I’ve long been interested in time-based alternative currencies, and the idea is playing a substantial role in the film I’ve been working on for the past year. Time/Bank is a project by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle (of the art network and journal e-flux) that attempts to establish a time bank for the art community. Aranda and Vidokle clearly know their stuff - they trace the time banking concept not just to Ithaca, but to Owen and Warren, and link to a number of contemporary time banking projects and resources. Using their website, artists are able to exchange hours of labor with other participants. For instance: you could spend two hours editing a video for someone in your city, and later use those two ‘hour-dollar’ credits to pay someone in Hamburg to translate your press release into German. The project was started last October, and the site gives no indication of whether or not it’s still operating (things like this have a tendency to die out quickly), but I’ve just submitted my application to join the network, so I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

For some reason I’ve never considered before that the art community may be especially suited for experiments in time-based labor exchange. For a few reasons… 1) the stakes are relatively low, 2) artists are typically known for not having a ton of money, 3) barter and unpaid labor exchange (internships, casual volunteering of skills among friends, etc.) are already common.

As part of their project, Aranda and Vidokle also asked a number of artists to design time-based currencies. A few of the designs are clever and aesthetically pleasing, most are ugly and ill thought out. A few have accompanying text explanations, most are left to speak for themselves. A few of those explanations are intelligent and creative, most are typical, overinflated artist statement blabber. These ones are my favorites:

“Film running on a camera that is pointed at an empty set. There are no actors, but the images are the promise of an exchange. No events yet, but my time for yours, for the images to become loaded with meaning.”

“When celebrating a time contract two parties need each find their own string. Any kind of string will do. […] The two parties join the strings in a lark’s head know, or two, or three, or four… One knot equals half an hour, a second knot equals an hour… and so on and so forth […] A note is born of each contract […] In theory a note (knot) can always be traced to its origins”

“This continuous roll of time-money is worth 24 hours. Divided into 48 half-hour segments, the roll was made on a printing calculator by typing the numbers 1 to 30 and then repeating the process 47 times. The user can tear the roll into whatever increments are needed. Artist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s ‘industrial paintings,’ which were kept on rolls and sold by the meter, provided the point of departure for the project.”

Vidokle himself and the net.art duo behind 0o0o0o0.org both had the clever idea of extending the concept beyond the visual/tactile, the former using a loaf of bread that takes one hour to bake, and the latter using silent mp3s of varying lengths. Contrary to the above examples, neither is at all practical, but they both have a poetic way of rethinking our perception of time.

“Most of the feckless, listless quality of today’s art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.”

“Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.”

“The common quality or defect which unites apparently divergent artists like Antonioni, Truffaut, Richardson is fear, a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film. Coupled with their storage vault of self-awareness and knowledge of film history, this fear produces an incessant wakefulness.”

“Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators […] seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite- tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.“

“[Kurosawa’s Ikiru] sums up much of what a termite art aims at - buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.”

- Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art and Termite Art” (1962)

“[F]ilms are just loose scaffoldings, jungle gym swings that allow you to go off in a dozen different directions in your head. Contraptions to think with, murky, messy things. Fascinating sometimes, even often, but rarely perfect. Who needs perfection? – that is the question. […] think about that moment in film theory, late ‘60s to early ‘80s maybe, when all we craved were films with cracks, ruptures and transgressions, films of contradiction, films that tear themselves apart to reveal ideological monsters, whether this film be directed by Jesús Franco or John Ford … those were the days.”

“Imperfect cinema, bad cinema, cannot be corralled down to one kind, one type, one genre of cinema. Today’s whole emphasis on B cinema, exploitation cinema, paracinema, on underground or outlaw cinema, on porno and gorno and all the rest of it, has only one radical point as far as I am concerned: it’s the beachhead, the wedge, that is meant to free you, cure you the viewer, of your in-bred cultural attachment to normative values (the professional film, the well-made film, and so on), and ultimately to the ideal of perfection. That’s why, speaking personally, I ran to Edgar Ulmer, to Tod Browning, to Samuel Fuller, and to so many others of that uncategorisable ilk: to be cured, cured of society, cured of taste, which is a prison – taste, cultivation, whether it is of A cinema or B cinema or Z cinema, is the thing that has to be destroyed in you, exorcised back to hell. It’s hard work, it takes a lifetime, I can assure you: I’m not there yet. It’s not dark yet, but I’m getting there.

“And today this therapy, this exorcism cure, is terribly hard. For today we are living in a Masterpiece culture, a veritable Global Masterpiece Theatre. It’s part of the Criterion Effect that has swamped the DVD market, and hence film culture at large.”

“These days, what I think of as the prison-house of taste has clamped down on most of us – paradoxically so, in the ostensibly wide-open days of the Internet. We are furiously streamed, niched towards what we already know we want to watch: the directors, the genres, the carefully labeled cult-films. And so there are literally thousands of films on those DVD shelves that you or I will never watch.”

 - Adrian Martin, “The World Ten Times Over: Ongoing Adventures in Pulp Poetry” (2010)

As a filmmaker who often works in the science-fiction and fantasy genres and who often incorporates radical themes into my work, the topic of the intersection between speculative fiction and politics is something I spend a hell of a lot of time thinking about. Recently I encountered two authors’ takes on the subject: Michael Morcock’s 1977 essay “Starship Stormtroopers,” and an article recounting a Q&A session with China Miéville at the San Diego Public Library.

Both authors speak of genre conventions that they find politically repulsive. Miéville attacks the trope of “the Chosen One,” a cliche he finds to be “fascist” and which he has attempted to avoid or else subvert in his own writing.

Moorcock, on the other hand, has a bone to pick with a far less obvious and far more insidious convention. He refutes the common interpretation of writers such as Robert A. Heinlein as “radical” or “libertarian,” pointing out that their “rugged individualism” is in fact a childish and simplistic rebelliousness which almost always goes hand in hand with conservative paternalism.

“The bandit hero — the underdog rebel — so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves — what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their ‘charm’. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby.”

“Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism — albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism — and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein’s paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne’s. […] To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn [sic] shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.

“An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A ‘rebel’, certainly, he or she does not assume ‘rebellious charm’ in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king.”

Morcock’s distinction between the childish rebel and the responsible anarchist is spot on. Not only is it something well worth keeping in mind for anyone hoping to write liberatory fiction, but it has far reaching resonance “in the real world” as well. For one, it offers insight into the differing roles “individualism” takes in rightist and leftist thought. Perhaps more importantly though, it should serve as a reminder for many of those on the left of that old adage, “with great freedom comes great responsibility.” I’m thinking specifically of some young punks who too often confuse “fuck you, mom and dad!” rebelliousness with “anarchy.”

The definition of an anarchist Morcock provides (”rejecting authority but accepting self-discipline and community responsibility”) is worthwhile in that it represents a mature political ideal - that is, one which can be enacted not only by the individual espousing it, but by everyone, and still result in a functioning society. Any political ideal which can’t meet that criteria isn’t really an ideal at all… it’s an infantile impulse.

(Thanks to Magpie of Birds Before the Storm for tipping me off to the Miéville article)

bolo’bolo is a utopian novel written in 1983 by the anonymous Swiss author and activist p.m. (a name taken from the most common initials in the Swiss phonebook). One amazon reviewer describes the book as having “No tedious sermons on recycling, condom use, or literacy. Instead, the Magus of Zurich talks about a possible world of duels, sprouting micro-religions, bizarre local cuisines, the transformation of bland existing buildings into bohemian funhouses, dramatic suicides, wild barter economics, and Tarkovskyesque railway systems.”

Central to the brief novel is an invented auxillary language. By simply inventing new terms, p.m. is able to group together concepts in simple, succinct ways. “Pili,” for instance, means “communication, education, language, media,” whereas “vudo” means “city, county, trading area, bioregion.” Each word has a corresponding abstract glyph, and the language has an interesting and elegant grammar system.

p.m. himself speaks of his motivation for creating a new language:

“The original idea for creating this weird secret language came up because the European left-wing terminology was no longer viable. Nowadays when people talk about communism, that’s gulag, no one wants to hear about it. Or if people talk about socialism, then they are speaking of Schröder’s politics - retirement cuts - and no one wants that, either. And all of the other standard left-wing expressions such as ’solidarity,’ ‘community,’ they’re all contaminated and no longer useful. But the things that they stand for are actually quite good. I don’t want to suffer because of terminology for which I am not to blame; instead, I’d rather create my own. It would probably take longer to explain that the communism that I am talking about is not the one that I saw. It is easier to simply say I am for bolo’bolo, and then everyone starts to think of the things all over again, to re-think them. […] I want to emphasize that there is not one single idea in this book that is new. Everything in it is something that I found.”

The official flag of Bikini Atol, whose inhabitants were re-located by the United States government in order to conduct a series of over 20 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, the most significant being 1954’s Castle Bravo - the world’s first ever test of a practical hydrogen bomb. Though the re-location was intended to be temporary, the effect of Castle Bravo was far greater than expected, causing widespread radioactive contamination and leaving the islands uninhabitable to this day.

From a site that also contains the (equally striking and saddening) Bikinian anthem:

“The 23 white stars in the field of blue in the upper left hand corner of the flag represent the islands of Bikini Atoll.

“The three black stars in the upper right of the flag represent the three islands that were vaporized by the March 1, 1954, 15 megaton hydrogen bomb blast, code named Bravo.

“The two black stars in the lower right hand corner represent where the Bikinians live now, Kili Island, 425 miles to the south of Bikini Atoll, and Ejit Island of Majuro Atoll. These two stars are symbolically far away from Bikini’s stars on the flag as the islands are in real life (both in distance and quality of life).

“The Marshallese words running across the bottom of the flag, ‘MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ’ [Translation: ‘Everything is in the hands of God.’], represent the words spoken in 1946 by the Bikinian leader, Juda, to U.S. Commodore Ben Wyatt when the American went to Bikini to ask the islanders–on a Sunday after church–to give up their islands for the ‘good of all mankind’ so that the U.S. could test nuclear weapons.

“The close resemblance of the Bikinian’s flag to the flag of the United States is to remind the people and the government of America that a great debt is still owed by them to the people of Bikini.”

Forget about Ashton Kutcher. Forget about Shaq. Forget about the fake but excellent Gary Busey, Steve Buscemi (RIP), and Jenny Holzer. Hell, forget about Iran*. I’m convinced that Twitter was invented for one purpose and one purpose alone… and that was to make Preschool Gems possible.

The site takes submissions of quotes from young children and posts about half a dozen or so “gems” a day. It’s sort of like the reverse of Shit My Dad Says, only a hundred thousand times better.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love kids and love working with kids. Two years ago I even made a video project where I collaborated with my three young cousins. One of the best things about being around people with ages in the single digits is listening to all the in-one-way-ignorant-but-in-another-way-totally-brilliant stuff that comes out of their mouths. As an artist (or even just as a human being) it can be incredibly inspiring, providing glimpses into an endless myriad of absurd and ostensibly “wrong,” yet very refreshing ways of looking at the world - lenses and vantage points that though once coming naturally, have been squeezed out of us by years of growing up.

Preschool Gems collects the very best examples of this kind of naive brilliance and puts it in a steady stream that can be consumed daily. And for that I am very very thankful.

Some recent favorites:
- “People are hamburgers in America!”
- “You know what? Computers are super smart, but I can beat ‘em.”
- “I would like for you to say wow when I say that you can never be in love with me again.”
- “He has the hapiness of truth and I have the sadness.”
- “I love everything in the world, even fake stuff.”

(That last one I just cannot get over. It kind of sums up my entire worldview.)

*Not that the idea of a bunch of tech-savvy kids challenging a regime isn’t an inspiring idea, but as Rami George Khouri writes in his NYT editorial, “We must face the fact that all the new media and hundreds of thousands of young bloggers from Morocco to Iran have not triggered a single significant or lasting change in Arab or Iranian political culture. Not a single one. Zero. […] [We must] grasp more accurately the fact that young people use the digital media mainly for entertainment and vicarious, escapist self-expression.”

Youtube/etc. Roundups are where I periodically post all the most interesting online videos I’ve watched lately. Feel free to share your own finds in the comments section. For links to more videos, click here.

A Conversation with Jon Rafman
Two-Pack-a-Day Smoking Baby Totally Cooler Than You
AVGN - Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
WWE Wrestler Confused by Own Mustache
cat in a bath “The Torture Room”
TO AMP UP for my day, I ghost ride the whip!
DEATH METAL PARROT
Battlestar Gallactica - Idumea
Why did you kill me Mommy?
Teen Werewolves
FACECAST - Wifebeater
BANGS Take U To Da Movies : [Official Video][HQ]
Fat Man Has A Rash Under His Tit From The Skin Rubbing Together in HD
I Lost My Virginity To A Dog
Hessian Hobbies
Starlings in sp
Shrimp Running On A Treadmill With The Benny Hill Theme
famous guitar player
Birthing Simulator PROMPT
Homeboy of the Month : MC Wagner
Jell-O Enrichment for Squirrel Monkeys at the Bronx Zoo
Walrus sucks own dick
Strange Cat Door Surprise
Foxes Jumping on my Trampoline
Brendan Fowler
BARR: Public Access Media Interview
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D
Creepy Lip Sync Contestant Totally WTF! (Phillipines)
Alka-Seltzer added to spherical water drop in microgravity
Eyewitness News - Hamster’s Mug Shot???
“Non-Documentary Scarf”
Zuckerberg’s Facebook Apology
7 Year Old Raps Justin Bieber - Eenie Meenie (Cover)
7 Year Old Raps B.o.B - Incredible Cover
Self High Five Machine by Deniz Ozuyger: Preview for chashama Installation
Reading and Time: A dialectic between academic expectation and academic frustration
Hippies Crying because of Dead Tree
Lonesome Road cover
GREATIST TREE HOUSE EVER

Also, it’s not worth it to start an entirely separate category/series/whatever for podcasts and the like, but I’ve been listening to a lot of really great interviews that I wanted to share. Hopefully posting audio in these Roundups will become more of a regular thing.

AUDIO:
Fireside Chat with Steve Reich
Bad at Sports: Episode 108: Marc Fischer
Bad at Sports: Episode 251: Mark Dion

Wikipedia Roundups are where I periodically post all the most interesting Wikipedia articles I’ve read lately. Feel free to share your own finds in the comments section. For more links, click here.

Project SCUM
Two Cunts in a Kitchen
Christian angelic hierarchy
Rocky Lockridge
Nurse log
Open-air museum
Historical reenactment
Living history
Renaissance fair
Cosplay
Society for Creative Anachronism
Live action role-playing game
Murder mystery game
Mafia (party game)
Mind’s Eye Theatre
Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Space art
James McIntyre (poet)
Security theater
Philosophy of mathematics
Civil death
Social death
Michael Fagan incident
Richard C. Weaver
Fairy chess piece
Alexamenos graffito
James Joseph Dresnok
Kardashev scale
Doomsday argument
Nudity in combat
The Black Book
List of famous trees
Planned shrinkage
Redlining
Benign neglect
Principles of Intelligent Urbanism
Cliff Young (athlete)
Sylvestre Matuschka
Saddam Hussein’s novels
Percussive maintenance
Hapax legomenon
Bloody Island (Mississippi River)
Flag of Bikini Atoll
Brian Douglas Wells
Dymaxion Chronofile
Radio jamming in Korea
Political religion
State capitalism
Erdős number
Erdős-Bacon number
Morphy Number
Shusaku number
Small world experiment
Supertaster
Selective eating disorder
Just-so story
Monogamy
Value of monogamy
Psychology of sexual monogamy
Cicisbeo
Attachment theory
Anti-fan
Fabula and sujet
Lost Cosmonauts
Emotional labor
The Hamster Dance
Alcohol belts of Europe
Little magazine movement
Sayre’s Law
Biological issues in Jurassic Park
Origin of birds
Cathexis
Waldorf education
The Experience Economy

Playscapes is a blog about playground design (and playground history and playground preservation and playground-inspired art and the politics of playground building). It’s also really cool. It’s things like these that bowl me over at the potential of the internet. Just to give you an idea of what a steady stream of fascinating beauty the blog pumps out, all of the images above are from the first two pages.

“Because it’s difficult to find non-commercial playground information. And I find that frustrating. Because a playground doesn’t have to cost a million bucks and come in a box. In fact, it’s better if it doesn’t. Because playgrounds are under-recognized as an artistic medium. Because everybody loves a playground.”

Thanks to the consistently wonderful An Ambitious Project Collapsing blog for pointing me there.

I’m torn between thinking this is really dumb and thinking this is really cool. Maybe it’s a little of both?

“Sade For Fonts Sake is a must-have special edition disc containing a set of 21 computer fonts and a collection of digital artworks by artist Paul Chan. For nearly ten years, Chan has been exploring the aesthetic, interactive, and philosophical potentials of fonts. As a complement to Sade for Sade s Sake, his monumental digital projection inspired by the work of novelist and philosopher Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), which premiered at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Chan has created a set of 21 truetype fonts that transform the act of typing into a generative Sadean performance.

“Unlike conventional fonts like Arial or Comic Sans, these Sade fonts are comprised of phrases and sentence fragments rather than letters and other alphanumeric characters, so that what is typed on the keyboard is not what shows up on the screen, or what is printed on paper. Each font holds a unique set of idioms that expresses a different sexual voice when typed. Some like Oh Bishop X and Oh Justine are based on characters in novels by Sade, while others are inspired by characters from news (Monica Lewinsky), pornstars (Michael Lucas), and poets and writers (Gertrude Stein, Holderlin) whose work knot together sex with language, rhythm and form. When you type with one of Chan’s fonts, anything you write becomes instantly, inexplicably, dirty, erotic, pornographic, poetic, sometimes all at once. The special edition data CD disc contains all 21 Sade fonts. They work with all three operating systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux). A special font installer is included to take the pain out of installing fonts. The disc also holds a collection of digital PDF works made using the fonts and a special set of drawings created as part of the ensemble of works that together weave the image of sex enmeshed with freedom, violence wrapped up with reason, and art entangled in it all.”