live at the tanks
avoiding a Digital Dark Age
link to an americanscientist.org article from Kurt D. Bollacker
thanks jwildeboer for twittering
"Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information
...When I was a boy, I discovered a magnetic reel-to-reel audio tape recorder that my father had used to create “audio letters” to my mother while he was serving in the Vietnam War. To my delight (and his horror), I could listen to many of the old tapes he had made a decade before. Even better, I could make recordings myself and listen to them. However, all of my father’s tapes were decaying to some degree—flaking, stretching and breaking when played. It was clear that these tapes would not last forever, so I copied a few of them to new cassette tapes. While playing back the cassettes, I noticed that some of the sound quality was lost in the copying process. I wondered how many times I could make a copy before there was nothing left but a murky hiss..." read the article
Realität und Ewigkeit
Gesehen bei der Gallerie Poesie und Kunst, wo Ales Steger gelesen hatte.
Medicine and Art
your correspondent AGENT in Tokyo visited the much discussed Medicine and Art exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills today. The museum is located on the 52 floor of the Mori building with a breathtaking view over Tokyo. The exhibition contained old and new artistic representations of the human body, for medical purposes such as anatomic studies as well as for the age-old artistic reminder of the brevity and fragility of our human life: memento mori.
However, reminders are only a start. Much representation of the nude and of death goes far beyond a gruesome reminder of our mortality to fascination with what we can't see: our inside. To fascination with difference between the sexes, between the living face and the mask of the dead. The most touching exhibit, to me, was the photograph series of individuals just before and shortly after death by Walter Schels. Notoriously, Stelarc reappeared with his third ear, and Eduardo Kac with the glowing bunny: etoy AGENTS remember the heated discussions at ARS last year about Kac's work with the flower and the replicability of artistic work that draws on undisclosed scientific methods: we disapproved.
Working with mortal remains, Alvin Zafra grated an entire human skull onto sand paper resulting in what looked like an abstract gray painting. Unfortunately, the process documentation on video demystified the grating procedure into a trivial mechanics that seemed pointless and inadequate to the quite intriguing end result.
A parallel exhibit featured the Complaints Choirs by Kalleinen&Kalleinen, a beautifully poetic work that reminds us of the apparent impossibility of happiness and our constant bias towards not living the moment but focusing on problems, obstacles, worries, and all the griefs that turn us into mumbling, bitchy, grumpy old folks.
Ales Steger in Zurich
I just looked inside the gallery where the poet - the husband of our agent MAJA PETROVIC-STEGER was reading his words to quite a crowd next to the ice cold floating river: here the article from the tagesanzeiger about him, and the latest book to order.
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