Edward Burtynsky's large-scale colour photographs, which are taken with large format field cameras, explore the way that nature has been transformed through industrial work and manufacturing--eg., railway cutting, mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles and the oil industry.

Burtynsky's toxic sublime work lacks the raw anger and the muckraking impulse of the documentary photographer, as it recognises a strange beauty in the destruction of nature. It has its roots in the Romantics' realization that the coming industrial revolution threatened a pristine nature.

The early landscape work in the 1980s has largely been forgotten. It is comprised of modest studies of pristine landscapes in Canada and the United States and it lead to a desire to probe much deeper, into the nature and visual result of impact of human beings on the planet.

In a recent post on if: book, the blog of The Institute for the Future of the Book, Bob Stein looks at what will replace the book in the futurist digital landscape. He refers to the flattening of all media types and experiences into varieties of apps:

I started to think about the iPad that I'd been using for the past six weeks -- not only for most of my reading, but for playing expressive games like my current favorite, SoundDrop, answering email, surfing the web, watching videos, and listening to music. The iPad has become the center of my media universe, much more than my computer, iPod, or iPhone have ever been. My text used to come in an object we called a book; movies came on tapes, laserdisc, and DVDs, music on records and CDs and games on cartridges and CDs. Now they are all appearing as apps of one sort or another on my iPad.

Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin Wilson is reinterpreting witty romantic songs from one of the masters of The Great American Songbook.

One track is "I've Got Rhythm" that becomes a rockabilly tune:

What is interesting are the two Wilson/Gershwin “co-writes”, based around a clutch of George G’s unfinished songs. “The Like In I Love You” and the intriguing “Nothing But Love”.

Are we shifting from the “front end” of browser-centric computing to the “back end” of apps, closed networks and proprietary connections between massive data servers and specialized clients--from open to closed digital network systems?

In The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet at Wired Magazine Chris Anderson argues that we are:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web.

The Pirate Bay is dead. And MiniNova has gone legal. Things are changing in the world of public BitTorrent trackers-- the millions of people who populated the large peer-to-peer file-sharing programs a few years ago is history.

In this excellent article on bit torrent sites at Gizmodo Adam Frucci explores the network of meticulously-built private BitTorrent sites. These have arisen in response to it getter harder to pirate media now than it was a few years ago, thanks to the efforts of copyright holders. Instead of millions in the public BitTorrent trackers we have a hundred thousand or so in the private BitTorrent sites.

Politics in liberal democracies with a neo-liberal mode of governance has become a manufactured reality that is little different from a reality TV show. Politics is now constructed as a mode of entertainment in which the political slogan is the substance, just as in corporate advertising.

How can this manufactured world of spin and glossy appearances be transgressed? Through taboo and transgression, such as violence in the form of sacrifice and the sexualized body. For Bataille transgression is a desire created by taboo itself, where taboo is understood as a system of rules and conventions designed to maintain order in society. Taboos also provide a space for transgression in the form of a disruptive force to develop.

Thus the body for Bataille as being opposed to the normative constraints that serve to constitute subjectivity within social formations. According to to this account of Bataille's work:

The body thereby resists absorption by social forces. For example, in the modern era, which is dominated by the capitalist mode of production and hence by the values of prudence and usefulness, the body serves as a reminder of the limitations of the notion of exchange‑value. The body cannot be recuperated within the logic of the market place, since bodily functions do not accord with dominant notions of exchange and profit. The body, rather, is prodigal: its basic constitution is determined by way of an alternative logic of excess

Victor Burgin's Hôtel D (2009) is a site-specific piece consisting of a digital projection loop inside a box installed in a principle room of the ancient former pilgrims' hospital, Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques, in Toulouse.

Hôtel D comprises four components: the two actual spaces in the Hôtel-Dieu, an image-track and a soundtrack. The image sequence assembled from the photographs Burgin made in the Salle des Pèlerins is projected in a continuous loop in a "viewing box" constructed inside the Salle itself. The room represented in the box is therefore a mise-en-abyme of the room that contains the box.

Burgin says that the material images projected in the Hôtel-Dieu, and the material sound of the voix-off in the adjoining chapel, were combined in an attempt to represent the strictly unrepresentable.

The pictorial turn is a shift from word to images and represents the way that there is an engagement with the visual in politics and mass culture and the visual media. We are not dealing with just pictures in this turn.

The picture is the material object--what we hang on a wall, whilst the image is what appears in the picture and what survives its destruction. Thus there are many pictures of Winston Churchill that contain Churchill image of the political hero or bulldog who saved England in WW2.

Images are not natural---in the sense of being a mirror or an unmediated copy of what they represent. Though there is indeed a likeness, images are conventional---just like the meaning of words---and we have to learn to read them. Since there is no intrinsic relation between the sign and its meaning, so there has to be a convention determining what the meaning of the sign is apart from its likeness.