still pictures collection

The still pictures collection features abandoned places, birds and bugs. Click for a higher resolution image.

birds and bugs

"if you're small and on a search
i've got a feeder for you to perch on..."

eels. "Birds" Daisies of the Galaxy (2000).

Mr. E wrote this about his birdwatching mother.

This collection is influenced by Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan (["The Medium is the Message" 1964]) was interested in a subversion of nationalist culture based in old media like newspapers by trans-national electronic media. The change in medium (mode of communication) alters the message. In McLuhan's global village, a shared trans-national culture replaces the outmoded nationalist culture through this new medium. Postman (["The Ecology of Learning" 1974]) explaned a Luddite ideology that looked to older modes of media as a representation of different social orders. An example of this backward looking view was "inquiry education." This is subversive to rote industrial (and post-industrial) education because it comes from a classical (Socratic) period where questions are emphasized. The current mode of entertainment media are distractions from the current socio-cultural conditions and they can be explored by different methods of inquiry.

Through these media theorists, one can build a framework for the production of theoretically revolutionary, historically relevant, educational, electronic-material using outmoded imperial era tools... Or show off a bunch of bird and bug photos...

abandoned places

"The Dead City. Dead, oh yes. Twice dead. For the second time, with the emergence of thousands of photos and the shitty lines of official tours. Bored hipsters shot Prypyat dead with their expensive cameras; rich girls from the capital soiled the rotten couches with their tattooed backs and mapped every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram. The sense of mystery has been lost; it has escaped, vanished in the web. The aura of mysticism was scattered like ash in all directions, flying through the Internet byways to distant foreign lands. After that, abandoned apartments can't be scary."

Markiyan Kamysh Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chernobyl (translated by Hannnah Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes) New York: Astra House, 2022. 37 (originally published in Ukrainian as A Stroll in the Zone in 2015).