crayonhistory - Tumblr blog

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J a m e s B r o w n

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Expanding Color Painting, 1987, George Condo

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Julia Soboleva

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Hans Bellmer, Untitled (The Cube)

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Radio Telescopes and Radiometers

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Consider two things in tandem. First, people in wealthier neighbourhoods almost always have more access to urban parks and to parkland, on top of the face that such neighbourhoods are often in the hills or by the water. […] Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically determined children’s content on YouTube, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children’s use of technology at home. As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button, had a parental-control feature set up on his phone by an assistant, to keep him from downloading apps. Loren Brichter, the engineer who invested the “pull-to-refresh” feature of Twitter feeds, regards his invention with penitence: “Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about.” […] In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention: privileged spaces where some (but not others) can enjoy the fruits of contemplation and the diversification of attention. One of the main points I’ve tried to make in this book - about how thought and dialogue rely on physical time and space - means that the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment. This knot will only come loose if we start thinking not only about the effects of the attention economy, but also about the ways in which these effects play out across other fields of inequality. By the same token, there are many different places where manifest dismantling can begin to work. Wherever we are, and what ever privileges we may or may not enjoy, there is probably some thread we can afford to be pulling on. Sometimes boycotting the attention economy by withholding attention is the only action we can afford to take. Other times, we can actively look for ways to impact things like the addictive design of technology, but also environmental politics, labour rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, anti-racism initiatives, measures for parks and open spaces, and habitat restoration - understanding that pain comes not from one part of the body but from systemic imbalance. As in any ecology, the fruits of our efforts within any of these fields may well reach beyond to the others.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (via luxe-pauvre)

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Why an omniscient eternal god would put infinite souls through endless suffering to test their character and grit for no reward for no reward for no reward cruel cruel cruel cruel

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Artwork by Bob Pepper, 1969

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Ron Asheton and Niagara by Destroy All Monsters, 1979

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Torah ark curtain, Piatra-Neamţ, eastern Romania, 1901

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Ed Galloway, Totem Pole Park, Foyil, Oklahoma, 1948

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Friedensreich Hundertwasser - 433 The I Still Do Not Know, 1960, mixed media, 1300 x 1950 mm

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Gulam Rasool Santosh

Kashmiri painter and poet.

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"Forms of power—or rather of the pursuit of power. When the struggle for power is of very uncertain outcome and brutally fierce, passions are lively and simple; contact with natural necessities is never lost; good and bad fortune are important, inner torments are less so [Homer—Sophocles]. Under the rule of a stable power the principal method of domination, for the mass of private individuals (except the laboring populations), is love—so it is also an age of flattery…[Don Juan] [Racine]. In a very brutal age, an age of rapes and abductions…the purest love can come to flower [Andromache: "Hector, you are father and mother and brother to me, as well as my beloved husband."] precisely because in such an age amorous intrigue is unknown. On the other hand, when love has become an instrument of power this purity is almost impossible; that is why there is something so cold and false in Racine's idyllic couples. The same applies to friendship." -Simone Weil

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Imagine a bee rn in a hive muttering "the beekeeper is not real because he is not intervening or helping me at all with this disastrous relationship I have with another bee". now imagine that's you talking about the good lord. now imagine a dog with a propeller hat on

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Amoxicillin and Blow Darts

digital illustration

(2023)