There may be some among you that have ever sent an actual letter (which is sort of like a printed e-mail). What I remember from letters is that you’d never write at the bottom that you couldn’t be held responsible for the contents of the letter et cetera. As a matter of fact; I never end a telephone conversation with anything like that either. The disclaimer is typical for e-mails. It’s understandable that such a statement is needed, but it is quite bizarre at the same time.

Today, I received an e-mail from someone working at one of our government offices and a sentence from our official governmental disclaimer caught my eye:

“The State accepts no liability for damage of any kind resulting from the risks inherent in the electronic transmission of messages.“

And I find this highly intriguing. Until now, I was never really that aware of the fact that that are inherent risks involved in electronically transmitting messages. Fortunately the State has brought this to my attention. I think I will take precautions of some kind. That’s important, since it’s also made very clear to me that, when damage occurs, of any kind I might add, as a result of one of these inherent risks, I may try to hold the State accountable, but it will accept no liability. None. Not even the tiniest piece of liability will be accepted when I encounter any sort of damage, no matter what the nature of that damage may be, when it result from the inherent risks in electronically transmitting messages.

If you are extremely offended by this posting and suffer emotionally, I must point out that this is considered a message, that is being electronically transmitted to you and, given that there are inherent risks to reading electronically transmitted messages, my State will no accept any liability whatsoever for it. Well, they’re not a part of this small electronic communiqé, so I’m guessing you don’t really mind. You’ll just hold me accountable.

Are the contents of these ‘electronically transmitted messaged’, also inherent risks from which damages may result? I mean, there are always inherent risks to any form of communication of ‘message transmitting’ , electronic transmission included. In other words, is the focus of the disclaimer on ‘transmission’, ‘messages‘ or ‘electronic’ or is it spread out over the three equally?

Even though I guess I understand what the disclaimer means to say, but it could mean so many things that I am actually thoroughly confused. I will spare you the more bizarre questions flying through my head right now, but I think I need to lie down for a minute. It wonder if the State will accept liability for emotional damages caused by the electronic transmission of disclaimers..

When I think about it… Moblogic actually sounds like quite a good name for a webchannel about economics and polictics (’n stuff) targeting the socially aware segment of the internet generation. (Hurrah, finally I managed to sound like a marketing guy!). I was made aware of these hip e-savvy cats through my my Flickr account, proving the use of online communities for me personally. I had a look at their site, watched a few videos, had a couple of laughs (Note #1: if Americans can apparently be funny, why on earth did they make that awful and exceptionally unfunny American version of ‘The Office’?). Anyway, this experience made me feel all 2.0 inside, so I decided to write a short post about it. A blog-to-blog campaign can be exteremely succesful in gaining in popularity and I am willing to put my two cents in for a channel I seem to be able to ‘dig’. (Note #2:If you doubt my claim on blog-to-blog campaigning, please e-mail this guy I have heard about who can tell you all about it at: b.obama@thewhitehouse.org).

So there you have it. A posting without a proper conclusion (I am quite happy with the opening though). Except that I will probabaly be a regular viewer of Moblogic and perhaps even steal a couple of their items to be able to write about current events without having to do much of the actual work myself. (Note #3: obviously I will give proper credits wherever due.)

Making sarcastic comments about the intellectual and philosophical qualities of advertising or financial people is taking cheap shots in front of an open goal. But if they are asking for it, they are asking for it. Last weekend I drove past a billboard of the Belgian financial multinational Fortis on which I read in big letters (images on billboards are overrated anyway): “Life is a curve, where on this curve are you?” (and where on his curve is their new shareholder, the Libean leader Khadaffi? Or, where on this curve is Fortis itself? I’d say on a downslope….).

My first thought was: “Life is a curve? … No, it isn’t” Actually, it may be one of the most stupid comments ever printed on a billboard poster. Many beautiful, insightful, philosophical things have been said and written about life. Socrates wrote that true wisdom is in knowing how little we know about life, I wonder if he would have thought that deeming life ‘a curve’, was perhaps oversimplifying matters a bit. We all know the analogies that have become bad clichés: how life is a rollercoaster, a river. Or perhaps the bizarre quotes like “life is like a tin of sardines, we are all looking for the key.” Every era gets the quotes it deserves and these times may not be bizarre, a cliché, or wise. Our era might deserve populist, unintelligent quotes. Actually, I don’t know who to feel more sorry for, the idiot copywriter that wrote it, or the idiot that approved of it and paid several million euros for this campaign.

At the same time I felt rather offended actually. “Where on this curve are you?” they have the nerve to ask me. Not only do those arrogant people at Fortis have the poor wit to inform about the alleged ‘curviness’ of life, they immediately try to convince me that this is a given fact and, since I undoubtedly accept this fallacy, ask me about my location on this curve. For the sake of argument: would life have been a curve (which, by intelligent and logical lines of reasoning, it isn’t), it would have been completely impossible for anyone to say where on this curve you are. Theoretically, it could be possible to say where you were in life at a given point, after your death, but I doubt that Fortis has informants in the hereafter.

In a press release Adrian Martorana, the Fortis exec that is guilty of this so-called ‘corporate campaign’, states”The ‘Life is a curve’ campaign encourages people to think about their financial needs today and plan for tomorrow, with the help of a trusted partner such as Fortis.” And to make matters even worse: “We carried out extensive global research over 12 months to make sure our message was relevant in today’s environment.” I don’t expect bankers to be good philosophers, I do expect them to able to do a bit of decent research, draw some solid conclusions from it and act according to them. I might be expecting too much.

I should mentally have linked Fortis with qualities such as ‘future financial needs”and ‘trusted financial partner’. How on earth this should have been done by bad philosophy is beyond me. The creatives at their advertising agency Grey EMEA were probably a bit too high on bad cocaine. When they listened to the lyrics of their superior in philospophy, Jessica Simpson, who begins her song “Walkin’ Round in a circle” with the sentence “Life is a curve BALL”. There is virtually no job easier than that of creating a corporate advertising campaign to build a brand image. That’s why, when you fail as a proper artist or writer, you can still work in advertsing (and if you even fail there: ‘corporate advertising’).

But perhaps all this is my mistake. The fact that all I think about is their poor ability in logical reasoning, and not their superior qualities in banking, is all my mistake. Or maybe I just have it wrong. Maybe ‘life is a curve’ actually makes wonderful sense. I don’t think I’ll be taking any of my banking to the lovely people at Fortis. But they probably don’t care anyway. I don’t have a clue about where I am on my curve.

Sometimes you’d think that ‘we the people’ are in control since everything is rapidly becoming a popularity contest. Voters get to choose their political leader, consumers get to choose what products are on the shelves, fans get to choose their next idols. There are polls on everything and this also means that serious discussions can get cluttered and important decisions get made on the basis of uninformed opinions, fed back to us in incomplete and misleading questionnaire reports (”53% of population opposed to roundabout” usually means, 53% of online voters are not completely satisfied with the current plan of a roundabout for various reason and 47% of online voters don’t care one bit, which is a completely different result than the headline in your local weekly.)

Dutch artist and webdesigner Jacco van de Post has made a cool online application that let’s everybody vote
on the news. It would simply be the next democratic step to take; news we like can make it to the final and news we don’t like, gets voted out. If news is injected in us with this big hypodermic needle, than at least let it inject us with a big dose of ‘happy’ (or perhaps, ‘denial’).

Besides it being a clever comment on our voting addiction his work also comments on the media-age we live in. bringing news is one thing, but what if you only bring news that (potential) viewers don’t like? That would cost you loads of money from advertisers wouldn’t it? So clicking and voting would bring CNN (which is where the app gets its headlines from) valuable information which, I am sure, Jacco would be willing to sell to them for loads of money.

Start the application by clicking here.

Being a genius is not about very difficult things, but about very simple things. This is especially true for contemporary art. Brilliant art, more often then not, has an end-result that seems very obvious. Stuff about which many people would say ‘my kid could do that’… Think the readymades by Duchamp, the prints by Warhol or the drip paintings by Pollock. Yes, your kid could probably do all of those… if your kid was a genius. Which he or she most likely is not.

I am not a hundred percent Belgian curator Jan de Nys is a genius, but I do consider the outdoor exhibition ‘Utopia’ which he curated for the Cultural Center ‘Scharpoord’ to be a brilliant idea. The exhibition is called Utopia and consists of several works all revolving around the ’suburban ideal’. And what depicts the suburban families pastime more than minigolf? Several European (Belgian, Dutch, German, Austrian and French) artists created their own minigolf track, which are all used as minigolf tracks as well, thereby involving and attracting audiences that would otherwise never show any interest in art. Plus, since the exhibition is situated in one of the poorer areas of Belgian city Knokke, it sort of adds an extra layer of meaning to the exhibition; The ‘have nots’ acting out the suburban dream.

Hopefully the exhibition will travel outside of the Netherlands and Belgium as well.

Contributing artists: Eric Angenot (B), Bisscherouw-Voet (NL), Franck Bragigand (F), Nick Ervinck (B), Sonja Gangl (A), Loek Grootjans (NL), Frank Halmans (NL), HAP (B), Thomas Huyghe (B), Jean Bernard Koeman (B-NL), Fabian Luyten (B), Xavier Mary (B), David Neirings(B), Regine Schumann (D), Lionel Scoccimaro (F), Kevin van Braak (NL), Veronika Veit (D)

I am not going to lie about it. Whenever I read a Coupland novel I think I can write myself as well. I start feeling the urge to document certain contemporary trivia about my life the way he does. And now I have this blog thing… so I can bother you with it as well. How?

Well, this morning when I walked out of the train station (since I work in the center of Amsterdam, going by car is not an option and would be insanely bad for the environment) I discovered two things. First; I am glad I quit smoking a long time ago. When you walk out train stations you see a lot people, a certain group of those people smoke. Those people do not seem to be the type of people that are going anywhere fast. In a lot of cases those people don’t even seem to be the types of people that are taking regular showers. Obviously, this is a crude generalization. Some people that smoke are young, successful, cool, cosmopolitan and healthy. However, their numbers are decreasing and they are none of those things because of their addiction but in spite of it. I took a deep breath of fresh morning air. At least, as fresh as you get it in Amsterdam.

My second discovery is that I really satisfied with the playlist I have uploaded to my first generation iPod Shuffle. My playlist currently features;

• Radiohead - In rainbows (legally downloaded and paid for at radiohead.com, Radiohead rocks)
• New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom (Tip: perfect music for looking at my artwork)
• Fink - Distance and time (No less than brilliant show in Paradiso a couple of weeks ago)
• Pete Murray - See the Sun (Bringing back memories of my stay in ‘Oz’)
• Bonobo- Days to come (Last.fm played Bonobo in ‘Fink’ radio, Ninja Tune is a great label)
• Hot Chip - The warning (haven’t heard the new album yet)
• Kings of Convenience - Riot on an empty street (it’s snowing right now, what better than Scandinavian music?)

And even though I am very pleased with this selection, it’s got some good tracks for reading while on the train as well as for walking though the center of Amsterdam I know it is far from perfect. A perfect mix depends on various variables like where, when and for how long you intend to listen to it. At this point I am not even sure whether or not I will add several individual tracks to the playlist or, as I have done now, select a couple of albums which will make it possible to not listen to a shuffle but in fact an entire album.

Which brings me to a different point. I believe that the iPod shuffle is superior to its bigger siblings, not in spite of but because of it shortcomings. There is not too much memory on a shuffle so you have to really select what tracks you add instead of adding just everything and thereby merely postponing the moment at which you cannot choose what music you’d like to listen to. It’s the same reason why I will never download a ringtone but just use the one my mobile came with. If you start downloading ringtones, you will never be happy and just keep on wanting more and better ones. Leave it to the marketing people. It’s just like the casino: the only way to win is not to play. Furthermore, the iPod shuffle does not have a screen or various sorts of buzzers. It limits your options to the basics, which is such a relieve nowadays.

I believe that over 85% of all e-mail traffic consists of so called ‘unsolicited spam’ (what ’solicited spam’ would be… I have no idea). You would think that if an industry is as big as the spamming industry, where you reach so many consumers just waiting to spend their money on stuff they don’t need, that it would employ state of the art copy writers. Writers of spam e-mail can potentially reach an incredibly large audience. With just a little scientific research you could upgrade the response on your spamming from, I guess, o,0001% to 0.001%. This would make you a tremendous amounts of money! I know spam sucks and we really shouldn’t advocate it, but all the other advertising sucks too and that industry brought us beautiful artists and philosophers like Roy Lichtenstein, Matt Beaumont and Paul Arden. ‘Even evil will spawn good’ which sounds like an awful quote from a Star Wars film, but in fact; I just made that one up. I apologise.

For an art project I decided to jump into my spamfilter and read the spam I received (over a weekend, this amounts to over 1500 messages), or actually… I just read the subject lines. I was very eager to be seduced into actually opening an e-mail that I thought would make interesting reading. “Come on, show me those creative, witty, intriguing subject lines that lure me into worlds of pleasure, self fulfillment, comfort and profitability!” Instead, I found creative, lingual carnage.

“‘Do you want a -insert designer name- replica at -insert number-% discount?” How is that going to seduce me? Personally, I am not triggered. Or how about ‘university small business loans’ (you can replace university with government, insurance, national, small business or whatever) as a subject line. That’s not really going to make anyone think that’s an e-mail worth reading, is it? Not even an attempt to target on sex: ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating girlfriend‘ with could appeal to me, being a man - even though I don;t have a cheating girlfriend, as far as I know) became ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating partner’ thus making it even more impersonal. ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that girl in bed’ is turned into the hideous ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that person in bed’. Yep, that makes me curious… NOT!

Personally I think that that is adding insult to injury. Those b#*tards are clogging up my e-mail server and they’re not even taking it seriously. Come on guys; if efficient communication was that easy, would Coca Cola spend all those millions of dollars on making their 3D commercials? Just put a little effort into it, you lazy slackers.

A raw selection of poor copywriting material is being refined at the CultBlender site.

Please read this post, you might win an i-pod. Upon reading this post, we will save your ip-number and store that data on our servers. We will combine that data with the information we will obtain from your internet access provider, which they are required to store for several months by our governments. Obviously, with all that data, on all those servers, it is easy to find a backdoor somewhere and get access to your websurfing information.

By snooping around your personal surfing data we will find out what your personal interests are and start sending you some tailored spam. So far, so good. Chances are also good, that we find out where you do your online banking. From your myspace page we will find out some essential data, like your date of birth et cetera, but do not worry. We are not thieves so we won’t actually get into your accounts. Not unless we have also found out that the way you actually made that money say… you are a an international money trader or something, is by stealing it yourself. In which case we will invest it in saving rainforests and educating children on your behalf. No need to thank us. With you accounts, date of birth, and address we are set up for obtaining your social security number. Luckily for us, your government will doubtlessly have all information we need to… erm… ‘own your arse’… linked to that one number.

This will save us a lot of needless hassle. Your credit-card details, your health insurance, the amount of super-saver points from the supermarket and the products you bought to earn those, if you have any debts, if you were ever active in politics, where you work(ed), who you called on your mobile phone, when and how long, when your drove your car past what toll-booth, who you talked to at the mall (unless that person is an unknown terrorist, obviously)… this information might all prove to be useful. We don’t know for what exactly, but rest assured. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

The great thing about all that personal data that is so conveniently linked to each other is that it provides jobs for government officials, nothing else. And it helps fight terrorism. And should you ever recover from a coma and suffer memory loss, isn’t it easy that your government can tell you all about your old life? From your favorite restaurant to your usual brand of undies. Storing and combining data is great!

But we lied about the i-pod. Sorry.

Watch how I cleverly start a new post, while at the same time promoting an item on an alternative webpage. While I was reading through some of the answers I had received from Kendrick Mar for the e-terview (Yes, I just a made that one up, yes it’s bloody awful) with him I was writing for the cultblender site, it suddenly dawned on me: Painting as an art-form is here to stay… where a lot of digital art forms may not be.

Kendrick said something along the lines of: “Painters who prefer not to have pictures of their art taken and posted on the internet -since you can never translate a painting to a digital image- are like musicians who don’t want their music recorded to cd, since it’s always better if you hear it live.” (not a quote, free interpretation) To me, it seems there is a lot of truth in that. In Wired magazine I read an article by David Byrne (former ‘Talking Heads’ band member and recording artist) who stated that the main mistake made by the record industry when trying to find an answer to downloading of music is that they thought that they were in the music business. Which is not true. Record labels are in the business of selling containers in which you contain the music you like to listen to. Big difference. The containers are things you can hack, make copies of. The music itself however….

Music, like painting, is an analogue and organic art form. A lot of its beauty comes from the personality the artist can put in it, or even the small mistakes he or she makes. That’s why we love to see those things in real life. And it’s the whole package, all the senses are important, smelling the paint, tasting the air, feeling the connection with all the other fans in the stadium. If art is performed or seen live, you can feel it, submerge in it. And since people will want the real live experience, it will always be possible to make money of it and make a living a an artist. If you are in the business of making digital art, it may be that you find that -even though you’re brilliant- it’s almost impossible to make a living of it. Because it will always be possible to make exact copies of your work that will be spread for free as soon as it seems that you can make some money of it. That’s the internet anarchy for you.

We also see an exact opposite development. Polaroid has announced it will stop producing their films because of the success of digital photography. It seems no one develops a film anymore. Except, obviously, for those photographers that enjoy developing their own films, which will - as long as you have a vague notion about what you’re doing- always lead to better results than the pictures that come from the lab. But by developing your photos yourself, you are , again, creating an analogue version that cannot be digitally copied, because you will lose a lot of the original attraction.

Like painting, analogue photography or live music performances will never die as an art-form. Simply because the total experiences cannot be copied to a digital form, from the relative comfort of your won home.

I love this feature in WordPress where you can see what people were searching for, upon opening one of the posts you wrote. Yesterday, not once but twice (yes: twice in one single day), someone typed the words ‘FEMALE MIDGETS’ (yes, in capitals) and ended up one of my posts.

Haven’t got a clue why. Haven’t got a clue which one. I’m actually dying to read it myself now. If you are the one that searched for female midgets, Could you please let me know if you found what you were looking for on my blog? I won’t judge. I really won’t…. (as to be expected: the number of readers looking for information on ‘(single) female midgets’ has increased dramatically since two days… well, I welcome all readers…)

Anyway; no knowledge is useless (or: al knowledge is useful). And because the two fine people that ended up in my little corner on the internet, today I have also learned something knew; a female midget is called; a ‘gidget’ . Thank you wikipedia.

On wikipedia I also found out that, apparently, there is this big (mind the pun) thing in the world about ‘midgets wrestling’ . Wrestling legend ‘André the Giant‘ is rumoured to have wresteld no less than six midget wrestlers (if there were ande gidgets present, wikipedia does not say) at the same time. And I did write a piece aboput streetart hero Shepard Fairey once. And Shepard Fairey has posted stickers with Andrés face all over the world. Could that perhaps complete the circle? We just might never know….