Another Damn Tune I Can't Get Out of My Mind

Listening to "Moonlight and Muzak" 

from M's 1979 album "New York-London-Paris-Munich"

Sift The Evidence Then Move

In Transit

7 May 2009

MARTA Station

On My iPod This Morning

Although it was released in 1977, there's little of the 70's about it. It may be 33 years old, but it's still Music of Tomorrow.

Wiretapping The Memory Palace

Japanese scientists have developed a technique that reconstructs images directly from the brain. The test images retrieved thus far are simple, monochrome characters but even at this early stage of development, the results are easily recognizable. The scientists assume that they will be able to reconstruct more detailed and complex images in time, including images retrieved from dreams. The applications of this sort of technology have been explored in fiction ad nauseam (see Wim Wender's film Until The End of The World, 1991), and the implications for art and privacy alone run the gamut from exciting to deeply creepy. Articles here and here.

Some aspects of art in general, and maybe photography in particular, are about externalizing the internal. In that sense, this new technology can be seen as a logical extension of the paint brush, or more closely, the camera. Apart from providing a grand new thoroughfare between the internal, physiological event of perception and shared, external reality, it also offers the very scary possibility of technologically updating Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon beyond his wildest dreams.

Late Night Storm

1981

Long exposure of a summer storm

Lenoir City, Tennessee

Volatile

...we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile"

William Gibson

From "Pattern Recognition"

It's A Godawful Small Affair

1983

Knoxville, Tennessee

I've Been Listening To This All Morning. And Afternoon.

She's Tidied Up and I Can't Find Anything

"There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it."

Don DeLillo