In the continuation of my personal “street art history” quest, I’ve been spending some time following French street artists, like Invader. His M.O. is — no surprise — invasion…by Atari sprites. Basically, if you’ve ever seen little mosaics of Space Invaders and other 8bit characters posted around a major city near you, you’ve witnessed Invader’s “invasion.” (He counts his installations of little sprites as points and records his tags on maps that you can dig up online. How many points does it take to win an invasion? Don’t know, but looks like he’s already taken over Montpellier…)
Yep…Montpellier is under control of a big blue Invader now.
Anyway, the point of bringing up Invader isn’t to wax about enormous 8bit sprites. It isn’t even to chew over my surprise that he’s never encountered any problems using Space Invader sprites in his work. (Fair use? Not quite.)
Nope, I want to share some of Invader’s other work: rubix cubism.
It’s novel pop art that, like a lot of pop art, just replicates other pop art and icons — but using Rubix cubes. And I think that is awesome.
You can check out the full swath of ‘Vader’s Rubix-8bitified creations here, but if you scroll down, you’ll see a few of my favorites.
Sad times, nerds. This year, we could have had our hands on Kurasawa (Seven Samurai), Tolkein (books 1 & 2 LOTR), some Dr. Seuss, some C.S. Lewis, some Hitchcock (Rear Window!!???), Creature from the Black Lagoon — classic works that all should have been released into the public domain (and thus in the hands of you and me!) … if not for anti-competitive, anti-creative extensions of copyright laws.
Mourning losses to the public domain doesn’t translate as whining about not being able to “steal” or make it big off the work of others. It’s about paying attention to restrictions on cultural dialogue and innovation — for not only are creative works withheld, but scientific and historical documents also — and about making good on the public’s right to access information (the compromise for granting exclusive rights in the first place).
Copyright is by no means “evil,” but it’s crucial that we choose to stay aware and critical regarding its societal role and, at times, its excesses.
Online communication is such an endless form of frustration…especially in relationships. If I’m not knitting my brows over him, it’s over me.
So much can be read into a phrase (taking it too lightly, not paying attention, wrong mood), a silence (read and ignored, hurt, physically hurt (“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”), unread and ignored), a (stupid) emoticon, punctuation, word choice…
Of course, it doesn’t take much reflection on the above to see how not new these problems are — textual (mis?)interpretation is part of the glory and terror of written communication for as long as we bipeds have been able to write. To me, this places more emphasis (or, perhaps some would say “obsession”) on the quality most “unique” to e-communication: timeliness.
Now, assuming that everyone I know reads this blog (hardly a reality), in taking in that last line a good deal of you are rolling your eyes. So, yes: I’ll admit that I myself am not always the most timely correspondent in personal matters…I (like you, I bet) have varying degrees of responsiveness. And I’m willing to raise my bet by saying that we both posses hierarchies of responsiveness – whether created consciously or unconsciously. So, Good Friend Who Will Forgive My Lateness, Friend I Haven’t Spoken To In A While And Feel Awkward About the Silence, Steam Tech Support, MOTHER, and Significant Other all experience my emailitude differently. At the same time, I respond to emails (and lack of emails) from these (and other) groups differently…just as I do for gchats, text messages, FB posts, and so on.
Ideally, this would be the part of the post where I judiciously draw my reflection to a close, perhaps with some grand, reasonable statement about “the Influence of Attachment” that artfully dodged the foaming, owl-eyed creature within me — er, you know, the one who (armed with an hourglass and Oxford comma-counter) can lapse into temporary fixations on the S.O.’s “habits” of written correspondence, denying all reality of communication, character, and quality of the relationship. Unfortunately, the Owl Lady is pretty scrappy, and just as her love for Boyfriend makes mine even stronger, her obsession with Boyfriend’s timing in textual communication makes mine…a little more crazy.
“Crazy” isn’t the right word…but “sensitive” probably is, and that sensitivity is definitely driven by “the Influence of Attachment.” Heck, screw Attachment. We’re talking about Intimacy — intimacy in an age where the delay between thought and conveyance to another person has shrunk to seconds. That’s the power of text and typing, and though that’s not always a great power — “foot in mouth” has a whole new meaning on a Net filled with quick typists and the comfort of Anonymous — the pseudo “open door” access to the mind/heart it creates must impact modern relationships. After all, an expansion of Intimacy bears with it increases of the assumptions and expectations that go along with normal — er, non e-enhanced Intimacy.
I’m sure there’s a larger dialogue to have here about the nuances of these e-expectations and how exactly such “instant” Intimacy would/could/will continue to play into partnerships going forward (perhaps there will be an Intimacy Evolution…or, for you naysayers, an Intimacy Dissolution) – but I’ll leave the matter here for now. With it, I shall also my rest knitted brows, my frustration with non-existent problems, my sensitivity to all the words and non-words lurking between lines, and my fear of the long, dark, quiet of the Tubes. In their places, a song:
I am so inspired by this type of art. It reminds me of a short piece once played on This American Life: an uncle (I believe) documents his niece from age 0 to 10, using sounds of course. It’s brilliant…and, not so secretly, something I hope to emulate with my own future progeny.
(Perhaps this stop motion video, too…although, in the meanwhile, I rather hope someone remixes this piece with audio. A mash-up (possibly blending TAL) is definitely in order…)
Astro Girl
