Singularity
visual culture

Passing by a Dublin Bike station the other day, I remembered a blog post I never wrote about currency – one of those. Yes, you see, I often wonder about such things.

As it happens, since I arrived in Ireland a while back I have been sharing accommodation with other people. One of the meaningless things I noted is that oftentimes forks and coffee spoons quickly run out on the clean cutlery drawer; there is high demand while supply doesn’t vary. They end up in the sink, or in the dishwasher at best, awaiting to be serviced. Curiously enough, spoons and knives tend to be less popular. So, what do you do when you can’t find one of these clean? You wash one, of course. You have to, really. But I wondered if adding currency to the demand – like printing more notes – would have any effect.

Yes, I tested it: I added a whole new set of 6, but only of forks and spoons. And what do you think it was the result?

Recently, the unexpected success of the Dublin City Bikes brought with it a minor downfall, a crack in the joyful experience of such a civilised engagement. Suddenly we the users realised that at certain times during the day, in particular locations, it was impossible to find a station to park. It defeated the purpose, as one had to travel to another station, perhaps far and inconvenient. But now we are offered a couple of solutions:

The first one: “In this case, log in at the terminal with either your Long Term Hire Card or 3 Day Ticket and you will be given 15 minutes free of charge to get to the nearest station with available stands and a list of nearby stations with availability.”

The second one, on top of that, is the addition of another 10 parking bays in many of these stations, to a total of 287 new bike stands.

And here, while passing by and taking that picture shown above, I thought about the paradox of the fork. The addition of that new set only proved to work depending on the number of users. The more users, the more likely to find a drawer with no forks. At the same time, the more users, the more likely the forks would be cleaned and placed back in the drawer. Is there an ideal number of users then?

I am sure there is a mathematical way to look at this, I just hope they talked to the right person about it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html

“On a chilly January morning 24 years ago, Corydon optometrist Jack Moss raised his new video camera to the sky over central Florida and captured one of the darkest moments in American space exploration the explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

In the videotape, a stream of white smoke behind the climbing shuttle shoots into view but Moss, his wife and a neighbor noticed immediately that More..something was amiss when the channel separated into two streams.

‘Thats trouble of some kind’, Moss can be heard saying. ‘That didnt look right.’

Moments later, someone is heard telling Moss that the Challenger had blown up.”

Via YouTube

Norman Mailer has stated that boxing is a metaphor for life. Investment of time and energy in a tradition like boxing can be explained through the desire to achieve stability in a rapidly changing world. It may also engender a yearning for a more vital existence and a longing for authenticity. In this photographic work, Mandy O’Neill uses the world of the amateur boxer to explore such ideas and to examine aspects of the human condition.

These images were taken over a two-year period at St Saviours Boxing club, Dorset St in Dublin.

Mandy O’Neill is a Visual Artist based in Dublin. She graduated with a BA in Photography from the DIT College of Photography in 2005. She has recently exhibited at ‘RUA RED’ Dublin 2009 and the RHA Dublin 2009.

Alliance Francaise
1, Kildare Street , Dublin 2

Opening Thursday 26 November at 6.30pm
Admission free
27 November 2009 – 6 February 2010

The National Campaign for the Arts in Ireland is a broad and inclusive coalition that reflects the scale, reach and diversity of the arts in Ireland today. Its membership has a national reach that includes major festivals, venues, producers and representative organisations in visual arts, theatre, film, dance, music, literature, architecture and collaborative arts.

The National Campaign for the Arts asserts the fundamental importance of the arts to economic recovery and calls for:

• Retention of Culture Ireland, the agency for the promotion of Irish arts worldwide.
• Retention of The Irish Film Board, development agency of the Irish film industry.
• Maintenance of existing levels of funding to the Arts Council.
• Retention of the artists’ income tax exemption scheme.
• Commitment to retain the arts portfolio at cabinet as part of a senior ministerial portfolio.

Why the arts are central to economic and social recovery.

• The arts and our reputational capital
• The arts and the smart economy
• The arts and cultural tourism
• The arts and employment
• The arts and the national psyche

How can you help?

- Read more about it at The National Campaign for the Arts web site
- Become a Member: Register your membership of the Campaign
- Sign the online petition.
- Follow them on Facebook and Twitter
- Donate: help funding for the Campaign

Henry Jenkins is the director, Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. In this viral-info-snack he discusses the power of media in a 21 century trans-mediated world. A world where converging technologies and cultures give rise to a new media landscape.

Just a quick video about a few people thought’s on Art, made by meetforeal.com

“We went out in the streets of Galway asking different sorts of people what they thought about art.”

A unique experiment uncovering crime in a typical British city

Why did they choose Oxford?
“We selected Oxford because it is as close as we could find to a typical British city. In terms of demographics, and particularly in terms of levels and types of crimes, it is typical of the national picture.”

More at the ‘The Truth About Crime’ BBC web site

Until fifteen years ago the Ru Kitch photographers were a familiar sight on the streets of Pakistan. For the odd penny they photographed passers-by, in black and white, with the results available immediately. The term Ru Kitch – literally ‘extracting the spirit’ – refers to the way in which the photographer stuck his hand into the camera in order to pull out the photograph. In fact the camera was a darkroom on a tripod, in which a photo could be developed in two minutes. The popularity of the color photo drove this century-old tradition from the street scene. The British photographer Malcolm Hutcheson prepared this survey of it.

RU KITCH, STREET PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE PUNJAB (1950-2000) was part of the 13th Noorderlicht International Photofestival (Sep-Oct 2006, The Netherlands), comprised of work by three Ru Kitch photographers, of whom only Mohammad Amin Naveed is still active. In the old days, passers-by, friends and families were eager to have him do a photograph of them as a souvenir of a day out. Now he makes his living by pasting portraits of his clients on pictures of famous names from the film industry. Naveed turned out to have in his possession a dusty box with work of his late uncle Gogi Pehlwan. He was active for forty years as a wrestler and Ru Kitch photographer. Hutcheson fills out his overview with the work of old Babba Bhutta, who was a Ru Kitch photographer for sixty years. He learned his trade from his father and has a collection of photos that perfectly reflects the peaceful life in a small Indian village.

Malcolm Hutcheson (Great Britain/Pakistan, b. 1966) is a photographer and teaches photography at the school for Visual Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. He devotes a huge amount of energy to setting up a photographic archive for the Pakistani province of Punjab.

Coming this Autumn, a magnificent exhibition that will bring to Dublin a taste of the old New York photographed by some big names like Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbot, Alfred Stieglitz, and more.
It will be at IMMA from the 25 Nov 2009 to the 07 Feb 2010.

Picturing New York comprises 150 masterworks from the photographic collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, covering the period from the 1880s to the present day. It celebrates the tradition of photographing New York, a tradition that frames and influences the perception of this vibrant urban centre. Including photographs by such influential photographers as Berenice Abbot, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lisette Model, Alfred Stieglitz and Cindy Sherman, it explores both New York and its inhabitants, highlighting associations – from the vast, overwhelming architecture and bright lights, to the diversity of people that lie at the soul of the city.

The photographs reveal New York as a city of contrasts and extremes through images of towering blocks and tenements, party-goers and street-dwellers, hurried groups and solitary individuals. Picturing New York demonstrates the symbiosis between the city’s progression from past to present and the evolution of photography as a medium and as an art form. Additionally, these photographs of New York contribute significantly to the notion that the photograph, as a work of art, is capable of constructing a sense of place and a sense of self.

Picturing New York: Photographs from The Museum of Modern Art is organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is travelling under the auspices of the International Council of MoMA. It is curated by Sarah Meister, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings at MoMA. The exhibition will also be  presented at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain (26 March to 14 June 2009) and the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy, (11 July to 11 October  2009).

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue produced by Thames & Hudson which includes a foreword by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA, an essay by the curator Sarah Meister, and text by notable New Yorkers.

via IMMA