Some wee beastie took a bite out of this discarded potato and agreed we were right to discard it.
Status:
- Rest day today.
- Fi went and got a bale of hay from the horse shop and it now costs £8. A few years ago it was a fiver. Still very cheap for a month’s worth of rabbit food but that sure is some inflation for dry grass.
- Been thinking about the concept of ethical or sustainable photography. It usually revolves around not using polluting chemicals to develop images - see CuriosoLab who I linked to the other day - and I’m wondering how this might relate to photography’s history as a mechanical medium. I remember Vilém Flusser talking about how photographs are authored primarily by the political, economic and industrial systems that produced the camera equipment - the photographer themselves is just along for the ride. (I did a talk about this in 2016, and Flusser is probably more relevant today than ever). So if cameras are authored by political, economic and industrial systems which we consider problematic… Maybe we need to get back to making cameras and lenses from scratch, not just the chemistry.
- Explained myself to Mastodon.
Overnight listening:
Reading:
- Adam Greenfield dissects the Wuben G5 rechargeable pocket flashlight - his point about the unnecessary multicolour option reminds me of this piece about Japanese web design, specifically that if something doesn’t have a function people might think it isn’t good enough.
- The History of Web Design, 1993–2012: Season 5 Launch - a nice overview of the key themes that emerged in that era. I’d never call myself a web designer but the accessibility of HTML / CSS and the hackability of basic Wordpress themes meant I had a lot of fun in the late 2000s.
- Is Tehching Hsieh the most extreme performance artist ever? - I looked at Hsieh when I was figuring out how to spend three months in a gallery for Instructions for Humans and he’s really interesting.
Watching:
- The Elsa edit craze of the 2010s 16:31
- We were at ICE’s invasion in Minneapolis 50:55 - really good reporting from Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick.