A Flaneur in the Cloud - October 14, 2023

By Chris Richards: “The guitarist revs up his amp, giving the universal signal that a punk rock concert is about to begin. Ahmad Zaghal digs for the iPhone in his pocket and shouts between the power chords: “Am I facing the right way?” | He’s half-joking. Because he’s blind. But he’s half-serious. Because he’s on Instagram, the photo-sharing social-media service that has — among other things — helped turn every concertgoer into a concert photographer, including Zaghal. “This is what happens when someone who can’t see a thing decides to shoot concert pics,” he’s written on his profile page. “Captions only indicate what I think I’m shooting.”

Hermes International SCA (RMS) has a solution for wealthy consumers seeking to beat the traffic or meander about town. The French maker of Birkin bags and silk scarves will introduce next month its own range of handmade bicycles, it said today in a presentation in Paris. [Monetizing the flaneur…] Named Le Flaneur, or stroller, and manufactured by bike maker Time, the eight-speed carbon fiber machine weighs 11 kilos and comes in three colors and sizes, all with leather-trimmed seats and handlebars. Hermes and other luxury-goods makers are expanding beyond fashion and accessories as they seek a greater share of the wealthiest consumers’ wallets amid slowing industry growth. LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA (MC), which owns 23.1 percent of Hermes, added a pastry maker and a hotel earlier this this year, while suitmaker Ermenegildo Zegna SpA is supplying fabric to Fiat SpA Maseratis.

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Two hundred years ago, artists had the monopoly on image making. Now, every parade or disaster is accompanied by ten thousand twitpics. In a world where mobile technology has made images instantaneous and ubiquitous, what does visual art have left to say? Drawing on her experiences doing illustrated journalism around Guantanamo Bay and the Greek economic crisis, Molly Crabapple — called “Occupy’s greatest artist” by Rolling Stone — speaks about the role of art in a world captured by a million cameras.

[accessibility potential for this new platform?] Curarium is a collection of collections, an “animated archive,” designed to serve as a model for crowdsourcing annotation, curation, and augmentation of works within and beyond their respective collections. Curarium aims to construct sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as groups of items within a corpora. The metaLab’s Jeffrey Schnapp, Matthew Battles, and Pablo Barría Urenda describe the Curarium, and its first project to ingest Villa I Tatti’s Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance collection, and build engagement with a wider audience to identify, classify, describe, and analyze the objects in the collection.

The disabled are a convenient metaphor for the movies and storytellers, often portrayed as little puddles of misery and misfortune, or as childlike god creatures full of wisdom. But there is reality in disability. Author Susan Nussbaum joins The Takeaway to explain how she successfully turns disability into a much more powerful metaphor for the world’s struggles with oppression and intolerance in her book Good Kings and Bad Kings.

Merrill Gilfillan is the award-winning short story writer and poet whose Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains, won the first PEN/Martha Albrand Award for non-fiction. Five years later, Gilfillan returns to the genre with a new collection of poetic essays that grew from his travels along the folkloric backroads of Appalachia.

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refer link to http://blindflaneur.com/contact/browse-the-archives/flaneurs-gallery/a-john-granger-gallery/