ThinkingShift

I’ve not heard of Banksy before but I like this guy. He’s a graffiti artist in the UK and, like me, he’s incensed about CCTV cameras being up your nose. He snuck up on a CCTV camera in a Post Office yard off Oxford Street in central London. In broad daylight too. Here’s the really fun bit. Whilst the CCTV cameras were supposedly monitoring, watching, surveilling, intruding - Banksy erected some scaffolding, which reached several stories in height and plastered a huge protest slogan that reads “One Nation Under CCTV”. The CCTV camera (or the hidden faces behind it) apparently didn’t raise the alarm. Perhaps it wasn’t switched on?  I have a suspicion that many CCTV cameras are there to remind us of their presence, but I wonder how many are active. Mmm….anyway…

If you look closely at this wonderful piece of art, you see on the bottom left corner a policeman is taking a photo of the graffiti artist (who is depicted as a boy in a bright red jacket), whilst a dog barks. 

Banksy quietly slipped away, having done this sort of political protest a number of times before. I haven’t been able to find out who Banksy is. A bit of an elusive chap. But I did find a group dedicated to Banksy’s works on Flickr. 

Source & image credit: The Telegraph

Video Sniffin. Have you heard of this term? I hadn’t until recently but I’ve been sniffing around to find out more about it and it’s kept me away from the darker side of surveillance. Video sniffin is a term that refers to the practice of picking up the public signals being broadcast by wireless CCTV (aka hacking wireless CCTV). As with a recent post where I told you about the film Look, using images from CCTV, here’s another example of people using public webcams to create art, in this case a short film. Makes sense to me: why buy expensive video equipment when there are millions of public webcams around to use?

MediaShed, the first “free media” space to open in the east of the UK, uses Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and waste electronic equipment. So it’s taking accessible media apart, reusing it without limitations and creating an artistic expression. Some members of MediaShed decided to use CCTV to make a film. Using cheap video receivers, they sniffed out 24 public webcams or hotspots and used the CCTV cameras to make a film called The Commercial. You can view it here. So you’ll see that young people are using technology, that is normally surveilling their activities, for creative purposes.

MediaShed also headed into a shopping centre in Manchester to make a film combining free-media with free-running. Parkour or free-running involves fluid uninterrupted movement adapting motion to obstacles in the environment. Like free-media, free-running makes use of and re-energises the infrastructure of the city. Professional parkour breakin’ crew, Methods of Movement, choreographed a performance that was filmed in the shopping centre over three consecutive nights. The film was shot using only the existing in-house CCTV network of 160 cameras operated from the central control room, with a soundtrack created entirely from the sounds and noises recorded during the performance. The film is called The Duellists and you can see it here. How good is this??!!

Source: MediaShed

Following up on yesterday’s post, I came across really fascinating news. I’ve always loved the Impressionist art movement - the vivid, fiery sunsets of a Turner painting; the dappled waters of a Monet reflecting the electric blue sky; the churning clouds; the emerald greens of a Renoir. I studied them in art school but have never stopped to think of Impressionist paintings against the backdrop of climate change. Until now…

Climate change scientists are busy analysing Turner’s paintings along with other Impressionist artists and sniffing out signs of climate change. In 1883, Krakatoa blew its top and coughed up rocks, dust and assorted debris that circled the globe. For many years, stunning sunsets were seen as the retreating light was scattered by reflective particles thrown high into the atmosphere. So the scientists have examined 181 artists who painted sunsets between 1500 and 1900 - before and after Krakatoa - and calculated the amount of material in the sky during the 1880s. This will feed into a scientific study of a phenomenon called global dimming, which is caused by air pollution blocking sunlight.

When Mount Tambora in Indonesia blew up in 1815 there was so much stuff in the atmosphere that 1815 was referred to as the “year without a summer” and there were massive crop failures in Europe, which led to famine and economic collapse.

The amount of red and green along the horizon in each artist’s painting has been calculated by a computer. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. And the result was most paintings with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the 3 years following Krakatoa’s eruption. There were 54 volcanic sunset paintings.

Interestingly, Turner was in the right place at the right time. He lived before, during and after several volcanic hissy fits: Tambora in 1815; Babuyan, Philippines in 1831, and Cosiguina, Nicaragua in 1835 and in each case the scientists found a sharp change in the red/green ratio of the sunsets he painted up to 3 years afterwards.

The team of scientists hope to check out 4o paintings from the 20th Century to see if the effects of pollution since the Industrial Revolution have been captured in sunset renditions.

Source: Guardian Unlimited
Images: Wikipedia

The Sydney Morning Herald carried a great piece the other day about the UK artist, David Hockney, 70 years, who points the finger of blame at the iPod for a decline in visual awareness and appreciation. Now, I love my iPod. I have a nano in hot pink (of course!) for those frivolous moments and a new 80GB iPod in sleek, stylish black for when you want to be seen to be serious:)-

But blaming my beloved iPod for the contemporary state of art and painting in a society that is more obsessed with celebrity is maybe going a tad too far. However, let’s look at what Hockney has to say. “We are not in a very visual age,” he says. “I think it’s all about sound. People plug in their ears and don’t look much, whereas for me my eyes are the biggest pleasure. You notice that on buses. People don’t look out of the window; they are plugged in and listening to something. I think we are not in a very visual age and it’s producing badly dressed people. They have no interest in mass or line or things like that.” So he’s saying we look but do not see; that we’re separated from our immediate surroundings.

Hockney believes we’re in a “fallow period” of painting, which has been caused by the rise of the iPod; the decision to end drawing classes in most art schools; and a lack of study of the old masters. People have turned off art in other words.

Now, certainly the rise of so-called ’shock art’ is very different from a serene Turner painting or the pastel wash of a Monet. British artist Mark McGowan, for example, recently roasted Queen Elizabeth’s favourite canine breed: a corgi. I think I read somewhere the corgi meat was made into a kebab. And this was in protest against a royal fox hunt. Recently, we’ve also seen British artist, Damien Hirst, unveil a provocative (and I thought beautiful) $98 million sparkling diamond skull. The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th-century European male, is encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond in the centre of its forehead. Of his work, Hirst said: “It shows we are not going to live for ever. But it also has a feeling of victory over death,” and he was inspired by similarly bejeweled Aztec skulls. The teeth in the skull are real because the artist felt it “..very important to put the real teeth back. Like the animals in formaldehyde you have got an actual animal in there. It is not a representation.”

Now, scoffing a corgi is a questionable piece of performance art I think; but the diamond skull I get. And whilst I listen to my iPod on the train, I always stare out the window as I love to see the varied colours and textures flashing across the landscape. The music seems to merge with the vision.

So is Hockney just getting a bit long in the tooth and this is a generational-gap opinion or has technology always informed art? Let’s take the architect - a practitioner of a grand art form. Prior to Computer Assisted Drafting or CAD, architects painstakingly sketched their ideas on paper and the pencil was the brain’s expression. The architect became immersed in a visual world; sensed proportions; manipulated shapes and textures; fussed over composition (my husband’s an architect whose favourite comment about a structure he likes is “..this is a collision of geometries”). Then CAD (technology) came along, which some architects felt resulted in design being at arm’s length with the artist engaging with a mouse and software rather than with the eye and the senses.

But look at the stunning work of my favourite architect, Frank Gehry. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain was designed by Gehry in 1997. The voluptuousness and curving complexity of this building could only be achieved by computer design tools, many of which Gehry and his team developed. The museum is a product of this architect’s innovative engagement with technology. Without CAD, could Gehry have produced a curving marvel of a structure that appears to dance with the light it catches? (if you’ve seen the building, you will appreciate what I mean by the light). Gehry has gone on to design contemporary jewellery using a variety of materials - pernambuco wood; black gold; cocholong stone - and using various motifs such as fish and orchids. This is an artist who engages with technology to produce a new form of art, whether it be a building or an elegant earring.

Art is an expression of society; a commentary on society. If this is a reasonable premise, then technology (iPod, CAD etc) enables us to comment on the state of society. Whilst Hockney pines for the likes of Turner, a theory suggests that Renaissance painters experimented with concave mirrors to project an inverted image that was then traced. Georges de la Tour’s 1645 work, Christ in the Carpenter’s Studio, was examined in evidence of this theory.

The use of technology in art enables artists to discover new possibilities. So why couldn’t the iPod influence art? In fact, the iconic music player has inspired a 23-storey residential tower in Dubai, designed by Hong-Kong based architectural firm James Law Cybertecture International. The building will be called the iPad (cute!) and here’s a photo of a scale model.

And then there’s abstract nano iPod posters, which to me is a piece of art; and there’s this great sketch of someone listening to an iPod on the London Underground; not to mention the seriously clever pop culture iPod advertising campaigns featuring dark silhouetted characters against a 1960s-style psychedelic background. Now THAT’s art!

What do ThinkingShift readers think? Is Hockney right - have we lost our visual sense - or should we just send him an iPod? I can’t do much about his comment on how badly people dress these days - some people just don’t have any sense of style - and the iPod can’t be blamed for this!

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has just announced its 2008 Watch list of the 100 endangered cultural and historical sites around the world. The WMF has a long history of working to protect and save cultural, historical and archaeological sites that are threatened by war or natural disaster, urban development, vandalism and neglect, and appearing for the first time on its Watch list: global climate change. The list is announced every 2 years and is compiled by an independent panel of experts who investigate sites of all types—from ancient to modern. “Monuments” can be archaeological sites; residential, civic, commercial, military, or religious architecture; cultural landscapes; and townscapes.

The WMF has done some great work. Since the Watch List was first launched in 1996, more than 75% of the sites have been saved or intervention has halted the inevitable decline into dust.

So what sites are endangered? you can go here yourself to find all 100 sites (including photos) because if I include them all, this would be the longest blog post in history probably! So I’ll only include a selection of sites and leave you to explore the rest. I’ll start off with my own country: Australia:

• Dampier Rock Art Complex, Australia: 10,000 BC to present. Third time on Watch List. Industrial development is the threat. Australian Aboriginals carved petroglyphs into the region’s numerous rock faces and outcroppings, giving this region the largest corpus of rock art in the world, with up to one million engravings. The site has been relisted for 2008 because the threat of industrial development of the area still hangs over it.
  
• Brener Synagogoe, Moises Ville, Argentina: 1909. First year on Watch List and threatened by lack of maintenance and lack of resources. This synagogue was the primary place of worship for the Jewish community for some 70 years. It is an important symbol of the community’s history and its founders - the judios gauchos (or Jewish Cowboys).The current state of the building has forced its closure to the public.
• Al-Azhar Mosque, Fez, Morocco: 12th Century. First year on Watch List. I’ve actually been here, so was saddened to see its appearance on the list. The mosque is in the centre of Fez and is an example of the austere Almohad style of architecture. The Almohad’s were a dynasty that ruled parts of North Africa and Spain between 1130 and 1269. The threat to the mosque comes from structural instability most likely caused by several adjoining houses collapsing onto the mosque in 2006.
• Pella Macedonian Tombs, Pella, Greece: 4th-2nd Centuries BC. First year on Watch List and endangered by climate fluctuations, humidity and structural weakness. These subterranean tombs tell us about the design and construction methods of this period, which is knowledge lost to the world. The best-known tomb of this style is that of King Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.
• Leh Old Town, Leh, India: 15th-17th Centuries. First year on Watch list, mainly due to development pressures and climate change. The Old Town of Leh was the capital of the once-independent Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh. It is a rare example of an intact historic Tibeto-Himalayan urban settlement. 55% of the 189 historic buildings are in poor condition, victims of seismic activity and the impacts of climate change, which is producing heavy rainfalls, and accelerating the deterioration.
• Modern Shanghai, China: 1920-1949. First appearance on list due to rapid urbanisation and development. Located at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Shanghai is China’s primary economic centre. Between WWI and WWII, many famous architects experimented with ideas around space and form, new or unusual building materials - this resulted in an eclectic mix of modernity and traditionalism. Examples of buildings by architects such as Alexander Leonard, Laszlo Hudec and Doon Da You are at risk - the 1933 Grand Theatre and Dr Wu’s villa of Hudec being vulnerable. Although preservation of historic buildings is happening, there is a lack of awareness of the importance and richness of recent architecture from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
• Scott’s Hut and the Explorer Heritage of Antarctica: 1899-1917. First appearance on list. Reason? climate change impacts, snow and ice build-up. Robert Falcon Scott, of course, was involved in a legendary race to become the first person to reach the South Pole, up against Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Scott left behind his prefabricated, seaweed-insulated wooden cabin, along with some scientific equipment - but he never returned to camp having died on the return journey. And the cabin was later occupied by Sir Ernest Shackleton during his Imperial Trans Arctic expedition of 1914-1917. Supplies from both the Scott and Shackleton remain as historic artefacts and witness to the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.
• Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, Canada: 1890-1907. First time on list due to climate change impacts - rising sea levels; eroding coastline; melting permafrost. Herschel Island was first inhabited a millennium ago by the Thule ancestors of the present-day Inuit. After the discovery of whales, the island became a major hub for commercial whaling and the first European/American settlement in the 19th Century. Many whaling related historic structures still stand and numerous archaeological sites of the Thule and Inuit are scattered over the island. Sea levels have risen 10-20 centimetres in the past century; sea ice is disappearing; and the island has experienced violent storms that are battering the landscape.
• Historic Route 66, Chicago, IL, Los Angeles, CA: 1926-1970. First appearance on Watch List due to development pressures and general abandonment. I presume this is the Route 66 of song fame. Route 66 was originally a series of disconnected, unpaved local and state roads, which were commissioned to become part of the first Federal effort to develop a national US highway system. Route 66 facilitated westward mobility and was known for its roadside culture. During the 1930s Depression, the route was an escape from the so-called Dustbowl of the Midwest. It’s a symbolic image of American culture often referred to in literature, music and films.

Like the endangered species I recently blogged about, let’s hope these endangered cultural sites don’t meet a similar fate. Take the time to have a look at all 100 sites: it’s an eye-opener.

ThinkingShift readers will know I have a slight tendency towards conspiracy theories and am extremely suspicious of CCTV cameras, which are filming us all the time. But I’m not quite sure what to make of this piece of news. An Austrian filmmaker, who is certainly being crafty when it comes to avoiding the costs of making a film, has patched together a film from real-life images captured from CCTV cameras. UK based Manu Luksch is both a star and director of the sci-fi film, Faceless. Luksch’s face appears in the film but those of others are blanked out. Apparently, under the UK Data Protection Act, a person has a right to request images of oneself from CCTV cameras. So she requested images from places like theatre foyers where existing CCTV cameras were in place and where she knew she had been.

Faceless was made according to the Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers, which states that images can only be obtained from existing CCTV cameras and under the Data Protection Act. Now, I think there are many positives to Faceless. Firstly, what a wonderful metaphor for contemporary life: as we shuffle through cities each day, brushing up against fellow citizens, many of us feel simply faceless. Richard Sennett in his book, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, which I’m currently re-reading, talks about contemporary cities as monotonous spaces that passive individuals have built for themselves. He describes cities as neutral spaces of social control. And so the faceless individual is one more bland component of a bleak steel and glass landscape. But by using existing images, Luksch has also manipulated and created a dynamic collage of city life in a new framework with a new rhythm and context. She has reflected on the constant gaze of CCTV from an artistic and social perspective and created a strange, yet plausible world.

However, I wonder to what extent privacy is impinged on. Though the faces are blanked out, maybe someone is wearing distinctive clothes or jewellery and can therefore still be identified? It sort of smacks of a social experiment too: you can’t use rats or other animals in laboratory tests unless you’ve gone through Ethics hoops and scrutiny and can demonstrate that no harm will arise. Using this framework, could mental harm, humiliation or embarrassment arise if someone is identified? Not to mention the issue of retrieving images from CCTV - whilst the legislation gives a particular individual the right to retrieve his or her image, that person’s image is unavoidably amongst images of other people - one day it could be you or me. And how is our permission obtained to appear in film a’la Faceless?

I’m just not sure what I really think about this but it makes me a tad more paranoid about the steady, focused eye of the CCTV camera watching us as we rush through the canyons of our world cities. Perhaps my paranoia is justified since recent articles describe the UK as an Orwellian society. Unobtrusive looking CCTV cameras have found their way into the quite village of Hampshire and the village’s deputy chief constable is not a happy man. He says: “I’m really concerned about what happens to the product of these cameras and what comes next. If it’s in our villages - are we really moving towards an Orwellian situation with cameras on every street corner? I really don’t think that’s the kind of country that I want to live in.” There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK - that’s about one camera for every 14 people. And if the police are concerned about their prevalence and use, then perhaps we should be concerned too.

Just as I was finishing this post, in came this RSS feed about eye-scanning technology recently introduced into Gatwick airport. Now, one of the reasons I avoid visiting the US (despite a liking for the country) is the fingerprinting and iris-scanning business. I have nothing to hide; I am simply against this intrusion on one’s privacy and liberty. So I have to think twice about the UK since Heathrow and now Gatwick have biometric technology that takes an image of a passenger’s iris patterns and stores it in a database, together with passport details. I’m sure that George Orwell would hastily be writing the next installment of 1984 were he still alive!

And then there’s the pilotless drones that UK police (obviously those not worried about CCTV) have just launched in Merseyside. The ’spy drone’ is fitted with CCTV cameras, mainly for tackling anti-social behaviour and public disorder. Great: not only do I need to look for CCTV cameras in public spaces, now I have to look up in the sky to see if things other than birds are whizzing past and looking down with an eagle eye.

In a similar vein, Dave Snowden over at Cognitive Edge, recently reported what I thought was a pretty horrifying experience. Having missed a flight to London through no fault of his own, Dave was whiling away some time until the next flight by uploading holiday photos to Flickr. From this innocent act, the fur flew. Here’s what happened in Dave’s words:

It started with an accusation of uploading porn to the internet. I was uploading holiday photographs to Flickr which included some of 17 year old daughter and friend scantily glad on a boat in Bali. This alerted some scanning system on the hotels broadband service. Things were difficult for a period to say the least. Much as I would like internet pornographers caught, this does seem a little Big Brotherish and one wonders what else is being monitored.

Seems to me that our society has become over-regulated and over-controlled. In the interests of protecting our neighbours from ourselves; our family and children from ourselves; our cats, dogs and goldfish from ourselves - we’ve acquiesced in the face of the ‘fear society’. With the constant rhetoric over terrorism, have we given up our liberties and, like the pig with the apple in its mouth ready to be roasted, served ourselves up to the shadowy world of surveillance? Are we a better society for this?

I have pinched the photo of the Faceless poster to accompany this post (Source: http://www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=faceless)

I’ve been intrigued by Sol LeWitt’s work for some time, so it was sad to learn of his recent death. Much like Nonaka studied the tacit knowledge embedded in the breadmaking process (leaving aside the high probability that Nonaka totally misunderstood Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge), LeWitt’s art came with its own recipe. If you followed his directions, you whipped up your very own piece of art.

Since the early 1960s, LeWitt had been working with basic geometric shapes and ideas to produce stunningly colourful conceptual art ie the idea is the artwork. An example of a LeWitt recipe is: Wall Drawing No. 681 C/ A wall divided vertically into four equal squares separated and bordered by black bands. Within each square, bands in one of four directions, ink washes superimposed. Another one was: “Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes each with color ink washes superimposed”.

Sometimes the instructions were quite specific, at other times they were vague - it all depended on the idea or the interpretation. “Black bands” might mean narrow or broad; “not straight” might mean wavy or irregular. But the input, the frustration, the joy and the passion contributed by those who assembled LeWitt’s pieces became a part of the art and the creative, organic process.

Clearly, he had a good sense of humour with one of his pieces entitled ““Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value” (1968). What I’ve always liked about his work is the notion of art as a visual sign. He began with an idea or a concept, which was translated into expression and meaning.

The National Art Gallery of Australia has 2 LeWitt pieces. You can learn more about LeWitt’s work here and see some stunning examples of his work here. The image accompanying this post is a LeWitt from the Opus Art Gallery in the UK.