Twitter as Attention Machine

I am reading On the Origin of Stories, a new book by Brian Boyd, which to make a long story short, draws conclusions from recent research into the mind and evolutionary psychology, that status is essentially attention (or at the very least attention is the currency of status). I can see how this applies to Twitter. The ability to 'favorite' another twitter's content is yet another way of bestowing attention. Twitter is an attention machine. When visiting a twitter's profile, being mentioned or retweeted in the stream of updates or being favorited are ways of gaining attention. A twitterer gains when a user with high attention favorites one of their tweets and more so, when they retweet.

Something Must Be Going On

The heart of OCD is a feeling of "not being right" or repeating a ritual until it "feels right." A creative mathematician experiences intuition as a feeling there is "something going on here but I don't know what it is" according to William Byers in How Mathematicians Think. You were probably taught in high school that mathematics is a rigorous and logical endeavor and that for every mathematical principle there is a proof. It was implied to you that mathematicians seek out new principles by following threads of logic from an existing proof to a new proof. You were taught a myth. Most mathematical breakthroughs began with an intuition. Only later, after the instruction was explored well enough to believe it was true, to believe it was worth proving, perhaps even after it was proved to the satisfaction of the mathematician was an "official" proof created for the record. Proof comes after the fact, not before it. An interesting relationship between obsessive compulsive disorder and mathematics.

Moreover, instruction plays a vital role in creative mathematics. Just as in other creative arts, a shift of frame is required to turn the ordinary into the novel. The author relates the story of how he along with fellow mathematician John McKay noticed something curious about a single number. If you express adding one to 196884 as an equation you get 196884 = 196884 + 1. On the surface, it hardly seems worth the interest of a mathematician. You can add one to any integer on to infinity, something obvious to even non-mathematicians. What is so fascinatingly curious about this instance? As Byers writes, "...these are not just any two numbers. They are significant mathematical constants that are found in two different areas of mathematics." The relationship of the constants could not be a coincidence, thought McKay, who began a line of inquiry leading to a series of conjectures, which went under the fanciful but telling name of "monstrous moonshine." I want to linger a moment on this point. Here we have a mathematician who sees something curious, which prompts a "gut feeling" something systematic must be going on, a suggestion there may be a relationship between two systems of mathematics, who starts inquiring into the possibility, and as he finds more support for the reality of the intuition, he begins to make conjectures about how the two systems might be connected through the curiosity he discovered. At this point, we can hardly blame a mathematician for feeling he was chasing "moonshine." But that is exactly what creative people do. They chase moonshine and rainbows. Yet, somehow they end up driving the process of scientific rational, mathematical and artistic discovery. McKay's conjectures were later proved.

Byers does relate mathematical creativity to artistic creativity, observing good mathematicians (the creative ones) are very sensitive to the feeling of something going on, and ties mathematical intuition to the poet's, quoting the poet Denise Levertov saying "You can smell a poem before you see it."

This is all a blow to anyone raised on the rhetoric of rationalism. The human mind is a reasoning machine. Human beings are rational actors seeking the most efficient path. This ought to be nonsense to any carnival barker or snake oil salesman, but for most educated people it is a conceit they sustain because they enjoy the belief they are rational. Reason has become a virtue and virtues cannot be questioned.

At the bottom of human irrationality may be rational decisions, observations, the machinery of the mind is not metaphysical, but the abstract layers above the fine grain of deterministic reasoning are irrational. The mind is connected to a body. People get "gut feelings" as their mind tries to tell itself something from its emotional, pattern recognizing centers. How else could the pattern recognizing centers of the brain communicate with this supremely rational being, other than by kicking it in the gut?

I take away from this you will not be a creative scientist, mathematician or musician unless you learn to use your intuition. Exercise your curiosity. Keep a childlike sense of astonishment about the world around you or the inner worlds you explore. Experiment. Follow instruction. Don't worry about the result, the path to a Nobel prize in mathematics is not by seeking that which is likely to win a prize, but by following up an intuition, seeing where the thread will lead, without any thought to where it will go, other than to satisfy curiosity and that feeling of something must be going on.

Snowball, the Dancing Bird

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound.



What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating a metrical framework. This is simply astonishing were it be to true, but perhaps not unexpected given the sophistication of bird vocalization and communication. It is one thing for a bird to keep time with a beat and an entirely different for a bird to exhibit division of the beat.

When people sing (or compose a melody to sing) the tones are not of arbitrary duration. No one could sing a song consisting of a series of tones of arbitrary duration measured to fractions of a second. Could you imagine signing a melody: A 1000ms, F 1500ms, E 500ms, D 1000ms, A 1000ms? The human mind is not well suited for measuring duration in milliseconds on an ordinary basis (we can leave out extraordinary abilities some humans may possess or develop). What if someone asked you to pick up the pace to sign faster? Each duration would have to be recalculated down to the millisecond, in your head. For this reason, music is organized by relative measures of duration.

In reality, when people sing or play music, they use simple division of the beat to measure duration. This is usually achieved through the division of a steady beat by whole fractions, usually simple divisors, like two or three. The most basic division of the beat is by two. When a tone of shorter duration than the beat is required, the melody will use a tone one half of the beat, or one quarter or one eighth and so on, down to the ability of humans to resolve divisions of time. The other main division of the beat observed in music is by three. So for every beat you have the possibility of three tones, six tones, twelve tones and so on. The human ability for perceiving and manipulation this time structure is sophisticated. Musicians can anticipate the division of future beats, playing notes that persist across multiple divisions of the beat or create "holes" or silences for certain beats, playing with the listeners expectations (this is called syncopation). I have to wonder if the small movements he makes dividing the beat follow any ornamentation of percussion or melody in the song. In the background, another bird can be seen bobbing his head to the beat, in a clear parallel to human "head banging."

Although I would have to watch a lot more video to be sure, what I have seen suggests he may be dividing the beat and deserves further investigation. I would not be surprised to find that birds do erect a sense of metrical time in sound and can mentally divide the beat and even anticipate it, perhaps even perceive syncopation. It is fascinating to watch Snowball lose and pick up the beat again.

I did watch a couple of video clips. At about 2:00 into the following video he lifts his foot and waves time to the beat, but does not divide it.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s)


In the following video, notice how he keeps the beat when Stevie Nicks sings "ooh, ooh" on the beat? This suggests he has an expectation of the beat even when the beat is not marked by a percussive instrument. At about 1:05 he may have divided the beat with a wave. He does lose the beat more frequently when based only on Nick's vocals or less percussive sections. At 2:31 he appears to divide the beat with a wave again. And at 2:56. I'm not sure if he's just losing the beat or dividing it...but this is a seriously important question about the intelligence of birds. At 4:43 also.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYMBIGTteWA&feature=channel)

(Note: The time required for a complete cycle of A above middle C is 2.27 milliseconds and a sixteenth note at a metronomic pace of 60 clicks per second is 250 milliseconds, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond 2009)

Graphic Recording

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

Life, Flickr and the New Panasonic GH1

The HD video version of the Panasonic Micro Four-Thirds camera is coming out, the GH1, and it confirms my idea this camera has potential to facilitate a new visual journalism, citizen journalism, social media journalism, whatever you want to call it, and Panasonic is aware of it (as I would assume they were from the time they started development of the system).

According to Twice.com "fans who bring their Panasonic DMC-G1 cameras to Beck’s live performances will have the opportunity to take photos and videos at the event." Fans can submit photographs for inclusion on Jeff Beck's website.

We may be seeing the beginning, with Flickr, JPG magazine and others who may follow in their footsteps, of a new great era of the "picture magazine" recapitualted on the network (I say network, because it is not just the web or email, anymore but content is becoming social and available throughout the network on all kinds of devices in all kinds of human contexts) through camreas like the G-series and social photo sharing sites.

The process described in the article, whereby fans photographs will be allowed to bubble up through an edited system for display on Facebook or the artist's website is reminiscent of the collaborative rating system on JPG magazine bubbles up content, so it is brought to the attention of editors, who then use their critical understanding of the art, and the state of the art, to decide which images appear in the official magazine. A very similar process to Life or Look magazine, which catered to an audience interested in learning about the world around them visually, before television.

Olympus Offers "Proof" Photo Contest

I like Olympus cameras. Ever since I saw and handled the OM-2 at the camera shop, when I was a teenager deciding on my first SLR camera (not that I could afford the OM's) and very impressed with the compactness of the OM-1 and OM-2 and performance of Zuiko lenses, I've had an affinity for Olympus. In recent years they have produced some amazing digital single lens reflex cameras, such as the first ones with Live View and the legendary E-1. But their marketing efforts have fallen short of what is necessary to explain the advantages of Olympus and Four Thirds photography.

Olympus is running a photo contest, asking for images offering "proof" of the ability of their weather resistant cameras to go where most cameras cannot. This is at least heading in the right direction, emphasizing the extraordinary weather sealing that Olympus cameras have, the experience Olympus has with making tough, water-resistant cameras. If I wanted to take a camera with me while exploring caves, I would choose the E-3 hands down. If I wanted to continue shooting on a rainy day, I would choose the E-3. If I wanted to shoot waves standing in surf. If I wanted to photograph off-road vehicle races. If I wanted to visit Africa or some other wild place. It would be the E-3 (or E-1).

Some will say weather sealing is not really important. How many photographs are taken in bad weather? But we really don't know how many photographs or what photographs might be taken if all cameras and lenses were weather sealed. It's like saying you don't need ISO 64000 becuase photographers got along fine with ISO 400 for years. Having ISO 64000 allows you to explore realms you never could before, in ways you never could before.

Henri Cartier-Bresson introduced a whole new vocabulary for photography, which he could not have done without the availablity of high speed black and white film and a small, unobtrusive camera to make "street photography" possible. Not every photographer needs high sensitivity or extraordinary weather sealing, but both give the photographer new possibilities to explore.

Degas and the Little Dancer

I recalled the story of Degas's sculpture the Little Dancer the other day. For a long time I have looked upon it as an example of how creativity really works and some of the misunderstandings about creativity our society perpetuates.

It might surprise you to know that Degas was not a sculptor. Although he made a number of sculptures, none of them were ever shown to the public except for the dancer. For a long time Degas was frustrated that sculptors were failing to explore what we now call realism in sculpture. It appears that Degas' interest in photography may have inspired him to envision a new vocabulary for sculpture, which depicted the subject as it really was, instead of attempting to inspire people with an idea or vision of what ought to be. Most sculptors of his time continued to work in this tradition of heroic or uplifting sculpture. Oddly enough, this is akin to "socialist realism" of the 1930s, which demanded that art earn its living by bringing about social change or improvement in society, otherwise it was not worth the effort. If art was not uplifting the individual or society, it was not worthwhile. The art world was astonished by the little dancer, many critics were disgusted and offended by its realism. It was revolutionary and introduced realism to sculpture. Degas had a truly innovative vision for sculpture and despite not being a sculptor he decided that it would be up to him to realize this vision.

An article on Degas published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the quality of his work politely, saying "the artist's armatures were often inadequate." (Timeline of Art History, Edgar Degas (1834–1917): Bronze Sculpture http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/dgsb/hd_dgsb.htm 2008). My understanding is that this was an understatement, that restoration artists working on the original wax sculptures found them to be very fragile, falling apart. This may be due to their intermediary role in casting a bronze, but I believe it is another piece of the puzzle demonstrating Degas was not a professional sculptor. It is believed Degas had help from friends who were sculptors from time to time while creating the Little Dancer.

There is a website, the Daily WTF?, devoted to sharing the coding mistakes (among other things like funny or confusing error messages) of naive, inexperienced or confused programmers. It occurred to me that if a Daily WTF? existed for sculptors when the Little Dancer was presented to the world, Degas would have made the front page. It certainly would not have met with approval from professional sculptors in his day. The site could be viewed as akin to group of master craftspeople getting together to laugh at the mistakes of apprentices and lesser craftspeople.

What is the lesson in all of this? What I came to understand was there is a difference between craft and art. Sculptors have "doing things correctly" as the measure of themselves and their profession. Sculpture should be done the "correct" way otherwise it should be regarded with contempt. Degas showed that one does not need to meet this standard to create a significant work of art that demonstrates the possibility inherent in a new artistic vocabulary, in this case, the introduction of realism into sculpture.

Degas was frustrated that sculptors were not exploring realism in sculpture. When he saw that they were not going to do something about it, he decided that he had to step in, despite not being a sculptor. The sculptors were capable of creating refined, polished, correct works according to their traditions, but they were not up to creating a revolution in art. In fact, their devotion to craft made it more difficult to (and less likely) to create an artistic breakthrough.

It happens that many good creative people restrain themselves out of fear. I know there are people who had ideas for innovative software applications, which were created in private but never released, because the code might end on the Daily WTF? Or whatever equivalent they imagined existed within the programming community at the time. They could have released their code to the wild and might have been influential and garnered attention for their work, but they failed to do so out of fear. This is not unique to software, but afflicts all creative activities.

It is the fear that you're not good enough to write a novel unless you're as good as the best novelist. It is the fear you're not good enough to make a film, because you're not as good as the best filmmaker. It is the fear you're not good enough to paint a significant painting, make a significant photograph, write a good story, because you're not equal to the best practitioners in the field. But that's not what art is about. Art is about the idea and you only need to be good enough to get a revolutionary idea across to succeed, not live up to the expectations of a craft community.

I am reminded of Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition appearing in a 1759 letter, he asks “why are originals so few?” His answer is that “illustrious examples engross, prejudice, and intimidate” creative people into silence. He goes on to say that we must not imitate the works of a great author, but should imitate the method or understanding by which their great works were arrived at. He asks authors to not become overawed by authority, to “let not great examples of authorities browbeat” you into dismissing your own ideas, your own creativity. He says we should “reverence” ourselves so as to prefer the “the native growth” of our own mind and “the man who thus reverences himself will soon find the world's reverence to follow his own.” Only by not being “strangers to our own abilities” and not “thinking meanly of them” can we learn to “cherish every spark of intellectual light.” Degas was an accomplished painter but not an accomplished sculptor, so how did he manage to revolutionize the vocabulary or sculpture? By not deferring to authority or exhibiting “diffidence” to his own ideas about what sculpture should be.

We teach people the wrong thing, we teach them to be perfectionists, to do things the correct way or not at all, but we don't teach them about Degas, we don't teach them that the creative act is more important than perfecting the craft, but then most people are engaged in some kind of craft or another, because that is where they derive their income and the world is mostly concerned with ensuring people earn a living. I know some people will argue that it is possible to perfect one's craft and to be a great artist. I am not arguing against that possibility, but it is rare, and doesn't apply to Degas.

Degas perfected his craft as a painter, but his ability to paint did not help or hinder his task of demonstrating the possibility for realism in sculpture, which required that he move into an area that was not his practiced expertise. He didn't have to perfect his craft as a sculptor to create a sculpture that was a declaration of a novel idea. Just as a sum can be greater than its parts, a lesser work can be greater than the best works of the day. It is greater because of its intellectual light, it's daring and reach, not the quality of its manufacture.

Is Hollywood the "Shadow Government?"

Increasingly, as so-called intellectual property becomes more prominent in the economy of the information age, is the entertainment industry becoming our government?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11885

Copyright is beginning to destroy our culture and exterminate the arts until Western art will be an empty shell, if it isn't already.

On second thought, this is easy to defeat. Just take an empty media player with you and fill it up from the network once you arrive at your destination...most people will probably fill it up with "pirate" editions since those will be the easiest to obtain. Someday, there won't be any source other than the network anyway. Or, as one person commented, mail your ipod to you.

I have to agree with the other comments that this is a futile effort by hidebound executives to put their finger in the dike. What troubles me is that this erosion of our culture has been going on for a long time, since the introduction of recorded media. I've said before that we should consider avoiding recorded media, that society should return to entertaining itself by playing our music, singing, gathering to hear music played locally, similar to the local eating movement. The invention of the phonorecord, despite the positive of being able to preserve music, has done a great deal of damage to the existing music culture. In the 19th century most people were in a band, played piano, sang in a choir, perhaps many still do, but when I compare our culture and attitudes toward music to a society like Ireland or others relatively untouched by recorded music, there is much greater participation. Everyone sings or plays a musical instrument it seems, and it's not shameful for ordinary people to join in and sing even if they aren't up to "professional" standards, yet the same culture produces some of the best singers and musicians. Recorded music appears to have eroded the incentives to play and sing, and created disincentives to perform publicly, reduced the outlets and venues, turned performance into an industry, much like farming has been turned into an industry.

It is strange to hear music of any and all genre coming at you from random directions and sources. It's like food, with technology, there are no seasons. Hearing music without the musicians divorces it from its culture and locality. One car goes down the street thumping out rap, the next blaring Latin rhythms, a country song, rock, pop, jazz. Which is the real music? Which is the real feeling? I think this is something that recorded music has done, cut us adrift from musical culture, musical practice, musical community. When we can have any music at our fingertips, played back as a card board cutout of the original through speakers, its volume controlled by a knob, it is like food disconnected from the seasons, from growing, from cooking.

Thoughts on the 4:3 Format and Golden Rectangles

I have a suspicion the near 4:3 ratios of the traditional photographic print sizes (probably based on traditional canvas sizes, but I am unsure of this...it seems likely) emerged due to a concentration of photography on portraiture in its early days and that photography adapted the canvas sizes used in painting, which very likely emerged out of portraiture. I am not entirely sure of this, but it seems reasonable to assume the majority of traditional paintings, as painting emerged in the Renaissance as an important feature of Western art, were portraits at first. The landscape I assume is a later invention as nature began to be seen less of a threat to life and more as an enjoyable extension of human space. We have to remember that nature, i.e. the forest, was a terrifying place for our ancestors and only in the 19th century did the modern conceit of the 'pastoral' emerge. So I hazard that most paintings were portraits. I doubt many of the first patrons wanted paintings of the landscape, they wanted paintings of themselves.

So, I conclude from this the 4:3 ratio may be ideal for portraits. Despite it not being as close to the golden rectangle as 3:2 format. This many explain why photographers who love 4:3 often speak of the difficulty they have with portraits using 3:2 format cameras and why landscape photographers say they prefer the wider 3:2 landscape. It may not be that there is _one_ ideal ratio for all images, but that there are ideal ratios for different _types_ of images. I remember my own struggles using a 35mm camera (3:2 aspect ratio) to take portraits, trying to frame the subject head and shoulders, either getting too much ceiling or too much waist in the finder. The 3:2 ratio frame is just too tall and narrow to comfortably fit the human head and shoulders, which may explain why 8 x 10 and other close to 4:3 ratio forms were favored in painting or early photography.

I would have to learn more about the size frequencies of traditional Western paintings before the 19th century to know for sure.

It is interesting to note 8 x 10, 5 x 7, 11 x 14 all are closer to 4:3 and are also the traditional photographic print sizes in the United States, which emerged in the 19th century with photographic print making and plate (glass negative) sizes. The one exception is 11 x 17, which is 1.54 and very close to the golden rectangle. I do not know how prevalent this size was as an enlargement in the 19th and early 20th century, but it seems to be rare. The 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 were the most common sizes from the mid-19th century to mid-20th century, up to the 35mm camera boom from mid-century to end of century. In the box camera era, many millions of snapshots were small, R3 or R4 I think they call it, 3 1/2 x 5 or 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches.

8 x 12 is close to the golden rectangle (12.94 / 8.0 exactly). I always thought the 11 x 14 was an odd size, but seemed to be commonly used in the 35mm days for enlargements, but is very far from 1.6, very distant from 8 x 12 since the nearest golden rectangle is approximately 8 x 14 (9 x 14.56)! An interactive golden rectangle calculator is available at
http://www.mathopenref.com/rectanglegolden.html

I always felt the pull to use the whole 35mm frame. It was just natural. I do not know why, but I loved to frame my compositions using the full viewfinder and hated to crop my images to the traditional sizes. I hated the enlarger frame used to hold the paper down with its fixed print sizes. I wanted to get one with sliding frames so I could choose print sizes like 8 x 12, but there was also the problem of obtaining paper in non-traditional sizes. I had some color prints made later in 8 x 12 after the influence of 35mm point and shoot cameras began to make prints and frames available in the 8 x 12 size for a while in the early 1980s. I used (horribly non-archival) "frameless" frames that sandwiched the 8 x 12 print between a piece of Masonite and glass and appeared to hang magically on the wall. Nothing interfered with the image I had seen through the lens at the moment I chose to trip the shutter. It was only later I learned that Cartier-Bresson had claimed using the whole 35mm frame introduced some special 'magic' to image making. I'm still not convinced he was not pulling our collective leg. There are images that 3:2 butchers and images that it helps.

It was just my style to want to see through the lens and then capture what I saw without thinking about cropping. I still prefer to print my 4:3 images (from an Olympus Four Thirds camera) 9 x 12 inches because I have always found 8 x 10 induces a "claustrophobic" feeling, where slightly upsizing to 9 x 12 gives the image room to breath and a feeling more like the 8 x 12 for some reason. It may have something to do with human visual perception, that as an image gets larger, it encompasses more of the visual field of the eye and "wideness" becomes less important.

An interesting question is when shooting in a 4:3 format, how does the "non-goldenness" of the frame affect compositional elements placed at or the frame divided by a golden rectangle? What happens when a 4:3 ratio rectangle is divided by the 3:2 ratio? We are told that an interesting property of the golden rectangle is if a section whose side is equal to the shortest side is marked off, a new golden rectangle is formed. So the frame is a golden rectangle and at about the third of the longest side is another golden rectangle, which is about equal to photographer's rules of thumb to place the horizon line at thirds vertically. Also, the "rule of thirds" points are about where the golden rectangle would place them. Does the 4:3 disturb the relationship between the outer frame and these golden divisions of the frame?

This is all mostly speculation based on intuition and memory, so don't take it as gospel but as a starting point for thinking about aspect ratio and composition.

Random Blather on Andy Warhol and Social Networks

Andy Warhol could have expressed himself in any medium. He chose painting (or at least a medium that appeared on its surface to be painting), perhaps by accident or by design, but whether he chose painting for this reason or was merely successful because he chose correctly, we may not know, but at the time he worked painting was the one medium where an artist would be taken seriously, what they had to say about society would be taken seriously in the medium of painting. He could have expressed his prescient views on celebrity and mass media by carving little dolls or collages, but he chose painting, I believe because that is the medium society would take seriously and pay attention to. If he didn't understand that, he was ignorant of the art world and society from the mid-twentieth century to the end of the twentieth-century. Only now with the information age are new art forms emerging that make painting, novels, movies obsolete.

A great artist does not care what medium they work in. They only care, as Warhol understood, that the job of the artist is to achieve a unity with their times and produce works that are completely in tune with what is happening in society, only slightly before society begins to realize what is happening. Celebrity was coalescing into a powerful social force in Warhol's time and he recognized it before anyone and found a means of expression for his recognition.

If you want to be a great artist today, you will not want to paint with oils like Picasso, abuse industrial sign printing technology like Warhol, or take photographs, you will want to discern the unique changes taking place in society in your time and create works that show people that. I don't know what they are or what medium it will be, but I can take some guesses. Social networking seems to have the force and weight that celebrity once had in 20th century society. It is emerging as a phenomena with the potential to completely reorganize authorship, art and life in the next century. I know it seems small and like a fad, but it there are profound changes taking place when you start to a) make authorship easy for everyone and b) make it easy to mix content from more than one person. When it becomes commonplace and ubiquitous for people to have other people's works of authorship displayed mixed in on their "social network profile page" (an ugly phrase, but what do you call it other than "my page?"), it changes the nature of authorship. It used to be clear who authored a work. Now it is not so clear or at least confusing to someone who grew up with books signed by an author, news stories bylined by the reporter. But the times are changing. It seems normal to young people to have other people's content show up mixed in their own, to see pages with content contributed by many people all jumbled together. I forsee a shift in the way people gain status, not just through works of authorship, which the networked world breaks down (devalues), but through becoming essentially editors of their own personal magazine...the profile page. It is a logical extension of your friends appearing on your social network home page, a simple step from that to your friends works of authorship appearing on your home page. This is like a "digg/slashdot/kuro5hin" site in miniature, where you get to approve or disapprove the content (stories, photos, etc.) appearing on your page. Users on flickr, gain status not just through authorship, but through association. The user with the most authors in their "stable" or contacts list or whose content appears on their page, wins. We already see the editors of these pages begging authors to "join their group" or become friends so that the best shared content will appear on their page.

I experimented with this in the late 1990s but it never went anywhere since I didn't push the project to completion. I was held back by fears, which I attributed to worries over vandalism (it was wiki-style), but which I believe were existential fears about authorship, the breaking down of authorship that might occur when one could easily refer to or include other people's content in your own through tagging (which was how it was to work).

Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku

I received Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku, yesterday (the 19th of May), a poetic and anecdotal chronicle of the celebrated poet's journey in 1689 to the northern end of the island of Honshū. The book itself is beautifully made of high quality materials, typical of a Japanese paperback. I sent for Bashō after enjoying his poetry while studying haiku and having read the jacket cover blurb by illustrator Miyato Masayuki online before ordering. I was captivated by the description of Bashō "drifting with the clouds and streams" and "lodging under trees and on hard rocks," in his long journey to Oku.

I felt a sensation of deja vu wash over me as I read the blurb. I looked up to one of my drawings on the wall behind where I sit at my computer, which depicts a poplar leaf caught up in the flow of a stream and about to run aground on a rock. I had seen many a leaf in this predicament, turning and twirling with the current until it snagged upon a rock, in my explorations of Four Mile Run, a local stream (I grew up in Northern Virginia, which is blessed by a myriad of small streams running through valleys).

I was certain there was more here than a description of a journey, but the words were metaphor for Bashō himself caught up in the currents of his journey, like a fallen leaf lodging under trees laying across the stream, escaping for a moment to twirl and spin, then come up again on hard rocks, until once again released by the force of the current, the journey can continue. I just had to have this book.

Before I continue, a word on the illustrations. The torn paper art of Masayuki illustrating each haiku is simply astonishing. I would have said it was done with an airbrush or is digital artwork unless I was told the illustrations were constructed from torn bits of paper. Simply amazing. I would have liked to seen the originals, since the printing does not do them justice. I could write a whole essay on just the illustrations alone.

Although the title is difficult to translate, I believe its meaning comes through clearly. Oku refers to the Northern provinces of Honshū and is known as the "interior." Knowing that Bashō chose this title for his work despite the road playing a very small role in the account, suggests the title was chosen for its double meaning, that he was traveling literally to the interior of northern Japan and metaphorically into his own interior life and that of poetry.

I am fascinated by many aspects of his poetry. The use of ordinary descriptions and freedom from grandiose visions or exaggerated emotions typically associated with poetry. The indirection and use of context and implication in communicating (or failing to communicate--many of his poems are difficult to understand without the help of the journal. I doubt I would be as satisfied by the poems without the story of his journey) contrast with the Western poem.

Bashō's poems frequently end with a line that only makes sense in light of the previous verse.

At a point in his travels, Bashō passes between a rice field and the sea.

Sweet smelling rice fields
to our right as we pass through
The Aristo Sea.

Another chronicler of a "road trip," Kerouac might have portrayed the journey with greater intensity, but not with greater delicacy than Bashō. His poetry is all the more remarkable considering this is simply a description of a scene passing by, recorded with delicacy and detail. This poem makes a complete sentence over its three short lines, but the last one is still jarring. On first reading it, there is a strangeness I cannot quite put my finger on. Typical of his haiku, it is less than a sentence fragment, not much more than a multi-word noun, frequently the name of a natural wonder. The line has a tendency to stand still, which may explain why they so often come at the end of a poem.

It is still a bit jarring to my ears when encountering a line that does not seem to state anything, but makes a statement only through counterpoint with the previous verses.

Turbulent the sea--
Across to Sado stretches
The Milky Way.

Then again, I may not be reading it right, since it does form a complete sentence with the second line. It may just be the novelty of reading haiku.

A better example from Bashō's poems that end with a line that only makes sense in light of the previous verse is this one:

At Yamanaka
No need to pick chrysanthemums--
The scent of hot springs.

I thought if I had read the last line alone, I would ask "the scent of hot springs ... what?" But when followed by the first two lines, the meaning becomes clear. The hot springs are as fragrant as the chrysanthemum.

For a while, Bashō stopped to rest under a willow tree famous from poetry and wrote the following haiku:

They sowed a whole field,
And only then did I leave
Saigyō's willow tree.

It is remarkable how Bashō measures time by how long it takes for a rice field to be planted. We must remember in ancient times, before clocks were commonplace and before the invention of the minute that rules our lives, people measured time by how long it took to complete some common task. Bashō was measuring time using the most immediate unit at hand, which offers a poetic opportunity for sowing a field to stand in place of the clock (at least with reference to the time addicted modern reading it, the poet may have been merely descriptive). It is an example of the brand of poetic indirection Bashō is known for.

What this tells me about poetry (and song alike) is that the poet must forget about imbuing his poetry with meaning, and just write down their experiences. Time will change the meaning and imbue the lines with meaning discovered by each reader or generation of readers. I feel he was merely describing what he saw and did while visiting a spot mentioned in poetry (a favorite activity of Japanese travelers) in concise and flowing words. It is very hard for a Westerner to give up that need for the poem to be _about_ something, to convey some grand meaning. The haiku is very much like a photograph, a graceful and economical record of an experience.

In the darkness gathering over a lonely beach, amidst the fishermen's huts and a forlorn temple, where Bashō went to collect little masuo shells, the poet left us with the second to last poem of his journey, a question:

What do the waves bring?
Mixed in with little shells
Bits of clover blooms.

This is the most memorable of my favorites, surfacing from time to time when thoughts are idle, holding on to unconscious attention more tenaciously than others, in the short time I've been acquainted with the Narrow Road to Oku. I believe it resonates with the way I see the world and reminds me my approach to photography, which hopes to accomplish what Bashō does, to call attention to the grace of ordinary things. It requires sensitivity and courage to take notice, as Bashō did, of bits of clover blooms amidst the stones and shells of tidal shallows. It's hard to consider we nearly missed having it, being the next to the last poem his journey inspired!

Creative Photography: Subversive Detail and Conceptual Contrast

Subversive content in photographs. No, I do not mean politically subversive, but details in the image that subvert or comment on the image's subject. For example, you may be attempting a very serious image of an important landmark, let's say the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington, Virginia, but in the foreground are parked a string of dump trucks or perhaps a string of circus vans. The presence of such contradictory details undermines the meaning and mood of the image. Of course, it can also be used by the photographer in a controlled manner to create commentary.

Here is an excellent example where subversive content is used to enhance the image. The graffiti in the background becomes a compositional element leading the eye to the hugging couple frame right and the joyous dancing figure of the iPod advertisement directly behind them communicates what the photographer "mind reads" or imagines is their inner feelings.

Hugs (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007)

(It reminds me of a late image by André Kertész from the 1970s of a couple I saw published in a photo magazine in the late 1970s, which if I recall, he made from his window).

Reflections in windows have famously been used as a way to introduce subversive content into images.

The important thing to keep in mind is the idea is not to introduce a lot of clutter or trash detail into your image, but to let the extraneous detail become a commentary. It has to mean something. You need to ensure the image forms and idea not just a composition (although sometimes a certain composition has such a powerful affect on the viewer that is sufficient to constitute an great image).

A good example of this by the same photographer. This image is powerful merely for it sense of captured movement and how the woman, coat, dog and background material "divide the frame," which is simply a term of art for how the three dimensional objects in the image divide the flat two dimensional area of the image into sections in an interesting way. Dividing the frame is an important concept in any two dimensional visual art.

Woman and Dog (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007)

Photographers also use contrast...not not contrast in exposure terms...but contrast in terms of visual language. For example, this image creates a feeling of loneliness by isolating the human figures as impersonal silhouettes in a large space inhabited by shafts of luminous light but contrasts the aloneness by presenting a group of people, not just one person. By this he contrasts loneliness and togetherness in the same image.

Across The Light (Tate Modern, London 2005, godfrey digiorgi)


By the way, I do not have to mention Godfrey is an excellent photographer who understands these important principles of authorship in photography. I found examples of both visual ideas discussed in this entry quickly on his site. He obviously understands that to make good photographs, to make photographs that are significant artifacts for consideration by society, the images must say something, not just be well exposed and composed, that the photographer must establish and manipulate a visual vocabulary. His best images have something to say and the few that fall flat are the ones that fail to establish and communicate an idea. A photograph without the presence of the author is nothing more than a documentary image (those have value as well, but that is not what I am discussing here...I certainly appreciate vernacular and documentary images).

Even if the photographer did not intend a specific message the images communicate one. There is a quote, I cannot recall exactly, but it was regarding hypocrisy and concluded the mind cannot know itself completely at once, which applies.