Permanence of Digital Culture
Saturday, September 15, 2007 | [link]
In George Fifield's class we talked about the the cultural record that we as a predominantly digital culture will leave. Sure, the great thing about digital information is that it, on its own, does not degrade, you can make an infinite number of copies and backup. You can disseminate it to all ends of the earth and every copy is identical to the first. However, by the very nature of technology, it is rapidly and constantly changing, thus unless this infinitely copied data is migrated from one generation of technology to the next, it becomes not only inaccessible, but also invisible. At least with untranslatable ancient records we can see what we can't read, but in 500 years, try knowing about, opening, and reading a Microsoft Word document.
As we talked about in the class, we are a culture with absolutely no mind of the future. We may talk about the future, but what we really mean is simply some fuzzy point in time that is later than now. We consider time in decades, not millenniums (or even centuries).

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  Julian's
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 | [link]

Last night a local bar showed R.Kelly's Trapped in the Closet. I do not know if he is brilliant with a great sense of humor or simply a lunatic. Either way it is one of the strangest and most complelling works of cinema I have seen in a while.

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  Settling in.
Friday, September 7, 2007 | [link]

I live in Providence now. Things are going reasonably well. The coffee is bad, the weather is great.
As it turns out I found out that Gabriella Salazar is a first year painting grad at risd. She and I were at the Yale Norfolk summer program together about 5 years ago. It is nice to have some one that you know. I have met a couple of my classmates. So far so good. It seems that we are coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. It will be fun to see how this all plays out.

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  I'm here.
Monday, September 3, 2007 | [link]


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  I live next to a castle.
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Who would have thought that there was a castle in rhode island. This is a huge, for real castle. Not just a big house.
Due to some great wisdom, this magnificant building is now a fire marshall training facility, complete with ADA approved access ramp replacing the once grand entrance and chain link fence protecting it from curious passer-bys.
So all 165,300 square feet of this great building are now inaccessible to public. I guess at one opint there were plans to make it into a Hollywood style sound stage and once was a public center.
But then again I don't know much about it. I just walked past it for the first time this morning.

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