{"id":79,"date":"2016-11-30T23:27:01","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T23:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/index.php\/2016\/11\/30\/november-2016\/"},"modified":"2022-11-15T20:36:54","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T18:36:54","slug":"november-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/2016\/11\/november-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"November: The Library, Digression, and Items from the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s 9.30 am. I am carrying my transparent plastic bag filled with a laptop, some pens and a book through the library. This place is quite ugly from the outside, but inside, it somehow works. A light-filled atrium connects the sounds of the entry hall with the desk areas and bookshelves. The noise level in here is perfect\u2014not too quiet; you still allow yourself to breathe, and not loud; enabling the perfect concentration mode. I put my coat, my bag and my phone (necessary!) into the locker, stuff a coffee and a doughnut in my face, and find myself a desk.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s basically a time machine back into 2013, when I spent most of January in this building to finish my bachelor thesis. The audience is a wild mix of art and engineering students, and they all appear to be very focussed and smart. I like to make myself comfortable on the fourth floor, between the sheet music and the multi-media library. From here, I can watch November\u2019s rain, finish some books and finally try to focus on studying. I really do try, at least.<\/p>\n

However, I also allow myself to drift off from time to time, from link to link, book to book. In October, I briefly mentioned Design Fiction<\/a>. In class, we talked about this amazing project by the Extrapolation Factory, called 99\u00a2 Futures<\/a>. It was a pop-up store which, for one day, sold various items from the future, like a Mars Survival Kit, void refills, or an \u201cinstant full university degree while you sleep\u201d. I might want that one. Even more design fiction can be found in Mark Dudliks essay \u201cSpeculations From Tomorrow\u201d<\/a>, where he explores the narrative of the Netflix series Black Mirror, for example, or Spike Jonze\u2019s movie Her (remember Scarlet\u2019s alluring Samantha voice?).<\/p>\n

Less fictional, more scary: Adobe recently presented a tool dubbed \u201cPhotoshop for Audio\u201d<\/a>. From a 20-minute voice sample, it lets you manipulate existing and create totally new audio snippets\u2014allowing people to put basically any word into any persons mouth. While it does sound like a disaster, regarding the current mistrust in media and algorithms, it really is what we have already gotten terribly used to with image manipulation.<\/p>\n

Further digression: My friend Caitlin is an awesome person and writer. Need proof? Read her article about womanhood<\/a> (is that a word?). Anyway, it\u2019s relevant.<\/p>\n

I am not very up to date when it comes to trending topics and memes, but some fragments of the #mannequinchallenge slipped through to my phone. This one won.<\/a><\/p>\n

This last day of November is my 25th birthday. And of course, I found myself thinking: \u201c25 is basically 30, and 30 is close to 40, and 40 means full grown-up-status, and what else is supposed to come after that?\u201d What a stupid chain of thought. However, it reminded me of Miranda July\u2019s movie \u201cThe Future\u201d<\/a>, where a couple wants to adopt a cat, and suddenly has very similar thoughts. They turn off the internet, start volunteering, loose each other, and everything falls apart.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think thats going to happen to me though. I\u2019ll hide here in the library, with some doughnuts and coffee, and if I stare at this open Pages document for long enough, it might start filling itself. Fingers crossed. Enjoy December.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 9.30 am. I am carrying my transparent plastic bag filled with a laptop, some pens and a book through the library. This place is quite ugly from the outside, but inside, it somehow works. A light-filled atrium connects the sounds of the entry hall with the desk areas and bookshelves. The noise level in … November: The Library, Digression, and Items from the Future<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1206],"tags":[140,44,152,41,40,3,43],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christels-corner","tag-140","tag-christels-corner","tag-design-fiction","tag-english","tag-newsletter","tag-schreiben","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1857,"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christowski.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}