[Rumori] idea to port over to audio domain?

[Bob Boster]

bb> One last swing at this and then back to work....


At 01:50 PM 7/5/2005 -0700, Steev wrote:
>I recently read a book called "Rubbish," by anthropologists that
>excavate landfills to learn about how people live.  They
>discovered that even supposedly biodegradable stuff doesn't
>degrade, in landfills. they found banana peels 50 years old, for
>example.  in fact, things only biodegrade under very
>certain circumstances.  so those garbage bags might make you feel
>better but they and everything in them will be intact long after
>we are wormfood, probably.

bb> Still, a big difference between 50 years and 50,000...my guess is that 
anything designed to biodegrade, however specious the term, is still likely 
to have a shorter half-life than a McDonald's coffee stirrer.

>plus, are these stickers supposed to be biodegradable? i didnt
>see that in the article.

bb> No, but I suggest thinking that through for the ambitious person who 
takes on the audio version...


>it's hard to say how low the impact would be, i think. if i, as a
>wandering, traveller, or whatever, see a yellow arrow sticker at
>every site of note, say in downtown Paris, i would be pretty
>annoyed. i'm already irritated when i travel and see armies of
>other travellers toting the same Lonely Planet guidebook.

bb> Remember, not every site of note, only every site where someone is 
recompiling the extant visual (or in our case audio) elements into artwork 
through OBSERVATION.


>it's an aesthetic thing, then, i guess. by tagging i guess you
>mean grafitti tagging? i like creative and beautiful grafitti,
>but i'm against gang tags and ugly tags.

bb> Freedom fighter/terrorist...


>but perhaps the comparison is not that apt, because on one hand
>we have poor street kids with spray paint and on the other we
>have rich privileged owners of gps/sms-capabable cellphones and
>college degrees.  something about these yellow arrows bothers me
>even more than the sprayed-on symbols announcing "this is my
>gang's turf, members of other gangs, stay away or we'll knife
>you."

bb> I hate to pick nits, but why does one of these groups have any more 
"right" to adjust the physical world than another?  Disenfranchisement is 
not, in itself, a justification for ownership of "the commons" any more 
than being of the owner class.  In fact, more "contamination" of the visual 
space by "non-native" visitors (although frankly, I wonder about the 
"street kids" thing...) is probably another productive Althusserian crack 
in the superstructure, regardless of the class association of the contaminator.