point and shoot

This work is called "Point and Shoot" and was done in 2013 by Alan and Michael Fleming. I just got back from their artist talk captioned "Relation, Collaboration and the Uncanny." They are identical twins, sometimes living in the same city, sometimes not. Their collaborative work, performance- or object-based, usually builds on their being identical twins (and there's a story there). "Point and Shoot" was done when they were living in Chicago and Brooklyn; each did one of the sculptures. They also played three rounds of Rock, Scissors, Paper by phone and didn't know who won until the hand sculptures were installed in an exhibition.

I couldn't help but think about point-and-shoot cameras as they talked about these two hands which were installed on opposite walls of a gallery. I hadn't thought about the violent side of "shoot" when I said point-and-shoot nor had I thought about the violence of taking a picture which may steal the soul of a person or place. Emphasis on the MAY: if something is visible, it's photographable, especially these days.

When the Fleming twins are doing one of their performance pieces in public, e.g., subway station, loading dock, public building, they are sometimes approached by a policeman, a security person, a janitor, or other interested party and asked to stop and leave. They used to go on and on about their practice but then discovered that they could say it was dance and usually the reaction turned positive. They didn't even have to expound semiotically to confuse the approacher. Sometimes they pretend they speak French and that works. It didn't work for me once, in front of Carnegie Hall before a concert. A man approached me either asking for money or to buy or sell a ticket, I don't remember that detail. I said "Je ne parle pas anglais" or some such thing. And again. A few more minutes later, he came by and asked if I was still speaking French. I felt violated, I'd been discovered a fraud.

ants and collaboration

So I was warned by the bookshop owner at Calamus Books in Boston that reading Eminent outlaws by Christopher Bram would lead to a list of books to read. No problem. I went up to Herrick Library this afternoon to get Just above my head, the last novel of James Baldwin. I left with three other books as well: Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood; The dream of Arcadia: American writers and artists in Italy, 1760-1915 by Van Wyck Books; and Fictions of masculinity: crossing cultures, crossing sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy. On leaving the library, I was meandering home in the lovely but cool sunshine when I spotted three ants pushing along a one-inch long piece of something. I couldn't tell if the object was a twig or perhaps a caterpillar carcass. The two guys at the ends were walking sideways and the guy in the middle was walking backwards, and they were moving at a good clip. When they got to the edge of the sidewalk, they shifted to moving the object lengthwise instead of broadside. Under this blade, over those blades of grass. Quite amazing how fast they were progressing even in the grass. The grass appeared rather alive with ants so perhaps more were assisting in the more difficult territory.

Walking on, I ran into Lily and told her about the amazing ant show and she said she'd just been watching a video about ants and emergence, about collaboration. A search on Google for "ants emergence" will get you a bunch of responses so I'm not sure what exactly she was watching or reading. Still, it was amazing that we were both enthralled at the moment about the great collaboratory of the ants.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Three or four times today here at the VRA conference, the thought has gone through my head that our modern world is just a faster version of yesterday's world. Or we're going back.

At the Transitions lunch in the spectacular (even on a cloudy day) revolving Sun Dial restaurant at the top of the Westin, someone was talking about how the art faculty members were all building their own collections of digital images as the university collections were being eliminated. In the old days, a professor probably collected the slides they needed and they were just kept on the shelves of their office. Then folks got the brilliant idea of building a collection and there was economy of scale. Now the collection is being dismantled, partly because of ARTstor and other image databases but also because of economics. Now we're seeing individual collections again.

Peter Brantley of the BookServer project at the Internet Archive gave the opening plenary speech. He talked about how information gathering is focused on discovery rather than content. But research has always been discovering the information you need. Social networking does bring it to you but you're really just doing the same kind of thing, just faster. I think he was trying to argue that the networking actually did change the information. Brantley talked about the redundancy of some of the paths and did pass on a wonderful quote he'd heard from someone about trying to keep up and worrying about missing something. Someone had said "if it's really important, the news will find me."

The redundancy of effort came up again in the blogs and wikis panel later in the afternoon. Not everyone will find the same path and information will fly around and you'll maybe find out what you need to know. But it's still just trying to find what you need to know. And I really can't buy Brantley's contention that content isn't the most important thing. Even when he said that sharing is more important than content, it's not worth sharing if it's not meaningful. Or, maybe, the receiver of the content will make something valuable of it even if it isn't inherently valuable. (This is probably all bunk ... as he changed his Facebook status to something else that didn't matter.)

Brantley started out by talking about everyone as publishers and communicators. I couldn't help but think of Benjamin and his writing on authorship (not that I really understand it). Maybe I should have just kept thinking about the modern architecture that we'd seen on the morning walking tour rather than trying to process what they'd said at the sessions. When I saw Dustin Wees, I said I really should do up some SAHARA cataloging, like the First Presbyterian Church in Bath.

promise, tool, bargain

Chapter 11 of Shirky's Here comes everybody is entitled "Promise, tool, bargain." The premise is that "Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausable promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users" (p. 260). Boy, that really resonates. The problem with my office is that folks haven't bought into the bargain which does have some promise of helping the user and we've even got some decent tools that could evolve and become even more effective.

series and accretions

There's been a big discussion on the PCCLIST about series authority records and it's morphing into BIBCO records and full/core records ... and now into Enhance. I keep thinking that what we really need is something more like accretion than enhance on master/other records. Someone puts a record into the common bibliographic universe, someone else adds another access point or two, someone else adds a contents note, now a book jacket or review. A combination of our traditional control with some of the jazzy new-generation stuff. Or perhaps an RLIN cluster with the accretions of the secondary cluster members more visible. I know we're getting there but big long reports on simplifying cataloging processes can be so dreary. Just go catalog. I think I will ... but, first, supper with Diana Mitrano.

collaborating

Murtha Baca and I co-wrote a chapter on FRBR for cultural objects in Arlene Taylor's book Understanding FRBR. We lost track, in a good way, of who originated which words. I remember some of the words and definitely the examples but the flow of the article became OURS, not hers or mine. There's an article in the Times from June 10th on the Rolex program to pair developing artists with masters. Alejandro Cesarco and John Baldessari are one of the pairs; Cesarco has long been a favorite, for his made-up indexes and other wordy art. Baldessari has of course been doing conceptual stuff with words for years and years. In the article, Cesarco is quoted thus:

The most gratifying thing about this program was working together with him on a work that became a synthesis of our practices. It's not recognizable who did what, which is what's nice about collaborating, because you are trying to work outside your comfort zone and pushing your collaborator to work outside his.

Of course, that makes the metadata more difficult but then Leonardo and Verrocchio have been making that hard for art historians for centuries.

When I went to go fetch a link for John Baldessari, I found his "JB_new" page and it has a groovy graphic tree. Oh my gosh, it's Baldessari's birthday!