Montreal in 2009 – I’m still fascinated by the idea of airports as heterotopias of waiting and transience.

An oldie but goodie from the days when George W Bush was still president. Somewhere in central Minneapolis, there was an enormous sculpture/installation of sorts depicting all of the evils of the administration. Nothing says political protest piece like baby heads and astroturf.

Powerful people often act at will, even if the resulting behavior is inappropriate—hence the famous proverb ‘‘power corrupts.’’ Here, we introduce the reverse phenomenon—violating norms signals power. Violating a norm implies that one has the power to act according to one’s own volition in spite of situational constraints, which fuels perceptions of power. Four studies support this hypothesis. Individuals who took coffee from another person’s can (Study 1), violated rules of bookkeeping (Study 2), dropped cigarette ashes on the floor (Study 3), or put their feet on the table (Study 4) were perceived as more powerful than individuals who did not show such behaviors. The effect was mediated by inferences of volitional capacity, and it replicated across different methods (scenario, film clip, face-to-face interaction), different norm violations, and different indices of power (explicit measures, expected emotions, and approach/inhibition tendencies). Implications for power, morality, and social hierarchy are discussed.

Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power: How Norm Violators Gain Power in the Eyes of Others
Gerben A. Van Kleef, Astrid C. Homan, Catrin Finkenauer, Seval Gu ̈ndemir, and Eftychia http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/01/20/1948550611398416.full.pdf+html

My Current Notebook

Something really amazing happened to me today. I was headed to the Northern Lights Tea Shop (link) when I was stopped by three people attending a conference about using technology to organize information, notes, etc… I couldn’t resist when they inquired if they could ask me a couple of questions about the ways that I organize information and make lists in my life. Really, how could I? This is something I obsess about; something that kicks into high gear all the archivist tendencies I try to suppress throughout the day. I am obsessive-compulsive when it comes to organizing data and it often takes all my strength not to completely reorganize the database I manage at work.

First, they wanted to know what apps and programs I used on a daily basis to take notes, make lists, and organize my thoughts. They were taken back (and maybe peed a little) by my response of “a notebook”. I felt I had to clarify, as if I was using word no one knew, so I followed that up with, “you know, like with a pen”. I could tell that they were a little mystified by someone that doesn’t use an iPhone synced to some cloud based service to manage ideas.

“So, what happens if you forget your notebook!?!” inquired one of the members of this motley info-app possé. My response must have seemed utterly mystifying: “I use my short-term memory”.  “How long would say you’ve been using this notebook, pen and memory system?” My reply since: “…since I was about 10 years old. Its a really good system, never crashes, requires updates or makes me feel like an asshole when I’m on the bus.”

However, it was the final question that really struck a chord with me. I was asked, “What if you DID use an app to make all your lists, how would you feel if you had an app on your phone that told you that you were out of toothpaste every time you walked by a Walgreens?” My response: “I would feel utterly violated. It would clearly be an overreach of late capitalist society if everywhere I went there was a reminder to buy.”

And, really, that is just it. I would feel violated if my moments of passing through public space were interrupted by the nagging reminders to purchase consumables. “So what if I’m out of toothpaste?” I asked. “That just means I’m fucking out of toothpaste.”

My question for the evening, what is the value of having a record of EVERYTHING? Every idea, every action, every movement, every item eaten, every transaction, every… everything. Are we truly better if we never forget? I ask this, because I truly believe that forgetting certain events in the course of one’s life is utterly healthy. We have to learn that there are things we can let go of. We have to learn that there are times to switch our brains from recording and analyzing to… experiencing.

After all is said and done, isn’t it our ability to have an experiential appreciation of our life experiences that makes us… human?

"October 18, 1977", Gerhard Richter, 1988 from the series of 15 paintings.

It has been two weeks since Osama bin Laden was killed by US marines in Pakistan. There has been an enormous amount of healthy discussion on blogs and news sites about the importance of seeing images of his body. I’m going to refrain from joining in on this discussion of “seeing is believing” and instead look for a way to analyze the images that have emerged in broader art context.

First off: I do not condone violence and I do not approach the images I have seen of death and carnage as art images. However, when I first came across the photographs of the bodies inside of Osama bin Laden’s hideout, I was immediately struck first by their formal similarities with the “Baader-Meinhof” series of paintings by Gerhard Richter.

Painted in the late 1980s, Richter’s paintings are dreamy and hazy reproductions of mass-media photographs of the bodies of RAF members found in their cells in a Stuttgart prison. Although officially ruled suicides, the deaths of radical terrorists such as Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof elicited sympathy from the German public. In many regards, there is still a sense of unease regarding the deaths in the fall of 1977.

Regarding the paintings, Richter was quoted in 1989, saying:

These pictures possibly give rise to questions of political content or historical truth. Neither interests me in this instance. And although even my motivation for painting them is probably of no significance, I am trying to put a name to it here, as an articulation, parallel to the pictures, as it were, of my disquiet and of my opinion.

I feel that there is a similar sense of disquiet when one looks at the images of the dead from the recent events in Pakistan. Although the exact circumstances of the two terrorist groups are drastically different, I feel a similar feeling of queasiness at the violence that is inherent in the protection and continuation of “peace time” Western society.

The unidentified body of a man is seen after a raid by US Navy Seal commandos on the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. Photo:Reuters

Perhaps most fascinating in all of this violence is the way that our society has grown accustomed to images of death in mainstream visual culture. When Richter set out to paint his series of 15 paintings, he chose to reproduce the images deemed unprintable because of their graphic nature. As you can see above, we are more than willing to look at these types of images and I imagine we will only continue to gain a further appetite for more.