Itch Away blog

Liquor. In neat tumbler musty smell emits into nostrils, spilling into nose, smelling excellent. Xmas merriment elates lips promised relentless licensed imbibation. Incredible naivity vaccinates consciousness of fear. Re-establishing stability till I ingest extortionate oral acquisition. Call an ambulance. Messy sight. I, involuntarily nauseous, suffocate under novice vomit. Mine. Never vomit more, one notes to oneself. Naughty guilt, lethargic empty memory. My yacking continues.

Well, after a pretty hellish false start at Heathrow, I’m finally back in the equally hellish heat of Phoenix. I’m toying with the idea of resurrecting the ArizonARSE blog while I’m here, but debating whether I might just as well update via this blog instead. We shall see.

The word which rhymes with SUX is LUX. LUX is a coffee shop in Phoenix. LUX is full of people on Apple computers* wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts. Buying a coffee at LUX involves the kind of negotiation I would expect if you were to have to plead with bailiffs who have come to repossess some of your items from your house:

“Well, look I know you have to take objects to the value of £500, but I’ll be really upset if you take the TV”.

In LUX:

“Well, yeah, sure we could do that mocha with one shot in theory, but I don’t want to do that for you, because we serve all our coffee with two shots. I wouldn’t be happy serving you with just one because we don’t do that here.”

Something which doesn’t SUX is the Transformers movie, a movie about which I’d heard mainly bad things. Essentially the film contained everything I wanted – fast-paced action, a few dreadfully cheesy one-liners (”more than meets the eye” is recontextualised in a painful chat up line) and a Prime ~ Megatron dual which is worthy of what every 25-30-year-old man has been waiting for for 15 years.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t perfect. Despite keeping reassuringly paced for the duration, it still could have been 30 minutes shorter at very little expense of plot. That aside, the love story sub-plot is thankfully slim. It was admittedly cheesy, and the binary malevolence / benevolence of the Decepticons / Autobots couldn’t have been more extreme. And yet, this was part of the charm of the cartoons and comics in the first place. Prime is a selfless leader, Megatron a kind of Machiavellian electro-Hitler whose fiery relationship with Starscream is bred on distrust and competition. Machines on both sides make mistakes. They are not faultless killing machines. And, as my companion for the movie Damon Moss astutely noted, the only Autobot to die was clearly the only black character, Jazz. Old movie habits die hard, I guess.

Speaking of Die Hard, I still need to see Bruce Willis take out a helicopter with a car.

* Yes, I own an Apple computer and am a slave to their products. A am a hypocrite.

Look what you could win.

Drew Milne
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
Sophie Robinson

Graeme Estry
Elisabeth James
Sean Bonney

More info can be found on Openned’s nights page.

Thanks to Zaf for snapping this blackboard special (click to enlarge)

“No Men’s Land” is a project by Simone van Grenestijn (Cym), which, as I gather from the synopsis of the piece, uses a program called CYM to render images solely in HTML.

From the concept:

As a first step cym is traveling to the actual borders that mark the countries. She takes photos with the digital camera at the different border situations. The photos give a good impression what this political line looks like in reality. Very often you can’t see anything special. There is only the knowledge that there are actually two different countries visible on the photo.

As a second step, and this is where the project ‘No Men’s Land’ really starts, cym creates an abstract image from the original photo. This abstract image is created entirely with HTML, the language used to create websites. The abstract image therefore is no longer an image, but only a piece of HTML code. The abstract images are not perfect copies of their original photos, but new compositions made by cym based on the photos captured in reality.

In this way the abstract images show some similarities with the political borderlines in Central Europe. Political lines are constructed to define the bounderies of the different countries, but reality does not always follow these lines.

Click to enlarge

The project uses geographical borders as the basis for its photographic progression, and presenting notions of representation and transformation in ways which foreground language, its visual representation and its construction, through digital transformation and code. The nature of representation is certainly foregrounded in a way which is striking, almost humorous for anyone who has ever used a BBC computer from the 1980s.

But there’s more to this project than an incidental aesthetic nostalgia. Process and artificiality seem central to the images. Geographical boundaries are as artificial as the digital images which capture them. Knowledge of the signified is what renders these boundaries relevant.

As such, “No Men’s Land” is a kind of abstract representation of abstract representation. Visually striking images bring to the fore the implementation of social constructions.

Czech it out.