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.

the additive property of communication

"That is the voice of the current somnambulism...There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form...It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are" (Understanding Media 23).

FriendsGreen!

"We are a bunch of green-passionate software people who wanted to make a difference by doing what we can on the web. Every little thing we do can make a big difference. We realized how much searching we do each day and thought, "gee, how can we turn search into a green-friendly activity?" The FriendsGreen Search Engine (friendsgreen.com) is an online activism site that gives Internet users a free and easy way to help fight Global Warming and to save the Rainforests. Merely by getting in the habit of using friendsgreen.com to search the internet, users can donate proceeds from their searches to fund a portfolio of reforestation projects.

How do you calculate the amount of rainforest saved?
Squarefeet are saved both by conducting searches on FriendsGreen and by our advertising features of the (Lil) Green Patch application on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/greentrees). The number of squarefeet saved is a total of all squarefeet saved across the media properties owned by Green Patch, LLC. The amount of funding generated per search depends on the search term and actions completed after the search is conducted. You are the key to the success of the FriendsGreen Search Engine. The more visitors we have using our search engine each day, the greater the total number of squarefeet we can save together."

http://friendsgreen.com/

Can the success of this type of proposed activism be measured by its actualized rehabilitation of ‘the rainforest’, or can it only remark on an adaptation of consumer consciousness which is now provided with pathways of concern-distribution by both advertisers and software programmers indebted to a bureaucratic network of desire management? The ambiguity of the projected result for conservation is inconsequential for the user in a transaction that is already vague. In presenting a platter of web results, the search engine communicates discreetly with its partners in market research, which allows a paperless loop of consumer feedback and bolsters advertiser niche marketing, flawlessly monitoring desire and choice and rendering the survey functionally obsolete for electronic consumption. This process is typically made invisible to consumers. Except, of course, when their previously assumed passivity in the act of searching (aligned with an assumed passivity of vision itself) can be revealed for its transactive exchange and allow the individual to play in directing the flow of this operation. Consumer activism, under the jurisdiction of an explicit set of active input (the search query) and the collaborative output (the advertiser’s agreement to contribute to a predetermined charitable fund in exchange for market research) conveniently manifests in 1 sq. ft. cubes of rainforest; the tangible (yet unimaginable) magic of this transaction allows the individual to experience the personal satisfaction of measurable conscientious behavior. As consumers become more concerned with ‘going green’, their anticipated processes of adaptation are matched by adaptations in the artifice of revenue generation by which corporations present their bureaucratic methods as more transparent, more interactive, and potentially more charitable, if only for the game in which the consumer may now conspicuously meddle.