Comments on: 15 Minutes at the Met | Ancient Egypt http://joshkaufman.net/15min-at-the-met/15-minutes-at-the-met-ancient-egypt/ Inside My Bald Head Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:33:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: John http://joshkaufman.net/15min-at-the-met/15-minutes-at-the-met-ancient-egypt/#comment-6663 John Tue, 09 Jan 2007 21:02:04 +0000 http://joshkaufman.net/?p=131#comment-6663 Josh, I agree 15 minutes to be a good time span for forcing yourself to focus fully and as a result experience it more deeply. Having said this, last Sunday I went to a museum for contempory art in Gent, Belgium the 'SMAK' (www.smak.be) and saw an amazing documentary film called 'The Future is Not What it Used to Be' from Mika Taanlia about the other extreme; - The documentary is about a guy from Finland, named Erkki Kurenniemi, who is devoted to the obsessive, even manic, effort to record his own life, preserving all his thoughts and observations, trivial objects, and a constant stream of images, continually recording an audio diary, making videotapes, and shooting 20,000 photographs a year! This accumulating mass of documentation is then regularly fed into a computer, storing the record of his existence, his mind and consciousness in digital bytes, thus creating a reconstruction of his life, a "virtual persona," to be premiered in July, 2048. Perhaps fulfilling some sort of quest for immortality, Kurenniemi's project can be seen as the logical extension of the notion of merging man and machine, of technologically reconstructing the human soul. - (see also www.kinotar.com) What about that as an idea for a blog!?! John BTW: Awesome the 2 of you managed to get to NY! Looking forward to the details ;) Josh,
I agree 15 minutes to be a good time span for forcing yourself to focus fully and as a result experience it more deeply.

Having said this, last Sunday I went to a museum for contempory art in Gent, Belgium the ‘SMAK’ (www.smak.be) and saw an amazing documentary film called ‘The Future is Not What it Used to Be’ from Mika Taanlia about the other extreme;

- The documentary is about a guy from Finland, named Erkki Kurenniemi, who is devoted to the obsessive, even manic, effort to record his own life, preserving all his thoughts and observations, trivial objects, and a constant stream of images, continually recording an audio diary, making videotapes, and shooting 20,000 photographs a year!

This accumulating mass of documentation is then regularly fed into a computer, storing the record of his existence, his mind and consciousness in digital bytes, thus creating a reconstruction of his life, a “virtual persona,” to be premiered in July, 2048.

Perhaps fulfilling some sort of quest for immortality, Kurenniemi’s project can be seen as the logical extension of the notion of merging man and machine, of technologically reconstructing the human soul. - (see also http://www.kinotar.com)

What about that as an idea for a blog!?!

John

BTW: Awesome the 2 of you managed to get to NY! Looking forward to the details ;)

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