose primary goal is to allow users to contribute and freely share data, a secondary goal of such services is to enable users to connect themselves to communities of interest either by direction participation, or indirectly as a side effect of data sharing.
The point is well taken. Bulletin boards can be extremely tedious and not so communicative. Long streams of discordant commentary are not useful. If you have some important data (an idea, a picture, a story, some statistics, some lists of things, some update information, etc.), having a serial discussion of it is the last thing you want to do. You want to distribute it as widely as possible so that it can have a widespread effect. This is what happens when an item you publish is linked via RSS to exposure points on a network of sites. It is an instant way of allowing data to explode onto the scene, while a single, unconnected instance of that data may take weeks to be distributed widely, if ever.
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