DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

A few months ago I brought you this story - from my fridge.

And now I see that there is a wonderful blog here all about ‘passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers’

Do other people find notes round their houses?

This is the latest one in my house:

Rosa likes to leave notes … another one here…

I think it is interesting the way people leave text around the place. Sometimes with no hope of seeing most of their audience.

This one is quite bemusing:

And I like Lemon2’s shot here which captures a moment where the text seems to have a relationship with the person in front:

But the relationship is only made by the reader. There are just two items in the image and we as readers join them in a narrative; we make connections between one element of the image and another.

I am really interested in the ways in which environment can change the meanings of text and vice versa. I am interested in the way text changes over time. This one is funny:

But really I am interested in interactivity of the environment - including people, and even the weather - with texts that are in the street …. specifically streetart and grafitti. The life and meanings of street texts.

I feel a a new project coming on ….

I have phases where I really like particular words or phrases.

For ages I liked ‘counter-intuitive’; I liked the sound and I liked the meaning. I liked the idea of something transgressing or challenging expectations and assumptions. I liked the way it is an unusual word, but possible to understand even if you have never heard it before.

When my daughter was about 5 she asked me what my favourite word was. I told her it was ‘incarnidine’ - just because I thought she wanted to know an unusual word. Anyway of course I asked her the same question back and she answered

“Hellandbuggeration”.

This is of course very rude and she heard it from my Mum. Anyway family traits aside ….

My favourite words at the moment are:

Palimpsest
Apophenia
Provenance

I like the words as I like the concepts they refer to.
They all involve an idea I am interested in at the moment.

In a way, ‘palimpsest’ refers to texts that have a visible history; the word originally was used to simply describe scrolls or parchments where original text had been scraped away and a new one written on the top. There would be tracings of the old script still visible. I like this idea of the old and new co-existing. The idea of layered histories, layered narrative and the present being suffused with the past.

There is even a palimpsest group on Flickr here. It is obviously something many people are interested in … and it seems that some are extending the idea of text as being something other than just words… like this.

I have contributed some pictures to the group including this one:

I am amazed it has not been painted over.

The next word’apophenia‘ is about the bringing together of ideas that seem disassociated. As wikipedia will have it: Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Maybe I have apophenia but I do see a connection between apophenia and palimpsest - since it is so often the case that when history seeps through to the present (as in palimpsest) it seems alien somehow. Sometimes the way history jars with the present makes it seem unconnected - but may actually be closely connected in some way. We may not always know the derivation of words we use in daily life - but they often have a history of meanings that have adapted over time and then come to mean something new. They have travelled a journey of usage and come to signify something differently.

such as this:

Arranged into topics from business to war to flowers, the author explains the most likely origins behind everyday words and expressions. “Laconic,” for example, means brief and blunt. Its origins, more than 2600 years ago, take it back to the Greek Wars. The Laconians, when told by an ambassador that “if we come to your city we will raze the walls and kill everyone.” The Laconians reply? “If.”

(Taken from here.)

Finally I like the word ‘provenance’ ; it is a term originally used by art historians to refer to the ‘biography’ or history of an artefact, such as a picture. The provenance of something describes the sources from which something comnes - where the work of art has been, who owned it, etc.

I like to think about the ways in which things carry stories within them so that they are meaningful not just because of what purpose they serve now, but because of their history and previous uses etc. I like to think about the ways in which the past is inscribed in the present.

Strangely enough, I am interested in all these ideas in relation to social networking and online texts as we can now see connections being made across texts which weave meanings together and bring together ideas and sites together in many new configurations. We can easily link to other people, other texts and ideas. We can embed old texts into new ones.

On the Internet there is a criss crossing and patchworking going on that seems to defy boundaries and logic. One moment a text can stand independently and in the next minute it can appear in someone’s blog; or on a wiki; or even in many places all at once. And you can pull threads through the networks to trace the paths back, or to trace new paths ahead.

It is all very exciting and DYNAMIC.

I even found MY hands here on wikipedia.

Originally uploaded by iz*source.

Oh how lovely on Valentine’s day …

But there is no need for us to forget what we are REALLY here for … the lurve of WEb 2.0

You Tube is NOT just videos of people at weddings . It is a rich resourrce for info of all kinds. Here are two useful bits about web 2.0

I really like this one:

This one is a bit less funky but a bit more controversial.

I am a bit behind on reporting this but Demos has recently  (beginning of January) brought out a new publication (authors Celia Hannon and Hannah Green) called Their Space.

You can download the article for free as a pdf ..

It does what it says on the  tin and more:

Their Space: Education for a digital generation draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media.

 Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy

I think it’s really good and Hannah and Celia talk about it here on the radio.

I have been at this conference today and tomorrow I will be giving my paper… ‘Chilli, stylist’s own: Online presentations of the Domestic’.  I really enjoyed meeting people from across the university today and it was great chatting in the breaks and finding out what everyone is up to.

This week has been fun on Flickr. I took a series of photos on Monday, telling a particular story:

Then TT uploaded this image to Flickr (while I sorted out the alcohol). Strange though because having uploaded that picture of alphabetti spagetti on toast (don’t ask) TT got abuse from other Flickr people … which he had to delete. All very weird as I would have thought the picture was pretty inoffensive, but there you go. He deleted the offending comments and blocked the users from his stream, after which the offending parties’ fiends all started with the aggro. Quite rare on Flickr but there you go. 

Anyway, that’s a glimpse of our domestic life this week.

Well the UK Celebrity Big Brother is in the news globally it appears… housemates are being accused of racial harrassment and bullying by watchers of the show.

Shilpa Shetty the Bollywood star is said to be the subject of racism and its been on the news everywhere. The BBC reports here. And even the Indian government has taken up the issue.

There is debate though since it seems that while in theory we can define racism, in practice people disagree with each other.

Frankly I think that some of the housemates are being racist … Jack has used the word ‘Paki’; Jackiey referred to Shilpa as ‘The Indian’; and the others have variously referred to her country as ‘never never land’; ‘India or whatever’; and ‘wherever you come from’. They comment on her being dirty for eating with her hands (presumably they eat crisps with spoons and burgers with a knife and fork?)

Well it is all fascinating; Reality TV hits the news big time and is rocking the boat. people are wondering whether it is important that a few people are being racist towards each other. Does it become more significant when it is played out n Natinal TV.

This website however seems to be misconstrued as racist and I am convinced it is ironically jibing at racists.

Sadly it is yet again the time of year when the British Nation is force fed 1970s style crap entertainment in a bid to get them to cough up dough for ‘Children in Need’.

The idea is to induce an overwhelming sense of pity and to foster the idea that children (soon to be adults) can only survive if other people are kind enough.

Hear it from disability nation.

And I am pretty much loving the piss on pity approach on these T shirts. It is definitely worth browsing through this site.

The BBC tv programme Children in Need has been running annually for 24 years. That is a heartsinking number of crap tv programmes the nation has had to endure. Its mascot is a teddy bear, ‘Pudsey’ which has a patch over one eye. (Poor Pudsey has a bad eye.)

Pudsey’s time is definitely up.

Thanks to Zombizi for the links. (He has been making bad situations worse, since 1963).

And finally … doesn’t this woman know that you can get loyalty points if you use your own bags in Tesco now?

TT is not happy as he is holed up in FINLAND where he claims it is pitch black and very cold.

Maybe it USED to be called Funland, but they had to change it.

TT has two vouchers to go to the bar. But it is closed.

How crap is that?

He has rearranged his hotel room and taken pictures but cannot upload them to Flickr as there is no Internet access.

But I have found that when he gets back he can upload pictures to the hotel website here.

Can’t be all bad; he will be able to show the shots he took where he was rearranging his room.

Here he is, holding his electronic tagging device. (Silly old twit)

Originally uploaded by jjdubit.

Everyday moment captured ‘from the hip’.

Just an everyday scene savoured by the digital.
Love the postbox front right and the half obscured figures by the post.
Everyone wrapped in their on world.