“The domestic housefly insinuates itself into the most banal aspects of our daily lives, haunting our homes with its privileged view of our intimate activities. The fly’s size and scale ensures its admittance into the human drama of love and hate, sin and retribution. But what would happen if we were to inhabit, to haunt, the body of the fly: how would we perceive the world around us? … Our approximation and abstraction of reality becomes indiscernible as technology continues to mediate our everyday experience. Tele-presence art, however, attempts to be less concerned with the technological feat than with the breaking down of unidirectional communication structures distinguishing both visual arts and mass media. Within the installation, Fly, the utopian rhetoric invested within the notion of telepresence is ultimately usurped by the ultra-trite, supra-insignificant act of possession.” – from a web experiment summarized as follows: “One dead fly with one microprocessor implanted into the fly body. The chip is a fully operational web server on the internet, and enables online viewers to enter and exit the fly corpse.”
MUST-READ: Stu Taylor on why the world needs America’s interventionism.
POLICING VOMIT: Oxford University cracks down on a sacred Brideshead tradition. The nerve. When I was there, we all did it.
SUNSET OVER EUROPE: Extremely cool photo taken by the Columbia Space Shuttle before its demise. Courtesy of Rush.
The Dish 