Back in April, The Wall Street Journal published a piece entitled The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work. If I fondly recall my teachers always saying that my class was—collectively speaking—the worst class they had ever seen in their lives, the most-praised generation has had their egos relentlessly stroked by their Me Generation parents.
Just how this co-relates with Network Culture isn't entirely clear to me, but I'd love to hear your comments. After all, this blog is all about you.
I needed to show a new Netlab intern the maps from Banham's Los Angeles, Architecture of Four Ecologies and realized that I had left the original behind. Luckily, Google Books had a copy here, strangely however, in their quest to remove copyrighted images, Google's censors (human? algorithmic?) had gone awry and had started producing art such as this image:
Is this meticulous work the result of someone emulating Justin Jorgesen's Obscene Interiors in which amateur pornography is removed, leaving only amateur decor? (Jorgensen's project is a recapitulation of Naomi Uman's 1999 film Removed and not all that different from John Haddock's Internet Sex Photos or Laura Carton's Fictive Porn series or Jo Broughton's Empty Porn Set series…the list seems to go on endlessly…thanks to my crack team of researchers for these) Or is this a sly commentary by the Google AI (which is reputed to be feasting on all the world's books) on a future immaterial world? Or perhaps it is evidence of the state of Los Angeles architecture, (in Banham's time as today)… in which branded, signature work is an alibi for the careful removal of traces of anything but bottom-line-driven developer design from the landscape?
At the Washington Post (via Wired), you can read about yet another instance of unreasonable behavior by the post-9/11 national security state, in this case, the unlawful harrassment of a photographer shooting a random installation that turns out to be the DARPA headquarters.
Through actions such as this one—or the calculatingly demeaning but ineffectual "remove your shoes" security measures at the airport—the Bush-Cheney regime builds a regime of fear.
Then again, perhaps their fears are warranted…after all, a bunch of photographers, plane spotters, and the like, could cause a great deal of trouble.
On the positive side, I had zero harrassment while I was taking photographs for the infrastructural city book in Los Angeles, including this one, not far from city hall.
