302. Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular

Tokyo — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.     Japan’s younger generation came of age with the cellphone, and created its own popular culture by tapping thumbs on keypads.   Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.   “Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.   Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.   One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.   After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.   “My mother didn’t even know that I was writing a novel,” said Rin, who, like many cellphone novelists, goes by only one name. “So at first when I told her, well, I’m coming out with a novel, she was like, what? She didn’t believe it until it came out and appeared in bookstores.”   The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.   The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.   “Their cellphone bills were easily reaching $1,000, so many people experienced what they called ‘packet death,’ and you wouldn’t hear from them for a while,” said Shigeru Matsushima, an editor who oversees the book uploading site at Starts Publishing, a leader in republishing cellphone novels.   The affordability of cellphones coincided with the coming of age of a generation of Japanese for whom cellphones, more than personal computers, had been an integral part of their lives since junior high school. So they read the novels on their cellphones, even though the same Web sites were also accessible by computer. They punched out text messages with their thumbs with blinding speed, and used expressions and emoticons, like smilies and musical notes, whose nuances were lost on anyone over the age of 25.   “It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”   Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.   The writers are not paid for their work online, no many how many millions of times it is viewed. The payoff, if any, comes when the novels are reproduced and sold as traditional books. Readers have free access to the Web sites that carry the novels, or pay at most $1 to $2 a month, but the sites make most of their money from advertising.   Critics say the novels owe a lot to a genre devoured by the young: comic books. In cellphone novels, characters tend to be undeveloped and descriptions thin, while paragraphs are often fragments and consist of dialogue.   “Traditionally, Japanese would depict a scene emotionally, like ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country,’ ” Mika Naito, a novelist, said, referring to the famous opening sentence of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country.”   “In cellphone novels, you don’t need that,” said Ms. Naito, 36, who recently began writing cellphone novels at the urging of her publisher. “If you limit it to a certain place, readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.”   Written in the first person, many cellphone novels read like diaries. Almost all the authors are young women delving into affairs of the heart, spiritual descendants, perhaps, of Shikibu Murasaki, the 11th-century royal lady-in-waiting who wrote “The Tale of Genji.”   “Love Sky,” a debut novel by a young woman named Mika, was read by 20 million people on cellphones or on computers, according to Maho no i-rando, where it was first uploaded. A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease — the genre’s sine qua non — the novel nevertheless captured the young generation’s attitude, its verbal tics and the cellphone’s omnipresence. Republished in book form, it became the No. 1 selling novel last year and was made into a movie.   Given the cellphone novels’ domination of the mainstream, critics no longer dismiss them, though some say they should be classified with comic books or popular music.   Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.   “They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”   As the genre’s popularity leads more people to write cellphone novels, though, an existential question has arisen: can a work be called a cellphone novel if it is not composed on a cellphone, but on a computer or, inconceivably, in longhand?   “When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone,” said Keiko Kanematsu, an editor at Goma Books, a publisher of cellphone novels. “Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.”   Still, others say the genre is not defined by the writing tool.   Ms. Naito, the novelist, says she writes on a computer and sends the text to her phone, with which she rearranges her work. Unlike the first-time cellphone novelists in their teens or early 20s, she says she is more comfortable writing on a computer.   But at least one member of the cellphone generation has made the switch to computers. A year ago, one of Starts Publishing’s young stars, Chaco, gave up her phone even though she could compose much faster with it by tapping with her thumb.   “Because of writing on the cellphone, her nail had cut into the flesh and became bloodied,” said Mr. Matsushima of Starts.   “Since she’s switched to a computer,” he added, “her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.”     © by Norimitsu Onishi January 20, 2008       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/onishi/index.html    

Sunday, 20 January 2008

304. The untold story: How the iPhone blew up the wireless industry

  It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."   The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. "It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill," says someone who was in the meeting.   The ramifications were serious. The iPhone was to be the centerpiece of Apple's annual Macworld convention, set to take place in just a few months. Since his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs had used the event as a showcase to launch his biggest products, and Apple-watchers were expecting another dramatic announcement. Jobs had already admitted that Leopard — the new version of Apple's operating system — would be delayed. If the iPhone wasn't ready in time, Macworld would be a dud, Jobs' critics would pounce, and Apple's stock price could suffer.   And what would AT&T think? After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry. Now, the least he could do was meet his deadlines. For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.   But by the end of the push, just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show to the suits at AT&T. In mid-December 2006, he met wireless boss Stan Sigman at a suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Las Vegas. He showed off the iPhone's brilliant screen, its powerful Web browser, its engaging user interface. Sigman, a taciturn Texan steeped in the conservative engineering traditions that permeate America's big phone companies, was uncharacteristically effusive, calling the iPhone "the best device I have ever seen." (Details of this and other key moments in the making of the iPhone were provided by people with knowledge of the events. Apple and AT&T would not discuss these meetings or the specific terms of the relationship.)   Six months later, on June 29, 2007, the iPhone went on sale. At press time, analysts were speculating that customers would snap up about 3 million units by the end of 2007, making it the fastest-selling smartphone of all time. It is also arguably Apple's most profitable device. The company nets an estimated $80 for every $399 iPhone it sells, and that's not counting the $240 it makes from every two-year AT&T contract an iPhone customer signs. Meanwhile, about 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T's rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier's volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco.   But as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T, its real impact is on the structure of the $11 billion-a-year US mobile phone industry. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them. Handsets were viewed largely as cheap, disposable lures, massively subsidized to snare subscribers and lock them into using the carriers' proprietary services. But the iPhone upsets that balance of power. Carriers are learning that the right phone — even a pricey one — can win customers and bring in revenue. Now, in the pursuit of an Apple-like contract, every manufacturer is racing to create a phone that consumers will love, instead of one that the carriers approve of. "The iPhone is already changing the way carriers and manufacturers behave," says Michael Olson, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray.   In 2002, shortly after the first iPod was released, Jobs started thinking about developing a phone. He saw millions of Americans lugging separate phones, BlackBerrys, and — now — MP3 players; naturally, consumers would prefer just one device. He also saw a future in which cell phones and mobile email devices would amass ever more features, eventually challenging the iPod's dominance as a music player. To protect his new product line, Jobs knew he would eventually need to venture into the wireless world.   If the idea was obvious, so were the obstacles. Data networks were sluggish and not ready for a full-blown handheld Internet device. An iPhone would require Apple to create a completely new operating system; the iPod's OS wasn't sophisticated enough to manage complicated networking or graphics, and even a scaled-down version of OS X would be too much for a cell phone chip to handle. Apple would be facing strong competition, too: In 2003, consumers had flocked to the Palm Treo 600, which merged a phone, PDA, and BlackBerry into one slick package. That proved there was demand for a so-called convergence device, but it also raised the bar for Apple's engineers.   Then there were the wireless carriers. Jobs knew they dictated what to build and how to build it, and that they treated the hardware as little more than a vehicle to get users onto their networks. Jobs, a notorious control freak himself, wasn't about to let a group of suits — whom he would later call "orifices" — tell him how to design his phone.   By 2004 Apple's iPod business had become more important, and more vulnerable, than ever. The iPod accounted for 16 percent of company revenue, but with 3G phones gaining popularity, Wi-Fi phones coming soon, the price of storage plummeting, and rival music stores proliferating, its long-term position as the dominant music device seemed at risk.   So that summer, while he publicly denied he would build an Apple phone, Jobs was working on his entry into the mobile phone industry. In an effort to bypass the carriers, he approached Motorola. It seemed like an easy fix: The handset maker had released the wildly popular RAZR, and Jobs knew Ed Zander, Motorola's CEO at the time, from Zander's days as an executive at Sun Microsystems. A deal would allow Apple to concentrate on developing the music software, while Motorola and the carrier, Cingular, could hash out the complicated hardware details.   Of course, Jobs' plan assumed that Motorola would produce a successor worthy of the RAZR, but it soon became clear that wasn't going to happen. The three companies dickered over pretty much everything — how songs would get into the phone, how much music could be stored there, even how each company's name would be displayed. And when the first prototypes showed up at the end of 2004, there was another problem: The gadget itself was ugly.   Jobs unveiled the ROKR in September 2005 with his characteristic aplomb, describing it as "an iPod shuffle on your phone." But Jobs likely knew he had a dud on his hands; consumers, for their part, hated it. The ROKR — which couldn't download music directly and held only 100 songs — quickly came to represent everything that was wrong with the US wireless industry, the spawn of a mess of conflicting interests for whom the consumer was an afterthought. Wired summarized the disappointment on its November 2005 cover: "YOU CALL THIS THE PHONE OF THE FUTURE?"       The Apple Touch   Apple has created two music phones. The ROKR, made with Motorola in 2005, respected the traditional relationships between manufacturers and carriers. The iphone, released last summer, completely overturned them.   ROKR   -Won't hold more than 100 songs, even if there's memory left. -iTunes Music Store purchases must be synced from a PC. -Clunky interface is sluggish and hard to navigate. -Design screams, "A committee made me."             iPhone   -Can hold about 1,500 songs — as much as its 8-GB drive allows. -iTunes Music Store purchases download wirelessly, directly to the phone. -Just tap and go; no user manual required. -C'mon. Look at it. It's gorgeous.         Even as the ROKR went into production, Jobs was realizing he'd have to build his own phone. In February 2005, he got together with Cingular to discuss a Motorola-free partnership. At the top-secret meeting in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. (When AT&T acquired Cingular in December 2006, Sigman remained president of wireless.) Jobs delivered a three-part message to Cingular: Apple had the technology to build something truly revolutionary, "light-years ahead of anything else." Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.   Jobs had reason to be confident. Apple's hardware engineers had spent about a year working on touchscreen technology for a tablet PC and had convinced him that they could build a similar interface for a phone. Plus, thanks to the release of the ARM11 chip, cell phone processors were finally fast and efficient enough to power a device that combined the functionality of a phone, a computer, and an iPod. And wireless minutes had become cheap enough that Apple could resell them to customers; companies like Virgin were already doing so.   Sigman and his team were immediately taken with the notion of the iPhone. Cingular's strategy, like that of the other carriers, called for consumers to use their mobile phones more and more for Web access. The voice business was fading; price wars had slashed margins. The iPhone, with its promised ability to download music and video and to surf the Internet at Wi-Fi speeds, could lead to an increase in the number of data customers. And data, not voice, was where profit margins were lush. What's more, the Cingular team could see that the wireless business model had to change. The carriers had become accustomed to treating their networks as precious resources, and handsets as worthless commodities. This strategy had served them well. By subsidizing the purchase of cheap phones, carriers made it easier for new customers to sign up — and get roped into long-term contracts that ensured a reliable revenue stream. But wireless access was no longer a luxury; it had become a necessity. The greatest challenge facing the carriers wasn't finding brand-new consumers but stealing them from one another. Simply bribing customers with cheap handsets wasn't going to work. Sigman and his team wanted to offer must-have devices that weren't available on any other network. Who better to create one than Jobs?   For Cingular, Apple's ambitions were both tantalizing and nerve-racking. A cozy relationship with the maker of the iPod would bring sex appeal to the company's brand. And some other carrier was sure to sign with Jobs if Cingular turned him down — Jobs made it clear that he would shop his idea to anyone who would listen. But no carrier had ever given anyone the flexibility and control that Jobs wanted, and Sigman knew he'd have trouble persuading his fellow executives and board members to approve a deal like the one Jobs proposed.   Sigman was right. The negotiations would take more than a year, with Sigman and his team repeatedly wondering if they were ceding too much ground. At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down. It was hard to blame them. For years, carriers had charged customers and suppliers for using and selling services over their proprietary networks. By giving so much control to Jobs, Cingular risked turning its vaunted — and expensive — network into a "dumb pipe," a mere conduit for content rather than the source of that content. Sigman's team made a simple bet: The iPhone would result in a surge of data traffic that would more than make up for any revenue it lost on content deals.   Jobs wouldn't wait for the finer points of the deal to be worked out. Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. And if the negotiations with Cingular were hairy, they were simple compared with the engineering and design challenges Apple faced. For starters, there was the question of what operating system to use. Since 2002, when the idea for an Apple phone was first hatched, mobile chips had grown more capable and could theoretically now support some version of the famous Macintosh OS. But it would need to be radically stripped down and rewritten; an iPhone OS should be only a few hundred megabytes, roughly a 10th the size of OS X.   Before they could start designing the iPhone, Jobs and his top executives had to decide how to solve this problem. Engineers looked carefully at Linux, which had already been rewritten for use on mobile phones, but Jobs refused to use someone else's software. They built a prototype of a phone, embedded on an iPod, that used the clickwheel as a dialer, but it could only select and dial numbers — not surf the Net. So, in early 2006, just as Apple engineers were finishing their yearlong effort to revise OS X to work with Intel chips, Apple began the process of rewriting OS X again for the iPhone.   The conversation about which operating system to use was at least one that all of Apple's top executives were familiar with. They were less prepared to discuss the intricacies of the mobile phone world: things like antenna design, radio-frequency radiation, and network simulations. To ensure the iPhone's tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn't generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads — complete with goo to simulate brain density — and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone's performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.   Through it all, Jobs maintained the highest level of secrecy. Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2 (the abandoned iPod phone was called Purple 1). Teams were split up and scattered across Apple's Cupertino, California, campus. Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter. Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes. By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.   The hosannas greeting the iPhone were so overwhelming it was easy to ignore its imperfections. The initial price of $599 was too high (it has been lowered to $399). The phone runs on AT&T's poky EDGE network. Users can't perform email searches or record video. The browser won't run programs written in Java or Flash. But none of that mattered. The iPhone cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers — and potentially the carriers themselves. Consumers get an easy-to-use handheld computer. And, as with the advent of the PC, the iPhone is sparking a wave of development that will make it even more powerful. In February, Jobs will release a developer's kit so that anyone can write programs for the device.   Manufacturers, meanwhile, enjoy new bargaining power over the carriers they've done business with for decades. Carriers, who have seen AT&T eat into their customer bases, are scrambling to find a competitive device, and they appear willing to give up some authority to get it. Manufacturers will have more control over what they produce; users — not the usual cabal of complacent juggernauts — will have more influence over what gets built.   Application developers are poised to gain more opportunities as the wireless carriers begin to show signs of abandoning their walled-garden approach to snaring consumers. T-Mobile and Sprint have signed on as partners with Google's Android, an operating system that makes it easy for independent developers to create mobile apps. Verizon, one of the most intransigent carriers, declared in November that it would open up its network for use with any compatible handset. AT&T made a similar announcement days later. Eventually this will result in a completely new wireless experience, in which applications work on any device and over any network. In time, it will give the wireless world some of the flexibility and functionality of the Internet.   It may appear that the carriers' nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes. But by fostering more innovation, carriers' networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone. According to Paul Roth, AT&T's president of marketing, the carrier is exploring new products and services — like mobile banking — that take advantage of the iPhone's capabilities. "We're thinking about the market differently," Roth says. In other words, the very development that wireless carriers feared for so long may prove to be exactly what they need. It took Steve Jobs to show them that.   © Fred Vogelstein January 9, 2008         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/vogelstein/index.html    

Wednesday, 09 January 2008

306. A Reformation of the arts

    Economic, social and cultural paradigms continue to change with increasing speed. The shift in emphasis from the creation of real concrete products to a virtual world of images and ideas means that now in Australia (to give an example that’s local for me) there are more people employed in the storage and retrieval of information than in the whole of agriculture and industry put together. Meanwhile, burgeoning online communities have evolved that bring hundreds of millions of individuals into personal interaction whether it be though social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook, through the sharing of images and video clips via Flickr and YouTube or immersed in complex virtual societies such as Second Life and Entropia Universe.   These changes are fundamental. It is not simply that old modes find new means. By opening up lines of communication to the direct access of the individual there is an increasing democratisation of opinion and culture. With the rise of technologies of mass production and distribution in the last century culture became divided. On the one hand there was popular culture delivering lowest-common-denominator products on a vast scale to mass markets. On the other was fine art delivering rare or unique objects and services to a tiny specialist market with values (cultural and monetary) jealously controlled by an even smaller taste-making elite. The role of the home-made in everyday life and the amateur in art became sidelined. The 20th-century mass markets and art industry were both controlled by a rigorous division between producer and consumer underwritten by the belief in the creator’s enduring rights over what was created.   The technological developments of digitisation and Web 2.0 have had two significant effects on this duopoly. The mutability of digital data and its ability to be copied and reformed without loss of quality has opened up the possibility of ripping and mashing – the continuous recombination and reforming of cultural material as an alternative to the passive reception, acquisition and preservation of immutable art objects. In the area of reproducible culture such as photomedia, the focus of art is beginning to shift from objects to processes. The mode of artistic production has diversified to embrace both the virtuoso individual and the creative community action.   Meanwhile, the means of dispersion of digital entities has expanded radically. The two-way flow of Web 2.0 has opened up the possibility of reaching a wide audience at little cost without the need to accommodate the taste of a mass market or corporate and institutional hierarchy. The result is a plethora of small niche groups, unconstrained by physical geography, that actively participate in both the production and consumption of new forms of art.   I have for some years sensed a coming dissolution of the hard and fast division between active producer (artist) and passive consumer (audience) in the (visual) arts. It has brought me to the conclusion that we are witnessing the beginning of a reformation of the arts analogous to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th-century Christian church. 1       That is, not a revolution resulting in the overthrow of one system by another, but the development of an alternative system which places the essence of culture in the heart and mind of the individual rather than in an authorising oligarchic profession.   This is, of course, an analogy and I am not proposing that in every way the new reformation will mirror the old, but simply that there are a number of resonances. Most significantly, what the Protestant Reformation made clear is that the subsequent effects of such a partial shift of power can be far reaching.   In effect the 16th-century Reformation sought to ‘de-professionalise’ the church, placing the essence of religion in the interior of the individual and I believe we will witness an increasing ‘de-professionalisation’ of art. This is perhaps most appropriately thought of as the correcting of an over-professionalisation that occurred in the second half of the 20th century in tandem with the reduction of art consumers to passive spectators where once they had been active participants. I do not mean by this that we will see an end to professional artists. The Protestant church has ministers and specialists, but their role is different from their counterparts in the Roman Catholic Church. Their expertise is (in theory at least) at the service of the community not in authority over it, and there is often the facility for community member and specialist to swap roles (as with lay preaching). Creativity and cultural practice will, I believe, increasingly become a process involving the many not the few.   One of the important conditions for the Christian Reformation was the invention of the printing press, which allowed the free flow of information previously controlled by the monasteries. Today the development of the internet (and especially the Web 2 phenomenon) is having a similar effect, as information is no longer constrained and filtered by institutional authority. Just as the veniality of the Roman Catholic church of the 16th century and the selling of indulgences outraged Martin Luther and his followers so there are those who consider that the art world has lost its way, corrupted by its self-aggrandising power as arbiters of taste and seduced by the marketplace. In this view art has become an industry in which the currency of credential can be converted to capital and, all too often, vice versa. Web 2.0 offers not only a way of expressing concern but a medium through which to articulate new approaches to creativity.   Once spiritual judgement became a matter of personal conscience the rule of church and state could separate. With the secularisation of the state issues of scientific exploration and mercantile expansion were no longer constrained by doctrinal orthodoxy, leading to, on the one hand, the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, and, on the other, industrialisation and the ascendancy of the middle class. That is, what followed as a result of the initial process of reformation led to outcomes far beyond the scope or interest (or, I suspect, the wildest dreams) of those that had initiated it.   However, while the strong central hierarchy of Roman Catholicism maintained, more or less, its unity over the years, the emphasis on personal conscience in Protestantism led to a cascade of schisms as new smaller religious structures were formed that more precisely suited the needs and aspirations of those who constituted them. Similarly I would expect that we will not see a singular alternative cultural structure form out of the social and technological ferment of the new millennium, but an unstable though potent set of interrelations with a tendency to sub-divide into smaller systems that more effectively generate meaning and affect for those involved. And while these new systems will offer a range of alternative forms of art and ways to engage with it, they will not overthrow the pre-existing art world institutions, though they are likely to cause that original system to evolve in new, if less radical, ways.   Finally, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church embodied very clear lines of communication (from the top down). The individual-focused and fragmented nature of Protestantism led to network communication based on a system of value exchanges – trade. While trade is based on exchange of goods of equivalent value, symbolic currency (money) and of capital became increasingly important as a flexible translator of that value. The Protestant work ethic is driven by wealth creation and operates in a network system.   The new network systems of information exchange through the internet have created an environment in which little or no financial stake is required in order to become an active consumer and producer. As a result many of the newest internet communities are driven by something other than wealth creation. The Protestant meritocracy that replaced (or at least modified) the Roman Catholic oligarchy is now facing a new democratising sensibility arising from the more level playing field provided by the internet communication and the social forms and connections that, while not spawned by it, have been given new life through it.   Nothing I am saying is specific to photomedia or even the visual arts, though I think the visual arts are more hardened in their established divisions than, say, music. The fact is the flow of information on the internet – good, bad and indifferent as it is – presages profound changes in hierarchies of many sorts – the arts are just one.   It would be foolish to speculate on where the current reformation of the arts might ultimately lead us, but by freeing creative communication from the constraints of the luxury market and the control of an elite profession we could perhaps liberate the quality unique to humankind and its most potent attribute: imagination.   1. I am very aware that the 16th century Reformation and its outcomes are very much more complex that outlined here. I have used a broad brush to paint a picture for the purposes of analogy only, in the hope than to do so will help shed new light on the way we think of art, culture and the individual imagination. (back)   Alasdair Foster director@acp.org.au January, 2008   **     Alasdair Foster is Director of the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney and Managing Editor of Photofile magazine. He is a member of the photomedia research cluster at Monash University Department of Theory of Art and Design, Melbourne.     As always please joins us with your comments in our forums.         http://www.zonezero.com/editorial/enero08/january08.html    

Thursday, 03 January 2008

308. The game of death

She may well have been the best leader available. With a military dictator and a corrupt businessman as the alternatives, Benazir Bhutto, with her western admirers and her feudal followers, was clearly a front-runner. How she died will probably remain a mystery, but she was playing the game of death, and it was unlikely she would win every time.   It is difficult to write about people who have just died. Many are grief stricken at the untimely death of the former prime minister. Even her critics are shocked by the way she was hunted down. An insensitive piece would aggravate their pain, and one doesn’t generally speak ill of the dead. I remember as a child asking my mother “Amma. Do bad people never die?” A man not known for his strength of character had died, and newspaper reports had described him as an honest social worker. I am no longer of the age to get away with such questions. But even for those who have loved Benazir, I believe the questions need to be asked if this cycle is to ever stop.   It was 1995. They were troubled times in Pakistan. I had gone over to Karachi on the invitation of my architect friend Shahid Abdulla. There were no telephone booths at Karachi airport, or anywhere else in the city. The government was worried the MQM (Muttahida Quomi Mahaz),would use them for their communication. Sindh was at war with itself.   Shahid wanted me to run a photography workshop at the Indus Valley School of Architecture and Design that he was involved in. Those were the days when we had time for long conversations. We talked of many things. The gun-toting security men outside every big house in Karachi. Shahid’s meeting with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. His memories of Benazir. But the conversation would often veer to a person we both admired. Abdus Sattar Edhi, the humanitarian who had set up an unparalleled ambulance service all over Pakistan.   On the morning of the 10th October, I went over to see the man. He had an easy charm that came from living a simple life and having little to hide. He sat on his wire mesh bed, talking of how things started. We were regularly interrupted by people coming in with requests, and Edhi responding to minor crises. Then we heard about Fahim Commando the MQM leader, having been killed. Fahim and his comrades had apparently been caught in an ambush and all four had died. They had been in police custody, but the police had all escaped and not one of them had been injured. Edhi was not judgmental. Fahim was another man who needed a decent burial. As I watched him bathe the slain MQM leader, I could see the burn marks on the bullet holes on the commando’s body.     The extra-judicial killings during Benazir’s rule are well documented. The fact that no investigation was done when her brother Mir Murtaza was killed outside Bilawal House, the family home, fueled the commonly held belief that her husband Asif Zardari had arranged the killing. Even Edhi’s ambulances had not been allowed access. Not until Murtaza had bled to death. Anyone who witnessed the murder was arrested; one witness died in prison. Benazir was then prime minister.   Murtaza had been vocal against the corruption of Zardari. Benazir defended her husband stoically throughout. Despite the Swiss bank accounts, she assured people that he would be seen as the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan. With Zardari now tipped as the new chief of PPP, Pakistan’s Mandela and his Swiss bank accounts might well be the new force. Whether Pakistanis will see this polo-playing businessman as the saviour of the day remains to be seen.   Supported by the US, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had been largely responsible for the break up of Pakistan and the genocide in Bangladesh. The current string pulling by the US has hardly made Pakistan a safer place. The western support of militarisation in Bangladesh and the growing importance of Jamaat is an all too familiar feeling. If Pakistan is an omen, it is a sinister one.   Perhaps Mrs. Packletide would have known how the former prime minister of this nuclear nation died. But the government’s attempts to cover-up will do little to quell the conspiracy theories. Like the Bhutto family, the military too have burned a lot of bridges in getting to where they are. There are too many skeletons in their closet. There is no going back, and no price too high.   © Shahidul Alam December 29, 2007         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/shahidul_3/    

Saturday, 29 December 2007

310. Gore wins Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize for slide-show presentation

  Stockholm - 2007 was an extraordinary year for former vice president Al Gore, who received the highest honors in both film and humanitarianism for his tireless efforts in creating a visually pleasing, hour-long slide-show presentation using the popular computer program Keynote.     The slide-show, which features approximately 80 full-color pictures of landforms and people, as well as a vast array of detailed line and bar graphs, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a successful visual presentation must utilize both an application's audio and graphic capabilities. Furthermore, Gore effectively silenced many of his critics by incorporating short videos.   "The Nobel Committee was deeply moved by Mr. Gore's passion for making a clear, concise, easy-to-watch slide-show", Professor Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute, told reporters in late October. "[The slide show] truly displayed how well-placed transitions—be they dissolves, wipes, or splits—can really tie a presentation together."   Added Lundestad: "Also, the slides with multi-image animation were cool." In February, Gore's montage of satellite images and title slides was awarded an Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was hailed for presenting a "truly global message" with a clear beginning, middle, and end.   "I was stunned", said Phoenix resident Amy Swinton, 23, who saw the slide show twice in theaters. "It turns out that you don't always need flashy fonts or background colors to make a great multimedia presentation. Simple white text on an all black background can be very effective."   Swinton later called the slide-show extremely informative, saying that over the course of two hours she was completely convinced of the reality of Keynote's "bounce" slide-transition option.   "I think these awards will help give even more weight to Mr. Gore's ultimate message", New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote. "In our changing world, it is absolutely essential that all of us do our part to stay informed about the various eye-catching possibilities of today's slide-show software."   © The Onion December 18, 2007       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/gore/    

Tuesday, 18 December 2007

312. Size Matters

              (and some other related matters)     This is, more or less, what we know:   A slow (?) but inevitable exodus towards electronic media is taking place. Even though the paper made of wood is being transformed into electronic-ink paper, and is still called paper, the fact is that this is one of the new forms that will be adopted by computer screens. We are talking about e-ink, iPhone, pad, computer, TV, flat screen or projector, we better get used to the idea that these will be the means through which information will be disseminated, and these will be the places where photography will continue to expand.   The exponential growth of the number of photos taken by people in every kind of way since the advent of the Digital Revolution –digital cameras, cell phones, etc- has caused photography to invade every corner of the planet, and has helped the ongoing evolution of the capacity to see, create, judge and reevaluate the use and importance of still photography.         In spite of the emergence of new visual expression media, such as TV, cinema and the Internet, photography has maintained its validity and despite the constant complaints about the “death of photojournalism” there are more and more photographs being published.   The Holy Grail of the use of photography in a journalistic or documentary context has been the "Photo Essay". In other words, the intention of using more than one image to build a story. W. Eugene Smith continues to be the main referent, and even though it is not necessary to copy the structure of his stories, there are some concepts that remain valid, and that explain why the photographers are still trying to get them published.   This is too obvious and needs no further explanation; a single image is not enough to explain a complex subject. Not all the pictures have the same “value”, due to their form, or their contents. As the title says, “size matters”, and it matters a great deal. Each image needs an ideal size to express itself. Gursky’s “99 cents” needs to be seen in the wall of a museum, an image by Nachtwey is perfectly fine in a magazine, an ID photography looks good in a passport.     A story, whatever the media –text, cinema, TV, music- has a dramatic structure. It has a beginning and an end, emphasis, relevant and not-so-relevant elements; central subject matters and peripheral subject matters, characters, climates, etc. All of them are tools used by the storyteller to convey what he or she is trying to say, in a better and more effective manner.   In addition, in visual media, the layout and design, play a chief role: a double homepage, different sized photos, more than one picture per page and the relation between captions, downloads, epigraphs, main text and the images. All of these elements, when used properly, help to realize the full potential of each one of them.   In the current paper-based platform, either in magazines or in newspapers, the struggle for space is vital. There is not a lot of it, it is expensive and has to be shared both with the text to be completed, and with advertising, and frequently they are in opposition. This was the state of affairs before the Internet. Suddenly, an unexpected space opened up, a virtual place that no one had foreseen, a new platform to show our images, and full of possibilities.   Photos look very good on screen. The other alternatives, such as e-ink, are still on an early stage, but without question, we will get to a point in which images will be reproduced with the highest quality. On the other hand, the cost of uploading one or several pictures is exactly the same.   Images don’t have to compete with advertising; they dwell on their own space. The only limit (apart from connection speed, another thing that continues to increase) is creativity.   Nevertheless…                           So far, the experience is almost discouraging. There is more quantity, but this doesn’t mean more quality. The aesthetics of slide projection remains unsurpassed. We still have to endure a slideshow similar to the vacation pictures of a relative; every picture has the same size, the same value and the same time on screen.   Looking at a photo is a “willful” action, and the time one decides to spend in each picture is decisive. One stops, enters into it, tries to read it, to understand it, to make discoveries. Information has to be deciphered. This triggers ideas and feelings, and carves them into our memory. The power of the still image is summed up here. In an attempt to enhance storytelling, audio and video have been added in the Internet. Sometimes it works, but sometimes is like a reinvention of television. And the linear, automated structure of the narration, most of the time prevents us from stopping to contemplate an image that appeals to us more than others. Of course, this can be done, but it interrupts the development of the story, and this surely does not happen with a reader.   And when speaking about the reinvention of TV, I can’t understand the idea of photographers becoming TV cameramen to narrate their stories in a new medium: the interactive newspaper. It’s not that exploring new media of expression is wrong, what is not comprehensible is that there are people advising photographers to abandon photography, which is twice as strange when these people are photographers themselves.   To conclude, the use of images is no longer done in relation to a text but to audio and video, which can be interesting, but definitely more ephemeral. In reality, the enriching experience of the interaction between text and image has been set aside: the understanding of certain subject matters requires text, and if the text interacts with interesting, powerful and clarifying images, the stories that need to be told can reach their full potential.   This is the task of programmers, designers, editors, photographers and writers. We have to re-think the use of photography in the new media. We must find other ways to tell our stories, to go beyond a sequence of images. We have to work in the editing, to know where to accentuate, to construct a narration, to make the reader participate.   Photography is going through a moment of extraordinary expansion, but if we do not put it in its rightful place, its use in the media will be reduced to mere ornaments of web pages or emasculated versions of TV shows.   Diego Goldberg diegold@fibertel.com.ar December, 2007   **     Diego Goldberg, Argentinean photographer who has been represented worldwide by the Corbis Agency since 1974. He lived in Paris, France and New York City for several years. His career spans form photojournalism to illustration work and industrial photography.       As always please joins us with your comments in our forums.     http://zonezero.com/editorial/diciembre07/december07.html    

Sunday, 02 December 2007

314. Photofinish and a home-brew digital camera

Very likely you already seen a photofinish image, either of a horse track or from the Olympic Games. They all look alike, the background is usually of a single color and seems stretched with a bunch of athletes or horses as they cross the finish line of a race. There's a timeline either at the bottom or at the top of the image, numbers that represent elapsed seconds from the beginning of the race. These images were generated by a camera equipped with a slit instead of a regular shutter and 35mm film moving behind this slit. Nowadays the linear CCD substituted the slit and made this cameras very similar to most scanners we have (or maybe scanners are similar to those cameras).   Late 19th century the Ermanox camera introduced the focal plane shutter, at that point the shutter was basically a moving slit. Later there's a report about the British Museum using a fixed slit with glass plates to record the entire surface of ceramic pots in one picture. Kodak made the slit static and moved flexible film for the first time in Circut panoramic cameras. In the 1930's, Lorenzo del Riccio, italian immigrant living in California, invented the photofinish camera. At that time he was working for the Paramount Pictures photo lab, probably with access to lots of 35mm film and equipment (this part is very badly documented) but those who hired him to develop this idea apparetly were the Hollywood horse track. He tried many approaches with regular cameras and flash exposures but without sucess. With a flash you document who wins the race, but unless you fire a camera for each horse passing the finish line, you cannot get the entire result of a race on images.   Lorenzo opted for moving the film in the opposite direction of the running horses, behind a slit. He placed this contraption in front of the finish line on a high spot. From there all the camera saw was the finish line itself. This is the reason why on the Olympic Games although the race tracks are terracota colored the photofinish images have white background, because all the camera sees is the finish line. Lorenzo would turn the camera on just before the winner finished the race and turn it off after the last one had crossed the line. Finding out the speed the film has to move to record a good image was the trick that made Lorenzo famous.   Slit photography isn't a kind of high speed photography. Instead of registering a range in space for a fraction of time, the slit records a range of time in a fraction of space. All the results of a single race could fit into one image this way. And even though the resulting image has a rectangular shape, the area that the camera sees is just a line.   Most photographers never did get close to this kind of technology because it was so complicated and demanded so much film to make things work. This knowlodge ended up kept inside the photofinish photography industry. Digital photography brought some of it closer to us in the form of the flatbed scanner which is basically a slit camera inside a box.   Professor Andrew Davidhazy from RIT in Rochester, published in the web many articles showing how to experiment with the linear CCD from hand held scanners by making a digital slit camera. The whole idea is very simple, all you have to do is free your scanner from its box and maybe make a few modifications to it if you must. If you're curious enough, I'm pretty sure you can do it, but having the guts to take it apart and risk loosing it helps.     Through the years I came up with what I think is the best combination for the things I do with such a machine, I use a HP 2200C scanner, with Vuescan software (sort of a universal driver for scanners) running on Mac OS plataform. When I started I had a Pentium 150Mhz, running Windows 95 and a scanner I couldn't tell which brand it was. Both setups gave great results, the trick is to find a combination of things that leads to a working machine. Most parallel or SCSI scanners have a manufacturer's driver that is able to check if the lamp is working, for example, and that spoils the setup (you end up with a message on screen telling you to visit the nearest service center).   This is the main reason why I picked Vuescan, it doesn't care if the scanner is in one piece or not. My experience with Sane on Linux is that is tries to calibrate for every scan and that is annoying. Slim scanners are of no use to this project, they can however be used to create a kind of scanning back for a 8x10" camera, but that's another story for the future. I usually find scanners at the place where they sell scrap computer parts, a broken glass or a burnt lamp usually end the life of a scanner, since we don't need them one can use such scanners for this.     At this point I should do a little disclaimer: this may cause extensive damage to your scanner and your computer, do this at your own risk. I'm no expert in eletronics, this is based in my readings and experience. If you decide to go ahead, good luck and keep your fingers away from the circuit board to which the scanner lamp is attached, voltage there goes very high and causes a strong burned skin smell when it touches you! There's also a lot of glass inside a scanner, be careful with that.   A typical scanner is a box containing three circuit boards (main, sensor and lamp), a little motor, a lamp and some other hardware. Basically you want to keep two of the boards (main and sensor) and the cable linking them and get rid of the rest. To test your setup it would nice to get a working scanner and scan a full sized image with it first. Unplug it from the wall, disassemble it and unplug the lamp from its board, check to see it still works. Repeat for the entire lamp board, then the motor. If you get an error message it's time to either look for other hardware or other software. If you didn't get an error message, you're almost done (dispose of the lamp safely). You may have problems with the U-shaped sensor. Some scanners have it, some don't or some software don't care about it. This sensor tells if the moving mechanism of the scanner is in its starting position.   There's usually a plastic tab from the scanner box that entries the U-shaped sensor. So remove the two remaining boards from the box along the moving part to which the sensor board is attached and test the scanner again. If you get a message such as "waiting for scanner", it seems the software is waiting for the scanner to reset. Place the tip of a screwdriver in the U-shaped sensor to see if that makes the scanner work. Test also if you can leave it there for the entire process. If you get a negative, look for other hardware.   By now you probably noticed there's a lot of black plastic right in front of your lens, and some mirrors too. Remove the mirrors carefully and get your saw out, let's get rid of that plastic. Once you are done, you will notice that your lens is focused too near, with a gentle tap of a hammer you can probably sink it a milimeter or two in its hole sending the focus back a couple of centimeters. Nice. You can build a whole new body for your sensor, with a lens that focuses and has an iris, but that's not a requirement. Just tape the main circuit board to the side of be camera and you're done. Plug it to the computer and hit scan.     Keep in your head the principle of the photofinish photography, things that remain static render lines at the background of the photo, things that move across the view of the camera get to appear in the final image. Go out, experiment, go as far as you can get from an eletrical outlet!   Guilherme Maranhão refotografia@gmail.com November 2007       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/maranhao/    

Saturday, 24 November 2007

316. We are all videographers now

              The inevitable convergence of the photograph and video For most photographers Cartier Bresson’s mantra, ‘the decisive moment’, is instilled into our photographic psyche at a very early stage. The ability to freeze a critical point in time, to capture an image that has significance and meaning above all other, is what makes a great photographer. One has to have the foresight and guile to be in the position to capture the image in the first place and composition plays no small part in that, but is the very definition of capturing a moment becoming less relevant?   A recent article in the British Journal of Photography written by photojournalist Dirck Halstead, predicts the demise of the still photographer and emergence of photographers working with video (Videographer). Relatively inexpensive video cameras can now shoot in high definition, with stills being grabbed and enlarged using algorithms that can produce images of up to 67 mega pixels. The economics of having one person in the field who can capture stills, video and audio is compelling to many news organisations that dictate their news gathering policies upon return on investment and value for money.   With the advent of globalised distribution and the need for news outlets to provide ‘content rich’ websites where consumers can choose to access content in a variety of formats, the still image is starting to be downgraded to the position of ‘poster frame’ – an icon that represents the content of the video.   So, is the decisive moment a delusional concept? Richard Drew’s photograph of the ‘Falling Man’ is a case in point. The iconic image shows a man falling from one of the towers of the World Trade Center after the attack on 11th September 2001. It could be said that this image is a decisive moment, but whose decisive moment? Drew’s camera took 12 frames as the man fell and only one of those frames was chosen to represent that moment.     It can be argued the camera was used as a surrogate video camera to document this moment. The image was pulled from an already stored and endlessly re-playable sequence or continuum. The critical decisions came in this case both with the circumstance the photographer found himself in and at the editorial stage. As technology allows higher frame rates per second, we are breaking down the iterations of this continuum. Will the distinction between still imagery and video inevitably disappear?   Digital SLR cameras can shoot bursts of still images approaching the speed of video; if the camera isn’t restricted by mechanical processes then speeds in excess of 60fps can be achieved and up to 300 fps, as is the case of the recently developed Casio Exilim. These new generations of camera borrow technology from their video and audio recording cousins. New cameras, albeit consumer models, are appearing with a pre-shot buffer constantly recording five seconds of images before the shutter is pressed. So the decisive moment will always be there, somewhere – you can find it at your leisure.       Julian Tait julian@redeye.org.uk November, 2007   **     Julian Tait is a founding member of Redeye – The Photography Network and coordinator of The Democratic Image conference about Photography and Globalisation held in Manchester in April 2007. He also runs Littlestar Media a media arts organisation based in the UK.         As always please joins us with your comments in our forums.       http://zonezero.com/editorial/noviembre07/november07.html      

Thursday, 01 November 2007

318. Dear Monsieur Picasso

  Download PDF   By Frederick Baldwin As I drove up the high winding road to the Villa la Californie, I thought back over the last few days. It was my last summer of freedom. Next year, I would be a college graduate looking for a job and trying to settle down. I would have to be satisfied with reading about the people and parts of the world that interested me. In the summer of 1955 I had won a reprieve, a stay of adult responsibility until 1956. I wanted to see Pablo Picasso. I don’t suppose that anybody felt less qualified or had less of an excuse than I did. But to me he was a compelling, attractive imaginary companion who had coached many of my dreams about creativity, not excluding a Riviera blue sea, hot sun; and sexual robustness. I had always admired Picasso. He was a rebel, unpredictable, an artist constantly evolving. He and Diego Rivera were probably the first artists I had known about, but Rivera didn’t have the attractive physical presence of Picasso. But mainly Picasso represented freedom that had nothing to do with the practical office-bound issues that I would soon have to face. This was my temporary, self-issued license to bust unannounced into Picasso’s life.

Sunday, 14 October 2007

320. A record price for a Radiohead Album: $0 The famed British band lets fans decide what to pay for a new release on-line

  related article about Radiohead's album "In Rainbows"   The great riddle facing the record industry in the digital age has been pricing. Napster and its ilk puckishly offered music for "free" in the late 1990s, and the major labels have largely clung to an average of $13 for CDs despite plummeting sales and seasons of downsizing.   Now, one of the world's most acclaimed rock bands, Radiohead, is answering that marketplace riddle with a shrug. "It's up to you", reads a message on the Web page where fans can pre-order the band's highly anticipated seventh album and pay whatever they choose, including nothing.   The British band, which has twice been nominated for a best album Grammy, will sidestep the conventional industry machinery altogether Oct. 10 by releasing the album "In Rainbow" as a digital download with no set price. The album will be available only from the band and at radiohead.com, its official site.     It may sound like a gimmicky promotion, but industry observers Monday framed it in more historical terms: Radiohead, they said, is the right band at the right time to blaze a trail of its own choosing.   "This is all anybody is talking about in the music industry today," said Bertis Downs, the longtime manager of R.E.M., the veteran alt-rock band that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. "This is the sort of model that people have been talking about doing, but this is the first time an act of this stature has stepped up and done it. They were a band that could go off the grid, and they did it."   Another high-profile manager said he was still trying to process the boldness of the Radiohead venture. "My head is spinning, honestly," said Kelly Curtis, who represents Seattle-based Pearl Jam. "It's very cool and very inspiring, really." Radiohead is hardly abandoning the idea of making money.   Its website will also sell a deluxe edition of "In Rainbow" that comes with versions in three formats (CD, vinyl and download) along with eight bonus songs and a lavish hardcover book with lyrics, photos and a slipcase. That package costs 40 British pounds (about US $82).   In the coming weeks, Courtyard Management, which represents the band, will reportedly negotiate with labels about a conventional release for "In Rainbow" that would put it on store shelves in 2008. Sources with the band acknowledge that the major labels may balk at the notion of releasing an album that has been available free for months. Still, previous Radiohead albums collectively sell about 300,000 copies a year, according to Nielsen SoundScan, so "In Rainbow" should still have value at the cash register.   "Only a band in Radiohead's position could pull a trick like this," is how Pitchforkmedia.com summed it up. That's because the band became a free agent after its contract with music giant EMI expired with its most recent album, "Hail to the Thief" in 2003. That set the stage for a one-band revolution, even if the five members don't see it that way themselves.   "It's more of an experiment. The band is not fighting for the sake of the fight or trying to lead a revolution," said their spokesman, Steve Martin of New York publicity firm Nasty Little Man. The group declined to comment.   Radiohead isn't the only artist taking bold steps to keep pace with the digital age. The firebrand R&B star Prince, for instance, has taken a maverick path by giving copies of one album away as an insert in a major British newspaper or as an extra to anyone who bought a seat on his high-grossing concert tour. Prince took considerable heat from retailers for the newspaper giveaway.   Then there's the business model of New Orleans' top rapper, Lil Wayne, who made dozens of tracks available free via the Internet to cement his stardom. Even old-school icon Bruce Springsteen seems to see the changing times. He gave away downloads of his new song, the aptly titled "Radio Nowhere."   Geoff Mayfield, the director of charts for Billboard, pointed out that Radiohead was not unique because singer-songwriter Jane Siberry offered a similar optional payment download a few years ago.   Radiohead has sold close to 9 million albums in the U.S., and three of its CDs have debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard album charts. The band has in effect made sure that won't happen with "In Rainbow" by taking its unorthodox approach.   The group has a reputation for daring, which has earned it "relationship fans," core loyalists who skew older, travel to see them play live and urgently seek out the latest release. Those fans, Mayfield said, are not the type to take the new music and leave the Radiohead "tip jar" empty.   "If that loyalty dictates consumer behavior," Mayfield said, "a good number are going to pay what's considered a fair price as opposed to 2 cents."   Several observers said all of that made this experiment far safer than it would be for a pop act that needed a major label to secure radio airplay and television exposure or an up-and-coming rock act that could not fall back on the receipts from sold-out arena shows. "It's a road act with proven appeal, so as long as they have the right people to take care of touring logistics and the business end of getting music out to market, they might be able to make a go on their own," Mayfield said. "It wouldn't work for everyone. You don't want to be an amateur. We're in a brave new world, but you want to make sure dots connect in terms of getting the music out."   That brave new world is a harsh one for the traditional recording industry. The major labels that enjoyed huge profits in the 1980s as fans replaced their music collections with CDs have suffered over the last decade as a new generation instead plucked its hit songs from the Internet, often without paying for them. There have been steady declines in recent years. As of midyear 2007, CD sales were off 19.3% from the same period in 2006. And there's intense competition now from video games and DVDs.   But even as the old empire collapses, new ideas take hold. Though its cerebral soundscapes are avant art rock, Radiohead's earnest and emotionally plaintive ethos puts it in line with acts such as U2. That's why, according to Wired editor Nancy Miller, all eyes have been on the band at the career and marketplace crossroads.   "We've been waiting for just the right band at just the right moment," Miller said. "Right now is it. Radiohead is the perfect band. After finishing its contract, we expected something revolutionary. I thought they would start their own label. Instead, they have done something more interesting: They decided not to decide."   Some pundits weighed in saying that although Radiohead's move might have been a sharp detour for an established band, it was hardly a path newer acts could follow. Curtis, the Pearl Jam manager, said that years on a major label roster established the Radiohead brand and made it possible for it to buck the system. "It's the newer bands I really feel sorry for," Curtis said.   Pearl Jam and other groups with intense followings, such as the Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M., Metallica and Nine Inch Nails, will probably learn the most from Radiohead's experience, Curtis said. "Everyone will keep an eye on this because this is the most exciting thing we've seen to this point."   Radiohead was trying to deal with that excitement. Intense interest and pre-orders overwhelmed the website, according to Martin, the band spokesman. Wired's Miller, for one, predicted the band's gamble would pay off.   "We've seen the crumbling of bigger labels, but there haven't been any big 'Aha!' moments, that risky departure," Miller said. "It's an interesting move, a terrific example of an artist exerting a terrific amount of control. It's definitely going to be successful."   by Geoff Boucher and Chris Lee, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers October 2, 2007         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/radiohead/index.html    

Tuesday, 02 October 2007

322. When does a photograph stop being real?

                  For more than 150 years photography has been about capturing and presenting reality. Whether using silver halides or CCDs, a photograph is thought of as a snapshot of some part of the world at a particular time with a particular point of view. We say things like “let me show you what happened on our vacation” or “Camino Real de Tierra adentro” as if photographs are unchanging proof of what was and how we saw it.   As every photographer secretly knows, there was never any stopping the development of silver halides once they had been exposed. It just took so much longer once fixer had been applied so that the missive to “keep the photograph out of the sun” was enough to make billions of people think of a photograph as a static document.   Today’s technology has steadily made photographs subject to more and more change downstream of the original shutter click. Digital photographs change rapidly and without any control. Every transmission between devices has the possibility of changing a photograph as each new device may have a new format, a new limitation, or a new set of possibilities. Every time a photograph is shown it is likely to be with a new meaning within a new context.   It may simply be better to think of a digital photograph as a kind of visual hint of what we once might have seen. Uploaded photographs are positively ephemeral (or is that ethereal?).     Take, for example, what happens if you use the Facebook online social network (www.facebook.com) to show others your photographs. According to press reports Facebook is growing at a phenomenal rate and is now delivering more than 10,000,000 photographs a day. Each photograph is reformatted and re-contextualized according to Facebook’s wishes without regard for what the photographer may have intended. The page with the photographs is created by software taking data and input from a large number of users who have no knowledge or intent with regards to the photographers. The software sizes, formats, colors, organizes, and orders photographs according to its own internal rules. Further, the system adds in metadata around the photograph which aids (or confuses!) the interpretation of the image. Similar things happen in all social online networks today.   So what does this mean to us as photographers?   Photographers must think of themselves as creators of visual imagery. Much like screenwriters, they are at the beginning of the process, but are rarely, if ever, involved at the end of the process where someone sees their work. This may be frustrating, but technology is steadily moving towards more disempowerment of content creators. Your frustrations are shared with writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, and everyone else whose medium can be digitalized.   Photographers today may have some influence, but certainly not authority.   This is even more so given that photographs are now being used in so many unforeseen ways. Take, for example, the possibility of taking a photograph and turning it into an 3-dimensional avatar. Such technology is being worked on in several places and represents a very odd juxtaposition of reality and virtual reality. We take a photograph of a friend at a wedding taking place at a sacred ceremony. Later we upload it to the net and in return receive a extrapolated 3D model of our friend.   This new avatar is then animated to show emotions and doing activities in the virtual world which our friend may never have considered doing themselves. For example, you may have your friend/avatar interact with other avatars in ways wholly unacceptable in polite society. The original photographic memory from the wedding has no bearing whatsoever upon what its derivative is actually doing.     On the other hand photographs are far more widely distributed today than in the past. I regularly see hundreds of photographs from friends and colleagues today where in the past I might have seen one. Even widely published photographers such as our mentor, Pedro Meyer, are seeing their photographs distributed more widely and more rapidly than ever before. Facebook and its brethren have made photographic distribution nearly effortless.   Technology will continue to lower the barriers and costs associated with taking and distributing photographs. It won’t be long before we see cameras which never turn off, recording continuously for as long as the batteries last. Our job won’t really change, though, and we will continue to edit, contextualize, and frame our experiences using our skills as photographers.   For those of us interested in seeing photographs, does this mean that photographs no longer represent the original intent of the photographer? I would say that one should never believe in the veracity of any image (and any information displayed near an image) that you see. The need for having an informed critical point of view – on everything you see – has never been more important.   Peter Marx pietro@evolutionary.com   September 2007 Los Angeles, California   **   Peter Marx is Adjunct Professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is the former CTO of Vivendi-Universal Games and was the Vice President of Emerging Technologies for Universal Studios.       As always please joins us with your comments in our forums.         http://zonezero.com/editorial/sep07/september07.html      

Sunday, 02 September 2007

324. When the Waters Came

  It was nearly twenty years ago when I had written this. After one of my first photojournalistic assignments:   What does one photograph to depict a flood? A submerged house, a boat on a highway, people wading in water?   As we boated through the branches in Jinjira we found a wicker basket in a tree. The family had long since abandoned their home, and their worldly belongings, gathered in that basket, waited patiently for their home coming.       The worst flood in a hundred years? That statistic is hardly relevant. They, as those before them and after them will always face the floods. How does it matter whether they are 60% starved or 75% starved? How does it matter what country the relief wheat comes from? They themselves are mere statistics to power hungry politicians.       What is relevant are the feelings that have been kindled, that half kilogram of rice that has been shared, that solitary dry house that has warmly welcomed all who have needed the shelter. That others have shared the pain.       What is relevant is that now the roads are dry and the walls repainted and that a nation that once so cared has so quickly forgotten.   I look back and merely feel the ineffectuality of my images.   Shahidul Alam Dhaka 1988   Nearly twenty years on, the floods are with us again. They are a part of our natural agricultural cycle. They irrigate the land, replenish the topsoil, remove the toxins. But deforestation in the mountains, illegal constructions, ill planned roads and ill caring leaders make floods take on a violent form. The waters get angry.   This year, when the waters had risen, our adviser advised that it was not yet a calamity. When the waters reached danger levels, the decree came that because of the state of emergency, ‘political banners were banned’ so while people struggled for food and shelter, banner rights became the issue. Now as the waters engulf the land and people flounder in need of relief, our adviser advises us "we don’t have to help the people, they’re going to their relative’s house by themselves".   Now that is a solution Bangladesh can offer to all the distressed people in the world. Just go find a relative.   Shahidul Alam August 2007         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/shahidul_2/index.html    

Wednesday, 22 August 2007