Representation is chunky and clunky

I've been thinking lately about simulation and representation and stuff in all sorts of ways. One thing that has struck me is the way that science fiction shows used to make the surface appearance of future technologies extra clunky, chunky and cumbersome in order to make them look at once more familiar to the viewer and at the same time more technical and unfriendly. A complex surface appearance is a placeholding sign for the imagined internal physical contents of fictional technological objects. By making an object look easier to deconstruct with a screwdriver, attention is drawn away from the fact that if you were to take these objects apart you'd find nothing inside. It's funny now to watch Star Trek because the laptop computers and datapads they use are far bulkier and fussier in appearance than the ones we use today, but I don't think this is just an act of foolishness and shortsightedness on the part of the set designers. The process of miniaturisation in consumer electronics was already well underway when Captain Janeway first sat in front of her huge, plastic machine with a cup of black coffee... did I remember rightly that she claims that replicated coffee doesn't taste as good? That's a whole other blog entry right there... the replicators on the set of Voyager are also hilariously overburdened with buttons for something that operates via voice recognition, and even voice recognition is too cumbersome a way for a machine to interface with a decision that is governed to a greater or lesser extent by personal habits and nutritional chemistry (at this point I realise that my science speak is terrible :,( ). I think all this buttoning-up of appliances is a deliberate attempt at representation. Even though the claimed referent doesn't exist yet, what was really being represented is present-day technology, which at the time was bulky and button-laden.

In 2009, the year of the iPhone 3G, along came the dollhouse chair, with its smooth, modernist stylings and relative scarcity of buttons. The dollhouse chair has its own canonical design story. Originally many wires and sticky pads were needed to connect it to an active - still used when the technician wants to demonstrate their domination and psychological invasion by means of the sign of physical invasion. But then Topher Brink, the awkward yet somehow enigmatic user-friendly science guy (swoon) comes along and declares that all these wires are unnecessary and can be replaced by some sort of ultraviolet light or something. I dunno, I wasn't paying attention to the science speak. As technology gets more miniaturised and individual appliances take on more functions, their designs become less intrusive. In consumer electronics these designs are deliberately multivalent, best expressed in the iPhone, which doesn't look like anything in particular because it can do almost anything at all. In science fiction, rather than having multiple purposes, clean, designed objects have one purpose that is only embodied for the duration of the relevant activity. Following this, the purpose fades away, leaving an empty space with no particular use inscribed onto it. What better example than the dollhouse chair, which routinely fills people with purpose and then empties them again, telling them simply to 'be their best.' Now here I am in 2011, trying to be my best in a polysemic, multivalent environment where I can no longer just push the right buttons and get moving towards my 'home,' like Janeway. At least the coffee is good.

Desktop wallpaper 22.1.11

Here's another desktop wallpaper. This one's made of fabric from the V&A collection. Enjoy!

Pretty Wallpaper

My usual sources for beautiful desktop wallpapers aren't serving me well at the moment, so I'm doing my own thing for a while and I thought I might as well share. This wallpaper is made up of silk ribbon images (mentioned on Black*Eiffel) and a Pema Chödron quote. More as and when!

Dissecting Love Actually

Dissecting Love Actually

My boyfriend finally agreed to watch Love Actually with me last night. It's one of my favourite films, it always makes me cry several times, and I was looking forward to initiating him into the wonderful world of crying at films. Unfortunately he found it profoundly morally and intellectually offensive, primarily for its unswerving loyalty to the Rapunzel myth of females as beautiful yet inactive beings with no moral obligations or individual agency, and men as only worthy so long as they work their asses off and suffer deep emotional pain for the sake of these dainty, near-magical beings. Worst of all, the film is far more interested in infatuation (and sex) than in loving relationships. So here's a breakdown of what was wrong with every sub-plot of Love Actually and how the stories should have gone. Look here to jog your memory of the original storylines.

Juliet, Peter and Mark
It's the classic moral infraction - you've fallen in love with your best mate's girl. Worse still, you're the best man at their wedding. So what else is there to do but provide a surprise brass band just to make the lady smile? Well, you could videotape her dashing grin so that you can enjoy it over and over again in the privacy of your own trendy art studio (not voyeuristic or erotic at all of course).

I want to see the story told from Juliet's point of view. If I'm her, and I'm watching the beautiful, flattering and ever so slightly invasive video that he's made of me, and he's stood charmingly silent and honorable, ashamed for being a bad friend but unrepentant of his love infatuation for me, I'm going to wonder, maybe only for a minute, maybe for the rest of my life... did I marry the right man? Mark had the imagination and initiative to hire out a brass band, for no other reason than to make me happy, 'with no hope or agenda', while all my husband Peter ever does is stand around looking goofy but smug. In fact, not only is Mark clever, moral and unabashedly loving, he's depicted in the film as positively saintly. Strictly observing the self-denying protestant morality this country thrives on, Mark stoically bears all the pain of ill-fated infatuation without a peep for his own needs - his heart may be 'wasted' for loving her for eternity, but his soul is exalted, as indicated by the angelic chorus of 'silent night' that he plays to conceal his guilty secret from her husband.

Juliet is nothing in this story but an object of affection. Her lack of agency is so profound that she is granted the license to kiss him with no guilt or repercussions - it's merely the natural, programmed response to an admission of affection, not the willful act of a self-aware human being wavering from a life-long contract she has only recently signed. If this film had any justice or conscience, Juliet would have recognised the saint-like perfection of the man pouring out his heart to her, ended her marriage while it was still young, and spent the rest of her life with the better man. Instead she stays with her husband, not out of marital fidelity but because if Mark got the girl, where would be the noble self-sacrifice?

John and Judy
Two people spend an inordinate amount of time naked, pretending to have sex with each other, and eventually the man works up the courage to ask the woman on a date. She says yes, because women are programmed to say yes to any proposal even if it comes from an awkward, flaccid ginger guy. The story is boring, but I'd like to leave it as it is because it's a) funny and b) ironic that while most romantic films are laced with brief, superfluous sex scenes that add nothing to the plot, this one shows people filming brief, superfluous sex scenes that add nothing to the plot.

Jamie and Aurelia
This story starts with Jamie's brother having sex with his girlfriend. The repercussions of this are never really covered. Rather than confront his brother or his girlfriend directly about their atrocious behaviour, Jamie retreats to the south of France for a while, and is slightly rude to his family at large on Christmas day. In fact, we never get to know his girlfriend. Presumably she just cheated on him because that's what women do. Being cheated on by a woman is basically as tragic as your house getting flooded - it's just a natural disaster, no use blaming anyone for it. At the end of the story he marries a Portuguese girl he has never held a conversation with. As the audience we're okay with this, because we've already seen her naked and our stupid monkey brains are hard-wired to confuse nudity with intimacy. Aurelia accepts his proposal, presumably because women are hard-wired to accept marriage proposals.

Jamie could have started off strong by punching his brother and kicking his still-naked, cheating girlfriend out of the house. The next day, when he's calmed down, she comes over, begging him to forgive her and take her back. He says he needs time to think about it, and goes on his writer's retreat. While there he has a fabulous time with Aurelia naked in the lake, and immortalises their fling by writing a sexy scene about her in his crime story. Satisfied that his brother has not, in fact, out-manned him, he can happily trot back to London to rekindle his relationship with his girlfriend. Aurelia learns English and comes to find him in London a few months later - they talk over some coffee, the same spark is there, but now they can actually hold a conversation. Jamie learns how much they have in common, how great they could be as a couple, how unlikely she is to sleep with his brother. Following this he can gently break it off with his girlfriend and spend the rest of his life with Aurelia.

Harry, Karen and Mia
Here's a puzzle: how do you cast Alan Rickman in your film without making him a satanic villain figure? Answer: cast him alongside a slutty secretary. For everyone knows, the only thing more ungodly and evil in this world than Alan Rickman is an attractive, single woman. To underscore this point, she wears devil horns at the office Christmas party. The only independent woman in this movie is portrayed as a selfish home-wrecker. Even her name screams, 'Me, me, me... Mia.' As a secretary trying to sleep with the boss, or failing that, wangle free jewellery out of him, she is the only character who is self-consciously seeking money through romance. I say self-consciously, but Aurelia and Natalie both get a rags-to-riches, Cinderella-style boost from their love lives, and Aurelia has very little other information to go on when accepting Jamie's marriage proposal - she's just more poker-faced about her hustling than Mia. Meanwhile, when Karen confronts her husband about his cruel and disloyal distribution of shiny, golden things, she asks him, 'If you were in my situation, would you stay, knowing that things would always be a little bit worse?' The obvious answer is yes. Her choice is between repairing a marriage with injured trust, and becoming a single mother who has to fight in court over every other child support payout. And she does stay with him, but we don't get to find out how they work at their marriage - all we see is her continuing to be passive aggressive and angry with Harry a month down the line. Harry looks sad and maligned, as he has looked all through the film, because he does love Karen, and he values her love for him (ergo, Joni Mitchell CD for Christmas). The only thing Mia could play for was sex and money - Karen's problem is not love, actually, but trust.

In a film with justice, Mia would have overplayed her hand with Harry, who would have ended up feeling angry and manipulated and firing her. In a film with strong female characters, Karen would have responded to seeing Mia dancing with Harry at the Christmas party by stepping over and proposing a threesome, thereby exerting her sexual dominance and her position as the alpha female.

David and Natalie
A newly-elected prime-minister called David - oh, the foreboding - prances around 10 Downing Street and falls in love with the tea lady. This one is only vaguely problematic - the main problem is that, due to the nature of the British media, it's really quite irresponsible not to keep your relationship a secret. If she didn't like one ex-boyfriend calling her chubby, she's not going to respond well to the tabloids. Nevertheless, this is a really nice story because the honorable prime minister chooses to pursue a relationship rather than a fling with the pretty tea lady. Unfortunately, no party would get in if the leader wasn't married. I'd like to see the story reworked with David as the chancellor running for party leadership when the PM declares he's retiring. His ratings are low until his burgeoning relationship with the tea lady is revealed at the nativity play in an adorable and amusing moment that captures the imagination of the party grass roots. Following his rise to power as the prime minister he marries Natalie, who proceeds to tell the seedy journalists that if they don't like her thighs they can all go fuck themselves.

Daniel; Sam and Joanna
Sam's mother has just died, but he insists that the reason he's so depressed and withdrawn is that he's in love with an American girl. Rather than worry about this textbook case of erotic transference, bereaved stepfather Daniel encourages the crush. The main purpose of this story seems to be to underscore the Rapunzel myth in which men work their asses off for women who do nothing all day - an intensive two-week crash course in playing the drums and breaking the law by bypassing airport security in a post 9/11 setting are only examples of the pains men must go to just to see a girl let her hair down. In real life, Sam would have spent at least an hour or two in a police station after Joanna bluntly responded to his surprise arrival with, 'what are you doing here?' In a good story, if Joanna really did like Sam back, she could have bloody well told him this before she left for America, leaving a couple of weeks for them to earn enough money for Sam to get a return ticket to visit her when she moves away, an fun-filled, romantic and action-packed couple of weeks which they spend busking in Covent Garden.

Sarah, Karl and Michael
Two coworkers who have been infatuated with each other for over two years almost have sex but then don't because Sarah has to be with her mentally ill brother. Karl is so swelteringly gorgeous that it would turn anybody's brain into bad Israeli halloumi. Sarah, another self-sacrificing saint, is briefly rewarded for her moral virtue in a tender tryst with the sexiest man in the film, but the moral virtue for which she is rewarded must not be undermined by the reward itself - she can't actually have him because she is angelic and noble and must sacrifice her own happiness for someone else, regardless of whether or not it's the best solution for everyone concerned.

If Karl really is in love with her, there are two obvious answers to their problem. If Sarah's brother really does need her to be available on the phone 24/7, he could grow up and learn to be patient, understanding and supportive. Chances are, the amount of pain it would cause her brother if she didn't always answer the phone is much less than the pain she is causing herself by limiting her own happiness for his sake. Sarah needs Karl to open her eyes and guide her to get some help from the rest of her family. This kind of life-changing help and support is what love actually is, rather than the blind infatuation that led to their first ill-fated tryst.

Colin
Guy goes to America and has an orgy with sexy American girls. A fine fantasy that has nothing to do with love and bears no relation to reality. It would have been much more interesting if he suddenly realised that his obsession with having sex with women is nothing more than self-denial - he's actually in love with his best friend.

Billy Mack and Joe
As for the rock star who declares his love for his best friend... rock on. However, it's a shame that Joe doesn't have a mind of his own and never objects to being publicly humiliated by Billy. In the world of Love Actually, he's basically a woman. Given that this is the case, he could at least have made Billy work for his companionship - he could have turned down the beer and porn and demanded jewellery. Or he could have grown a pair and found himself a woman. They're programmed to kiss you if you admit your undying love for them, so it's really not that hard to get one.

This interesting critique covers some of the same points made here and is worth a read :)

Wooden computers

One day, when I'm no longer flat broke, I'm going to replace my 2006 MacBook with a mini desktop (like a Mac mini), a mobile projector and some low-profile alternative to a keyboard - I say an Arduino LilyPad-based homebrew dataglove, but I'm told that the technology for webcam image recognition is so advanced now that visual gesture recognition is much more efficient than conductive fabric and an accelerometer. We shall see. In the meantime, I'm going to fantasise about a mini desktop that is light, portable, and actually looks like something you want to pick up and touch and take to bed at night for an evening of Battlestar Galactica on the ceiling. Enter the glorious google search for wooden computer enclosures. Not all of the examples I found below are small enough for my liking, and none of them are affordable - some aren't for sale - but oh my, imagine the warmth schnuggliness of a living room with one of these as its media center.


The original show and tell for this DIY modern danish computer enclosure is now long gone, but isn't it pretty? It's far bigger than what I'm looking for, but if you're going to have a massive computer tower it really better had be an item of furniture in its own right.


This mod, entitled level eleven, is pretty much exactly the size and style I've been dreaming of. The only thing I would change is get rid of the speed stripe, and make the overall shape a bit more curvy, as at the moment it looks like something that should be sat on a desk whereas I want something that looks grabbable and maybe even cuddle-able.


This beast is far too large, but so beautifully ornate and art-deco that it makes me want to charge around shouting, 'I'm a time-lord, biyatch' - something Doctor Who will, admittedly, probably never say.


And finally, yes oh my god yes that really is a computer. But they only made 10 of them. No, it doesn't look grabbable or small. But if I had one I would bow down before it every morning and bestow upon it fragrant oils, precious jewels and sprinkle gold powders. Just imagine the patina.

I had a dream last night about men

I had a dream last night about men breaking my best teacup. One by one they came into my kitchen and each did a little bit more damage until it was completely broken. I woke up really worried about my teacup, kind of wanted to give it a cuddle. I guess Freud would have a field day with that one. Why is my subconscious so Butler-esque and whiny?

Pictured: not my cup, but one in the V&A collection - see here

Weird pride

Today the brilliant Mark Nicholls wrote:

Who are those strange people who sit in parked cars at two o’clock in the afternoon staring into space? Why do they gawk at me when I walk down the street rambling to myself, trying to prepare the necessary phrases to use in basic human interaction?

Case in point. On Tuesday, I walked up the leafy suburb to cash a cheque. As I walked, muttering ‘can I cash this please’ or ‘could I cash this please’ or ‘could this be cashed, please’ I saw at least THREE passengers staring out at me. Who are they waiting for? Are they sitting there hoping someone might climb into the driver’s seat and drive them? Why do they always see me when I’m trying to be privately weird?

Let me tell you, being weird in this climate of prudence and common sense is not easy. Sometimes I want to sing along to pop songs packed into buses tight with silence. Sometimes I want to debate with myself the tone of voice someone used when speaking to me, and the implications of this tone on our relations. The only thing stopping me is the thin line between sanity and craziness, a line I am happy to straddle without medication.

Recently my housemates and I were teasing each other about our geeky inadequacies when it comes to social skills. Some of us took the Autism Spectrum Test on Facebook, because we like being given numbers to help us understand ourselves. I came out at 31, one point below the level at which doctors start looking at you funny, but a high enough number to make one of my housemates eyes swell up with surprise. Admittedly, this housemate has an unusually elastic face, so I probably overestimated the extent to which he was surprised.

When I was younger, I would spend every lunchtime sitting in the library quietly reading things in or about foreign languages, but then I realised at some point that the reason I had so few people to talk to was because I didn't go up to people and talk to them. Now I spend every lunchtime talking to someone so that I can be sure that I develop relationships with people. Relationships are important to me, not just because I need the company but because I find people fascinating - I love it when you're close to someone and you know some of the unique patterns in their head, and I love it when I say the right thing at the right time and it makes someone happy.

I'm really not good at chit chat. I don't like it at all. If there's something on my mind, then that tends to be the answer I give when asked, 'How's it going?' Here's a typical conversation:

Norm: Hi Zoya, how's it going?
Zoya: Great, I'm having a really nice morning. I just saw some children singing, holding hands in a circle, with two of them in the middle spinning around, and I thought what an idyllic image, and I loved the order and regularity of the circle with the rotation in the centre.
Norm: Oh. That's nice...
Zoya: (remembers that pleasantries should be reciprocated) How are you?
Norm: Fine, thanks. A bit tired.

I'm not even going to start on my outright refusal to recognise taboos. I spend a lot of my time getting into conversations about sex and death. Sometimes I even get people to talk about the class system.

I'm not really interested in looking at this stuff as though it were an indication of some sort of minor learning difficulty. I think it's nice to be weird. You can say things to people that they've never heard before, and that can bring up all sorts of positive feelings in them. This is why I don't walk down the street practicing necessary phrases. I quite like the way I bumble through them - many transactions for me begin with, 'I need to do Y. In order to achieve this I need to do X. I have this piece of paper which I am told can help you to help me to do X. Is this right? What do I need to do now?'

I can sort of sense that there are normal people in this world, but I tend to attract the weird ones so that we can analyse the shapes and patterns of life and talk about the stuff we're really thinking and feeling rather than the stuff we're supposed to think and feel. I think we're all having a great time together here in the weird faction.