Monthly Archives: August 2013

What Wit!

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Last night I started to read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (it seems it can only be read at night), the first major work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I have come across several things that have been pretty interesting so far, including links to Solipsism, which we were discussing in philosophy last week.

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, into one of the richest family’s in Europe at the time (holding a monopoly on the steel industry in Austria), with four brothers and four sisters. He was the youngest member of the family. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, was dominating, apparently lacking empathy, and saw only a future in industry for his sons. His mother, Leopoldine Kalmus, was reportedly timid and anxious, unable to stand up to her husband, a harsh perfectionist, focused only on business and the continuation of it through his family.

Ludwig’s brothers displayed evidence of a streak of depression that seems to have run through the family. Three of his four brothers committed suicide, and Ludwig contemplated it regularly, approaching it as though it was a problem of logic that he needed to overcome. In his notebooks he wrote:

“If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours.”

His eldest brother was a musical prodigy, able to identify the different pitches and keys of music from the age of four. He disappeared on a boat after leaving for a America in 1902. The third eldest brother committed suicide in Berlin at a bar, where he ordered a glass of milk, requested the song “Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I” to be played by the pianist, and proceeded to mix potassium cyanide into his glass, before drinking it.

However, intro and gloom aside, I’d like to talk about several passages, the first being what Russell (who was Wittgenstein’s good friend and wrote the 20 odd page introduction to this work, which includes sentences like, “The definition of identity by means of the identity of indiscernible appears to be not a logically necessary principle”) describes as Wittgenstein’s most fundamental thesis.

“The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the components words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the structure and the structure of the fact. (…) That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said in language.”

This is difficult. And I’ve been reading through it (by the way, he has written his Tractatus in numerical point form, e.g. “1 The world is all the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.“) and I’m struggling to make an enormous amount of sense of it. But basically, what I think he’ saying, is reasonably simple, but the terms he uses are confusing. For example, his sentence that begins, “Given the syntax of a language,” is essentially saying that there is no difference between understanding the words in a sentence, and the persons meaning. It reminds me of the part from Atonement, when Briony is sitting in the nursery contemplating he failing play.

“By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols unravelled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from a distance, with woods in high summer spread before it…”

I’ll let this sit for a little bit, as I have to go off to training, but it is to be continued…

Photojournalism in Conflict

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Again, while scrolling down the infinite wall that is tumblr, I saw a photograph (down the bottom of the linked page) of some hands against the back window of a car. It was a grainy photo, the hands were dirty and the car was several decades old (rust spots showing, paint missing and grime tinging roof green) and it was under the title, “Chechen Hands”, by photographer Stanley Greene.

I googled his name and found the company he was attached to, Noor Images, which contained what I can only assume is his entire body of work. Greene mainly seems to photograph conflict, wars and famines, capturing the different scenes that come with those types of environment. As his profile reads:

“For the last 25 years, Stanley Greene (New York, 1949) bore witness to births of new dawns, rising and falling empires, invasions of countries, liberations of others, mass migrations, deportations, displacements, famines, conflicts, wars and destructions. He worked on the five continents trying to document the human condition. “Sometimes I wonder if societies just lust for tragedies.”

I had a look through some of his works, and his most recent one, “Snipers Life in Aleppo“, reminded me that I has read about Aleppo for the first time only few weeks ago, in an article that I wrote a blog post about.

As coincidence would have it, or perhaps a reflection on how little this is being covered by the more general media, the description of the photographs is written by Francesca Borri, the same freelance journalist and human rights activist who wrote the article I wrote a blog post. She tells chillingly about tells of the level of death present in Aleppo.

“Iyad is 32, a broken expression nestled in strong muscles, he was a carpenter. “My workshop is at the end of the corner,” he tells you, even if at the corner there’s but a slid ceiling, the stump of a wall, and even if he now is a sniper, two hours per day, every day, he sleeps here, a mattress and a blanket next to a door’s skeleton, his brother died his father died, his best friend died, everybody died, his two-year-old daughter died, in his Nokia the photo of her body covered in blood, and now he is a sniper, that’s all, two hours per day shielded by sandbags, you look through the hole where he shoots from and the helmets of the last soldiers he hit are still there, in the street.”

Wishing Wall?

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Trawling through tumblr the other (what charming alliteration) day, I came across this piece of art (DON’T CLICK THE LINK YET! READ ON!), by Kate MccGwire that I thought was quite interesting. Copyright being what it is, and this being my self-confessed (though not by myself) online identity, that will add to building a digital reputation, I won’t post any pictures of the actual exhibition, but click through the link to see it in the back-lit flesh.

In fact, perhaps I shall try to describe it to you. I’ll endeavor to build a picture of it in your mind, and then, only then, click through to the exhibition and you can see how close the picture I created is to the actual piece.

It is a large, grey wall, seven meters long and over five meters tall, painted a neutral grey, not quite as dark as slate, perhaps closer to the colour of the grey on a Commonwealth Bank debit card. And on the wall, is a spiral of 23,000 chicken wish bones, starting from the right of center of the wall. The chicken wishbones are completely clean, and are that off-bonewhite, that is similarly called, cream (the colour you might see on the wall of your house). The wishbones are arranged so they almost fit into each other as the form the spiral, like this; “<<<<<<“, but rather than straight, curved in a lazy arc. The effect when seen from a distance is similar to what one might imagine if you saw an ornamental pebble garden from above.

You may now, I suppose, click the link and see what it actually looks like, as now, class must be attended.

(probably to be continued)

Toy Stories

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I stumbled across this article, when I was researching for the last post I did, and thought it was an incredible idea for a photographic project, and produced some incredible images.

It is titled, “Toy Stories“, by Italian photographer, Gabriele Galimberti, who spent 18 months traveling the world taking photographs of children with their favourite toys. As the article says, he spent some time playing with each of the children before helping them arrange their toys neatly on the ground, before taking several portraits of the child next to their toys.

His photograph’s reflected each different child’s world by illuminating their interests, personalities, families, cultures and wealth.

As Gamimberti discovered, there was some significant and obvious relationships between a child’s socioeconomic class and their personality.

“The wealthiest children were more possessive of their belongings, refusing to let Galimberti touch the toys at first. Building rapport with those kids took longer. The poorer children were much more receptive to Galimberti and were more generous with their fewer belongings. In the poorest countries, children often had very few toys, and therefore spent most of their time outdoors with friends.”

This project is special for several reasons, including that Gamimberti traveled so long and far to collect these photos, and that he was able to capture a snapshot of such a wide range of cultural and economic situations through such a simple vehicle. It reminds me of a quote by French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Galimberti chose the denominator common to all societies; children, and then picked a thing that is almost exclusively shared by this common denominator; toys. He gave us insight, not only into the world of the child, but the reality of the society that child was from, highlighting the different values favoured in different places around the world.

But mostly, this project is special because of the sense of nostalgia it creates in everyone who sees the photos, as they remember back to their own childhoods and cannot help but wonder what might have been in their portrait. It takes you back to all of those small pieces of plastic and metal that are either in landfill now, or are sitting in a box that collects dust in an attic or storage container somewhere. Those tokens, no, those idols, that you might have received as a Christmas present from an uncle, or your parent bought you one day after weeks of listening to your nagging, or that especially sacred first purchase with saved pocket money.

What was so special about them? Can you even remember now? Was it really that long ago?

Week 3 Reading: Bruce Sterling on design fictions

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One of the readings for this week was an interview with Bruce Sterling, an award winning science-fiction writer, but also a vocal advocate of what is known as “design fiction”. He defines design fiction as being, “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend belief’s about change.” Sterling is appearing at a conference at Arizona State University, called ‘Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future‘, which serves to facilitate lecturing and discussion about what the future might look like.

I found some of the things said by Sterling to be quite interesting, especially at his mention of a legal case between technology giants Apple and Samsung. In the lawsuit, there was reference to an iPad-like tablet that was used as a prop in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which you can watch, here. Sterling used this as an example of a design fiction that proved to be successful, 45 years later, as you can now walk down to your local electronics store and purchase one.

Another interesting observation by Sterling was in his response when asked what it was that made design fictions work so well. He replied quite reasonably, “Talking about a future gadget isn’t like talking about a future government or women’s rights in the future or other hot-button problems. Plus people are interested in things like that.”

A pretty reasonable statement to make, that electronic toys are more likely to grab people’s attention than social rights or political issues. Perhaps a reflection of people’s general exhaustion at the topic of politics, or anything ‘serious’, or maybe more a statement about the imagination within everyone that needs, at least occasionally, to be exercised.