Thursday, April 29, 2010

legally mandated visual representations of your insides

According to some new legislation that has just been enacted in Oklahoma, before a woman has an abortion within the state limits, she is obligated by law to have an ultrasound and listen to a doctor give her a description of the fetus inside of her. The massive implication of this to me is how much power and influence images and visual representation are assumed to have on the general public, and how a bible belt government would use this assumption to legally mandate an all out visual-audio assault on women to deter a medical procedure that is in itself, perfectly legal. If a woman closes her eyes and covers her ears during the ultrasound screening and verbal description given by her doctor, is the abortion still legal? Or are they going to put in place some Clockwork Orange headgear, blocking the women from closing their eyes while they stare at the visual representation of the organism moving around inside them? And what about a blind and deaf mother, do they just slip through some loophole, or will they still be forced to have an audio description of a visual representation of their fetus translated to them in morse code taps on their skin? That is such a wild concept, that the state passed a law which makes it mandatory for women to view visual representations of inside their bodies, and listen to another person give an oral description about their insides as well.

This could be an interesting trend, though, if the same type of legally mandated viewing of visual representations is applied to other areas of law. Maybe before a bank forecloses on a house and evicts its occupants, the bank worker who would sign the official paperwork could be legally obligated to sit and watch a screening of the family's home video archive or photo album and hear stories about their lives before that bank employee could legally ask them to leave their home.

Or before a soldier is sent into a combat zone, there has to be a photo or video reconaissance mission, afterwhich the soldiers will view visual and audio footage of a sample of the civilians living in that area, and hear stories about their day to day lives.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

365 with a vein of gold

new mix:

365 with a vein of gold

get it here

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

literate visual fragmented freedom

Perhaps the quote of the month (at first it read to me like an indecipherable mis-translation from an online translator):

"Eating people is wrong. Even grafting people into the ulcer of a big corporation seems wrong to anybody brought up in a literate visual fragmented freedom." --Marshall McLuhan

Friday, April 9, 2010

The truth of a place

I've been reading this autobiography of Prince Modupe a little bit recently. He was this West African, born into a tribe, and then ended up crossing an ocean and landing in America. He writes about his experience and the the polarities between vastly disparate modes of thought and perception he encountered. The part that really got me was when he was describing how his father (still leading the tribal life) felt about maps and what they represented:

"Maps are liars, he told me briefly. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it."