First read this post.
Then watch this South Park episode.
Now, if you are not going to cook something, get out of the kitchen (and at least start selling 
)
After posting graphs and cold data (quite ilustrative, I believe), and the discussion it has generated (people, why don’t you use the “comment” instead all the other unstructured methods you are using?), please let me write a caveat about graphs and cold data.
In my high-tech gym, you have the option to have a lot of data collected, for your own, private and personal use. It seems like a great idea at first. For example, I can access via a secure web site real time stats of my workouts, such as the “fitness balance” (which shows my emphasis in weight lifting, and then swimming -some data greyed out for privacy purposes-):
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Not that fast.
The following graph (Workout Log) allows me to see how many times I have worked out. Since I tend to go to the gym everyday (but it is not always possible), an average of 4 times per week sounds reasonable, but what is that max. 8 times per week number? Why is there such a dip in mid February?
Data often needs to be contextualized, otherwise we might end up with the wrong conclussion (those 8 workouts per week happened to be visits to the gym to do a personal assesment and training routine design, added to my regular workouts; and the dip… just a long trip!).
But even worse things can happen:
In this case, an obviously strange abherration is showing in the graph. Somehting to be concerned about? Not at all: the scale of the axis make a slight variation (less than 1%, less than a pound) seem like a huge shift. And variables such as measurement thresholds, electronic glitches, etc must be taken into account when considering the validity and presentation of that data.
Let’s just keep in mind: however great quantification and visualization tools are (and I do like them a lot, and believe they can be very beneficial to the way we make decissions and understand the world and ourselves) they must be used with care. After all, this following map might show all the places I have traveled to… but it can not tell you about the experiences lived there…
Play with data, discover, learn the hard truth…
Government debt does not explain it all:
Unemployment is, indeed, quite inapelable:
And minimum wage:
So, perhaps, taking all those (and the last “devastating evidence” one) graphs into account, French and German governments have tricked, via manipulative markets and rating agencies, ignorant technocrat Spain’s PP government into cutting social spending (like education and health, which in turn becomes productivity, and minimum wage and job stability, which promotes spending and growth) so we go deeper into the hole, and they take advantage of our excellent engineers at a low rate, while speculating with debt and making sure Spain does not become a strong competitor…
Don’t they realise that with a monarchy that “shoots itself in the foot trying to hunt elephants and hiding corruption and scandalous ties”, a media that is so self complacent and ass kissing that feels more like brothels, politicians so entrenched in the corrupt game that with two degrees of separation you could not find an honest Spaniard anymore, a starch church mingling in public affairs, and a population so absorbed by soccer, celebrities and fear, they do not need to do that? Spaniards doom themselves! We always have, damn religious guilt, envy, fear, pride and inferiority complex!
Since I could not get a hold of tickts for New Museum’s Seven on Seven, I decided to make the most out of my day yesterday (defying my cold), so I even had time to visit the NYC anarchist book fair, at Judson Church (Washington Square).
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I wish I had had more time to devote to exploring all the literature (great and aweful) on display. But at least I had time to notice:
After j-CATION and having lunch at Mr. K’s (one of the best Chinese restaurants in Manhattan), yesterday I went to MoMA Film to see Gosfilmofond’s copy of the 1935 USSR film Loss of the Sensation (87 min.), directed by Aleksandr Andriyevsky.
Virtually unseen in the U.S., Andriyevsky’s liberal film version of Karel Capek’s popular 1920 play, R.U.R. (in which the notion of robots was introduced), the movie tells the story of Jim Ripple, an engineer, who invents robots controlled by saxophones and radio signals. As far as the capitalists are concerned, this is the “solution to the proletarian problem”, and they immediately hit on the idea of creating an army of emotionless fighting machines. Jim’s brother Jack is a workers’ leader and organises strikes against the robots, who will produce nothing but unemployment. After an accident when trying to bring them together, the humanoid machines are set on the strikers, but the workers fight back …
Although Marx’s “class struggle” mixed with Stalinist propaganda messages permeate much of the quite simplistic plot of the film, Jim Ripple’s character carries all the complexities and dilemmas that we are still wondering today in regards with technology, humanity, capitalism, production, power… An excellent film that makes you think.
In Spain, the conservative PP government is planning to make “passive resistance” a crime (as well as organizing demonstrations using internet technologies).
I have these 4 criminals’ magnetic puppets on my fridge. 2 were outlawed (and had to flee) by German Nazis. 1 had to flee Spanish dictatorship because he was a Communist. And the other one was thrown in jail by British occupation forces for “passive resistance”.
I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.
On September 28, 2011, Hou Hanru, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute said on a lecture (Curator’s Perspective) in New York:
I think the worst exhibition in the world is the exhibition that is organized like a book. We see this a lot, an exhibition that takes the artwork as an illustration of a concept. I think an exhibition is not necessary for this: frankly, it’s too expensive. Through exhibition making we must spend the money, time and energy to produce a language that can not be replaced by other forms.
Interested by this argument, I watched the recordings of The Critical Edge of Curating conference held at the Guggenheim Museum November 3-4, 2011. Here are some more thought provoking quotes:
For many curators and artist working today, the exhibition no longer serves as the culminating manifestation of their work. For some, it is a mere step along a trajectory of research and planning. For others it has become an entirely dispensable model.
Anton Vidokle (e-flux) said:
I see the artist as someone who sees art as an integral part of human social life and who can discover or renounce a social identity in his or her encounter with art.
I think that in the future, the art of our time may very well become incomprehensible because of how incredibly historically contingent contemporary art seems to be. In order to understand today’s art in the future you may have to reproduce the very specific context of our time in minutia. TV shows, fashion magazines, Hollywood movies, popular music, comic, supermarket circulars, and so forth, which is something far beyond what a didactic museum wall text does for the Renaissance paintings, for example.
From the #thisIsHowItsDone (not the movie adaptations, but special events to make people go more to the movie theaters) department, here is an awesome initiative from AMC movie theaters:
Get ready to watch the greatest Marvel movie event ever held at your local AMC Theatre on May 3rd! Experience THE ULTIMATE MARVEL MARATHON with six movies on one epic day. Watch the heroes’ stories unfold as they assemble for the midnight premiere of The Avengers 3D! Here’s a list of the six movies being shown at THE ULTIMATE MARVEL MARATHON: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor in 3D, Captain America in 3D, The Avengers in 3D.
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