Pop Culture – Page 6 – Gravity Drift

The Seattle Review of Books – The publishers’ dilemma

The Seattle Review of Books – The publishers’ dilemma

The publisher as distinct, unique entity is the foundation of Roberto Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher, a small collection of connected essays and transcribed talks about Adelphi Edizioni (the Italian publisher Calasso has worked for or run in some capacity since 1962) and about publishing in general. Calasso immediately complicates the idea of the publisher, pushing it past purveyor of art and into art itself: “What is a publisher,” he asks, “but a long snakelike progression of pages?”

A publisher, then, is a sort of super-book that contains hundreds, maybe thousands of distinct but “mutually congenial” individual books. Each publisher is a multimedia, multidisciplinary project (including everything from editorial to publicity) whose essential concerns are whether and how a book gets published.

Things, then, haven’t really changed in 500 years. Whether and how have always been the primary concerns of the publisher. The former is a complicated question. It’s a bit like asking, “What makes a good book?” The answer might be beautiful or moving, but it’s just as likely to be subjective, overly reliant on current trends, biased, or myopic.

Calasso pokes fun at the question of what makes a good publisher even as he fails to adequately answer it: “A good publishing house [is] one that… so far as possible, publishes only good books.” Elsewhere he invokes publisher-as-book: “publishing the wrong book would be like putting the wrong character in a novel.”

The Useless Agony of Going Offline – The New Yorker

The Useless Agony of Going Offline – The New Yorker

Levy writes that when we choose to cast aside “the devices and apps we use regularly, it should hardly be surprising if we miss them, even long for them at times.” But what I felt was more general. I didn’t miss my smartphone, or the goofy watch I own that vibrates when I receive an e-mail and lets me send text messages by speaking into it. I didn’t miss Twitter’s little heart-shaped icons. I missed learning about new things.

…

it became clear to me that, when I’m using my phone or surfing the Internet, I am almost always learning something. I’m using Google to find out what types of plastic bottles are the worst for human health, or determining the home town of a certain actor, or looking up some N.B.A. player’s college stats. I’m trying to find out how many people work at Tesla, or getting the address for that brunch place, or checking out how in the world Sacramento came to be the capital of California.

What I’m learning may not always be of great social value, but I’m at least gaining some new knowledge—by using devices in ways that, sure, also distract me from maintaining a singular focus on any one thing. I still read deeply, and study things closely, and get lost for hours at a time in sprawling, complicated pieces of literature.

The Very Simple Idea Of A 3D Bitmap (Tokyo Art Beat)

This show, organized within a series of exhibitions curated by Command-N (an activity-based art collective directed by the artist Masato Nakamura) highlights the newest activities of the artist Hideki Nakazawa, focused on the actual patents he has obtained during the past recent years.

His main patent deals with the very simple idea of a “3D bitmap”. If you know what a “pixel” (= abbreviation of pictures + element) is, you just need to think of a pixel in 3 dimensions. This 3D pixel is called “Voxel” (= combination of “volumetric” and “pixel”) and Nakazawa owns the patent for deploying any 3D bitmap art form. He claims that the purest artistic form of expression does not lie in the use of a medium, but rather in the act of creating the medium itself, just like Leonardo Da Vinci who spent a considerable amount of time just on preparing his ideal pigment. With this hypothesis, Nakazawa claims that the artistic quality of his work only resides in the following table.

In this exhibition, you can take a look at the actual patent certificates that the artist obtained both in Japan and the US, along with a showcase of the 3D Bitmap editing software he directed and published in 1996.

Hideki Nakazawa’s “Art Patent Sustaining Project” @ Kandada / Project Collective Command-N

The Curse of Storage

The Curse of Storage

Our ever-growing collections of information and objects can lead to thoroughly modern crises that echo the past. Commentary by Momus.

I’ve been thinking about the parallel between object storage and information storage — apartments and computers — ever since visiting an interesting exhibition at London’s Barbican last month.

Future City looks at experiment and utopia in architecture over the last 50 years. I was particularly impressed by a quote from Japanese metabolist architect Kiyonori Kikutake. “A Japanese room is determined by information,” Kikutake was quoted as saying, “whereas a Western room relies on objects.”

I thought immediately of Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s photographs of Tokyo apartments. These tiny places (I lived in one myself for a year) tend to consist of an empty living space — typically a tatami-covered floor — surrounded by densely packed information-storage systems.

The information “saved” to these spaces might be clothes, records, knickknacks, magazines, toys — the obsessively collected, meticulously arranged, somewhat pointless “hard copy” of countless shopping trips. The tatami-and-futon floor space, meanwhile, is where processing happens.

There, the room’s occupant does his living, eating, loving, sleeping, thinking. This is the room’s RAM, its processor, where the present moment is all. Here the timeline of human attention scans through a book, a manga, a magazine or website, one page at a time.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to think of my lifestyle as Japanese rather than Western, I decided there and then to create a “Japanese” apartment in Berlin, a place devoted to information and the storage of information. My new apartment, after all, was on the small side. I’d have to resort to Japanese tricks and a Japanese sensibility to make it work. I had in mind not just Tsuzuki’s photographs of stashed Tokyo pads, but also a lovely book I have (it’s in a box somewhere) of photographs of Japanese writers’ rooms.
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Lapka

Lapka

Lapka started with the ambitious idea to build the most beautiful science ever. We first set out to explore body network and personal environment, utilizing numerous, sensitive environmental factors such as radiation and carbon monoxide. We built tools for self-care and mind harmony, but never saw them as medicinal devices.

Technology is powered by style, taste, and story. Not by technology alone. Whether it was a radiation sensor, EMF sensor or even a breathalyzer, each product was imagined as a token, charm or talisman, not a device.

At Lapka, we were unconcerned with investing in a particular device, service, category or direction. Instead, we focused on creating an adaptable lifestyle brand where people can engage comfortably and enthusiastically. People only resort to a glucose monitor company when they need to. We imagined a teenage girl needing a glucose monitor, but afraid to use one because of its experience. We thought, what if we could redesign the whole experience — how you get the monitor, how you found out about it, how its story is told. We realized it should be about anything but glucose and medicine. That’s the vision that was set and executed for all our products.

Lapka was a lifestyle brand. We never intended to build “medical devices”. Instead, think of Lapka as a magazine, a coffee shop, a funny Twitter account, a movie. So if all you have is $2.95 for an iced coffee, you can still engage with Lapka.

You Don’t Have to Keep Up With Everything — Science of Us

You Don’t Have to Keep Up With Everything — Science of Us

“It’s like a different flavor of FOMO … It’s fear of missing out, but missing out on content — and on knowledge. With limited time and mental resources, there’s no way to get through it all.”

This thing has a name: infomania. Infomania was first pointed out as an issue in 1984 by the author Elizabeth Ferrarini. Email had just been invented, and Ferrarini foresaw the desire to constantly scroll through intraweb company messages and answer them now, other priorities be damned. This behavior inspired her book, aptly titled Confessions of an Infomaniac. But infomania remained an artifact of the 1980s until 2005, when Hewlett-Packard repopularized the term by sponsoring a widely criticized study describing infomania’s effects on the human psyche, claiming that it was “worse than marijuana” in its power to reduce IQ.

Again, that research was disputed and discredited; still, most of us can relate to the feeling Zomorodi and her listener describe of being trapped in an infomania loop. The thing is, we don’t quite know how to fight against infomania besides the impractical, drastic solution of tossing our phones into a toilet. Perhaps Zomorodi said it best, when she writes about reframing society’s scorn about not knowing what’s trending right now on whatever hip social-media feed is demanding our attention.

Information Overload or a Search for Meaning? – The American Interest

Information Overload or a Search for Meaning? – The American Interest

The principal response to the anxiety about Information Overload has been a technical one, namely, trying to improve the processing and management of information. But the development of new techniques of storage and retrieval of information does not relieve their users of the burden of interpreting it and understanding what it means. To gain meaning is a cultural accomplishment, not technical one. Unfortunately, Western society has become estranged from the messy business of engaging with meaning. This sensibility is vividly captured by the oft-repeated idiom (‘That’s too much information!”), so common that it’s now often communicated in texting simply by thumbing out “TMI.” This idiom is often used playfully to warn about “over-sharing” personal details or inappropriate sentiments. But the very fact that the ambiguities of everyday encounters are expressed through a language that quantifies personal communication (“too much”) and reduces it to abstract information speaks to a culture that all too readily assigns people the role of passive victims of information overload.

The corollary of Information Overload is the phenomenon of what Nico Macdonald, a British writer on digital culture, has characterised as Paradigm Underload. Macdonald notes that the problem facing society is not the quantity of information but the conceptual tools and paradigms with which to “filter, prioritise, structure and make sense of information.” Unfortunately, without a paradigm, the meaning of human experience becomes elusive to the point that the worship of Big Data displaces the quest for Big Ideas.