FractalMix

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Ocean Level

Global sea level is currently rising as a result of both ocean thermal expansion and glacier melt, with each accounting for about half of the observed sea level rise, and each caused by recent increases in global mean temperature. Antarctica and Greenland, the world's largest ice sheets, make up the vast majority of the Earth's ice. If these ice sheets melted entirely, sea level would rise by more than 70 meters - according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Photography

This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints. (Susan Sontag)

Monday, September 14, 2009

Failures of Representation

"I think that there is less and less interest in adequate, pleasing, skillful, appropriate, successful, informative, functional representation, and more and more interest in representation that fails. We care about representation when it goes wrong, and we don’t notice when it works well. In part that is the result of our modernist heritage: we don’t spend time with naturalism because we associate it either with older ideologies of the image, those in force from the Renaissance to the rise of Impressionism, or else with capitalist consumerism and its army of coercive representations. Skilfull representation, in particular, is hard to think about except as a constructed idea that responds to certain desires in relation to images and to fine art.i Adequate representation, mimesis, naturalism, and realism sound like old, asked-and-answered problems. On the other hand, we have not abandoned representation. On the contrary: we are fascinated by it. I take this ambivalence, and this somewhat forensic interest in the places where representation fails, as signs that the present moment is neither modernist nor postmodernist in the usual senses. The present moment is concerned with a resurgence of representation, but as a ruin. Representation is no longer capable, adequate, comprehensive, or systematic: it lacks what Robert Williams calls “systematicity.”

James Elkins