conversations

Charles Bayliss

Charles Bayliss was one of the successful late 19th Century Australian professional city photographers who utilised the craft of photography well to provide rich photographic views of the urban environment and the progress of colony. Bayliss is considered to be a leading figure in Australia’s photographic heritage.

Charles Bayliss, View overlooking the Hawkesbury Bridge, Hawkesbury River, New South Wales, ca. 1885, NLA

The equivalent today of the railway bridge would be freeways.

The Holtermann panorama is one of the most impressive Australian photographic achievements of the nineteenth century as well as being a visual document which documented and celebrate the city’s progress.

digital humanities

Digital technology has ruptured, and completely transformed, photography. We know talk easily about film based photographers using outdated technology. It represents a nostalgia for techniques presently on the wane.

Gary Hall in "The Digital Humanities Beyond Computing: A Postscript" in Culture Machine Vol 12 says:

The digital humanities can be broadly understood as embracing all those scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology, and being engaged in processes of digital media production, practice and analysis. Such activities may include developing new media theory, creating interactive electronic archives and literature, building online databases and wikis, producing virtual art galleries and museums, or exploring how various technologies reshape teaching and research.

He adds that this field or, better, constellation of fields, is neither unified nor self-identical: it is comprised of a wide range of often conflicting attitudes, approaches and practices that are being negotiated and employed in a variety of different contexts.

Traditionally technology has been seen as a tool (as techne) which is used to bring about certain ends. Technology was understood as an instrumentality. This is assumed in utilitarianism. and it acts to repress the way that technology also change our experience of time, our modes of thought and, ultimately, our understanding of what it means to be human.

The Unthanks

Andrew Ford in his Dark Pop article on Inside Story says that The Unthanks sing in delicately astringent harmonies, set against repeating piano and violin lines that create hypnotic aural patinas, bringing distance and emotional detachment to songs that might otherwise come too close for comfort.

Here is their interpretation of Alex Glasgow’s “Close the Coalhouse Door,” written in the 1970s for a play of the same name about mining in Newcastle:

It is from The Unthanks Last album in 2011.

The title track and official video by Nick Murray Willis:

They have the ability to strip everything back to the bare bones of a song, always ensuring that the vocals of Rachel and Becky Unthank take centre stage. There's no clutter in their music.

Scientist meets Publisher

Alex Holcombe says that academic publishing is stuck in an outmoded system. Most scientific research is paid for by government and non-profit university funds, but high-profit corporate publishers often control access to the results of the research through their paywalls. It's a knowledge monopoly.

It’s not just authors that provide free labor to the publishers. It’s also the academics that review each of the articles. Holcombe says:

The largely for-profit publishing system particularly galls because we scientists do most of the work, but the publishers make all the money. For most journals, scientists not only write all the manuscripts submitted to them, but also vet and edit all these manuscripts before they are published – the peer-review process – all without receiving a cent for their services.

Those not associated with a subscribing university or research institution pay a huge fee for each article --up up to A$42 an article---they download. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

This restricts the flow of new knowledge. One solution is to opening up access to scholarship eg., the Open Humanities Press. This is spelled out by Michael B. Eisen in the New York Times:

Researchers should cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many “open-access” journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded). Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. And most important, the N.I.H., universities and other public and private agencies that sponsor academic research should make it clear that fulfilling their mission requires that their researchers’ scholarly output be freely available to the public at the moment of publication.

Unlimited access to the latest publicly funded scientific and medical findings is an important public good. So governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly funded research are placed in a free public database.

Weather Report: Birdland

I been watching a DVD video of Weather Report's interesting Live at Montreux 1976 Jazz Festival performance (featuring the Heavy Weather lineup of keyboardist Joe Zawinul, bassist Joe Pastorius, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Alex Acuna, and percussionist Manolo Badrena). The focus of the show is primarily on material from Black Market (1976).

At its inception, Weather Report was an avant-garde experimental jazz group, following in the steps of Miles Davis' In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. The band moved away from the free-jazz elements of its early albums towards a more fully developed compositional technique.

The video is of 'Birdland' from the 1977 album Heavy Weather; an album that pushed the group into superstardom. It is from the Live Concert, Offenbach, Germany, Sept. 29, 1978; a period of the bands commercial peak

The band's history is divided into three distinct eras—the early, freer material, the middle groove period with bassists Alphonso Johnson and, later, Jaco Pastorius and their final period where co-leader/keyboardist Joe Zawinul's increasing interest in world music became more dominant. In 1978 Weather Report was the rock and roll band of jazz. They lasted until 1986.

Naomi Oreskes: Answering Climate Change Skeptics

Where does climate change denialism comes from? The fossil fuel industry pays for it. No one even really tries denying it any more.

The presentation is based on her recent book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth about Climate Change. N

Nussbaum on tragedy

Martha Nussbaum interviewed on The Fragility of Goodness: luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. In this text Nussbaum's inquiry is to pursue Greek responses to the problems of living a good life and making the right ethical choices in a world where chance and events beyond our control can shatter the very foundations of all we hold dear or force us into insoluble crises.

Nussbaum holds that tragedy places importance on the contingent factors of our lives -- our relationships with loved ones and friends, our wish for power and success in the world, and so on; for her, tragedy's typically complex treatment of these issues leads to a 'learning through suffering' and conveys a sophisticated ethical world-view.

In our time, we are tempted to think that luck has nothing to do with goodness, because we are inclined to define this latter purely in terms of intention. Nussbaum points out how much contemporary moral thinking is under Kantian influence. It is the quality of the will that matters, and that is independent of fortune. What happens to us may affect our happiness, will certainly determine how much good we manage to do; but it can't touch what we intend, and that alone is relevant to the moral quality of our lives.

This can push us towards a narrowing in our definition of the good. In pursuit of ethical self-sufficiency we can be led to redefine the good life so as to exclude the things which are vulnerable to chance. The tdesire to limit vulnerability can take us in the other direction--to make us try to control the course of things, to get a grip on events, to be in control. This leads to maximizing power.

Madonna: remaking American culture?

Madonna was probably the first female pop star to have complete control of her music and image. According to some it is in her interpretation of the role and politics of images wherein lies her cultural significance.

Madonna, still from Sex

Sex is a coffee table book written by Madonna with photographs by Steven Meisel Studio and film frames taken from film shot by Fabien Baron. The book was edited by Glenn O'Brien. Sex was released on October 21, 1992 by Warner Books. The book was released by Madonna as an accompaniment to her fifth studio album Erotica, which was released a day earlier.

Sara Marcus in How Madonna liberated America at Salon.com says that Madonna's cultural significance was her assault on American prudery her revelatory spreading of sexual liberation to Middle America, which changed this country for the better. Marcus says that throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, her protean personae and erotic gambits were consistently a step ahead of what Middle America was ready for. She dared us to catch up with her.

For instance:

In the early ’80s, when the Material Girl owned the dance floor at Manhattan nightclubs and reveled in the downtown scene’s polysexual utopia, the political advances of feminism and gay liberation had stalled out and were hurtling toward backlashville. By the end of that decade, when gay rights laws were being repealed in cities across the country, Madonna was bringing the ball culture of gay and transgender blacks and Latinos — the true voguers — to junior high school gymnasium dances worldwide, popularizing an ecstatic ethos of freedom, sexual and otherwise, sprung directly from big-city club scenes that millions of suburban kids might never get to experience firsthand.

The forces of censorship were no match for the marketing and dramaturgical genius of Madonna:

In an era when photographers and performance artists were being blasted in the halls of Congress and the courts of public opinion for using religious iconography or homoerotic images or referring to self-gratification, Madonna hit upon danceably glamorous versions of all of these things. She managed to smuggle the values of the sexually fluid, multiracial art underground into the dead center of American culture before the old-school guardians of moral rectitude could gather their forces to protest.

In this way Madonna remade American culture.

Grateful Dead: Radio City Music Hall 10/31/1980

In the fall of 1980, the Grateful Dead played a series of shows att he Radio City Music Hall in New York City (venues considerably smaller than they had grown accustomed to) for the purpose of filming and recording. The group opened these concerts with a special acoustic set at which Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir played acoustic guitars, Brent Mydland played piano, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart played reduced kits, whilst Phil Lesh stuck to his electric bass.

The acoustic set preceded their standard two electric sets; the first time since 1970 and the acoustic music deliberately harks back to the band's origins in the folk, bluegrass, and country groups:

The October 30 and 31 performances were edited into a home video release--Dead Ahead in 1981 and then remastered as a music video on DVD in 2005.

It was during the 1980s that the Grateful Dead become quite set in its ways. Forced to perform in cavernous arenas, the group lost some of its connection to its audience. Likewise, the hardened existence of life on the road took its toll on the health of the musicians. As a result, the Grateful Dead assumed fewer risks on stage, and the structure for its concerts became clearly defined.

Paul Outerbridge Jr

Paul Outerbridge was a designer and illustrator in New York before turning to photography in the 1920s. His early work, influenced by Paul Strand, consisted primarily of still-life abstractions of ordinary objects such as cups, light bulbs, milk bottles, machine parts, and eggs.

In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. He became friends with the artists and photographers Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Berenice Abbott.

Paul Outerbridge, saltine box, Platinum print, 1922

In 1929 Outerbridge returned to New York and set up a country studio where he began to do challenging work in carbro color photography. Achieving mastery quickly, he became a successful commercial color photographer and worked in earnest on his color nude studies.

Moving to California in 1943 and taking up residence in Laguna Beach, Outerbridge made his last important body of work throughout California and Mexico. Between 1948 and until his death in 1958 he codified a new language in color photographs (in particular the carbro-color process) that anticipated the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and others known for their “New Color” work in the 1970s.

Paul Outerbridge, ‘Gas Station, Mexico’, c.1950

This body of work from California and Mexico was shot in bold, luminous Kodachrome, his photographs explore the quirkiness of 1950s leisure culture. This forgotten body of photographs bridges the art historical gap between modern and contemporary practice.