“In My Language” by Amanda Baggs is an explanation of another way of seeing/thinking/being. Amanda is clear: “This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.”

Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me. Ironically, the way I move when responding to everything around me is described as “being in a world of my own” whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am “opening up to true interaction with the world.”

They judge my existence, awareness, and personhood on which of a tiny and limited part of the world I appear to be reacting to. The way I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all but it is a way of thinking in it’s own right.

However the thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language no matter how we previously thought or interacted.

Serpico, the 1973 film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Al Pacino, is based on the true story of the New York City cop who spoke out against police corruption and was shot in the face under dubious circumstances for his trouble.

Frank Serpico is “the first police officer not only in the history of the New York Police Department, but in the history of any police department in the whole United States, to step forward to report and subsequently testify openly about widespread, systematic cop corruption-payoffs amounting to millions of dollars.” — Peter Maas, author of the book Serpico, in the 25th anniversary issue of New York Magazine.

In October, and again in December 1971, Serpico testified before the Knapp Commission on police corruption:

“Through my appearance here today… I hope that police officers in the future will not experience the same frustration and anxiety that I was subjected to for the past five years at the hands of my superiors because of my attempt to report corruption… We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer, and not the other way around… The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which honest police officers can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.”

In our era of continued widespread corruption, we need more Frank Serpicos at all levels of government.

Last night a couple of us from work went to a presentation by Jonathan Harris at the Apple Store in SoHo. Jonathan talked about his interest in creating and finding stories, showing examples of his impressive data mining visualization projects like We Feel Fine, harvesting human feelings from blogs, and Universe , a project built off of Day Life technology to “reveal our modern mythology.” He previewed a piece that is currently up at the MoMa built with Processing, that visualizes information extracted from online dating site profiles, and attempts to find commonalities and connections within that dataset: the most common interests, first lines, closing lines, and potential matches.

While Harris is best known for his elegant visualizations of information from the internet, drawing connections and patterns, he sees more meaning in his recent work like Whale Hunt, and a yet to be completed project based on his 15 day trip to Bhutan. These works differ from his earlier pieces in that he is an active narrator and traveller, photographing, and interviewing his subjects directly while experiencing their environments. As such, this work is inherently more personal, which fits well with his professed egocentric world view.

Harris’s better known pieces, such as We Feel Fine, draw parallels to Learning to Love You More, a project by Harrell Fletcher & Miranda July. LTLYM is an on-going project in which participants submit “reports” completing “assignments” defined by Fletcher & July to the website. Assignments vary from the humorous “#57 Lipsync to shy neighbor’s Garth Brooks cover” to the self-reflective “#52 Write the phone call you wish you could have” and have been exhibited in musuems, galleries, and in print.

As a participatory art project, LTLYM’s character comes from both the constraints of the assignments Fletcher & July define for participants, and the reports submitted by participants. These constraints are much more transparent and recursive (#44 Make a LTLYM assignment”) than the constraints in Harris’s data-mining visualizations. But with Harris’s shift in interest away from data-mining projects towards a more personal narrative structure, approaching his work with the same method of defined constraints does little to draw out meaningful insights that speak to the human condition. Fletcher & July have succeeded in balancing their artistic voice with a system that opens up the creative process to its participants, while drawing out these type of deeper insights Harris seems to be searching for.

Note to Harris: it might not have been a good idea to tell a packed audience at the Apple Store that you don’t like technology and our reliance on the iPhone and other Apple products.

The video for Tonto from Battles‘ new album is simply outstanding. I’ve been a big fan of Tyondai Braxton for years, since I saw his voice/guitar/effects/sitting-on-the-floor/time-warping mastery in a small performance at the multi-purpose room on his father’s home turf, at Wesleyan University. While I think his solo work pushes more and is ultimately more interesting, the music Battles puts out represents a (slightly) new direction for post-rock that is tight and pretty accessible. This video saves the 3 minutes in the middle of the song that border on extended jam-band nonsense.

to cut off Cheney’s executive office’s funding ($4.75 million in 2008) in response to Cheney’s completely outrageous claim.

A preview of the sound of the new album, M.I.A. drops a new video for Boyz. The video is hot in that M.I.A. lo-fi style, but that hook is already borderline annoying.

The Colour Lovers Blog has a great post on the striking color palettes found naturally in butterflies. Simple and beautiful.

Alexis will be playing Galapagos in Brooklyn on Friday. Last year Spin.com wrote:

While you can’t judge an album by its cover, Alexis Gideon’s album artwork pretty much sums up its content. A lion’s body, with wings, boasts the head of an elephant and is depicted walking across water on the cover, and the music that waits inside is equally out of left field. Eccentrics like Animal Collective and Beck come to mind when spinning Gideon, who loops beats, warps guitars, and creates a carnival of schizophrenic sound morphing from dreamy folk to dancehall fodder.

From Frank Rich’s subscription-only New York Times column, via Editor & Publisher:

NEW YORK Tucked inside Frank Rich’s Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer attend the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls “a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era.” He writes that the event “illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows.”

“After last weekend’s correspondents’ dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events,” wrote Rich. “But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as ‘Mission Accomplished’ and get a free pass.”

Rich mixed this criticism of the press in with regret over the death of David Halberstam this week, who Rich said it would be hard to imagine “yukking it up with Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and two discarded ‘American Idol’ contestants” at the dinner. “It’s our country’s bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone, too many Joe Alsops still hold sway,” writes Rich, comparing the Pulitzer-winner to the now-forgotten Vietnam War cheerleading columnist.

Feed the Head is the latest Flash creation by artist Patrick Smith. Years ago, his project Vectorpark inspired me to think past trendy conventions for Flash interfaces and to create interactive systems that encourage visitors to explore and discover.