Watch: New Documentary Short Explores Northern China's Huge Water Crisis
“The Story of Invisible Water,” produced by Asia Society’s China Green project, heads to the North China Plain to shed light on “of the world’s worst environmental crises.”
In Focus: Mexico’s Drug War: 50,000 Dead in 6 Years
Warning: All images in this entry are shown in full. There are many dead bodies; the photographs are graphic and stark. This is the reality of the situation in Mexico right now.
Top: A masked Mexican soldier patrols the streets of Veracruz, on October 10, 2011. Soldiers of the Army, Navy and members of Federal Police patrol the streets of the city as part of “Veracruz Safe Operation” after a rising tide of violence plaguing this tourist city.
Bottom: A forensic technician points his flashlight at the shoes of a man at a crime scene in Mazatlan, on February 13, 2012. The man was shot dead by gunmen while he was walking on the street, according to local media.
See more. [Images: AFP/Getty, Reuters]
Source: The Atlantic
NASA photos show Dead Sea dying
Thanks to massive water-diversion and salt-evaporation projects, satellite images show how the ancient lake is gradually living up to its name.
(via theatlantic)
Source: mothernaturenetwork
In Focus: Glimpses of Humanity in Choreographed North Korea
In a massive spectacle held in Pyongyang over the weekend, North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong Un, addressed an audience of thousands. His appearance was part of a week-long celebration of the birth of the nation’s founder Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Un, who was recently named “supreme commander,” promised to continue a military-first policy, despite chronic economic and food shortages. Foreign photojournalists invited for the celebrations have been sending back hundreds of images — but viewers back home must work to read between the lines. As you view these images, keep in mind that the photographers are strictly limited, only able to capture pre-approved subjects in sanctioned settings. These shapes, colors, and choreographed formations form the image North Korea wants to project. But even photographs like these can give us glimpses of an individual among the masses, inspiring empathy or curiosity. As we look at these members of a long-impoverished, tightly controlled society, we can only study their faces and imagine what they might truly be thinking.
See more. [Images: Reuters, AFP/Getty]
Look at the top photo. None of the dancers are smiling.
I don’t want to pretend like North Korea is better than it is, but look—are the dancers supposed to be smiling?
I am not a Korean person, nor am I a Korea scholar, but I do know that smiling is not at all part of traditional Japanese dance or musical performance—solemn expressions are part of the atmosphere. I’m not sure the expectation should be that everyone needs to be smiling?
I also want to point out that when you’re doing a choreographed dance in the States—where smiling during performance is part of the whole shtick (can’t you hear the dance coach hissing at the nine-year-olds to SMILE from offstage?)—your smile is absolutely done on purpose, because much of the time your natural expression would be one of concentration.
Look, North Korea is a horrible place in basically every conceivable way. But searching for drops of pathos in these photos is sort of embarrassing. People are eating leaves and dying of starvation and being systematically abused in concentration-style labor camps. What do we want from the people who are not going through that? I really feel like the need to see some flicker of something in these faces says most about how we like to think about the people under totalitarian regimes—i.e., that they’re all secret, silent rebels. I don’t think that’s true.
I didn’t intend it that way — I just thought it was strange to see dancers who weren’t smiling. Still, this is much more incisive than the bit I wrote.
Nicely done, baileyeverywhere.
Source: The Atlantic
Somalia: A Look Back
Ibn Battuta is one of history’s great explorers. He set out from his native Tangier in 1325, when he was just 21. By the time he returned home for good almost 30 years later, he had covered some 120,000 km and nearly every part of the Islamic world.
What makes me so astonished is to read about this great scholars account of his visit to the Somali coastal capital Mogadishu in 1331. He paints a picture of an exotic, vibrant and rich nation which played a vital role in world trade.
Mogadishu is a very large town. The people are merchants and very rich. They own large herds of camels…and also sheep. Here they manufacture the textiles called after the name of the town; these are of superior quality and are exported to Egypt and other places.
Just makes me wonder what happened to this Somalia? (Graphics|Text)
(via npr)
Source: newsflick
Final Exam: Networking Art, Politics and History
“In the last two weeks Mazen Kerbaj’s drawings have been one of the strongest most vivid expressions of the whole mess that is unfolding in lebanon that i came across”, wrote Amsterdam based blogger Paul Keller on his blog referring to Lebanese artist Mazen Kerbaj’s artwork that he posted to his blog since the beginning of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. While Kerbaj’s drawings are very striking and evocative, what Keller did with these drawings is even more interesting as he printed them out and posted them in the streets of Amsterdam (Cities Unbuilt, p. 95). Although, this example doesn’t fit exactly fit into the idea of a networked city, Keller himself feels that translating a blog, which is a technology contained within the internet, into the fabric of the city, he is able to make a connection between digitally generated and distributed images and physical landscape. He, therefore, creates a feedback loop between the city of Lebanon, it’s people, the situation of war and destruction, the chaos and emotions expressed in Kerbaj’s images posted to his blog, and the streets of a completely different city, that is, Amsterdam.
The way in which the inhabitants of a city interact with the urban environment around them is important in understanding the complexity of the city. As Kevin Lynch points out, “we must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants” (SYSTEMS/LAYERS, p. 18). Keller’s A4 sized printed posters are able to add another layer of meaning to the built landscape by bringing the issue of war and violence to a completely different context. However, there is one drawback in his feedback loop: it’s not exactly a loop that allows us to to perceive the reaction and thoughts of the people in Amsterdam who view these images.
Keller’s project may not be an example of digital networked landscape where objects speak to you and connect with you, like in the case of Quividi billboards with facial recognition technology or the American Eagle spectaculars at Times Square that display your own image while advertising to you. Nevertheless, it is part of a network of infrastructure (of course with the digital element of Kerbaj and Kellers’s individual blogs as well) and performs the very important function of using art, memory and conflict to temporarily modify the façade of the city by asking people to think about a situation that they are very removed from.
Recently, I came across an Israeli non-governmental organization called Zochrot that aims to bring the Palestinian Nakba into the Israeli-Jewish public imagination by posting signs and images commemorating destroyed Palestinian villages and sites. This activism project is part of a design solution missing from reconstruction of Palestinian villages that Malkit Shoshan points out in the article “Lifta after Zionist planning” in Cities Unbuilt (p. 142). Shoshan explains how Lifta, a Palestinian village that retained much of its original architecture, is being reconstructed into a exclusive real estate while using it’s historical aspect as a “Palestinian ruin” to increase the value of the space. The article concludes by saying that “the original Palestinian inhabitants of Lifta are nowhere to be found in the plans. Those who created and cultivated this space, their memories of the village, their exile and longing to return are not mentioned at all” (Cities Unbuilt, p. 143).
Zochrot addresses Shoshan’s criticism by generation networks of knowledge, creating a space for discussion and linking historical, cultural and political memory and context to the people and the environment. The NGO’s website curates maps, images, testimonials, videos, articles, books that tell the story of the Nakba in an attempt to create historical and collective memory of the land and the people. This retelling of the story and bringing the Nakba into the language, landscape, environment and memory of the Israeli-Jewish people is Zochrot’s attempt to start a much needed process of reconciliation between the Jewish and the Arab people of the region.
Thus, by creating an online community as well as generating discussions in different Palestinian sites within Israel, Zochrot is truly able to create the feedback loop that Keller attempted. However, both projects are able to generate networks that infuse the fabric of the city with historical and symbolic contexts. Finally, while technologies such as facial recognition for advertisement billboards or interactive QR codes on gigantic digital screens have very specific functions in terms of their general commercial use, I believe that creating digital and infrastructural networks that address political, economic, social and cultural issues are far more important in impacting urban life.
References:
Greenfield, Adam. SYSTEMS/LAYERS: URBAN EXPERIENCE IN THE NETWORK AGE. 2011
Rem Koolhaas etl. al. eds. Volume 11: Cities Unbuilt. New York: Columbia University Archis. 2007
