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Jack Kerouac: Tech Pioneer (1)

Jack Kerouac’s famous “scroll” of the typescript for his landmark 1957 novel “On the Road” is an iconic artifact, due to the cultural impact of its content, but its treatment (however reverential) as an oddball, one-off experiment masks its maker’s insight into the technology of writing and its prophetic relationship to his medium’s future. […]

Election 2012: Image World (15)

According to a BBC report, the word “omnishambles” has been named “word of the year” by the Oxford English Dictionary. “The word — meaning a situation which is shambolic from every possible angle — was coined in 2009 by the writers of BBC political satire The Thick of It.” Putting an American spin on it, we get Romneyshambles: Any political project with Mitt Romney at its helm. […]

Election 2012: Image World (14)

There’s a direct relationship between the klutziness in the handling of visual imagery and the demographics of the Republic Party and its subsets. Bluntly put, if I wanted intelligent advice on effective and persuasive 21st-century mass communication via visual and electronic means, I wouldn’t expect to get it from over-40 Caucasian small-town midwestern and southern males and females. […]

Election 2012: Image World (13)

The sheer quantity of visual imagery disseminated today during a national election, its diversity of forms, its variety of sources and distribution methods, and the rapidity with which image succeeeds image, destabilizes the electorate’s perception of the candidates. For unified, coherent Renaissance representation it substitutes Cubist depiction of its subjects, a collage of glimpses built up over the course of the campaign, fluid and unfixed in the mind perhaps even at the moment the voter steps into the booth to cast the ballot. […]

World Press Photo 2012 (b)

Time to rethink the whole World Press Photo project from the ground up. If they ever get serious about catching up with where “press photography” has gone since 1955, WPP might want to scrap the entire process of Academy Awards-style categories and prizes, and become instead a serious forum for discussion of information-based, issue-oriented imagery in the new media environment. […]