Re: [Pen-l] BBC | Bomb blows hole in Lenin statue

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
This is a cliched subject oft repeated.  However, I have a fresh  
perspective so I'll respond.

A statue is a fixed and stable file of knowledge that is placed in a  
public space.  So there is a kind of strategy for knowledge production  
about putting visual displays in the public.  Usually displays are  
flat like a billboard for advertising.  Some commercial media like  
contemporary movies try to exploit the depth information in displays  
with 3d techniques for commercial properties.

The basic contempt for statues is that they are static and hand hewn  
representations.  Machine reproductions from cameras far surpass the  
ability to represent that hand made statues could produce.  In  
essence, a single photo image these days might be for high quality  
cameras about 35 million pixels that can be done about twice to six  
times a second.  The actual resolution of the statue might be less  
than 35 million pixels even on the scale of Mount Rushmore.

Public display of information is dominated by text in signs in cities,  
and roadways.  Fixed static signage is usually very low wattage file  
size displays.  Ten words or less.  Less than a 1000 bytes of  
information.  By comparison a statue is a bit more ambitious with more  
than a megabyte of display information.  However text efficiency to  
represent brain schema is what makes text more useful than visual  
representation.  A statue is all surface and not much schema.

Public space can be labeled like signs by GPS techniques and stored  
knowledge seen in a location with for example an iPhone.  Google is  
one of the more famous exponents of mapping public space, but remote  
storage also has military meaning too.   A map is a surface which  
shows more or less influences of the missing dimensions.  So for  
example 3 d movies combine two surfaces to display more depth  
information than is contained in a single surface display.

Surfaces parallel brain processing regions.  In the brain a schema is  
a surface processing region 'layer'.  Usually the brain region has six  
layers to process surface information.  Think of surface information  
as what the skin layer does and evolving through evolution to what the  
eye retina does as a surface of the retina.  In other words in the  
brain a surface is processed by other layers to extract kinds of  
information.  Broadly speaking with visual information, the brain  
regionalizes processing of depth information or motion information in  
distinctly different regions.

Getting back to public displays, a statue uses depth to display  
knowledge about say how someone 'looked'.  Depth makes the statue  
whole.  Take a single photo of someone in the sense of a sculpture  
wanting to know body shape and the depth question is difficult to  
answer as well as a statue hand done.  Usually these days various  
photos are stitched together in composites to give a three d surface  
depiction of a human body.  And that stitching organization of visual  
information is the sense of 'wholeness' a statue presents.

Storing information for a location on servers elsewhere allows us to  
address file size limitations in fixed signage or statues.  And  
further to 'process' information by specifics of what people want to  
know.  So for example maps are presented in pieces and the whole map  
must be processed to access a piece.  Any given location in public  
space has a variety of public uses and needs that ought to be  
addressed or developed by increasing information or knowledge about  
the location.  This then is the real deal behind a statue.
Thanks,
Doyle Saylor
On Apr 7, 2009, at 7:47 AM, Jim Devine wrote:

> I forgot to mention that Lenin did not want any statues of himself
> built. I believe he said that all statues do is to attract pigeons.

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