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Hmm, I might go back to writing thoughts and posting links here instead of twitter. But is anyone listening.... ?

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Joel Witkin’s moving image troubling the binaries of life/death and fantasy/science. 

Cupid and Centaur by Joel Witkin.

This art piece was made with real human bone, among other animal bones.

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This is a pretty interesting project. It’s a platform for doing certain kinds of mapping. Worth exploring. 

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A text book on digital humanities, appropriately published on the web. Skimming it, it seems pretty dense. I’m not sure how useful it would be in undergraduate classes but for grad. students and others it could be useful. Posting it here so I can find it again. 

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Here’s a short film about Darkmatter, “a trans south asian art and activist collaboration”, by Signified. 

http://thisissignified.com/?post_type=artist_page&p=714

They say "At its core, I think queer is a colonial and racist idea. Because what it allows us to do is rehearse this dichotomy between queers and not queers which is so decontextualized from history and it fabricates an artificial solidarity amongst people who actually have nothing in common other than a similar reading of text, which is ridiculous as an organizing principle." I don’t think I agree with that, but it’s a fair critique. I tend to think of “queer” as having potential to do anti-racist, anti-colonialist work, but it doesn’t do that automatically. I’m curious about other people’s thoughts. 

I more resonate with the other quote pulled out from this video, "For us, our art is part of a process of becoming more ethical people, and recognizing that we can never be perfect but we're always aspiring towards becoming less and less violent." Word. 

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Xeriscaping

I just heard about Xeriscaping as a landscape design philosophy--basically a method of gardening which requires no artificial water input. 

While xeriscaping is most important in places where water resources are scares, and so does not much apply to the ever-more-wet Ohio eco-zone I inhabit, it is still a useful approach in the development of alternate approaches to public space. 

One of the disadvantages of xeriscaping is the reduction of “usable” recreational space (i.e. it’s hard to play soccer on a lawn of cacti), this may not apply in a wet environment. In my experience, an Ohio lawn without herbicides, yet regularly mowed, is allowed to blossom with species diversity, requires no water input, and can still be used for all kinds of recreation. Biodiversity of lawn plants would be a benefit to local wildlife as well as conserving resources. I really can’t see any drawbacks. 

It’d be an interesting project to create a Xeriscaped lawn at OSU (in conjunction with the landscape architecture department) and then see if there was any real disadvantage to it with regards to use and aesthetics. 

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Rouge Taxidermy

http://takeshiyamada.weebly.com/    I’ve got mixed feelings about this artist, Takeshi Yamada. It’s entertaining artwork that calls attention to animal bodies, but it’s definitely not a vegan practice. The animal lives that he’s working from aren’t acknowledged or cared for in any way. Still, I like the magical quality of his work and it makes clear how important animals are to our imagination--even, or especially, monstrous animals. 

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Trans Buddhist Yoga

I was happy to discover Jacoby Ballard in my web wanderings. A trans man and teacher of Buddhism and yoga, he’s got interesting things to say about yoga culture, justice, and inclusion:    http://jacobyballard.com/   

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AnimalOSU, BioPresence

Going to see how I can get involved in these projects. 

I feel like part of my current scholarly mission is bring awareness to animals around us so I’m excited to have found some community of people also excited about animals! 

http://u.osu.edu/biopresence/projects/ 

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Wikipedia as a media object

It’s interesting that students are being taught not to use Wikipedia for research (my 7th grader, collage undergraduates) yet, because it’s “not reliable.” I have issues with this because a) I’m not sure that something published in a print book is necessarily more reliable, b) wikipedia is a more democratic collection of information than a published book would typically be (wikipedia has its own hierarchy, but still) c) students are using it any way. 

The thing to do as an instructor would be to teach students how to use Wikipedia, but in order to do that we would need to understand it better ourselves. 

Here’s an interesting document toward that end: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/portfolio/project/iraq-war-wikihistoriography/  

It is the "The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs" a twelve-volume printed set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq war over a period of time. This document tells a kind of history of the war through the edits, revisions, and vandalism that took place on Wikipedia, including the “talk” page comments explaining the edits. 

Some questions for class discussion: How can a Wikipedia page, even a “non-objective” provide a primary source in the public understanding of an event? How does the publication of this ephemeral digital text into a print document transform its status as “reliable” information?

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Erotic weaving or “anti-pornography” art?

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We can make our minds so like still water

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet, our silence.

-William Butler Yeats, excerpted from "Earth, Fire and Water" in "The Celtic Twilight" (1902)