What happens when you curse your own country? In this version of the classic Americana tale your host is sentenced to live out the rest of his days in a hot air balloon. In part one we hear the story of what happened when he fought the “three strikes you are out forever” law and lost. Plus Howard Zinn on the myth of American Exceptionalism.
A few years ago your host took a pilgrimage to Copenhagen to walk the streets the great Dane Søren Kierkegaard once walked. He wanted to understand the meaning of Kierkegaard’s religious stage so he decided to ask the experts at the Kierkegaard research center. Also Photographer Dina Litovksy tells us about the history and some of the secrets of the modern bachelorette party. And Michael Holmes tells us about life’s final stage – death.
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This week we examine the legacy of The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin. Media Theorist and Benjamin scholar (and translator) Thomas Levin explains why this essay resonates today and what Benjamin has to tell us about the utopian power of new media. Also Russell Meyer tells us about the Wu-Tang clan’s plan to release a sole copy of their new album and why he has turned to Kickstarter so he can buy it and release it to the world. And your host shares an imaginary story about Hitler and Goebbels encountering Benjamin’s essay during their final days in the bunker.
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Andrew Rubin opens up his Archives of Authority to tell us the story of how George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 became global phenomenons. Melissa Gira Grant tells us about her new book Playing the Whore and the complicated relationship between sex workers, Feminists, Journalists, and the Police. And your host turns to ToE correspondent Peter Choyce for advice on how to fight his bike ticket in traffic court.
Technology consultant Sarah Slocum loves social media and her Google Glass, she wears them everywhere. But when she walked into Molotov’s, a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco, she discovered that not everyone shares her love for wearable gadgets. Also, your host makes his annual pilgrimage to SXSWi and ends up designing wearables at a surreal Hack Day. We also hear from Shingy, AOL’s Digital Prophet. He says wearables will allow us to have it both ways: we can be both digital and human.
After moving to New York alone, writer Olivia Laing discovered the truth about loneliness. She says it is a gift. Eric Klinenberg explains why more and more people are choosing to live alone and why cities like New York must invest in housing stock that singletons actually want to live in, the type of housing they have in Scandinavian countries. In Denmark when someone dies alone, and no-one claims the body, the authorities put an ad in the newspaper calling for Possible Relatives. This is also the title of a photo-book by Danish photographer Tina Enghoff. She tells us about the pictures she took of the apartments after the dead were removed. Some of these bodies went undiscovered for months.
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To Bot or Not? That’s the big question for Data Scientist Gilad Lotan. His research suggests we may be damaging our online reputations if we choose not to play the fake follower game. Jason Q Ng, author of the book Blocked on Weibo, tells us why the Chinese government hates fake bots and why they targeted Black PR companies last summer. And your host imagines a future were humans are forced to shower their new Bot Overlords with unwavering attention.
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Social Media theorist Nathan Jurgenson wants us to understand what is truly revolutionary about ephemeral photographs and platforms like Snapchat, Fred Ritchin says we are going to get our minds blown “After Photography” and Finn Bruntun explains why we need to preserve our transition from Analog to Digital.
Photographer Robert Burley takes pictures of the end of analog for his book The Disappearance Of Darkness. Christine Frohnert explains how conservators must care for Art with a Plug. Curator Christiane Paul tells us how the Whitney Museum of American Art restored the digital artwork “the world’s first collaborative sentence” by Douglas Davis. And TOE’s Washington D.C. corespondent ‘Chris’ tells us the truth about Edward Snowden and Snapchat.
In 2005 the photographer and educator Robert Burley set out to document how digital technology was changing photography. Two years later when Kodak began dynamiting its international headquarters he realized things weren’t changing — they were ending.
Robert Burley is the author of The Disappearance of Darkness — a picture book / wake for the last days of analog photography. Over the course of five years Robert travelled around Canada and the United States taking pictures of the grand finale. He travelled to Rochester, New York when Kodak imploded and he travelled to Parsons, Kansas when Dwayne’s Photo-lab announced it would no longer process Kodachrome film.
The world’s first collaborative sentence entered the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995. When the staff decided to put the work back up for display last year, they were faced with a philosophical dilemma: use the old version with the dead links, or create an updated version, one users could interact with. Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney, tells us what the Museum did and why. You can find the sentence here
Digital works, like the Sentence, are posing new challenges to Arts Conservators. Christine Frohnet (yes, this episode has TWO Art World professionals of German Descent) explains to us why “Art with a Plug” is so difficult to care for and why so many Electronic Artworks are in danger.
And wrapping up this installment: a chat with our D.C. correspondent “Chris” who tells us the TRUTH about Edward Snowden and Snapchat.
And wrapping up this installment: a chat with our D.C. correspondent “Chris” who tells us the TRUTH about Edward Snowden and Snapchat.
This week your host tries to break through to the other side using the art of John Singer Sargent as a… jumping off point. Also we get an update from our corespondent Peter Choyce. When we last heard from Peter (in “admissions of defeat”) he was heading to rehab, he is now free and living in the woods in North Carolina.
Those who study John Singer Sargent, who painted An Artist in His Studio, see that painting as a lesser work, a kind of joke.
Your host disagrees. He thinks it’s a masterpiece, and carries it with him always. The painting depicts of a man painting a landscape in his “studio” — his home.
What Sargent commentators don’t realize is that the man in the painting isn’t painting a landscape, he’s creating a window.
Your host also checks in with corespondent Peter Choyce. Peter has escaped Los Angeles (and rehab) for the idyllic woods of North Carolina.