erhebung

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.

Sites of Incarceration

I found Pete Brook’s thought-​provoking Prison Pho­to­graphy blog via con­sumptive (another thought-​provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s def­in­itely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask per­tinent questions:

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/​were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the pho­to­graph as social document, there­fore, what social and polit­ical powers are at play in a photograph’s man­u­fac­ture? And, how is know­ledge, related to those powers, constructed?

It’s implicit, I think, that these are ques­tions we could — should, even — direct at all pho­to­graphy, not just the pho­to­graphy of “sites of incarceration”.

On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read some­thing that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:

[…] I think pho­to­graphers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice pho­to­graphy these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]

I think other people do notice pho­to­graphy, and I think that some will notice the aes­thetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of con­tem­porary pho­to­graphy (and likewise con­tem­porary poetry, con­tem­porary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appre­ci­ation within a quite insular, self-​contained, elitist milieu.

Twenty-​Ten

So, 2010 is here. We’re not quite at manned missions to Jupiter, yet, but NASA does have a few inter­esting missions planned. On a related note, I like io9’s 15 Reasons To Live For The Next 10 Years.

In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.

The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:

I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm imper­man­ence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your con­sulta­tions:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

I have a feeling it’s going to be an inter­esting year.

It Won’t Be Free

A feisty, noisy article by Libby Purves on the subject of “content” and its “value”. Worth a look. Dying cry, though, or clarion call?

Flickr Adds Galleries

Last week Flickr unveiled Gal­leries, a new feature that allows users to con­struct and publish (on Flickr) col­lec­tions of other people’s Flickr pho­to­graphs (more inform­a­tion can be found in the amusing FAQ). So far I’ve made three gal­leries, my favourite being this one. Part of me wants to pair themed Flickr gal­leries with com­ple­mentary 8tracks playl­ists, as I think it would make for a fas­cin­ating mashup; but another part of me knows that it probably isn’t really feasible to pull the two tools together. I await eagerly the day when merging a music playlist and pho­to­graphy gallery is a simple case of dragging, dropping, and hitting “Publish”.

Tweaking Appearances

The theme I’ve just begun using on erhebung is Rodrigo Galindez’s Modern Clix. I liked the old theme, Neo­clas­sical, but it never hurts to change things a little, every once in a while.

One of the biggest advant­ages of this new theme is that images in posts can be wider (436px or 596px) than they could be in the old theme; the down side of this is that images in the older posts, posts written for the old theme’s spe­cific­a­tions, may appear a little too narrow. This is a problem I have no imme­diate plans to remedy (manually editing 200 chunks of HTML code is tedious).

So, a new look, and hope­fully one that is readable on all browsers. If you encounter any problems, let me know.

Disaster Voyeurism

I’ve been reading xkcd for about a year, but only today did I notice that the image file for each strip has a tooltip, a field of text in the HTML code that becomes visible on mouse rollover. I’m glad I found them, and wish I’d found them earlier, as they add a lot to the strips. This, for example, is the caption for the latest, #611:

Hur­ricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and com­par­isons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-​tacked-​on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it’s a dud.

Here is the strip itself:

‘Disaster Voyeurism’, the 611st xkcd webcomic. (Source)

Won­derful.

Rebirth

Okay, so because of some hacking (silly, point­less, hacking) I’ve had to move erhebung here, to this new place. Please update your feed readers and book­marks to reflect the new address (the RSS is here).

RSS Strangeness

Some­thing odd is hap­pening with my RSS feed. Apo­lo­gies to anyone who had a list of spam keywords come through on the RSS of the previous post.

And there seems to be some­thing going wrong with a few other recent posts. Annoying. I can’t work out if I’ve been hacked or not.

Better Typography

One of the first plugins I ever found for erhebung was Hamish Macpherson’s wp-​Typogrify, an ingenious bit of code that con­verted hypens to dashes, curled quo­ta­tion marks, and tidied up a range of typo­graph­ical annoy­ances. That plugin, a great plugin, has now evolved into some­thing even greater:

KINGdesk Web Design has just released wp‐​Typography, a merger and expan­sion of the wp‐​Typogrify and wp‐​Hyphenate Word Press plugins and Smar­tyPants func­tion­ality. It is now a one‐​stop‐​shop for improved web typo­graphy in Word Press.

The new plugin looks very powerful. You can find out more on their site, here.

A Really Enjoyable Blog

I am really, really enjoying Mostly True, the blog of pho­to­journ­alist Ken Jarecke. Start here, maybe; or if you’ve got the time, just start at the latest post and work your way back: I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The Pictures Generation

If you have a few minutes to kill, you might want to take a look at an inter­esting audio slide show that’s just been pub­lished on the website of The New Yorker. It’s a com­mentary by Peter Schjeldahl on some of the work, and some of the artists, featured in The Pictures Gen­er­a­tion, 1974 – 1984, an exhib­i­tion cur­rently showing at the Met­ro­pol­itan Museum of Art. Many of the artists dis­cussed were com­pletely new to me, including Dara Bernbaum, the artist behind the Wonder Woman video still at the top of this post.