Bloging

Writing a blog has been a very interesting and fun activity. I really think it has been a good idea from anyone who stated it. It is not only a class task, because my classmates and I have been working on them in our independent time also. You can notice that in the preoccupation with aesthetics on making each blog something personal, in which we put our effort in expressing ourselves, but also in making them interesting to the other classmates who will eventually read them.
I think by allowing us to express ourselves -and by that I don’t mean just show our deep interior selfish feelings but to write and think of the topics we liked at the time-, by having that chance I was able to build a connected, coherent theme based mainly in three topics: internet, its implication in life, and language, all of them carried out in most of the posts, stressing some aspects more in one post and the others in another.
A huge portion of the Internet and the programs to access here are available only in English (i.e. Wikipedia has 417.000 articles in Spanish, 537.000 in Japanese and 2.626.000 articles in English): it means that by learning English people expand their quantitative access to the web. In addition, a huge amount of important content written in native languages, have also an English version: by being able to surf the internet in English you are also (at least partially) able to access pages in other languages, and in different countries. The privilege of being able to use internet also makes people capable of helping those who don’t have that privilege: There are a lot of internet projects developed by user communities which are available for more and more people as volunteers translate the contents and the programs to local languages. Examples of that are Wikipedia, and the Free Software communities.
Though the use of blogs I have been able to learn internet skills which will help me to access more content which make my internet bigger, to make it accessible to other users who don’t speak English (like my mom), I learned in the practice the English writing skills –partially-, and I am also trying to get along with this blog posting thing, which is not that hard anymore.

Brazil

Terry Gilliam's Brazil plays a critique of XX century city life, to bureaucratization, mass production of false needs, the spread of ideology through mass media. The story is located “somewhere in the twentieth century”, inside a metropolis whose irrational rationality the characters -as real people nowadays- are unable to scape. Though events happening around Sam (the main character), an anonymous bureaucrat disenchanted with his world, expecting, wanting nothing from it, Gilliam tells the common story of our world in the late twentieth and early twenty first century: The instrumental relations held between persons; the lack of meaning in everything; the impossibility of escaping; the destruction of nature; the alienation of men though work, but also though the use of free time satisfying false needs... OK, at this point of my commentary the movie sounds quite depressing, well, it is not. The story is told though hyperbolic situations and spaces, though rich aesthetic, narrative and visual resources which illustrate this dystopian fantasy metropolis as a grotesque, but yet familiar, common space in contemporary life. The irrationality and the banalization of life is accused, caricatured explicitly but also implicitly by the proper use omissions, the ingeniously display of accidents and incidental situations, the exquisite aesthetic dimension, the cheats made on the viewer's expectations, and also humor, aspects which makes this movie a masterpiece.

I have the movie, so if anyone in the class is interested just ask... shouldn't have said that, Big Brother is reading us!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzRHTKa8iDE

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laaaou: Camila Vi's blog

Most of the blogs on the class are fun and interesting -so by this time I have been spending valuable time for this assignment checking them- but I had to pick one. The one I chose was Camila Vi‘s Blog. It is very friendly and shows the author’s preoccupation with the aesthetic, order and good work.

You can recognize it from the beginning. At the top of the page there is this big picture which shows a collage being done in a piece of copybook paper, mixing different elements, and giving the idea of the presence of her subjectivity starting from the very name of the blog, "laaaou".
The topics and the way they are stated in the blog are always referring to the reader, inviting (him/her/it) to go further, read more, think more of the subject stated – “Give it a try, I highly recommend it!”; “if you want to learn more about this fascinating (at least for me!) subject”; quoting the common place of making the hard decision of choosing one only single piece of art. That’s cool because the blog format makes it possible for the reader to continue reading, and to give feedback to the topics posted, which makes us forget that they are part of an “assignment”, and …
I think the topic I like the most of those she has posted is “Le Baiser”, which talks about the homonymous piece by Auguste Rodin. She explains very beautifully and exhaustively the history and the story behind it.
I strongly recommend you to check it at http://laaaou.blogspot.com/ .

Las Meninas

The piece of art I'm going to refer to in this entry is "Las Meninas" (English: "The Maids of Honor"), painted in 1656 by the Spanish king's court painter Diego Velásquez. This canvas plays a central role in western art history, and also is one of the most widely analyzed piece of art. We've seen it - and some variations of the concept- in different contexts, from art books to t-shits. Personally i cannot identify the first time I saw it, provably when I was a child and spent my time drawing and painting.

What makes this piece special is the nature and the depth of what is represented in and beyond it. The composition puts together what is in the canvas along with what is outside of it. There appears to be a double movement, one of the painting going out of the canvas, and at the same time, of the spectator coming inevitably to play a -central- role in the composition of this representation, becoming for some moments the king or queen being portrayed by the painter and watched by the dwarves, court members and infanta Margarita, who is at the center of the canvas but relegated to a secondary role in the representation

The object of the representation in which we became involved is the representation of classical art and its space being represented, setting itself free from it's object, a signifier without other signified than itself, self reference, deep ontology of language.

Privacy in the Age of Information

An article i just read refears to problems that people might have with some internet sites -specially social network sites like MySpace and Facebook- publishing and sharing their private information.

In real “offline” life, people spend a lot of time and effort in the “presentation of the self” –the author quotes sociologist Ervin Goffman's contributions to the understanding of social interactions - which consist of the different things people do to present themselves to others and to the world as personalities. This process of building and showing personality is based on sharing information about the self by the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the places you go, the way you talk, and so on.

The article proposes that the same happens in “online” life, especially considering these social network sites where people present themselves through other mediums of information –photos, comments, and so on- but, here there isn’t the mechanism people use in "offline" life to choose who this information will be shared with. That could be dangerous, specially when your girlfriend’s father logs in.

("One Friend Facebook Hasn't Made Yet: Privacy Rights" by Adam Cohen. New York Times, February 18, 2008)

Interesting /b/sides from the internets

Internet is a very diverse (cyber)space, there is room for everyone and websites are created everyday to satisfy the interest and desires of unimaginable kind of people, and now also to create new ones -interests, desires, people.Lately, I've realized internet is not just something you "enjoy visiting" like a stranger, rather it has transfigured more of something you own; you constitute, as a part; or which constitute you. Examples of the first case are the e-mails, of the second the "internet communities" of various kinds; and in the last case, the growing importance of the internet for everyday life.One interesting page I found which is a good example of what I just stated is 4chan -www.4chan.org -. It is a bizarre phenomenon. It is based on a very simple format, which is called "image board". It consists on a message list where people can enter texts and -as its name says- images. What is interesting about it is that people is forced not to identify themselves as they post, so what is stated there hasn't got an "author", so there isn't a responsible for what is posted. Also, there is not a moderator, because of that, the website is room for political incorrectness, hackers, and a long list of etceteras. Also, the massive population which constitutes the community, or the communities in it has the power to take over internet polls, and to influence “real” life.