This is really great. Chris Hadfield, commander of Expedition 35 on the ISS:

The clinamen

The question is never if but rather where to locate the clinamen. In science, they tinkle in the background noise of curled up dimensions and bark at in the incompleteness of set theory. They dance in Al-jazari's Islamic clockwork machines, serving us drinks and divine fortune at the same time. Jarry rides with an invisible tribe of them, while composing imaginary plays about the clinamen who haunt Kant's transcendental. Another tribe causes Derrida to trip on the gap between words. When Plato looks over his shoulder in his cave, a surprised clinamen waves back. Old Descartes gets his fix through his pinneal gland. Meanwhile when Christians praise the blinding wisdom of God, the clinamen chortle and say he is one of us, bien sûr. Afterwards they amble away to lurk in Heidegger's impenetrable shadowy presence. Marx is overcome by the clinamen while measuring labour against labour-power. And Nietzsche? The clinamen are nothing if not tragedy! Wilde fell in love with a bellicose clinaman who previously put Rousseau in chains. In the future Neo's love of Trinity is clinamenical, this from an oracle who knows the clinamen well. Butler relates her visits with the clinawomen who live within the contingent possibilities of structure, but what will really bake your noodle is when Irigaray simultaneously disappears and births a clina Goddess. Impressed by this, Harraway invents the clinaborg. Art has clinamen outposts too, and Barthe's punctum and Krauss's negative condition of sculpture are favorite spots. Clement shouts out that Pollock paints portraits of them, though few these days listen. Epicurus no doubt would delight in all this, and award a special prize to Meillasoux for absolutizing the clinamen of hyperchaos, just before winking into nonexistence.

Nested parens to make Knuth proud

America in the 1930s-40s

Commuters in Lowell, Mass, 1941.

The US FSA black and white photos are well known, but personally I love this old and quixotic photo set of color photos from the 1930s-40s.

Twitter journalism

I am irritated by mainstream newspapers' adoption of Twitter as their primary source for quotes. You find journalists peppering their articles with stuff like this:

“I live and breathe this stuff, and I’m bored,” she wrote on Twitter.

How is this good journalism? We can all type queries into a search box and pull empty quotes like this. But how does this tell us anything new? Similarly, quoting measurements of Internet hit counts or post frequencies does not turn those numbers into real statistics. What happened to in-depth journalism? This used to involve research, interviews and analysis, so as to present newsworthy events along with carefully drawn insights and commentary. No longer. "For the record" is being replaced by "according to Google". Hey, I should post that to my twitter feed.

Update: Data from Pew research shows that, in the case of TV news, news reportage has dramatically dropped in favor of opinion shows.

Art and activism in Bushwick

Autonomous Organization is opening a free space that will be a resource center for sharing and creative economies in Bushwick. They have started a Kickstarter campaign to help raise money for the space. Worth checking out.

Smashed at LoBe

I have a piece in the group show Smashed, at LoBe, Berlin.

New chains

I saw a poster on the wall with this quote:

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains -- Rosa Luxemburg.

Later the same day I went to a lecture where Nietzsche was quoted:

"Free will" really means nothing more than the absence of feeling of new chains. -- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 1880.

Strange coincidence.

Pecha Kucha Berlin

I am giving a short talk at Berlin's Pecha Kucha night. What is Pecha Kucha? Around 200 people come to hear between 10 and 15 short talks. Every talk is the same format: 20 images, 20 seconds per image, 6 minutes 40 seconds. The talks cover a range of topics and are in English and German. I will give an overview of some of my research for my PhD.

Pecha Kucha #27
Festsaal Kreuzberg
Skalitzer Str. 130 • 10999 Berlin,
Einlass / Beginn: 19:30h / 20:20h,
Eintritt / Entrance: 6 Euro.

Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch is divisive. Some adore her work. Others reject it as sexist, classist, and cruel (or "torture" as Joan Acocella states in her New Yorker review). For me, if cruelty is present in Pina's work, it is there in an Artaudean sense, not a literal one (by the same token, would these people likewise say Monty Python is about torture and humiliation?). Watching Wim Wenders personally introduce his film, and listening to the interviews in the film, it is striking how Pina is surrounded by love. In one moving moment, a dancer points out (I'm paraphrasing) that Pina had watched her for more hours than her own parents had... who would watch her now? For me, it is Bausch's watchfulness that informs her work, not any desire to depict torture.

Of Wender's film I had mixed feelings. The way the interview segments cut into the dance segments often left me frustrated. Some of the interviews appear to be included for inclusiveness' sake, rather than because they inform us about a new aspect of Pina's life. I didn't like the 3D: I would have preferred to see the images brighter and clearer and without the reflections of smeary plastic glasses in front of my face. And where Pina's performances were peppered with textual elements, these were largely missing from Wender's tribute. All this said, I left the film with the same sense I have when I went to see Pina at BAM. Yes, I remain very resolutely a Pina fan.