‘Elephant in the room’
Ink on paper, 10 x 17
(by the wonderful Martin Kingdom of Prufrock coffee cup rock-star-dom)
![hautepop:
Jesse Darling, The Frame: Ikea, Facebook, Bodies and Performance, 21 May 2012.Transcript of a talk given at Fierce Festival, more details here.
Whenever we encounter a new temporality or spatiality, there’s a lot of talk of survival; it’s hard to imagine now, but the big cities in which many of us grew up were once brave new metropoles, socio-economic hives of a density seldom seen before in cultural memory (at least in the Western world, quote unquote). Back then, psychiatrists and urban theorists were talking a lot about agoraphobia and claustrophobia, which are spatial malaises concerning the scale and density of place; nowadays, meanwhile, everyone’s talking about Asperger’s syndrome and ADHD, which can be seen as pathological sensitivities to [hyper]stimulation. Or otherwise, perhaps, as evolutionary prototypes for survival in a blinking, popping, semio-capitalist world of wall-to-wall screens and nonstop hyper-connectivity. So if this talk jumps around a lot, it’s because I’m especially contemporary in that sense.
One thing I’ve been thinking about lately, in my own work and research, is how and why IKEA and Facebook have become such ubiquitous, omnipotent, world-dominating psycho-spatial paradigms. My current conclusion is that it’s because they offer a very seductive illusion, or mirage, of a kind of order that simply doesn’t exist any more. They offer us a frame to exist in, to shelter in, when all else is in flux and crisis. Right now I can’t see this [image] as anything other than a brilliant, genius, terrifyingly cynical play on the psychological homelessness of not just one generation but several.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4e7vzICZs1qcq6s5o1_500.png)
Jesse Darling, The Frame: Ikea, Facebook, Bodies and Performance, 21 May 2012.
Transcript of a talk given at Fierce Festival, more details here.Whenever we encounter a new temporality or spatiality, there’s a lot of talk of survival; it’s hard to imagine now, but the big cities in which many of us grew up were once brave new metropoles, socio-economic hives of a density seldom seen before in cultural memory (at least in the Western world, quote unquote). Back then, psychiatrists and urban theorists were talking a lot about agoraphobia and claustrophobia, which are spatial malaises concerning the scale and density of place; nowadays, meanwhile, everyone’s talking about Asperger’s syndrome and ADHD, which can be seen as pathological sensitivities to [hyper]stimulation. Or otherwise, perhaps, as evolutionary prototypes for survival in a blinking, popping, semio-capitalist world of wall-to-wall screens and nonstop hyper-connectivity. So if this talk jumps around a lot, it’s because I’m especially contemporary in that sense.
One thing I’ve been thinking about lately, in my own work and research, is how and why IKEA and Facebook have become such ubiquitous, omnipotent, world-dominating psycho-spatial paradigms. My current conclusion is that it’s because they offer a very seductive illusion, or mirage, of a kind of order that simply doesn’t exist any more. They offer us a frame to exist in, to shelter in, when all else is in flux and crisis. Right now I can’t see this [image] as anything other than a brilliant, genius, terrifyingly cynical play on the psychological homelessness of not just one generation but several.
(Source: mirakurun)
Created with NYPL’s new Stereogranimator, which lets users create .gifs out of the library’s archive of over 40,000 19th century stereoscopic images.
“Photographers around the world produced millions of stereoscopic views between 1850 and 1930…Around the world, independent and entrepreneurial photographers broke into the growing market for illustrations of all types of subjects: local history and events, grand landscapes, foreign monuments, charming genre scenes, portraits of notables and urban architecture. War and disasters such as floods, fires, train-wrecks, and earthquakes were enormously popular subjects.”—NYPL
