Greetings Economists,
This is a cliched subject oft repeated. However, I have a fresh
perspective so I'll respond.
A statue is a fixed and stable file of knowledge that is placed in a
public space. So there is a kind of strategy for knowledge production
about putting visual displays in the public. Usually displays are
flat like a billboard for advertising. Some commercial media like
contemporary movies try to exploit the depth information in displays
with 3d techniques for commercial properties.
The basic contempt for statues is that they are static and hand hewn
representations. Machine reproductions from cameras far surpass the
ability to represent that hand made statues could produce. In
essence, a single photo image these days might be for high quality
cameras about 35 million pixels that can be done about twice to six
times a second. The actual resolution of the statue might be less
than 35 million pixels even on the scale of Mount Rushmore.
Public display of information is dominated by text in signs in cities,
and roadways. Fixed static signage is usually very low wattage file
size displays. Ten words or less. Less than a 1000 bytes of
information. By comparison a statue is a bit more ambitious with more
than a megabyte of display information. However text efficiency to
represent brain schema is what makes text more useful than visual
representation. A statue is all surface and not much schema.
Public space can be labeled like signs by GPS techniques and stored
knowledge seen in a location with for example an iPhone. Google is
one of the more famous exponents of mapping public space, but remote
storage also has military meaning too. A map is a surface which
shows more or less influences of the missing dimensions. So for
example 3 d movies combine two surfaces to display more depth
information than is contained in a single surface display.
Surfaces parallel brain processing regions. In the brain a schema is
a surface processing region 'layer'. Usually the brain region has six
layers to process surface information. Think of surface information
as what the skin layer does and evolving through evolution to what the
eye retina does as a surface of the retina. In other words in the
brain a surface is processed by other layers to extract kinds of
information. Broadly speaking with visual information, the brain
regionalizes processing of depth information or motion information in
distinctly different regions.
Getting back to public displays, a statue uses depth to display
knowledge about say how someone 'looked'. Depth makes the statue
whole. Take a single photo of someone in the sense of a sculpture
wanting to know body shape and the depth question is difficult to
answer as well as a statue hand done. Usually these days various
photos are stitched together in composites to give a three d surface
depiction of a human body. And that stitching organization of visual
information is the sense of 'wholeness' a statue presents.
Storing information for a location on servers elsewhere allows us to
address file size limitations in fixed signage or statues. And
further to 'process' information by specifics of what people want to
know. So for example maps are presented in pieces and the whole map
must be processed to access a piece. Any given location in public
space has a variety of public uses and needs that ought to be
addressed or developed by increasing information or knowledge about
the location. This then is the real deal behind a statue.
Thanks,
Doyle Saylor
On Apr 7, 2009, at 7:47 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
I forgot to mention that Lenin did not want any statues of himself
built. I believe he said that all statues do is to attract pigeons.
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