*Some or these work like gangbusters, while others are actively irritating. Those effects have little to do with the formal qualities of the photograph. The ones with the
prettiest buildings, best lighting angles and most cunning Photoshop techniques
tend to be as vapid as novelty postcards.
*A good vocabulary for this would have to include historical insight and collage.
Collage can be achingly surreal or merely annoying, and a great deal of clumsy cultural
engineering goes on in the effort we call "history."
*If Augmented Reality gets some real-world traction, it's going to be doing many things like this, and critics will have to learn to talk about that effort, using a new vocabulary, like those of game design, interaction design and cinema.
*For instance: this thing you're looking at on a computer screen? Maybe tapping on it a little to speed it up, in semi-interactive fashion? That's somehow described as both a "slideshow" and a "pool."
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*"Steampunk metaphysics." Not sure I concur with all this, but it's great to see these issues raised. An atemporal metaphysics is the key to reach from street-pop atemporality to high-culture atemporality.
http://interdome.blogspot.com/2009/08/multi-tracking-eno-with-cyber-time.html
Adam Rothstein:
"What is really interesting about the "Looking into the Past" Flickr set is not that time changes, or that b/w photography is old school. The interesting thing is that any number of people can contribute to this artistic comparison, upload it to the Internet, and add to an infinitely replicable viewing experience for an unlimited number of people, who will all no doubt see and experience any part of the set in different ways.
"The set has 1,063 members. You could join too. Digital photographic technology is one thing, but networked-participant-enabled digital photography is something else. More important than the ability to Photoshop, to record and re-record, is the ability to alter the speed of the consumption of the photograph, by networking its distribution and consumption.
"In typical math, if D/T = S, and you let T go to zero, you get an unworkable solution. The Cartesian child asks, "how could viewing the picture differently possibly change the content? Isn't it the same picture, just faster?"
"But in math which does not rely on the real number set, you get an infinite amount of possibilities in the same situation. Your specific time=T definition is no longer applicable, and now we are in the terrain of the atemporal. The atemporal child responds, "all your RTs are belongs to us." Is the Internet fast, or really fast? How do you measure how fast "things end up on the Internet" or how quickly "things begin trending"? It doesn't really matter–because there is only "as soon as you know about it". Speed is now a joining, a multi-tracking, a conjunction, and a metaphorical form of expression. If you are moving at speed, the only things you can see are those also at speed. The difference between them is purely relative. What is truly atemporal is not just immediately available, but always on; it is not just multi-faceted, but multi-authored and multi-consumed; it is not just immediate, but currently-being-expressed/experienced; it is not just Heideggerian presence, but a headlong dive into Bergsonian duration, the first-ever expansion of Kant's Transcendental Ideal of time into new territory (sorry about that last one, folks). (((He's apologizing because it hurts – but without Bergson there would have been no Italian Futurists, and without Eno there could no Long Now.)))
"We can produce and experience more, and in a new way, all beyond our previous constraints of mere "time"...
(((The bumper-sticker:)))
"The temporal currency has crashed, and our metaphysics can now operate outside of the constraints of the free market (otherwise known as history)."
