Going off-topic

I had a primary school teacher named Mr Farebrother. He was also a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Mr Farebrother used to rattle on to us in class in a sort of stream of consciousness. He would famously go off-topic, constantly linking one thing to another, before he would stop and say, “Wait, what is it we are meant to be talking about, we’ve gone off-topic again.”

I loved that term. Off-topic. Offtopic. The guilty way he would say it. It sounded like a rare tropical disease that had suddenly broken out all over our skin. We would need to be rushed to the school nurse because we had suddenly gone offtopic.

As a 10-year-old I marveled at Mr Farebrother’s ability to go off-topic. He would wave his hands about like some sort of sorcerer conjuring up invisible chains that could link one thing to the next. We would start talking about mosquito larvae and end up talking about the dark side of the moon, yet it never felt we had jumped from one topic to the next, it was a smooth and seamless meander across the world of knowledge.

Off-topic is where I wanted to go. On-topic always felt like we were standing still. Stagnant. I wanted to wander out of the stuffy confines of the classroom into the buzzing laneways of the off-topic metropolis.

But I wasn’t allowed out. Off-topic wasn’t learning. Off-topic was wasting time. As I entered high school, I was coached into keeping on-topic in my examination essays. My essays would return with large blocks of text crossed out with red pen, sometimes accompanied with an ‘irrelevant’ scrawled next to the offending paragraphs, but more often than not, just a simple question mark. A question mark that queried why 19th century poetry was relevant to the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The switchboard operator

At art school I had a little more freedom, off-topic was even encouraged. My theory lecturer John Conomos would often say to us that as artists and thinkers of the 21st century, we needed to act as switchboard operators, taking up one idea and connecting to another idea across the other side of the board.

In his essay ‘The Moving Image and the Academy’ that was included in the catalogue to an exhibition I was featured in,’Who Do We think You Are’, Conomos elaborated on his imagery of the switchboard operator. Conomos says that a ‘mercurial interdisciplinary approach’ needs to be undertaken that resembles ‘Michel Serre’s multi-faceted comparativism that is based on the zig-zag pattern… Read more

Ask any journalist what the most important section of text in a news story is and they will tell you it is ‘the lead’. Following the inverted pyramid style of news writing, the lead signposts almost all the information that will follow and allows the old-school reader to quickly scan the newspaper and decide whether to continue reading any particular article. As the old-school reader scans the newspaper, jumping between various headlines and leads, his eyes hover past advertisements, and the advertised products can successfully catch the attention of this old-school reader and consumer. The consumer then pays for a product, the product pays the newspaper and the newspaper pays the journalist.This is why news has financial value.

As the new-school reader scans Google News, jumping between various headlines and leads, his eyes could also hover past advertisements and these products can successfully attract the attention of the new-school consumer. The consumer then pays for a product, the product pays Google and somebody else can somehow pay the journalist. This is in a nutshell why newspapers are going broke despite more people reading the news than ever before. Newspapers no longer control the distribution of news content, Google does. Google might not advertise on Google News yet, and Google insists it isn’t violating any copyright, but the company seems to overlook the innate purpose of copyright. Copyright exists to provide a financial incentive for the creation of original content. Google News uses original news content created by journalists but does not provide any financial incentive for its creation. Google News generates an incredible income from that all-important lead the journalist composed, just as the newspapers of yesteryear did, but Google doesn’t pay anyone for it.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, recently spoke to a United States Senate hearing that was investigating ways the government could aid the failing newspaper industry. Mayer explained how Google News acted as a sort of conduit that channeled web traffic to the newspaper sites:

Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that web traffic to increase their traffic and generate additional revenue.

Google functions similarly to newspapers in that it channels information to end-users. The information that Google channels are the links or ‘directions’ to the… Read more

Not too long ago I was teasing Simon Reynolds for taking out his iPhone and updating his facebook status when we met for a brief coffee.

‘Do you really think your friends care which cafe you’re having coffee at?’ I asked
‘Yeh, I’d love to know where all my friends were now and what they were doing,’ he replied.

I originally laughed off Simon’s urge to be constantly connected but as I began to start playing with my own iPhone and its various networking apps I began to see the value in these tools and in particular Brightkite. By logging into a location, posting notes and photos at that location, Brighkite will begin to build up a database of micro reviews that people can consider before drinking, dancing, or dining at that location.

It will completely alter the urban environment and each cafe, restaurant, bar, club, shop or university will have the equivalent of a public notice board plastered on the door. On this notice board there will be comments like ‘the DJ here needs to stop listening to the top 40’ or ‘the coffee was served too cold’ or ‘the corn fritters here are incredible’. It will be the equivalent of reviews at the bottom of amazon book listings, user generated rating thats will ultimately affect the success or failure of a location.

I look forward to this near future where I won’t have too much trouble trying to decide which place to eat noodles at in Chinatown.

‘Future art criticism will be structured by the measuring of the various phases of ugliness as it grows habitual: it will measure exactly how one gets accustomed to ugliness, how the new grows old.’ – Vilem Flusser

It happened by accident. I moved into a new studio and paranoid about security I set up a motion sensor webcam. Each day I arrived in the studio I would review the photographs that it had taken. There were no images of balaclava clad prowlers, only photographs of myself, entering and exiting the studio. I turned off the camera when I arrived and turned it on again when I left. The repetitive images of me opening and closing the door became bookends to that moment of time in the studio. A moment of time where I made art.

I began a blog documenting my entrances and exits entitled ‘Comings and Goings’. The repetitive documentation inverted the actual art object in time and space. The photographs of my entrances were titled ‘Andrew Newman enters the studio for purpose of making art’ and my exits were titled ‘Andrew Newman exits his studio having made art.’ The inversion of the artwork through the framing of its production encouraged the imagination of the artwork itself. Drawing parallels with Heidegger’s definition of ‘the thing’
these photographic bookends of moments of time illustrate that an artwork can exist not through the material in which it is formed but rather by the emptiness that is shaped through the documentation of its production. This imagination of the void is possible through repeats in photography as opposed to the repetitive image of video or film because by its nature photography misses moments of time. These missing moments extend the imaginary space, allowing the viewer to participate in the production of the image. As Godard said, ‘A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end.. but not necessarily in that order.’ The documentation in ‘Coming and Goings’ presents only the beginning and then the end, compelling the viewer to engage with the work and imagine the middle of the story.

The habitual repetition of the action of entering and leaving the studio also present a persistent passing of time not dissimilar from Beckett’s play ‘Come and Go.” The measuring of moments of time provokes boredom as attention is drawn to the passing of time and the new becomes old. Repetitive photography that records a daily habit invokes a narrative with no end. ‘Coming and Goings’ thus presents an experience that calls for the imagination of a middle while because of its repetitive nature also incites an absurd experience of no end.

Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, ‘Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.’ I myself use two d’s, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occured to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod – that is, almost death – and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.

John Barth’s The Floating Opera is a novel about ‘almost-death’ or more succinctly ‘life’. Todd Andrews is a young solicitor who suffers a condition of the heart where every beat could be his last. He adapts various systems of living to cope with this condition. The first being life as a rake in college where ‘the goal was to drink the most whisky, fornicate the most girls, get the least sleep, and make the highest grades’.

Todd Andrew’s fast living soon fizzled out on a brothel floor with a swollen prostate and a broken glass bottle embedded in his leg. He countered that system of living with life as a saint. This involved sitting on window sills, sunk in shadows, speaking very little. Life as a saint succeeded for Todd Andrews until his best friend loaned him his wife after a nice day of sailing. The next system of living was life as a cynic. Cynicism survived until the morning of June 21st (or 22nd) when Todd Andrews despaired.

The conclusion that swallowed me was this: There is no way to master the fact with which I live. Futility gripped me by the throat; my head was tight. The impulse to raise my arms and eyes to heaven was almost overpowering – but there was no one for me to raise them to. All I could do was clench my jaw, squint my arms, and shake my head from side to side. But every motion pierced me with its own futility, every new feeling with its private hopelessness, until a battery of little agonies attacked from all sides, each drawing its strength from the great agony within me.

The novel is soaked in Sixties nihilism yet Todd Andrews’ calculated and measured manner of living resembles the very systematic and applied ‘life guides’ featured in the Noughties phenomena of life hacking.

John Barth was only 24 when he wrote The Floating Opera. The novel involves that existential search for the solution to living that is prevalent in the early novels of writers… Read more