December 1sts (Agora)

12/1944, Maastricht 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/1/1975

In Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction story “Dial F for Frankenstein,” which begins “At 0150 GMT on December 1, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring.” 

 

 12/1/2006

Went to south end of Grant Park to see the Abakanowicz “Agora” sculptures. took some pix, but then I noticed everyone was doing it—another over-photographed site). Why photograph other art?

    

...Years ago people could recall long passages of sermons because they were trained to remember them. Now that the internet is a repository of memory, there’s no need for the brain to do it. The internet has changed us in the same way that the building of the pyramids did for the ancient Egyptians: 

[12/1/2024: As a pre-smartphone and pre-social media musing, the world now finds itself a slave to both. As Villem Flusser said, “We work for the camera”, we now work for smartphones and social media. The camera I used to take photographs of this sculpture was an SLR not connected to the internet. In 2006, the world was not yet tethered to the strange world of the internet, so we had not yet become collectively strange].