Learning from history

Compared to a display in a sex-shop window by Port Philip Councillor Andrew Bond, parts of Paul Yore's photo collage Everything Is Fucked at St Kilda's Linden Gallery were seized by local police on Saturday after a week of controversy in the local press. No charges have been laid, although News and Fairfax media are speculating loudly about "child pornography offences". Link. Link. Link.

The police raid came a month after LNP Queensland Senator and Shadow Attorney General George Brandis passionately defended both free speech and artistic freedom in an address to the Sydney Institute on May 7. ALP State MP Martin Foley, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Arts, used his Twitter account to "oppose Liberal Party taking us back 60 years". Liberal State MP Clem Newton-Brown tweeted back "I'm curious @martinfoleymp as to whether you are still defending the works of this artist today?"

The police raid came nearly one year to the day after the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee tabled its "Report on the Review of the National Classification Scheme: achieving the right balance" in the Australian Senate.  Chaired by the former Liberal Senator for Tasmania Guy Barnett, the committee examined the role of Australia's national classification scheme (NCS) in the visual arts and the application of the NCS to works of art and the role of artistic merit in classification decisions.

I'm quoting the Arts Law Centre here because the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee's actual report seems to have disappeared from the Australian Senate's website.

The Australian Arts-Law centre commented:


Despite the media hype, the Committee did not recommend the classification of all artworks by the Classification Board. Fundamentally their approach appears to be "business as usual" but encourages artists to take a responsible self-censorship approach

The committee commends the actions of artists who have sought classification of their work prior to public exhibition or display. In the committee's view, obtaining classification assists in ensuring that audiences can be provided with appropriate advice (and, where necessary, warnings) regarding the nature of the artwork.

To this end, the Report notes that the cost of classification of artworks is problematic for artists and recommends that classification of artworks should be exempt from classification fees (Recommendation 7) 

There is a process for applying for a fee waiver outlined on the Classification Board's website.


The Commonwealth Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 defines Australia's classification and censorship system as a cooperative scheme between all the States and Territories of Australia. Enforcement of the scheme is through a Classification Enforcement Act enacted by State and Territory, with the Australian Classification Board (ACB) acting as a national clearing house.

The ACB was asked to review photographs by Bill Henson seized from  the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington in 2008. The Board said its review found nudity in the photographs was "mild and justified".

Most artworks would not need to be classified to be exhibited in Australia. An exception  is for what the ACB calls submittable publications - those which contain material that would cause them to be restricted to adults if they were classified. This includes material that is unsuitable for a minor to see or read, or material that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult.

Artists, curators and galleries may submit works to the ACB to be evaluated, for a fee. The fee may be waived at the Board's discretion.


A NSW working party on Child Pornography observed (pdf)

Artists found to legitimately exercise artistic purpose should not have their work legally defined in the same way as the horrific images that pervade the Internet of child sexual abuse. To do otherwise is to undermine the gravamen of the exploitation and abuse of children that does occur in the creation, possession and dissemination of child pornography, both in Australia and overseas. (p22)

The Australian classification system provides certainty, and protection from political agendas,  for artists, curators and galleries involved in the planning of a public exhibition of works which may be controversial. It is lamentable, and kind of contemptuous of all the hard work done in this area over the past two decades, that the Linden Gallery management followed an ultimately failed policy of both assuming an exemption from the classification regime, and simultaneously issuing a self-assessed advisory, outside of the national framework, to visitors.

On Photography - Piss Christ and Kulturkampf

I don’t believe in culture. Don’t believe artists produce it, for example, or that television advertisements create it. Analysis of culture, for example from a marxist perspective on capitalist monopolies, or from an epidemiological perspective on the causes of violence, require some initial leap of faith: you have to believe in culture as deterministic, cause and affect, a mechanism, or a force-field, when there is scant evidence of any of those.

In many theoretical perspectives culture is presented as a fog that needs peering through, an organisational chart, a guided tour rather than a lived experience. The word is a handy generalization, sure. You can look at the edges, borders and overlaps between geographies, histories, circumstances, and what those might have in difference or in common. But boundaries, epistemologies and zeitgeists are fluid, liminal, shifting, and no great help for getting to the heart of what's inside.

It would be dishonest, though, to leave what are popularly called the culture wars out of a discussion of modern photography. Conjoining culture and war leaves an impression in my mind of...something shapeless and vague, shadows in twilight perhaps, or Goya's giants endlessly bludgeoning each other.

Thinking about this is further complicated by the strategy I’m using that follows  Elaine Scarry’s critique of aesthetic critiques in On Beauty And Being Just. I’m using beauty in the sense of notability, like that black eye is a real beauty, or (from football) what a mark, you beaut!. Something notable, in other words, rather than something of beauty in the ordinary sense of being pleasing to the eye. Elaine Scarry wrote:

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.
and
The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.
(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)

Both arguments are in play in consideration of Andres Cerrano’s photograph Piss Christ. The photograph itself is described here, the artist’s website is here. I didn’t see the photograph when it was exhibited. I’m not familiar with the artist’s work, methods or rationale, or the series of photographs of objects in fluids of which it is part. My interest here is solely in the idea that its exhibition in Melbourne is storied as an engagement in a larger war of and on culture.

It will be no help referring to European statesman Otto Von Bismarck's difficulties with Catholicism in 1870s Western Europe, or referencing early twentieth century Italian Marxism, or the 1933 Säuberung.

I want to leapfrog those ideas into recent experience, into modern Melbourne. A further complication for me is some ideas from the study of macro economics. I have no background in the study of economics at all, but I am going to borrow ideas about exchanges from discourses on macro economics. My (limited) understanding is not all exchanges have to do with money, some are to do with ideas and associations and even making friends, but nevertheless play their part in a whole that is often, but not always, described as an economy.

The facts are straightforward. Pre publicity for an exhibition of Andres Cerrano’s photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 saw the photograph or its description included in prominent print and electronic media. The Catholic Church in Australia sought an order preventing the photograph from public display at the gallery in the Victorian Supreme Court, arguing precedents in both Canon and Common Law on blasphemous libel.

The Catholic Church argued "Both the name and the image Piss Christ not only demean Christianity but also represent a grossly offensive, scurrilous and insulting treatment of Christianity's most sacred and holy symbol. It is calculated to outrage the feelings of Catholics and other Christians."

The National Gallery of Victoria argued the photograph had been the subject of a television documentary, published in newspapers and books and its exhibition would not add to any perceived offence against the Catholic Church.

The Victorian Supreme Court rejected the application as having no foundation in law, and found no legal basis to prevent the exhibition.  "A plural society such as contemporary Australia operates best where the law need not bother with blasphemous libel," the court decided.

In the week after the exhibition opened the photograph was vandalised twice, leading to the arrest of three men, two of whom had acted in concert. Concerned that it could not prevent such determined attacks, gallery management closed the exhibition.

Using the term ‘calculated’ to describe the production and exhibition of this image places ideas about determinism, conspiracy, authenticity, and deception on the table. To paraphrase: blasphemous libel is a wrong social arrangement. In labelling the photograph art, including it in an exhibition, making it on object of sustained regard, the gallery is a willing accomplice to, or alternatively an unwitting element in, an overarching - devilish perhaps - subterfuge.

Holding the photograph in high regard certainly led to attempts to destroy it. But there is no evidence to support the existence of a calculating, conspiratorial, organized enemy force, no sign of an evil empire poised to make revolution for or against ideology, national self-determination or even religion. If it really were an engagement of a culture war there are no visibly organised protagonists beyond a few  ivory towers blasting away at each other’s values at megaphone volume.

The photograph did not produce a force field that compelled individuals to act in these ways. The artist didn’t produce a predetermined train of events. With no epidemiology of violence to trace, and no rapacious capitalist to blame, or media personality to boycott, the episode has become a muted controversy over artistic and curatorial freedom. But it is explicable in terms of spontaneity and self-organisation, terms often used to describe market economies and a free exchange of goods, or in this case ideas.

Arguments for and against exhibiting the work became more sophisticated. The second act of vandalism was more determined and certainly more complex, and through use of distraction and concurrent action, demonstrably more innovative than the first. These might not be predicted in theories of culture, but they are predicted and comprehensible in theories of markets. I guess the absence of any concrete transaction, for example money for service, undermines an economic perspective. But call the events a series of exchanges, rather than transactions for profit, with outcomes the result of self-organisation rather than any centrality of planning, and you get a glimpse of a free population testing, contesting, reformulating, rejigging, muddling through, as one economist I read put it, one way and another, the limits of its own freedom.

It just might be, from a secular Australian perspective,  that is all the culture wars are.

The last post in this series is here

On Photography - damned either way

Public interest in wrong social arrangements are the heart of most photographic controversies.

Two images come to mind in particular that illustrate tests of public interest,  one far too ordinary, the other not ordinary enough. Both were said, by contemporaries, to distract from, or amplify, somehow, wrong social arrangements.

There is a photograph archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, of  Alexandra Feodorovna, Anastasia and Olga Nikolaevna bathed in light, women of the Russian royal family in 1915, seemingly unposed.  The family are busy with needlework, one has her feet up, relaxed, ordinary, familiar even: there is a wrinkled rug in the foreground.  It feels candid, unforced, intimate, real, a photo from a family album, although it is not any more.  It is a moment and a history all at once, and now part of a greater story the library's collection frames - revolution, dislocation, suffering, murder. But perhaps "rare" is a somewhat misleading description: after the Soviet Union disbanded an estimated 150, 000 photographs of the Russian royal family were discovered in secret government archives, suppressed,  in the public interest, from public view by their communist successors for nearly 100 years

There is a photograph of film star Julia Roberts by Mario Testino for a L'Oreal cosmetics advertising campaign in 2010, happy, bright-eyed and unblemished. The photograph  and advertising campaign was banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority after complaints from Scottish  Liberal Democrat member of parliament Jo Swinson that the images were digitally altered, and "not representative of the results the product could achieve." Swinson is a long time campaigner against what she describes as overly perfect and unrealistic images of women in magazines and advertisements.

Communist political parties are, of course, long time campaigners against royal families. But it seems to me that the absence of any regal trappings in the photograph, the ordinariness of the setting and the commonplace and all too human appearance of the Russian royal family posed the greatest threat to the new russian ruling class.  Demonising a ruling elite is one thing. Disappearing women that look like someones sister, aunt or wife is something else altogether. The humanity of the women that belies perceptions of wrong social arrangements had to be disappeared as well.

In modern times it is "overly perfected and unrealistic images of women", and the "deification of beauty", that must be disappeared. Photographs of supermodel Christy Turlington and actress  Rachel Weisz have also disappeared from English magazines. Ms Swinson told the UK Daily Mail  there was sound medical evidence that faked - airbrushed or photoshopped -  images cause harm. "There needs to be much more diversity in advertising – different skin colours, body shapes, sizes and ages."

What was ideologically impermissible somewhere a century ago is essential to the public interest somewhere now. In parts of the world such contradictions are avoided by suppressing images of human bodies altogether. In Western tradition, the human body is central to our humanist  heritage and what we think and say about ourselves, although depictions of it are often contested.


Upon the Protestant reformation the Catholic Church compiled and circulated huge lists of forbidden books, and demanded the censorship of painting:

... all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust...

Seventeenth Century poet, polemicist and propagandist John Milton is often quoted arguing against clerical censorship:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties (1644)

Ironically, by 1744, Samuel Johnson was observing that a century of democratization of writing and publishing had rendered traditional systems for evaluating their worth shambolic. It was easy to publish and obtain books but difficult to trust their contents.

There are echoes of Johnson's world-weariness in controversies on photography today, and echoes of the old religious and political dogmas in conversations about them. Ironically, it may be that the failure of both religious dogma and political ideology to solve problems of wrong social arrangements that keep those controversies relevant.


The Australian Christian Lobby argued

...it is problematic to measure community standards by the number of complaints generated by a a particular broadcast or telecast. It would come as news to a great number of people within the community to learn that their view of the contemporary media environment was judged solely on their formally complaining...  (2011 Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee Inquiry into the Australian film and literature classification scheme pp10)


Historian Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Canberra Times

...the fact that an image or a bunch of words may offend someone and is therefore a reason to ban or severely restrict them is a Draconian and intolerant position. I'm offended by lots of things these days - Question Time, alcohol and cigarettes sold in supermarkets, reality TV and religious fundamentalism - but I don't use this as a reason to try to ban these things merely because it's just my opinion.

A very modern case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - An Angry Country?

Much has been written about the 2008 seizure of Australian artist Bill Henson’s photographs, and their subsequent restoration to his Sydney dealer, innocent, along with the artist, of overwrought allegations against them.

Child protection campaigners labelled Henson’s images of a nude thirteen year-old pornographic. Art critics argued the images were, well, art. Ultimately the independent Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the images a PG (Parental Guidance advisory) classification, and State prosecutors advised the child pornography charges against the artist would not succeed.

Watching an art gallery’s contents emptied into a truck on television I was grateful to whoever had thought the operation through: the police seizing artworks weren’t visibly armed. Later, as Henson’s photographs disappeared from the walls of Australian public spaces I wondered for how long?

There is, rightly, a great deal of sympathy and support for child protection campaigners. And like any other special interest involved in the political process those campaigners are expected to vigorously prosecute their agendas. However, as noted by sociologist Frank Ferudi and others, populist policy actors of all colours who adopt child protection agendas as their own simply cannot be trusted to act upon anything except self-interest, in the end. There have been some notable witch hunts in modern times that have ended without any beneficial outcomes at all, save for the self-advancement of those involved.

Worse, rapists have had their sentences cut, and victims brought to tears and bewilderment as newspapers seek to increase circulation with name and shame gambits. Criminal investigations, especially those involving crimes against children, have not been well served by regimes of continuous speculation. And there is evidence - for example the labelling of corporations as pedophiles - that the current panic over child protection serves only the political ends of ivory towers. Frank Furedi wrote:

Mention the word ‘child’ and people will listen. Raise the moral stakes by claiming that a ‘child is at risk’ and people will not just listen but endorse your demand that ‘something must be done’. For instance, campaigners against poverty understand that they are far more likely to gain sympathy for their cause by focusing attention on what is now called ‘child poverty’. It is as if abstract socio-economic injustices are simply not compelling enough on their own terms: they have to be recast as something afflicting children

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill writes: 

Everyone treats the ideal or at least the word freedom seriously. Everyone pays lip service to it...This does not mean, however, that freedom as a lived experience is not under threat. It absolutely is. Many of our core freedoms, especially freedom of speech, are being undermined by a political class that doesn’t trust us to live freely. But here’s the thing: such is the value still attached to the idea of freedom that now even attacks on freedom get dressed up as an expansion of freedom. Even the killing of freedom is disguised as freedom.

It seems fair to say that contemporary Australian creatives: artists, photographers, writers, publishers, film makers, polemicists, poets, and their audience, regard each other with suspicion. Photographs, web pages, television programs, newspaper articles, internet cartoons, broadcast pranks, speeches and even privately expressed opinions have all been discussed, dissected, boycotted, divested and otherwise sensationally prosecuted during the past few years.

There is a mood to compel the media to act for the public good, an expansion of media regulation to include public interest tests put to parliament (but defeated), a looming general election contested in part on issues of public interest and in part upon issues of free speech.  Where once free speech and public interest seemed inextricable, polemic is inexorably wedging them apart.

Newspapers’ circulation has fallen off a cliff.  Newspaper journalism is routinely outsourced overseas, our commercial TV networks are two-thirds owned by foreign banks, our commercial radio networks caught in spirals of cost-cutting and falling audiences. And Australians have turned their collective backs on government-approved and financed Australian films.

It is as if people can only bear to see and hear what is already known and agreeable.

The speed at which issues are churned online is overtaken only by the almost instantaneous coagulation of opinion around them. The occasional scholarly article lamenting, for example, media coverage of climate change issues, is liked and twittered and decontextualized and resignified at breakneck speed, contested and deconstructed and decried at length and likely to be of historical interest only long before any old fashioned op-ed or editorial response appears in the next edition of a daily tabloid or weekend broadsheet.

The sclerotic nature of internet discourse has been noted by many, an interesting counterpoint to what is  otherwise imagined as fluid lines of communication. To venture an opinion, for example on a blog, is to risk deletion. Anything you say can be held against you. Simultaneously, anything you say can be turned into something else - fixed! Somehow, it all seems to make sense, even if your original post had nothing to do with cats.

Durning the past few years Australians have campaigned for sackings, boycotts, internet filters, seizures, closures, divestments, damages, apologies, corrections, and even arrests over cultural artefacts, published words, pictures, videos, sounds, that for one reason or another became controversial. Alongside the large mass media outlets other, lesser, publishers have come under pressure: notably film festivals but also art dealers and even the management of assorted privately owned and operated public venues, like those hired for controversial Dutch politician Gert Wilders and British climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton.

But while there is a mood to allow the display of those publications, artworks, photographs, books, magazines, films, ideas, only if they are in the public interest, there is next to no clarity about what the public interest might be. Outrage has replaced clarity in so much of public discourse we can start to think about crossing out lucky and substituting angry in front of country.

At the very moment the freedom of unlimited communication beckons we rush to shackle ourselves in chains of mindless rage.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - Eyes In Skies

There is a scene in Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner which goes something like this:

Deckard: (pretending to be from the American Federation of Variety ArtistsConfidential Committee On Moral Abuses)  Oh yeah. I'd like to check your dressing room if I may.
Zhora: For what?
Deckard: For, uh, for holes.
Zhora:  Holes?
Deckard:  You'd be surprised what a guy would go through to get a glimpse of a beautiful body.
Zhora: No, I wouldn't.

Although it seems a little redundant to say so, the AustralianOffice of The Information Commissioner says there is a high level of community awareness of the use of surveillance cameras in our public places.

Former Assistant Privacy Commissioner Mark Hummerston says it is difficult to offer a single, consolidated figure of the number of surveillance cameras in Australia.  There are already 53 fixed surveillance cameras and 2 mobile camera-equipped vans operating in public places in central Melbourne alone.  Last year the Victorian State Government offered Melbourne local councils three million dollars to install more. At 30,000 dollars each, that’s an extra 100 to add to the unknown quantities already installed in public places.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance told ABC news last year “There’s a study out of the UK which shows, certainly in London, surveillance cameras have been responsible for solving one crime for every thousand cameras.” The Victorian Government recently ordered Victoria Police to audit the number and type of surveillance cameras in the State.

Despite Australian national privacy principles requiring that, where practicable, consumers must have the option to transact anonymously, every Melbourne taxi, automatic teller machine, train, tram, bus is camera equipped and many retailers photograph their customers. The Office of The Information Commissioner says concerns about surveillance cameras include misuse of stored photographs or videos, loss of anonymity, discomfort about being watched and the effectiveness of surveillance cameras achieving  their stated goal of crime prevention. Around eighty percent of people responding to surveys about surveillance cameras expressed no concerns about them at all. Five percent were 'very concerned.'

Last year the Melbourne Age newspaper bemoaned the spread of surveillance cameras as undermining “the sense of liberty that is part of the fabric of this city and this nation” (Saturday Age Editorial September 29 2012)  Brenna Krenus wrote a few days later that more cameras: “will not engender feelings of safety: they will heighten feelings of fear” (The Age October 2 2012).

Despite their ubiquity surveillance cameras do not unexpectedly present “an intentional intrusion (whether physical or otherwise) upon the situation of another (whether as to the person or his or her personal affairs) where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy; and the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities” (D Butler '(2005)'A Tort of Invasion of Privacy in Australia?’  Melbourne University Law Review 11)

What does present as intrusive, invasive and unexpected is a new generation of cheap, lightweight airborne cameras mounted on surveillance drones. There is a good example of their capabilities here on youtube

ABC journalist Mark Corcoran told the Sydney Morning Herald "The day is fast approaching where the small personal drone will be an obligatory part of the tool box for journalists, photographers and bloggers"

The Australian Privacy Foundation worried that Kate Middleton “and many other people besides can rest assured that their bare breasts are fair game, anywhere, any time,” after Australian Woman's Day published candid photographs of the pregnant Duchess in a bikini. It is legal to operate a remotely piloted drone in Australia below four hundred feet for non commercial purposes.  In Victoria it is illegal to knowingly use an ‘optical surveillance device’  to record a private activity without consent.

Anxieties about surveillance technologies are often expressed in the same vein as general concerns about photography: a potential loss of anonymity, discomfort about the photographic ‘gaze’, misuse, for example through publication, and the offensiveness of the images themselves. In one notorious case photographs of a dead child were obtained from a helicopter and published without the family’s knowledge.

The grieving parents wrote:

"We are not arguing the fact that the media have an important role to play, what we want is the media acting in a responsible, sensitive and ethical manner for grieving families such as ours and many others...At the time of Molly's loss of life we would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to share with the media in our own time and in our own words the story of her life”

As if to confirm the worst of general anxieties about photography, so-called ‘body scanners’,  cameras that see through clothes to the naked human body, are installed at eight Australian airports.

The Australian Government says The current generation body scanner is equipped with automatic threat recognition technology. This removes the need for screening officers to view detailed or ‘naked’ images and instead highlights areas of concern on a generic ‘stick’ figure. In addition, the body scanner is not able to store personal information about passengers or the screen display generated from individual scans.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - In Trouble?

A woman meets relatives in a busy inner city shopping strip. There is banter, hugs, and before they say their goodbyes, a moment to take a couple of photographs. Later, she relaxes over a coffee in a nearby cafe, peeking at the photos on her camera’s liquid crystal display.

The woman, a friend, a respected artist/photographer, writer and academic, had her camera out again several days later when she was approached by the cafe's owner, who said he'd had complaints from four other patrons that she was 'photographing children'  Being a mother herself and a woman of standing, she was naturally upset and confused by what sounded to her as an accusation and was prompted to write this account:

...I was thoroughly shocked, insulted and offended yesterday when a Manager/Owner of a coffee shop in Camberwell said when he saw me with my camera, that if I brought out my camera again then they would not serve me. Apparently (according to him) he'd had four complaints from people saying that they didn't want their children photographed...

We often speak of transformative technology breathlessly, as if it were a desired, rather than lived, experience. Perversely, the lived experience of transformative technologies is often a negative one.

Anxieties about cameras are as old as the manufacture of film. The tools of photography are notionally extensions of natural, embodied phenomena - the camera a prosthetic eye and the photograph an augmentation of memory - that provided the basis for modern visual communication and began to globalize human experience long before the internet.

The incident itself bears the postmodern imprint of internet-speed culture. Something is remarked upon, there are likes, a critical number is reached, a moderator implements a ban - fixed!  In a spasm of autonomic reflex an artifact with no place in the social body is ejected, and the symbolic order of things restored.

The internet changed photography. Analyses of contemporary photographic practice give next to no account of the wirelessly interconnected lenses embedded in and peeking from everyday artifacts. Everywhere you look, they look back. From doors, walls, cars (both inside and outside), telephones, tablets, television screens and more, existing predominantly not to augment human bodies, but to make and store and categorize recordings of them.

Anxieties about surveillance are as ancient as writing itself. We live in times where old fears are magnified at every turn by experiences of photography as command and control. Those experiences are not novel in Western culture. Whole categories of people, for example those with disabilities, suffer forms of surveillance for the whole of life. The experiences are not novel but have become much more common, and have brought the invisible aspects of photography, the composing eye and controlling hand, to prominence in discussions about photography.

Where the photographer was previously almost invisible, a tabula-rasa upon which events imprinted themselves through an indifferent mechanism, now the question of what is not in a photograph is as salient as the question of what is. The composing eye is inexorably linked in culture on the one hand with expressions of power, and on the other with perversions of it. Chris Munroe writes, in Tracker, of Norman Tinsdale famous 1930s photographs of Aboriginal peoples:

Critics suggest the forlorn expressions staring back at the camera tell a tale of a sorrowful people treated like museum exhibits, firstly measured, weighed then forced to pose awkwardly for photos whilst clutching serial numbers. Many have compared the exploitative look of the images to those of police mug shots. A closer examination of the Tindale genealogical photographic collection reveals almost none of his subjects are smiling at the camera or seemingly engaging at all in the compulsory process either. They look resigned and defeated – an enduring reminder of the dark days of mission life and the Protection Board era.

There is a photograph by Bettina Rheims of style icon Kate Moss, bare-breasted, part of Rheims's Modern  Lovers series. In 1989, when the photograph was taken, Moss was 15. News columnist Andrew Bolt poses a problem with Rheims's photograph better than most:

Hear how Moss herself has described the pain that is the reason for laws to protect children from being forced to expose themselves for the sexual pleasure of others.

and

...This is art, we are told, not pornography. Perfectly fine to stare in a state gallery at a picture not too different from those for which a Melbourne stalker now faces jail. So ogle away, dear art lovers...

 (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Thursday February 14 2013 pp15)

Despite previous controversies over the works of Bill Henson and Ella Dreyfus, the Art Gallery of NSW said it had ''no issue'' displaying Rheims's photograph of Moss. "We exhibit art, not pornography" the gallery told anyone who asked.

Controversies over photography often inhabit a kind of cultural underbelly and are often conducted at megaphone volume between contesting ivory towers. We have all seen politicians, for example, falling over each other on the way to denounce the latest photographic outrage. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, for instance, denouncing a photographic exhibition he hadn’t seen by an artist he’d previously never heard of discussed in a newspaper column he hadn’t read. While many claim outrage, few talk sense, and I think Chris Munroe and Andrew Bolt succinctly express cultural anxieties about who is  watching and why.

Here then are a couple of peaks, or ivory towers, landmarks in the cratered landscape contemporary photography finds itself labouring over. Cultural tensions over history, power, privacy, nudity, art versus porn - a battle some cast as ultimately between good and evil extremes.

Professor of Aesthetics Elaine Scarry provides a substantial contribution to the controversy, from an academic ivory tower, in On Beauty and Being Just

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.

and

The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.

(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)


I'm interested in the first axis of argument because it directly states (but does not solve) a problem often raised. It seems to me that wrong social arrangements are at the heart of Andrew Bolt’s critique of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Beauty has the capacity to wound, not only others but also is itself at risk from the attentions it draws. This line of inquiry goes directly to the heart of anxieties over photographs of children. To paraphrase, innocence is at risk of destruction from the attentions of photography.

Around the same time the Art Gallery of NSW was organising school tours of its new photographic exhibition, Chi Magazine published photographs of a bikini-clad, pregnant, Duchess of Cambridge.

The controversy over those photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge turned upon ideas about public and private moments, privacy versus surveillance. In the photographs themselves the subjects are unaware and unposed, the (anonymous) photographer concealed from their view. The British Royals were reportedly “outraged”, inside their  white-walled palace.

"They are images of such unexceptional normality that there is only limited mention of them on the cover of the magazine," Chi's editor, Alfonso Signorini, told the BBC.

There was, however, many lengthy mentions of the photographs on the covers of other publications. I don't know how many covers above normal circulation a bikini clad aristocrat is good for, but you can bet that every editor who published those photographs worked it out beforehand. Style sells, celebrity sells, and I want to place by example in this geography of mind a market, not in any particular point,  but one which can displace the landscape anywhere, inconveniently, like a blemish upon an already cratered and pockmarked cultural underbelly.

Australian Woman's Day editor Fiona Connolly told News Limited she had no qualms about running the photographs of the Duchess, claiming they were taken by a fellow holiday maker on the Caribbean island of Mustique rather than a paparazzo. "It wasn’t a hard decision to run these photos," she said, and  "we are sensitive to photos that shouldn’t be published, for instance I haven’t laid eyes on the nude photos of Kate."

Nude photographs of the Duchess, also covertly obtained, were published in Grazia Magazine earlier this year. Designer Bella Freud, speaking to Vanity Fair last December about her time as a stylist with a large fashion retailer, describes walls and mood boards pinned with pages torn out of Grazia Magazine of daily sightings of (Kate) Moss. “Whole clothes lines have been made out of one look she put on one morning.” Grazia is typical of many such style, scandal and surveillance pictorial magazines sourcing photographs from long-lensed paparazzi and advertising from the fashion industry. Nudity sells, and what it sells is, paradoxically, apparel.

It seems to me that objections to these photographs are along the lines suggested in Elaine Scarry's second axis of argument, that when we stare at the beautiful Duchess, make her an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the Duchess. The immediately visible destruction is of her privacy, but that is only the beginning. Publication of private moments pose a danger to her moral integrity as well, and none more serious than to the childlike Kate Moss.

Fashion ivory towers Vogue Magazine and Cosmopolitan have traded blows over what Connolly described as sensitivity to photographs of Moss that shouldn't be published.

Corinne Day’s photographs, styled by Cathy Kasterine, of Moss for British Vogue “showing how we all wear our underwear when we’re hanging around the bedroom” as Kasterine put it, were described by competitor Cosmopolitan’s outraged editor as “Hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the pedophile market. If I had a daughter who looked like that, I would take her to see a doctor”. Moss herself shoots back “Ridiculous. I must have been 19. I’m standing in my underwear. Really controversial.” But Moss has described herself as depressed, and pressured to bear her breasts for the cameras as a sixteen year old in the famous Calvin Klein heroin chic advertisements. New York is a beating heart of uber capitalism, and Moss’s work experience there frames one of the best arguments I know for unionism and the formation of industry associations dedicated to protecting members from moral exploitation.

Photography polarizes opinion at every turn. Worse, dialogue about moral issues are from a distance between the vested interests in ivory towers that sense some worth in their being conducted at megaphone strength. Photography is in trouble. Part of the problem is discourse. At the very moment the camera became ubiquitous, leaders of public opinion, who might be expected to step up and fulfil their self-proclaimed roles as authorities of specification and delineation, are divided and defensive behind the walls of their ivory towers.

Photography is in trouble. At any moment a photographer’s work might be seized, even photographs that previously hung with pride in public spaces, as happened to Bill Henson’s works in recent times. Or a child might be declared a sex offender for life, for posting a naked picture of someone somewhere from their phone, or downloading one to it in an email.

At any moment a woman with a camera in her handbag might become the object of scurrilous whispers and unwelcome attentions. Since one way or another we all carry cameras with us now, the problem can only get worse.

Beginning with this and continuing in the next few few posts on the topic, I'm going to attempt to sketch what I see as marking the boundaries of the problem, and the pathways to them, a geography of mind pursuing the tangled landscape of Civilization itself.  And I'm hoping against hope that it does not follow a trajectory of the photograph from treasured memory to the scene of a crime.

Thoughtcrime?

My son sent me a link to a recent article by John Pilger entitled You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it? Pilger states that because Echelon exists and identifies words associated with terrorism that we may all be considered terrorists if we use any of these words in our electronic communication with others. This is such old news! I remember in the 70s provocatively using the word 'bomb' or 'explosion' in my telephone conversations, knowing full well that any intelligence system in place would have to be going on more than words to identify someone as a potential threat to the security of a country or people. We are NOT all suspects as Pilger suggests! Basically he uses emotive language to attack America, to defend the actions of Julian Assange and to criticize Julia Gillard -  again, old news.
But it's not any of the above which concerns me, it is his question What are you going to do about it? that fills my thoughts. He gives absolutely no clue as to what the ordinary, everyday person can do and if even they really want to 'do anything' about such surveillance systems, instigated to protect them against potential threat of those who wish to cause damage to person and property & who would, if allowed, destroy personal freedoms by disrupting our hard won, peaceful life. Fact is, that what Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) says in A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner,1992) is true: 'We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns'. I'm not saying that I like living in this kind of world, I'm just stating facts.
Newer weapons in the arsenal against our real or perceived enemies include surveillance systems. However,regardless of the thousands of CCTV, video surveillance systems, spy satellites and signals intelligence systems operating to monitor human communication and behavior, if you're not a terrorist and not planning to commit a crime then there's nothing for you to be concerned about. Sure, it might be a bit unnerving to think that a mechanical instrument can track your movements and take a photograph of that pimple on your nose from space, but other than that, this 'Big Brother 'world is not going to go away anytime soon and no amount of signing petitions on Face Book is going to make any difference!
I think the worry is that many of us have read 1984 (George Orwell) and we think, like Winston that we might be arrested and persecuted for 'facecrime': 
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. (Book 1, Chapter 5).
I for one am glad that large shopping complexes have CCTV, which can help identify an individual who has unlawfully absconded after abducting a small child, or the security mirrors in place so that you know that you can go to an isolated toilet area and a least feel that you have a level of safety. But really, we cry about our lost freedoms, but we bought into the convenience of EFPOST, even though it records electronic information about our location when we made that financial transaction and would, if necessary, aid police officers if we suddenly went missing. We enjoy our email, social media sites, new technology, iPhones, GPS tracking devices, but cry out that our personal freedoms are being infringed upon! Give me a break!
Pilger writes his article amidst a background of person freedoms, when he knows full well that we already have limited personal freedom. We can't just do what we like, especially since our behavior impacts on the welfare of others.However, having said all this, if we ever get to a time, described in 1984 in which thoughtcrime is punishable, then I'll be careful to avoid surveillance and start wearing a mask!

How to make a tinfoil hat

For anyone troubled by the Australian mass media saying stuff you don't like, help is at hand. The Anything But Human Special Edition Tinfoil Hat is here, and in the great tradition of direct action, you can make it yourself.

You need:

1. Two squares of aluminum foil about 300mm a side.

2. A head.

Five-step assembly:

1. Arrange one bit of aluminum foil on the head, from front to back.

2. Pat the foil until it conforms to the head's shape and gently bend bits of the foil away from the eyes and neck.

3. Arrange the second square of foil on the head from ear to ear.

4. Pat the foil until it conforms to the head's shape and gently bend bits of the foil away from the ears.

5. Squeeze and fold the bits of foil you folded away from ears, eyes and neck into a flat shape that runs continuously around the head. Your tinfoil hat is now ready to use.

WARNING: Some media may require extra layers of tinfoil. You will know which when you see it.

argument Ad Nauseum

I read Robert Manne's criticisms of The Australian newspaper in The Age newspaper.

Some of the criticism is Ad Hominem, playing the man and not the ball:

...it is doubtful The Australian could survive without hidden financial subsidy from the global empire of its founding father, Rupert Murdoch...

and I really don't follow it. Some of the criticism is laughable

...citizens have a plethora of accessible sources of information on the internet...

but the big issue seems to be

The Australian has conducted a prolonged and intellectually incoherent campaign against action on climate change and undermined the hold in public life of the central values of the Enlightenment, Science and Reason.

and

The Australian not only waged a war on science but also threatened the always vulnerable place of reason in public life.

Robert Manne goes on to argue, if I may paraphrase, that only statements which are true are permissible, suggesting that what is true or not should be established by consensus.

Democracy relies on an understanding of the difference between those questions that involve the judgment of citizens and those where citizens have no alternative but to place their trust in those with expertise.

An Argumentum ad Verecundiam, or appeal to authority, or a consensus of authorities, is of course an adventure in rhetoric in the ancient styles of academic disputation and not even close to the overwhelmingly skeptical central values of the Enlightenment. And Robert Manne deploys as well the Argumentum ad Baculum beloved of early Renaissance polemicists like Savonarola in Quattrocento Florence.

In the discussion of climate change, the future of the Earth and of humanity are at stake.

Only the argument that the only permissible statements are true ones is connected with the Enlightenment and that belongs to the now discredited philosophy of Logical Positivism, which had as a central proposition only statements which are true are permissible. A proposition accepted by consensus that turned out impossible to logically prove.

Still typing with one hand so I'll keep it brief. In the discussion of climate change, the future of free speech is at stake. The worst aspect of the awful dispute over weather forecasts we call the climate change debate is the repeated attempts by both sides of the so called debate to try to silence the other. Bah. Humbug. And a pox on all your houses.

Climate strange

Still feeling my way on teh bloggingsphere. Who cares what I think? I think. Am opinionated, but never believed I needed an opinion on everything. Perhaps that is lazy. It is supposed to be an information age, with every who what where when and why known to humankind at my fingertips, waiting for an opinion to form.

I don't really get what people call the climate change debate, all this hot air and angst, strident rhetoric gushing in torrents from car radios, from the TV news or a current affairs program I get to watch, if I'm lucky. Time was, the weather changed as a matter of course. If you don't like the weather in Melbourne right now, just wait a couple of hours.

But now "the climate change debate plays out amid a chorus of populism and self-interest", a senior retired politician said. And "I don't understand it at all", one of my neighbours remarked today.

It made me think, or remember, or tingle of deja-vu though, as if I had heard it all before. What it might be is the feeling that the climate change thing is going the same way as the bomb thing did a few decades ago.

The bomb thing was a perception that one or all nations that had nuclear weapons would use them, blowing the world up along the way. What to do about the bomb preoccupied politics it seemed for ever. And it was really divisive politics, with some taking -ist and -wing positions, and vehemently demanding the rest of us do the same, crying foul treason if we did not.

Numbers were big news then as well, I recall. The number of nuclear missiles that were somewhere caused violence, and television spectacles of banners condemning war used as clubs to beat people with banners wanting peace. And numbers were apparently the answer, because there were so many of them being hawked, or doved, around. And it all dragged on for years.

The climate thing seems as big and divisive now as the bomb thing was, in the day, oozing from media, everywhere, all the time. Pretty much impossible to ignore. Or understand in any detail.

Trying to make sense of all this the usual way, by listening to all sides of the debate, seems as futile as it was when people were arguing about the bomb. Global warming, say some. The Earth is cooling, argue others. No it isn't at all, others affirm. Look at the science, all sides urge. The facts. We have proof, evidence, numbers, and the other guys are making it up for sinister reasons of their own.

Everyone seems to be arguing over computer simulations (they call them climate models, but aren't they weather forecasts?) as if they were real.

I don't know how true, but there is an old story that Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, called Caligula, (12-41 CE) made war upon the Sea-God Neptune, in the waters of the English Channel, capturing a booty of sea-shells and kelp that were paraded around Rome in triumph. He was assassinated, because people thought him weird. The legend of King Canute, who said "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings" also comes to mind, a cautionary tale. Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard got involved in the drought. Controversy over his big thing, rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin, rages still, with books of numbers set ablaze in public demonstrations of loathing and fear. The next Prime Minister didn't do so well either, after making the weather a great moral issue of his time.

I guess there is a moral in there somewhere, but I'm not quite sure what. Other than people who take credit for the weather are really brave. Or something.

taxing hot air

I would rather sit in a dentist's chair than have lunch on an inner Melbourne footpath. So the tax on local restaurants using outdoor heating introduced in my 'hood to "discourage the use of outdoor gas heaters" won't change my alfresco dining habits one bit.

But I am interested in the reasoning behind the introduction of a tax on hot air. One commentator writes:

Diners who choose to dine outside on very cold days should wear appropriate attire instead of using external gas heaters installed by the business owners. Most of the heat is wasted in warming up the open air, and only small proportion benefits the diners. Such inconsideration reflects on the naivety and hypocrisy of the diners on climate change and global warming argument.

Scrutiny of dress and behaviour, the preoccupation of moralising writers since ancient times, places this tax on outdoor heaters in a moral sphere. Lacking experience, wisdom and judgement, diners are not conforming to moral standards or beliefs to which they profess to aspire. Like wayward children, diners at restaurants that use outdoor heating will be encouraged to act morally by adopting uniform attire, in this case a government issued blanket.

“I would like to start to build a culture in outdoor dining areas of people using a blanket rather than a heater,” one local official told Melbourne media.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd labelled what the correspondent I quoted refers to as the global warming argument the greatest moral issue of our time.

Around seventy cafe's in the 'hood use outdoor heaters on footpath dining areas. Those heaters are estimated to produce fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, around three-quarters of a tonne per cafe per year. By contrast, Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, which supplies around a quarter of the electricity used in my 'hood, produces sixteen million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, capped at a net four hundred and fifty million tonnes over time. If global carbon dioxide emissions are changing the weather, as seems likely, common sense suggests that some kind of debate over what to do about that must follow. But I doubt that framing the debate in moral terms will produce any useful outcome.

The platform principles of the deep ecosophy movement (which I have been rather painstakingly working through on this blog for a while now) attempts to frame the debate in rational terms. Those who subscribe to the platform principles "have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes." Taxing fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions smacks of tokenism, and a lack of intellectual rigour, in what ought to be a debate over human interference in nonhuman life. It is simply not good enough to frame this earth-shaking debate as a moral argument, and rail against the hypocrisy of those who are hungry and cold. We need to do better, and I fear we are incapable of rising above the condemnatory rhetoric of everyday moralising, inevitably a domain of the intellectually bankrupt.

I think I think

I haven't posted for a while. But I have been writing a lot. And a series of posts about deep ecology is coming. I'm still feeling my way with a blog. Using the perpendicular pronoun in a sentence is more fraught than I imagined . Who cares what I think? I think.

I am attempting a synthesis of deep ecology with bodies without organs. I am aggrieved beyond words by the ecosophists who decided to turn their backs upon modern philosophy. Although I don't care enough to argue with them, I do think that the ecosphere cannot exist without at least one thousand plateaus.

I always thought that deep ecology meant just that, a philosophy unfolding over a very long time. And understood that the very long time was many many multiples of my own. So it is disappointing to find a project begun less than thirty years ago to synthesize the best of the rest with a simple but profound ecophilosophy abandoned, because the rest has been somewhat arbitrarily judged irredeemably anthropocentric. And careerist.

But who cares what I think? I think. I think!

Love, or the notion of love

I finally worked out how to reinstall the tracking code into my blog template last night and  I'm delighted its' working!
Thinking about yesterday, it appeared that everyone I had occasion to talk to in virtual as well as in real life was interested in love or various aspects of it.  Love, or, rather, the notion of love was played in their minds through family, food and possession. Notwithstanding family, of course, the idea of possession conjures up all kinds of ideas about control, ownership and romance. The idea of romantic love - you know, the love associated with sexual attraction, which sneaks up on you and before you recognize what's happening, you've already fallen too deep to escape its gentle but firm grip on your body and psyche, tends to bring with it notions of property. Somehow  from that moment on you belong to the other.  All very well if that's what you desire. However, there are some, including Robert Dessaix (On Humbug, 2009:56) who perceive the whole 'falling in love thing' as a mind-fuck - your reason takes a holiday; your psyche becomes an overheated brazier of dreams, desires and resentments; you want to be intimately alone with whoever has cast the spell; you start collecting stamps or watching old John Wayne movies because your beloved likes to do that; you see enemies and rivals everywhere; you live for a repeat of the epiphanic moment; you become an emotional wreck; you surrender; you say 'yes' to everything; you become deaf and blind; you start living out borrowed narratives; you are in love. It's all quite fabulous, of course, and definitely not to be missed. (2009:64)
Yes, I've been there, and experienced all that, but after discussion yesterday with a friend we decided this kind of love is definitely for the young. Older people are more psychologically and physically vulnerable to the kind of roller-coaster ride of 'being in love' and the inevitable aftermath - almost everyone falls out of love, and opt instead for something more comfortable, more predictable and manageable in their lives. And, anyway, older people know who they are and are not about to bend to the will of another or change their habits easily!
But I was thinking that the notion of possession becomes even more important for lovers, having been through the turmoil and surviving the insecurities of the state of being-in-loveness don't want to loose their love interest, even though much of the passion has gone. Couples clutch even stronger to one another, not permitting anyone or anything to permeate their concocted cocoon - I don't want you, but  I don't want anyone else to have you either.
We could attempt to take the physical out of the equation, focusing instead on  'falling in love' in a mental kind of way, but then doesn't it all become pure fantasy? You can't really take the body out of the equation and why would you want to. Being in love, possession, jealousy and emotion is played out on the body - beating heart, rage, fear, anxiety. Oh, and of course, the pleasure, pure pleasure and that's what it's all really about. But some, already anticipating the failure of love and the pain that comes with loss, spend all their time in avoidance. 'I'll never fall in love again' you can hear them cry and by avoiding pain they also manage to avoid the type of pleasure associated with feeling fully connected to another, if only briefly.

Humbug again

I haven't finished Robert Dessaix's On Humbug as yet, but stopped short yesterday to muse over his words,  'In America, humbug is probably more closely associated with figures from the Jacksonian era such as PT Barnum (The Greatest Show on Earth)' (2009:21). So, yes, of course I'd heard of Barnum and Bailey Circus, but it was when Dessaix said, 'The point was not whether Barnum's 'Fejee mermaid' with her fish's body and monkey's hand and head, his 'Tom thumb', his 'Irish giant', his trained fleas, fat boys, bearded ladies and dwarfs were really monsters, but that they were intriguing, they were fun!' I remembered that I'd made a post on Stelarc's Articulated head and used the words 'Bah Humbug' in the title. When Charles Dickens attributed the words 'Bah! Humbug' to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, he was, according to Dessaix objecting to the whole idea of wishing someone a happy Christmas, '...that's what humbug does: it makes a show of concocted attitudes and feelings...' (2009:6) '...as far as Scrooge was concerned, his nephew was an emotional impostor, a humbug' (2009:7). When I used Bah! Humbug! I was really talking about the bullshit element associated not only with art, but also with science and there's certainly a lot of insincerity in the art world as well as great deal of stroking. And you'd have to admit that there's more than a little Barnum and Bailey in the art word today (and the world of science and politics) - you get more funding and greater crowds if you exhibit monsters. More people have probably seen Gunter Von Hagens Body Worlds - an exhibition of plastinated bodies (water and fat from a corpse is replaced by certain plastics so that it will not smell or decay) than any other art show. And how many years is Stelarc going to fly the 'Ear on Arm' circus, is it really SO monstrous, so engaging that we can't live without seeing it? It's already five years old and remains mute, but perhaps that's what makes it monstrous? (Of course, I'm in no way implying that muteness in an individual  is monstrous.) I'm still surprised that people (or is it only younger people) are over-awed by this kind of body modification. But, we all like a bit of bull shit in the art world, it's what makes it go around - keeps the curator's in a job, not to mention Gallery Directors and of course, the Australia Council, all of which probably make more money curating, writing and organizing art exhibitions than  the artists make themselves! Oh yes, we love our artists, we drag our bodies off to the 'gallery' (meaning of course, the National Gallery) when we have nothing else to do on a Sunday, and feel that by admiring art that we are somehow like artists. Sure, I can hear you saying that if no-one looks at the art then artists wouldn't make art - not so. The creative urge is there whether or not you have an audience. Well, after all that, what can I say, perhaps I should ask myself the question: Is there a certain amount of humbug in all of this, humbug being '...a kind of bluster, with a casual disregard for whether something is strictly true or not. If it seeks to mislead at all (and sometimes it can barely be bothered - it's having too much fun), it seeks to play tricks with the speaker's everyday reality (situation, attitudes, stance), rather than to deceive anybody with false information, the semantic weight of humbug being pretty much zero'. (Dessaix, 2009:10).

Stelarc's Articulated Head ~ bah humbug!

I know that I made a brief comment about Stelarc's (MARCS Auditory Laboratories. University of Western Sydney) Articulated Head project in June this year, but in thinking about it again I wonder, is this really what we want for our future? Do we really want to be interacting with non-human robots? Robots don't exude odour, they do not cough or sneeze; we cannot catch viruses from them. Although they may produce a fake laugh, they can't cry and if they feign sobbing, they will never produce tears that our human emotions will respond to ~ they are totally incompatible with fluids. They never age and their worries (if they were indeed ever be able to experience trauma or distress) will never show on their carefully constructed faces. They will never be a mirror of our fragility and although they can respond to those who are in close proximity, they will never, can never be truly intimate. They are capable of seducing the vulnerable and gullible into thinking that they are like us, that their facial expressions are enough to tell us that they are a mirror of our humanity, but they can never really seduce. They are pure artifice. They will never bleed and so we will never feel truly connected to them, for their flesh (if you could call their exoskeletons flesh) is cold and ours is warm. We are able, through our complex nervous system to feel a robots steely hand and yet it will never experience the feel of our friendly touch. They may be used as companions, but we will always understand that any sympathy they show us is contrived. Although the Articulated head can locate an observer through its visual tracking capabilities, it cannot see your eyes as a mirror to your soul. You know that when you say 'don't the flowers smell beautiful'? That it will probably have a system melt-down because it simply cannot compute the cultural or situated meanings attributed to the words flowers or beautiful. And, even if the programmers in the future manage to install all permutations within its system, the robot will never understand particular associations and memories that give things meaning to you. Robots are said to be intelligent and yet they cannot do what a four year old can ~ they cannot tie their shoe-laces because they have no feet. Their words and responses are not thought through to respond to our thoughtful questions, they are simply pre-programmed and selected. The Articulated Head is an attractor, it attracts funding and probably will continue to do so for its makers and collaborators, but this does not make it attractive, unless of course, all the above that I have described is exactly what we desire. Perhaps we have a love/hate relationship with human beings, perhaps we would prefer constructs that are simultaneously more than or less than human ~ things that do not deteriorate and die, things that do not urinate and defecate. Things that will never bleed, things that we don't have to care for ~ enabling us to develop our empathy, because they do not deteriorate. Things that will never be a burden, because they can easily be cast aside for a new or better version! And see in this photo how the Articulated Head is cordoned off and protected from the curious and parasitic crowd who looks at their so-called mechanical counterpart. No wonder their faces show a sense of cynicism, seriousness or amusement! 'Bah humbug' they seem to say.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nime2010/4704265611/

I actually felt a little sympathy for both Stelarc and his Articulated Head when I read the Noise & Sound blog, which stated:

'Poor old Stelarc’s articulated head from earlier in the week was slumped to the ground, disconnected'. http://www.charlesmacinnes.com/blog/files/category-concerts.html

For me, the only manner in which a robot can be even partly human is when it is shown to be vulnerable.