The rise and spread of the internet and the world wide web are first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Their impact will be felt first in culture and only later in politics and commerce. The web allows more people than ever to create and make content; distribute and share it; to form groups and conversations around the ideas and issues that matter to them, which shape and express their identity and values. The current expression of that process – Web 2.0 – began to emerge in the late 1990s, created by social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogging and wikis. The next phase of that process will turn on a distinctively different kind of internet, the rise of cloud computing, which will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real-time connection and easier collaboration...The next most likely stage of the web’s technical development – cloud computing – will act as a giant accelerator for cultural cloud formation. It will be like a giant machine for making clouds of culture.

Sharing our programs, storage and even data makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. Pooling storage and software with others should lower the cost. Cloud computing would turn computing power into just another utility that we would access much as we turn on a tap for water..When computing becomes merely a utility we plug into, the focus for innovation will shift to the demand side...The cloud should also encourage collaboration. Different people, using different devices should be able to access the same documents and resources more easily. Work on shared projects will become easier, especially as collaboration software and web video conferencing becomes easier to use.

In this world you will be defined not just by what you own but by what you are prepared to share and how much effort you put into making it easy for others to share with you. It is not just what you do but how you link with others that counts.

However, the costs of the “war” on “piracy,” is deemed to “threaten” the “survival” of certain important American industries. Peer- to- peer file sharing is the enemy in the “copyright wars.” Kids“stealing” stuff with a computer is the target. The costs of this war wildly exceed any benefit, at least when you consider changes to the current regime of copyright that could end this war while promising artists and authors the protection that any copyright system is intended to provide. He adds that:

I’ve tried to advance this view for peace by focusing on the costs of this war to innovation, to creativity, and, ultimately, to freedom. My aim in The Future of Ideas was to defend industries that never get born for fear of the insane liability that the current regime of copyright imposes. My subject in Free Culture was the forms of creative expression and freedom that get trampled by the extremism of defending a regime of copyright built for a radically different technological age.

In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural?.....What should we do if this war against “piracy” as we currently conceive of it cannot be won? What should we do if we know that the future will be one where our kids, and their kids, will use a digital network to access whatever content they want whenever they want it? What should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distribution of “copies” simply will not exist?

Artists and authors need incentives to create. We can craft a system that does exactly that without criminalizing our kids. The last decade is filled with extraordinarily good work by some of the very best scholars in America, mapping and sketching alternatives to the existing system. These alternatives would achieve the same ends that copyright seeks, without making felons of those who naturally do what new technologies encourage them to do.

This is one track from the album by Al Jarden. It sounds okay.

It is a song about a particular place as it is part of a three-part ode to California that can be seen as a song cycle. The trilogy titled "California Saga is Holland's centerpiece.

Ross does photograph outside Wellington:

From windows facing west and from the roof of her loft, Mensch has views of the Brooklyn Bridge's span and the Municipal Building and the bridge has been a constant in her life and her art.

The Brooklyn bridge is definitely one of the most photographed bridges in the world since its construction over a 14 year period beginning in 1870. It was the first steel-wire suspension bridge ever built.

Hence the minimalist designed iPad with synchronisation, wireless and 3G connectivity that functions as a web browser, bookshelf, video player, game console and communication device. It also has the capability to download photos from a camera. It has an entry price of $US500.

This is basically Apple's entry into the netbook market, using the stuff it's learned from the iPhone. Using it will be familiar to anybody who has tried an iPhone: it uses the same combination of swipes, pokes, jabs and sweeps of the finger of its smaller cousin. So sweeping your hand across its reactive 9.7-inch screen will feel satisfying and natural. But it does not have a camera, it means surfing the web without Flash and no multitasking.

There doesn't appear to any significant differences between the iPad and the iPod Touch, other than its size. It is a portable internet, full-fledged media device. Do people want a big iPod touch with e-publishing support? Who is going to use this? Is it for the casual surfer infront of the TV or existing iMac/iPhoners? I'm a Mac user and I'm not sure how this fits into my life. Where does one stick the iPad? I would worry about that glass screen bouncing around in your briefcase or backpack naked?

Another thing the iPad makes abundantly clear is that if you want to succeed in a world ruled by a giant iPod touch, you had better develop (or acquire, or partner with someone who has) some serious multimedia chops. This device is designed to do large full-color photos, full-screen video (even HD) and much more. If all you have is a traditional newspaper-like page with a few small photos and some grainy video, you are going to get left in the dust.That might make things easier for magazines like Conde Nast, which are used to dealing with large-format, high-quality images and which understand design. But if you’re a newspaper, let’s be honest — large, high-quality images are not exactly your thing.

He adds:

Think about it this way: Have iTunes and the iPod rescued or saved the music business? Hardly. If anything, they have only accelerated the disruption in that industry, and exposed how out of touch, out of control and cost-prohibitive most of it still is when it comes to doing business online. The web has been doing the same thing to traditional media for the past decade or so, and devices like the iPad are only going to accelerate that process.

It is essentially a niche device in it’s current form: a media player that’s too large to carry around comfortably in your pocket, too small to be preferable for movie viewing to the TV, and could even represent a significant recurring money drain if you get 3G service. Will the iPad will be carried around the house and in bags to and from schools, colleges and workplaces?

It appears to be a screen for reading and watching—at some loss of convenience in creating even though it has an on-screen keyboard---and so a consumption device for playing movies and games at very high resolution. It is a little portable entertainment center connected to the AppStore, iTunes store, and the new iBook store. So we have an all-purpose content consumption device that opens the door to a digital library--a library without books. This is important since books have become so expensive that I've stopped buying them. Apple is going after the Kindle for sure.

Personally, as a heavy power user, I’m more concerned with getting stuff done than having a mobile entertainment device. However, I can see that it would be a way to present a portfolio of photos to people.

The distribution and sharing of snapshots online highlights a paradoxical condition that characterizes snapshot photography: it is both ubiquitous and hidden. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the snapshot has been the archetypal readymade image: placeholder for memories, trophy of sightseeing, produced in their millions by ordinary people to document the rituals of everyday life. And yet despite being the most mass produced photographic product, the snapshot has remained highly private, concealed from public eye, and quite often an invisible image. When snapshots do appear in public, whether in the context of fine art exhibitions and publications or in s stripped of notions of authorship or details about the original purpose of the image, its subjects and the circumstances of its creation.

One of the assumption of this body of work was his claim about aesthetic judgments and the nature of taste. Greenberg held that taste was involuntary and intuitive in nature, and thus as incorrigible and objective. Involuntary means what we cannot help but do. "You no more choose to like or not like a given item of art than you choose to see the sun as bright or the night as dark," he claims in "Intuition and the Esthetic
Experience". The question to ask here is why are aesthetic judgments involuntary and objective, rather
than being governed by specific theories or individual preferences?

Though Greenberg saw judgments of taste as involuntary, he also saw them as capable of revision or improvement. He conceived of taste as a faculty that could be "developed" or "cultivated" through increasing exposure to art—both through a broadening of the range of experience and through repeated encounters with the same works— and through reflection upon what was seen (or heard, or read).

The production of art works in this late industrial age has for the most part been circumscribed and structured by the commodity market. Beyond this, most artistic careers follow the contours of a consumer-oriented market: a style is established within which yearly variations occur. These variations do not threaten the style's identity but change subsequent production enough to make it identifiably new. Such a pattern then comes to be seen as natural and value-free rather than a condition of art distribution and sales. Strictures for change under different social conditions might emphasize disjunctive change, or no change at all.The modes for all change, or nonchange, in production, including art, may be limited to three: static, incremental, and disjunctive.

Beyond this, the mode of art paralleling commodity production with its basic style/yearly variation yields good as well as bad art. While this has proven obviously more economically sound for artists than either the static or disjunctive modes, it is probably safe to say that the disjunctive, when effective, for whatever reasons, has been granted greater cultural value, either in terms of individuals or movements. (

The album, the last wheeze of Bowie's glam rock period, is not much as a 1984 concept album. However, —“Diamond Dogs” along with a “Rebel Rebel”—have all the storm and frizzy froth of Ziggy’s best.

Shaviro says:

Most aesthetics of the past century has been focused on the sublime, and has disparaged the beautiful. This is because the sublime involves a moment of rupture or disproportion, whereas the beautiful seems to involve accommodation, comfort, and proportion. Thus, for instance, Roland Barthes is clearly on the side of jouissance (which is sublime) as opposed to mere plaisir (which corresponds to the beautiful).I argue, however, that Kant’s analytic of the beautiful remains important, because it is really a nascent version of what Deleuze calls singularity. A judgment of beauty is non-cognitive and non-conceptual; beauty is that which cannot be subject to rules, or derived from rules. It is always a singularity or an exception. It cannot be reduced to norms.

On the one hand, 21st century marketing and commodity production seem increasingly to be concerned with questions of “aesthetics”...This is so, both in the manner of Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that “everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense”, and in the way that the aesthetic attributes of our existence have themselves become commodified and marketed, so that today we are incited to purchase, not just tangible commodity objects, but also such things as events, experiences, moods, memories, hopes, and desires.

Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. n a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”

A wider selection of interviews from the documentary film can be found here.

Bradbury argues that all that glitters is not gold. Short term windfall profits for BHP Billiton and a handful of jobs if the next federal government approves the Olympic Dam expansion will reap a spiral in cancer rates and birth defects the like of which this nation has never known. When they mine uranium to extract the yellowcake, more than 80% of the radiation stays behind at the mine in the form of radioactive tailings.

Radiation travels on the wind, and the fine radioactive particles can easily blow to the dense population centres of Sydney (l300k), Melbourne (l000k) or Adelaide (522k) away from the Olympic Dam minesite

Though Mitrano explores Sontag's debt to Walter Benjamin in understanding the role of the critic, my interest in this post is with Sontag's early formalist understanding of criticism. Mitrano says:

Before encountering Benjamin, Sontag conceived of criticism as a secondary kind of writing associated with rumination and opposed to the 'first idea' of literary productivity, synonymous with freshness, youthfulness, novelty. In his approach to photography Benjamin passed on to Sontag a viable and explanatory narrative of the critical act, which freed her from her formalist confinement. This narrative, which I will call the narrative of the gaze, equates interpretation with the anticipation of an answering gaze; it joins visual questions to hermeneutical problems.

Mitrano says that Sontag was still working with a rather traditional notion of interpretation. She thought that: "great art induces contemplation" and that "the reader or listener or spectator ... must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval" ... For the most part, she echoes Rene Wellek's view of aesthetic experience. Summing up the dominant position of the 1940s in Theory of Literature, Wellek (and co-author Austin Warren) define the aesthetic object as that which the reader does not attempt to reform, possess, or consume, but as something that induces contemplation or amorous attention ... While Sontag transforms Wellek's amorous contemplation into "dynamic contemplation" .... she basically agrees at this stage with the traditional notion of interpretation as individual or comparative commentary aimed at evaluating bad and good literature.

What is rejected is interpretation of the text or the image within the semiotic world with interpretation seen as the intellect's revenge upon art. It is an anti-theory position in that interpreters -- people who "translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else" -- are philistines.The true task is not to ask what the work means but to appreciate what it is.Sontag says:

Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation. Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?

An example of their work: 'The Photographer' from 2006:

What is intriguing is the multilayering and multiple perspectives.