Tag: media

• Working Through the Breasts of The Secret Museum of Anthropology

  
  I have a book. It has been in my possession for a few weeks now. It is called The Secret Museum of Anthropology. It was a private printing from the American Anthropological Association created in 1935 from a series of pirated photos. It included illustrations as well, to make it more science-y I am guessing. The photo above is the cover, the copy, and the drawing that I’ve been intrigued by since receiving the book. I… like it? No. Yes? It is provocative. That is a better word I think.

  So, today, since I woke up an hour early due to daylight savings time, I decided to finally work through the illustration and the book by drawing, photographing, printing, cutting, and pasting. The result is a triptych (three 16x20inch panels) of the book and the breasts featured in the book. I did this because my way of working through problems is to play with them/tear them apart, recreate them, meditate on them, and then figure out what the hell is going on in my head around it (Yay to weird methodological approaches!).

  

  [those are some crooked photos!] I think I might keep it in this order. I think what was so intriguing to me about the photograph is the ability to reduce even breasts to types, when, if you actually put the illustration next to the breasts in the book, it… doesn’t work. The reduction is actually, hilarious. And the actual breasts in the book are overwhelming. So, that is where I am. The problem is, and will always be, the reduction of women of color from specific groups being reduced to a squiggly line, a line that can be erased and erases at the same time.

  I need to finish cleaning up the drawings. I am debating adding the numbers. I will be sharing the triptych with a class in 1.5 weeks, so I need to get everything finalized. I think I’m almost there.

  Jade

  Nov 4, 2012

  acdemia, Human Zoo, my work, reading

  anthropology, breasts, drawings, germany, images, media, obesessions, performance studies, reflections

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• History & the Digital in a Post September 11th World

  I have a question I’m trying to think through. Does the speed of digital media allow for the creation of history/historical encounters?

  I am not in a history based field anymore, though my M.A. is. It is just a part of my formation, and an area of interest for me so there’s that…

  Basically, we understand history as the passage of time, as something embodied, and as a before time/before now. The temporal aspect of history makes us and it contingent. However, the advancement of speed, that is, things moving at the speed of light due to the digitization of so much of our communication, interactions, and even our memories, has made it so the traces of new histories are vast and disjointed. In the past there were a few people gifted the ability to set the historical narrative and affirm it’s faultlessness, and reinforce its disciplining capacity by placing it in specific, recognized, archives. Often we talk of history as being written by “the winners”. Now though, people are constantly creating searchable, reproducible across time and space, public archives without the commitment or politics of what we previously marked as the Archive, and without being on the winning team. The archive isn’t as obviously being scripted by the power structures of society (though obviously there is power written into the code of the platforms we use etc., and nothing is created outside of society).

  Still, I can’t help but think maybe there is no more History except for the history that exists in the browser.

  The last big historical event that comes to mind before smartphones were the norm was September 11th.

  My counter example is May 2, 2011. When I search that date on google what I am looking for comes up as the first result among 816,000,000+ other results. It should have been a major historical event.

  The speed at which things happen now means there is no longer a future point in time where we go back and write the past. The past is written in virtually real time. we go back and look at the archive. I am thinking specifically here of the death of Osama bin Laden. In the past, the news of his death would have gone through a 24-48 hour news cycle, with those in power giving out the information to official sources who then passed it on to the journalist at most probably the New York Times. From there it would be on page 1, pass through other communication systems, and then be on the front pages of other papers, or on internet news sites within 12-48 hours. Instead, it was leaked, then officially announced, at which point the realization occurred that it was live tweeted by a random person nearby. People celebrated that night by tweeting pictures of their celebrations and posting those across social media while simultaneously being broadcasted live on 24hour news channels. Within two days, instead of the news just getting to people, people had already moved on.

  When things move this quickly, I can’t help but wonder what the history will look like once it is codified and agreed upon and disseminated, and how all that will be done.

  Jade

  Sep 10, 2012

  Digital History, History

  media, news, reflections, september 11th, technology, the future, thoughts

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