#but I imagine its just giving an introduction to the museum and its purpose

[bumblingbabooshka]

Tuvok and T’Pel take their kids to a museum in the city

[walpurga-nacht-academy]

“Any practitioner of magic that’s received even a modicum of training in the field has, at one point or another, heard of the term ‘grimoire’. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, its purpose unknown and the power that it possesses inestimable. However, their prevalence is also fading. 

As magic studies become more and more accessible to mages of all walks of life, it is considered futile for witches and warlocks to keep personal tomes of spells and hexes anymore. The uniformization of magical practice has brought about an age in which collaboration between our kind is considered not only beneficial, but also ideal. The practice of taking apprentices is no longer an individual choice that each magician makes for themselves, and thus the need for secrecy - the fear of others invading our most personal matters and thus robbing us of our knowledge has become quite absurd.

Nowadays, grimoires have started to gain a reputation as old-fashioned magical tools, relics of the past or tools of forbidden lore. Less than 200 remain still, collected by the Ministry of Magic’s illustrious archivists and kept in many museums across Twisted Wonderland for easy access to those that seek to expand their knowledge. Yet despite their heavy efforts many of these crucial tomes fall prey to the passage of them, deteriorating as their magic fades away. Preventing the loss of these books is quintessential, if not for us, then for future generations. Thus, many countries have launched conservation projects in order to salvage what is left of our inheritance.

It is due to these projects that my own efforts have not been in vain. For years I have searched all over the world to recover and preserve the eight grimoires which had once belonged to the eight great witches of the Bald Mountain, figures shrouded in such mystery that these books are considered the only valid proof of their existence. They are thick volumes, averaging about 1,000 pages each, something quite unusual for that period, and written in codes and foreign languages that have long passed into obscurity. Translating them required intensive work and research, and even so I was able to conquer only sixty percent of the original text. The rest will be lost to history, I am afraid to say, for there are few people able to interpret the original dialects and signs of these spellbooks. 

I hope that in the future there might be somebody more courageous and ingenious than me, who will decipher these tomes in their entirety. There is precious knowledge to be learned from these pages, power that has been lost over time, and power that might help the future. It is thus my request that for every person who reads this book detailing the journey I have taken since I decided fourteen years ago that I must resolve this mystery and prevent it from slipping through the cracks of progress, that you think to dedicate a little bit of time and money to the eminent researchers that still struggle to maintain their memories alive.   

In this regard, I would like to dedicate this book to the many people and organizations that have made possible the publication of this volume. First, there is of course the Magical Research Board, The Ministry of Magic and the Magic University who have kindly and dutifully supported me financially. The research grant that they have awarded me with has helped me carry my investigation through several countries, as well as access resources that would have been otherwise impossible for me to make use of.

I would also like to express my gratitude towards the ruling families of the Afterglow Savannah and the Valley of Thorns, for their generosity in allowing me to study the history of their kingdoms in order to better understand the social and political dimensions to two of the witches’ that are said to hail from these places. 

I would also like to thank all the translators and historians that have taken time out of their busy schedules to help with my manuscripts - pointing out translation errors, mistakes regarding historical dates and events, or even my continuous use of the word “mystery” of which I am guilty even in my opening chapter I must sadly admit! Thus, I would like to mention among many Miss Line, and her lovely daughter Safia, whose generosity saved my life when I was to drown at sea; 

my Lord Duban of the Land of Hot Sands, who enchanted me with tales of viziers and street rats who court princesses; 

Nefu, whose knowledge of the low town in the Savannah rivals none, I am sure of that; 

Lord Himalia of the Land of Pyroxene whose heart is as great as the acres of land he owns; 

old, wise Louisa who welcomed me in her hut before her beloved Cockatrice managed to tear me to shreds; 

my dear friend Daphne, whose courage is greater than even the rage of a Kerberos breed when it sees its owner attacked; 

Thursday, who proved to the world that despite their short stature dwarves should not be taken lightly after all; 

and General Vanrouge, whose skill with the sword is as unmatched as the knowledge he possesses. To all of them, I would like to express my sincerest, heartfelt gratitude for the help they have given me. It is truly unmistakable that good friends are more valuable than a thousand golden statues!

Though they are departed, I wish to thank my parents as well, for having instilled in me such good morals and values. I am eternally grateful to all your guidance and love, and hope that you rest safely above in the sky.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank my dearest Alkin, who is first among familiars and friends alike. His companionship and experience has proven to be invaluable to me during my travels, and there are no words to express the warmth with which I regard my beloved brother.”

- Introduction to Of Grimoires and Pledges: A Study of Eight Texts that Shaped Our Understanding of Modern Magic

Grimoire of the Rose 

In the sea I used to be a poet.

You do not believe me. That is alright. I understand. My speech is stilted. My pauses are long. My mind, once sharp and swift as the marlin’s gait, now always searches its corners for words that came easily before. I have forgotten them all now. I glance around with wild eyes. The vastness around us scares me. 

You think, ‘Ah, this woman is not well.’ And perhaps you are right. 

You think, ‘She must have suffered greatly.’ That is not so.  

Please do not pity me. I do not deserve it. 

As all fools I’ve made peace with myself. 

As all wise men I wish to warn others. 

Forgive me. Speaking in your tongue is hard for me. But please bear it. I would like to tell you my story. It is not long or sad. Just short and silly. You will surely laugh as you read it. That is alright. I wish you would laugh. It eases my soul when I hear others laugh. It reminds me of the ocean.

But I wish to tell you my story. Please listen.

It starts with a beautiful princess born in a wealthy kingdom.

No, that princess is not me. I was born on the shore, among the sand and shells, under the great night sky. I have never seen a palace, nor worn a gown. I have heard that they are beautiful. Princesses wear them at balls, with golden slippers and dance away the night. This princess must have worn one too. She must have been very beautiful. And loved. All beautiful women are loved. 

No, I do not know what made her beautiful. I have never seen her. But I like to imagine it must have been so. It helps me rest. 

As I said, my story starts with a princess born in a wealthy kingdom. She was her father’s only child, a sweet, delicate girl with fair hair and golden eyes. 

Yes, I am lying now. For I never laid eyes on her. I say these things because it helps me rest. 

I am repeating myself? Forgive me. Your tongue is difficult for me. I wish to tell you my story. Will you listen? 

My story starts with a beautiful child, born to a widowed king, who paid three gold pieces to the undertaker to build a temple over his wife’s grave, where he went to pray every evening. I do not know why humans built temples. My kind does not. 

I have asked him, but he did not know either.

He loved her too. They all did. She was beautiful. All beautiful women are loved. I was loved too. I was beautiful too. 

My story starts with the birth of a beautiful child, whose father built a temple ashore the land where my mother had borne me. It was the darkest night she had ever seen, and the stars shone bright. My mother cried as I came out, small and pink and weeping. I was so small I fit in her arms with ease. She was frightened I would die of cold. She bundled me up and ran to the sea. 

You think it’s strange. That is alright. Forgive me. I will explain.

My mother ran with me to the sea, for my father was giving chase. She reached the waters before he had a chance to grab her. That is as well. For if he did, he would have pulled my mother’s skin away. 

Yes, my father loved my mother. All men love us. They cannot help it. It is their sin.

He found her upon the beach and took her to his hut and made her his wife. She bore him sons, I don’t know how many for I never asked, and then me. My father’s world came crashing down upon him. My mother wept with joy. When I came she knew Mother Sea would welcome her back. She bore me upon the shore so that Mother would bear witness. 

When mother’s feet touched the water, she had already been gone. I do not know if my father followed. I think he must have not. Mother Sea does not welcome his kind. You cannot breathe when Mother holds you. That is very pitiful. 

Forgive me. Your tongue is difficult. 

There are no men among us. It is only us and Mother. She loves us deeply and we love her. And the men that Mother hates also love us. It is a difficult love. No, I do not know if we love the men too. We must love them. We swim every year to the shore to take our skin off and be like them - the human women that they love. And they love us too. Because we are more beautiful than their women.

Forgive me. 

They love us, and they desire us. They take our skins and bring us to their sheds and take us in their beds. We bear them sons and mend their clothes and curse the land we live on and love them dearly. We cannot help but love them. No, it is not love. It is love. Your tongue is very difficult. 

We love them and we love them. We must, for Mother no longer loves us when we love the men. She does not recognize us anymore. She cannot hold us when she doesn’t know who we are. She is frightened of us then. So we love the men because we cannot love Mother anymore. We miss Mother. But she doesn’t miss us. 

It is very pitiful. 

When we are human we cannot love Mother, so we wait for daughters to be born so she will love us again. No, only daughters. Never sons. Mother does not love our sons. They cannot see or hear Mother. But daughters - us - we can. I heard Mother before I had been born. She sang to me of the sea foam, and the waves and of my mother’s skin and where my father hid it. I told my mother this. She dug the chest buried underneath the juniper tree with her bare hands as I sang to her. She was crying because she heard Mother’s voice in mine.

I do not know what happened to my father. I have never returned to that shore. I have never met my brothers. I do not wish to. Mother does not either. She told me to be careful. She held me to her breast as we watched the angelfish, and told me to never go to the land of men and take off my skin. She told me to keep away. 

But it was a waste. She knew this. We must go to the shore every year. We must take off our skin. 

My mother did so the next year as well. I never saw her again. She must have been found by another man. That is as well. I would soon follow in her footsteps. 

My story starts with the birth of a fair child, beloved by all, and especially by the young poet who wished to marry her. He was a handsome man, but he was poor. This is unfortunate in your land. Forgive me. 

Why did he love the princess? Because she was beautiful. All beautiful women are loved. 

Yes, all beautiful things must be loved.

Why?

Because they are beautiful. That is all.

The poet loved this princess because she was beautiful, but she did not love him because he was poor. It is a pitiful thing. 

Yes, I loved the poet too. Because he was beautiful. No, I did not love him. I loved him. Your tongue is very difficult. 

I wish you could understand. 

He did not understand either. Though he was a poet. It was odd. He told me he could not hear me sing when I spoke, and did not hear me speak when I sang. But Mother hears us. She hears me and my sisters as we sing-speak and speak-sing to her. Only Mother can hear us. 

But still I loved him.

Yes. No, I did not love him. Please understand. 

I sang to him under the night sky and he kissed my lips. I spoke to him about love and he kissed my cheeks. He loved me on the shore until dawn. No, it was love, not love. Forgive me. 

When Mother released the sun from her hold, he kissed my eyelids. He had beautiful lips. I loved them dearly. He was a beautiful man. All beautiful things must be loved. 

He did not take me for his wife. He loved the princess.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Forgive me,’ he said.

I am repeating myself. Please understand.    

‘You are taking my skin,’ I told him. ‘You are taking my skin. What will I do without my skin? Mother won’t take me back without my skin.’

‘Forgive me.’

He spoke so sweetly. Do you understand? All beautiful things must be loved.

‘The princess of this land - I love her dearly. I wish to marry her. But I am poor. I am not worthy. I wish to be worthy. The princess - she wishes for a coat more beautiful than the sunrise. I have searched this land - from the mountain to the sea, from the fields to the hills, but I have not found a coat more beautiful than yours.’

‘I cannot give you my skin,’ I told him. ‘You must take me as your wife. I cannot give you my skin for another. I must have my skin to return to Mother.’

‘Forgive me,’ he said. He kissed my lips, my cheeks, my eyelids - and then he was gone. He took my skin to the princess. She loved it dearly. She loved him dearly. They were to be married within the year. She wore my skin as her veil. It was a beautiful veil. It was a beautiful wedding.

All beautiful things must be loved.

I gave chase. Yes, I did. I followed after him - my husband. 

I called to him. But he did not stop.

I wept for him. But his heart did not yield. 

I wept for Mother. But she could not hear me. 

I wept for our Master. He said I was a fool to trust the word of man. He thundered. He roared. He drove me away with arrows made of fire and spiteful words. He did not care. He did not listen.

Please listen. 

I wish to tell you my story.

There was once a child born upon the land where a temple was built with just three gold coins. This child was so beautiful that when she spoke, the birds would listen to hear her song. When she danced, the ground would soften underneath her feet so no harm would come upon her. When she smiled, the sun bowed so it would not deter from her beauty.

He loved her. She scorned him. He was poor. It is a pitiful thing.

I loved him. He loved her. I loved him and loved him. 

Your tongue - forgive me.

She came to me upon the shore. 

All beautiful things must be loved.

My husband - he left me upon the shore. He took my skin and left. He loved the princess. I loved him.

I wanted to return to Mother. But Mother did not love me anymore. She did not hold me. She could not hold me. I wept. Mother’s arms - they seemed to wrap around my throat. I could not breathe.

She came to me upon the shore. My Lady.

My sisters - they tore away their skin. A leg, an arm, a breast, an ear - they had sewn it all together. They gave the coat to me. They said Mother would hold me now.

She did not. She could not.

I loved Mother. I loved and loved and loved and loved and loved and loved and loved Her. 

She could not love me. He did not love me. She did not love him.

They were to be married within the year.

It was a beautiful wedding. 

It was a beautiful veil.

‘My skin,’ I said. ‘My skin, my skin, my skin - You must take me as your wife.’

‘I do not love you.’

‘You must. Mother does not love me anymore. You must.’

His roots went deep. They touched her mother’s grave. They touched my mother’s grave. 

He loved her. She loved him. No, not love. Love. 

Please understand. 

All men love us. It is their sin. We must love them too, when Mother no longer loves us. 

Please understand.

‘My child, my rose,’ she spoke. Her eyes were so sweet. I wept. She kissed my eyelids. She kissed my tears. All beautiful things must be loved.

I loved him. I let him bloom. I gave him light. I gave him water. I fetched it every day from the well and watched him grow. My husband.

It was a beautiful wedding.

‘My child, my rose, my sweetest heart.’

She held me. Mother could not hold me. She held me and kissed me and loved me. 

Your tongue is very difficult.

‘I do not love you,’ my husband lied. ‘I cannot love you. I do not want to love you. Please understand.’

All men love us. It is their sin. 

It was a beautiful veil. 

Forgive me.

I am repeating myself.

Forgive me.

Forgive me.

Forgive me.

They take us from the shore into their huts and into their beds. We bear them children and mend their clothes and curse the land we live on and love them dearly. And wait for daughters to be born.

Every year he gave me blossoms. I crushed them underneath my feet. He fed on my blood. 

I loved him. And I loved her. And I loved Mother. And I loved her.

‘My child,’ she kissed me. ‘My rose,’ she kissed me. ‘My sweetest heart,’ she kissed me.

I sheath myself in wicked thorns and sing of my Lady’s love. 

Please listen. Please understand.   

My mother’s grave. Her mother’s grave.

He took her into his hut and into his bed. He took her into the garden and stripped her of her skin. He hid it underneath the juniper tree where mother heard me sing.

All men must love us. It is their sin.

She was a beautiful child. He was a dutiful king. He paid three gold pieces for the temple. It was made of stone and wood and the bed inside it was warm.

They take us from the shore and into their beds.

I loved him. He died in spring. I burned him. I kissed the ashes.

Mother would not listen. 

Mother could not understand.

It was a beautiful veil.

Forgive me.

Your tongue is very difficult. 

I wish to tell you my story.

Please listen.

Notes

“Translating this introductory part of the grimoire has proven to be by far the easiest part of my endeavour, as there has not been much to translate at all. It seems that unlike her sisters, the Witch of the Rose wrote in the common tongue of that time, which fortunately for me is not very different from our current one. Line tells me this might be because the language of the selkie has no written form. In fact, its complexity is so great, no written form could properly capture its beauty.

It is an interesting notion to me, a student with meagre interest in languages, at the very least before I become employed in this project. There is no proper way to prove this, however, as according to what Line tells me, she can barely remember even the few things she picked up from her grandmother. It is so with every selkie that lives on land for too long - slowly they forget the tongue of Mother Sea (an ancient pagan deity, I believe) and learn the tongue of their husbands. Line herself seems to remember mostly old songs that she teaches to little Safia too so she can remember her ancestors even a little. She tells me they are the last ones. 

Line’s great-great-grandmother was taken from the sea by her husband as well - a practice which was considered normal back in the day - and as she never managed to have any daughters was forced to live the rest of her life on this foreign land. She tells me this story with a sort of melancholic detachment as she brushes her daughter’s long, golden hair. This is standard for their species it seems - all daughters have golden hair and golden eyes which makes them look terrible and inviting to the men that come across them.

Line also tells me that the selkie language has over 34 words to express ‘love’. She says that the witch must have been trying to capture them all as she wrote down her confession, but she can only remember a few of the ones her grandmother taught her. Thus, there is ‘love gleaned from above the sea foam’, ‘love that is realized by the stroke of midnight’, ‘love which blooms only at the wake of dawn’, ‘love which burns one as they feel it’ which is different from ‘love that scorches one as they let go of it’. She does not know the word for the love felt for one’s husband, but she tells me that the love for one’s daughter is translated as ‘love for a budding flower which blooms on the bottom of the ocean’.    

She tells me all this with a mournful look - the expression of a woman who knows that when she passes there will be a little less of her legacy left. The grimoire that I show her has a shell accessory on the cover that when opened produces the most beautiful melody in the world. When I showed Line this she started weeping and once she calmed down she explained that it was the same song that her grandmother used to sing when she was little. I believe it must be an old folk song, though she cannot confirm it for me, since she admits that there are barely any words that she recognizes. Though she can tell with some certainty that it is a song of forgiveness - that the witch is begging her mother to welcome her back to the sea. Little Safia listened to the song as well, but I could tell that beyond the soothing melody nothing stuck out to her at all. It broke Line’s heart.

I stayed there for almost two months learning what I could about the selkie. It did Line good too since she felt that even if she were to die, little Safia and her children would not be robbed of her heritage. I was touched by this sentiment - so much that I swore that once I have finished my business collecting and translating the grimoires I would make sure to amass in one volume the entirety of Line’s teachings during the time they graciously let me stay there.”

-  Of Grimoires and Pledges: A Study of Eight Texts that Shaped Our Understanding of Modern Magic

“It has now been more than ten years since I have made that promise, which I have managed to keep after all. If you were to look in any library right now, dear reader, you might spy tucked away in one of the shelves a little book of no more than 100 pages, more than half filled with illustrations and drawings, while the other half is full of songs and poems and little phrases that Line shared with me as we sat huddled around the fire at night. I’ve been told it is a commercial failure - that nobody but the most dedicated anthropologists give it more than a glance. But it does not matter to me. It took four years for the 100 copies to sell. I have recently ordered 100 more. 

To others these books might be nothing more than curiosities, oddities, a change of reading material - but it is not so. Not in the slightest. These are the words and experiences of a woman whose ancestry has been erased almost entirely and plunged into obscurity. By no means can I simply let her life or history be disregarded in such a manner. Especially now since I am the only one left fighting. 

It was two years after I departed from Line’s house that I received a letter from the young lord who oversaw the village she lived in. I was in the midst of a lesson with Old Woman Louisa when I was informed that due to a tragic accident little Safia lost her life at sea, followed three months later by her mother who died of grief. I was left numb by the news - barely registering it at all and inconsolable for weeks after. I had to leave Louisa’s abode as my mourning made the beasts under her care uneasy, and with no goal in mind simply proceeded forward to the Isle of Lamentation. A fitting spot to vent my grief.

I have had the good mind to send the young lord a letter asking him to keep the hut in which they lived in good condition, and returned there two years after my travels ended. It is now a museum, my dear reader, dedicated to Line, Safia and all the women who suffered at the hands of their destiny by being taken from their home to live on these strange lands. The last that will even suffer this destiny, for Line and Safia’s deaths did not mark merely the loss of two great souls and hearts from the world, but also the loss of an entire species. There are no more selkie that roam the ocean, and if there are any on land they must have long forgotten they even were. 

To them I wish to dedicate this small volume that I have compiled, relying on the memory of the most wonderful woman I have ever met in my life, and the innocence of the sweetest little girl that I have had the good fortune of knowing.  

May their souls rest among the stars, free of pain and suffering, curled in Mother Sea’s bosom.”

- Songs of Mother Sea: A Short Guide to the History of Selkie Culture Through Poems and Music

[sims4museumchallenge]

The Sims 4 Museum Challenge

INTRODUCTION

This challenge is for those of us that have the sick need to complete EVERY achievement in EVERY game we play. In this challenge, gameplay is centered around completing every collection in the game, while building and filling out a “Museum” to showcase both the collections and the “Curator” family. Think of it as a combination cultural, natural history, and science museum plus a family mausoleum for the Curators. 

In short, the goal of the challenge is to complete every collection and build a Museum worthy of your family’s legacy. It can be completed by one sim, or by a family of Curators. The rules below are primarily for the family-style gameplay, but can be easily adapted for one sim.

CHALLENGE RULES

Basic Rules

1. No money cheats. You have to build the museum using money earned during gameplay.

2. Keep cheating in general to a minimum. If something is breaking or getting stuck, sure. If you just want your Sim to be able to fish longer without a toilet break, no.

3. Most mods are OK. Just so long as they don’t affect the rate at which collectibles spawn, give you more options to buy collectibles, etc.

4. If you can naturally buy collectibles (such as on the computer), you may. Sometimes collectors buy things instead of discovering them!

5. The museum lot can be your home lot, a retail shop owned by the Curators, or any lot that you can design and drag items to. Mods/cheats are permissible to let you set this up. 

6. You can either play this challenge with a family of Curators or a single long-lived Curator Sim.

7. Once the Museum has been established, you may not move it. This will hopefully prevent any losses to the collection.

8. Feel free to adjust anything to better suit your gameplay. The main thing is not to decrease the natural difficulty of this challenge, and to have fun.

Family Rules

1. Use normal lifespan or similar. 

2. Keep aging and story progression on at all times. 

3. You may use UI Cheats to help with things like daycare not taking care of toddlers, etc.

4. The Curator (heir) may be chosen each generation - choose any method you like. This is the heir for the purposes of the Legacy Hall.

5. Each Curator must complete the Curator aspiration before they start any other adult aspiration. Otherwise, they may complete as many aspirations or parts of aspirations as they want. 

Optional Rules

1. Random traits.

2. Family trait - each Curator must have a shared trait - such a geek, which promotes collecting.

3. Each Curator must complete 1 unique aspiration and career, in addition to the required Curator aspiration (which still must be completed before any other adult aspiration can be started).

4. Combine this challenge with any number of other challenges, such as Legacy, Immortal Dynasty, or Super Sim. Just keep in mind that to avoid an extremely long playtime, the main focus should be the collection, not the family.

STARTING THE CHALLENGE

1. Start with one young adult sim, with no preloaded reward traits or skills.

2. Choose whether your Museum will be your home lot or a retail lot owned by your Curator. There are advantages to both. Regardless, lots must be purchased by money earned through normal gameplay.

3. The museum lot can be any size, but I recommend 64x64.

3. Your First Curator must have the Curator trait. This sim is responsible for filling out and building the museum until they either finish it or pass down the Curator role to their child.

MUSEUM SECTIONS

Below is a short description of each area of the Museum. See the checklist document (link) for a detailed list of what should be included in each section.

Entrance and Ballroom

1. The entrance is an entrance. Use your imagination. It needs to have a portrait of the current Curator and the Donor Wall. More on that later.

2. The ballroom is where Museum Balls take place. It includes displays of social event rewards.

Gift Shop

If your Museum is a retail shop, this area can be functional. This is meant for miscellaneous/kitschy collections such as Snowglobes.

Optional: Include the retail and restaurant perk reward items.

Legacy Mausoleum

This section contains exhibits for each Curator, and smaller records of each family member. Create exhibits for each of your Curators including their portrait, urn, and any items from their life you would like to include. 

Optional: Create exhibits for each completed career path including the reward items. 

Natural History Section

This area is for natural collections, such as fish and fossils.

Hall of Secrets

This section contains collections that should be kept secret for the good of society. Make sure only trusted sims can access this area! Includes the Vampire Lore books and aliens.

Science Exhibition

This area is for science and technology. Exhibits that allow guest interaction are encouraged. For example, include the microscope prints and a microscope.

Hall of Cultures

Ancient Omiscan artifacts, etc.

(Optional) Curator’s Library

Create a library containing every book you can get your hands on. This can include a special exhibit of books written by Curators. 

Workshop

This are is for your Curators to perform their duties. Any useful skill items can be kept here. If the Museum isn’t your home lot, the workshop can also include a small area for necessities.

Art Exhibit

If desired, this section can contain paintings and other items made by your sims. Otherwise, things like the city posters and experimental food prints can be found here.

CREATING EXHIBITS

Each collection should have its own “Exhibit” that keeps the items together and nicely arranged. Flesh out the displays with purchasable cultural objects such as rugs and paintings.

RUNNING THE MUSEUM

Museum Docents

Create a club for the Docents of the Museum - sims connected to the family of the Curator by blood or friendship who visit the museum lot to help run the place. Club activities such as cleaning, reading books, researching, or talking to visitors would be a good fit.

Museum Sponsors

Once the Museum has at least one complete collection, you may open the museum to the public and accept monetary donations through Sponsor Balls. Invite the richest sims in town to an event at the Museum and earn money. You can earn more money if more sims attend and if you achieve higher ratings for your events. You can decide how often you host Balls, but the usual should be once per Sim year.

For each rating level, you earn money.

1. No medal/unsuccessful event: no money earned.

2. Bronze: 200 Simoleons per guest.

3. Silver: 500 Simoleons per guest.

4. Gold: 1000 Simoleons per guest.

Events such as the Black and White Party or Charity Fundraiser are ideal for this.

Each donor Sim gets a picture on the Donor Wall of the Museum, kept in the Ballroom. Come up with a system for rewarding regular donors - larger pictures, colored frames, etc. Make sure to note the amount each sponsor has donated in the name of the picture!

COMPLETE THE CHALLENGE

The Museum Challenge is complete when every collectible has been found and displayed, every unlockable social event reward is displayed, and the museum building is completed to your satisfaction. Optional additions such as the Curator’s Library and career exhibits are up to you.

[prachidhama-blog]

Art

An activity to  produce or create something on paper with the help of imagination of human mind like painting , making designs and styles with colours and different shades of pencil. In other words , artwork is performed by an artist which show's their imagination and conceptual ideas or technical skill and appreciated by other human being for their creativity. Art is a gift from God and some kind of a  freedom where you can create a different pieces or thing on your own imagination with a great idea. Importance of art - Art enhance your thinking style with some different ideas. Arts is important in the development of children and arts also help children in their emotional and social development because children learn about the environment through art and to the world. Art also influence the society through changing opinion and experience of people which they put it on a paper or wall to express something. Painting , literature , sculpture , music and other art help the society members to create a environment of natural nature and cool one. Basically art help in the formation of a society in a positive form. Art is a sense of communication it allows people From different cultures to communicate with each other  and it creates a healthy environment between different people by this they can exchange their ideas and  create more opportunities to improve themselves. Art provide a basic  taste to the society because everything is uncertain in a society which no on can predict and taste and preferences is changeable according to the nature of the fashion. Research have been proof that the relationship between art and human brain made a best combo and it is found that visual art had positive effects on personal lives of nursing home bound elders. Art represent the memory of a kid If children have practice creatively, it will come naturally to them now and in their future career. Art help in forming the confidence of a kid if a children perform on a stage and then  singing gives kids a chance to step outside their comfort zone and built up their career or they will grow in future on their own. Especially for young kids, drawing, painting, and sculpting in art class help develop visual specialised skill. Children need to know more about the world than just what they can learn through text and numbers. Art educate  students how to make choices and provide information about visual arts and modern form of arts. Categories of art- literature (including poetry, drama, story, and so on), the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), the graphic arts(painting, drawing, design, and other forms expressed on flat surfaces), the plasticarts (sculpture, modeling), the decorativearts. Art is essential for everyone - The Arts are an important cultural tool for expressing concerns and love for the world focused on altering our physical relationship with the natural world, art is orientated more toward a philosophical and emotional understanding of that relationship. * Features of art - 1. imagination of human mind = Art is a gift from God and some kind of a freedom where you can create a different pieces and thing on your own imagination with a great idea. 2. Enhancement of thinking style = Arts help in the method of thinking and people's creative knowledge. 3.development of children = Arts is important in the development of children and arts also help in emotional and social development. 4. Improvement in communication = It allows people from different cultures  to communicate with each other. 5. Society = Arts also influence the society through changing opinion and experience of people which they put it on a wall to express something creative. 6. Research = Research have been proof that the relationship between art and human brain made a best combo And it is found that visual art have positive effect personal lives of nursing home bound elders. 7.creativity = Art represent the memory of a kid ,if children have participate creatively it will come naturally to them now and in their future career. 8. Art educate students = Especially for young kids drawing, painting and sculpture in art class help in develop visual specialised skill. 9. categories of art = Literature (including poetry, drama, story, and so on), the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), the graphic arts(painting, drawing, design, and other forms expressed on flat surfaces), the plasticarts (sculpture, modeling), the decorativearts. 10.art is essential for everyone = Most art I believe readily fits into the category of reflecting the culture of its time. As was stated, this is what makes art history so interesting. ... Culture is a reference point to many artists creating work; art trends or current social issues often drive anartist to create their work.                                         ART IS EVERY WHERE           Every human being is unique in there own way and different. Every person is involve in art whether the art is making food, dancing or working , playing, finding new places to visit or traveling. Every person is a artist in there life even when you make a circle or a flower it includes in art. In a article a woman said that she earns money by working on a creative art webs in her home with her husband so yeah you can earn money from your work and expend your passion without anyones help you can become financially independent . Every women in the world is creative in a different way included men  also but some womens did not know how to earn money from art. In historical period  women and men make creative sculpture and sold it and now this thing is work on a digital way . In a Instagram page you can saw different different art work. Just like ln a order to bloom? You must grow. So, you can share your work on social media too where you can earn money through Instagram post of art or any other platforms. There is a lot of platform where you can show your work to society or any general public through internet.Hence, digital world is a essential element in today's world. # Abstract art Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form colour and line to create a composition which my exists in the degree of independent visual art in the world. Basically abstract art  is a western art which is an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. In other words, abstract art is non- figurative art, non- objective art and non-representational art all are related terms in the field of art. Most of the art in the early period are make on the rock and explain through signs ,poetry , textiles, and inscriptions. It is at this level of abstract art  that helps in the communication of people.one can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy and Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it. # Music As visual art becomes more abstract it develops some characteristics of music. It includes the abstract element of sound and division of time. There was a musician who is inspired by the possibility of marks associative colour responding in the soul. It is basically our senses respond to various stimuli but the senses are connected at a deeper level. Music is an art and culture activity is sound organised in time. John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound." Music includes songs, tunes,symphonies, harmony of the spheres, rythm, and many more. It is music to my ears pointed out that music is a pleasent and a cure. Sometime we listen to music to heal our soul. Music can make a person happy or sad depends on the song. Music is related to weather their mood is changed according to weather. Some people listen music at the time of night some in  the morning infect you can listen at your own washroom.you can listen the music and play at anytime and any where even at the time of jogging and in the metro.                                                ART IS LAW Art law is a unique specialty area of the law. lntellectual property interests in art include protecting copyrights to various works and determining whether a piece was created independently or as a work for hire. Art law is a unique specialty area of the law. After all, art occupies many roles in our culture and serves many functions for businesses, governments, museums, families, and artists. Art can be a form of expression, it can be a decoration, it can be a currency, and it can serve as the basis for many careers. Common issues for art law include how works of art should be valued, how to protect intellectual property rights in art, free speech issues, authenticating and dealing with stolen artworks, and a variety of business issues related to the art industry. Art valuation is particularly important for determining tax consequences of dealing in art and for testamentary purposes. It also has relevance to insurance claims disputes, and when using the art pieces for collateral when obtaining a loan. And, of course, when one chooses to donate all or a portion of their art collection to a museum or other nonprofit organization, the value of the art can have important consequences to both the donor and the donee for taxes, insurance, and in retaining not-for-profit status. Intellectual property interests in art include protecting copyrights to various works and determining whether a piece was created independently or as a work for hire. A common question is whether a work has been illegally copied or not. Another issue is whether an artwork can be moved from its original installation or not. Free speech issues in art often relate to whether something is art or obscenity. Occasionally, issues about free speech may also relate to whether something is art or a violation of some other law. For example, is "tagging" or spray painted graffiti, a form of protected artistic expression or a crime? The resources below will provide you with additional information on art law, and you can find an attorney in your area who focuses on art law under the "Law Firms" tab, above-mentioned.               Introduction                       Art law is the body of law which includes rules and regulations and discipline that help in the protection of copy right and facilities the creation basically the use of making the art. Those include in the practice of law that have a variety of disciplines, intellectual property ,law of contract , constitution law, tort , tax, commercial and international law to protect the interests of their clients. Do you know your right? *Is body paint considered clothing? *Law regarding graffiti and art? #ARTICLE ABOUT ART AND CULTURE LAW PROPERTY- 1. copyright of art whether it is related to tattoo or any other artistic thing. When a person form a copy right of its work then other person should not  have the right to use that work it is illegal by law or consideration of lawful things .The  establishment that infrings upon these right can suffer a lawsuit before a judge that will determine if the rights of the copyright owner  and remain to be protected. 2.copyright protection- when a person create new art and or reinvent the existing art and give it a copyright then it is protected by the law and can distribute the work without interference with social media like Facebook ,WhatsApp, twitter , Instagram, messenger etc. Hence copying is there for the protection of the people and if a unknown or know person use this without the permission of the owner then the owner can sue  the other person  or against that person.the artist can pursue a lawsuit if the tattoo parlor does not cease using the design. 3.The copyright art- the person that aquires a copyright provides the basic in law that he or she has the right to display or perform the  work without any interference . The protection of the work is for the artist for their creativity and there work. These extend are both for public and for private. 4.The concept of theft- The artist that make a art work have the copyright of its work that protect the item. When a tattoo artist create a tattoo of a persons body that on the persons leg ,arm ,back it may not have the same copyright protections as if the artist create it alone. Basically this thing need consultation of lawyer and how this work is stolen and why all this happened.

[grahamstoney]

Musique Concrète and Other Experimental And Electronic Music

New Post has been published on https://grahamstoney.com/music/musique-concrete-and-other-experimental-and-electronic-music

Musique Concrète and Other Experimental And Electronic Music

In the subject Creative Music Technology at university last semester, I was asked to listen to a collection of experimental and electronic music to stimulate my creative imagination, and to write what I liked and didn't like about it. Here's my rather cynical take on the genre.

Musique Concrète

Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry – Symphonie pour un Homme Seul

This piece reminded me of Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica; only less musical. I’m a Homme Seul (single man) and my life doesn’t sound anything like this. In his book La musique concrète, Schaeffer described the work as “an opera for blind people…”. Haven’t they suffered enough?

Edgard Varèse – Poème Électronique

The audio equivalent of Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou.

Does to my ears what the asbestos coating on the walls of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair for which it was commissioned, would do to my lungs.

György Ligeti – Artikulation

George Lucas must owe Ligeti millions in royalties for R2D2’s sound effects. Initially I thought I was joking when I first wrote that, but I’ve since discovered that he was actually trying to create a sort of phonetic speech in electronic music, which pretty much fits R2D2’s dialogue. Plus, the title is German for “articulation”. That should have been a giveaway.

I thought this piece might make more sense to me if I played it backwards, so I dropped it into Logic Pro X and reversed it. I couldn’t tell the difference. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I listened to it in the original quadraphonic. I’ll just end noting that Ligeti abandoned electronic music after composing this piece.

Iannis Xenakis – Concret PH

2 minutes and 44 seconds of breaking glass to my ears. I think I’d rather listen to Kraftwerk.

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Kontakte

It’s long. It’s too long. I think this is how Jacob Collier learned to play piano in his mother’s womb; but look at him now. The title is German for “Contacts”, which I think Stockhausen interpreted as “Just hit the things.” Maybe it sounds better in the original quadraphonic.

Stockhausen was evidently a pioneer of the extended dance remix, as the work exists in several versions: “Nr. 12”, “Nr. 12½” and “Nr. 12⅔”

Bernard Parmegiani - Accidents / harmoniques

Parmegiani had studied mime before turning his hand to electro-acoustic composition, and in this piece it really shows. From the album De Natura Sonorum (the nature of sound). I felt like there were Martians in my head listening to this. Surely he’s just playing a joke on us.

Pauline Oliveiros – Bye Bye Butterfly

Bids farewell to the institutionalized oppression of the female sex while also providing inspiration for the sound of the Theramin. Gave my new monitor speakers a good workout; I hope the neighbours enjoyed it too.

Tape Loops

Steve Reich – It’s Gonna Rain

I’ve got this pervasive feeling that it’s going to rain. I’m not sure why. I liked the way the meteorological message panned left and right. More like It’s Gonna Have An Acid Trip.

Halleluiah Part II is over. I’m not sure how I lasted the full 18 minutes.

Terry Riley – Mescalin Mix

Parts of this sounded to me like an industrial version of native Australian bush sounds. I felt like I was on a camping trip in the 23rd century.

Brian Eno – 1/1

From his album Music For Airports/Ambient 1, which apparently coined the term Ambient Music. Brian Eno has a lot to answer for. However, this track put me in a relaxing state, ready to fall asleep on the plane; so I liked it.

Sampling

Luc Ferrari – Ronda, Spain, June 2001

After being jolted awake by the sound of a loud sliding door opening to greet the day, I was drawn into this by the sweet sound of a French woman’s voice. I imagined she was Ferrari’s lover, speaking to him in bed after awakening on a warm Spanish summer Sunday morning. I wanted to know what she was saying, but my French isn’t good enough. In my mind’s eye, they head to a busy market together to buy some croissants for breakfast, where we hear a man’s voice repeating “numero quatro”, which I assumed is Spanish for “number 4”. As the voices fade, the sound becomes more musical and we return to the soft sound of Ronda speaking to her beloved back in their villa together. I quite liked it.

My interpretation, however, is not what the composer had in mind. According to him, the point of Les Anecdotiques (The Anecdotals) is to dispense with the story altogether. My busy market was, in fact, the sound of Spanish tourists in a museum. While he describes the woman’s words as “Spontaneous and intimate”, in this context they are simply words in a foreign language with no narrative purpose. Just another one of Pierre Schaeffer and Michel Chion’s sound objects, if you will. My narrative interpretation of what was intended as an explicitly anecdotal work is testament to the human brain’s tendency to make meaning out of nothing. It turns out Rhonda is a village in Spain, not a woman.

Still, I enjoyed my little fantasy, thank you Luc.

John Oswald – Manifold

Wow, this was short. I didn’t even have time to eat breakfast while listening to it. It was only about as long as the Spotify ads, but certainly more fun. I recognised a couple of songs, like U2’s With or Without You and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To You. Artists who use samples liberally often sample obscure works, sometimes affording them attention they would otherwise have missed; but in this work Oswald went mainstream. It sounded to me like the soundtrack to a sample-abusing hip-hop artist from the 1990’s being beaten up in a boxing ring by all the artists who reckoned he’d ripped off their work.

Tod Dockstader - Water Music: Part III

I quite liked this piece. The cuteness of the sounds and the stereo effects bouncing between the left and right channels really drew me in. I’ve recently got myself some decent monitor speakers for my home studio and this piece really worked on them. Pretty amazing for something released in 1963.

Dockstader started out in the 1940’s, prior to the invention of magnetic tape, editing his steel wire recordings with a lit cigarette. That makes me realise how much I take the piece-of-crap Logic Pro X File Editor for granted. Listening to this, I found myself wanting to know what was going to happen next, like I was watching a soap opera on TV; only with no actual story.

Synthesis

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Studie I

I found this quite disorienting to listen to. I guess it was revolutionary in 1953 but I reckon now you could whip it up in Ableton in about 5 minutes using the Random MIDI Effect and some automation.

Eliane Radigue – Jetsun Mila (Pt.1) / Birth and Youth (Excerpt)

I liked how the pulsing ambient drone sound in this grew over time; it drew me in and had me wondering what was going to happen next. Unfortunately the answer was: not much. Gradually a rhythmic element with some high pulsing tones which grew over time came in. It was a bit like listening to a very slow EDM dance track from underwater in a diesel-powered submarine going at full throttle for 12 minutes.

Laurie Spiegel – Appalachian Grove: I

I liked the pulsing stereo effects in this piece and the way the tonal characteristics of the sound varied while the pitch changed. It’s much more melodic than the other tracks we’ve listened to and that made it more enjoyable to my ears. It got a bit harsh in the middle though. This piece puts the musique in musique concrète.

Morton Subotnick – Silver Apples of the Moon – Part A

Perhaps the sound designer for Star Wars had this in mind when creating the sound effects for R2D2. I kind of lost the flow of the conversation without the witty English-accented retorts from C3PO though. Morton Sobotnick is described as The Mad Scientist in one interview, and I think if I listen to this too often I’ll end up fitting one of the DSM-5 diagnostic categories I’m learning about over in PSYC1002.

Suzanne Ciani – Concert at Phil Niblock’s Loft

This piece had some funky sounds that I liked. The start reminded me a bit of Kraftwerk but without the rhythm and melody; although it did get more melodic later. I’d probably give it a Distinction for its use of technology given it was made in 1975, but only a Credit for musicality.

Barry Schraeder – Lost Atlantis: Introduction

At first, I thought this sounded a lot like a modern ad for KFC; then I realised I was hearing a Spotify ad.

I liked the ambient sounds in this piece and the way it surged in and out with its “mysterious tone colors”. It slowly builds to a crescendo until we get the drop that EDM lovers crave, and then built more quickly to the ultimate drop at the end. I kept wondering what was going to happen next; I’d still rather listen to Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp or Queen though.

Contemporary Examples

Amon Tobin – Foley Room

DJ & producer. Retain percussive quality through sounds. Horsefish & Esther’s. Create beauty and delicate textures from sounds. Pitched percussive material. Fast loops. New textures. Funky beats. Check out the Foley Room Documentary.

Aphex Twin - 1ST 44

Acid house DJ in rave scene. Intelligent Dance Music. More complex sampling, polyrhythms, rhythmic patterns. From Collapsed album. Polyrhythms sounded funky. Lots of variation.

Holly Herndon – Chorus

Intersection of humanity and technology. Recorded web browsing. Stereo ping-pong effects. Here’s a talk she gave about her creative process.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Riparian

This was my favourite out of these three, largely because it sounds the most musical to my ears. I liked the pulsing beat in this track. I can hear a bass line for instance, melodies played on the synth and lyrics, although I can’t tell what they are saying. I also like the way the soundscape swirls around when listened to with headphones. It feels ambient, immersive and musical all at the same time. I get the sense that she’s using the electronics at her disposal in service of the music rather than the other way around. There’s even a great video about how she uses modular synthesis.

Graham Stoney - Foster le Concrète

"How hard can it be?", I asked myself. And since I had an assignment to do, I wrote my own musique concrète track based on the drum rhythm from one of my favourite songs, Coming of Age by Foster The People. I even made a breakdown video showing how I did it; because that's what the assignment required.

Conclusion

I didn’t take too easily to some of the more experimental musique concrète pieces we studied at the beginning of this semester. The weekly listening tasks felt harsh to my untrained ears and I would think mean things like:

“Didn’t the Geneva Convention ban cruel and unusual punishment?”

Perhaps these tracks will never be my preferred go-to pieces for chilling out on a Friday night, but when I look back at some of my cynicism-laced early comments in these discussion threads, I cringe. I just didn’t appreciate the historical significance of these pieces and how they might have influenced later electronic music that I do enjoy, like Kraftwerk say.

Then in Angharad Davis’s Music Colloquium Series talk on George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, when she played a snippet of the work I heard sounds reminiscent of musique concrète. Sure enough, they were roughly contemporaneous, and Antheil had been living in Paris at the time musique concrète was just getting started. You never know when something you study in one arena will pop up elsewhere.

Another thing I’ve learned in this subject is about taking creative risks and learning to follow my gut instincts without worrying whether a concept will work, or other people will like it. This has been an opportunity for me to explore that. My Formative Skills Assignment piece Foster le Concrète was in part a reaction to my frustration at the lack of discernible rhythm in some of the early pieces we studied. However, I really didn’t know whether the concept was going to work, and that was a little anxiety-inducing; especially given that I was doing it for an assignment which would be graded. I was quite touched to hear other students say they liked the end result, and I feel more confident about following my gut instincts in future and seeing what I end up.

Finally, I’ve been really inspired by the creativity of the other students in this subject. It’s been a weird experience studying online this year without ever meeting them in person, but I’ve really enjoyed hearing the creative works everyone came up with. They’re all so distinctive and amazingly different, it’s incredible; yet they were all products of the same brief. I can’t wait to hear everyone's works on the radio, TV, movies, video games, Spotify, or whatever audio technology is around when we all graduate: live streaming direct to our neurons perhaps?

[korbynwatt237331]

Week 5

1. Using the past exhibitions from Te Papa ( on the Te Papa website and link in the talk uploaded below )  identify an exhibition that has displayed a collection that reflects the identities of a specific social/ cultural group, medium, or social issue. Identify the key drivers behind the collection, curation and exhibition strategies.

Things Seen and Heard - 2018

https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/past-exhibitions/2018-past-exhibitions/things-seen-and-heard

“Each of us inhabit our own version of the world, shaped by what we see and what we imagine. This is especially true of distant places, even ones we’ve visited before.”

“These objects, which connect Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand, reflect this dynamic flow of ideas. None is the product of a single culture. Instead, each has been shaped by influences that span the globe, representing over a century of connected and curious artists and collectors.”

I was not fortunate enough to view this exhibition in person but I can see its value that it had. “None is the product of a single culture. Instead, each has been shaped by influences that span the globe, representing over a century of connected and curious artists and collectors.” The simple design of the exhibitions flow looks to be an important aspect of the big idea that this exhibition is showcasing, the idea that Asias connection with New Zealand is a special one, the inclusion of multiple cultures and New Zealand's acceptation of so. 

Woman viewing a silhouette

This uchiwa-e ‘fan-shaped composition’ by Utagawa Sadahide (1807–73), is one of several that he designed featuring yūjo (courtesans) peering at the profiles of brothel quarter patrons silhouetted on shōji screen doors. The scene is set early in a relationship, in the moments before their introduction at a teahouse function. To the left, carefully-prepared food and a large kettle of sake are laid out for the engagements that will follow. The conceit here appears to be playful: the yūjo is trying to make out the identity of her patron – and the silhouette is certainly distinctive. Whoever he is, etiquette required that her entertainments should be conducted with the greatest professionalism. But there is also a tacit acknowledgement of a double standard in the quarters: historically, while the identities of Yoshiwara women were public knowledge – even feted – their clients had always enjoyed some anonymity, often arriving and leaving under hooded disguises. Sadahide’s observation is acutely perceptive and matter of fact, qualities that served an interest that was to prove even more profitable for the artist: documentation and reportage of the local scene during times of momentous change. In this sense, it is his ground-breaking views of the rapidly changing fabric of international relations at the port of Yokohama that secured the commercial success of his inquisitive mind and analytical, purposeful eye.

Flight, AWMM

This photograph by Haruhiko Sameshima was taken in 1991 at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Sameshima used a two-and-a-quarter square inch camera for the shot, which features one of the bird dioramas at the museum. Rather than photographing the dioramas from the front, Sameshima's image is constructed so that the viewer looks through the frosted glass background of one diorama into another. The result is a slightly strange perspective that seems to free the birds, the opaque glass heightening the sense that the birds might actually fly and move.

Athenes

This black and white photograph was taken by Haruhiko Sameshima in 1992 while the artist was travelling around Europe. Having graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1992, Sameshima went on a compressed version of the traditional New Zealand O E (overseas experience), visiting France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Athenes was taken in a museum in Greece, and it focuses on the shadow cast by a plinth and glass display case, which holds an ancient bronze male figure.

Miniature Chinese garden

Yokohama kaiko kenbun-shi/ Things seen and heard at the Yokohama Open Port

The major Japanese Utagawa school artist Sadahide (1807-73) came to fame with his bijin-ga (images of beautiful women) and diversified into landscapes and warrior prints. However, he remains best known internationally for his depictions of exotic locales and events (e.g. the First Opium War), and he particularly focussed in the late 1850s and early 1860s on the port of Yokohama, which he also mapped in panorama form. Still a sleepy fishing village at the time of Commodore Perry’s mission in 1853-54, it rapidly expanded from 1859 as Japan’s sole open port, with permanent foreign residents as Japan’s key open port.

Sadahide’s inclusion in this publication of both Japanese characters within each pictorial composition and English-language text on separate pages reflects a rapidly growing awareness of the importance of multilingual capacities for informing the changing activities of diplomacy and commerce. The combination certainly enhanced the capacity of volumes like these for informing New World readers of American activities in these exotic lands.

This exhibition bridges the gap between cultures and allows us to understand the impact of the events that have been shown within the items on display. Such as Yokohama kaiko kenbun-shi/ Things seen and heard at the Yokohama Open Port’s expression and use of Japanese characters and English text to reflect the importance of multilingual awareness. Allowing us to bridge the gap between language and understand ones culture without filter.  

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, NZ. 2020. Things Seen And Heard. [online] Available at: <https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/past-exhibitions/2018-past-exhibitions/things-seen-and-heard> [Accessed 8 October 2020].

2. Select an example of a design focused museum ( for example, The Dowse, The Design Museum in London, Cooper Hewitt/ Smithsonian New York, The Danish Design Museum in Copenhagen, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London -- or any other of your choice..

The Printing Museum 

(http://www.theprintingmuseum.org.nz/index.html)

The Printing Museum ( Inc.) began life over 30 years ago when a group of enthusiasts and professional printers began collecting items of historical and industrial interest. This was at a time when the era of letterpress, the method of printing by mechanical impression that Johannes Gutenberg had perfected in the fifteenth century, was coming to an end. Had it not been for their foresight, many of these wonderful machines - some of which are now listed items of historical interest - would have been lost for ever.

Although not a museum with design focused area this museum captures that same aesthetic through the items themselves. The impact that comes from a well designed exhibition in my opinion can come from the artwork or items themselves. 

Although the printing museum is not in a traditional place of historical significance, the items themselves holds the value of which itself. The industrial machines of printing presses hold a value of historic events that allow us to print as we know it today. 

The surroundings throughout this collection symbolises the industrial feel that the items give, almost as if the items are in their natural habitat of printing studios and workshops. This is just one example of how a gallery/museum can effect the viewing experience. As this example gives us a raw value to the story that is on display.

Theprintingmuseum.org.nz. 2020. Home. [online] Available at: <http://www.theprintingmuseum.org.nz/index.html> [Accessed 8 October 2020].

CONTROLLER OF THE UNIVERSE, 2007

Damián Ortega’s Controller of the Universe is a frozen explosion of hand tools hovering in an almost dreamlike state. These saws, planes, and axes suggest alternative ways to look at tools, in the hope that the experience will transform the visitor’s own ideas about what tools are and mean. Tools can destroy as easily as they can help construct. They extend our body’s abilities and come between us and our direct experience of the action. Ortega explores such dualities in Controller of the Universe. The installation appears threatening at its perimeter, but by way of a cruciform path the artist invites the visitor to experience the optimal viewpoint at the center. The placement of the piece in the exhibition—on axis with "live" images of a pulsating Sun that is part of a separate installation—underscores this perceived control of our universe, while the distant ball of fire reminds us so potently that this is far from the truth. We can tame it at times, use it to help us survive and endure and to enhance our lives in many ways, but we will never control it—even with a world of tools at our fingertips.

Damián Ortega’s use of creating a unique experience is very inspiring. Using tools as a an expression of creativity and the potential of which can be created from. 

The design of this exhibition is a very important one, its very satisfying in how the almost explosion looking design of the tools is paired with a more muted room which could be a metaphor of how creativity is from the power of human potential. The mess of tools contrasting with a blank room also expresses the ideas that without the curiosity and creativity life such as the room would be blank. 

I want to propose an exhibition that allows for such a unique experience such as this one. One that will allow people to walk through and experience almost alone in order to have more of an impact on those who view it.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 2020. Controller Of The Universe, 2007. [online] Available at: <https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/35460745/> [Accessed 8 October 2020].

Part Two

Contemporary Museum architecture and design Georgia Lindsay

This is especially true when architecture within a gallery space or museum interrupts the flow of the items on display. Sometimes this could compliment the exhibition but in my eyes this is a distraction. 

To create a true experience is to cut down on the barriers that may interact with our interpretation. I think to experiment with my narrative I design design a space that splits the work into a raw state to a point of no barriers. 

This quote also backs up my statement of using the surroundings as a story making device, yet to help myself in creating a cohesive narrative I want to take it one step further and create a room inside a room that contradicts the surrounding room. A room where if someone were to enter they would be taken back into a raw state of mind to see face to face with the portraiture that will be on display. 

Create a space of contemplation and reflection, once again is a path I need to explore when it comes to creating a space that's sole purpose is to do just that. 

[mst3kproject]

Face of the Screaming Werewolf

So.  That's a title.

Face of the Screaming Werewolf was directed, so to speak, by Jerry Warren of Wild Wild World of Batwoman fame.  It stars much of the cast of Robot vs the Aztec Mummy, because bits of the first film in that series were used in its construction – just as they were in the flashback sequence of Robot vs the Aztec Mummy itself!  The movie also stars Lon Chaney Jr. by virtue of footage stolen from another Mexican horror film called House of Terror. As you might imagine, the resulting Frankenmovie is not particularly coherent viewing.  Are we gonna see that singing Aztec sacrifice scene again?  You bet your butts we are! In fact, we see significantly more of it.

Scientist Dr. Edmund Redding places a young woman, Ann Taylor, in a trance, and listens to her describe an ancient city of the Aztecs. She hints at something of importance hidden in a pyramid there, so Dr. Redding and his colleagues set out for Mexico to look for it. The pyramid itself prompts Ann to have another vision, and she guides the scientists to a chamber deep inside it, where they find two mummies.  One, which I shall call Mummy A, is our old friend Popoka, who to general horror is up and shuffling around.  Mummy B, as described in a news broadcast, is a modern man who was injected with mummy juice in the attempt to induce a state of undeath.  Whether either mummy is the important thing that drew Ann to the pyramid in her visions, we never find out.

Naturally Dr. Redding brings these corpses, both animate and not, back to California with him and holds a big press conference to announce his finds.  Before he can take the stage, however, he is mysteriously assassinated, and Mummy B is stolen!  The thugs who took it try to ressurect it with mad science, but fail, so they hire a guy to steal Mummy A from Dr. Redding's research institute.  Meanwhile, a chance bolt of lightning ressurects Mummy B after all, and the full moon turns him into a werewolf!  He begins slaughtering scientists, while Mummy A, having knocked out the thief sent to collect him, kills Ann and then vanishes from the movie entirely.

So what we have here are highly abbreviated versions of two different movies stitched together, and wow, are the seams ever visible. There's the scene that's supposed to be Dr. Redding's presentation: we see a big audience applauding, and Dr. Redding stands up... but he's clearly in his own living room, while the audience is in a large hall in what looks like a completely different building!  Even more obvious is the stuff Jerry Warren shot to fill in the holes between the two plots, which is on a completely different grade of film stock (and in a completely different decade) than anything in either source movie.  And while both The Aztec Mummy and House of Terror put some actualy money into their productions (not much, but some), the extra footage had no budget at all, and gives us things like a 'Cowan Research Institute' which appears to be next door to Batwoman's house.

As in other Jerry Warren movies, nothing follows anything else logically, and the fact that we've got two movies mixed together here only heightens this effect.  In fact, I suspect that a lot of things here did make sense in the original movies, before Warren took a hatchet to them.  Take, for example, Mummy A's fascination with Ann.  In The Aztec Mummy this was explained as her being the reincarnation of Popoka's lover Zochi.  Face of the Screaming Werewolf might be doing the reincarnation thing, too, but is way less clear about it.  In House of Terror the mad scientists were working on ressurecting the dead, but in Face of the Screaming Werewolf we are never properly introduced to them and their goals are a mystery – although their hideout, in a wax museum, is creepy as hell and their equipment is incredibly amusing.  Among other things, they appear to subject Mummy B to a giant panini press and a purpose-built corpse centrifuge!

The mixing of stories leaves the movie with a particularly egregious case of No Main Character Syndrome, simply because we never stay with a set of characters long enough to consider them 'main'.  Dr. Redding and Ann are introduced as if they ought to be the main characters, because of course that's exactly what they were in their own movie. Rather than stay with them, however, the movie disposes of them both by killing them offscreen (since at no point in the Aztec Mummy quadrilogy do Eduardo or Flora die).  Then the scientists at the wax museum appear as if they're going to be main characters, but without ever being properly introduced to us.  I don't think any of them even got a name.  The detectives in Warren's added footage might have had names, but if so I don't remember them, and because they can't interact with any of these other characters they never do anything useful to the plot.  That leaves us with only the werewolf and the mummy, neither of whom ever even speak.

The thing I do find rather interesting about a patchwork movie like this is what was kept versus what appears to have been cut.  The Aztec Mummy was eighty minutes long, House of Terror was sixty, and bits and pieces of both have been combined into the sixty-minute Face of the Screaming Werewolf. A lot clearly had to go from each, but what they kept was, in some cases, really strange.  As I noted, we don't ever get proper introductions for the guys at the wax museum, and yet we see the entire Aztec sacrifice scene without any of The Aztec Mummy's backstory to give it context – and without context, the events we see are meaningless.  Why include it when it mostly just draws attention to the fact that Mummy B does not belong in this tomb with Mummy A?  The only answer I can imagine was because it represents the nearest thing Face of the Screaming Werewolf has to spectacle, but the movie didn't need spectacle.  It needed characters and a plot.

Meanwhile, because we never get the beginning of House of Terror, very little from that story means anything to us, either.  We get repeated shots of the museum's creepy wax figures, which were significant in House of Terror, but have nothing to do with Face of the Screaming Werewolf. The werewolf himself has no backstory or motivation, and although we're told he's a modern man who somehow ended up in the pyramid, we're given no clues as to how or why.  He has no lines, I'm guessing because Lon Chaney Jr. didn't speak any Spanish.  His rampage is committed against more characters we've never met, and we don't understand why he kills some people, kidnaps others, and leaves yet more alone.  A scene of him in human form, moping over his sorry plight, suggests that we're supposed to feel sympathy for this character, but how, when we know nothing about him?

If I were in charge of fixing Face of the Screaming Werewolf, he first thing I would do is go back to the source material and make some changes in what actually became part of the final movie.  And once I had my footage all picked out, I would then rewrite the story that goes with it very thoroughly indeed.  As I observed in my review of Time of the Apes, the beauty of dubbing is that you don't necessarily have to stick to the original script.  You can take out irrelevant stuff and add in new material.  I think I would have kept it to a single mummy, and perhaps made lycanthropy a tomb curse of sorts – Chaney's character would be the last archaeologist to profane the pyramid, and he was punished by becoming a werewolf so he could in turn punish any foolish enough to come after him!  There.  I just wrote a more coherent version of this movie in ten seconds than Jerry Warren did in however long it took him.

All this does tend to make one ask: is making one movie out of two, like Face of the Screaming Werewolf, or finishing somebody else's movie, as in Monster A-Go-Go, a lost cause?  I think if you could find a pair of movies that shared actors or sets, it might be possible to come up with something reasonably coherent, but you'd still have the problem of characters who can't interact, or scenes that have to be stitched together where they obviously don't belong.  It seems to me to be something that works better as a joke, as in Kung Pow! Enter the Fist or Ninja: the Mission Force, rather than something to be done seriously.  When not used for Internet Humour, frankenmovie-making seems to be motivated primarily by greed.  Herschel Gordon Lewis finished Monster A-Go-Go in the attempt to sell an unsalable product, and Jerry Warren turned La Momia Azteca and La Casa del Terror into Attack of the Mayan Mummy, House of Terror, and Face of the Screaming Werewolf so that he could release three movies for the price of the rights to two.

Greed is of course at the core of a lot of modern moviemaking.  Summer blockbusters and long-running franchises are designed specifically to earn as much money as possible without anybody necessarily caring if they're any good. A lot of the time they're not, yet despite poor reviews they still earn money, so I guess moviegoers don't care either as long as they get to see something cool.  Even by that standard, though, Face of the Screaming Werewolf is extremely cynical.  Warren figured as long as he gave the movie a cool title, people would pay for it regardless of whether it even made any damned sense.  And you know what?  I watched the damn thing, so I guess I don't care, either.

[micaramel]

Artist: Han Bing

Venue: Antenna Space, Shanghai

Exhibition Title: A Labile Boundary at Best

Date: January 11, 2020 – March 10, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Antenna Space, Shanghai 

Press Release:

Pixelating, Tearing Apart, and Regrouping

I. Spatial relationship has been a continuous thread in Han Bing’s painting practice. In works c. 2013, physical and architectural spaces bear the weight of the artist’s visual expression. In Bush (2013), an outdoor tree is inserted into the interior of a modernist house; Meeting (2013) depicts a domed room converted into a deep dry well; and, in Landscape #5 (2014), a floating billboard of landscape, like the backdrop for a play, is suspended above a pink stage. With these works, Han Bing wanders along the fine line between fiction and nonfiction. She examines and imagines an unusual quotidian reality using painterly thoughts.

In Ball Room (2015), muted depiction of human figures contributes to Han Bing’s exploration of spatial relationships. The crowd in, presumably, tuxedos and gowns appear no different than the crystal chandeliers, stairs, or curtains in the background. Thick layers outline shapes, conveying specific objects and figures; but none of this is the subject of this work. The subject is encapsulated in the three bars of colors – white, gray, and deep red – placed high and centered in the painting. The bars are short and clear-cut, and contrast with the rest of the jagged images that resemble visuals from a distorted television screen. With this work, Han Bing seems to be confronting a contemporary dilemma: In an era during which images and symbols saturate reality, how can a painter trust their authenticity on the canvas? Perhaps, at the time she created this piece, for her, the straight-forward bars of color served as a refined extraction of shapes, but also a basic unit she could trust to measure reality.

II. Han Bing soon started to fight against this dilemma, and fortunately, she was not devoured by this beast-like reality that is so occupied with an excess of images. On the contrary, she strove to identify its chaotic nature and portray the folds and particles within it.

In a group of works represented by East Wave (2017), Han Bing used photos she took of street posters and subway advertisements in various cities. She noticed these ready-made images that had been torn apart in many iterations, and then translated the misplaced, ripped-apart, and then adhered parts onto her canvas. In East Wave, the artist created at least three layers of images: first, a large area of yellow with white-edge slices sits in the foreground, almost appearing as a yellow iceberg; next, a layer of faint blue and red creates a haze, haunting the background behind the bold yellow shards; at the bottom, a plain grayish-white with creases and neat borderline suggests a darker background lurks below the whitish surface. It seems as if the image’s most relevant parts have been sliced off in large chunks. The gaps, holes, and fragments give off the feeling of an abandoned image as an object.

Other works in the series, such as Double Screen (2016) and Overlap (2017), include complex layers of images, dazzling the eye to the extent that it is difficult to clarify the elements. The eye experiences a journey full of rhythms while moving around these images, just like a melody with peaks and valleys – along the white edges lie the staggered residuals of fragmented images; some parts are dense like drum beats, some graffiti sprays a line of rap, and some comet-tail-shapes the ending notes with a gradual-weakening effect. The materialized and invalidated images are reborn on Han Bing’s canvas. She cherishes the previous life of these images, tracing back the process of separation between an image and the information it carried, and keeps the glue marks, curly edges, uneven wrinkles, and torn and broken remains. She replaces the original images to allow a new one to emerge.

For Han Bing, the creation process is an anti-symbolic one. It is also the reality that Han Bing gives to her painting. She deconstructs all sorts of purposeful images in real life, and these resulting images construct new patterns, rather than new semiotics. In the titles of some works, places like New York City’s Mott Street, Canal Street, and Downtown LA are mentioned. They hint at the existence of spatial relationships in a traditional sense. But just as the images are stripped of meaning, the reference to specific locations has nothing to do with geopolitical critiques; rather, the geographical information is an archiving method for the newborn patterns.

III. If it is presumed that Han Bing started off figuratively depicting images and her portrayals of the folds and particles of reality led to abstract images, then we could argue she is taking it one step further: She knows how to comb a chaotic reality and re-purify it in a more abstract way than an abstraction. It is as if she starts the second round of a juice squeezing process by using a spoon or a blunt tool to scrape fibers remaining on the squeezer’s filter. She gets more drips.

She first filters out specific references, thus erasing any portrayal of reality. In I am not unaware of my reputation for self-seriousness (2019), a work based on a broken poster of FKA Twigs’ new album, the singer’s metal earrings could be recognized faintly in the fields of reddish-brown and dark purple. The borders, edges, curls, and wrinkles are all removed. The effects of pixelating and tearing-apart have merged into her recent works, forming a new visual language through their amalgamation.

By banishing the portrayal of reality in her work, Han Bing opens up space in her practice to explore intertwined memories and cultures. Taking Angels in America (2019) as an example, the shape of the angel’s double wings is based on a photo of a miniature sculpture the artist took at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its composition recalls Luc Tuymans’ painting Angel (2004), while its title makes direct reference to the eponymous play written by the acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner. Yet, Han Bing’s painting remains anti-symbolic, as the angel in her work does not appear in traditional white, nor does the artist go deep into any of the details of the image of an angel. The artist abstracts the sculpture into two-dimensional outlines on her canvas, as if this is the only way that all three angels – from the Met, Tuymans, and Kushner – could coexist as one.

Such an introduction of memories and cultures may correspond to Han Bing’s growing interests in frescoes. From the fresco fragments, which had been traced back to the Renaissance and had been shaped by the power by time, the artist realizes that, through the centuries, the broken and missing parts of a fresco have all become its flesh – it is as if the fragments have taken on an organic quality – changing with the passing of time. They are the shape of memory and culture in themselves. In the meantime, Han Bing switches her medium from acrylic to oil paint. Compared with the former’s quick-drying lightness, oil paints are thick and tough, an almost “meat-like texture,” as described by the artist. Accordingly, painting becomes a battling process that requires physical wrestling, in which a painter’s hand tames her paint, and vice versa. Again, it is as if the work has its own life that shifts and revises as time and forces act upon it.

Spatial relationships remain an important element in her work, and perhaps even more important than ever. In Cards on Cords (2019), Han Bing restages a scene she captured from a construction site. The interior of a building has returned to the collapsed state where all bricks, steel bars, grids are not functioning at all. The doors have fallen down, the walls peeled off, and the sawdust is scattered around everywhere. It is a scene ten times worse than an abandoned image. Symbols and their carriers, frameworks with structures have all lost use. Adopting a large format canvas with a height of more than two meters, Han Bing positions her viewers right in front of the hole of the ruins. In its upper right corner, the sketchy brushstrokes evoke a feeling of potential danger from falling stones. However, despite the fact that it’s falling apart, the entire scene also inexplicably displays a sense of order, in which pillars stand firm to support vertical structures. It seems that the purpose of the chaos here is not to destroy, but to reveal its inner layers. Like a metaphor, the work combines abstract and figurative visual languages to push the viewers to confront what the artist has seen and felt, as her painting has regrouped those fundamental things that are not taken away by the chaos. One could argue that the spatial relationships manifested in Han Bing’s works mirror our relationship with reality.

Perhaps the artist knows well that ruins are the dead-end of dilemmas. Through pixelation and tearing-apart, Han Bing has developed a process of regrouping, and through painting, she conveys these visual experiences to us.

Written and Translated by Qianfan Gu

Link: Han Bing at Antenna Space

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/38wszwQ

[woollyqueen]

usse 55

Floral Patterns ~ An Essay About Flowers and Art (with a Blooming Addendum.)

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by Andrew Berardini

A Change of Heart installation view at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, 2016. Courtesy: Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

“Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.”

— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (2001)

“Not even the category of the portrait seems to have ever attained the profound level of painterly decrepitude that still life would attain in the sinister harmlessness in the work of Matisse or Maurice de Vlaminck… the most obsolete of all still-life types.”

— Benjamin H. D. Buchloh on Gerhard Richter’s Flowers (1992)

Don’t worry, nobody’s looking. Go ahead.

Stop and smell the flowers.

Feel that sumptuous perfume blooming from those spreading petals. That’s pleasure. That’s sex. That’s the body lotion of the teenage beauty fingering your belt buckle to take your virginity (or the one you wore when you tugged that belt off your first). That’s your grandmother’s bathroom and the heart-shaped wreath at her funeral. That’s the lithe fingers and supple wrists of the florist, an emperor of blooms arranging the flowers for your mother just so.

Those petals, that scent, those colors.

Somehow flowers have become a decrepit subject, “the most obsolete of all still-life types,” to use Buchloh’s words. Despite the eminent Octoberist’s antipathy (and he is hardly alone in his disdain), flowers in art are back in bloom.

Flagrantly frivolous, wholly ephemeral, though ancient in art, the floral’s recent return as a major subject for artists marks a pivot toward those things that flowers represent: the decorative, the minor, the ephemeral and emotional, the liveliness of their bloom and the perfume of their decay, a sophisticated language of purest color and form that can be both raw nature and refined arrangement, poetic symbolism rubbing against the political mechanisms of value, history, and trade. Flowers are fragrant with subtle meanings, each different for every artist who chooses them as a subject. They are a move away from literal explications, self-righteous cynicism—and toward what, precisely? Let’s say poetry.

Bas Jan Ader, Primary Time (still), 1974. © Estate of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Andersen, 2016 / Bas Jan Ader by SIAE, Rome, 2016. Courtesy: Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles

Free in the wilderness, rowed in gardens, in bouquets on tables, or as a decorative aromatic around the dead, flowers offer an opportunity for a simple, sensual pleasure—both a temporary escape and a corporeal return. Their origins as a species are a bit shrouded in mystery, but most who study flowers and evolution agree that they came about in order to employ insects and animals in their reproduction (a process that surely continues with our artful interventions). They lure with beauty, eventually tricking humans into agriculture and the dream of making such fecund and lively yearnings permanent, into art.

First and foremost, flowers are the sex organs of plants. Those bright colors and elaborate bodies were meant to turn us on. Georgia O’Keeffe transformed her blossoms from still-life representation into a kind of abstraction that tongued that first truth of flowers; all of her blooms wore the faces of interdimensional pussies. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers look even more suggestive to me than some of his more obviously lusty snaps of men in various states of undress and erect action.

Though their flounce and curve have a pornography of color, flowers as a metaphor can be easily read as safe, sanitized stand-ins for the real musk and squelch of sex. A vase of flowers in grandma’s parlor might be less notable than a bouquet of dildos erupting out of a bucket of lube. The opposite of badass to all the tough boys playing with their power tools, flowers to them are for old ladies and sissies and girls. Macho minimalists preferred stacks of bricks and sheets of steel to prove the heft of their seriousness. Besides, the florals look too comfortably bourgeois for the shock and spectacle of self-serious avant-gardists, though Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Flowers(1918-1925) look as radical as anything else those defiant Italians cooked up.

Virginia Poundstone: Flower Mutations installation view at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, 2015. Courtesy: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield. Photo: Jean Vong

Though flowers have appeared in art for thousands of years, first evidenced in funerary motifs in the earliest Egyptian dynasties, they’ve been used mostly as a sideshow, a decorative motif, a signifying prop. But around 1600, during the time of the tulip mania that rubbled the Netherlandish economy, Dutch artists began to paint blooms as the main attraction: finely wrought bouquets with delicate strokes, an idealistic botanist’s attention to perfection and detail, each variety laden with meaning, some held over from religion, some devised for newly invented varietals. This efflorescence came about with the disposable income of the bourgeoisie and the introduction of the tulip to international trading with the Ottoman Empire; in the court of Constantinople, flowers were all the rage. As an object of desire and prestige, the flower earned its worth as a central subject.

By the Victorian era, the language of flowers became wildly popular, as that repressed period needed something sexy to finger, especially for the corseted women. The frivolity of flowers was perhaps an area of knowledge the patriarchy let ladies have mastery over, but male artists weren’t ignoring the chromatic potential of blooms, either. With wet smears and hazy visions, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet were among the best floral daubers of their time (with a solid shout out to the drooping beauties of Henri Fantin-Latour, whose 1890 painting A Basket of Flowers made it onto New Order’s 1983 album Power, Corruption, and Lies, itself an elliptical Richter reference). Flowers to these painters were a way to explore the power and range of their medium with unfettered color. “Perhaps I owe it to flowers,” said Monet, “that I became a painter.” As art took an intellectual turn, however, flowers fell out as serious subjects and became the provenance of Sunday painters, appropriate only for the marginalized. Yet as outsiders increasingly collapse binaries, the center cannot hold and vines snake into the heart of power to bloom a variety as diverse and beautiful as the spectrum of humanity.

A Change of Heart, an exhibition organized by the curator Chris Sharp at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles in summer 2016, touched on dreams and contemplations I’d been having about obvious forms of beauty and their force in art as both assertion and escape. Sunsets, moonlight, waterfalls, and, of course, flowers, all easily dismissed as sentimental kitsch, seemed to be enjoying a new life, born of a self-conscious romanticism that acknowledges these subjects as perhaps decayed and misspent, but lets their beauty sweep them up anyway. Sharp stated in the press release that the work in the exhibition “embraces the floral still life in all its formal, symbolic, political and aesthetic heterogeneity… a radical and even dizzying diversity of approaches, including the queer, the decorative, the scientific, the euphemistic, the memento mori, the painterly, the deliberately amateur and minor as a position, and much more.”[1]

Willem de Rooij, Bouquet IX, 2012. Courtesy: the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

From historical works by Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Jane Freilicher, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Bas Jan Ader to art made much more recently by Camille Henrot, Willem de Rooij, Amy Yao, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Paul Heyer, the pieces in A Change of Heart approach the floral in wholly unique ways. Rather than cordoning off the artists in Sharp’s excellent show, I’m going to weave their methods, ideas, and visions into a larger conversation, some aspects of which were quite likely on the curator’s mind, as any art gallery and its resources can only be so expansive. In London as well, the gallerist and curator Silka Rittson-Thomas has opened up a project space and storefront called TukTuk Flower Studio to host the floral visions of contemporary artists.

Of course some artists in recent history focus on the base, mass appeal of flowers, like Warhol and his iconic screenprint Flowers (1964), or Jeff Koons with his giant, bloom-encrusted Puppy(1992) and solid shimmering metal of Tulips (1995-2004). But despite the blank-faced games of pop cipher employed by Warhol and the spirited industrial-scale exuberance of Koons, I can’t help finding a whisper of contempt in both, a pandering hucksterism, giving the people what they want. This obviousness and its exploitation is of course a part of the story of our modern interactions with flowers, but it obscures a more nuanced narrative.

Capitalism has so often turned beauty as a notion into kitsch, or as Milan Kundera puts it, “a denial of shit,” and we can find this modern kitsch in the unblemished bloom on the cheeks of a Disney princess, or in “America’s most popular artist” Thomas Kinkade’s creation of an imagined past of perfect old-timey townships, a good old days that glosses over all the problems of inequality and oppression endemic to that era. Donald Trump is the kingpin of this kind of kitsch these days. The best of our feelings can be easily hijacked for political purposes, but it is a mistake to cynically dismiss those feelings simply because others would take advantage of them.

All aspects of creation are beautiful enough to need little human improvement, including flowers. As John Berger writes in The White Bird, “The notion that art is the mirror of nature is one that appeals only in periods of skepticism. Art does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature.” [2] We attempt to capture the power of these moments not to improve upon them, but to fix their power, to make ephemeral hopes and desires into something more permanent. Perhaps the natural versus the human-made is one more collapsing binary, and the diversity of flowers allows for such wild variety that the simple monolithic subject of “flowers” can’t easily contain it. In using flowers as a subject, artists have gravitated from the classic still life (like Richter on the ass end of Buchloh’s anti-floral sentiment), with its entwined poetical and political meanings and their elaborate symbolic language, operating at the decorative margins, toward the center. This can be traced in the atmospheric floral patterns of Marc-Camille Chaimowicz (enjoying a fantastic resurgence of interest), the pastel squiggles of Lily van der Stokker, and the softly erotic washes of Paul Heyer. Pulling the margins into the center is also of course one of the great political projects of our time.

Felix Gonzales-Torres, “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas’ and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992. © The Felix Gonzales-Torres Foundation. Courtesy: Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

The poetical-political intertwining in flowers has a few significant contemporary exemplars. Felix Gonzalez-Torres imbued common objects with profound poetic and political force throughout his work, and included in A Change of Heart was his photograph of the flowers on the graves of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In a single snap, an almost slight touristic photograph, the artist reveals a nexus of forces around flowers: as memorial, as assertion of love with all its political and artistic forces, as vaginal (given their lesbian sexuality), and as a visual poem that matches Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose…,” itself of course an invocation of William Shakespeare’s “A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” A rose is a rose and love is love, by any other name.

With a blend of flowers, sometimes artificially constructed, and his own indexical variety of sharp critique, Christopher Williams takes a more distinctly political focus, working wholly on reclassifying a collection of flower models (fakes, to be clear) not into botanical hierarchies but into political relevance. The photographs in Angola to Vietnam* (1989) are snapped pictures of selected replicas from the Harvard Botanical Museum’s Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models, made between 1887 and 1936. Williams, however, focuses on flowers from countries where political disappearances were recorded in 1985, reclassifying them by country of origin rather than by the museum’s system. But although these are certainly flowers, one gets the feeling that Williams wants to undermine their bourgeois beauty and the colonial impulse that collected, modeled, and classified them.

This sharply political act finds force in Taryn Simon’s photo series Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) and Kapwani Kiwanga’s ongoing series Flowers for Africa (begun in 2012), with their similar focus on floral arrangements made for banquets celebrating important political moments. Simon’s pictures tend to flatten the arrangements into manipulated environments. Kiwanga presents living bouquets, with the intention that they rot over the course of the exhibition (I watched one whither in A Change of Heart) so as to describe a complex physical poetic. For Kiwanga, the flowers that stood on the tables of important moments in politics represent the colonial import of European flower arrangement: where, for what, and by whom these flowers were cultivated, but also the hope and heartbreak involved in many of the agreements they witnessed. Some represented a marked turn toward liberation, while other accords withered along with the flowers. (Both of these projects echo, for me, Danh Vo’s display of the chandeliers from the Hotel Majestic in Paris hanging over the agreement that ended the US-Vietnam War.)

Zoe Crosher, The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project in Conjuction with LAND, Fourth Billboard to Be Seen Along Route 10, Heading West… (Where Highway 86 Intersects…), 2015. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Chris Adler

Zoe Crosher’s billboard series Shangri LA’d (2013-2015), produced in collaboration with LAND, displayed a lush array of flowers and greenery arranged by the artist and shot in a storefront in Los Angeles’s Chinatown formerly occupied by the Chinese Communist Party. As one drove across the country on the transcontinental highway, I-10, the flowers rotted further with each successive picture, until a decayed brown mass greeted the traveler as they crossed into California and on to Los Angeles. The dream of prosperity and possibility that drives a traveler westward became the hardships of the road and the realities of the place.

For the last decade, Virginia Poundstone has included in her artwork all aspects of floral cultivation. She has climbed the Himalayan mountains to find the wildest of wildflowers, and traveled to the factory farms of Colombia, tracing industrially grown blooms from growth to auction to wholesalers to flower markets and shops. Her interest grew from her day job as a floral arranger and her research into the gendered origins of that craft in the West and its resonance as a mode of art making in Japanese ikebana. She has also curated exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum that included floral works by Christo, Nancy Graves, and Bas Jan Ader (Ader’s video Primary Time [1974], of endless arrangements, is also in A Change of Heart) that have informed her deep investigations into the complex symbolism and language of flowers.

Other artists focus primarily on this language. Willem de Rooij’s Bouquet series (first begun with his late collaborator, Jeroen de Rijke, in 2002) speaks without literal language. Discussions around politics are followed by meditations on color or a collection of blooms gathered for their intensely allergenic qualities. The giant displays, in contrast to Kiwanga’s, are carefully maintained throughout an exhibition; a florist collaborator always makes regular visits to an exhibition to maintain the scent, color, and freshness of the expression.

In A Change of Heart, Sharp also included Camille Henrot’s ikebana interpretations of important modern novels as well as Maria Loboda’s A Guide to Insults and Misanthropy (2006), which attempts to use the symbolic language of flowers to insult their receiver.

Camille Henrot, The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, 2014. Courtesy: the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

For flowers, the recent turn holds an echo of romanticism, the intuitive, the emotional, the poetic, existing alongside a belief in political freedoms. The lusty poet Lord Byron died in the war for Greek independence. One of the fundamental human rights is a right to pleasure, to beauty. Beauty isn’t our collective ignoring of the hard struggles of the world, but rather an assertion of exactly what we’re fighting for.

As Fernando Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet (1984), “Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures.”[3]

[1] http://hannahhoffmangallery.com/media/files/pr_acoh_web.pdf. [2] John Berger, The White Bird (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985) [3] Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (London: Serpent’s Tale, 1991)

~ BLOOMING ADDENDUM ~

Christopher Williams, Angola, 1989, Blaschka Model 439, 1894, Genus no. 5091, Family, Sterculiaceae Cola acuminate (Beauv.) Schott and Endl., Cola Nut, Goora Nut, 1989, from the series Angola to Vietnam*, 1989. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Orchid / #DA70D6

General Sternwood: The orchids are an excuse for the heat. You like orchids? Marlowe: Not particularly. General Sternwood: Nasty things. That flesh is too much like the flesh of men. Their perfume has a rotten sweetness of corruption… — The Big Sleep (1946)

The shape of this flowering plant’s pendulous doubled root ball suggested to some ancient Hellenic botanist the particular danglers in a man’s kit, and the orchid got its name from the Greek word for testes. Thus the dainty beloveds of aristocratic gardeners and fussy flower breeders are buried balls, dirty nuts. Try not to snicker when granny effuses, “I simply adore orchids.” Flowers have always been symbolic of sexuality, and even more so for those for whom it’s suppressed. Women, especially older ones, have been forced by social norms to stanch their desires, rarely granted the allowance to fuck freely. It gladdens the heart in its own weird way to hear old folks homes have the highest rates of STDs these days. Not because it’s good for anyone to catch the clap, but because it means they fuck with more abandon than most might care to admit.

To some, orchids are the sexiest of flowers. Their namesake roots lie buried in most variants, while those strange blooms pump horticultural hearts with lively colors, generous curves, and lusty orifices. If vaginal decoration took a sharp surgical turn past bejeweled vajazzling, you might find yourself confronted with one of these psychedelic pussies when dipping down for a French lick. As flowers, they fall into an uncanny valley. Too close but not close enough, the effect is just creepy rather than alluring. While other flowers invite an inserted nose, a huff, and though not yet an erection, their floral perfume has turned my head in that general direction. But the fleshy orchid does not inspire my lusts even a little. Perhaps even the opposite—its odor and form the absence of body, a dry, funereal thing.

“Crypt orchid” is the term for an undescended testicle, though I dream a flower that can only blossom in tombs.

The bright, rich purple creeps its name from the flower, one of innumerable possibilities for a plant with wild variation. Though it has the crackle of electricity beneath its buzz, orchid’s too muted to be much beyond a suggestion. Bright but not the brightest, rich without being creamy, orchid’s a faded purple haze on a bright day, the fading neon of a strip club past its prime.

Rose / #FF007F

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. — Agnes Martin (1989)

Each five-petal-kiss of colors from the tangled, toothy green stems. A brokenhearted smear, a yearning expressed through the formality of its presentation, the rose’s simple obviousness is its charm. The color of nipple, just exposed before cold air and hot mouths harden it into a deeper shade.

In many languages, the words for “rose” and “pink” are the same.

Rose-colored glasses. Roseate glow.

Rose tints my world Keeps me safe from my trouble and pain. — The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Ask any florist and he’ll know how much a dozen will cost, one extra thrown in for luck. The rose grows thorns to better climb over its neighbors, to push over other flowers hungry for a beam of sunlight. More than one rose has drawn my blood, the dripping finger quickly mouthed.

Rose, floating in the pond, a dead flower in the eddies of the silver surface spangled with light. A lover’s bathtub blanket, a romantic’s bedspread. Rose, a gesture, an empty signifier, a lover’s lament, a husband’s apology. A shapely scented flower, a dream of what pussies could be.

Flowers and fruits are the sex organs of plants. Georgia O’Keeffe knew surely what she was doing with her folded blooms, plumped petals peeled back. Victorian ladies corseted by rigid morality spent repressed hours devotedly fingering their carefully cultivated flowers. Fresh blossoms will wilt on the vine whether they are nabbed or not. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, you virgins who make much of time. The scientific term for wilted plants starved of nutrients and water is “flaccid.”

A lover once told me she only enjoyed flowers knowing that something was dying expressly for her pleasure. Every rose has its thorn…

Flowers began as a funeral tradition to mask the odor of a decaying corpse. Wreathed, bouqueted, and sprayed, apple blossoms and heliotropes, chrysanthemums and camellias, hyacinths and delphiniums, snapdragons and, of course, roses. Anything goes for funeral flowers, just as long as they are fresh.

One artist I know dreamed of casting in concrete the cast-off flowers at the base of a Soviet war memorial. All the original flowers she stared at for hours, snapping picture after picture, measuring and admiring the perfect war memorial, the waste of pageantry all heaped and rotting, all the showy pomp to be swept up and trashed. Failing to gather them all from a park one Sunday afternoon, she made a memorial to that one. Under marbles carved Pro Patria, sometimes you’ll find flowers, but you’ll be sure to find a corpse.

“Roses,” she thought sardonically, “All trash, m’dear.” — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

As bright blooms fade, what is the color of decay?

Is it a sinking brown, a pale green, a moldy black that captures the wilted flower, the rotten fruit, the decomposing body? Spotted and mottled, both wet and dusty, alive with death’s critters and aromatic with rot, the color is unsteady at best, a hue with a checkered future. Tuck a rose away, let it dry, and though the life goes and the color fades, its form remains.

Ah Little Rose—how easy For such as thee to die! — Emily Dickinson (1858)

I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.

Lilac / #CBA2CB

I lost myself on a cool damp night Gave myself in that misty light Was hypnotized by a strange delight Under a lilac tree I made wine from the lilac tree Put my heart in its recipe It makes me see what I want to see and be what I want to be When I think more than I want to think Do things I never should do I drink much more than I ought to drink Because it brings me back you… Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, like my love

Pale purples are the fucking saddest. Lavender’s forgetful wash. Mauve’s lonely decadence. And lilac. The color of unwilling resignation to lost passion. The pale fade, a lost spring.

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

The lilac flower originated on the Croatian coast whence it found its way into the gardens of Turkish emperors and from there to Europe in the 16th century, not reaching the Americas until the 17th. The scent of lilac has become for many the scent of spring. Carried by the compound indole, which is also found in shit, lilac’s aroma carries with its fade a special decay, heavy and narcotic. To a nose that does not know the tricks of the master perfumer, indole dropped in chocolate and coffee makes a product smell natural.

A note found in perfume, bottled spring, often worn by elderly ladies. In the Descanso Gardens near Los Angeles, there is a grove of two hundred fifty varieties of lilac, their names a horticulturist’s poetry of yearning: Dark Night and Sylvan Beauty, Snow Shower and Spring Parade, Maiden’s Blush and Vesper Song.

I missed their bloom this year, gone to the snowy mountains where the flowers blossom late, but to walk among the towering shrubs is to be punched in the face with perfume. So sweet, so heady. Running my fingers over its heart-shaped leaf, failing to feel my leaf-shaped heart. I dreamed of going to the gardens with my lover and went there many times after she left me. Dreaming of her. Feeling the sweet sadness of her perfume, the unwilling resignation of her love withdrawn. And this lover, all the lovers who always go away. One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs… — Kenneth Koch (1994)

Walt Whitman dropped a sprig on the passing coffin of a murdered president and birthed a poem for dooryards and students. Not his most beautiful by far, but its love is real. As any love for a distant leader can only be so real, but the lilac is love. Staring into a screen full of its color, I am both spring and its destruction. Its bright lovely burst of life, its wilt and loss. The cool kiss of night, naked skin shivers but still you stay. And you stay and drink its sweetness and its rot, you drink your heart.

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.” — Stephen Crane (1895)

Cherry Blossom / #FFB7C5

A Selection of the Traditional Colors of Japan; or, Bands I Wished I Was In

Cherry Blossom Ibis Wing Long Spring Dawn Orangutan Persimmon Juice Cypress Bark Meat Sparrow Brown Decaying Leaves Pale Incense The Brown of Flattery The Color of an Undried Wall Golden Fallen Leaves Simmered Seaweed Contemplation in a Tea Garden Pale Fallen Leaves Underside of Willow Leaves Sooty Willow Bamboo Thousand-Year-Old Green Insect Screen Rusty Storeroom Velvet Harbor Rat Iron Storage Mousy Wisteria Thin Color Fake Purple Vanishing Red Mouse Half Color Inside of a Bottle

Andrew Berardini is an American writer known for his work as a visual art critic and curator in Los Angeles. He has published articles and essays in publications such as Mousse, Artforum, ArtReview, Art-Agenda.

Originally published on Mousse 55 (October–November 2016)

[dailyaudiobible]

07/05/2019 DAB Transcript

1 Chronicles 1:1-2:17, Acts 23:11-35, Psalms 3:1-8, Proverbs 18:14-15

Today is the 5th day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It's great to be here with you today as we kind of sail into…well…toward the weekend. Kinda weird because some of…some of you…are like extended…extended little vacation time, especially I guess…only if you live here in the United States because of the national holiday and all. Nevertheless, no matter what's going on in your schedule, we have a constant, we have a rhythm, we come together around the global camp fire every day and we allow God's word to speak and inform us and guide us and direct our steps. So, that's what we’re here to do and that's what we will do. We’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week and yesterday we concluded the book of second Kings. So, first and second Kings, the books of the Kings, which brings us to the books of Chronicles. So, let’s just get ourselves situated here because we’ll be camping out for a little while as we move through that territory.

Introduction to the book of Chronicles:

We’re not actually sure who the author or authors of the Chronicles or who collected them, who they are but there is a Jewish tradition that suggests the priest Ezra was involved and even though there isn’t consensus among scholars, the books were penned about four and a half centuries before the common era, which would make them contemporary with Ezra. So, as we start Chronicles you may be thinking, “wait a second, I’ve heard this story, like didn't we just hear this story recently?” That’s because first and second Chronicles are going to cover a lot of the same territory that we covered in the books of Samuel and then in the books of Kings. It’s just coming from a different perspective. Chronicles looks at the same stories, the same history, only through the eyes of the priests whereas we’ve been kind of traveling along with the view from the Royals, about the Kings, through the Kings and now we’ll see this thing territory through the eyes of the priests. So, we ended the books of Kings yesterday with the conquest of Judah and subsequent exile to Babylon, which, as we said yesterday basically ended the ancient ear of the promised land. Everyone was displaced and taken in exile. So, the books first and second Chronicles that we’re about to read were written from this exile. So, as we've discussed, the northern kingdom of Israel was captured by the Assyrians. Exile was their way of the building their Empire. They were forcing people to assimilate by mixing people groups together so that…so that their individual histories would be forgotten over time and they didn't really have groups of people that they could just segregate…they had to find new ways of getting along with new people. The books of Chronicles were, at least in part, written to kind of stave that off, to remind the children of Israel who they were and where they came from and who God is. So, the first nine chapters will be covering a bunch of genealogy. And this is kind of one of the parts of the Bible where there’s a bunch of hard to pronounce names and you know your eyes can just glaze over when you're reading through this and you wonder like, “what's the purpose? What's the reason for all of these names in the Bible over and over? But when we understand why the names are there then they tell a very moving story. Put yourself in the position of exile. Your city has been conquered, that would even hard to comprehend your city has been conquered and occupied, families have been indiscriminately split apart, you don't know where your kids are, you don't know where your spouse is, you don't know your parents…like…community groups…you don't know where your friends are, there displaced and you didn't realize that that moment where you were separated, that was the last time you were ever going to see them again because it happened so fast. And, so, you spend all of the time that you're being drug away from your home and drug into a foreign land…like asking questions…anyone who might have any information and maybe you get a scrap of information, “yeah, I think I saw somebody who looked kinda like that. They're in this other city,” which might be days away. And you don't even know where any of the cities are because you are in a foreign hand. Like imagine what we're talking about here. These names that we’re going to read as we move through the first part of first Chronicles, these genealogies, they were knit together so that people can remember where they came from and who they were. So, each name that we’re going to read, behind that name is a person who lived a life who smiled, who laughed, who cried, who ate, who died. And, of course, the genealogies in first Chronicles, this won’t be the last time that the Hebrew people face displacement and hardship. So, we even know of the hardships of World War II on the Hebrew people. So, like you  go to any Holocaust Museum and if you…if you walk…if you walk in…there will be likely be a room somewhere with the genealogies, with the name's. And in some of these museums it'll be a contemplative, quiet, somber place where a recording simply just recites the names over and over and over without end. They keep being said over and over, even though they're lost so that we won't forget what happened and who was lost. This kind of the Bible's way of doing that. So, let’s not just blow through it. And then the books of Chronicles will show us God's long-suffering, His kindness towards those who love Him and serve Him and walk with Him, but it'll show us how things fall apart when we walk away. So, whether that was a story from a thousand years ago, or whether that was something happened last night, our choices are writing the story of our lives and our choices matter as we will see. So, we begin. First Chronicles chapter 1 verse 1 through 2 verse 17.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word and we thank You for another day to allow it to wash into our lives and wash our minds and hearts clean and give us orientation and direction. And as we move into this new territory, the books of Chronicles, as we read the genealogies we invite Your Holy Spirit. And as we continue this journey, this harrowing journey of the apostle Paul who has been spirited away from Jerusalem and now finds himself on the Mediterranean coast of Caesarea, we notice Your hand in it all and we will continue to notice that as…as You protect Paul's life from those who would so easily have taken it. Come Holy Spirit into what we have read today and what we have contemplated today, continue to lead us on the narrow path that leads to life, continue to guide our steps into all truth we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, it’s home base, it’s where you find out what is going on around here. So, of course stay tuned and stay connected.

We’re moving into the weekend and the weekend this weekend is the Daily Audio Bible long walk. So, that’s this Sunday, the 7th of July. I’ve been talking about it for a couple of weeks, so you probably know the lay of the land, but once again, the Daily Audio Bible long walk, the 7th of July is our own holiday and it's a day that we have found over the years and this will be, I think, the 11th one, makes for a fantastic reset of the year. It's a day on the calendar that we set aside and say, “look…this one day I am not allowing the chaos to rule. Like, there are plenty of distractions and disruptions that fly at me faster than I can possibly deal with. I constantly have anxiety in my belly because I feel like I'm missing something, I'm forgetting something, something important is falling behind, but I don't know what it is. I'm shutting that off, I'm giving myself permission for one day to go be alone with God. I'm going somewhere beautiful. I'm gonna allow nature to speak. Like, I’m gonna drink in the life that is happening all around me that I am ignoring and that I am missing because I am chasing...what I don't know.” So, that’s the reason for the long walk. What you do on the long walk is either walk out your front door and go somewhere beautiful or get in your car and drive somewhere beautiful. Doesn't matter whether you're driving like for 90 seconds or whether you're driving for like four hours. It doesn't…wherever your feeling led to…wherever is pulling you…somewhere beautiful, somewhere where nature is left alone and its beautiful, whether that be a nearby park, a national Park, it doesn’t matter. Go somewhere beautiful and spend the day. Get on a trail and walk and when you come to a bench, if you're tired, sit. And then, walk some more and talk and say what's in your heart. And you might be like, “I mean…when I pray, you know, 10 minutes…10 minutes and like I don't have 5 minutes and I'm out of words and then I'm just making up words for another 5 minutes and I don't want to say.” You’d be surprised at what you have to say when you're not in a rush. You’d be surprised at what comes up inside of you, the thoughts and the memories and the things that you need to deal with, that you need to invite the Holy Spirit into when you have time. So, go for a long walk and say what you need to say and give space and let God, let the Holy Spirit lead you and say what needs to be said. This is an individual thing, obviously. Like, I do it by myself every year, but what we do ask is, because we’re doing this at the same time on the same day together, even though we’re doing it alone, we’re still doing it together. So, take a picture or shoot a little video of what…wherever it is that you end up, wherever you go, maybe whatever you're hearing…it doesn't…just share…share your experience, post your pictures to the Facebook page at Daily Audio Bible which is facebook.com/dailyaudiobible. And then we post them up and we have all these windows into all of these lives and all of these places and we get to see the beauty of the earth together and know that we’re in this together and it's remarkable the things that God speaks about what the next half of the year 2019 should look like if you're listening. So, make plans for that. Circle it on your calendar, block it off, don't let anything interfere, give yourself permission for this one day and I we’ll enjoy that together on Sunday.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. I cannot thank you enough. I cannot say the words that would make them big enough to say we wouldn't do this, we couldn't do this if we didn't do this together. Thank you for your partnership as we navigate the summertime. So, there's a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253, is the number to dial.

And that is it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hello my beautiful family, I just wanted to let each and every one of you know that you are so sweet and you’re so loved by me and I just thank you so much for calling and leaving your prayer requests, which I listen every single day without fail and I pray and I lift up each and every one of you. Be encouraged, we are serving a great God and he loves each and every one of us and He listens to what’s going on in our life and He answers. I just wanted to say that, Suzanne from Albuquerque, she’s experiencing fear and I want to say to you Suzanne that the Lord spoke 365 times about fear. And, so, don’t fear because fear is not from Him and I’m going to be praying for you. Bob from Arizona, thank you so much for calling and I do pray for you as well and for your daughter. And Julie from Southern California, praying for you my sister. And Kristi, her two dogs, she’s had to put them down and that broke my heart Kristi and I’m lifting you up and hugging you in the Spirit. And I just pray that the Lord will just touch your heart. You’re a sweet woman of God. Vera from Los Angeles, I’m lifting you up my sister. And…

Hello, my DAB family, my name is Mike, I am from Pennsylvania, I’ve never called in before, but I just wanted to ask for prayer for my wife. She’s been dealing with anxiety for some time now and she’s currently, you know, not doing very well. Her doctors are unable to figure out what medication she should be on and just things seem to be getting worse. So, as you can imagine, it’s also, you know, been tough for me as well because I don’t know how to help her. But if you could just pray for her. Her name is Heather and again my name is Mike. I’d appreciate your prayers. Thanks.

Hi everyone, this is Liz, the soccer from Toronto. This message is for Kristi in Georgia/Ohio. We heard your cry for help in the night. You sounded terrified and full of fear. So, the Lord immediately brought to mind to me Psalm 91, which I’ve been praying over you since that call. Verse two calls on you Kristi to say, “He is your refuge and fortress, your God in who you trust.” And if you do that then in verse five it says, “you will not fear the terror of the night” and in verse six “nor the pestilence that stocks in the darkness.” And then immediately after your call Kristi we heard the words “hold on” and that was our brother Blind Tony who was reciting the words to a song he’d been writing, and it was just as if it was just for you. Hold on Kristi. Later in the calls we also heard from Slave of Jesus and I think this is really cool, he’s had some great advice about memorizing verses to bring to mind quickly when you need them. And again, I thought of you. So, use a word as an offensive weapon. It is living and active and when you speak it out it can’t come back void. So, “the Lord is my refuge, my fortress, my God in whom I trust.” Say it and He’ll protect you Kristi. We love you, God bless you. Everyone, just quickly before I sign off, I would love it if you could pray for my boy Nathaniel who leaves for university on July 4th. He’s heading down to the University of Alabama Birmingham. So, please pray for a smooth transition for him and a deeply rooted faith and trust in the Lord. And yeah, thanks everyone. Thanks DAB family. And Kristi, hold on. Okay? Bye, for now.

Hi, this is Faye from New Jersey. I’m calling in response to the woman that didn’t leave her name but she said that she’s full of joy, hence the smile, and she says, you know, she should be broken but for God’s love and mercy and grace He’s take care of __ and she was explaining how, you know, her life wasn’t perfect, that she hasn’t spoken to her son in four years or there was no communication with her son for four years and that she hasn’t seen some of her grandchildren and she said that even though, you know, the world would say because her life was broken we should, you know, we should feel sad or that’s my interpretation. But, you know, through the Holy Spirit and through God’s mercy she’s sustained. And I’d like to pray for a reconciliation with her son and so that she’ll be able to…and also that she’ll be able to meet her grandchildren. Again, she didn’t leave a name, but I was just so blessed, and it was just great wisdom for me to hear because I’m going through something and it just kind of encouraged me. Okay. Take care. Bye.

[neilchax]

TRUTH OF FEELING

When my daughter Nicole was an infant, I read an essay suggesting that it might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because speech recognition and synthesis would soon render those abilities superfluous. My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter’s skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy.

It turned out that we and the essayist were both half correct: now that she’s an adult, Nicole can read as well as I can. But there is a sense in which she has lost the ability to write. She doesn’t dictate her messages and ask a virtual secretary to read back to her what she last said, the way that essayist predicted; Nicole subvocalizes, her retinal projector displays the words in her field of vision, and she makes revisions using a combination of gestures and eye movements. For all practical purposes, she can write. But take away the assistive software and give her nothing but a keyboard like the one I remain faithful to, and she’d have difficulty spelling out many of the words in this very sentence. Under those specific circumstances, English becomes a bit like a second language to her, one that she can speak fluently but can only barely write.

It may sound like I’m disappointed in Nicole’s intellectual achievements, but that’s absolutely not the case. She’s smart and dedicated to her job at an art museum when she could be earning more money elsewhere, and I’ve always been proud of her accomplishments. But there is still the past me who would have been appalled to see his daughter lose her ability to spell, and I can’t deny that I am continuous with him.

It’s been more than twenty years since I read that essay, and in that period our lives have undergone countless changes that I couldn’t have predicted. The most catastrophic one was when Nicole’s mother Angela declared that she deserved a more interesting life than the one we were giving her, and spent the next decade criss-crossing the globe. But the changes leading to Nicole’s current form of literacy were more ordinary and gradual: a succession of software gadgets that not only promised but in fact delivered utility and convenience, and I didn’t object to any of them at the times of their introduction.

So it hasn’t been my habit to engage in doomsaying whenever a new product is announced; I’ve welcomed new technology as much as anyone. But when Whetstone released its new search tool Remem, it raised concerns for me in a way none of its predecessors did.

 Millions of people, some my age but most younger, have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”

Remem monitors your conversation for references to past events, and then displays video of that event in the lower left corner of your field of vision. If you say “remember dancing the conga at that wedding?”, Remem will bring up the video. If the person you’re talking to says “the last time we were at the beach,” Remem will bring up the video. And it’s not only for use when speaking with someone else; Remem also monitors your subvocalizations. If you read the words “the first Szechuan restaurant you ate at,” your vocal cords will move as if you’re reading aloud, and Remem will bring up the relevant video.

There’s no denying the usefulness of software that can actually answer the question “where did I put my keys?” But Whetstone is positioning Remem as more than a handy virtual assistant: they want it to take the place of your natural memory.

It was the summer of Jijingi’s thirteenth year when a European came to live in the village. The dusty harmattan winds had just begun blowing from the north when Sabe, the elder who was regarded as chief by all the local families, made the announcement.

Everyone’s initial reaction was alarm, of course. “What have we done wrong?” Jijingi’s father asked Sabe.

Europeans had first come to Tivland many years ago, and while some elders said one day they’d leave and life would return to the ways of the past, until that day arrived it was necessary for the Tiv to get along with them. This had meant many changes in the way the Tiv did things, but it had never meant Europeans living among them before. The usual reason for Europeans to come to the village was to collect taxes for the roads they had built; they visited some clans more often because the people refused to pay taxes, but that hadn’t happened in the Shangev clan. Sabe and the other clan elders had agreed that paying the taxes was the best strategy.

Sabe told everyone not to worry. “This European is a missionary; that means all he does is pray. He has no authority to punish us, but our making him welcome will please the men in the administration.”

He ordered two huts built for the missionary, a sleeping hut and a reception hut. Over the course of the next several days everyone took time off from harvesting the guinea-corn to help lay bricks, sink posts into the ground, weave grass into thatch for the roof. It was during the final step, pounding the floor, that the missionary arrived. His porters appeared first, the boxes they carried visible from a distance as they threaded their way between the cassava fields; the missionary himself was the last to appear, apparently exhausted even though he carried nothing. His name was Moseby, and he thanked everyone who had worked on the huts. He tried to help, but it quickly became clear that he didn’t know how to do anything, so eventually he just sat in the shade of a locust bean tree and wiped his head with a piece of cloth.

Jijingi watched the missionary with curiosity. The man opened one of his boxes and took out what at first looked like a block of wood, but then he split it open and Jijingi realized it was a tightly bound sheaf of papers. Jijingi had seen paper before; when the Europeans collected taxes, they gave paper in return so that the village had proof of what they’d paid. But the paper that the missionary was looking at was obviously of a different sort, and must have had some other purpose.

The man noticed Jijingi looking at him, and invited him to come closer. “My name is Moseby,” he said. “What is your name?”

“I am Jijingi, and my father is Orga of the Shangev clan.”

Moseby spread open the sheaf of paper and gestured toward it. “Have you heard the story of Adam?” he asked. “Adam was the first man. We are all children of Adam.”

 “Here we are descendants of Shangev,” said Jijingi. “And everyone in Tivland is a descendant of Tiv.”

“Yes, but your ancestor Tiv was descended from Adam, just as my ancestors were. We are all brothers. Do you understand?”

The missionary spoke as if his tongue were too large for his mouth, but Jijingi could tell what he was saying. “Yes, I understand.”

Moseby smiled, and pointed at the paper. “This paper tells the story of Adam.”

“How can paper tell a story?”

“It is an art that we Europeans know. When a man speaks, we make marks on the paper. When another man looks at the paper later, he sees the marks and knows what sounds the first man made. In that way the second man can hear what the first man said.”

Jijingi remembered something his father had told him about old Gbegba, who was the most skilled in bushcraft. “Where you or I would see nothing but some disturbed grass, he can see that a leopard had killed a cane rat at that spot and carried it off,” his father said. Gbegba was able to look at the ground and know what had happened even though he had not been present. This art of the Europeans must be similar: those who were skilled in interpreting the marks could hear a story even if they hadn’t been there when it was told.

“Tell me the story that the paper tells,” he said.

Moseby told him a story about Adam and his wife being tricked by a snake. Then he asked Jijingi, “How do you like it?”

“You’re a poor storyteller, but the story was interesting enough.”

Moseby laughed. “You are right, I am not good at the Tiv language. But this is a good story. It is the oldest story we have. It was first told long before your ancestor Tiv was born.”

  Jijingi was dubious. “That paper can’t be so old.”

“No, this paper is not. But the marks on it were copied from older paper. And those marks were copied from older paper. And so forth many times.”

That would be impressive, if true. Jijingi liked stories, and older stories were often the best. “How many stories do you have there?”

“Very many.” Moseby flipped through the sheaf of papers, and Jijingi could see each sheet was covered with marks from edge to edge; there must be many, many stories there.

“This art you spoke of, interpreting marks on paper; is it only for Europeans?”

“No, I can teach it to you. Would you like that?”

Cautiously, Jijingi nodded.

As a journalist, I have long appreciated the usefulness of lifelogging for determining the facts of the matter. There is scarcely a legal proceeding, criminal or civil, that doesn’t make use of someone’s lifelog, and rightly so. When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.

However, I’ve been much more skeptical about the use of lifelogging in purely personal situations. When lifelogging first became popular, there were couples who thought they could use it to settle arguments over who had actually said what, using the video record to prove they were right. But finding the right clip of video often wasn’t easy, and all but the most determined gave up on doing so. The inconvenience acted as a barrier, limiting the searching of lifelogs to those situations in which effort was warranted, namely situations in which justice was the motivating factor.

Now with Remem, finding the exact moment has become easy, and lifelogs that previously lay all but ignored are now being scrutinized as if they were crime scenes, thickly strewn with evidence for use in domestic squabbles.

 I typically write for the news section, but I’ve written feature stories as well, and so when I pitched an article about the potential downsides of Remem to my managing editor, he gave me the go-ahead. My first interview was with a married couple whom I’ll call Joel and Deirdre, an architect and a painter, respectively. It wasn’t hard to get them talking about Remem.

“Joel is always saying that he knew it all along,” said Deirdre, “even when he didn’t. It used to drive me crazy, because I couldn’t get him to admit he used to believe something else. Now I can. For example, recently we were talking about the McKittridge kidnapping case.”

She sent me the video of one argument she had with Joel. My retinal projector displayed footage of a cocktail party; it’s from Deirdre’s point of view, and Joel is telling a number of people, “It was pretty clear that he was guilty from the day he was arrested.”

Deirdre’s voice: “You didn’t always think that. For months you argued that he was innocent.”

Joel shakes his head. “No, you’re misremembering. I said that even people who are obviously guilty deserve a fair trial.”

“That’s not what you said. You said he was being railroaded.”

“You’re thinking of someone else; that wasn’t me.”

“No, it was you. Look.” A separate video window opened up, an excerpt of her lifelog that she looked up and broadcast to the people they’ve been talking with. Within the nested video, Joel and Deirdre are sitting in a café, and Joel is saying, “He’s a scapegoat. The police needed to reassure the public, so they arrested a convenient suspect. Now he’s done for.” Deidre replies, “You don’t think there’s any chance of him being acquitted?” and Joel answers, “Not unless he can afford a high-powered defense team, and I’ll bet you he can’t. People in his position will never get a fair trial.”

I closed both windows, and Deirdre said, “Without Remem, I’d never be able to convince him that he changed his position. Now I have proof.”

  “Fine, you were right that time,” said Joel. “But you didn’t have to do that in front of our friends.”

“You correct me in front of our friends all the time. You’re telling me I can’t do the same?”

Here was the line at which the pursuit of truth ceased to be an intrinsic good. When the only persons affected have a personal relationship with each other, other priorities are often more important, and a forensic pursuit of the truth could be harmful. Did it really matter whose idea it was to take the vacation that turned out so disastrously? Did you need to know which partner was more forgetful about completing errands the other person asked of them? I was no expert on marriage, but I knew what marriage counselors said: pinpointing blame wasn’t the answer. Instead, couples needed to acknowledge each other’s feelings and address their problems as a team.

Next I spoke with a spokesperson from Whetstone, Erica Meyers. For a while she gave me a typically corporate spiel about the benefits of Remem. “Making information more accessible is an intrinsic good,” she says. “Ubiquitous video has revolutionized law enforcement. Businesses become more effective when they adopt good record-keeping practices. The same thing happens to us as individuals when our memories become more accurate: we get better, not just at doing our jobs, but at living our lives.”

When I asked her about couples like Joel and Deirdre, she said, “If your marriage is solid, Remem isn’t going to hurt it. But if you’re the type of person who’s constantly trying to prove that you’re right and your spouse is wrong, then your marriage is going to be in trouble whether you use Remem or not.”

I conceded that she may have had a point in this particular case. But, I asked her, didn’t she think Remem created greater opportunities for those types of arguments to arise, even in solid marriages, by making it easier for people to keep score?

  “Not at all,” she said. “Remem didn’t give them a scorekeeping mentality; they developed that on their own. Another couple could just as easily use Remem to realize that they’ve both misremembered things, and become more forgiving when that sort of mistake happens. I predict the latter scenario will be the more common one with our customers as a whole.”

I wished I could share Erica Meyers’ optimism, but I knew that new technology didn’t always bring out the best in people. Who hasn’t wished they could prove that their version of events was the correct one? I could easily see myself using Remem the way Deirdre did, and I wasn’t at all certain that doing so would be good for me. Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.

Moseby gave a sermon every seven days, on the day devoted to resting and brewing and drinking beer. He seemed to disapprove of the beer drinking, but he didn’t want to speak on one of the days of work, so the day of beer brewing was the only one left. He talked about the European god, and told people that following his rules would improve their lives, but his explanations of how that would do so weren’t particularly persuasive.

But Moseby also had some skill at dispensing medicine, and he was willing to learn how to work in the fields, so gradually people grew more accepting of him, and Jijingi’s father let him visit Moseby occasionally to learn the art of writing. Moseby offered to teach the other children as well, and for a time Jijingi’s age-mates came along, mostly to prove to each other that they weren’t afraid of being near a European. Before long the other boys grew bored and left, but because Jijingi remained interested in writing and his father thought it would keep the Europeans happy, he was eventually permitted to go every day.

Moseby explained to Jijingi how each sound a person spoke could be indicated with different marks on the paper. The marks were arranged in rows like plants in a field; you looked at the marks as if you were walking down a row, made the sound each mark indicated, and you would find yourself speaking what the original person had said. Moseby showed him how to make each of the different marks on a sheet of paper, using a tiny wooden rod that had a core of soot.

  In a typical lesson, Moseby would speak, and then write what he had said: “When night comes I shall sleep.” Tugh mba a ile yo me yav. “There are two persons.” Ioruv mban mba uhar. Jijingi carefully copied the writing on his sheet of paper, and when he was done, Moseby would look at it.

“Very good. But you need to leave spaces when you write.”

“I have.” Jijingi pointed at the gap between each row.

“No, that is not what I mean. Do you see the spaces within each line?” He pointed at his own paper.

Jijingi understood. “Your marks are clumped together, while mine are arranged evenly.”

“These are not just clumps of marks. They are… I do not know what you call them.” He picked up a thin sheaf of paper from his table and flipped through it. “I do not see it here. Where I come from, we call them ‘words.’ When we write, we leave spaces between the words.”

“But what are words?”

“How can I explain it?” He thought a moment. “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. That’s why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused:Anyom a ou kuma a me?

“But you speak slowly because you’re a foreigner. I’m Tiv, so I don’t pause when I speak. Shouldn’t my writing be the same?”

“It does not matter how fast you speak. Words are the same whether you speak quickly or slowly.”

“Then why did you say you pause after each word?”

“That is the easiest way to find them. Try saying this very slowly.” He pointed at what he’d just written.

Jijingi spoke very slowly, the way a man might when trying to hide his drunkenness. “Why is there no space in between an and yom?”

“Anyom is one word. You do not pause in the middle of it.”

“But I wouldn’t pause after anyom either.”

Moseby sighed. “I will think more about how to explain what I mean. For now, just leave spaces in the places where I leave spaces.”

What a strange art writing was. When sowing a field, it was best to have the seed yams spaced evenly; Jijingi’s father would have beaten him if he’d clumped the yams the way the Moseby clumped his marks on paper. But he had resolved to learn this art as best he could, and if that meant clumping his marks, he would do so.

It was only many lessons later that Jijingi finally understood where he should leave spaces, and what Moseby meant when he said “word.” You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.

Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person’s mouth hadn’t changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn’t known it until now.

The ease of searching that Remem provides is impressive enough, but that merely scratches the surface of what Whetstone sees as the product’s potential. When Deirdre fact-checked her husband’s previous statements, she was posing explicit queries to Remem. But Whetstone expects that, as people become accustomed to their product, queries will take the place of ordinary acts of recall, and Remem will be integrated into their very thought processes. Once that happens, we will become cognitive cyborgs, effectively incapable of misremembering anything; digital video stored on error-corrected silicon will take over the role once filled by our fallible temporal lobes.

What might it be like to have a perfect memory? Arguably the individual with the best memory ever documented was Solomon Shereshevskii, who lived in Russia during the first half of the twentieth century. The psychologists who tested him found that he could hear a series of words or numbers once and remember it months or even years later. With no knowledge of Italian, Shereshevskii was able to quote stanzas of The Divine Comedy that had been read to him fifteen years earlier.

But having a perfect memory wasn’t the blessing one might imagine it to be. Reading a passage of text evoked so many images in Shereshevskii’s mind that he often couldn’t focus on what it actually said, and his awareness of innumerable specific examples made it difficult for him to understand abstract concepts. At times, he tried to deliberately forget things. He wrote down numbers he no longer wanted to remember on slips of paper and then burnt them, a kind of slash-and-burn approach to clearing out the undergrowth of his mind, but to no avail.

When I raised the possibility that a perfect memory might be a handicap to Whetstone’s spokesperson, Erica Meyers, she had a ready reply. “This is no different from the concerns people used to have about retinal projectors,” she said. “They worried that seeing updates constantly would be distracting or overwhelming, but we’ve all adapted to them.”

I didn’t mention that not everyone considered that a positive development.

“And Remem is entirely customizable,” she continued. “If at any time you find it’s doing too many searches for your needs, you can decrease its level of responsiveness. But according to our customer analytics, our users haven’t been doing that. As they become more comfortable with it, they’re finding that Remem becomes more helpful the more responsive it is.”

But even if Remem wasn’t constantly crowding your field of vision with unwanted imagery of the past, I wondered if there weren’t issues raised simply by having that imagery be perfect.

“Forgive and forget” goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that was all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions wasn’t so straightforward. In most cases we had to forget a little bit before we could forgive; when we no longer experienced the pain as fresh, the insult was easier to forgive, which in turn made it less memorable, and so on. It was this psychological feedback loop that made initially infuriating offences seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.

What I feared was that Remem would make it impossible for this feedback loop to get rolling. By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that’s needed for forgiveness to begin. I thought back to what Erica Meyers said about Remem’s inability to hurt solid marriages. Implicit in that assertion was a claim about what qualified as a solid marriage. If someone’s marriage was built on—as ironic as it might sound—a cornerstone of forgetfulness, what right did Whetstone have to shatter that?

The issue wasn’t confined to marriages; all sorts of relationships rely on forgiving and forgetting. My daughter Nicole has always been strong-willed; rambunctious when she was a child, openly defiant as an adolescent. She and I had many furious arguments during her teen years, arguments that we have mostly been able to put behind us, and now our relationship is pretty good. If we’d had Remem, would we still be speaking to each other?

I don’t mean to say that forgetting is the only way to mend relationships. While I can no longer recall most of the arguments Nicole and I had—and I’m grateful that I can’t—one of the arguments I remember clearly is one that spurred me to be a better father.

It was when Nicole was sixteen, a junior in high school. It had been two years since her mother Angela had left, probably the two hardest years of both our lives. I don’t remember what started the argument—something trivial, no doubt—but it escalated and before long Nicole was taking her anger at Angela out on me.

“You’re the reason she left! You drove her away! You can leave too, for all I care. I sure as hell would be better off without you.” And to demonstrate her point, she stormed out of the house.

I knew it wasn’t premeditated malice on her part—I don’t think she engaged in much premeditation in anything during that phase of her life—but she couldn’t have come up with a more hurtful accusation if she’d tried. I’d been devastated by Angela’s departure, and I was constantly wondering what I could have done differently to keep her.

Nicole didn’t come back until the next day, and that night was one of soul searching for me. While I didn’t believe I was responsible for her mother leaving us, Nicole’s accusation still served as a wake-up call. I hadn’t been conscious of it, but I realized that I had been thinking of myself as the greatest victim of Angela’s departure, wallowing in self-pity over just how unreasonable my situation was. It hadn’t even been my idea to have children; it was Angela who’d wanted to be a parent, and now she had left me holding the bag. What sane world would leave me with sole responsibility for raising an adolescent girl? How could a job that was so difficult be entrusted to someone with no experience whatsoever?

Nicole’s accusation made me realize her predicament was worse than mine. At least I had volunteered for this duty, albeit long ago and without full appreciation for what I was getting into. Nicole had been drafted into her role, with no say whatsoever. If there was anyone who had a right to be resentful, it was her. And while I thought I’d been doing a good job of being a father, obviously I needed to do better.

I turned myself around. Our relationship didn’t improve overnight, but over the years I was able to work myself back into Nicole’s good graces. I remember the way she hugged me at her college graduation, and I realized my years of effort had paid off.

Would those years of repair have been possible with Remem? Even if each of us could have refrained from throwing the other’s bad behavior in their faces, the opportunity to privately rewatch video of our arguments seems like it could be pernicious. Vivid reminders of the way she and I yelled at each other in the past might have kept our anger fresh, and prevented us from rebuilding our relationship.

Jijingi wanted to write down some of the stories of where the Tiv people came from, but the storytellers spoke rapidly, and he wasn’t able to write fast enough to keep up with them. Moseby said he would get better with practice, but Jijingi despaired that he’d ever become fast enough.

Then, one summer a European woman named Reiss came to visit the village. Moseby said she was “a person who learns about other people” but could not explain what that meant, only that she wanted to learn about Tivland. She asked questions of everyone, not just the elders but young men, too, even women and children, and she wrote down everything they told her. She didn’t try to get anyone to adopt European practices; where Moseby had insisted that there were no such thing as curses and that everything was God’s will, Reiss asked about how curses worked, and listened attentively to explanations of how your kin on your father’s side could curse you while your kin on your mother’s side could protect you from curses.

One evening Kokwa, the best storyteller in the village, told the story of how the Tiv people split into different lineages, and Reiss had written it down exactly as he told it. Later she had recopied the story using a machine she poked at noisily with her fingers, so that she had a copy that was clean and easy to read. When Jijingi asked if she would make another copy for him, she agreed, much to his excitement.

The paper version of the story was curiously disappointing. Jijingi remembered that when he had first learned about writing, he’d imagined it would enable him to see a storytelling performance as vividly as if he were there. But writing didn’t do that. When Kokwa told the story, he didn’t merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.

Jijingi was still glad to have the paper version, and would read it from time to time. It was a good story, worthy of being recorded on paper. Not everything written on paper was so worthy. During his sermons Moseby would read aloud stories from his book, and they were often good stories, but he also read aloud words he had written down just a few days before, and those were often not stories at all, merely claims that learning more about the European god would improve the lives of the Tiv people.

One day, when Moseby had been eloquent, Jijingi complimented him. “I know you think highly of all your sermons, but today’s sermon was a good one.”

“Thank you,” said Moseby, smiling. After a moment, he asked, “Why do you say I think highly of all my sermons?”

“Because you expect that people will want to read them many years from now.”

“I don’t expect that. What makes you think that?”

“You write them all down before you even deliver them. Before even one person has heard a sermon, you have written it down for future generations.”

Moseby laughed. “No, that is not why I write them down.”

“Why, then?” He knew it wasn’t for people far away to read them, because sometimes messengers came to the village to deliver paper to Moseby, and he never sent his sermons back with them.

“I write the words down so I do not forget what I want to say when I give the sermon.”

‘How could you forget what you want to say? You and I are speaking right now, and neither of us needs paper to do so.”

“A sermon is different from conversation.” Moseby paused to consider. “I want to be sure I give my sermons as well as possible. I won’t forget what I want to say, but I might forget the best way to say it. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry. But writing the words down does more than help me remember. It helps me think.”

“How does writing help you think?”

“That is a good question,” he said. “It is strange, isn’t it? I do not know how to explain it, but writing helps me decide what I want to say. Where I come from, there’s a very old proverb: verba volant, scripta manent. In Tiv you would say, ‘spoken words fly away, written words remain.’ Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Jijingi said, just to be polite; it made no sense at all. The missionary wasn’t old enough to be senile, but his memory must be terrible and he didn’t want to admit it. Jijingi told his age-mates about this, and they joked about it amongst themselves for days. Whenever they exchanged gossip, they would add, “Will you remember that? This will help you,” and mimic Moseby writing at his table.

On an evening the following year, Kokwa announced he would tell the story of how the Tiv split into different lineages. Jijingi brought out the paper version he had, so he could read the story at the same time Kokwa told it. Sometimes he could follow along, but it was often confusing because Kokwa’s words didn’t match what was written on the paper. After Kokwa was finished, Jijingi said to him, “You didn’t tell the story the same way you told it last year.”

“Nonsense,” said Kokwa. “When I tell a story it doesn’t change, no matter how much time passes. Ask me to tell it twenty years from today, and I will tell it exactly the same.”

Jijingi pointed at the paper he held. “This paper is the story you told last year, and there were many differences.” He picked one he remembered. “Last time you said, ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves.’ This time you said, ‘they made slaves of the women, but they did not stop there: they even made slaves of the children.’”

“That’s the same.”

“It is the same story, but you’ve changed the way you tell it.”

“No,” said Kokwa, “I told it just as I told it before.”

Jijingi didn’t want to try to explain what words were. Instead he said, “If you told it as you did before, you would say ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves’ every time.”

 For a moment Kokwa stared at him, and then he laughed. “Is this what you think is important, now that you’ve learned the art of writing?”

Sabe, who had been listening to them, chided Kokwa. “It’s not your place to judge Jijingi. The hare favors one food, the hippo favors another. Let each spend his time as he pleases.”

“Of course, Sabe, of course,” said Kokwa, but he threw a derisive glance at Jijingi.

Afterwards, Jijingi remembered the proverb Moseby had mentioned. Even though Kokwa was telling the same story, he might arrange the words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible, but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words. Once he found the one he wanted, he could hold on to it for as long as he needed.

Out of curiosity, Jijingi tried imagining he had to deliver a sermon, and began writing down what he would say. Seated on the root of a mango tree with the notebook Moseby had given him, he composed a sermon on tsav, the quality that enabled some men to have power over others, and a subject which Moseby hadn’t understood and had dismissed as foolishness. He read his first attempt to one of his age-mates, who pronounced it terrible, leading them to have a brief shoving match, but afterwards Jijingi had to admit his age-mate was right. He tried writing out his sermon a second time and then a third before he became tired of it and moved on to other topics.

As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant; writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.

Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory—knowledge of general facts—and episodic memory—recollection of personal experiences. We’ve been using technological supplements for semantic memory ever since the invention of writing: first books, then search engines. By contrast, we’ve historically resisted such aids when it comes to episodic memory; few people have ever kept as many diaries or photo albums as they did ordinary books. The obvious reason is convenience; if we wanted a book on the birds of North America, we could consult one that an ornithologist has written, but if we wanted a daily diary, we had to write it for ourselves. But I also wonder if another reason is that, subconsciously, we regarded our episodic memories as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them, to relegate them to books on a shelf or files on a computer.

That may be about to change. For years parents have been recording their children’s every moment, so even if children weren’t wearing personal cams, their lifelogs were effectively already being compiled. Now parents are having their children wear retinal projectors at younger and younger ages so they can reap the benefits of assistive software agents sooner. Imagine what will happen if children begin using Remem to access those lifelogs: their mode of cognition will diverge from ours because the act of recall will be different. Rather than thinking of an event from her past and seeing it with her mind’s eye, a child will subvocalize a reference to it and watch video footage with her physical eyes. Episodic memory will become entirely technologically mediated.

An obvious drawback to such reliance is the possibility that people might become virtual amnesiacs whenever the software crashes. But just as worrying to me as the prospect of technological failure was that of technological success: how will it change a person’s conception of herself when she’s only seen her past through the unblinking eye of a video camera? Just as there’s a feedback loop in softening harsh memories, there’s also one at work in the romanticization of childhood memories, and disrupting that process will have consequences.

The earliest birthday I remember is my fourth; I remember blowing out the candles on my cake, the thrill of tearing the wrapping paper off the presents. There’s no video of the event, but there are snapshots in the family album, and they are consistent with what I remember. In fact, I suspect I no longer remember the day itself. It’s more likely that I manufactured the memory when I was first shown the snapshots and over time, I’ve imbued it with the emotion I imagine I felt that day. Little by little, over repeated instances of recall, I’ve created a happy memory for myself.

Another of my earliest memories is of playing on the living room rug, pushing toy cars around, while my grandmother worked at her sewing machine; she would occasionally turn and smile warmly at me. There are no photos of that moment, so I know the recollection is mine and mine alone. It is a lovely, idyllic memory. Would I want to be presented with actual footage of that afternoon? No; absolutely not.

Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, “On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.” Our memories are private autobiographies, and that afternoon with my grandmother features prominently in mine because of the feelings associated with it. What if video footage revealed that my grandmother’s smile was in fact perfunctory, that she was actually frustrated because her sewing wasn’t going well? What’s important to me about that memory is the happiness I associated with it, and I wouldn’t want that jeopardized.

It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn’t capture the emotional dimension of events. As far as the camera was concerned, that afternoon with my grandmother would be indistinguishable from a hundred others. And if I’d grown up with access to all the video footage, there’d have been no way for me to assign more emotional weight to any particular day, no nucleus around which nostalgia could accrete.

And what will the consequences be when people can claim to remember their infancy? I could readily imagine a situation where, if you ask a young person what her earliest memory is, she will simply look baffled; after all, she has video dating back to the day of her birth. The inability to remember the first few years of one’s life—what psychologists call childhood amnesia—might soon be a thing of the past. No more would parents tell their children anecdotes beginning with the words “You don’t remember this because you were just a toddler when it happened.” It’ll be as if childhood amnesia is a characteristic of humanity’s childhood, and in ouroboric fashion, our youth will vanish from our memories.

Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children’s ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do of my imperfect, organic memories.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.

But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of selves? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

When Jijingi was twenty, an officer from the administration came to the village to speak with Sabe. He had brought with him a young Tiv man who had attended the mission school in Katsina-Ala. The administration wanted to have a written record of all the disputes brought before the tribal courts, so they were assigning each chief one of these youths to act as a scribe. Sabe had Jijingi come forward, and to the officer he said, “I know you don’t have enough scribes for all of Tivland. Jijingi here has learned to write; he can act as our scribe, and you can send your boy to another village.” The officer tested Jijingi’s ability to write, but Moseby had taught him well, and eventually the officer agreed to have him be Sabe’s scribe.

After the officer had left, Jijingi asked Sabe why he hadn’t wanted the boy from Katsina-Ala to be his scribe.

“No one who comes from the mission school can be trusted,” said Sabe.

“Why not? Did the Europeans make them liars?”

“They’re partly to blame, but so are we. When the Europeans collected boys for the mission school years ago, most elders gave them the ones they wanted to get rid of, the layabouts and malcontents. Now those boys have returned, and they feel no kinship with anyone. They wield their knowledge of writing like a long gun; they demand their chiefs find them wives, or else they’ll write lies about them and have the Europeans depose them.”

Jijingi knew a boy who was always complaining and looking for ways to avoid work; it would be a disaster if someone like him had power over Sabe. “Can’t you tell the Europeans about this?”

“Many have,” Sabe answered. “It was Maisho of the Kwande clan who warned me about the scribes; they were installed in Kwande villages first. Maisho was fortunate that the Europeans believed him instead of his scribe’s lies, but he knows of other chiefs who were not so lucky; the Europeans often believe paper over people. I don’t wish to take the chance.” He looked at Jijingi seriously. “You are my kin, Jijingi, and kin to everyone in this village. I trust you to write down what I say.”

“Yes, Sabe.”

Tribal court was held every month, from morning until late afternoon for three days in a row, and it always attracted an audience, sometimes one so large that Sabe had to demand everyone sit to allow the breeze to reach the center of the circle. Jijingi sat next to Sabe and recorded the details of each dispute in a book the officer had left. It was a good job; he was paid out of the fees collected from the disputants, and he was given not just a chair but a small table too, which he could use for writing even when court wasn’t in session. The complaints Sabe heard were varied—one might be about a stolen bicycle, another might be about whether a man was responsible for his neighbor’s crops failing—but most had to do with wives. For one such dispute, Jijingi wrote down the following:

Umem’s wife Girgi has run away from home and gone back to her kin. Her kinsman Anongo has tried to convince her to stay with her husband, but Girgi refuses, and there is no more Anongo can do. Umem demands the return of the £11 he paid as bridewealth. Anongo says he has no money at the moment, and moreover that he was only paid £6.

Sabe requested witnesses for both sides. Anongo says he has witnesses, but they have gone on a trip. Umem produces a witness, who is sworn in. He testifies that he himself counted the £11 that Umem paid to Anongo.

Sabe asks Girgi to return to her husband and be a good wife, but she says she has had all that she can stand of him. Sabe instructs Anongo to repay Umem £11, the first payment to be in three months when his crops are saleable. Anongo agrees.

It was the final dispute of the day, by which time Sabe was clearly tired. “Selling vegetables to pay back bridewealth,” he said afterwards, shaking his head. “This wouldn’t have happened when I was a boy.”

Jijingi knew what he meant. In the past, the elders said, you conducted exchanges with similar items: if you wanted a goat, you could trade chickens for it; if you wanted to marry a woman, you promised one of your kinswomen to her family. Then the Europeans said they would no longer accept vegetables as payment for taxes, insisting that it be paid in coin. Before long, everything could be exchanged for money; you could use it to buy everything from a calabash to a wife. The elders considered it absurd.

“The old ways are vanishing,” agreed Jijingi. He didn’t say that young people preferred things this way, because the Europeans had also decreed that bridewealth could only be paid if the woman consented to the marriage. In the past, a young woman might be promised to an old man with leprous hands and rotting teeth, and have no choice but to marry him. Now a woman could marry the man she favored, as long as he could afford to pay the bridewealth. Jijingi himself was saving money to marry.

Moseby came to watch sometimes, but he found the proceedings confusing, and often asked Jijingi questions afterwards.

“For example, there was the dispute between Umem and Anongo over how much bridewealth was owed. Why was only the witness sworn in?” asked Moseby.

“To ensure that he said precisely what happened.”

“But if Umem and Anongo were sworn in, that would have ensured they said precisely what happened too. Anongo was able to lie because he was not sworn in.”

Anongo didn’t lie,” said Jijingi. “He said what he considered right, just as Umem did.”

“But what Anongo said wasn’t the same as what the witness said.”

“But that doesn’t mean he was lying.” Then Jijingi remembered something about the European language, and understood Moseby’s confusion. “Our language has two words for what in your language is called ‘true.’ There is what’s right, mimi, and what’s precise, vough. In a dispute the principals say what they consider right; they speak mimi. The witnesses, however, are sworn to say precisely what happened; they speak vough. When Sabe has heard what happened can he decide what action is mimi for everyone. But it’s not lying if the principals don’t speak vough, as long as they speakmimi.”

Moseby clearly disapproved. “In the land I come from, everyone who testifies in court must swear to speak vough, even the principals.”

Jijingi didn’t see the point of that, but all he said was, “Every tribe has its own customs.”

“Yes, customs may vary, but the truth is the truth; it doesn’t change from one person to another. And remember what the Bible says: the truth shall set you free.”

“I remember,” said Jijingi. Moseby had said that it was knowing God’s truth that had made the Europeans so successful. There was no denying their wealth or power, but who knew what was the cause?

In order to write about Remem, it was only fair that I try it out myself. The problem was that I didn’t have a lifelog for it to index; typically I only activated my personal cam when I was conducting an interview or covering an event. But I’ve certainly spent time in the presence of people who kept lifelogs, and I could make use of what they’d recorded. While all lifelogging software has privacy controls in place, most people also grant basic sharing rights: if your actions were recorded in their lifelog, you have access to the footage in which you’re present. So I launched an agent to assemble a partial lifelog from the footage others had recorded, using my GPS history as the basis for the query. Over the course of a week, my request propagated through social networks and public video archives, and I was rewarded with snippets of video ranging from a few seconds in length to a few hours: not just security-cam footage but excerpts from the lifelogs of friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers.

The resulting lifelog was of course highly fragmentary compared to what I would have had if I’d been recording video myself, and the footage was all from a third-person perspective rather than the first-person that most lifelogs have, but Remem was able to work with that. I expected that coverage would be thickest in the later years, simply due to the increasing popularity of lifelogs. It was somewhat to my surprise, then, that when I looked at a graph of the coverage, I found a bump in the coverage over a decade ago. Nicole had been keeping a lifelog since she was a teenager, so an unexpectedly large segment of my domestic life was present.

I was initially a bit uncertain of how to test Remem, since I obviously couldn’t ask it to bring up video of an event I didn’t remember. I figured I’d start out with something I did remember. I subvocalized, “The time Vince told me about his trip to Palau.”

My retinal projector displayed a window in the lower left corner of my field of vision: I’m having lunch with my friends Vincent and Jeremy. Vincent didn’t maintain a lifelog either, so the footage was from Jeremy’s point of view. I listened to Vincent rave about scuba diving for a minute.

Next I tried something that I only vaguely remembered. “The dinner banquet when I sat between Deborah and Lyle.” I didn’t remember who else was sitting at the table, and wondered if Remem could help me identify them.

Sure enough, Deborah had been recording that evening, and with her video I was able to use a recognition agent to identity everyone sitting across from us.

After those initial successes, I had a run of failures; not surprising, considering the gaps in the lifelog. But over the course of an hour-long trip survey of past events, Remem’s performance was generally impressive.

Finally it seemed time for me to try Remem on some memories that were more emotionally freighted. My relationship with Nicole felt strong enough now for me to safely revisit the fights we’d had when she was young. I figured I’d start with the argument I remembered clearly, and work backwards from there.

I subvocalized, “The time Nicole yelled at me ‘you’re the reason she left.’”

The window displays the kitchen of the house we lived in when Nicole was growing up. The footage is from Nicole’s point of view, and I’m standing in front of the stove. It’s obvious we’re fighting.

“You’re the reason she left. You can leave too, for all I care. I sure as hell would be better off without you.”

The words were just as I remembered them, but it wasn’t Nicole saying them.

It was me.

My first thought was that it must be a fake, that Nicole had edited the video to put her words into my mouth. She must have noticed my request for access to her lifelog footage, and concocted this to teach me a lesson. Or perhaps it was a film she had created to show her friends, to reinforce the stories she told about me. But why was she still so angry at me, that she would do such a thing? Hadn’t we gotten past this?

I started skimming through the video, looking for inconsistencies that would indicate where the edited footage had been spliced in. The subsequent footage showed Nicole running out of the house, just as I remembered, so there wouldn’t be signs of inconsistency there. I rewound the video and started watching the preceding argument.

Initially I was angry as I watched, angry at Nicole for going to such lengths to create this lie, because the preceding footage was all consistent with me being the one who yelled at her. Then some of what I was saying in the video began to sound queasily familiar: complaining about being called to her school again because she’d gotten into trouble, accusing her of spending time with the wrong crowd. But this wasn’t the context in which I’d said those things, was it? I had been voicing my concern, not berating her. Nicole must have adapted things I’d said elsewhere to make her slanderous video more plausible. That was the only explanation, right?

I asked Remem to examine the video’s watermark, and it reported the video was unmodified. I saw that Remem had suggested a correction in my search terms: where I had said “the time Nicole yelled at me,” it offered “the time I yelled at Nicole.” The correction must have been displayed at the same time as the initial search result, but I hadn’t noticed. I shut down Remem in disgust, furious at the product. I was about to search for information on forging a digital watermark to prove this video was faked, but I stopped myself, recognizing it as an act of desperation.

I would have testified, hand on a stack of Bibles or using any oath required of me, that it was Nicole who’d accused me of being the reason her mother left us. My recollection of that argument was as clear as any memory I had, but that wasn’t the only reason I found the video hard to believe; it was also my knowledge that—whatever my faults or imperfections—I was never the kind of father who could say such a thing to his child.

Yet here was digital video proving that I had been exactly that kind of father. And while I wasn’t that man anymore, I couldn’t deny that I was continuous with him.

Even more telling was the fact that for many years I had successfully hidden the truth from myself. Earlier I said that the details we choose to remember are a reflection of our personalities. What did it say about me that I put those words in Nicole’s mouth instead of mine?

I remembered that argument as being a turning point for me. I had imagined a narrative of redemption and self-improvement in which I was the heroic single father, rising to meet the challenge. But the reality was…what? How much of what had happened since then could I take credit for?

I restarted Remem and began looking at video of Nicole’s graduation from college. That was an event I had recorded myself, so I had footage of Nicole’s face, and she seemed genuinely happy in my presence. Was she hiding her true feelings so well that I couldn’t detect them? Or, if our relationship had actually improved, how had that happened? I had obviously been a much worse father fourteen years ago than I’d thought; it would be tempting to conclude I had come farther to reach where I currently was, but I couldn’t trust my perceptions anymore. Did Nicole even have positive feelings about me now?

I wasn’t going to try using Remem to answer this question; I needed to go to the source. I called Nicole and left a message saying I wanted to talk to her, and asking if I could come over to her apartment that evening.

It was a few years later that Sabe began attending a series of meetings of all the chiefs in the Shangev clan. He explained to Jijingi that the Europeans no longer wished to deal with so many chiefs, and were demanding that all of Tivland be divided into eight groups they called ‘septs.’ As a result, Sabe and the other chiefs had to discuss who the Shangev clan would join with. Although there was no need for a scribe, Jijingi was curious to hear the deliberations and asked Sabe if he might accompany him, and Sabe agreed.

Jijingi had never seen so many elders in one place before; some were even-tempered and dignified like Sabe, while others were loud and full of bluster. They argued for hours on end.

In the evening after Jijingi had returned, Moseby asked him what it had been like. Jijingi sighed. “Even if they’re not yelling, they’re fighting like wildcats.”

“Who does Sabe think you should join?”

“We should join with the clans that we’re most closely related to; that’s the Tiv way. And since Shangev was the son of Kwande, our clan should join with the Kwande clan, who live to the south.”

“That makes sense,” said Moseby. “So why is there disagreement?”

“The members of the Shangev clan don’t all live next to each other. Some live on the farmland in the west, near the Jechira clan, and the elders there are friendly with the Jechira elders. They’d like the Shangev clan to join the Jechira clan, because then they’d have more influence in the resulting sept.”

“I see.” Moseby thought for a moment. “Could the western Shangev join a different sept from the southern Shangev?”

Jijingi shook his head. “We Shangev all have one father, so we should all remain together. All the elders agree on that.”

“But if lineage is so important, how can the elders from the west argue that the Shangev clan ought to join with the Jechira clan?”

“That’s what the disagreement was about. The elders from the west are claiming Shangev was the son of Jechira.”

“Wait, you don’t know who Shangev’s parents were?”

“Of course we know! Sabe can recite his ancestors all the way back to Tiv himself. The elders from the west are merely pretending that Shangev was Jechira’s son because they’d benefit from joining with the Jechira clan.”

“But if the Shangev clan joined with the Kwande clan, wouldn’t your elders benefit?”

“Yes, but Shangev was Kwande’s son.” Then Jijingi realized what Moseby was implying. “You think our elders are the ones pretending!”

“No, not at all. It just sounds like both sides have equally good claims, and there’s no way to tell who’s right.”

“Sabe’s right.”

“Of course,” said Moseby. “But how can you get the others to admit that? In the land I come from, many people write down their lineage on paper. That way we can trace our ancestry precisely, even many generations in the past.”

 “Yes, I’ve seen the lineages in your Bible, tracing Abraham back to Adam.”

“Of course. But even apart from the Bible, people have recorded their lineages. When people want to find out who they’re descended from, they can consult paper. If you had paper, the other elders would have to admit that Sabe was right.”

That was a good point, Jijingi admitted. If only the Shangev clan had been using paper long ago. Then something occurred to him. “How long ago did the Europeans first come to Tivland?”

“I’m not sure. At least forty years ago, I think.”

“Do you think they might have written down anything about the Shangev clan’s lineage when they first arrived?”

Moseby looked thoughtful. “Perhaps. The administration definitely keeps a lot of records. If there are any, they’d be stored at the government station in Katsina-Ala.”

A truck carried goods along the motor road into Katsina-Ala every fifth day, when the market was being held, and the next market would be the day after tomorrow. If he left tomorrow morning, he could reach the motor road in time to get a ride. “Do you think they would let me see them?”

“It might be easier if you have a European with you,” said Moseby, smiling. “Shall we take a trip?”

Nicole opened the door to her apartment and invited me in. She was obviously curious about why I’d come. “So what did you want to talk about?”

I wasn’t sure how to begin. “This is going to sound strange.”

“Okay,” she said.

I told her about viewing my partial lifelog using Remem, and seeing the argument we’d had when she was sixteen that ended with me yelling at her and her leaving the house. “Do you remember that day?”

“Of course I do.” She looked uncomfortable, uncertain of where I was going with this.

“I remembered it too, or at least I thought I did. But I remembered it differently. The way I remembered it, it was you who said it to me.”

“Me who said what?”

“I remembered you telling me that I could leave for all you cared, and that you’d be better off without me.”

Nicole stared at me for a long time. “All these years, that’s how you’ve remembered that day?”

“Yes, until today.”

“That’d almost be funny if it weren’t so sad.”

I felt sick to my stomach. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Sorry you said it, or sorry that you imagined me saying it?”

“Both.”

“Well you should be! You know how that made me feel?”

“I can’t imagine. I know I felt terrible when I thought you had said it to me.”

“Except that was just something you made up. It actually happened to me.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Fucking typical.”

That hurt to hear. “Is it? Really?”

“Sure,” she said. “You’re always acting like you’re the victim, like you’re the good guy who deserves to be treated better than you are.”

“You make me sound like I’m delusional.”

“Not delusional. Just blind and self-absorbed.”

I bristled a little. “I’m trying to apologize here.”

“Right, right. This is about you.”

“No, you’re right, I’m sorry.” I waited until Nicole gestured for me to go on. “I guess I am…blind and self-absorbed. The reason it’s hard for me to admit that is that I thought I had opened my eyes and gotten over that.”

She frowned. “What?”

I told her how I felt like I had turned around as a father and rebuilt our relationship, culminating in a moment of bonding at her college graduation. Nicole wasn’t openly derisive, but her expression caused me to stop talking; it was obvious I was embarrassing myself.

“Did you still hate me at graduation?” I asked. “Was I completely making it up that you and I got along then?”

“No, we did get along at graduation. But it wasn’t because you had magically become a good father.”

“What was it, then?”

She paused, took a deep breath, and then said, “I started seeing a therapist when I went to college.” She paused again. “She pretty much saved my life.”

My first thought was, why would Nicole need a therapist? I pushed that down and said, “I didn’t know you were in therapy.”

“Of course you didn’t; you were the last person I would have told. Anyway, by the time I was a senior, she had convinced me that I was better off not staying angry at you. That’s why you and I got along so well at graduation.”

So I had indeed fabricated a narrative that bore little resemblance to reality. Nicole had done all the work, and I had done none.

“I guess I don’t really know you.”

She shrugged. “You know me as well as you need to.”

That hurt, too, but I could hardly complain. “You deserve better,” I said.

Nicole gave a brief, rueful laugh. “You know, when I was younger, I used to daydream about you saying that. But now…well, it’s not as if it fixes everything, is it?”

I realized that I’d been hoping she would forgive me then and there, and then everything would be good. But it would take more than my saying sorry to repair our relationship.

Something occurred to me. “I can’t change the things I did, but at least I can stop pretending I didn’t do them. I’m going to use Remem to get a honest picture at myself, take a kind of personal inventory.”

Nicole looked at me, gauging my sincerity. “Fine,” she said. “But let’s be clear: you don’t come running to me every time you feel guilty over treating me like crap. I worked hard to put that behind me, and I’m not going to relive it just so you can feel better about yourself.”

“Of course.” I saw that she was tearing up. “And I’ve upset you again by bringing all this up. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Dad. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. Just…let’s not do it again for a while, okay?”

“Right.” I moved toward the door to leave, and then stopped. “I just wanted to ask…if it’s possible, if there’s anything I can do to make amends…”

“Make amends?” She looked incredulous. “I don’t know. Just be more considerate, will you?”

And that what I’m trying to do.

At the government station there was indeed paper from forty years ago, what the Europeans called “assessment reports,” and Moseby’s presence was sufficient to grant them access. They were written in the European language, which Jijingi couldn’t read, but they included diagrams of the ancestry of the various clans, and he could identify the Tiv names in those diagrams easily enough, and Moseby had confirmed that his interpretation was correct. The elders in the western farms were right, and Sabe was wrong: Shangev was not Kwande’s son, he was Jechira’s.

One of the men at the government station had agreed to type up a copy of the relevant page so Jijingi could take it with him. Moseby decided to stay in Katsina-Ala to visit with the missionaries there, but Jijingi came home right away. He felt like an impatient child on the return trip, wishing he could ride the truck all the way back instead of having to walk from the motor road. As soon as he had arrived at the village, Jijingi looked for Sabe.

He found him on the path leading to a neighboring farm; some neighbors had stopped Sabe to have him settle a dispute over how a nanny goat’s kids should be distributed. Finally, they were satisfied, and Sabe resumed his walk. Jijingi walked beside him.

“Welcome back,” said Sabe.

“Sabe, I’ve been to Katsina-Ala.”

“Ah. Why did you go there?”

Jijingi showed him the paper. “This was written long ago, when the Europeans first came here. They spoke to the elders of the Shangev clan then, and when the elders told them the history of the Shangev clan, they said that Shangev was the son of Jechira.”

Sabe’s reaction was mild. “Whom did the Europeans ask?”

Jijingi looked at the paper. “Batur and Iorkyaha.”

“I remember them,” he said, nodding. “They were wise men. They would not have said such a thing.”

Jijingi pointed at the words on the page. “But they did!”

“Perhaps you are reading it wrong.”

“I am not! I know how to read.”

Sabe shrugged. “Why did you bring this paper back here?”

“What it says is important. It means we should rightfully be joined with the Jechira clan.”

“You think the clan should trust your decision on this matter?”

“I’m not asking the clan to trust me. I’m asking them to trust the men who were elders when you were young.”

“And so they should. But those men aren’t here. All you have is paper.”

“The paper tells us what they would say if they were here.”

“Does it? A man doesn’t speak only one thing. If Batur and Iorkyaha were here, they would agree with me that we should join with the Kwande clan.”

“How could they, when Shangev was the son of Jechira?” He pointed at the sheet of paper. “The Jechira are our closer kin.”

Sabe stopped walking and turned to face Jijingi. “Questions of kinship cannot be resolved by paper. You’re a scribe because Maisho of the Kwande clan warned me about the boys from the mission school. Maisho wouldn’t have looked out for us if we didn’t share the same father. Your position is proof of how close our clans are, but you forget that. You look to paper to tell you what you should already know, here.” Sabe tapped him on his chest. “Have you studied paper so much that you’ve forgotten what it is to be Tiv?”

Jijingi opened his mouth to protest when he realized that Sabe was right. All the time he’d spent studying writing had made him think like a European. He had come to trust what was written on paper over what was said by people, and that wasn’t the Tiv way.

The assessment report of the Europeans was vough; it was exact and precise, but that wasn’t enough to settle the question. The choice of which clan to join with had to be right for the community; it had to be mimi. Only the elders could determine what was mimi; it was their responsibility to decide what was best for the Shangev clan. Asking Sabe to defer to the paper was asking him to act against what he considered right.

“You’re right, Sabe,” he said. “Forgive me. You’re my elder, and it was wrong of me to suggest that paper could know more than you.”

Sabe nodded and resumed walking. “You are free to do as you wish, but I believe it will do more harm than good to show that paper to others.”

Jijingi considered it. The elders from the western farms would undoubtedly argue that the assessment report supported their position, prolonging a debate that had already gone too long. But more than that, it would move the Tiv down the path of regarding paper as the source of truth; it would be another stream in which the old ways were washing away, and he could see no benefit in it.

“I agree,” said Jijingi. “I won’t show this to anyone else.”

Sabe nodded.

Jijingi walked back to his hut, reflecting on what had happened. Even without attending a mission school, he had begun thinking like a European; his practice of writing in his notebooks had led him to disrespect his elders without him even being aware of it. Writing helped him think more clearly, he couldn’t deny that; but that wasn’t good enough reason to trust paper over people.

As a scribe, he had to keep the book of Sabe’s decisions in tribal court. But he didn’t need to keep the other notebooks, the ones in which he’d written down his thoughts. He would use them as tinder for the cooking fire.

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences, and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I’m writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it’s easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are subject to every kind of error and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.

When it comes to our individual memories, I live on the opposite side of the divide. As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I’m threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events. I used to think it could be valuable for individuals to tell stories about themselves, valuable in a way that it couldn’t be for cultures, but I’m a product of my time, and times change. We can’t prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.

And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory? How much can you? You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you’ll find out.

But the reason I now recommend Remem is not for the shameful reminders it provides of your past; it’s to avoid the need for those in the future. Organic memory was what enabled me to construct a whitewashed narrative of my parenting skills, but by using digital memory from now on, I hope to keep that from happening. The truth about my behavior won’t be presented to me by someone else, making me defensive; it won’t even be something I’ll discover as a private shock, prompting a reevaluation. With Remem providing only the unvarnished facts, my image of myself will never stray too far from the truth in the first place.

Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that—I hope—acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.

Nicole has begun using Remem as well, and discovered that her recollection of events isn’t perfect either. This hasn’t made her forgive me for the way I treated her—nor should it, because her misdeeds were minor compared to mine—but it has softened her anger at my misremembering my actions, because she realizes it’s something we all do. And I’m embarrassed to admit that this is precisely the scenario Erica Meyers predicted when she talked about Remem’s effects on relationships.

This doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about the downsides of digital memory; there are many, and people need to be aware of them. I just don’t think I can argue the case with any sort of objectivity anymore. I abandoned the article I was planning to write about memory prostheses; I handed off the research I’d done to a colleague, and she wrote a fine piece about the pros and cons of the software, a dispassionate article free from all the soul-searching and angst that would have saturated anything I submitted. Instead, I’ve written this.

The account I’ve given of the Tiv is based in fact, but isn’t precisely accurate. There was indeed a dispute among the Tiv in 1941 over whom the Shangev clan should join with, based on differing claims about the parentage of the clan’s founder, and administrative records did show that the clan elders’ account of their genealogy had changed over time. But many of the specific details I’ve described are invented. The actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I’ve told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.

As for my account of my argument with Nicole, I’ve tried to make it as accurate as I possibly could. I’ve been recording everything since I started working on this project, and I’ve consulted the recordings repeatedly when writing this. But in my choice of which details to include and which to omit, perhaps I have just constructed another story. In spite of my efforts to be unflinching, have I flattered myself with this portrayal? Have I distorted events so they more closely follow the arc expected of a confessional narrative? The only way you can judge is by comparing my account against the recordings themselves, so I’m doing something I never thought I’d do: with Nicole’s permission, I am granting public access to my lifelog, such as it is. Take a look at the video, and decide for yourself.

And if you think I’ve been less than honest, tell me. I want to know.

[lendoco]

Arcona — virtual and real worlds in a single ecosystem.

The 21st century is an age of high technology. With this, you can not argue, because the present time is characterized by an unprecedented increase in the number of information flows. Each of you has heard about virtual reality. About glasses3D and gloves, wearing which a person is transferred from the real world to the virtual world. And if I tell you that for such a journey does not require the purchase of expensive Devices? And, what is the key for “walks in the virtual world” is literally at your fingertips in your smartphone? The reaction will be uniquely surprising.

The idea of the Arcona project is to create a platform that will help create augmented reality objects in existing geographic areas. One of the first implementations of this idea was the park “Ludza Castle” — a virtual Teutonic castle “built” in the Latvian city of Ludza. It was established in 2014 and since then has greatly increased the tourist interest in this place. In reality, the castle existed in the XV century, but since then there have been ruins. The completed reality created by the project team allows you to see the castle itself and the buildings in their original form.

Arcona is a system of augmented reality based on Blockchain technology, which combines the real and virtual worlds by creating a layer of the augmented reality of a global scale called Digital Earth. Ecosystem Arcona connects the physical and virtual worlds into one information space, which is ideally connected with the world of reality. Thanks to this, the experience of user interaction with the surrounding space in different places of the world is enriched. Arcona- is a new innovative project to create an integrated ecosystem that combines digital and real spaces.

How it works.

The Arcona ecosystem consists of the following elements:

Platforms.

Geographic Information System.

Data store.

Landscaping simulator.

From the digital data warehouse, information is used to form digital lands. The contents of the repository are filled with content creators. The owner of a virtual plot of land with specific coordinates uses the content to organize the space in accordance with their wishes. Remote creation and publication of objects allow you to attract traffic, earning on it.

Arcona Augmented Reality is an ecosystem on Blockchain that promises to combine real and virtual worlds to form an environment that blends well with our ordinary world. The largest of these virtual assets will be Digital Land, and the new Arcona platform will be available for business, users and technical improvements.

Arcona Digital Lands will very soon open the portals to the past, offering you the opportunity to see the most exciting historical events with your own eyes. And, of course, such a time portal will appear on the island of Rügen, where many centuries ago the holy city of Arkona was located. Imagine that our planet has another dimension — digital land, where you can find amazing games and stories, shops, cinemas, museums and much more. But to visit this amazing digital world you will need a key for access. An important element that will distribute keys and open doors for you to the stunning world of digital reality will be Arcona Ecosystem!

And the key is the token Arcona — the internal currency of the system. With its help, you can buy yourself a new land — large or small, to create on it, to realize your dreams, and invite guests who will appreciate your experiments. With each new project, Digital Land will become an increasingly popular, interesting and useful place for exchange and interaction.

The first digital territories will appear by the end of next year in the largest metropolitan areas of the world. They will attract millions of curious tourists. Just imagine that you can see, through the streets, which cities and places, what historical events you can walk!

Also, the uniqueness of Arcona will be appreciated by users of any smartphones, tablets and, in the long run, glasses, and lenses of digital reality.

Ultimately, Arcona will cover 12% of our entire habitable surface, and this is almost 18 trillion square meters. This huge digital world will belong to all participants of the ecosystem — spectators and businessmen, developers and artists. And thanks to the introduction of Blockchain-technology, copyrights and intellectual property will be reliably protected!

You can use arcona markers to purchase 3D content with animation and other interactive functions to decorate/improve your sites, hire developers and project designers. The most technically savvy users will use the market to sell their 3D-objects and software.

Solving real-world problems

According to the founders of Arcona, at the moment people are increasingly faced with a general problem — a lack of space. According to their opinion, only 12% of the area of our planet is suitable for use for useful purposes. At the same time, the proportion of space that is suitable for development is decreasing. One of the options for resolving this issue is to move all people into virtual reality, which significantly increases the boundaries of life, and build it to a new level. The innovation of the project is not to help create content and provide an opportunity to view it. Such projects already exist not only in Piligrim XXI but also in other companies. The main innovation is the sale of digital land. The platform offers for sale virtual space, tied to a specific geographical location. Physically, the purchaser of the digital land gets access to the “terrain plan” attached to the points or beacons on the spot created by the developers. On this “plan” you can remotely create different objects of augmented reality. All the charm is that the viewer, who is at the geographical point, can connect to the Arcona platform and see this content, and the author does not even need to come there

Continuing the development of his idea, the project team decided not only to create similar objects of augmented reality, but also to enable others to do something similar. According to the developers, they will create tools on the Arcona platform that can greatly facilitate the simple user the creation of such content. They say that it will not be harder than uploading a video to YouTube. Professional developers will also be provided with a medium for writing complex applications and implementing their own third-party tools written with the help of tools. This will be the first scope of the platform — the creation of content augmented reality. Without viewers, the idea loses its meaning and relevance. Therefore, those who will look and “get used to” in AR landscapes and buildings are an important part of the platform. They can use smartphones, tablets or virtual reality devices to immerse themselves in the content created by the authors.

As a result of the developments, the world will be presented with a project that can be called breakthrough without exaggeration. In the end, our real world will be completely duplicated in digital form. First on the site will be available megacities with a history, such as London, Paris, New York, Barcelona, St. Petersburg, and many others. Imagine, you already can not go to London to see Bigben, and turn on the smartphone and enjoy the luxury of this architectural masterpiece right from your apartment. Arcona conducted a study and identified sites that are visited by 50 to 100 thousand travelers daily (mainly the central square of megacities — London and Paris). It is assumed that after the launch of the digital platform, all these people will be able to use the virtual space.

Do you want to have a piece of digital land or a digital dimension?

Time travel.

Alternative worlds.

The film, which was filmed in this area.

Training programs.

Computer games.

Quests.

Linking future buildings to the terrain and the stages of their erection and much more.

The owner of the land will be able to create an augmented reality on its territory, invite professionals for this, rent out his site, organize pools of digital territory together with other owners. All of the above opportunities will be available to those who own internal tokens Arcona. It is through them that all settlements and access to content are carried out.

It should be noted that the platform itself has unique features:

Distance.

To learn something new, there will be no need to leave your home. Thanks to Arkona, you gain the opportunity to interact with the surrounding space and change it while remaining in your own apartment.

Creation.

The possibility of interaction between the participants of the Arkona is practically unlimited (we can say that everything that is available in the material world is available here). Participants can build objects, trade with each other or generate unique content. At the same time, conscientious work will be worthy of evaluation.

Why Bclockchain?

Arcona is based on the Bclockchain technology and Smart-contracts . In intellectual contracts, all conditions of land tenure, rent, viewing and other will be registered. Bclockchain will securely store information, will ensure transparency of all operations, protect copyright for content and digital territory. The Arcon universal token gives the participants the right to own sites prepared for remote deployment of virtual objects, creation, and demonstration of their own projects — quests, excursions, training programs, promotions, attractions. Piligrim XXI believes that openness will provide the project with the emergence and monetization of a huge number of applications, as a result of which the platform will become a single platform for communication and exchange of experience of the community of developers and users. This should serve to more intensive development of technology and make the platform an industry standard. The developers guarantee that they will create only one digital layer, tied to a geographical point. Perhaps in the future, there will be companies that will create their own layers. But this is unlikely to create problems, as different software and hardware will be used. It is necessary to understand that all digital land exists only on servers of Arcona platform and only those who are connected to it see it.

The main task of the developers is to provide a global universal tool for creating projects on the technology of augmented reality. Arcona automatically generates a virtual layer anywhere in the world, fixing the graphics without special markers.

Personally, I want to express my great gratitude to the Arcona project — an unparalleled, ambitious project. This is a large-scale and ingenious idea, not sucked from the finger, Bclockchain is not attracted to the ears and most importantly — at the time of the launch of the ICO project can boast of the current prototype! Such luggage gives the company every reason to become successful, which will allow the owners to multiply their capital in dozens of times! In addition to the iridescent descriptions of the financial future, Arcona can quite acquire the status of a flagship and be the “gold standard” in the entire VR (virtual reality) industry.

ARCONA

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#AugmentedReality @arconaecosystem @arconaico #AR #ARtechnology #ARplatform #ARecosystem #blockchain #blockchaintechnology #ICO #ArconaICO

submitted by /u/criptman [link] [comments] Arcona — virtual and real worlds in a single ecosystem. published first on https://icoholder.tumblr.com/

[rafaelribeirosoares]

Black Panther comes at a time where racism has been having a huge spotlight in the recent years of news in the U.S.A. where Afro-American personalities pointed a lack of appearance percentage in movies, awards and whatever else. Here is a movie that has also caused some controversy in that aspect, with a 90% of the cast consisting of African and/or African American actors. If I have something against it? Why would I? The majority of the story happens in Wakanda, a fictional, secluded, highly developed and technological country in Africa. And as you can imagine, an African country should have African people right? Please people, let’s keep our common sense.

As always, there are spoilers before the analysis, so if you don’t want to be spoiled just advance towards the third image.

Even though Captain America: Civil War was released two years ago, and more movies were released way ahead of its timeline since then, Black Panther begins merely two weeks or so after Civil War. T’chaka, the king of Wakanda, was murdered in a terrorist attack. His son, T’challa, avenged his father’s death by finding the culprit and delivering him to justice and was now about to be crowned king of the advanced African civilization.

What we did not know before, was that T’chaka had a brother named N’jobu, who carried spying missions for the King as a War Hound. N’jobu betrayed Wakanda by helping Ulysses Klaue on a heist to steal the country’s most valuable resource, Vibranium, the toughest metal in existence. This was years ago. T’chaka ended up in killing his brother N’jobu who attempted to murder his partner after understanding that he was a double agent. T’chaka managed to save his other agent and condemned N’jobu’s son, his own nephew, to a life in exile without even giving a word of what had happened to the child’s father.

Now in the present, T’challa completed the ritual to become King of Wakanda after defeating the challenger and leader from the Mountain Tribe, M’baku. Once seen the various aspects of Wakanda, including the ascension rituals, the first action of T’challa is to bring Ulysses Klaue to justice for the heist that resulted in a significant loss of Vibranium and the death of many Wakandians, including the father of the River Tribe’s current leader. Once aware of the theft of a Vibranium tool at a Museum in London, T’challa had a hint of where it would be sold and where he could eventually capture Klaue.

T’challa, Nakia, and Okoye then travel to South Korea after learning that the Vibranium tool would be sold to the highest bidder there. They cross paths with Everett K. Ross, a CIA spy who we are already familiar with from Civil War. Once they mess the place up and chase down Klaue through the streets, T’challa captures his target and imprisons him on a CIA holdout for interrogation. But while the two factions argued over which one of them would keep Klaue, the benefactors of the arms dealer came to rescue him and succeeded.

All of this was merely a stunt, a stunt for Erik, son of N’jobu and heir to the throne, to earn passage into Wakanda by delivering Klaue to the Wakandians, thus earning the right to challenge T’challa’s reign by doing what he could not. Killmonger, as Erik was also known, defeats T’challa in the ritual duel and becomes King. Then he proceeds to initiate the delivery of weapons to several factions across the globe to incite revolutions through the War Hounds stationed in every country.

T’challa was not dead yet and he gathered what allies he could to overthrow his cousin and earn control of Wakanda to lead it through the rightful path, as it had been ever since its creation.

Now that you know a little bit of the story, or you knew anyway because you already saw the movie, here’s what I think of Black Panther and its intended message, or at least, that’s the idea that I got from it.

First and foremost, Black Panther introduces Wakanda and its history in the MCU. We learn that they had access to a meteor of Vibranium that landed there thousands of years before and that through it, the country’s five tribes were united by a shaman who inhaled the essence of a Vibranium infused plant. Ever since then, Wakanda remained quiet within the World, growing higher than any other in terms of technology while posing to be an underdeveloped third world country. Practically half of the movie resumes itself in learning about Wakanda, it’s people, technology, and traditions. Which is quite interesting to be honest, since we will see more of Wakanda in Infinity War for example.

Then, for the next half of the movie, the antagonist reveals his intentions, claims the throne for his own, and proceeds to give wings to his nefarious plans, which kinda points me to the main issue of this movie considering the current situation of many countries, but mainly the U. S. where it is majorly reported through the media.

Killmonger delivers a message to the audience, one that could incite hatred and violence.

Killmonger turned out to be intelligent but was also exposed to the poverty of his ethnicity where he lived in Oakland. After learning his ancestors’ history, Erik also shared the vision that his father, N’jobu, had in mind and ultimately led to his unfortunate death. Their vision was a warcry for their brothers and sisters, to arm them so that they could overthrow governments? Rise up? Cause a rebellion? What about all the other people who were not brothers and sisters? I guess what he really wanted was to destabilize everything since he was trained to do so while he was in the military. But the thought crossed my mind, that Killmonger was actually arming his ethnicity across the world so that they could take matters into their own hands through violent means and therefore, be in control.

I don’t really mind this purpose in the fictional world, but the message sure implies that a lot of things are wrong out there and the aggressive response sure scares me, with or without Vibranium weapons. Of course, Killmonger is the antagonist in this movie, and he is eventually defeated by T’challa who instead of arming the minorities, will share his country’s resources and technologies with the world, as is implied in the scene after the credits and thus revealing what Wakanda really is to the world. Even though, if I belonged to mentioned factions, I’d probably feel inspired or motivated to do so. Perhaps I’m over exaggerating but I just couldn’t let this slip by.

Wakanda was built to marvel your eyes with a blend of technological development allied with the surrounding nature of a tropical African country.

Apart from this crucial point, the action was sublime, as is usual for a Marvel movie. The visual effects are astonishing! Wakanda has icy mountains, a developed city by a river and farms across its borders. The waterfalls where the trials are held are without a doubt the most beautiful zone in Wakanda.

Personally, I love English with an African accent. The sound itself is pleasing to my ears, and in this movie, I had plenty of that. The music was cool and characteristic of an African country, but if you ask me if I remember any of it, I’ll have to say no. Not because it wasn’t any good, but perhaps because it did not come into play at key points of the movie.

Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER L to R: Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Shuri (Letitia Wright) Ph: Film Frame ©Marvel Studios 2018

Overall, Black Panther is a good movie with a decent amount of action and comedy, but more importantly, it comes as an introduction to Wakanda and its technology that will be present in future MCU movies. The plot was okay but perceptible from the beginning, thus leaving no events to surprise the viewers. While the difference of views was interesting to ponder, I did not doubt for a second that there would be any unprecedented turns, thus taking away some of the excitement of what I was watching. Still, as with all Marvel movies, it is a must watch if you want to keep up with the expanding universe that will come together in April of this year.

Black Panther - A Warcry To Revolution Around The World? Black Panther comes at a time where racism has been having a huge spotlight in the recent years of news in the U.S.A.

[prachidhama-blog]

                                             ART                                           An activity to  produce or create something on paper with the help of imagination of human mind like painting , making designs and styles with colours and different shades of pencil. In other words , artwork is performed by an artist which show's their imagination and conceptual ideas or technical skill and appreciated by other human being for their creativity. Art is a gift from God and some kind of a  freedom where you can create a different pieces or thing on your own imagination with a great idea. Importance of art - Art enhance your thinking style with some different ideas. Arts is important in the development of children and arts also help children in their emotional and social development because children learn about the environment through art and to the world. Art also influence the society through changing opinion and experience of people which they put it on a paper or wall to express something. Painting , literature , sculpture , music and other art help the society members to create a environment of natural nature and cool one. Basically art help in the formation of a society in a positive form. Art is a sense of communication it allows people From different cultures to communicate with each other  and it creates a healthy environment between different people by this they can exchange their ideas and  create more opportunities to improve themselves. Art provide a basic  taste to the society because everything is uncertain in a society which no on can predict and taste and preferences is changeable according to the nature of the fashion. Research have been proof that the relationship between art and human brain made a best combo and it is found that visual art had positive effects on personal lives of nursing home bound elders. Art represent the memory of a kid If children have practice creatively, it will come naturally to them now and in their future career. Art help in forming the confidence of a kid if a children perform on a stage and then  singing gives kids a chance to step outside their comfort zone and built up their career or they will grow in future on their own. Especially for young kids, drawing, painting, and sculpting in art class help develop visual specialised skill. Children need to know more about the world than just what they can learn through text and numbers. Art educate  students how to make choices and provide information about visual arts and modern form of arts. Categories of art- literature (including poetry, drama, story, and so on), the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), the graphic arts(painting, drawing, design, and other forms expressed on flat surfaces), the plasticarts (sculpture, modeling), the decorativearts. Art is essential for everyone - The Arts are an important cultural tool for expressing concerns and love for the world focused on altering our physical relationship with the natural world, art is orientated more toward a philosophical and emotional understanding of that relationship. * Features of art - 1. imagination of human mind = Art is a gift from God and some kind of a freedom where you can create a different pieces and thing on your own imagination with a great idea. 2. Enhancement of thinking style = Arts help in the method of thinking and people's creative knowledge. 3.development of children = Arts is important in the development of children and arts also help in emotional and social development. 4. Improvement in communication = It allows people from different cultures  to communicate with each other. 5. Society = Arts also influence the society through changing opinion and experience of people which they put it on a wall to express something creative. 6. Research = Research have been proof that the relationship between art and human brain made a best combo And it is found that visual art have positive effect personal lives of nursing home bound elders. 7.creativity = Art represent the memory of a kid ,if children have participate creatively it will come naturally to them now and in their future career. 8. Art educate students = Especially for young kids drawing, painting and sculpture in art class help in develop visual specialised skill. 9. categories of art = Literature (including poetry, drama, story, and so on), the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), the graphic arts(painting, drawing, design, and other forms expressed on flat surfaces), the plasticarts (sculpture, modeling), the decorativearts. 10.art is essential for everyone = Most art I believe readily fits into the category of reflecting the culture of its time. As was stated, this is what makes art history so interesting. ... Culture is a reference point to many artists creating work; art trends or current social issues often drive anartist to create their work.                                  ART IS EVERY WHERE           Every human being is unique in there own way and different. Every person is involve in art whether the art is making food, dancing or working , playing, finding new places to visit or traveling. Every person is a artist in there life even when you make a circle or a flower it includes in art. In a article a woman said that she earns money by working on a creative art webs in her home with her husband so yeah you can earn money from your work and expend your passion without anyones help you can become financially independent . Every women in the world is creative in a different way included men  also but some womens did not know how to earn money from art. In historical period  women and men make creative sculpture and sold it and now this thing is work on a digital way . In a Instagram page you can saw different different art work. Just like ln a order to bloom? You must grow. So, you can share your work on social media too where you can earn money through Instagram post of art or any other platforms. There is a lot of platform where you can show your work to society or any general public through internet.Hence, digital world is a essential element in today's world. # Abstract art Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form colour and line to create a composition which my exists in the degree of independent visual art in the world. Basically abstract art  is a western art which is an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. In other words, abstract art is non- figurative art, non- objective art and non-representational art all are related terms in the field of art. Most of the art in the early period are make on the rock and explain through signs ,poetry , textiles, and inscriptions. It is at this level of abstract art  that helps in the communication of people.one can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy and Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it. # Music As visual art becomes more abstract it develops some characteristics of music. It includes the abstract element of sound and division of time. There was a musician who is inspired by the possibility of marks associative colour responding in the soul. It is basically our senses respond to various stimuli but the senses are connected at a deeper level. Music is an art and culture activity is sound organised in time. John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound." Music includes songs, tunes,symphonies, harmony of the spheres, rythm, and many more. It is music to my ears pointed out that music is a pleasent and a cure. Sometime we listen to music to heal our soul. Music can make a person happy or sad depends on the song. Music is related to weather their mood is changed according to weather. Some people listen music at the time of night some in  the morning infect you can listen at your own washroom.you can listen the music and play at anytime and any where even at the time of jogging and in the metro.                                     ART IS LAW Art law is a unique specialty area of the law. lntellectual property interests in art include protecting copyrights to various works and determining whether a piece was created independently or as a work for hire. Art law is a unique specialty area of the law. After all, art occupies many roles in our culture and serves many functions for businesses, governments, museums, families, and artists. Art can be a form of expression, it can be a decoration, it can be a currency, and it can serve as the basis for many careers. Common issues for art law include how works of art should be valued, how to protect intellectual property rights in art, free speech issues, authenticating and dealing with stolen artworks, and a variety of business issues related to the art industry. Art valuation is particularly important for determining tax consequences of dealing in art and for testamentary purposes. It also has relevance to insurance claims disputes, and when using the art pieces for collateral when obtaining a loan. And, of course, when one chooses to donate all or a portion of their art collection to a museum or other nonprofit organization, the value of the art can have important consequences to both the donor and the donee for taxes, insurance, and in retaining not-for-profit status. Intellectual property interests in art include protecting copyrights to various works and determining whether a piece was created independently or as a work for hire. A common question is whether a work has been illegally copied or not. Another issue is whether an artwork can be moved from its original installation or not. Free speech issues in art often relate to whether something is art or obscenity. Occasionally, issues about free speech may also relate to whether something is art or a violation of some other law. For example, is "tagging" or spray painted graffiti, a form of protected artistic expression or a crime? The resources below will provide you with additional information on art law, and you can find an attorney in your area who focuses on art law under the "Law Firms" tab, above-mentioned.               Introduction                       Art law is the body of law which includes rules and regulations and discipline that help in the protection of copy right and facilities the creation basically the use of making the art. Those include in the practice of law that have a variety of disciplines, intellectual property ,law of contract , constitution law, tort , tax, commercial and international law to protect the interests of their clients. Do you know your right? *Is body paint considered clothing? *Law regarding graffiti and art? #ARTICLE ABOUT ART AND CULTURE LAW PROPERTY- 1. copyright of art whether it is related to tattoo or any other artistic thing. When a person form a copy right of its work then other person should not  have the right to use that work it is illegal by law or consideration of lawful things .The  establishment that infrings upon these right can suffer a lawsuit before a judge that will determine if the rights of the copyright owner  and remain to be protected. 2.copyright protection- when a person create new art and or reinvent the existing art and give it a copyright then it is protected by the law and can distribute the work without interference with social media like Facebook ,WhatsApp, twitter , Instagram, messenger etc. Hence copying is there for the protection of the people and if a unknown or know person use this without the permission of the owner then the owner can sue  the other person  or against that person.the artist can pursue a lawsuit if the tattoo parlor does not cease using the design. 3.The copyright art- the person that aquires a copyright provides the basic in law that he or she has the right to display or perform the  work without any interference . The protection of the work is for the artist for their creativity and there work. These extend are both for public and for private. 4.The concept of theft- The artist that make a art work have the copyright of its work that protect the item. When a tattoo artist create a tattoo of a persons body that on the persons leg ,arm ,back it may not have the same copyright protections as if the artist create it alone. Basically this thing need consultation of lawyer and how this work is stolen and why all this happened.

[eco-art-fiu]

Project 1 Eco-Art Aesthetics Experience by Catherine Berendsohn- Entertainment Sans Machines

For this project I considered a few things. I have done a transformative experience with walking in the past to raise awareness to protect the Everglades, and I considered doing my laundry without a machine and hanging it up to dry with safety pins like my grandmother. I loved the idea of that, but I actually did used to do that as a re-enactor for Mission San Luis de Appalachee, a living history museum in Tallahassee, Florida. So even though I was thinking I don’t watch TV like other people do, I try to avoid the onslaught of too much depressing news every day, I realized I am glued to it so easily. And I do turn to it for my entertainment. I also thought about my iphone, computer, I am too attached to them. So instead of screens, I decided to just entertain myself without machines. I actually don’t do this, I realized. I take walks, but I have not really played full out with simple toys for years of my life. Just to go throw things outside, or even do something not for a performance for someone else, but just for me. So I dug out my old items that just sit forgotten in a corner of my closet. I went out front and played with them. I felt strange at first, sad, aware of loss and missing. I hung out with that the first day, then had my mother help me document my play the next day. It made me laugh, and smile, my feet got dirty, and even though I have done certain things like that, it was different this time. I started to remember something, a truth that is valuable on its own in being who I am. I petted my cat, and appreciated the outdoors, getting back to nature in a different way that got me back to myself. I kept thinking about ecocentric versus anthropocentric, and the way I don’t label my cat in a way of being with her. I kept thinking about “She Unnames Them” by Ursula K. LeGuin, “The cats, of course, steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those self-given, unspoken, ineffably personal names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating- though none of the contemplators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is their names and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse.”

Even as I called out my cat’s given name, I felt in the way that I interact with her and leave her a space that is present with her being, that the unsaid one she carries I intuitively recognize. I started to become aware of this respectful space I have always held for animals that was different from the demeaning and painful conversation I had with an ex-boyfriend when I first went to college, about his own dog. And I also thought about his effect on me, and I thought of “unnoticing Adam,” and the effects of being labeled, so fresh to leave this joyful play behind, and walk into an arena unawares of what was being left. Memories rose and fell and a kind of recognizing things that had been once- simple, powerful, how sweet I was in confidence and command at play when I was little, director, offering greatness to friends, “here, you can be the Mage Wise Woman, she is a powerful sage, you can stand here, and we have to escape and use ourpowers”, “don’t step on the lava!”, “Bow to the Queen of the Fairies”, and I think as a child so open, the mind has access to an ancient kind of wisdom, also as fresh and innocent as the dawn. To see invisible creatures, “don’t step there! That is a fairy ring!” Why? Because I respect these unseen souls, we are each others’ keepers, true life bonded friends. Be it the sunlight, and the leaf fall. It is a kind of resurrection I was grateful for. I saw the little girl shinning in laughter in my mother, the child so bright and vibrant and alive that gives life to us. The true value of the world. I thought of Jesus’ quote about “it be harder for a rich man to pass through heaven, than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”, and like the echo of a soulful Southern spiritual, a wisdom revealed arises from someplace effemeral yet real inside, and I find a felt conclusion in it, here, now, this is what he means. Humans miss what is the treasure that is the gate to heaven, when they don’t know what to value, like me. I am there at the gate in the light today, with air and wind and cat, leaf and laugh and promise of rain.

Linda Weintraub says in her introduction that, “The urge to give visual form to personal sentiments, communal purport, economic conditions, spiritual beliefs, aesthetic values, and institutionalized agendas originated approximately forty thousand years ago. Humans have been creating art ever since, inventing countless devices to manifest their cultural identity.” I find often art has been dismissed in my life, shocking how effecting it has been as an excuse to dismiss me by a label before ever discovering what is there in me, “artist”, used as though a handicap of no value by assumptive opinion, and I attached the breakdown, this makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”, to assume such things. But it is all a bias against what is “soft” like a soft science versus the “hard” sciences, such as a life example I experienced with someone telling me that psychology is not as valuable as physics, because it isn’t straight, obvious, and ironed down with easy definitions like a mathematics discipline. Well, it is about people. And we are each a universe unto ourself to even begin to unravel. Isn’t this why I want to be discovered beyond an easy equation? There is no formula for the richness of things unsaid where life really blossoms. So my urge to give rise to “personal sentiment” does have value. Just to discover the sentiment again at all was unearthing, an exhuming from its death by smothering in a world experience where “sentiment” is not valued because it is hard, even though it is the ephemera from which heaven is found. I found a bit of life, of heaven, and I say there is nothing more valuable than that. I know the cost of having it gone, I recognize the only value in its return.

Maybe art is like that, a barometer of a higher society, to appreciate things as they exist for their own value. Like to meditate upon the meditations of another living being, to notice the deeper musings of a cat. I think it is tied to leaving nature alone for its own purposes because you love it as it lives and breathes, I think it is tied to women, to leave them alone to their own devices, it was a reintroduction to the idea and experience that what I do and feel in my life is of value for my own sake. That is sad to know why it is so gone, so unrecognized in a world desperate for appreciation of real value, in nature and in the feminine, in my child within whose value still stands even after I leave childhood, though my world doesn’t notice, and is desperate for what soul really emanates from, in a place where eco artists are a need like white blood cells to cancer, as we choke our own lives by all we don’t appreciate, respect, and value for its own deserving that is life itself. Like the light in my eyes, grandeur of self directed natural environments, and the child inside us all.

I was so glad to feel free with my mother, cat, wind, movement, toys, light, dirt, and air. It slowed me down and added bonding value to the things that really matter. It was fun! It was funny! And the video added a dimension because I was surprised by things I found, like mom swinging poi behind me when I wasn’t looking! It was directed, actually, and it made real play happen. I just noticed that, it was the opposite process of what I did when I was little, so full to imagine and direct stories, and now actually needing to have someone else film for this made real play be found again.

[char27martin]

Quotes on Writing: 19 Classic and Contemporary Lessons from Black American Writers

I grew up in Memphis, Tenn., a city steeped history in general—but specifically in Civil Rights history. In the early 20th century, Memphis was the cotton capital of the world, home to industries dominated by (white) landowners and still mired in racial divisions that had lingered since the Civil War. A crossroads settled at the center of the North and South and home to a large population of black workers, Memphis was geographically and culturally destined to play a major role in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

The city’s history rose to a sharp and tragic crescendo in April 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated when he visited to support a strike by city sanitation workers.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to visit Memphis and experience the living history that still hums in the air, from Beale Street to the Lorraine Motel, I recommend it.

Perhaps in part because of my connection to the city, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is always a time of particular reflection, and even moreso given the racially focused discussions and conflicts we face today. At such times, I often turn to the words of the black American writers whose voices are recognized around the world for their wisdom and timelessness. I thought I’d share some of my favorites here today.

One note, however: One of the most relevant quotes I’ve found, from a March 30, 1981 interview with Toni Morrison in Newsweek, admittedly made me question whether I ought to be presenting these authors together at all.

Of course I’m a black writer…. I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

As Morrison suggested, black writers are not a monolith—nor should they be considered as such. Shelly Stratton suggested something similar in another Writer’s Digest article about the problems with considering, for instance, black women’s fiction to be its own genre.

As such, my aim in this post is not to suggest that these authors ought to be grouped together as one—but instead, to recognize the range of thought leadership and genres in which black American writers have become icons, and the depth of the lessons we can learn from them. The writing community and the larger market still have a long, long way to go in terms of truly reflecting global and national diversity through the voices of writers, but these authors and their stories have paved the way for readers and writers to forge a more inclusive future for the literary world. Their words teach universal lessons to us all.

Writing Insights and Tips by Iconic Black American Writers

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

— Zora Neal Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), from Ch. 10: Research.

Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying.

— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 4

I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words.

― Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (2016)

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

— Ralph Ellison, a quote from Writers at Work (1963) edited by George Plimpton

I can give tips on many things, but not productivity and time management. One thing I do is make time. Everyone loves talking about how busy they are. But there are 24 hours in a day. Make a half-hour or hour in a day, or an hour in a week, for writing. Just make sure you have at least one designated time—however long it is, given your constraints—to focus on writing. I treat my writing like a job, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean I give it the respect of a professional endeavor, not a hobby. Even when it was a hobby, I treated it like a job. It is important to do that because craft takes time and demands respect.

— Roxane Gay, Writer’s Digest September 2017

72 of the Best Quotes About Writing

Art has to be a kind of confession. … The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people.

— James Baldwin, from “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961); an interview with Studs Terkel published in Conversations With James Baldwin (1989)

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

— James Baldwin, from “An interview with James Baldwin”

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

— Toni Morrison, “Black Matters” in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

The instructor said,

Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you — Then, it will be true.

— Langston Hughes, “Theme from English B,” Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

— Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)

MAYA ANGELOU: You are about five-three, white, Midwestern—right?

[Interviewer] CAROL BENSON: Yes.

ANGELOU: I’m six foot, black, Southwestern. If we started looking at each other and our differences, our family background and personal history, we could find so many differences. But those are tangential, those are peripheral. There are really no differences. We are, first, human beings. And so when you weep, I understand it clearly. When you laugh, I understand it clearly. When you love, you don’t have to translate it to me. These are the important things. Now if you want to tell me what happens in the Midwest, what the summers were like, what you ate for picnics—we can talk, and I can tell you what happened in Arkansas and what happened in California in the ’40s and all that. But those are tangential.

— from an interview in Writer’s Digest, January 1975

Writer’s Digest Digital Archive Collection: Iconic Women Writers

Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification.

—W.E.B. DuBois, from his writings, quoted in The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003) edited by Aberjhani

I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.

― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (2013)

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. … But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of his own emotions. Emotions are subjective and he can communicate them only when he clothes them in objective guise; and how can he ever be so arrogant as to know when he is dressing up the right emotion in the right Sunday suit?

— Richard Wright, from the introduction to Native Son (1940)

And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive emotion, coalescing and telescoping alien facts into a known and felt truth. That was the deep fun of the job; to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and — until that very split second of time! — unheard-of and unfelt effects with words.

— Richard Wright, from the same introduction

Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

— Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)

“Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand this, you will. You’ll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior.” And she had put her hand on his hair. “When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.”

— Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites (1988) Part II “Phoenix” chapter 4 (p. 329).

I know when it’s the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it’s the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, No. No, I’m finished. Bye. And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

— Maya Angelou, Paris Review Interview (1990)

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