04w04:1 *POWERPOINTLESS* Posted January 25th, 2004 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | * POWERPOINTLESS * 2004 week 4 number 1 A recent conversation on the pros and cons of PowerPoint vs. good old fashioned slides promted these selections. On the one hand, PowerPoint is derided for oversimplifying and on the other David Byrne thinks it’s an art form. – Tim ——————————————————————— PowerPoint Makes You Dumb | Clive Thompson http://tinyurl.com/2evbu “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation — where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.” Power Point is Evil | Edward Tufte http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2_pr.html “In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds’ worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentially, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships.” Learning to Love Power Point | David Byrne http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1_pr.html “Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were “about” something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb program as an artistic medium.” Turning Heads with PowerPoint | Xeni Jardin http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,61485,00.html “This is exactly what was intended by the people who developed this program. They hoped that this tool would allow people to bypass the middleman, to communicate without having to work through a gauntlet of graphic designers or AV professionals. Do it yourself. After all, I learned how to do it in only a couple of hours.” The Epistemology of David Byrne | Brian Braiker http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3703506/ “They all make assumptions about what you want to do with them and what kind of use you’re going to put them to, and therefore how you lead you’re life and what’s important to you. And it comes down to really simple things. Like in address books, it has a slot for your parents and your house and your spouse. That makes assumptions about how you live–and most of them are absolutely true–but what I’m talking about is stuff that’s not visible. It’s about how the architecture of the software makes assumptions about how you do things. This is going to sound high-falutin’, but it’s in the same way that Wittgenstein would say that the limits of our thought are the limits of our language. What we can say, what we can verbalize or write, determines what we can think. ” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Sunday 25 January 2004 @ 2:54 PM
04w03:3 Posted January 23rd, 2004 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 3 number 3 ——————————————————————— It’s Time, Once Again, To Kill The Past | Charlie Finch http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/finch/finch9-20-02.asp “In 2002, nobody gives a shit if you were once insulted by Barbara Kruger. She is old hat, and so is the star system of art which arose in the past 40 years of the last millennium. […] What the young artists need is exile: get out of New York, get out of London, get out of Berlin, find your own place […] cream over yourself and your personal circle, without hungering for validation from above…”(Article date: 20 Sept 2002) How an Art Scene Became a Youthscape | Benjamin Genocchio http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/arts/design/23DEAL.html?pagewanted=all “Mr. Reich says that for the younger dealers the art business is less about making money than about expressing the values and experiences of his generation. ‘It’s all about being happy about whatever you can be happy about,’ he said. ‘My generation grew up in a time when we didn’t have heroes. You grew up believing you were being hoodwinked and manipulated — and knowing you were, but learning to enjoy it because it came in fun colors or was on MTV. ‘The bottom line,’ he added, ‘was that I really wanted to have a gallery, and sometimes you just have to start doing something with whatever you have at your disposal.'” Note: NYT may require a free one time registration (but then you’ll be able to read whatever you want without going through the hassle again). —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 23 January 2004 @ 3:20 PM
04w03:2 Posted January 22nd, 2004 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 3 number 2 ——————————————————————— Criticize, Don’t Vandalize | Roger Kimball http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110004585 “We are often told that establishment taste is parochial, obtuse and unreceptive to novelty. Since ‘transgressive,’ morally decadent art is the establishment taste of today, the good Swedish bureaucrats overseeing the exhibition doubtless expected all who gazed upon Snow White to demonstrate their sophistication by confining their response to appreciation or at least silence.” Talking Bacteria: The work of Bonnie Bassler | Marguerite Holloway http://tinyurl.com/39hoj “Quorum sensing, as this phenomenon is called, is a young science. Until recently, no one thought bacteria talked to one another, let alone in ways that changed their behavior, and Bassler has been instrumental in the field’s rapid ascension. She has figured out some of the dialects–the genetic and molecular mechanisms different species use–but is best known for identifying what might be a universal language all species share, something she has jokingly referred to as ‘bacterial Esperanto.'” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To add or remove yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Thursday 22 January 2004 @ 9:00 PM
04w03:1 Posted January 19th, 2004 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 3 number 1 ——————————————————————— Bad on purpose or just plain bad? | Sarah Milroy http://tinyurl.com/2u9p6 “The more you sit there, the more blank your mind becomes, and ultimately, you leave the gallery with the uneasy sense that you have thought about the work harder than the artist who made it. This is not a good thing. If you are going to ask for an audience’s full and long attention, you have to be ready to meet it.” The Word Made Flesh | Nicholas Blincoe http://tinyurl.com/24w2x “Connor uses post-war French philosophy as the frame through which he views the long history of writing and reflecting upon skin, from Classical and Renaissance medical treatises through to our modern taste for tattooing and aromatherapy oils. Connor contends that the theme of skin unites all French philosophers, from existentialists such as Sartre to structuralists and post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida.” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 19 January 2004 @ 1:17 PM
04w02:1 Goodreads Mailing List Posted January 13th, 2004 by timothy. Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 2 number 2 Hello, I am beginning an email list of some of the more interesting articles I have found on the net. I will send the links to new articles to this list. As someone who has made it into my address book for some reason, you are on this list. ——————————————————————— The first selections are: Forgery and Plagiarism | Denis Dutton http://www.denisdutton.com/forgery_and_plagiarism.htm What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58554-2003Dec12?language=printer “Back in 1937, an economist named Ronald Coase realized something that helped explain the rise of modern corporations — and which just might explain the coming decline of the American two-party political system. Coase’s insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations. It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths…” Past articles I have found are archived at http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove yourself from this list, click and send tim@instantcoffee.org —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove yourself from this list, click and send tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 13 January 2004 @ 10:15 PM
