A most amazing art exhibition

When I was in high school I was amazed to read of the work by an Australian performance artist called Stelarc, who is famous for a number of things. In the 1970s Stelarc suspended his naked body off the ground by metal hooks piercing his body tied to ropes, hoisting his body off the ground for the duration of the performance.

Around the same time I heard of an American performance artist called Chris Burden who had a friend use a rifle to shoot him in the arm. I made a silkscreen print of the photo of this 'work'.

I could never imagine myself doing these kind of extreme acts in the name of art, so it fascinated me about how these guys could do so.

Until 30 June Stelarc has an exhibition of recent works at Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation. Well worth a visit if you want to challenge yourself about 'what is art.'

One of Stelarc's most recent project was to insert a 'surgically constructed left ear' into his left arm. There is a short video documenting the process - not for the squimish.

Why? you might ask? Indeed. Art is a funny business, but Stelarc is one of the best at what he does.

Shortening the collective attention span?

My good friend Fang is right up there with all the latest and greatest technology inventions. If it's about to come-out in the Mac or PC world the Fang will already know about it and have about 6 different ways of using it.

He introduced me to Twitter. I don't consider myself a Luddite. I used to work in the PC world and started in a technical capacity before moving to sales and sales management, but I'm not definitely not a cutting-edge technology person. Now I'm just a PC user.

Remember when older friends of your parents would talk about their experience in computing - probably before you were born! 'Ah yes, I used to code in assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP and did some in APL and C. BASIC, nah, Business BASIC was more like it. But anyone could write in BASIC!' And you'd think they were like so, I don't know, who cares!

My technology claim to fame was being the network guru back in the introductory days of Novell Netware, JANET ('Just Another Network'), 3COM's network product (now what was it called), then learning to program in Z-80 machine code (while waiting for a BASIC interpreter, or even an assembler) for the Dick Smith kit computer , some 6502 assembler, smidgens of BASIC, and in C I got as far as being able to write, compile and run the 'Hello World' code, but that was about it.

Oops, I'm rambling, something of a right for aging folks... Probably lost most of you after the first paragraph...

Fang told me about Twitter. It's apparently the bees knees and a easy way to keep in touch with fellow twitterers by sending 'tweats' from a mobile phone, computer, or who knows what else. You basically get a real-time one or two line 'post' from the creator to whoever is in your Twitter group. Some immediate Twitter posts from the Twitter home page were:

1) Talking to Russ on the phone, while talking to Russ over the computer
2) Playing Rayman Raving Rabbids (Story Mode)
3) What'd I finish from today's to do list? One item and two others from left field. Doh.
3) trying out some new stuff in the HD DVD player for the September issue...already got reader letters and LiveSpace done! Bring on the weekend
4) 裸神ハトーコ（誰　それにしてもすごい空耳でしたヽ(´Д｀)
5) 72.44.54.138: Starting job sliceJob:fef53d3a-1616-11dc-9336-00a0d1e284a9, group group:89b30226-1615-11dc-bd00-00a0d1e284a9 (domU-12-31-37-00
6) Found a jumper that says "normal 1-2" "clear CMOS 2-3". Do I have to power it on in the "clear CMOS" setting?
7) Eddie Jun Yip Lee is George's father. Eddie's son is begging to grow facial hair, like father like son.
8) I'm so pescando here. Lol!

I don't know, what am I missing here? I think the one post I did on Twitter said 'just farted' or something equally pointless.

Fang said that he gets so much email these days that he may not actually read it - it can sit in his inbox for ages before he'll do a batch read/respond/delete of it. 'I don't have time to read email,' he may or may not have told me.

Then our eldest child tells me that the friends parties that she visits on a weekend night are usually 'boring' because people get there and very shortly after they get there if it isn't interesting they jump in their cars and head off to the next party which they hope is interesting. I'm thinking, that the interest level of a party would be the result of what the people there are putting into/bringing to it. And if they chuff-off within minutes of arriving how will it ever get interesting?

So what I'm (slowly) getting to is wondering if we are seeing a learned general reduction of the collective attention span resulting from new technoloies and easy mobility?

Low down scoundrals

I was talking with a fellow artist and her car had been broken-into overnight. The only thing that was stolen from the car was her disabled parking permit. When she reported it stolen she learned that it is a fairly common occurrence.

What kind of a person breaks into a car to steal a disabled parking permit? If there was a hierarchy of crimes that would be pretty low on the scale. How can people do that? It amazes me.