In this month's issue of Wired, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff argue that the Internet is finally undergoing the economic rite of consolidation that railroads, telephony, and the electrical grid reached in the interwar period. The delivery of content via the Internet, Anderson notes, is gravitating toward the “walled garden,” app-driven economy created by Apple; the greater “generative Web”—the free-as-in-speech self-publishing sandbox we identify with Web 2.0—will persist at the periphery, but will consist mainly of the long tail (or wide orbit?) of Internet content production. Basically, the argument—seemingly valid, despite the misleading graph employed as evidence—is that the Internet may not be as disruptive as the fever around it promised: new technological systems will be oriented around delivering traditional media in a more personalized, mobile manner. This supposition has been hotly contested by the community of philosophically-minded engineers whose ideals of absolute transparency have reigned for much of the Internet’s 18-year life.
Triple Canopy is in many ways a product of the wheat-paste ethos of the past decade on the Web, in which anyone with nine dollars to buy a domain name and decent programming skills could create a site that would occupy more or less the same space as those of CBS News and the New York Times (and certain major military contractors). Our original mission statement, however, recalcitrantly claimed that Triple Canopy worked “with and against the Internet”: We risked the conceit of adopting tropes of print magazines that ran up against the undifferentiated “stream” of the Web; we published in issues (discrete assemblages of content); we used the visual metaphor of the page, complete with bounding rectangles—a somewhat arbitrary (though, we thought, comical in its showy marriage of conservatism and innovation) constraint cribbed from the codex.
“What the Web has lacked in its determination to turn itself into a full-fledged media format,” Wolff writes, “is anybody who knew anything about media. Likewise, on the media side, there wasn’t anybody who knew anything about technology.” The challenge of producing “content” of actual value on the Web or on Internet-based applications—the articulation of ideas in a form particular to that expression and its reception—still has everything to do with inhabiting both of those seemingly divergent worlds, and with determining which pre-Internet metaphors remain viable and which are needless constraints. (We’re currently working on a redesign of Triple Canopy’s site that will shed the page-boundary paradigm completely.) Web 2.0 has been a kind of golden age: progressive browser improvements have empowered a generation of graphic designers to bring their work—the centuries-old practice of 2-D information representation—to the screen in a meaningful way. Likewise, Wolff argues, traditional media marketers may finally be able to practice their own trade of monetizing media consumption via the app market. Triple Canopy remains a hybrid, between the promise of the Web (look out for our soon-to-be-open-sourced publishing platform!) and the contemporary tendency to utilize the Internet to deliver conventional media experiences: reading text, watching video, looking at images. We like to think that our new design will go some way toward addressing Wired’s complaint that the Web lacks any “sublime integration of content and systems, of experience and functionality.” If only Steve Jobs had not already “perfectly fill[ed] that void.” —ADAM FLORIN
Two articles in the September issue of Artforum feature Triple Canopy contributors, collaborators, and/or agonists. In “The Long Take,” artist Lucy Raven, whose photographic animation China Town is currently being exhibited as part of MoMA P.S.1’s Greater New York 2010, talks with filmmaker Thom Anderson, whose works include Los Angeles Plays Itself and Red Hollywood. The discussion focuses on films that jettison the “stock-in-trade didactics of documentary or metanarrative” in favor of “audiovisual experiences that toy with the forms of time and media themselves”; Raven describes the composition of her visual essay "Daybreak,"
which appeared in issue 7, as an illustration of this approach.
In “Drama Queen,” David Velasco describes artist Ann Liv Young as “pop avec Sade.” His appreciation includes an account of Sherry tries on Cinderalla, Young's performance at 177 Livingston in June. “Everything about the situation is theater,” he writes. “It is unplanned, but not unanticipated. That it is in any way convincing (as reality, not theater) has to do with the fact that [Triple Canopy deputy editor Sam] Frank has not been scripted but rather has been compelled in the moment (better: inspired) to intervene”—when “Sherry” interrogates a woman in the front row about how she would feel if the audience were to hang someone onstage. “As the evening’s presenter and an ostensible authority figure in the space, Frank rehearses a position overdetermined by prior Sherry performances, and thus the action consummates rather than interrupts the work (or, to be accurate, the former is the consequence of the latter). Frank becomes, in effect, an accomplice to the performance, engaging with the fiction on its own terms. Young plays along, always staying in character (even if it’s a ‘broken’ character).” And so it goes:
SHERRY: This is art. This is performance art, have you ever heard of that?
FRANK: Do you believe in performance art?
SHERRY: Of course I do! Why else would I be doing this? You think that I think that I can make all of these people hang her from a rope?
FRANK: No, I don’t—
SHERRY: That is it! It’s twisted. It’s twisted! ... You guys can all go home. Fuck off. Fuck off. And you can keep your fifteen hundred fucking dollars, you asshole.
The Berlin-based biannual magazine 032c recently launched an online archive, where you'll find one of the most extensive extant treatments of Aspen, the great magazine in a box published between 1965 and 1971. (The current issue of Triple Canopy includes three projects directly inspired by Aspen, as detailed in the note from the editors.) Emily King writes that Aspen evolved from the fifteenth annual International Design Conference Aspen; its first issue included papers from a session called “Configurations of the New World,” which aimed to determine how design could fundamentally alter, and improve, the lives of ordinary Americans. Six years later, the magazine "was finally killed off by a much more prosaic concern: that of postage. On August 20th, 1971 the US Postmaster General rejected [publisher Phyllis] Johnson’s appeal against the denial of mail privileges for the magazine. Upholding a ruling that Aspen was not sufficiently 'periodical,' the postal service withdrew the lower rates available to more conventional publications. The Postmaster took particular exception to the fact that 'each issue of Aspen is complete unto itself and bears no relation to the prior or subsequent issues' and that 'each issue of Aspen could be considered to be an independent work, capable of standing alone.'” Thankfully, those independent works can now be viewed at UbuWeb.
The Internet is taking a beating these days. Nicholas Carr believes, and in his recent book, The Shallows, cites plenty of research to buoy his assertion that, the Internet is reconfiguring our brains, making us worse thinkers. Yes, the Web puts vast amounts of information at your fingertips, but its functionality has made it possible to do what scholars and scientists and just about everyone who’s ever studied anything have always wanted to do: cross-reference everything. So we flit about, moving from one article to another as quickly as we can click on hyperlinks—the mere presence of which greatly reduces reading comprehension. Carr argues that our brains are actually being rewired as a result. (The blog Three Percent
has been taking up these ideas recently in a series of posts derived from the first Future of Reading conference, where participants seemed split between “claiming that reading is just migrating to a new place and form, to claiming that technology can help improve close reading, to a belief that the belief in a constant decline in readership has been around since Gutenberg Day One and nothing has really changed.”)
In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brooks wrote, “The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian.” This is a long-standing claim, and is on one level true: Internet access offers (near) universal freedom to create and disseminate information, and to consume it on the other end. But on another level, this assertion is complete bullshit: We all know that the Internet has its own hierarchy, that the virtual equivalent of the crazy homeless man ranting about UFOs shouldn’t be—and, generally, is not—taken seriously.
Consider design. Books, for several hundred years, have not changed much at all. The paper is nicer. The covers last longer. And the evolution of printing technology has allowed for prettier pictures. But the format has remained static since the letterpress days: One reads from left to right, top to bottom, turning the pages to make progress. The Internet, on the other hand, is almost infinitely malleable—but you need a good blacksmith. Which has led to a hierarchy: the nicer, the more professional looking a site is, the more respected it is. Which sort of negates the egalitarianism.
But where do these two notions intersect? If there is a hierarchy, and if we now know why and how our brains are being rewired, can’t the blacksmiths behind the curtain counteract this effect? There is no single answer, of course, and much trial and error (along with a fair amount of hand wringing) will occur before designers—and information aggregators—find workable solutions. Despite Brooks’ pat assessment of Internet egalitarianism, there is an element of democratization at work, which allows individual concerns—preventing the dumbing down of the populace, for instance—to be articulated and amplified to the point where they might effect change (in this case, to the structure and function of the medium). On the Internet, there is no Tyranny of the Majority. —TOM ROBERGE
Many of us are currently in Berlin, undertaking our Sender, Carrier, Receiver program series. So it was a revelation to happen upon this recent Sugarhigh interview with Javier Peres, the proprietor of Peres Projects in L.A. and Berlin.
Ana Finel Honigman: I am really glad that people are taking Berlin seriously.
Javier Peres: Berlin, in many ways, is more serious than just about anywhere.
AFH: It’s more serious than London or New York because seriousness requires levels of authenticity and reality, which haven’t existed in either city for decades.
JP: I can’t exactly pinpoint when it started here, but suddenly now there is this place, and Kimchi Princess and all those little cute Mexican places popping up.
Read more here.
British author Tom McCarthy’s new novel, C, will be published in August in England, and the following month in the U.S. But before that happens, McCarthy’s activities as the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society will be laid bare by Triple Canopy in Berlin—which the INS has declared “the World Capital of Death.” On July 29, as part of its Sender, Carrier, Receiver program, Triple Canopy will present inteligence related to the INS’s efforts to “map, enter, colonize, and eventually inhabit the space of death.” The INS’s activities have long been a concern of Triple Canopy: In the first issue of the magazine Peter Schwenger’s "The State of Inauthenticity" investigated the INS’s “Statement on Inauthenticity,” and ultimately revealed the New York presentation of that document to be a reenactment of an event that probably never occurred. (Sources suggest that Schwenger’s claim inspired the INS to replace its members with actors in future reenactments.)
McCarthy recently wrote the script of Johan Grimonprez’s film Double Take, which is largely composed of archival footage dealing with Cold War paranoia and a Hitchcock look-a-like contest, among other acts of doubling. (“Hitchcock gets eliminated in the first round,” McCarthy notes in an interview with Triple Canopy editor Alexander Provan last year.) For McCarthy, doubling is an act of repetition analogous to death itself, one embodied by the form of cinema; the reel is destined to return to the same terminus each time it is played, but is nevertheless wound and played again and again. How might we confront this fate? “If you meet your double,” Double Take advises, “you should kill him.”
Or, see George Gallo's 2001 ontological comedy, the eponymous double of Grimonprez and McCarthy’s Double Take—itself based on a 1957 film adapted from Graham Greene’s Across the Bridge. In it, Orlando Jones plays a fugitive who steals Eddie Griffin’s passport...only to discover that Griffin is also a criminal, at which point the two inexplicably trade identities. In Greene’s story Griffin’s character is a dog; Jones’s character dies while trying to save the dog’s life. The narrator observes: “Death doesn’t change comedy to tragedy.” —JORDAN LORD
Last month in San Francisco, Subtopia founder Bryan Finoki led a workshop at the conference Toward a Just Metropolis: From Crises to Possibilities, which elaborated upon his contribution to issue 7 of Triple Canopy, “The Anatomy of Ruins.” The workshop, titled Decoding Military Landscapes, was organized in collaboration with Javier Arbona and Nick Sowers. Finoki’s essay for Triple Canopy found in the post-disaster landscapes of New Orleans and Detroit “the spectacle of ruin,” spaces that reveal “the degradation of state power and the heightened role of sovereign corporations in the production of space.” Decoding Military Landscapes extended this thesis to explore how military and corporate entities dominate not only physical space but also information about them, through the archives that store our collective memory. The Internet itself, Finoki and his colleagues argue, is “the archetypal example of military-industrial-complex archival practices”; its preeminence should push us to develop an alternative archival form, one that is transparent, open-source, mutable, inward looking, a document of its own creation—"not just a measure of space, but a new public production of space.”
Last year in Triple Canopy, Ian Volner and Matico Josephson published a lengthy reexamination of the administration of New York mayor John Lindsay (1968–73) and his far-reaching, largely unrealized plans to remake the city. His story is that of “a young, cultured, and charismatic politician,” they wrote, “as confident in the power of the people to effect change as in the ability of government to keep pace with their needs, who promised to usher in a new era for a city plagued by political gridlock, institutional malaise, and an insurmountable deficit, and who was elected under the banner ‘He is fresh and everyone else is tired.’”
Since then, a slew of further reappraisals of Lindsay have appeared in print, on television, and in exhibition; most of them follow Volner and Josephson’s lead, drawing a line between the ambitious, charismatic Lindsay, whom Robert Moses called “matinee-idol mayor,” and President Obama. Sam Roberts, the New York Times urban-affairs correspondent, has written America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York. The Museum of the City of New York is currently showing an exhibition of the same name. New York public-TV station Thirteen has produced Fun City Revisited: The Lindsay Years. (Rudy Giuliani recalls learning from Lindsay that “you have to know how to sporadically intervene.”)
These various endeavors highlight how the turmoil of the age stymied Lindsay’s progressive program: The idealism he inspired gave way to disenchantment as he was buffeted by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his allies, as well as the city’s white-ethnic population, and the dream of “Fun City” became the folly of Captain Marvel or Sir Galahad or Mr. Clean, as the mayor was called in the press. But Volner and Josephson go beyond the allure and pitfalls of callow idealism, sketching out a vision of urban transformation that should be fully reckoned with, especially as we strive to reshape our cities to address the myriad problems that have festered in the years since America’s Mayor left office.
Please stop by 177 Livingston on Thursday and Friday for two TC-related events. On Thursday at 7:30, Eliot Weinberger and Jeffrey Yang will be presenting "Natural Histories," a selection of readings about animals large and small. Weinberger is a translator of Spanish and Chinese poetry and one of the best essayists working today, polemical and lyric by turns; Yang is poetry editor at New Directions and an excellent poet. TC contributor John Latta wrote about Weinberger here, here, and here, and about Yang's An Aquarium here. More info is available here.
On Friday at 7:30, at Light Industry, TC senior editor William Smith will be presenting "In Collaboration," a screening of works shot by Robert Fiore, followed by a discussion with Fiore. Friday's program includes work by Joan Jonas, the Maysles brothers, Richard Serra, and Brian De Palma, and, one hopes, something from Pumping Iron. More details are available here.
Next weekend! Ann Liv Young and Triple Canopy present Sherry tries on Cinderella, an evening filled with performance and music on Friday and Saturday, June 4 and 5, at 8 p.m. at 177 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY. Tickets are a $10 donation. (Purchase tickets here.) More info is available here.
Congratulations to the past and future Triple Canopy contributors whose work is included in P.S.1's Greater New York 2010, which opens this weekend. They are: Amir Mogharabi, an artist and editor of Farimani, whose experiment in language analysis, "Heraclitus Series," was published in issue 4; artist and filmmaker Lucy Raven, whose visual essay, "Daybreak," was published in issue 7; and Erin Shirreff, who participated in Triple Canopy's "The Medium Was Tedium" program at the New Museum in February and will present a new Internet-based artwork for issue 9, to be published in June.
Sculptor John Powers published "Star Wars: A New Heap," his magnum opus on the uncanny relationship
between the groundbreaking sci-fi film and minimalist art and architecture, in issue 4. Now, he has turned the essay into a film, which he will be screening next Thursday, May 20, at 7:00 p.m., at the Philoctetes Center in Manhattan. (Click here to view an excerpt from the film.)
The 45-minute screening, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a conversation with Powers and the composer R. Luke Dubois, whose score for the film combines the harmonies and melodies of John Williams's original orchestral soundtrack with the rhythms of Philip Glass's minimalist compositions of the 1970s. Triple Canopy senior editor Colby Chamberlain will moderate.
Upcoming events at 177 Livingston, the downtown Brooklyn office space and venue Triple Canopy operates in partnership with Light Industry and The Public School New York:
Saturday, 5/8, 6 p.m.: Molly Springfield: The Mundaneum and Beyond.
$3. Springfield, an artist and Triple Canopy contributor, discusses Paul Otlet's Mundaneum and her own work: text-based drawings and installations that reveal visionary moments in the history of how we experience, organize, and reproduce information.
Saturday, 5/22, 6 p.m.: Robert Walser: The Microscripts, with Susan Bernofsky and Rivka Galchen. $3 donation. Walser biographer and translator Susan Bernofsky teams up with writer Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances) to introduce stories from and about Walser’s enigmatic microscripts, late texts written on scraps of paper in a millimeter-scale hand, which will be published on May 25 by New Directions and Christine Burgin Gallery. Stories, a trivia quiz with prizes, larger-than-life secret manuscript pictures, and a German penmanship lesson. Advance copies of the book will be available.
A full calendar is available here.
Triple Canopy is pleased to announce the Artist-Landlord Agreement (ALA), a freely distributed guide to the negotiation and use of unoccupied real estate for arts programming. The guide will be collaboratively developed over the next few months by Triple Canopy and other organizations, and will eventually be published online and as a print-on-demand book. The publication will coincide with a series of free workshops. The ALA aims to capitalize on the economic crisis by providing a sustainable and flexible model for independent arts initiatives—such as our own 177 Livingston—to create hubs for community activity and artistic practice outside the usual established institutions.
This past Saturday, Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics (FEAST)—a recurring public dinner in Brooklyn, the proceeds of which are used to fund community-based art projects—awarded Triple Canopy a grant of $1,000 to use for the realization of the ALA. We'd like to thank Jeff Hnilicka, founder of FEAST, and its many supporters for their encouragement and look forward to reporting on the progress of the ALA at the next dinner.
To participate in the development of the ALA or receive more information, please email us.
During his recent visit to Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, Roger Hodge, the former editor of Harper’s, delivered a talk on the paperless future of long-form journalism, which can be viewed here. Given our interest and investment in the prospects for writing and reading online, and our efforts to adapt the magazine format for the Web, we thought it worth our attention. Hodge’s speech, “Decline and Fall,” begins with a caveat: “It’s a requirement of anyone who’s in the magazine industry, especially as an editor, that you be upbeat about the prospects of magazines.” Since his unceremonious dismissal from Harper’s in January, that proviso no longer applies to Hodge, and so he proceeds to run through the numbers: Harper’s circulation is down 7.2%; the sector as a whole is down 35%; TV Guide was sold in 2008…for $1. His verdict: “It is baaad out there."
Saying as much no longer makes one an apostate, of course. But Hodge—a confessed Luddite who was nonetheless instrumental in building the Harper’s website—goes on to do more than rehearse the most current, daunting conventional wisdom. He offers an eloquent, bleak, elegiac, funny, contrarian take on the forces that have led to the magazine-publishing industry’s collapse, and the concomitant diminution (in funding, in cultural weight) of long-form narrative journalism. Hodge defends the value of independent journalistic institutions, which act as buffers against powerful corporate and governmental interests—in ways that an individual reporter’s brand of one cannot. And yet responsibility for their loss cannot be assigned to technological determinists alone. "We’ve chosen to follow an economic, and social, and political path of least resistance that destroys our traditions and our modes of life and our canons of thought," Hodge says. "If we continue down this path, we will find ourselves stranded on a Cartesian grid with no landmarks, and with no consolation."
And what about those who would just as soon see that grid cast aside? They're as willfully detached from political realities as their even more radical brethren, those "techno-utopians [who] prophecy the coming of the singularity,” and believe in some ill-defined future in which they will “leave our fallen meat space forever as they upload their minds into this glorious neural net in the sky—or something like that.” —LAURENCE LOWE
The New Museum has posted a video of Triple Canopy's “The Medium Was Tedium” event, which took place on February 19 and was organized by senior editors Colby Chamberlain and William Smith. Artists Mel Bochner, Daniel Bozhkov, and Erin Shirreff each discussed how their work traverses different mediums and the media. A conversation followed, covering Larry King, monumental sculpture, the Beach Boys, and Darth Vader. Projects related to the panel—including new web-based artworks by Bozhkov and Shirreff—will appear in issue 9, which will be published in May.
Missives from Triple Canopy contributors and confreres around and about the Internet:
Contributor Joshua Cohen responds to accusations of anti-Semitism in Harper's: "Hollywood movies, especially when they’re directed and produced by Jews, very rarely cast 'a Jewish type' (a type stereotyped by both Nazis and Jews), let alone someone who looks like me, in a starring role." Additional slights and self-depreciation can be found in the New York Observer's profile of the author, whose new novel, Witz, tells the story of the hunt for the last Jew (which commences on Christmas). Spilt oil and the Salton Sea: Senior editor Caleb Waldorf's collaborative group Third Rail will be presenting at the conference Oil + Water: The Case of Santa Barbara and Southern California on April 9 at the University of Santa Barbara. Editor Alexander Provan's "The Golden Compass: Islam Versus Global Capitalism" appears in the new issue of Bidoun—a free gold dinar with every copy. On April 3 Provan be talking about Triple Canopy and Internet as Material at the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art as part of its inaugural exhibition, in which contributors Lucy Raven and Taylor Baldwin and editor at large Adam Helms have work.
In the rarefied hills above Los Angeles, contributor José León Cerrillo recently completed a LAND residency, installing himself in R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House and churning out posters riffing on the graphic programs of West Coast modernism. The second issue of Farimani, the journal edited by contributor Amir Mogharabi, is now available online. What would Jesus blog? Contributor Nathan Schneider has published a report on "The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere" with the Social Science Research Council; on a more scatological tip, read his interview with Judith Butler in Guernica, "A Carefully Crafted Fuck You." Finally, New Slaves, the latest missive from the band Zs, which drilled our eardrums at More Talks About Buildings last April, is out now on The Social Registry.
If you track international mining conglomerates and their foibles, you've most likely been enthralled by the imbroglio in which Australia's Rio Tinto has found itself as of late. Four employees of the firm, one of the world's largest producers—and one of China's major suppliers—of iron ore, were sentenced to between seven and fourteen years in prison by the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court yesterday for accepting millions of dollars of bribes from Chinese officials and illegally obtaining commercial secrets related to state-run steel companies. (The latter part of the trial was closed to the public, so it is impossible to know what actually constitutes a commercial secret in China.) Where did those millions go? Perhaps into the pristine lake that acts as the centerpiece of Daybreak, the Utah mega-development being built by Kennecott Land, Rio Tinto's U.S. real-estate subsidiary. Since Lucy Raven told the story of "the newest great dead American economy laying in wake atop the rumblings of the last one" in issue 7, the adjacent Bingham Canyon Mine has been further excavated, further revealing a geologic image of the earth 550 million years ago. There has also been an art walk, Daybreak's second:
Q. Do many of the artists involved live at Daybreak?
A. My wife and I bought a home here nearly three years ago. The beach-community vibe and architecture is what drew us here. Being from SoCal, it's a big difference from all the cookie-cutter new housing tracts around.
The new, artificial lake, which buries a brownfield, has a precedent. During the Pleistocene, Lake Bonneville covered Utah, its northwestern shore abutting the Oquirrh Mountains. As a real-estate feature, historical continuity across hundreds of millennia seems to have distinguished Daybreak: Last year it ranked sixth among leading American planned communities in number of homes sold.
Starting tomorrow Triple Canopy's downtown Brooklyn headquarters, 177 Livingston, will be open to the public each Thursday through Sunday, from twelve till six. We share the space with Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art, and The Public School New York, an open framework for education. Come talk to us about the various organizations' activities, peruse our burgeoning media library, behold our tricolored florescent chandelier. If you'd like to make an appointment to speak with someone from a particular group, or you'd like to make a tax-deductible contribution of books, magazines, films, or other media—or a flat-screen television or sofa—to our library, please email us.
For more than a decade the artist-run 16 Beaver Group has been hosting free talks, presentations, readings, discussions, screenings, and other programs in its Lower Manhattan home. The work of 16 Beaver, and the critical conversations that occur there, are rare and invaluable. Recently the group has run into financial and legal difficulties related to renewing its lease and, in order to remedy the situation, must raise $30,000 by April 13. Click here to find out more and here to make a donation.
In response to Joshua Cohen's "Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue," some readers have wondered about the difference between synthetic colors and artificial ones. (Mauve was "the first aniline dyestuff prepared on a large scale"; that is, the first
industrial, mass-produced color.) Clarification from the author follows:
Chemist: Though saying that Prussian Blue is the world's first synthetic color is correct, I should point out—and, of course, I'm no artist, just an interested man of science—that all colors nowadays are synthetic.
Egyptologist: Whatever do you mean, Doctor Farbstoff?
Chemist: I mean that all paint bought by painters today—very few painters manufacture their own paint—is artificial. Pigments that once were made from natural materials are today produced through the wonders of chemistry, Doctor Schaufel.
Egyptologist: How fascinating! My own issue with Joshua Cohen's essay is his utter disregard for the color called Egyptian Blue.
Chemist: Would you mean calcium copper silicate?
Egyptologist: Indeed, I would. Egyptian Blue predates Prussian Blue by thousands of years. It was used to decorate monumental sculpture, especially during the New Kingdom period (1570-1070 BCE).
Chemist: But why would Cohen leave that out of his essay?
Amen-Ra, AKA the Sun God: Forgive my intrusion, gentlemen. I believe Cohen consciously omitted mention of Egyptian Blue because, as a color, it wasn't stable. Due to the presence of copper, the "blue" veered wildly in hue, from a dark Prussian to a bright green. While certainly a synthetic color—painters could and did make it—Egyptian Blue's constituent chemistry is identical to that of the mineral cuprorivaite.
Chemist & Egyptologist: Meaning...?
Ra: Meaning even the gods can't tell whether the paint used in Egyptian artwork was made or found. Or, to be precise, we can't always tell. —JOSHUA COHEN
Ten years ago, Triple Canopy contributor Dan Torop had “a dream of floating at twilight above orange traffic” on the Bowery. In "Virtual Bowery," published in issue 6, Urbanisms: Model Cities, Torop revisited that vision—and recreated the Bowery of yore, populating it with flocks of trumpeter swans—using an arcane programming language. In the next week he'll present this work three times in New York: on Thursday and Friday at 8:30 at Mabou Mines, as part of a series devoted to connectivity and complexity; and on Tuesday at 7:00 at NYU's 80WSE gallery.
Two months ago President Obama announced the recipients of eight billion dollars in federal funds for the construction of high-speed rail projects, with much of that money being given to Florida and California. Since then there has been much sparring over the federal money, suggestions that California's share will disappear into the state's budgetary black hole, and accusations that the agency charged with managing the funds is incompetent. Meanwhile, the UAE is embarking on its own high-speed system and China, which has built the world's most advanced train network—it will soon connect Shanghai to London—is bidding on contracts to build whatever lines the U.S. can afford. What lies in store for the U.S.? In issue 7 of Triple Canopy, Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran of the VPL Authority, a public-private group developing a massive eco-friendly rail hub in the desert southwest, presented their group's plan for the future of transport in America—suburban sprawl meets Japanese efficiency. Read their prescient article here.
In celebration of the second anniversary of the publication of our inaugural issue, we're making an initial foray into podcasting and ... annotating (a unique invention combining real-time commentary and links to pertinent reading). Annotations aim to expand the scope of the projects we publish—and revive the projects we've published in the past—by engaging with related conversations happening elsewhere in the world and on the Web. (Please email us with suggestions.) Podcasts will include sound art, audio travelogues, radio plays, records of public programs, interviews, readings, sonar signals, conversations between whales and humans, messages received from distant planets, and, of course, exclusive mixes from Vienna's hottest trance deejays. Stay tuned.
