Labels: citylife, new york

I like the cycling culture on UCSB's campus. The west coast is often stereotyped as a bastion of car culture and pollutino, and that's certainly true in certain parts of the state, especially in the Los Angeles-San Diego stretch. It's often more efficient to take the i-5 up to San Francisco than the Amtrak, and of course, the Pacific Coast Highway wouldn't be quite the same on a train.



But the UCSB campus presents a compelling example of a town existing on a cycling culture. With miles of bike trails and convenient bike lots, it encourages a culture of healthy and low-impact living (and certainly the weather plays an important role). However, the practical necessities of modern life are met: bus, train and air travel are easily accessible, and there's plenty of space for parking your car.

Labels: california, citylife, environment

Incongruous yet logical in retrospect, especially given that this is in the East Village. Gets me thinking about how forms can be adapted to lifestyles, and how lifestyles often parallel each other in interesting ways. In suburbia, this gumball machine is better suited for gumballs for kids. In the mostly-childless village? Gumball-like treats for child-like dogs.

Labels: citylife, design, new york

Urban memorial or moneymaking hoax? Public art installation? How do we interpret and experience public space?

Spotted in Venice Beach

Labels: art, citylife, los angeles

How do you translate a brand not just across languages but across script systems and cultures? How do you adapt to writing systems intended in their original form for totally different writing implements? This has practical implications in cultural melting pots like New York City, of course, but as the Internet creates a veritable global village, unique issues will arise.

Take, for example, the recent decision by Facebook to require a gender designation. This decision upset members of the queer community who don't identify with traditional gender markers, and rightly so. But it also reflected the reality that many languages (Facebook supports dozens) are deeply gendered, from the gendered nouns of Spanish to the gendered grammar of Japanese. Where in English, genders affect a few pronouns and maybe a handful of words, other languages face a slew of logistical challenges that forced the decision for the company as it expanded internationally.

And another example: Twitter systems in Chinese count each Chinese character toward the 140-character limit. However, as most words in Chinese consist of one character each, the system essentially allows 140 words. That's not a "tweet"--that's an entire birdsong symphony. The literal meaning is there (140 characters), but the spirit (brevity) is not.

In New York City, special signs can be posted in neighborhoods where concentrations of language speakers exist. In the Internet world, these signs automatically adapt to the viewer's language, but language is much more than words---it's a world of function, context, visual cues and local conventions, especially in the conversation-driven atmosphere of the Web. Bringing all of this together raises all kinds of issues that I'm glad I don't have to deal with.

Read more about Facebook's hurdles with implementing Arabic.

Labels: chinese, citylife, culture, design, gender, internet, language, new york

Labels: business, culture, food

The weather in New York this weekend has been quite lovely. Yesterday, Regina of Simple, Neat and Wrong and I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and Prospect Park to take pictures and enjoy the scenery. Having just come back from Los Angeles, I wasn't floored by the weather, but there's a distinct experience of spring in the east coast that gets me every time. I've been breaking out my camera more and more these days.



This set contains two visions of the blossoms popping up all over the city. One is at night, immersed in the urbanity of downtown Manhattan, and one is at daytime, on a blue-sky canvas. It's an interesting and deliberate juxtaposition, though I have to admit that, aesthetically, I'm pushing myself more with the night shots, while the daytime ones are probably more familiar. However, the daytime ones reflect my fascination with branches and tree trunks as compositional elements, and the light and dark, yin/yang of blossoms and branches.

Click here to view:



I'm also trying something new. All of these photos, in their digital (vs. print) manifestation, are on a Creative Commons License: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic. In the spirit of an open Web and open access to information, I'm slowly transitioning all my digital works into this license. The digital versions will be available at approx. 1280x853 pixels, allowing for their use as desktop and iPhone backgrounds, in web sites and blog posts, and more. I'll be posting more on this later, but for context, check out how a company called Braithwate is using Creative Commons for their wallet design.

In any case, I hope you enjoy these images. Per the license, feel free to take them for desktop photos, pop them onto blog posts, share the slideshow, etc. etc., so long as you're able to provide credit and avoid commercial use and derivative works. Sakura (cherry blossoms), along with autumn leaves, are the classic images of Zen aesthetics, and they never fail to inspire me. I hope they inspire you too!

Labels: art, internet, new york, photoessay, photography, zen

Night Blossom, An Xiao

It's the change of the seasons once more, and as with every change, I'm finding myself in a more "Zen" mood, more attentive and mindful to the present, and the passing of moments.

Lately, my artistic side has been deeply conceptual, from the Brooklyn Museum project to something come up at Yale Haskins Laboratories (more info on that to come). But a pleasant reminder of the first stepping stone in my artistic journey, deeply immersed in the Zen aesthetic tradition, was the fact that one of my poems was selected for the 2008 edition of Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka. I'm truly honored.

The editorial team of Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka set out to read the entire field of tanka publication for a single year, regardless of source, without any dogma regarding definition, form or content. Over the course of fourteen months, they read over fourteen thousand poems. The results are gathered in one of the best new poetry anthologies. Famous names and unknown poets from around the world appear side by side in 321 single poems and several tanka sequences and tanka prose pieces.

via Kujaku Poetry

I've been wandering around the city as of late, taking pictures of cherry blossoms at night, blooming in the darkness and amidst street lamps and cars and silhouettes of people rushing past. Most of the time, I am so busy thinking about and writing about social media and various conceptual art project proposals coming up, and it's been refreshing and calming to get back in touch with my visual-aesthetic practice. The above is a preview. I'll be posting more soon.

In the mean time, if Zen poetry and photography is your thing, be sure to check out Ron Moss's fabulous show at the online 3 Lights Gallery. And you can purchase Take Five at the Modern English Tanka Press web site.

Labels: art, personal, poetry, zen

It's interesting when a word or phrase in one language means such a particular concept or item that it's readily carried over into another. English is full of such examples: Schaudenfreude. Kow-tow. Burrito. Nom de plum.

What drew me to this pair of signs is the melding of different writing systems. The understanding that even if you only speak Chinese, you'll have some basic knowledge of Roman letters and their pronunciation. It's an obvious effect of English's dominance as a lingua franca (ha) 'round the world, though also a basic assumption about anyone taking the subway in New York City.

It's difficult to imagine this the other way around. Could we ever see a sign solely in English, with a clarifying point in Chinese script, Cyrillic, Korean? Today, words like samurai, kow-tow and hoi polloi are transliterated from the original writing system, even while retaining their basic pronunciation, but as China grows in economic and cultural influence, I wonder if we might start seeing words like, say, "上海" alongside "Shanghai", to help clarify that we mean the place, not the (mildly derogatory) verb.

See also: Scrolling it all up.


ADDENDUM: I started thinking about the practice of using Chinese characters as tattoos. Today, it's often derided as Orientalist at worst and cultural appropriation at best when non-Chinese speakers get them, but maybe one day, it will be a sign of economic and culture dominance instead.

Labels: chinese, citylife, culture, design, language, new york

Two different signs for urban social order. One appeals to the self-interest of the reader, while the other appeals to his/her empathy for noisy days at home.

See: The tension between economic self interest and civic responsibility.

Labels: citylife, los angeles, new york

Labels: culture, language

Awful picture - sorry!

Spotted at a small gathering of friends ordering take-out Chinese. On all three of our fortune cookies: A financial investement [sic] will yield returns beyond your hopes.

So very strange.

Labels: culture, food

I've been thinking about contrasts lately. Well, I think about contrasts all the time (I'm coming to realize), but I've been thinking about contrasts with regards to communications technology. I'm thinking about two articles in particular: "The End of Solitude," by William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle Review, and "Hellhole", by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker.

In the first article, Deresiewicz describes a world driven by social media and cell phones in which human beings are never alone:

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.

In the second, Gawande describes a world driven by concrete walls and draconian policy in which human beings are always alone:

After a few months without regular social contact, however, [the prisoner's] experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

These two articles came out within two months of each other, an eternity in the world of the Internet, but I couldn't help but draw a connection. It seems like the point of all this social media and communications technology is to fight the very human fear of being alone, and yet, just as we can be alone too much, it must be possible to be not-alone too much. There must be a point when the constant volley of @'s and wall posts and comments and emails and IM's and beeping phones overwhelms the mind, like a Times Square saturated not by advertising that can be ignored without guilt but by the messages of other people, for whom common courtesy has taught us to respond in a timely and thoughtful fashion.

In Zen, there's this notion of the Middle Way, a path between the yin and yang of strict ascetism and unfettered hedonism. On the one hand, ignoring the tide of social media seems retrogressive and unnecessary, but on the other hand, fully succumbing to the always-on ethos seems equally unhealthy. Either extreme makes my ambivert brain hurt. I wonder: what is the middle way when it comes to social media? I'm drawn to something Maryann Devine wrote recently:

I use Google Reader to subscribe to a little more than 100 feeds (they're not all blogs -- some of them are saved searches), and I use key commands to quickly scroll through til I find something compelling, optimally once a day, but not always. I don't read posts that are more than a couple of days old, usually, and Google Reader shows the most recent first. Sometimes the sense that I need to read everything creeps in and I start procrastinating because it seems like such a huge undertaking. But soon, when I see that way too many posts have accumulated, I just mark all as read and start over.

"I just mark all as read and start over." Brilliant. I wonder if the pressure Maryann, I and so many others feel to read through blog posts derives less from the plethora of information available (after all, how many people feel guilty about not reading the Sunday paper cover to cover?) but from the personal connection that blogging and other social media allow and the common courtesies we were raised to follow. Social etiquette, evolved for a much simpler time, probably needs some kind of update to 2.0.

More thoughts on solitude in a digital age.

Labels: culture, internet, psychology, zen

The cache of no cache: a downtown LA restaurant made to look like a taco truck stand, complete with tables made with soda crates. What happens when the consumer's need for authenticity intersects with a company's business and branding interests?

Labels: business, citylife, design, los angeles, marketing

Venice Beach: Graf-style writings etched out in the dust on the windows of unoccupied storefronts. They're only visible at certain times of day, when the sun bounces off just so, and only from certain angles. Gets me thinking about the endless need for self-expression. If there's anything new about online social media, it's that Twitter, Facebook and Blogger make it easier and more common for us to etch out something in the ether, till it's wiped away by the sun, a new storefront owner, limited data streams.

Also: testing out AudioBoo at Venice Beach, as I wandered around. Check out more at my AudioBoo station.

Labels: audio, citylife, culture, internet, los angeles

Jan Chipchase on the future of advertising:

But is there sufficient pull for mainstream consumer's to turn to some form of nearly-always-worn data glasses? Imagine knowing the tax-bracket of everyone around you - drawing on publicly available tax records and the means to identify an individual in near to real time. Imagine this from the point of view of a would-be lover, a salesman, a charity worker. Extrapolate with mash-ups with Facebook profile, knowledge about your last vacation; previous convictions. Now imagine the advantages you get from access or subscriptions to 'premium channels' - data only available to the select few: from the realtime cop feed; to the wolfpack view of the city; to real-time, real-space casual encounters.

During my time away from social media land, I started thinking a bit about the ubiquity of advertising on the Internet, but also the uniqueness of this particular type of advertising. The way it grabs from the context of your social life and presents messages catered to your likely lifestyle and interests. In marketing, there's this notion of finding that demographic of one, i.e., catering to the individual, rather than broad groups. It's more of a theoretical ideal, like the horizon or the perfect circle.

And yet, embedded, contextual advertising is bringing us closer to that reality. All the data about ourselves that we upload to Facebook and blogs, everything we type about ourselves in Gmail, the little quips and comments between friends--all these little lifestreams can be aggregated into a picture of who we are and what we might buy. Is it so far-fetched, as Mr. Chipchase argues, that this advertising will one day extend into our physical lives? I'm thinking about the free Android operating system (run by Google, which has made a fortune off free services with embedded advertising) and how it will leverage the existing ubiquity of mobile phones.

Of course, what's the difference between algorithm-driven marketing and a skilled salesman? The other day I was looking to buy a straw fedora for the spring/summer, and the salesman, spotting my DKNY glasses and lambskin handbag, recommended a $300 hat and called it the Prada of fedoras. This is a story as old as human exchange. But it's like the issue with Google Streetview: there's something different when it's done on a large scale and with near-ubiquity, as if all the salesmen in the world were following you and aggregating their notes.

Maybe the 21st century will see the greater commodification of social life in the pursuit of this marketing horizon, or maybe we'll all just run to the mountains and take vows of silence.

Labels: 21st, culture, marketing, technology

I shot this in Echo Park, near where I grew up in Los Angeles. In my old neighborhood, art is everywhere. It's in beautiful murals, in half-done posters, in etchings and etchings over etchings. Art is messages and codes and cracked paint and funny names. Legal or illegal, it doesn't matter.

This was my first education in art, before I learned about gallery openings and fine wine: art is for everyone, created by anyone, and exhibited everywhere the eye will go.

Labels: art, los angeles

How the presence of a street map suggests the likelihood that (1) you're walking in this neighborhood and (2) you're not from the area.

Labels: citylife, culture, design, los angeles

It's funny how the unconscious works.

On April 1, I posted the following status to my Facebook: "An Xiao is saying farewell to Twitter and Facebook today. Good luck in the digisphere, everyone. You can reach me via email from here on out." It was an April Fool's day joke, of course, because I've pretty much been an Internet junkie since the mid-90's, and there's no way I could ever truly leave Facebook and Twitter land.

And yet, I realized since then that I do need to take a break and unplug for a while. I'll be back soon--am gearing up for some exciting things this month and next--, but it's time for a little kado retreat.

On visiting Shorin Temple, Where Bodhidharma lived

The steep slope hangs above
the temple calm.
An autumn voyager,
I go by ways neither old nor new,
Finding east, west, the mind the same.

- Soen (1859-1919)

Retreat, reflect, renourish. See you soon!

Labels: personal, poetry, zen