Image from http://uqbarorbistertius.blogspot.com/

In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges imagined a place with a completely different perception of reality than ours.
In Tlön “the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “moon,” but rather “round airy-light on dark” or “pale-orange-of-the-sky” or any other such combination.” Also, lacking the concept of subsequentiality brought by verbs (and heavily discussed by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Derrick De Kerckhove), “they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”. This also reflects on Tlön’s philosophy: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

To read the story many years later it’s kind of easy to think of it as a metaphor for the internet, even though there are some important differences between Borges’ imaginary land and the World Wide Web. Google continuosly caching the web makes time stand still, but the importance of real-time has been re-established after all the Twitter Search buzz that shook SEO blogs a few months ago. Also, sequentiality of events still matters a lot: any happening carries its own trail of cascade sub-events, parodies and top-down debate or conspiracy theories on the internet, and while blogging we’re desperate to link as much as possible.
Still, a crucial similarity to Tlön is the process of tagging. The self-selecting nature of meta-data, driven by user-generated tags and keywords ruling both Google’s ad services and the much more innocent knowledge-focused social bookmarking networks like Delicious, is one of the main features of Web 2.0 and the semantic web.

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“I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said, ‘Forget everything you know about slipcovers!’ So I did. It was a load off my mind! Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, but I didn’t know what the fuck they were!” – Mitch Hedberg

Although I’ve always been reading it, I had never put my hands on Wikipedia before. Turns out the interface is kind of messy; everything is user-generated, but sometimes not so user-friendly. Before I could get to writing I had been going in circles (metaphorically speaking) for a while and my click finger was getting bored. Eventually, I was able to start playing in my personal sandbox and start working on my entry.
Being a stand-up fan and unhappy with the information provided by the italian wiki, I thought I might start with one of the many american comedians who had a lot going on media-wise, like Dave Chappelle. I was thinking the whole Africa thing and the Oprah interview were perfect material to contribute spreading the word on enlighted comedians in my country (an often difficult ground for those who dissent, no matter how comicly).
The italian entry for Chappelle is kinda slim, and it needs some plumping up. However, I wound up creating a page from scratch, and I did it for Mitch Hedberg. The guy was hilarious and acted like only a sincere person in showbiz can do, confused out of his mind. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to his postumous Do You Believe In Gosh?, but it’s never enough.
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In one of the last scenes of Werner Herzog‘s Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) an Aborigine stands up in a court room to speak up against some mineral excavations happening in a sacred tribal ground. The judge asks for a translation, but nobody can provide it. The man is called “the Mute”, being the last living member of his village and the only one in the world left speaking his native language.
This saddening scenario may not just be a relevant piece of cinema, but a likely future for many of today’s less technology-savvy linguistic minorities.
Although there are diverging opinions about it, there are from 4,000 to 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, but on the internet English reigns as an unquestioned king (enlightened, yet patronizing), since the first bit was transmitted back in the ’60s. Nevertheless, despite it being the globalization’s lingua franca, more languages and some interesting linguistic phenomena have been emerging on the net in the past years, drawing the attention of linguists and media scholars.
The Multilingual Internet, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring, is a very interesting and significative attempt at making sense of such phenomena, in both their novelty and urgency. (more…)

[ download .pdf ]

MIRKO NIKOLIC – “Games Without Frontiers”
May 25 to June 6, 2009.

ZVONO Gallery
Visnjiceva 5, Belgrade

The colored stripes painted by Mirko Nikolic stretch across the raw-gray canvas discretely, limited by a lazy and capricious will we behold distantly, with a sort of latent, detached sensitivity hi-jacked by their chromatic contrast. As they group in more or less tight, parallel or intertwining bundles, we see them shape complicated grids, overlapping and creating different morphologies. Nikolic’s paintings are maps, and those bundles of colored stripes are territories, flowing on spot along invisible vectors, each figure tense towards the closest one.

We look at those territories from afar, from outer space, with the cold omniscience so familiar to us Google Maps users.
Thanks to the internet, we now own more knowledge than we can possibly absorb, and so the web is more and more about interfaces, about the way we’re served this cognitive over-abundance and the ways we can filter it. Interfaces become the aesthetics of the latest postmodernity, or maybe they testify an emerging post-postmodernity mashing not only aesthetics, but recombining functionalities as well as looks.
When all information is common, to filter, choose and even discard it is an act of elegance, a semiotic gesture more significant than information in itself. And so the explosion of maps, indexes, graphs and charts all over the internet might be the world wide web’s most relevant content right now.
In particular, maps and geo-referenced meta-data are the pulp of the new information aesthetics. With Google Maps, the most famous and invasive of these devices, we’re able to leaf through different interpretation layers – map, terrain, satellite, traffic – each one projecting a different aesthetic rendering on the same geographical structure. I could make many other examples (only the most famous of which standing under the Google banner), but whatever its implications – be it for advertising, blogging, or anything else – the geospatial web (1) is proof the digital, once deemed “virtual” internet sphere is intertwining tighter and tighter with the physical world.
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Here’s another post previously published on yskira.com.

(All photos © Alex MacLean)

Photographer Alex MacLean has been flying around the United States in his plane for a while now, taking aerial pictures that little have in common with the cold-hearted omniscence of Google Earth. Instead, they provide a beautiful, poetic, and yet compelling view of the ecological risks of suburban sprawl, uncontrolled industrialism, and the scarcity of environment-friendly energy sources. MacLean’s eye selects visually-amazing targets, to which he also attaches a rich statistical documentation to better outline a risky scenario: toxic waste, pollution, global warming, but also housing speculation and social isolation.

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Here’s a post I already published on yskira.com a few months ago.

Thanks to the internet, we now own more knowledge than we can possibly absorb. As a consequence, the web is more and more about interfaces, about the way we’re served this cognitive over-abundance and the graphic ways we can filter it. Interfaces become the aesthetics of the latest postmodernity: when all information is common, to filter, choose, and even discard it, is an act of elegance, a semiotic gesture more significant than information itself. So, the explosion of maps, indexes, graphs and charts over the internet becomes the world wide web’s most relevant content. (more…)

This is a video I made last year. It’s a tribute video to american stand-up, to the wide range of subjects it tackles with the most varied approaches, from crass swearwords to the noblest spiritual investigation and purposes. I’m sorry the quality sucks so bad, but (as you’ll be able to tell) i’m not a pro at video-making.