they are the true fairies of these arcades

G [Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville]

Yes, when all the world from Paris to China
Pays heed to your doctrine, O divine Saint-Simon,
The glorious Golden Age will be reborn.
Rivers will flow with chocolate and tea,
Sheep roasted whole will frisk on the plain,
And sautéed pike will swim in the seine.
Fricasseed spinach will grow on the ground,
Garnished with crushed fired croutons;
The trees will bring forth apple compotes,
And farmers will harvest boots and coats.
It will snow wine, it will rain chickens,
And ducks cooked with turnips will fall from the sky.

—Ferdinand Langlé and Emile Vanderburch, Louis-Bronzeet le Saint-Simonien: Parodie de Louis XI (Theatre du Palais-Royal,February 27, 1832)


Despondent Divorcee/Genesee Hotel Suicide
Photograph by I. Russell Sorgi, Buffalo Courier Express, 8 May 1942.

B [Fashion]
"Here fashion opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware--between carnal pleasure and the corpse...For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered between shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion"(Benjamin 62-63).

Z [The Doll, The Automaton]
"In a shop on the Rue Legendre, in Batingnolles, a whole series of female busts, without heads of legs, with curtain hooks in place of arms and a percaline skin of arbitrary hue--bean brown, glaring pink, hard black--are lined up like a row of onions, impaled on rods, or set out on tables' J.-K. Huysmanss, Croquis parisiens (Paris, 1886)" (Benjamin 694).


Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century {Exposé of 1935}
"Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshiped...Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service" (Benjamin 8).

Security, Information, Code

cats/dogs: for eliza,

" (Tourist Traps): Online commercial sites, including eBay, MySpace, and Amazon, have employed acrobatic ciphers as police, a fully achieved “implementation of a writing that is only cipher, not meaning” . Cognitive recognition of a sign’s assimilation into pixilated mutation is now even used to programmatically refuse non-human inquiry; password discovery must correctly reaffirm the sign, suggesting that this ability is stable, natural and a definitive qualifier of human vision. Perhaps in a pluralistic attempt to account for the visually disabled, one may also choose to listen to a polyphonic, anonymous, and fragmented dictation of the code. Human to human security is enforced as computer language is inverted to police itself. The cyborg orators collide in sterile recitations, vocal mathematics, numero-sadean fantasies of forced and necessary intercourse."

From: Poetry in /BIG>
On Literary Code and Informative Text
Eliza Wicks-Frank, December 2007 [1].



A new cipher (above) demands that you only type the symbols that have a cat climbing on them. The other beasts resemble puppies, although sign-semblance is really not the crux of the code here. In typical US security fashion, measures are ritualized and performed to create the feeling (and this use of semblance may be appropriate) of security, particularly of one's private property on the internet: personal information. The practical effects of the cumbersome puzzles hardly "measure up" to the cracking abilities of global spam-ers and credit hackers, much in the same way that the flu vaccine must evolve every year to combat the increasing strength of the immune virus (in relation to the exponentially decreased strength of the infected's immune system). Requiring consumers to identify characters on a linear plane and then re-type them gives each individual on the net another minute to abstract the process of their financial, or "personal" disclosures; one extra click secures the consumer of their own identity online. Only in the time between the previous page and the loading page does one have to reflect on the actual dispersal of property-information. The next page insures an eventual return through 2-3 day shipping.

[1] The code in Eliza's title is not able to be shown because it does not constitute a legitimate html read-able code or recognizable letters.

The Life We Want

THE LIFE WE WANT: much more to come, followed by project proposal.

women in the integrated circuit

"Can anyone even name an important female programmer?"
HEDY HEDY HEDY LAMARR!!!

female computer

Melba Roy heads the group of NASA mathematicians, known as "computers," who track the Echo satellites. Roy's computations help produce the orbital element timetables by which millions can view the satellite from Earth as it passes overhead.