Required Reading
This week, an art project asks people to give away their data for a cookie, the first web brower turns 20, a child befriends Siri, slowing down in museums, the smell of old books, tea propaganda, and more.
This week, an art project asks people to give away their data for a cookie, the first web browser turns 20, a child befriends Siri, slowing down in museums, the smell of old books, tea propaganda, and more.
This past week was the 20th anniversary of the release of Netscape Navigator, which was the first commercial web browser. Its original press release included these bullet points:
Mosaic Communications’ network navigator achieves its dramatic performance improvements through new capabilities such as:
- Continuous document streaming, enabling users to interact with documents while they are still being downloaded rather than waiting for the entire document to load.
- Multiple, simultaneous network accesses, allowing several documents or images to be downloaded simultaneously.
- Native support for the JPEG image format.
One art project asks people if they would give away personal data for a real-life cookie:
Participants couldn’t be certain that Puno wasn’t a flagrant identity thief planning to leak selfies. But they made a bet that she was what she seemed to be: a bright young Brooklyn artist making a well-intentioned point. Her project would have been more daring, and perhaps more artistically complete, if she’d put everything online, posing the question of who would be at fault if someone made nefarious use of the information.
A bizarre story of how a boy with autism befriended Apple’s Siri:
Siri can be oddly comforting, as well as chummy. One friend reports: “I was having a bad day and jokingly turned to Siri and said, ‘I love you,’ just to see what would happen, and she answered, ‘You are the wind beneath my wings.’ And you know, it kind of cheered me up.”
Maurice Berger explores LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Notion of Family“:
Ms. Frazier, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was inspired by Gordon Parks’s idea of using the camera as a “weapon” of choice against racism, intolerance and poverty. She does not pretend to speak for African-Americans or even Braddock’s black community in this project. Instead, she typically photographs herself and her mother and grandmother, three generation of women whose “lives parallel the rise and fall of the steel mill industry,” and who endured despite “thirty years of disinvestment and abandonment by local, state and federal governments.”
Reconsidering the “Broken Windows” theory that the NYPD so depends on to justify their policing:
When “Broken Windows” was published, in 1982, tax revenues in New York were shrinking at an alarming rate and the city’s ability to maintain itself was in doubt. In 1980, the population had fallen to 7,071,639, a drop of about 800,000 from ten years earlier and around where the city’s population had been in 1930. Crime by blacks—not the collapse of local manufacturing or the flight of middle-class families to the suburbs—was popularly perceived to be the primary cause.
This racial perception is no less prevalent today. The most comprehensive study to date on the roots of crime found that the central factor in how people perceive the safety of a neighborhood is not disorder or even the presence of boarded-up stores and abandoned buildings, but the number of African-Americans (and to a lesser extent Hispanics) who live there. This perception was true for blacks and whites alike.4 The link is ingrained in the American psyche. When we criticize the police for racial prejudice, we are decrying a condition that is bigger than the police, a prejudice that we may share ourselves.
The age-old question of slowing down in a museum:
Most people want to enjoy a museum, not conquer it. Yet the average visitor spends 15 to 30 seconds in front of a work of art, according to museum researchers.
… Indeed, a number of museums now offer “slow art” tours or days that encourage visitors to take their time … sometimes you get more for the price of admission by opting to see less.
… Previous research, including a study led by Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan, has already suggested that museums can serve as restorative environments. And Daniel Fujiwara at the London School of Economics and Political Science has found that visiting museums can have a positive impact on happiness and self-reported health.
Every wonder why old books have a particular aroma? Galley Cat has your answer:
A PDF catalogue accompanying the Art Post-Internet exhibition, curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing during spring 2014, is finally available online. I’ll probably have more to say about this at a latter time.
We often associate tea with India, but did you know that it took a British propaganda campaign to get Indians to drink chai?
Tea might seem to be India’s best-loved beverage, but its popularity is actually the result of a careful propaganda effort. Like Christmas and diamonds, tea consumption is among the world’s more successful advertising campaigns.
… Tea plantations in India were initially meant to produce tea for foreign consumers. When tea consumption in Britain and the US began to stagnate around the turn of the 20th century, the British, ever the opportunists, decided to look to India to expand their markets.
The only problem was that Indians were extremely reluctant consumers of the combination of sugar, boiled leaves, water and milk.
In 1903, the British government established a propaganda unit, at first called the Tea Cess Committee, that was meant to propagate tea consumption. This board was funded by the proceeds of a tax on the export of tea. The government neatly renamed this as the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in 1937.
A short history of Fire Island architectural modernism and its distinct style (emphasis theirs):
It was, essentially, the antithesis of the suburban ideal: no cars, no carefully maintained lawns, no fences—just meandering paths that took you from the boardwalk to the front door. Gifford, who often talked his wealthy clients into building houses with a smaller footprint, is quoted by his biographer, Christopher Rawlins, as saying, “Someday we will learn to live with nature, instead of living on nature.”
The YouTube channel of the New York City Department of Records is a treasure trove of strange video, including:
- The Guggenheim Museum in 1986 (posted below)
- Random footage from Harlem
- AIA video tour of the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood
- The Bronx in 1986
- Footage of Shirley Chisholm declaring her presidential bid on January 25, 1972; she was the first African-American woman to ever do so.
Why do so many gay men hate camp men?
There is a growing resistance to the straight-acting gay man. “Masc” is just another mask and the straight-acting gay man is just that – an actor. The bromosexual chooses his clothes as carefully as any drag queen; his mannerisms are as studied, his voice as carefully modulated. He is trying to pass. But so is the straight man. It’s just that over centuries all his careful nurturing has been naturalised. He is the norm but he is not natural.
A man and his hummingbird “pet” (via Colossal):
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
