zaha dancing.

Like the secret dork that I am on Friday I was just nestling in for a night of doing work when Jason called and asked if I wanted to go to the ballet. And like a not-so-secret marathon procrastinator I accepted the ticket.

When I got to Lincoln Center Jason was on the phone describing the ballet to a friend. The words "Zaha designed the sets" were uttered which was the first clue that we were going to see something closer to _______ rather than Balanchine.

Now in my effort to become a better student of philosophy I've been trying to take lessons and learn from experiences rather than criticize, but the idea of a dance concert created in collaboration with Zaha Hadid was just asking for criticism.

But here's what I learned:
1. I don't know anything about modern dance. Actually I don't know anything about dance, except that I like to do it. But as to anything factual or academic I'm a blank. Surely this sort of knowledge should make me more open-minded.
2. Video art. Has that ever been good? I tried to engage with Justin on this point by wondering if part of the problem could be that video art has the same conceits as TV and security cameras, but tries to pawn it off as art. But Justin held firm on the essential badness of video art. Also video doesn't seem to have progressed since 1989 or so because all the video in the concert dealt with city scenes, voyeurism, sexuality, and surveillance (or architectural renderings), which seemed less Zaha and more D+S: The Shitty Political Years. The fact that video art made up a substantial portion of the show was a serious downer.
3. Maybe architects who use animation programs are thought of as pretty cool within the field, but outside of architecture animation should be left to the professionals.
4. Rock violin is a pretty bad idea.
5. As is the idea that everyone is a media critic. You're not. Even with that post-graduate certificate in media studies.

But the Times was less charitable than I.

maps, libraries, knitting

A few months ago during a post-departmental colloquium drinking fest several of us started talking about libraries, education, the uses of information, and the relationship between technology and physical, with-pages books. The main impetus of this conversation was the recent transformation of our library, which has become (or rather tried really hard to become) a technology-focused information hub complete with a cafe. All this would be fine if this were executed with some insight, but instead we still have perfunctory stacks in ugly rooms with dropped ceilings because books are passe.

This can be short-sighted, as evidenced by Carla Hesse's own exhuberance regarding how information and network technology changed San Francisco's library. Ultimately SF's library didn't have enough room in the stacks for books. When designing the main branch of the Seattle Public Library OMA took that information (along with a lot of other stuff) and really did something interesting and insightful with the books.

[Here I will put a place-marker for some comment on being forward-thinking and how it's not necessarily connected to drinking all the technology Kool-Aid and liking it. This is like Kierkegaard saying something like in order to live forward one must look backward.]

But the questions and points that came up during that conversations seem to be clearly to me based on this NYT article on amateurs online mapmakers. I wonder if the point that some make that physical geography is getting progressively less important is just overdetermined, and that the relationship between networks, physical location, and the trading of information is more dynamic--that perhaps we need to appreciate physical geography (and books) in order to go forward.

That's just a musing though.

Last night Mimi and I went to a presentation on crafting and craft culture. The most memorable part for me was a slide of a man in a wet white shirt--the type of man that makes one think of nothing so much as Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. Of course the photo was from the guy's wedding. And Mimi surmised, probably correctly, that he was probably very, very happy in his marriage. Whatever.

data smog

A couple years ago I took a course on the uses of information and the Internet in education. One of the required texts was David Shenk's Data Smog, which I found compelling and timely even though it had been written several years earlier. One thing I pointed out in my comments to class was the fact that book did not (or perhaps more accurately, could not) address the rise of blogs, which were at the time just reaching popular consciousness. So now, ten years after the book's publication Shenk takes a look back at the book and, among other things, mentions the absence of blogs. Like Shenk I totally agree that much of the book is still worth reading and thinking about--probably more so than in 1997.