Ballardian

Image from Diet Soap #1.

+ Following on from my rapture at discovering the SurveillanceSaver software, here are some more portals onto mediated inner space.

Chris Nakashima-Brown brings news of issue 1 of the fabulous zine, Diet Soap. The theme is Surveillance and there are poems, palindromes, fiction, reportage and lots of excellent collaged art, including (so says the editorial) ‘a piece on the history of cake making, a story about super heroes, a panopticon, and one soiled wig.’

Already, from Darin C. Bradley, I’ve picked up some excellent advice on how to inwardly counter CCTV the next time it traps me in its gaze:

We’re sort of comically frozen like this. No one is really sure what to do next, so I think to myself, What would Borges do?

And via Diet Soap #1, the Surveillance Camera Players, a group that performs plays in front of security cameras. What an excellent idea!

According to Diet Soap’s Doug Lain:

The police, who kept tabs on the organization before the Republican convention of 2004, describe the SCP as “a self-described anarchist group” that is nonetheless apolitical as it aligns itself with “no political party, citing the belief that democracy should be direct, not ‘representative.’” The SCP, again according to the police, encourages people to perform for security cameras. What the cops call “Surveillance Camera Theater” is both art and protest, but the SCP does not necessarily recruit members. The cop’s report concluded “the actual number of persons involved in this sort of activity can be significantly greater than actual membership.”

+ Away from Diet Soap, hardcore Ballardian Mike Bonsall has used images from the same feeds that the SurveillanceSaver software churns to provide a remarkable illustration of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ‘in a suitably Ballardian way’

According to Mike:

It was in the trenches of the first world war that Wittgenstein developed his ‘picture theory’ of propositions which is central to the Tractatus … Wittgenstein could hardly have forseen the flowering of pictures on the internet, although proposition 6.341 might presage the invention of digital images. Sometimes by design and sometimes by accident, thousands of webcams are constantly ‘depicting reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs.’ (2.201)

Now watch and read on …

+ And finally, via Posthuman Blues, a ‘typically idiotic local news piece about a “ghost” visible in gas-station surveillance footage.’ It’s clearly a digitally generated animation. I reckon the petrol station is trying to drum up business, as one of PB’s readers suggested.

Watch the footage and listen to the news android: ‘Too bad it’s not the ghost of cheap gas-station prices. They’re also gone with the wind’. Ho ho.