Ecosystem

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Thumb notes and photographing the invisible

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Bill Crandall

My good friend and collaborator Craig Czury is doing a poetry event at Upshur Street Books on Feb 16th, if you're in Washington DC mark your calendars. Craig is an old school poet-warrior with the soul of a documentarian, with an enigmatic way of looking at things. We've been working together on an ongoing fracking-related project combining his words and my pictures from around where he lives in rural northeastern PA - fracking ground zero, the Marcellus Shale region. This event is for the release of his latest book, Thumb Notes Almanac, docu-poems he made by hitchhiking up and down the rural highways and back roads and chatting up locals and fracking workers alike. He creates a humanistic, nonpartisan mosaic of voices from a region under duress.

We’re planning a book of our joint work too. I think our visions meshed well, since we both like getting at a story indirectly, through the side door. I remember an intro to a Josef Koudelka book that calls Koudelka a ‘secretary to the invisible’, which always struck me as a noble guiding principle. How to illustrate an issue that is mostly invisible (fracking happens two miles underground)? For me, it wasn’t about shots of fracking towers as much as a feeling for the land. I consider it a landscape series.

I’ll probably make one or two more visits up there to keep the project going. Fracking activity, and the ripple effect on the community, is constantly in flux. Below is a photo I took of a well pad that seemed fairly innocuous. I couldn’t tell if it was under construction, or deconstruction, or was simply a dormant former drilling spot. (On a tragic side note, the family across the road who owns the property got a big windfall for signing off on the land rights. They spent part of the money on a four-wheeler for their teenage son, who promptly crashed it and died.)

This is right up the road from where Craig lives in an old rural schoolhouse converted to artist studios. Here’s a night shot he sent more recently of the same spot:

If you want to see how our project is shaping up so far, take a look on my website.

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It's a Robot, Baby

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Joe Lucchesi

Like a lot of folks, I’ve been thinking about love in the time of robots lately. A recent viral video of a smiling electronic baby happily squirming in its UCSD Machine Perception crib really sent me over the edge, plunging into the uncanny valley. Looking at something close - its nubby teeth and charmingly squinty expressions, but not close enough - its rubbery skin jaggedly meeting its acrylic blue skull, produced a visceral sense of existential angst that took me by surprise.

Could this almost-baby potentially be my technological successor, my reaction already intuiting my own technological insufficiency? Maybe. Could it also be that the video is yet another irresistible metaphor of machinery mediating any and all intimate relationships? But this is a social media fact that projected our love lives into the digital realm back in the internet equivalent of the stone age.

Or perhaps my response was a jarring realization that our robot overlords have arrived, and unlike what pop culture has led us to believe, it wasn’t in the form of an inexorable army of powerful replicants, or deceptively charming and attractive lackeys lulling us into a false sense of pampered security, or even the friendly neighborhood drone delivering my mail. It arrived in the form of a gurgling, happy baby making cute for my benefit. Some aspect of all these notions fed my momentary vertigo on the edge of the technological ravine, but mostly I think I reacted from a sense of self-betrayal - the robot baby caught me off guard because this already exists. It might be too late, and I hadn’t even noticed.

Programmed using newly-available big data drawn from studies of infant responses by developmental psychologists, one of my more sobering thoughts in staring down that video was that our physiological human reactions had been recorded, translated, crunched, freely exchanged and turned into a simulated replica of ourselves, programmed into a silicone equivalent whose goal is then to teach us about developing human interactivity and emotion. The breathtakingly efficient inversion of that exchange is what worries me now, as though we’ve already ceded the territory of invisible human connection to its quantified doppelganger. This feels like one more step to making technological conquest both plausible and palatable.

Human relationships mediated by technology are nothing new, only taking new forms appropriate to the age. The camera, the telegraph, and the telephone all opened up new possibilities for connectivity across time and space even as they subtly initiated an easily-ignored gap in which we’re dealing with disembodied versions of each other, negotiated across this divide. And that’s only in recent history. As that video suggests, some folks think of the uncanny valley as only a warning of an unsolved problem. But others see this sense of uneasiness when confronted with our almost-selves differently, as a prompt to think about the human within that gap. 

So maybe I should thank the robot baby for its charming and off-putting chubby grins, its inability to perfectly simulate human behavior and - in turn apparently - teach us about our own development.

Our human relationship to the natural world can’t be far behind in all this unsettled estrangement, and of course is already here. Server farms succeed the agri-business conglomerate that itself replaced the family farm in the vast plains of American productivity, producing a new crop we increasingly rely on for sustenance.

The question then becomes: can we live on data alone across the rolling hills of the fertile uncanny valley? We can’t, but robot babies do.

Cafe Cultura

Bill Crandall

Skyped last week with my friend Aleksei Shinkarenko in Minsk. We go back to my first visits to Belarus in 2000, when I started work on my photo book The Waiting Room.

Aleksei is a quiet force in the local scene. He recently opened Cafe Cultura, a clean, minimalist storefront space set up to spark conversation on culture. Basically it's a tiny gallery with a coffee machine. While Aleksei makes your macchiato, the work on the walls is food for thought, and for talk.

He told me customers seem to pick up on that cue, and culture is a hot topic. A big question facing Belarus has long been one of national identity. Many feel it's the main element keeping the country in a kind of limbo between East and West, with Lukashenko being as much effect as cause of Belarus' isolation and uncertainty (depending on who you ask, perhaps up to half the population does support the authoritarian leader up to a point, or at least the degree of stability they feel he brings against buffeting forces from every direction).

Aleksei, along with colleagues like my friend Uladzimir Parfianok - a stalwart of the Soviet-era photo scene in Minsk who also has quietly but doggedly fought for the role of independent photo art - always recognized the potential of photography and art to be a catalyst for progressive thought and even change.

Our first collaborative exhibitions - The Seeing-Eye in 2001 with the Czech photographer Karel Cudlin and Seeing-Eye II in 2003, both at Parfianok's Nova Gallery - helped nurture the idea of the photographer as humanistic observer, which was a rather weak tradition at the time in the tightly controlled landscape of post-Soviet Belarus. Aleksei expanded and built on on those seeds, launching the first independent photo school in Belarus, the Center of Photography.

In 2009, I met the Swedish photographer Jens Olof Lasthein at the school (Jens just so happened to be in Minsk last week and joined our Skype) when we were both invited to be instructors at the first Summer Photopracticum documentary workshops. By then it was clear that the local photo scene had matured to the point where there was a new generation of young photographers - such as Andrei Liankevich, Alex Kladov, Pavel Grabchikov and many others - casting a savvy eye at the Belarus that was evolving (albeit slowly, but evolving nonetheless) from the cliches of 'black hole in Europe' and 'frozen in time' into its own kind of Third Way.

So now Aleksei has this humble, elegant concept, Cafe Cultura, to carry the torch as well. We discussed bringing the franchise to Washington DC, which could also use higher quality discussion of culture, art, and identity. In the meantime, if you're in Minsk, stop by for a кофе with a shot of intelligence.