Video reblogged from Storyboard with 135 notes
“I don’t know that I would say the morgue is a diamond in the rough. I might say it’s a rough in the rough. It’s as unpolished as the world we have now, and that’s what makes it valuable. We can turn to it for a reminder that we’re not living a life for the first time: we’ve been here before.”—David Dunlap, NYT reporter
Inside the New York Times “Lively Morgue”
Print archives that were once the heart of many newspapers have gone the way of the floppy disk. But at the New York Times, home to the Lively Morgue Tumblr, the technology that’s threatened to kill the morgue may also save it. We went inside the morgue to find out what all the fuss was about. Read the accompanying feature.
Link reblogged from Bobulate with 277 notes
Door or less →
Want to remember an experience? Don’t move.
That’s overstating it, but a new study shows that just walking through a doorway creates what’s called a “new memory episode,” which makes it difficult to remember the experience in the previous room:
[M]emory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. “Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one’s event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]” the researchers said.Apparently, there can be these sort of episode markers — “a while later” — in stories as well.
Curious what episode markers mark our digital spaces.
Link reblogged from it's never summer with 380 notes
How to Photograph the Entire World: The Google Street View Era →
….Lee Friedlander took a series of photographs in the 1960’s that included screens (that were in a 1995 exhibit and subsequent book called “The Little Screens”). In the photos from this era the television is usually a small, glowing box in the corner of a room. Friedlander’s screens almost always have a person, but he moves in closer to capture faces. Friedlander is attracted to those moments where the facade peels back from the relatively new, perfectly sensible electronic communications medium and reveals a 1/125th of a second of raw, unpolished humanity. The GSV photographers, with the exception of Mason, seem to be looking for this same kind of moment.
Lee Friedlander, Florida, 1963Where Mason and Rickard do their best to remove evidence of the web experience of GSV, Wolf and Jon Rafman are not afraid of the moiré patterns and the interface elements (arrows and labels) to create compositions that are not in the GSV photographs themselves. In this way they are more like Friedlander’s photos in “Little Screens,” which capture how the televisions are designed, how they sit in hotel rooms, and the distortions of transmission, the warped edges and burps of the early tubes.
….
Michael Wolf, Paris, 2008
If we were to tell a patient that in other societies his perversion would not be a problem, that it is a problem here only because it is our society that is sick and produces constructions and constraints, we would certainly be telling him at least a partial truth, but it would be of little help to him. He would feel, rather, that as an individual, with his own individual history, he was being passed over and misunderstood, for this interpretation makes too little of his own very real tragedy. What he most needs to understand is his compulsion to repeat, and the state of affairs behind it to which this compulsion bears witness. His plight is no doubt the result of social pressures, but these do not have their effect on his psyche through abstract knowledge; they are firmly anchored in his earliest affective experience with his mother. Thus his problems cannot be solved with *words*, but only through *experience*—not merely corrective experience as an adult, but, above all, through a conscious experience of his early fear of his beloved mother’s contempt and his subsequent feelings of indignation and sadness. Mere words, however skilled the interpretation, will leave unchanged or even deepen the split between intellectual speculation and the knowledge of the body, the split from which he already suffers.
