Fritsch in Chch

The National has a simply glorious looking show of Karl Fritsch's work on at the moment. Not only do the pieces look terrific, but his characteristically rough-edged yet elegant displays look just as good. Go visit and shop, if you can.

Some chewy weekend reading

James Bridle's WebDirections keynote on 'The New Aesthetic' (video and transcript - the transcript is awesomely annotated with links to images and articles).

A nice bookend to the above - Russell Davies on the post-digital.

Relevant to PBRF funding in universities: Mark Bauerlein asks in The Chronicle of Higher Education whether all the publishing in the field of literary studies is actually benefiting anyone.

Michelle Nijhuis in 'The Last Word on Nothing' (an awesome science blog) on the the different narrative styles of environmental reporting (Quest, Rebirth, Tragedy, Rags to Riches).

Aimee Levitt on Laura Ingalls Wilder and American economic downturns.

Don Driver

Jim Barr and Mary Barr have written beautifully on Don Driver, who died today.

I never met Don Driver. It makes me sad. Over the last few years I've become a fervent admirer, seeking out as many shows and opportunities to see the work as possible (and opportunities to mention him here and when on the radio).

Driver's work holds the room. It squawks and it growls and it sings (and occasionally it's quite trippy) but it's impossible to look past. It grabs your eyeballs and it makes you think.

I owe five people real credit for my love of Driver's work: Jim and Mary, William McAloon, Julian Dashper and Hamish McKay. It's a delight to see curators my age (or thereabouts) taking up his work as well - Aaron Kreisler in Dunedin (a NP kid himself), Aaron Lister in his sculpture show at City Gallery next year. People have been saying today that Driver is sadly overlooked. Me, I think he was loved and admired where it mattered.

(Having said that - a dirty great survey show would not go amiss.)

UPDATE: That first 'Aaron' should have been Kreisler - sorry, both. And Sarah Farrar has written a nice short piece about Driver and her own discovery of his work (another one of those young curators) on the Te Papa blog. And Roger Taberner has written a lengthy and insightful piece on the Auckland Art Gallery blog.

Pretty ... smart

I've been oohing and aahing over Australian jewellery gallery Pieces of Eight's recently-launched online store Edition X, which stocks limited edition pieces of jewellery, textiles, books, objects and more.

In addition to the seductiveness of the objects, I've been seduced by the little design touches on the website; feminine, not too girly, and a strong sense of the Pieces of Eight personality.

Now eg.etal, another of my favourite Melbourne haunts, as also launched an online store.

Although eg.etal's stock doesn't quite delight me as Pieces of Eight does, the site also has some really lovely, simple touches - like how the thumbnails on the homepage react as you scroll over them.

Now all I need is for Gallery Funaki to make my life complete.

City Gallery Wellington's Future - The Survey

When I saw the announcement of Paula Savage's retirement from City Gallery in their enewsletter, and an invitation to take a survey on the future of the Gallery, I was quite excited. Would they give us a multi-choice list of potential directors to choose from? Could I ask for a larger number of smaller, shorter-run exhibitions throughout the year? Could I tell them about the public programme events I want to attend?

Nope. But you can tell them what you think about the idea of a $10 entry fee for anyone who can't prove Wellington residency to visit City Gallery Wellington and the Museum of City and Sea.

Some sample questions:

After all these days

It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still loving NPR's Infinite Player (original post here).

Usually, the glow of new internet toys wears off pretty quickly (or I bookmark things and never return). But I've just kept the Infinite Player alive in a browser window, switching it on whenever I want a little bit of background chatter (like right now). It's less commitment than a podcast, but more varied and controllable than normal radio. Joy.

Sport and cancer

Yeah, I think it's a weird pairing too. Never mind.

First, a fantastic profile of Siddartha Mukherjee, oncologist and author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, one of the best on-fiction books I read this year (even if the second half does drag somewhat).

One of its most arresting observations was inspired by a conversation between Mukherjee and a friend many years earlier "about the nature of interior and exterior", which returned to him as he was working on the book. "Every era," it suddenly struck him, "casts cancer in its own image." The US in the 70s was haunted by cold war fears of the enemy within – and so the "big bomb" was replaced by "the big C". HIV overshadowed the following decade, and then the search for cancer-causing viruses became oncology's new obsession. Now that we're obsessed with genetics, the focus of research has moved on to hereditary causes. "When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era," he writes, "it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination."

I got all riled up on behalf of (American) football fans when I read this WSJ article about how the NFL will not release the 'All 22' footage - the angles that show what all the players on the field are up to during the game - to fans. 

By distributing this footage only to NFL teams, and rationing it out carefully to its TV partners and on its web site, the NFL has created a paradox. The most-watched sport in the U.S. is also arguably the least understood. "I don't think you can get a full understanding without watching the entirety of the game," says former head coach Bill Parcells. The zoomed-in footage on TV broadcasts, he says, only shows a "fragment" of what happens on the field. 

And a rather good list of the top sports books of 2011 from Dan Shanoff on Quickish, interesting also for this final observation, his prediction for sports publishing in 2012:

Shorter-form (and quick-turnaround) e-books from "indie" publishers like Byliner and Atavist; from sportswriters publishing on their own; from mainstream publishing houses (including Amazon, foreshadowed by Emma Span and Ben Cohen); and -- most interestingly -- directly from mainstream sports media companies (taking a cue from what The Atlantic did with Taylor Branch's cover story this fall and Politico's e-book strategy, which made its first surge this week) will explode.

Sparkly

I'm quite taken by the Walker Art Center's new homepage.

Some people will find it way too busy. Me, I like how they seem to have expanded their remit - not just a homepage for their gallery, but a homepage for the visual and performing arts. I like, for example, how articles from other sites are getting pulled through to the page.

I also like all the small touches - little features where you can flick through three panes, the three views for opening hours, this little feature on the far left that highlights different content by theme.

It's a bit super-user, but I enjoy how it rewards exploration. The more you adventure through it, the more it reveals to you - a nice metaphor for art itself, no?

The day after

I hope to write something more reflective about the NDF conference in the next few weeks. Overall, I couldn't be happier with how it all turned out: fantastic speakers, a highly engaged audience, and - miracle of miracles - sunshine.

I slipped out just before lunch on the second day of the conference to do my regular spot on Nine to Noon, and covered some of the projects featured at the conference. The way Kathryn was immediately sucked in by some of the sites we talked about reinforced for me some of the messages we heard at the conference about helping people sense the texture and colour of our collections.

Here are links to the sites I touched on:

Old Weather, National Maritime Museum, London http://www.oldweather.org/
A citizen-science project where volunteers are helping transcribe the logbooks of Royal Navy ships from around the time of World War One.

What's on the menu, New York Public Library http://menus.nypl.org/
Learning what people were eating a century ago in New York by transcribing NYPL's special collection of historical menus.

Australian Dress Register http://www.australiandressregister.org/
Collecting examples and information about clothing in New South Wales before 1945, from public and private collections.

History Pin - http://www.historypin.com/
A global map for sharing pieces of people's personal histories to create a global resource

Remix and Mash up competitions:
[New Zealand] Mix and Mash winners http://www.mixandmash.org.nz/2011-winners/
[Australia] LibraryHack winners http://libraryhack.org/2011/06/25/the-winners/

A Grand Mother from Candy Elsmore on Vimeo.

Opening remarks for National Digital Forum 2011

[I didn't give references for the quotes I used yesterday when kicking off the NDF2011 proceedings, so I thought I'd pop the text up here in case anyone wanted to follow them up.]

Before I introduce our first speaker for the conference, I wanted to share a few thoughts. They’re not really thoughts of mine - they’re the thoughts of other people, thoughts that have stuck in my head all year, buzzing away quietly in the background and rising to the top whenever I’ve contemplated this moment of standing here in front of you all.
 
The 20th century has released us into history through technology

This idea comes from broadcaster and author Melvyn Bragg - I found it in one of his In Our Time e-newsletters at the start of the year.

Bragg was talking about a series of radio interviews he’d been doing at radio stations across the England, asking people to contribute photos, videos, diary entries and other memories to be mixed with archival material to create the TV series “The Reel History of Britain”. Bragge said he was:

attempting to encourage people to send in their memoirs, photographs, whatever, to build up this series, so that it widely and fully and properly represents all of us who were part of all of the history of this country over the last 120 years.

Releasing people into history through technology - this is what we’ve been doing for the past ten years. We call what we do harvesting or cataloguing, digitising or preserving, data visualising or crowd-sourcing, community management or customer service, or whatever the latest round of restructuring has deemed our job to involve. But what we’re really doing is working with people to create and share back our collective and collaborative history.
 
A book is a machine to think with

This line comes from IA Richards’ introduction to his 1924 book Principles of Literary Criticism.  I haven't actually read the book myself - I've just spotted the reference a lot lately.

The line is often cited in debates about the future of the book - contrasted against the idea of a book as ‘tree flakes encased in dead cows’. The full quote goes like this:

A book is a machine to think with. What kind of a machine? Not a bellows or a locomotive but more like a loom on which to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilisation. 

When you think about books like this they become social items, items which pass through a network of people. In the case of a book, the network includes the writer, the editor, the publisher, the reviewer, the reader: each extracting and absorbing and reusing what they have touched, consciously or otherwise.

The same can be said of all the items we work with: physical, digital, physical made digital, digital made physical. All this stuff, these records of human life and thinking and experience that we are busy collecting, preserving and making available. They are all crucial items in the unending cycle of creation and creativity, and we’re there in the middle of it, helping the wheel turn around. It’s a position of responsibility and privilege and opportunity.  

Data needs spokespeople

I first saw this phrase in a blog post by the urban designer Adam Greenfield, citing a presentation about people-powered data by Elizabeth Goodman, who was in turn citing Bruno Latour, at which point I gave up any hope of understanding the original thought, and decided to take out of it just what I wanted to.

What I wanted was this:

We are swimming in data. Digital New Zealand now has more than 25 million records* in its search API. It can’t print posters advertising this miraculous figure, because it grows faster than their printing budget can keep up with.

Over the past ten years we have mastered the tasks of data: of collecting and preserving and making available. More recently, we’ve been getting so much better at the arts of data: of sharing nicely, of recruiting supporters, of welcoming contributions. The hurdle at which we continue to stumble, however, is letting go.

And I know, I know - I’ve banged my heads against the walls of copyright and donor restrictions with the best of you. But if we are going to continue to play an important role in the cycle of creation and creativity, we are going to have to do even more to not just promote our data for what it is, but to promote it for what people can make of it.  

Giving a shit

This line comes from an article by Alexis Madrigal published in The Atlantic in June this year. He was talking about the tenacity, the bullheadedness, the inspiration and the desire that’s needed for people like us to keep pushing our institutions forward in order to serve the people we are here to serve.

The article is titled ‘What Big Media can learn from the New York Public Library’. Here’s the full quote:

First, I'm convinced the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire. The library's employees give a shit about the digital aspects of their institution, and they are supported in that shit giving. I mean this in the most fundamental way possible and as a damning critique for media companies. Second, the library sees its users as collaborators in improving the collections the library already has. While serving them online costs the library some money, they are creating value, too, by opening up conduits into the library for superusers. 

You don’t work for your line manager, or your director, or your CE. Really, you work for your customers. How much say do they have in what you do? How many decisions are made in their best interests? If you were to ask ‘what is the single best thing we could do to add value to our customers’ lives’, what would it be?

I hope that, as ever, this year’s conference is a chance for you to confirm just what it is that you give a shit about.

*27 million records, as of yesterday

Reading lists

Ah, I love the Books of the Year outpouring on the internet. Here are a few goodies:

New York Times 100 Notable Books

The Guardian's Books of the Year

The New Statesman's Books of the Year

Bus stops

In the vein of abandoned, polar-bear infested workers' barracks, I now bring you Soviet bustops, including this beauty

which reminds me strongly of the Ratana temple at Ratana Pa

and Rua Kenana's meeting house and church at Maungapohatu

Images: 
Photograph of a Soviet bus stop by Christopher Herwig from How to be a Retronaut
Ratana temple. Godber, Albert Percy, 1875-1949 :Collection of albums, prints and negatives. Ref: 1/2-018648-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23113205 
Bourne, George, 1875-1924. Rua Kenana Hepetipa's wooden circular courthouse and meeting house at Maungapohatu. Godber, Albert Percy, 1875-1949 :Collection of albums, prints and negatives. Ref: APG-1679-1/2-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23131313