Friday, June 26th, day after Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett die

"Where were you when Kennedy got shot?" Where were you when Michael Jackson died? Where will you be when the next celebrity dies?

First Entry, day before summer solstice

> 1st Location: my temporary studio, #306 in the JPL Building on the Banff Center campus.
> Latitude: N 51°10.052
> Longitude: W 115°33.548
> Geographic location: Banff, Alberta, Canada
> Weather: currently sprinkles of rain, 10:10 p.m., still light in the sky

The low rez video below this paragraph traces the line of the pink string which is my eye level, 360 degrees, full circle, strung up around the studio. It represents the event horizons of both my immediate visual field and a rhizomatically expanding representation of selected images and stories taken from the 24/7 global media stream.



Note: the use of the forward slash "/" in this blog is intended at times to replace the customary commas and periods in a sentance--those moments of reflecting on what one has just read. The forward slash is intended as a form of syntactial stumbling / an uncontrolled overlapping of moments of reflection / information overload/a collision with the next sentence/the next feeling/next hyperlink to a freakout/next to/next/just keep moving/folks/nothing to see here/just keep moving/

The beginning of each drawing session in the studio involves a decision on what sources I will tap into and digitally collage together from the 24/7 global media stream. This first step into the telematic malstrom of the Internet is like stepping into multiple dreams / nightmers at once / tonight I am listening to the BBC on the Internet which is being streamed from KCRW 89.3 FM in Santa Monica / CA / every now and again / I turn on my FM radio to get national news by listening to a local Canadian Broadcasting Corporation affiliate / Calgary Hearold and other Canadian newspapers are everywhere around me on the event horizon line shouting the headlines/ the link to my family's website is now on call because my brother in St Louis has gotten a preliminary diagnosis of cancer / my heart and mind are being separated by a combinatin of physical and virtual distance from my brother / a BBC reporter in GMT timezone says / "The Iranian authorities are also using something called deep packet inspection / DPI / which basically allows Network operators / or a government / to intercept data on the Internet and de-construct it to search for key words...."/ CNN's web page is open and I click on the first "breaking news" story which takes me to Neda Agha Sultan's image / the "dying angel" in Iran /

This drawing was made from a still image taken from the video on YouTube of the young Iranian woman, Neda Agha Sultan, who was shot dead on the streets in Teran in the midst of violent protests over the rigged elections. This image of her is now in the minds of millions the world over. How do we keep not her image but her life lost in our minds? It seems impossible without the photograph.

The still image taken from the video of her looking towards the person who shot the video on a cell phone is horrifyingly in that moment / a moment that is doomed to be washed downstream and out of the short term memory of the global village. This image has the brutal frankness of an image made by a machine / yet we look at it with our subjective human eyes / the added horror is the realization that this unflinching machine eye that shot this video does not stop to contemplate what it has just revealed to the world, but rather, it is immediately poised and ready to go / roll again and register the next "breaking news" story on its memory chip. In the collective short term memory of the global village, this image of Neda Agha Sultan will be washed downstream in the 24/7 global media stream / Her image was for milla second / a miniscual fraction of the viscious / memory-erasing daily dose of online telematic parataxis / the torrent of unrelated images / berift of any contextual cues that would anchor it in long term memory / drifting inexorably downstream / out of site /out of mind /

At the precipitous moment when one logs on to the Internet, the malstrom of RAM makes available to the "user" an instant, massive dose of unrelated images, momentarily rastered together on screen to form the illusion of importance before it is vaporized from short term memory. Neda Agha Sultan's marterdom in Iran is turned into a single screen refresh in the global random access memory banks. This special effects of parataxis fits squarely into what William Burroughs referred to as the junky's geometry of need for more junk.

Unlike a daily newspaper or a television station, the 24/7 global media stream has no editor, it does not deliberate over any moral imperatives to include or not to include an image or story based on its content. What is most disturbing about 24/7 media stream is that its gluttonous need for continuous up-to-the-minute content puts images of abject suffering next to the profoundly trivial images of pop culture next to the clockwork regularity of advertising, next to....re drawing the screen at the speed of light. The media stream simply takes all images, video, texts, everything, and sends it instantly downstream to an almost certain oblivian from our collective short term memories. If it were not for the existance of search engines, the Internet would have no history at all.

Of course newspapers are dying. What use is a yellowing piece of pulp that carries the promise of establishing a longer lasting personal and cultural memory. (Be back in a moment, gotta check my email).