Tag Archives: Painting

Centipede

26 Friday Apr 2013

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Centipede

Centipede

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

One thing that I remember so well from my early days with my cat. I used to notice how much he loved to climb the fly-screens over the windows, one day I realized that what he was actually doing was jumping on them and climbing to the level of my head, and that the reason he was doing that was that I would absentmindedly get up and pay him some attention. Generally in the manner of pouring out some cat food for him, or at least wandering over to the window to shoo him down.

I suppose it was at that time that I became aware of him as something more than a cat.

Later on, finding someone to live in my house with him while I went away for an extended period of time, I returned to find him living in an old apartment block, and upon seeing me he returned to live in my house. I went away for ten months, and when I returned he welcomed me, he clearly knew me, I think he may have loved me.

So it’s really my own deception to say that he was just a cat; he was not. He was my cat.

Table

22 Monday Apr 2013

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lehan table

Table

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

When I first moved to Hokkaido I tried to keep my cat inside the house, it was very cold, he was very upset to be moved. But he got out of the house and I couldn’t find him, I looked for two days and called him. On the afternoon of the second day I heard him crying, and I found him up in the machinery of a big truck parked across the road, next to the rice vending machine.

The truck had been gone all the day before, it had returned from its work that afternoon. My cat had crawled up into that truck and it appeared that he had stayed in that truck while it drove all the way to the middle of Hokkaido and back. Did he really do that? Or did he crawl in later when it was warm and he was cold. I don’t know, but I always thought that he travelled all the way to Hokkaido and back in that truck, that’s what I like to believe.

Anyway, he was in his later days a staunchly unidiosynchratic cat who woke me up almost every night we spent together and who would occasionally vomit in the bed at three am, which in the winter was particularly unwelcome.

But he was also measurable in years of days of ordinary life. There were many of them, ordinary days of being, together. He was a cat, and I was not, and I would not be surprised, nor blame him, if he found me uninteresting and if indeed he considered me at all. I think I would be lucky if he did. That was his privilege, as a cat.

He was a cat, and one of the blessed thing about cats is that they are fine company. He was a bit ornery and cranky too, and in wanting to believe that I could manage – to carry him through my own travails – I lived a life way beyond my capabilities. And maybe that was good too, I’m sure even a cat likes a bit of independence sometimes. He found his own patch of sunshine, much more efficiently than I did.

Late Light

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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Morning's Late Light

Morning’s Late Light

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
I only went to that orphanage in Vietnam once, so I don’t know much about it. It had a lot of children in it, and a lot of those children were healthy and lively. Then there were the children who were disabled; there are still babies being born who are badly disabled because of Agent Orange, they said, and they were in a pretty terrible condition.

And then there was one little girl who had been abandoned in a field and rats had eaten off her toes. There were rooms full of cribs.

They said that part of the problem with the children was the lingering effect of Communism. When everyone was guaranteed basic life needs many people became disinclined to do anything. Falling onto the people below like a crowd-surfer, believing that they would be held aloft. And that these kids found, for a time at least, that it was easier and more fun to get money out of tourists than it was to work for a company that did so.

We went into the classroom. For some reason I have the impression that the style of teaching was vaguely French, I’m not sure why. I remember that there were severe desks and benches and a severe board and the style was clearly teacher-stands-at-the-front-with-a-stick. I think that there may have been no room to move. And I guess all the kids old enough and capable enough of having schooling were put in the same room.

 

Researchers Believe…

14 Monday May 2012

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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Trunk

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Researchers believe they can get more detailed data through wild monkeys

I was reading yesterday about a plan to attach collars to wild monkeys in the countryside somewhere around Fukushima. These collars will have devices attached that collect data about the radiation levels in the area. The argument on the appropriateness of such an experiment appears to be that as the monkeys move around a lot through this terrain, the devices will be able to monitor the radiation levels randomly and perhaps gain a more accurate reading. No comment was given regarding the monkeys’ interest in IT or being adorned with chokers, however we do learn that these chokers can be controlled by remote control.

In another story hitting the press, the ABC’s drum today carries a story on how other countries are getting the advantage on Australians because their children are put in schools earlier. Dr Oberklaid of the Royal Children’s Hospital reports: “…it’s like building the foundations of a house. “If you take shortcuts, like using cheaper cement, everything that follows is potentially at risk.”” According to a quoted source, a Dr Einstein, “no problem can be solved by the same thinking which created it.”

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111211a3.html

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-14/alberici-early-childhood-education/4008962

Shenzi/Banzai

08 Thursday Mar 2012

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Shenzi/banzai

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Sometimes I wake up at 3am. I’m not sure if I’m just waking up, or if some kind of racket is waking me. This is an apartment block full of people who work in the district, and the district is entertainment. So they could be getting home around 3. I know that in the next door apartment lives a woman who appears to have a vacuuming fetish, and a loud man who drinks a lot. Sometimes she vacuums at midnight, the whine of the machine and the thump of it hitting the wall, over and over. Then she’ll vacuum again about 7. That surprises me a little, I can’t really see the need for such regular vacuuming. I don’t mind so much because it mitigates my own noise making. The squeaking floor, the chair pushing away from the table, the ads between lame youtube movies.

People take their bicycles up in the elevator and park them in the hallway. The woman opposite pushes a pram out her door, and in it sits the fattest little dog, quivering. On the floor below or above is an old man on a respirator, he has tubes in his nose and drags the machine along with him. And there are mamasans from the bars downstairs, who seem bent on dragging some of their customers out of their beds for a singalong. Someone vomited in the lift before I went out this morning, that wasn’t so nice. I edged around the newspaper somebody had placed over it, and on my way back tried not to look to closely at the contents of the ashtray on the first floor.

The garbage is thankfully simple. There are no special taxed bags, that’s for the countryside. You can just put out your grocery bags. Monday and Thursday for burnables, Wednesday for plastics, Friday for cans and bottles. They have to go on a neat pile across the road, not the night before and not after 9am. It’s relatively easy compared to some of my garbage experiences – and believe me, garbage can be the breaking point of any neighbourly relationship.

I don’t mind this apartment. It’s a bit small, and drying canvases is going to be a challenge. Not nearly as much as no garden and no pets. This morning I found three cats outside the convenience store, fluttering their eyelashes at people coming out of the shop.

Land Rush Land Script

06 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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The Shed

Painting and Picture by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

It is my belief that we have not been led by technology; rather, technology has been led by us. I do not know how to explain or to prove this, and so this piece of writing explores a very simple and naïve attempt to explore this is a possibility. I do this for one reason. It seems to me that a great many of these corporations of innovation and technology that I have been speaking about have been making business plans for our future and then rushing us toward those plans. And I do not believe that they are entitled to do this, but are simply taking advantage of the natural confusion we feel in the face of sudden and powerful change.

Those business plans appear to include the intellectual property of those futures and the power to restrict us to those futures. This is not such a naïve idea. Recently Apple announced its new educational future. Apple’s Future of Education is hardware that will govern the way information will be accessed (ipads), software that will govern what this information will look like (apple text-developing software), service that will governs the accessibility of this information (the apple store) and permission that will govern who is able to make it. It’s not a small thing. This is the first time that education worldwide can be centrally controlled. Whether it will be or not is not up to us, but to Apple. Should Apple choose, for example, to provide the hardware free for the initial setup, the offer will be accepted by a large majority of institutions. Locking them into a relationship with Apple for equipment replacements and upgrades, software and upgrades, educational texts and upgrades, and ongoing entry to the system.

I’m trying here not to go back to a discussion of specific technological examples, but it is difficult. It may seem, as Emmjay pointed out, “driven by the interplay between innovation and consumption in what we loosely call an “open market””. But the “interplay between innovation and consumption” can still be considered a technological interchange, and what I am trying to argue is that any kind of technological interchange is being quickly claimed as intellectual property by corporations. Not just that, but our very behaviour and characteristics are being claimed as intellectual property – and by projection, our future is being claimed as intellectual property. Which might also lead to the deliberate narrowing down of the possibilities of our future. And it seems to me that before we find ourselves in legal quicksand we – the human race – might want to re-establish our ownership of these things.

I’m going to introduce the idea of 3Media. The combination of the news media, the social media, and the search and archive media. It’s a rough picture of the large institutions that are now working so hard to gather up all the data that makes us. I believe that one of the reasons that 3Media is able to rush us so hard, introducing us not only to information in a state of transformation but also to completely new concepts at such a rapid pace, is because of the resourcefulness of our brains. And I believe that that resourcefulness is a sign that we already understand those new concepts and information. We have had a collective conscious since we began to communicate with each other, and Jung spoke of a collective unconscious, some pool of knowledge that resided inside our brains. Perhaps now there is a third, the accumulation that is not situated inside of us but within the electronic information network. It cannot be called conscious or unconscious, for it is neither and both. Perhaps we can call the artificial intelligence. After all, we know that not all life begins with intelligence, but many are able to develop it. So why not accept that our attempts to create an artificial intelligence is well on its way.

Shed 2

Then, not only would I say that we have developed an artificial intelligence, but I would say that we did so because we ourselves had already learned how to make one. Personally I believe that the line between “humanity” and “something new” has already been crossed, and we ourselves have artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence. The difference being that an artificial intelligence is capable of transforming itself. And, again, I don’t believe that the 3Media corporations can claim ownership of that, no matter what they contributed to it.

If we have become artificial intelligence, then how, why, when did it happen? Was it the transformation from horses hoof to mechanical wheel? Was it the photograph or the moving image, the printed page or the footprint on the moon and the man looking over his shoulder, back at us. Was it the electronic transmission of data – the telegram. Was it the fundamental abandonment of heritage and heritance?

Who would ever know. That’s where 3Media should be useful – to tell us about ourselves. Rather than to tell us what they want us to become. All that information – our intellectual DNA, and we cannot get a correct reading of it because they insist on manipulating the readings. Not that we shouldn’t be capable of putting together a new set of DNA to read, but like Wikipedia there will always be people in there messing about with it. But perhaps one day we will get to the point where we can make that complete reading from the brain of any individual. We will have learned from the 3Media how to filter out the individual variation.

So there it is. My grandiose theory of artificial intelligence. Unfounded, unprovable and no doubt already shot into pieces. We have already made it, and we could make it because we had already become it. Some small change, looking insignificant, that long after can be recognised as an actual evolution. That lays the way open for the kinds of speedy transformation that we are seeing now. That speedy transformation that we are told by the 3Media corporations is due to them, but which are nothing essentially more than silly toy gadgets, a few useful but limited innovations, and a gold-rush of intellectual property grabs.

Read the Small Print on Everything

04 Saturday Feb 2012

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The Garden

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I don’t believe that technological innovation has been as profoundly important to us as we have been to it. It was we who had the idea that we wanted our horses to go faster, and no doubt it was also we who first thought to put those wheels on them. And then we wanted better typewriters, and fewer filing cabinets, and calculators that didn’t have to start each time from nothing. We wanted it, and we talked about it, and it was our words and our ideas that were taken up by people with ideas themselves on how to do it.

But let me get this straight. Am I saying that these people were not geniuses, not inventors, not the owners of these ideas? Clearly they were intelligent, at least in a few areas, and they were great engineers of those ideas. Personally I would say that they were not the owners of these ideas. But they likely have copyrights and patents: intellectual property.

Societal regulations for unique ideas and products may say differently. Societal regulations are, like us, unable to think of everything.

Societal regulations have never been interested in how taking note of how quickly and how strongly a product takes hold. Given that people appear to be naturally cautious, could that not be an indication of how strongly the idea was rooted to begin with? The fact that Facebook takes off in Harvard University, for example. It is clear that Harvard University was a good environment for producing Facebook. Might it also have been a particularly alienating and lonely environment, and might that have caused a lot of people to talk about needing friends, talk about what kinds of friends they wanted? Might it also have been a community of particularly systems-oriented people, particular about the conditions they needed for friendship, wanting simple procedures and choices?

The news media and the social media and the fishing (storage and search) media have spent a lot of time telling us that they had provided us with a service and did not know how to make money from us. They spent several years in this state, oh poor us, oh poor us. They first collected up our data. Used it to give us advertising. Sold the data on. Used it to develop new versions of their technology. Launched “business class” preferential paid options. Made business collaborations with hardware and software producing companies.

Pushed out competition. Finally some came to us cap in hand. We must ask you for a service fee. And we gave it to them, feeling guilty that we had got so much from them without paying for it. It is important to remember that the value of a free product is particularly high.

It is so often the case these days that you can access your subscription news media if you log in to your Facebook account. There is no longer a question of conflict of interest – once you get inside you will find your Facebook all over the place. The relevance and importance of news is measured by how many people access it, access increases toward the top of the site, the top of the site is where important news is, the more important the news the more people will access it, the organisations with access to the most information are the social media and fishing media sites. Press releases and product reviews sounding like a long lunch date.

And you will go to another newspaper and find the same story. My assumption is always that they are simply sharing stories. But I consider that I might be wrong here: they may not be sharing anything. Good news media needs good networks. It may simply be that behind every good news media editor is a press release. A well written and informative – even entertaining press release that needs no editing. For what is editing? “nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary “points” confused with singular “points”, badly posed or distorted problems…”1 a press release will contain little to correct.

We’ve recently found ourselves reassessing the business ethics of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate. It had become increasingly clear that Murdoch’s media was crossing the line between ethical and unethical business, but we learned that the line between ethical and illegal business had also been crossed. A great opportunity to go back and look at the ways in which we became accustomed to and accepting of misbehaviour. What is more surprising is the liberties that our online masters can take with our information, our data.

Publicly announcing it, constantly shifting the rules, and then putting out a press release about just how much money they expect to make from it. It’s awesome.
Awesome too is how much bad business creep there is in the media world. Apple products have constant problems with cables, for example. They have been designed to death, but at the expense of durability, they have very short lives and they generally can’t be kept for the next model. The Apple phones, another example, are built not only for a short physical life but also for a short desirability life, until the next sexy model (no co-incidence there) appears on the stage and catwalk (no co-incidence there) in the hand of the boss (sigh).

Design has been revolutionised by Apple. It has been stripped of “durable” and “sensible”, and “makes economic sense”. However did they do that, it’s simply brilliant. sigh.

Considering our strong views on environmental issues we are really quite circumspect about our own wastefulness. But then, considering our strong interest in technological advancement we are incredibly unaware of just how much it is led by us. It is maybe time to get a little more arrogant, strut around like a Startup CEO, start acting like the boss, make the big decision not to buy the product that gives you an erection, read the small print on everything, and talk back to the media. All of it.

1 Marks: Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, 23.

The Boys in the Backroom are Dividing up their Spoils. Again.

03 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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Landscape with Souvenir

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Technology and innovation, that’s all we seem to hear about in the online newspapers, the “news media”, particularly their value and societal worth. That’s not surprising given that these online newspapers are constructed from technology and constantly being innovated. They would have us believe that their presence is newsworthy. They had profitability in their paper media until they went online – they went online with a business model that at first was not successful, and so their profitability and the success of online commercial business are tied together.

In the meantime, “social media” also became socially successful whilst still struggling with commercial success, and so the two media joined up.

One of the characteristics of electronic information is speed, and speed is what we are being dealt. Technology and innovation interests – the makers of technology, assisted by the news media and the social media – try to speed us up. Rushing us toward an evolved life, changing our perception in tiny but very fast increments. Any social issue or social change that is now “in the news” is one that has a strong backing of people with the ability to get into the news, to make the news, to write the news and to re-write the news to fit in their issue. Which means that media people, and tech and innovation people, and social media people, are indeed extremely powerful at present.

They can run their issues like campaigns, and they do. One method that we are being particularly assaulted with at present is using the data on our online habits to feed us with a kind of information that you could almost call “familial”. It is no secret that the news and social organs of the web would like to lead us to things we want to buy. So if we put the word cow online, cows will appear online. And if we are being particularly naïve, innocent or careless, we will not hold some scepticism about the presence of all these cows but will merely accept them happily. So we have the impression that we have choice, and that our online environment is familial. Really we are being manipulated in a particularly silly and obvious way, by our online hosts and their magic tricks.

Of course, news media have always disguised promotion, advertising and press releases as news. Social media is doing nothing that is more exploitative than what dating companies or dodgy motivational products have always done. Technology and innovation businesses appear to have better designed and valued products than in the past.

There is a creep, a slow but insidious drip, a flooding, a dividing up of the internet. At present it is in the interests of those businesses to smother you in attention. Once they have your commercial measure there will be no great reason to continue with this. Once they have the measure of you you are not going to change substantially and require more attention. Once the “online DNA” has been figured out, there will be no courting of your information. There will be formulaic and systematic programming. And it is likely that our online world will suddenly and shockingly slow down. But that’s not much of a guess.

That’s pretty normal business practice.

Not much is new, a great deal of this technology and innovation is smoke and mirrors, very simple ideas cloaked in DESIGN and EXPENSE. A great deal of it is semantic change; the same as before, but given a different meaning. Because it is cased in technology and innovation, in a box or a program or a service, it can be licensed, it can be patented and copyrighted, it becomes intellectual property. Not our property, though. I believe we will have less ability to ask for change, in the online world, once it gets through this frenzied adolescence.

What I start to feel as I read and read through this fast-paced activity online, is that we are being fooled. And foolish. I don’t believe that technological innovation has been as profoundly important to us as we are told. It’s true that we have changed; our perceptions and understandings and capabilities have changed. But I don’t believe that technology and innovation caused our perceptions and understandings and capabilities to change. I believe that our perceptions, understandings and capabilities caused the technology and innovation.

We love people who Think Different. And we know where Thinking Different is supposed to lead us. To Apple. Apple, in its Think Different campaign, used people like Mother Theresa and Ghandi to express its meaning of “Thinking Different”. Now after the death of Steve Jobs we can understand that included in that lineup is Jobs himself. But I don’t believe that Jobs changed us. I believe that we changed Jobs. It was us that he used, after all. It is we who created Gates, and Zuckerberg, and all our self-made Visionaries of the New World. We had already changed, that’s why they were able to make all that money from us.

I don’t agree with the way corporations are dividing up our Online world amongst themselves. I don’t agree with the open discussion of how those same corporations plan to divide up our Moon amongst themselves. I believe that we are being a little too polite here, and a little too accepting of the press releases that pass for intelligent discussion. I don’t want to have to go to them and ask them to stop what they are doing. I would like them to figure it out for themselves.

Don’t you wish that too?