notes on the geography of ithaca

      Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

“I'd known, even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I'm pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain.” -David Foster Wallace, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”
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ithaca sits surrounded by hills; the tops of the hills are flat. this is because they are not true hills, which rise up from the earth. they are plateau remnants; and the valleys are scratchmarks left by the fingers of glaciers when they reached down from the north.
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the hills in ithaca are split open with cracks where merciless water flows. the shattered sides of the gorges crumble at the touch as though the hills could dissolve at any moment. beneath every bridge in cornell a net is spread to deter jumpers, and ducks swim peacefully in the water below.

there are always more secrets hidden in these folded hills. when i am home i hike with dad, our small anxious dog, and our large blind dog. i think of the extradimensional geometry of string theory with every discovery of something i had never seen before. we go as far from civilization as we can and hidden among the trees we find colonial graveyards, old stone walls, abandoned logging roads.

minnesota stretches out flat until farms meet clouds at the horizon. driving becomes a shifting study of parallax and perspective. the skyline of minneapolis rises out of the flat land like mount fuji exposed against the open sky. in ithaca the hills hold you in pockets with only a sliver of sky. the other side of the valley is laid out like an abstraction of a landscape, flat houses and barns, farms and forests in a formless pattern. but this is a map of somewhere else: your perspective is only a single point in the image seen by someone on the other side.

ithaca sits surrounded by the names of dead places and people. odysseus will never return here. nor will the cayuga people reclaim the lake that carries their name. it stretches north to the horizon from ithaca, as if reaching to ontario where the displaced survivors of the sullivan campaign took refuge.

the haudenosaunee reached minnesota, in their imperial phase as english proxies. hiawatha’s name is still spoken here, more often than i ever heard it in ithaca.

something about minions and emotional signifiers

i saved this fuckin fossil to my hard drive in 2010

Sony is set to release next year a movie about a common set of images that depict a single, legible emotion set on a nonspecific shape. Which is funny, because I thought the Minions movie already came out in 2015.

The minions movie/market phenomenon was/is such a blatantly corporate money grab that it’s almost too easy to make fun of. I don’t even know what the movie is about; I’ve never even seen the trailer. But what’s really interesting is how indistinguishable minions are. They’re nothing like, say, Star Wars Merchandise, where the characters are easily distinguishable and the narrative firmly set. Minions, as far as I can tell, are differentiated by slightly different proportions and goggle styles. Beyond that, they’re just a vehicle for the expression of funny faces.

So they’re animated emojis, basically. An emoji is a particle of expression, conveying an easily legible emotion. They’re a feature of the blending that happens online between the image and the word, two modes of visual communication that have spent a long time apart. It’s not a totally unprecedented blend: comics, illustrations, illuminated manuscripts, and plenty of other forms have used the potent combination to good effect. But like many other forms of communication in this, the age of aquarius, it has become astonishingly easy. Memes are the most obvious forms but it carries throughout the web—I’ve found that instagram posts do better with cutesy captions than without text; I’ve been starting these blog posts with a picture for the same reason; and crucially our textual discourse is now filled with emojis.

The emoji represents an interesting kind of blend between text and image, very different from (but still related to) the common meme of text-over-image. Here it is an image with an almost (but not quite) textual containment of meaning. A word has a discrete referent; an emoji expresses a discrete emotion. This fixedness actually seems to be a plot point in the upcoming movie—the protagonist is an emoji who is not fixed on any one emotional display. Charming.

Now that our emotions have such easy signifiers available corporations are circling like sharks with the scent of blood. After movies, who knows what they’ll get into. But if there’s one thing that’s wonderful about the internet, its the ease with which corporate signifiers can be recognized, repurposed, or abandoned by real humans just trying to talk to each other. Anyways, here’s my favorite work of art from 2015: a minion committing seppuku.

the flappy bird post

I love Flappy Bird. It might be my favorite video game ever, though I don’t play much so I’m not sure how far you can trust my taste. But (as I have insisted to several of my very patient friends) I think that it’s more than just a silly little experiment of a game with nothing to offer beyond a low-grade addiction. From an aesthetic perspective, I think it is as epoch-marking as the original Super Mario Bros.

That’s just not an arbitrary comparison with (arguably) the most famous video game of all time, though. Flappy Bird and Mario share the same DNA. Visually, Nguyen appropriated the iconic warp pipe as the principal obstacle for flappy bird to navigate. Mechanically, each game is centered around precisely timped jumps.

But they diverge. The Mario games offer discrete challenges, each one situated in its own landscape. There is stable ground beneath your feet, something to retreat to and rest on between moments of challenge. In Mario, the player is expected to learn and grow as the game goes on, mastering each challenge just to be faced with another step. Finally the game offers completion, a state of total mastery over the elements, symbolized in this case by the rudely patriarchal acquisition of a woman of status.

The struggle of Flappy Bird is infinite. You are born, given a brief period of free practice, and then immediately set to jumping through hoops. The object that could transport you across worlds has become the principle object. The challenges are not designed: they are mindless, randomly set. You can never see further ahead than the next hoop. There are no enemies: death comes as a result of any interaction with the landscape, no matter how slight. There is nothing to rest upon: you must continue your struggling flaps until you are brought to death by your own clumsiness. The world of Flappy Bird is indifferent to your accomplishments.

I’ve never been much of a platform-game player, though. I always get frustrated with the challenges and quit. But Flappy Bird brings me into an almost meditative state of calm. When I’m doing well, it’s a quiet state of flow. My highest scores have come from when I started playing with some anxious train of thought running in my mind that distracted me from the game, and I don’t notice the choices I’m making as I play. I am as disengaged from Flappy Bird as Flappy Bird is from his surroundings.

Where Mario is a game of touching the world and mastering it, Flappy Bird invites disengagement from the world around you in favor of a soothing state of flow. You pass between obstacles almost without noticing them, until eventually one finds you: game over. But it’s easy to restart, and it’s not like you lost any accomplishment.

skeuomorphic modernism

this is a mess

Following graduation I’ve come back home to Ithaca for the summer (where “home”=“the place where I grew up”) and it’s helped me understand an architectural trend I’ve noticed recently. It’s particularly visible to me here for a couple of reasons: I grew up here, so new buildings stick out; Ithaca, as a prosperous but relatively isolated collegetown, has its own idiosyncratic culture; and a recent loosening of zoning laws has brought on a wave of new construction downtown.

The defining feature of this architecture is a development of modernism that maintains its formal elements: asymmetries, cube shapes, airiness and oppenness. But visually it centers traditional building materials like brick and wood in a decorative (not structural) way. The shining steel and huge windows of earlier modern architecture becomes ornamental peripheries.

An older building in Ithaca: brick structure, symmetry, some ornamentation, cloth awnings, arches over windows.

Modenism in Ithaca: smooth stone exterior, asymmetry, no ornamentation, awnings, or arches.

Skeuomorphic modernism: brick exterior, asymmetry, no arches, cloth awnings become steel sunshades, overt modernist elements become secondary ornamentation.

De-emphasizing the synthetic components of modernist architecture in favor of older materials is a spatially situated authenticity claim. Modernism is defined in part by what it is not, an attempt to situate buildings solely in an aesthetic space with an ‘anywhere’ quality. The new style tries to maintain the aesthetic features of modernist forms while projecting the appearance of being definitely, organically ‘here’ by using the same textures of wood and brick that old buildings use. This is an illusion—I’ve seen similar styles in Minneapolis and in photos of other cities.

The phenomenon is related to the one described in True-ish Grit, which talks about post-industrial cities selling their decay as an authentic backdrop for social media. (I promise I’m not deliberately mirroring Real Life Mag, they’ve just been putting out too much good shit.)

I think that this increased focus on authenticity of place is a response to anxieties resulting from the fluidity of information enabled by the internet. Semiotic information is no longer tied to space; its final spatial holdout in the printed word has been undercut by the digital word. Detached from its physical place, from the speaker or the text, words now are only attached to other words. But even as smartphone absorption seems to make physical space irrelevant, we try to make the physical spaces where we use our phones feel more real. But this style of architecture is the product of the likewise detached forces of global capitalism, which is why it seems to peddle the same sort authenticity regardless of place.

It’s the mirrored spacelessness of the internet and of money that produces this skeuomorphic architecture which comforts through decorative anachronism. It stands out in Ithaca because this cookie-cutter authenticity feels inauthentic against the backdrop of Ithaca’s actual local culture--anachronistic bohemians and bleeding-heart liberalism.

digital dualism and the novel

                                       X-Files S2E04

So I might just be an underqualified rando, but now that I have a ~platform~ I’ve got to use it for something, and that something might as well be a subject where I am vastly out of my depth. So let’s talk about digital dualism. You can thank the generous public scholarship of Nathan Jurgenson and his peers for giving me a lot of silly ideas about this (and other things). Hopefully I’ll be able to synthesize some of that here without talking to myself too much.

It was through several of Jurgenson’s essays that I was first introduced to the idea of digital dualism, a pejorative term he coined to describe reactionary trends of thought among baby boomers (Sherry Turkle et al.) against contemporary communications technology—the internet, social media, smartphones. The archetypal digital dualist sees these technologies as inhuman and unhealthy, and can often be found calling for disconnection and a return to what they see as more authentic lifestyles. Jurgenson contrasts this dualism with his theory of augmented reality, where the digital and the physical are meshed together in a reciprocal relationship and each constructs the other.

His steadfast advocacy for this position is why I was surprised by one of the first essays published in Real Life Magazine, which Jurgenson recently launched as editor-in-chief. Gemini Haptics by Michael Thomsen is an insightful and interesting piece that sets up a workable foundation for arguments of digital dualism. This is not to say that I would expect Jurgenson to be close-minded about the opportunity for conversation-it just wasn’t what I expected. The essay is quite pretty, and much smarter than I am.

The crux of the piece rests on a philosophical argument about perception—that instead of being strictly representational, our senses only exist in relation to the physical actions that they enable. As he puts it: “we see, in other words, what we can do.” Computers detach us from the physicality of our senses—the same mechanical actions on a touch screen accomplish vastly different material ends, and are distinguished only by the semiotic content of the interaction. The mental state that emerges from this Thomsen likens to the “machine zone” that slot-machine gamblers enter, a state of mind where repetitive mechanical actions produce a comforting dissociation and the illusion of control.

As a student of literature I lingered during undergrad on the early English novel as it emerged in the 18th century. It’s a fascinating time when the form was still emerging into popularity and no one really had a clue what they were doing. This is the period when the lovely experiment Tristram Shandy was written. Studying the rise of the novel, I encountered the writing of what I could playfully call “literary dualists.” These writers—typically older men—share many of the anxieties of our own digital dualists. In their words reading novels promotes narcissism, laziness, and sexual immorality; and renders their readers incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.

The novel and the smartphone are obviously tremendously different mediums of communication. But I often find that a valuable response to digital dualists is to ask if anything in their argument changes if you substitute one for the other. The novel causes its reader to comfortably dissociate from their surrounding environment. A simple repertoire of repetitive mechanical gestures—scanning a line of text with the eyes, turning a page—provokes in the mind a vast range of different experiences depending on the semiotic content of the page in front of them. Reading a novel allows an individual to fit themselves within the superstructures of gender, nationhood, narrative, and molds us into individuality. Depending on who you ask, Western notions of individualism began with the novel.

I suspect it is the visible privacy with oneself that elicits the critiques of dualists. The state of absorption of the reader (whether reading a phone or a book) appears to be an uncanny kind of stasis in the eyes of a third party. The third party cannot also read the phone or book, the private space generated in the mind of the reader, so they are excluded. They feel physically disconnected from the proximate individual who is mentally connected to words that were written into another phone (or computer) somewhere far off.

Thomsen’s critiques are not of something new then, despite the fact that he speaks in terms of computers, of “a medium of dead quanta, the lifeless motion of charged particles through their semiotic cages.” He casts it as a frighteningly new thing, but as much could have been said about literacy in any period.

These screens, our new mediums for language, have brought on an intensification of mass literacy. The endless web of text that is hyperlinked to more text, along with the emerging power of hyperlinked actions where text or images can be linked to material effects, is certainly novel. Maybe the main reason why this causes so much anxiety is because we are emerging out of the age of television, when literacy took second-place to imagery. Touchscreens bring a balance between the two, and also correct for the TV’s biggest failing: in order to buy something that you had seen on TV, you had to leave the TV.