Let's play the game: Danish political parties or Star Wars references?

Left

New Alliance

Social Democrats

Radikale (also the greatest name for a vegan political group, ever)

Danish People's Party

My bike game has a long way to go

This past weekend I reached Level: Cake on my bike. In order to earn this badge one must Bike With Four Boxed Layer Cakes of Various Frosting Type and Delicate Cream and you must Make It All in One Piece with Fancy Frosting & Fruit Topping Art Undisturbed to Your Event.

I also recently succeeded in Level: Julefrokost, which one only gets to attempt once a year. That entails Biking Home After A Holiday Party Where One Has Consumed At Least 8 Drinks, Over Half Must Be Schnapps Shots, and As You Bike You Will Laugh at All of the Office Hanky Panky You Saw Go Down While Avoiding Getting Hit (On) by a Similarly Drunken Rando on Street, Coming Home from Own Party.

There are many levels I have yet to reach... There is the tricky and awe-inspiring Level: Fir where you Bike With An Entire Christmas Tree (Base Snuggled Into Your Basket, Branches Everywhere, Bonus Points if Blocking Your Vision). There is Level: Santa where you Stick All Christmas Presents Into Giant Red Sack and Hold With One Hand While Biking. Level: Chainsmoking. (Double points if you light your match one-handed on your pants!) Level: Dutch Master (Fit Someone on the Back and Make It Look Both Sexy and Easy, preferably to Bring Them Home for the Night). The list goes on.

Google Street View Art has got me thinking

I've been kind of keeping tabs on all of the Google Street View Art that is popping up and I think it raises some interesting questions. I want to keep finding more art in this category because I think it has blown open the photography world in some ways.

Google Street View as travel

'All of us have a ‘Detroit’ in our minds, or a ‘Dallas’ or a ‘Fresno,’ even if we have not travelled there,” Rickard told me. “I think that I chose pictures that partially represented those biases and media-affected notions of place, and yet I explored immensely these American places, a thousand hours or more, gaining an understanding of the conditions.'

GSV as surface-level

'Also, Google’s blurring of the faces and the lo-fi nature of the images changed the individuals into symbols or emblems and representative of larger notions, such as race and class, instead of personal stories that would have wanted to emerge with recognition.'

- Doug Rickland

GSV as omniscient

'I almost see the Google camera as the modern concept of God. It knows everything but does not act in history. It takes no positions, but it’s there, watching.'

GSV as both objective and ideological

'But the truth is that the neutrality of the camera is actually somewhat . . . there’s hidden ideologies within it. For example, the camera only captures who’s on the street during daylight hours, while most, let’s say, white-collar workers are in their offices somewhere. People like prostitutes, people living on the street, they have much more of a chance to be captured by the camera. With the prostitutes, I don’t think it’s a licentious or erotic gaze. There’s something about the camera that gives respect to the subject being photographed, something about the fact that it is this robotic gaze restores this balance that I feel like would be exploitative if it were a human photographer taking the picture.'

- Jon Rafman

GSV as intruder, Orwellian

'As the publicly accessible pictures are of individuals taken without their permission, I reversed the act: I took the pictures of individuals without Google’s permission and posted them on public walls.

The obscure figures fixed to the walls are the murky intersection of two overlain worlds: the real world of things and people, from which these images were originally captured, and the virtual afterlife of data and copyrights, from which the images were retaken.'

- Paolo Cirio