The College HIll Independent Vol. 32 Issue 4

the college hill independent Volume 32

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a Brown/RISD weekly

March 4, 2016

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Issue 04

the

NEWS 02 Week in Overreactions Jack Brook, Alif Ibrahim, & Julia Tompkins 03

Volume 32 No. 4

Antonement Joshua Bronk

METRO 05 Checking In Will Tavlin & Erin West

From the editors: Sometimes a situation so dreadful arises that the only response is a total lack of response—a simple giving-in in the face of awful conditions. What is it to be resigned when confronted by a monstrosity?

ARTS

Immanuel Kant proposes four fundamental questions.

08 Ammo-Apparel Mary Catherine Nanda 13 An Average White Cube Brock Lownes

What can I know? Once we were stealth-camping with some friends in the northern Chilean desert, really in the middle of nowhere. We wake up at dawn surrounded by field mice, nibbling our fingertips and eating our leftover dinner scraps. When we sit up we are confronted with a scene of such terror, such utter, unspeakable dread, that all we can do is ignore it: a cube of meat (we’re vegetarians) and a single cigarette (we don’t smoke anymore) on the ground at our feet. “Oh,” we say. What ought I to do? Half-asleep, we feel neither horror nor amusement, just drowsy resignation in the face of a deeply sinister future in which we don’t figure, having been similarly hacked into meaty bits. All

FEATURES

we can do is fall back asleep without discussion, collectively giving up.

07 Unreality Jack Brook 11 Medecine for WHO? Rani Chumbak

In our resignation we don’t sleep well. We share nightmares of Chilean killers smoking Marlboro Reds, the type only dreamed of in Bolaño stories and Chucky IV: Curse of Chucky. What can I hope?

Nothing, clearly. We are obviously fated to die here in the desert, here in Chile among the field mice.

We finally bring ourselves to wake up for real and investigate further, confronting the unthinkable at our toes. We look closer at the cube of meat. In sharper sunlight it’s awful, marbled and veiny, two square inches of fleshy red beef in the sand. We pick it up. It’s a rock. The cigarette, a thin bone.

OCCULT

It’s the meatiest rock you’ll ever see, but still.

09 Invisible Cities Robert Weiner

What is Man?, Kant finally asks. At the end of the day, we are all just cubes of meat, smoking cigarettes.

LB & MB

TECH 16

Drive My Car Julian Fox

LITERARY 17 Three Poems Anna Bonesteel EPHEMERA 15 Not a Blank Page Mark Benz X 18 You Can’t See Me Lukas Eigler-Harding

Managing Editors Camera Ford Alec Mapes-Frances Francis Torres News Jane Argodale Piper French Julia Tompkins Metro Sophie Kasakove Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Lisa Borst Jonah Max Eli Neuman-Hammond Features Gabrielle Hick Patrick McMenamin Dominique Pariso Science Fatima Husain Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Tech Kamille Johnson

P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Interviews Elias Bresnick

Metabolics Sam Samore

Staff Writers Ben Berke Liz Cory Kelton Ellis Liby Hays Corey Hébert Hannah Maier-Katkin Madeleine Matsui Kimberley Meilun Ryan Rosenberg

Ephemera Mark Benz Jake Brodsky India Ennenga

Staff Illustrators Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko

X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff

Web Charlie Windolf

Occult Lance Gloss Literary Marcus Mamourian

List Polina Godz Rick Salamé Cover Jade Donaldson

Senior Editors Sebastian Clark Rick Salamé Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee MVP

Celeste Matsui

Design & Illustration Celeste Matsui Alexa Terfloth Zak Ziebell

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@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN OVERREACTIONS

by Jack Brook, Alif Ibrahim, and Julia Tompkins illustration by Yuko Okabe

Precious Memes The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thought it would simply be another case of swiftly repressed political satire. A minor blip on the radar of Turkish political dissent at worst. Instead, to his dismay—and the amusement and horror of the rest of the world—it has become a landmark trial for…

Lord of the Rings fans.

In October of 2015, Dr. Bingil Ciftci made the retrospectively poor decision to post a meme on his Facebook page comparing images of Gollum with pictures of Erdoğan.

Ciftci, why couldn’t you have been satisfied making a meme about a different politician? Say, a side-by-side of Vladimir Putin and Dobby the house elf, or Donald Trump and Grumpy Cat. You had to pick the despotic ruler in your own country, where insulting the president can lead to four years in prison.

There was one unexpected legal technicality, however.

Ciftci said in court that he had not intended to insult the president by comparing him to Gollum. At heart, Ciftci says that he believes Gollum is actually a decent guy. He even went so far as to say the meme contained no images of Gollum. In fact, it was meant to depict Smeagol, Gollum’s benign alter ego (à la Jekyll and Hyde). The state had not anticipated this unprecedented legal defense—what will go down in the annals of legal history as the “Smeagol plea.”

Complicating matters, the judge in Ciftci’s trial was forced to admit that he didn’t know the difference between a hobbit and a dwarf—he hadn’t ever cracked open a single LOTR novel and felt he was unqualified to make the final call.

Hold on to your hat, Gandalf, because here’s where things get crazy—the judge called for a LOTR expert panel to determine whether Gollum is good or evil. (Note: binge-watching the trilogy this weekend will not qualify you to be on this panel).

“Smeagol is a joyful, sweet character,” said LOTR director Peter Jackson in an interview with The Wrap, unsuccessfully attempting to defuse the situation. “He is not evil, conniving, or malicious—these personality traits belong to Gollum, who should never be confused with Smeagol. ...In fact he’s very loveable.”

I don’t know if I would quite go that far, but the point stands—perhaps the dude is more like a suffering drug addict than a profoundly malevolent being. After all, the ring clearly corrupted him. He also does take Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom, despite occasionally trying to kill the “tricksy hobbitses.”

It’s fun to laugh at Turkish restrictions on free speech from a distance, but behind the absurdity are very real issues—Ciftci, for one, has lost his job and could spend over two years in prison, depending on the outcome of the trial in May. And closer to home, just last week the Donald was heard calling for repeals to US libel laws so that anyone who insulted him could be sued. Considering this man could become our president, make your Trump memes while you can.

Take the High Road It’s 2012. The Hague has a transportation problem. A roadkill problem. Red squirrels routinely flattened while trying to cross one of the city’s major motorways. Yet in the selfproclaimed “International City of Peace and Justice,” located in the Western Netherlands, it’s a problem they’re willing to tackle.

In response to the declining species numbers, Dutch engineering stepped in to combat the animal injustice. The mayor of The Hague commissioned a special suspension bridge for the squirrels to cross the N44 motorway from the Haagse Bos forest to Clingedel Park. The bridge was meant to provide safe passage for the rodents. According to Hennie Greven of the local Animal Protection Agency, the bridge would “prevent the rodents from being run over” giving the squirrel population “the chance to grow again,” as reported in The Hague Online, a popular expat newspaper. The bridge was no small investment either, as the city government put up €150,000 (163,035 USD) largely from environmentally designated tax-dollars, for its construction.

For a city that frequently employs the Twitter hashtag #peacejustice, the motivation to construct the bridge requires only a short stretch of the imagination. The local Animal Protection Agency was appeased, and the local red squirrels are no longer forced to choose between mobility and life.

However, usage records since the bridge’s completion are anything but inspiring. The Times, a UK publication, reports that CCTV cameras show only five squirrels having made use of the bridge to date. All five squirrels used the bridge in the period between 2014 and 2016, three in 2014, and two in 2015, according to the mayor’s office. This means that each trip over the N44 cost $32,607, based on the cost of the bridge. As Hague councilor Arjen Dubbelaar told a local radio station: “Private taxis for the squirrels would have been cheaper.” But hey, that’s the price we pay for taking the high road.

–JT

Thanks, But No Tanks Jakarta’s governor, Basuki “Ahok” Purnama, came up with a plan last month to convert Kalijodo, a red-light district in Northern Jakarta, into a public park. Until now, the area had always been an open secret within socially conservative Indonesia, where the government recently called for the removal of emojis depicting same-sex couples from instant messaging services.

Kalijodo Street is not unlike other red-light districts in Southeast Asia. The “standard package” gets you a couple of drinks, a round of karaoke, and half an hour of sexual services. The area is mostly operated by gangsters, or preman, dressed almost exclusively in Ramones t-shirts. The women sit outside the small bars on dingy plastic chairs, offering what’s colloquially known as “fleeting bliss” to passing motorcyclists.

Daeng Azis, a local landlord who controls 1847 square meters of land on which a number of these brothels are located, has stated that he is “150 percent against prostitution.” He also emphasized the fact that he has routinely paid property taxes since 1997. Several clubs have deployed strategy analysts to respond to Ahok’s call to action. One brothel, Kafe Pondok Melayu 2, has cut its prices by almost 30 percent, from $11 to $7.50 for full service.

However, the Indonesian media seems to have diverted its attention from landlords and business owners, directing it towards the reaction of the sex workers instead.

Mimi, a 21-year-old sex worker from the area, told national newspaper Kompas that Ahok won’t be able to complete his project: “We’re not harming the environment or creating excessive litter, so I don’t see why he wouldn’t leave us alone,” she said. “I doubt he has the guts to come here. A guy like [Ahok] won’t make it here…unless he came here with a tank. Ha-ha. Come if you dare.”

But Ahok has made it clear that he’s coming. “If they want me to send a tank, I’ll send a tank,” Ahok responded.

“Of course I’m not going to send a tank. I only said that because that’s the metaphor they used,” he swiftly added.

–AI

–JB

March 4, 2016

NEWS

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RECKONING WITH MEMORY Atonement in Germany and the US

by Joshua Bronk illustration by Yuko Okabe On February 11, Germany began its trial of Reinhold Hanning, a former guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. He is charged with over 170,000 counts of accessory to murder. Hanning, who is 94, was arrested in 2014, almost 70 years after the end of World War II. His arrest is preceded by the 2011 arrest and conviction of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian national who defected to the Germans as a POW. He had been serving in the Red Army and was captured following a battle in Eastern Crimea. Demjanjuk was ninety-one at the time of his sentencing. He was given five years in prison for his complicity in the murder of 28,000 people at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland, where he was stationed as a guard in 1943. These trials are the latest in a series of actions the German state has taken to officially memorialize the horrors of the Holocaust.

20 years ago, Germany became the first European country to establish a national remembrance day for the victims of the genocide. With the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin starting to crumble, Germany built three new monuments to the victims of the Holocaust, including one dedicated to the Roma victims, according to German magazine Spiegel.

These efforts to address the tragedies of the Holocaust not only produce a new generation of memory, but also instill a public national memory.

Of course, even in distilling this narrative, the German state is not perfect.

According to a report written by Humanity in Action, an international rights education non-profit, Holocaust education in Germany is inconsistent due to the lack of a standardized curriculum, although the majority of teachers do make efforts to discuss the history. The organization notes a number of reasons for this, including the generational lag, the difficulties in instituting a consistent narrative across different types of school systems, and the relatively small number of Jews still living in Germany.

Despite these difficulties in continuing to acknowledge its history in the public sphere, Germany has made an effort to create room for reflection, for growth, and for healing. As a public impulse, Germany’s memorialization is both accessible to all and present in structural memory. It is, truly, a physical reminder of what was, and what remains. Theirs is a hard past, and painful to recall, yet present within Germany is a moral compulsion to remember.

This past month, an exhibit opened at the German Historical Museum of works made by people imprisoned at concentration camps. Chancellor Angela Merkel inaugurated the exhibit, stating, “The millions of individual stories during the Shoah [Holocaust] remain deeply rooted in our national conscience.” To this day, Germany continues its public and national efforts to ingrain its difficult history into the collective conscience of its citizens.

Unfortunately, the United States has no similar moral impulse. Caught in a cycle of revisionism perpetuated through curricula that fail to engage deeply with the country’s traumatic past, and stuck in an economic model that offers vastly unequal opportunities for advancement, the United States makes little effort at the national level to address the histories that feed this ignorance. And in its treatment of slavery, the institution that has most profoundly affected the trajectory and growth of the United States as a nation, America has failed to foster a broad consciousness of its own culpability in preserving, perpetuating, and promoting the subordination of Black Americans. While both Germany and the United States have seen myriad individual efforts to bring to light their respective national traumas, the United States fails at a structural level to claim responsibility for its past.

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The argument here is not to compare and contrast the horrors each country perpetrated, nor to claim they are equal. There is no gain in attempting to quantify pain, trauma, and hurt. Further, because the Holocaust and US slavery constitute vastly different histories, neither is the purpose of this piece to try and draw normative conclusions on how states should act in the aftermath of monstrosities. Where the comparison lies, however, is in the immense these histories had on the US and Germany.

The entire US economy was tied up in slavery, and although much guilt falls on the South and its large plantation economy, the industrializing North, too, was deeply invested in the institution, and played a large part in the importation and transportation of slaves. In Germany, Hitler’s rise took place in a critical moment after World War I when inflation was astronomical, the economy was busted, and people were desperate. By 1933, the Nazi party had won 44 percent of the vote in the Reichstag, the German parliament. Up to 14 million people voted for the Nazi party at its peak.

For both the US and Germany, these systems enveloped the whole country, from its political system and economic structure to cultural production and technological advancement. In their massive scope, they merit recognition, and they merit reckoning. +++ The 2011 Demjanjuk case set a new precedent in German law, overturning a 1969 ruling requiring defendants to be connected with a specific killing.

Since then, German prosecutors have brought to trial dozens of people thought to be accountable for some of the brutality of the Holocaust.

Though some feel sympathy for the aged suspects—the dwindling number of survivors are mostly in their nineties—a new generation of German prosecutors, called the “grandchildren generation,” disagree. In their view, Germany is trying some of its eldest citizens to preserve and commemorate a traumatic national past, a collective memory of violence. Though they are controversial, and perhaps even excessive—Demjanjuk died in 2012, effectively making the point moot in his case—these trials bring to life a real commitment to the narrative Germany continually seeks to renew. Morally just or not, the trials reveal an attention to detail at the national level.

In the United States, the rhetoric of colorblindness has gained traction in recent years. In a 2013 poll conducted by NBC News, 59 percent of white Americans believed the United States “is a colorblind society.” The argument behind colorblindness, that all people should be treated without preference because there is no inequality of opportunity, reflects a revisionist history of the United States. Colorblindness does not exist, and cannot exist, because all people do not have equal treatment in the public sphere, let alone before the law and other institutions. According to data compiled by political scientists Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley, about 60 percent of white Americans believed that Black people, who are incarcerated at a much higher rate than white people, deserve this penal treatment because of predispositions toward lawlessness and criminality.

It’s almost inconceivable to believe that Black people in the United States receive equal treatment in front of the law given how recently they won full access to political citizenship. Public schools were only legally desegregated in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision.

Ten years later, only 2.3 percent of Black students in the Deep South went to

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integrated schools, says a report by civilrights.org. Despite segregation being officially illegal, schools are as segregated today as they were 40 years ago, according to PBS. Redlining, the process of excluding Black communities and other communities of color from mortgage lending, was outlawed in 1968. Yet, in 2015, the largest bank in Wisconsin settled a case in which the Department of Housing and Urban Development declared that the bank discriminated against Black people and Latinos in its lending policies from 2008-2010. These two examples are by no means comprehensive, but aim to demonstrate that on the basic policy level, without concern for implicit and systemic racial bias, Black people are not treated equally by housing, education, and other institutions.

Colorblindness is rooted in an unwillingness to deal with America’s history, and is reinforced by an education system that conflates nationalism and patriotism with willful ignorance. In response to the 2014 revisions of the Advance Placement US History curriculum by the College Board, which the Republican National Committee denounced as focusing on the “negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects,” Oklahoma, Georgia, and Texas all proposed bills to cut the course altogether.

Oklahoma’s passed. In response, a year later, the College Board released a final version of the revisions, with references to the Founders’ belief in white superiority, the abolitionist struggles of Black slaves, and mention of colonial racial hierarchies all softened and made less critical of the American nationbuilding project. In 2010, Arizona banned ethnic studies curricula, which center the narratives of struggle and resistance of people of color in this country.

Instead of acknowledging the reality that Black people were enslaved—owned, viewed as property, and deprived of all legal recourse—books like A Birthday Cake for George Washington, which came out this year and tells the story of George Washington’s “servants,” reinforce a false history, removing guilt from white slave-owners because the slaves were, supposedly, happy.

The rhetoric of colorblindness, rooted in this manipulation of history to create an alternative narrative more pleasing to the white majority, leads to a logical impasse for white America. People of color have been moving, creating, and fighting to put the realities of the inequalities they face on the national agenda. Yet, at a systemic level, the US is stuck at square one, unable to coherently discuss the history of slavery. In 2008, the House passed a bill apologizing for slavery; the Senate passed a different version in 2009. Despite the recent election of Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, the two assemblies could not resolve the differences between the bills, and no official apology was ever passed. The tension was primarily over how the apology could morph into proposals for reparations, a contention that was revived again during this election cycle. Even Bernie Sanders, who has repeatedly talked about fixing racial inequalities during his campaign, does not support reparations. Citing its divisiveness, he espouses policies that look forward, not back, in solving unequal access to opportunity in the US. To look forward without looking back, however, is misguided. The repercussions of slavery in the United States have resulted in governmental, political, and cultural inequalities, and applying a policy solution to a problem that penetrates deeply into the American ethos is inadequate.

Sanders’ contention that reparations would be divisive is an understatement. In failing to cultivate a national memory that meaningfully addresses the history and legacies of slavery, the United States instead created a breeding ground for a culture that seeks to erase race and racial history.

March 4, 2016

When Beyoncé took to the Super Bowl halftime show stage, her performance an open homage to the Black Panthers, many in white America took it as a personal attack. One news outlet, the Gateway Pundit, wrote, “Beyonce’s Super Bowl Performance Was a Racist Political Statement In Support of Marxist Cop Killers.” In the comments, people compared Beyoncé to various animals, used gendered and racial slurs, and equated her allusion to the Black Panthers as equal to invoking the KKK. When Kendrick Lamar performed at the Grammys, walking out in shackles and calling out the prison industrial complex, police violence, and injustice, he was criticized for making his performance about race. These examples are merely emblems of the antagonistic logic of colorblindness. Through deliberate historical revisionism, the present cannot be understood. And if the present is taught as an era of equality, of opportunity, and of colorblindness, then bringing to the fore the legacies of systemic inequality creates contradictions in the logic. These contradictions provoke anger and resistance. They produce racial antagonism.

They undermine the values of hard work and equality that many white people, and even people of color, place at the core of their understanding of success; like a wounded animal that feels threatened, they, too, lash out. +++ Germany’s trial of aging Holocaust war criminals may seem excessive, but it serves a larger project: the collection and recollection of national memory.

The trials forbid people to forget or to misremember. The Holocaust was only 70 years ago, they remind, and its effects linger on the German polity.

In the United States, slavery officially ended over 150 years ago. Jim Crow didn’t officially end until 1965, twenty years after the Holocaust. Race-based violence continues en masse in the present. Facing contemporary realities requires dealing with the traumas of the past systemically, thoroughly, and truthfully. Policy solutions, even good ones, are not enough. Building a just present, and preventing a more unjust future, requires collectively understanding the horrors of the past in all their ugliness.

JOSHUA BRONK B’16 remembers Selena Quintanilla.

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Labor Grievances in Brown University’s Changing Libraries In February 2016, Brown University completed its full scale renovations of the John D. Rockefeller Library’s ground floor. A new lobby features glass walls, pleated leather couches, and a space-age circulation desk. What was once the periodicals room has been gutted and replaced with the Sidney E. Frank Digital Studio—a large room akin to an Apple Store. Flat screen TVs, industrial grade extension cables hanging from the ceiling, and a 3D printer adorn the space that, according to the library’s website, is intended to be “a place where faculty and students from all the disciplines are actively encouraged to mingle, share their experiences, and learn through a series of workshops and project showcases.” Sleek, minimal, and cutting edge, Brown’s lavish central humanities library is a symbol of digital innovation and is picture-perfect for the cover of a college pamphlet.

Brown’s libraries are in a starkly different position than the majority of public libraries nationally—which have been struggling for years. Accelerated by the 2008 recession, budget cuts, digitization, and drops in public usage have resulted in nearly a quarter of US states slashing their library funding by over 10 percent. In 2009, here in Providence, budget constraints forced Providence Public Libraries to consider closing five branch libraries until a private nonprofit organization, the Providence Community Library, stepped in and took control. Jennifer Romans, an administrator at Providence’s Smith Hill Public Library, is forced to spend much of her time scraping together grant funding to cover the costs of basic and critical services, such as supplying residents with Providence’s annual summer reading list, building an elevator to comply with American Disability Act standards, and even repairing the building’s roof. Because of its tight budget, the Smith Hill library is severely understaffed with only three full time employees. “There are two days each week where just to be able to take our lunch break, to get coverage, we have to get someone to come over from another library,” Romans tells the Independent. At Smith Hill, funding cuts have hit workers the hardest.

Like Romans, Brown University Librarian Harriette Hemmasi—overseer of the university’s five libraries—also spends much of her time looking for outside funding. Access to wealthy donors and alumni has allowed Hemmasi to undertake expensive projects like the new lobby and digital studio. These renovations, entirely funded by donors, make Brown unique; the $8 million Brown allocated for its libraries’ purchasing and staffing costs during the fiscal year 2014-15 makes the university’s library system the most extensive and well-funded in Rhode Island. However, even without the same budget constraints as Smith Hill, Brown is no less of a pressured environment for its workers. The influx of funding for renovations has ushered in a slew of unique challenges for Brown’s library staff—especially for unionized workers. +++ Traditionally, unionized workers at Brown’s libraries have occupied positions such as shelvers, bibliographers, and circulation desk workers. These jobs sometimes require a Masters of Library Sciences (MLS) degree, but most are attainable with a high school diploma or G.E.D. In the past few years, however, Brown has transitioned from hiring for these more traditional unionized positions to filling highly specialized listings such as “Digital Humanities Scholars”— non-unionized jobs that expect advanced academic training. Ian Straughn, a self-described archaeologist and assistant professor of Anthropology at Brown, is a Joukowsky Family Middle East Studies Librarian and specializes in digital research. “It used to be everyone had a library degree,” Straughn told the Indy in his spacious office on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library, “of the three of us in this office, not one of us has a library degree.”

As scholarship increasingly becomes more digitized and research methods diversify, the specialized knowledge of Straughn and his counterparts is a valuable asset to an elite research institution. Nonetheless, Brown’s expansion in these positions has left little room for members of United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island (USAW), the union that represents Brown’s unionized library workers. Karen McAninch is a USAW business agent and heads the union’s bargaining team. She told the Indy that “[Brown’s] library has historically and continues to define new positions as non-union, whether because they are ‘professional’ or ‘exempt’, including but not exclusively positions requiring master’s in library science.” The union is concerned that Brown’s shifting hiring landscape is working to erode their membership and, in turn, their bargaining unit. In 2014, amidst contract negotiations between USAW and the library, the union noted in a letter sent to Brown faculty that, since 2007, the number of library union positions has declined by nearly one third. As of December 2014, only 48 percent of Brown library workers were unionized, down 6 percent since 2007. This, coupled with a drop in total library positions available from 164 in 2007 to 127 in 2014, doesn’t bode well for unionized labor’s future at Brown. Currently, the Brown Library is choosing to permanently fill only 1.75 out of five recently vacated library union positions, after years of cutting other

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positions by attrition (the .75 indicating that the position was filled for only ¾ of the year).

An anonymous Rockefeller Library staffer told the Indy that the university announced it is cutting daytime security positions because of alleged “budget constraints.” This staffer, standing behind the sleek plexiglass circulation desk said this statement from the university was “hard to swallow.”

From Brown’s perspective, the shift in hiring is justified. During the 2014 contract negotiations between Brown and USAW, Marisa Quinn, former Vice President for Public Affairs and University Relations, told the Brown Daily Herald, “Staffing decisions must take into account significant changes in the nature of work in the library, the increased use of online materials, and other technological innovations that serve library users.” But why this means unionized library workers must be left out of these changes is unclear. In their 2014 contract negotiations, the union bargained strongly for access to training that would allow them to fill new positions with an emphasis on digital scholarship. Brown has thus far made no significant efforts to provide these resources.

Within the past year, Brown has begun replacing unionized labor in more systematic ways.

In March 2015, the university launched major renovations for its Sciences Library. During a period of five and a half months, Brown planned to gut five floors of the library in order to clear stack space for a Social Sciences Research Lab, a Language Resource Center, as well as collaborative work spaces. To complete these renovations, the university outsourced labor to two temporary work agencies: W.B. Meyer and Gentry. In total, they brought in eleven workers, or “Limited Duration Employees,” to remove books from the Science Library, reshelve texts, and transport materials to Brown’s library Annex. According to USAW, this was work that should have been available to its workers first and foremost—a request that was denied by the university. The union specifically took issue with the loss of potential overtime pay, which, for Brown, would have been more costly than temp wages.

In the middle of the Sciences Library renovations, the university proceeded to violate the union’s labor contract. On June 12, 2015, USAW filed a grievance against Brown University for violating three Limited Duration Employee (LDE) contracts. According to the union’s 2014 agreement, a temporary worker could only be brought in for a period of up to 90 days. Brown violated the 90-day limit and worked three of the Sciences Library temporary workers for over five months. In response to the grievance, the university conceded 135 hours of total overtime to union members who were restricted from work given to W.B. Meyer employees, and issued a payment of $983.75 to USAW as compensation for their lost work.

Mark Baumer is a librarian at the Sciences Library and an active member of the union. His most serious grievance with Brown University is not necessarily the extra weeks that the temp workers stayed on, but rather with Brown’s tendency to leave staffers out of decision-making structures entirely. “This was coming from the provost, down to the library administration, getting pushed down on the workers and at no point in any of that did the library administration or university say, how did this affect the workers?” Baumer tells the Indy. “The union had to step up and go against the whole structure.”

The temporary workers’ contract violation isn’t the first major grievance library workers have filed with the university. A long-standing history exists between the union’s rights to fair treatment and the administration’s attempts at superseding them. In the past decade alone, USAW has renegotiated three separate contracts with the university—each more contentious than the last. Tense negotiations in 2010 kicked off when the administration demanded that library workers pay more than double their current health care contribution. After temporarily extending their contract three times, solidarity marches on Brown’s Main Green and in University Hall, and a threatened strike from the union, negotiations were finally settled when the university agreed to implement the contributions hike incrementally over the next four years. The university also agreed to pair those health care increases with yearly wage increases of 1.5-2 percent. When their contract ended in 2014, the union made stronger demands: lower health insurance contributions coupled with wage increases, as well as access to training that would allow unionized workers to fill specialized positions. Again, the union’s contract, which expired September 30, 2014, was extended well into December as negotiations stalled.

After another series of demonstrations—one of which gathered over 100 protestors outside of the Rockefeller Library on its 50th Anniversary Ceremony—the negotiations ended with an agreement to invest in more training for library workers.

Mark Baumer and other library workers felt largely optimistic after the 2014 negotiations.

One stipulation in the new contract established a labor management committee that would serve to facilitate better communication between labor and administration; it was the answer to many unionized workers’ concerns of being left out of the library’s decision-making procedures.

Baumer is on the labor management committee, but according to him the meetings are

The College Hill Independent

by Erin West & Will Tavlin illustration by Celeste Matsui

essentially meaningless. “[There’s] no one from upper levels of management” says Baumer. The administrators have instead opted to send a human resources representative to every meeting so far. “How are you supposed to have a conversation about the direction of the library when the people making the decisions about the direction of the library aren’t there to have the discussion?”

Speaking to the Indy, Harriette Hemmasi emphasized the number of parties consulted during projects like the lobby renovations: architects, an administrative space planning committee, and the university provost. Mentioning that she had spoken with staff during this process, Hemmasi claimed there were no substantial disputes. One Rockefeller Library staffer, however, told the Indy that she was “horrified” when she saw the blueprints for the new circulation desk. Another staffer said that no one who actually works the circulation desk was asked for feedback; privately, many expressed concerns that the new desk—at half the length of the old one—would negatively affect their ability to organize their materials.

Daniel O’Mahony, Director of Library Planning and Assessment, works with Hemmasi at the helm of library renovations. He explained that many of the physical changes at the Rock are being decided based on a statistical model; stacks are cleared based on the rate at which books are circulated; the administration is monitoring how many people use a room, and when, so that they can decide what can stay. In many ways, data models are useful to the library because they provide a bird’s eye view as to how materials and spaces get used. “There’s a lot of money being spent on these things so it helps to ground that in some semblance of reality,” O’Mahony told the Indy. But in terms of reaching out for further feedback, data is about as far as the administration tends to go. “Just for the sake of conversation,” says O’Mahony, “How else would we do it?”

O’Mahony told the Indy that the administration has reached out to faculty and students and insisted “we are addressing the varied expectations of our patrons better than ever before.”

O’Mahony did say he is aware of worker concerns, but understood their worries as akin to: “Will my office have the same view? Will I have the same amount of space as the person over there?” However, Baumer and others library staffers aren’t necessarily worried about their office space. They’re worried about their jobs and the dwindling bargaining unit’s ability to stand up against unfair employment contracts. There is a glaring lapse in the way Brown’s administration evaluates library space; they are not adequately addressing the needs of those most directly affected by changes—the staff. +++ What Baumer has gotten out of all his dealings with the university, “reaffirms [that] we need a union, we need workers to be able to stand up for themselves because otherwise, the way the university is structured they will just keep forcing things through.” The challenge that Baumer, the union, and other workers have faced during this process is its gradual advancement through seemingly small, hidden changes. “It’s tough for the average person to wrap their head around, but that’s where the university or any administration wins, is when this is too difficult for anyone to pay attention to or follow along and the whole time workers rights are diminishing.

People can say, oh it’s not that bad.”

For the people that spend their entire days and weeks at the libraries, it is that bad. Ian Straughn told the Indy that “the changing nature of spaces is also part of the changing nature of the different skill sets of those who work in the library.” But the cost at which these changes occur is steep. Many workers have been employed by the library longer than administrators, and now their jobs appear less secure. Hidden behind changes to the library’s physical space are also changes with regards to the people that keep that space running.

On February 26, Brown celebrated the opening of the Digital Studio with a presentation and a speech by newly appointed Digital Scholarship Services Manager James Murdock. With library administrators in attendance, Murdock announced, “the space here is really for the community.” This is not the first time Brown has used the language of community with regards to changes at its libraries; Elizabeth Huidekoper—former Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration—opened her op-ed in the Herald amidst the 2014 negotiations: “The Brown community of students, faculty members and staff members is unique in its commitment to advancing fair, supportive and just treatment for all.” But the university is consistently unclear about how the union fits into the community when their treatment of the union is neither ‘fair’ nor ‘supportive’: loss of additional working hours and higher-level positions, unconsulted adjustments to their space, blatant violations of their contracts. And it isn’t changing anytime soon. Later this Spring, the Rockefeller Library’s second floor computer cluster will be gutted and replaced with a new graduate student space. Equipped with a kitchen, common areas, and a digital presentation room, the space will likely create new staffing positions too. But whether that work will go to the union, the administration has declined to say.

ERIN WEST B’18 and WILL TAVLIN B’17 collaborated on this piece in the Rockefeller Library’s Sidney E. Frank Digital Studio.

March 4, 2016

METRO

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BRAND NAME REALITY VR and Journalistic Ethics

Chris Milk believes we have found “the ultimate empathy machine” in the form of Virtual Reality (VR). Formerly a renowned music video director, Milk has become something like the 21st century patron saint of VR filmmakingthrough his pioneering work. According to those who follow Milk’s gospel, VR will not only transform our ability to tell stories, but also extend our capacity for human connection and compassion. Until recently, VR was primarily considered a niche in the gaming industry, but in the past year it has gained momentum in the world of journalism as a means to immerse viewers in real-life stories.

“I wanted to go further, to pull people through that window onto the front lines and let them witness it firsthand,” writes Danfung Dennis, an award-winning combat photo journalist, in an essay for the New York Times explaining what compels him to produce VR stories. “The power of virtual reality is its command of presence—its ability to transport the viewer into another world, and have him feel present in it.”

Proponents claim that VR offers a transcendental experience and the ability to step into another world. But, in its current uses, particularly in the Times, VR actually represents a more subtle form of manipulation than its counterparts in film and photography by fostering the illusion of presence and the perception of truth. Moreover, the power of VR in many recent manifestations has been harnessed to promote corporate agendas, revealing a need to question the perceived truth and validity of VR content in a journalistic setting. +++ If you ask an executive at the New York Times what they think of VR, they’ll tell you that, more than empathy, it’s the ultimate advertising machine. Traditional newspaper advertising is becoming less effective, considering our access to Internet ad blockers and the sad truth that most people no longer buy print papers. This means that new forms of advertising need be found. The Times noted as much in its leaked 2014 Innovation Report, a self-critical internal review outlining a strategy for adapting to the digital age: “The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served the Times well for decades, allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers. But the growth in our subscription revenue and the steady decline in advertising—as well as the changing nature of our digital operation—now require us to work together...Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence.”

Two years later, how has this collaboration of newsroom and business manifested itself? With a story sponsored by Purina pet food, about dogs. Shelter dogs, specifically. The Times has created a native advertising unit, T-Brand Studio, to produce paid-for feature stories in an attempt to increase ad revenue. Other stories have included an interactive and heavily reported piece on women’s prisons (as a promotion for Orange is the New Black) and a video for Holiday Inn about a family’s last trip with a dying mother.

When the Times prepared to launch its revolutionary VR program (NYT VR) it intuitively understood VR’s potential for native advertising and worked with T-Brand Studio to form a series of unusual partnerships—with Google, General Electric, and Mini—to help acquire the funds necessary to

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build a new platform for VR. In turn, the Times promised to work with its partners to develop VR stories showcasing their products.

Native advertising spans all mediums and is not unique to the Times or VR. Nevertheless, the fact that NYT VR could one day become a primary advertising catalyst for the Times is troubling. What will likely embody the most potent form of storytelling for one of the most respected news site in America is developing in a manner closely linked with corporate interests.

It appears that so far NYT VR has mostly been used as a way to disseminate corporate and political agendas. Since 2015, when it first created a VR platform, the Times has produced nine VR stories. Only three could be considered purely journalistic: a story on displaced child refugees, another showing scenes from the Presidential campaign trail, and a third reflecting on a Paris vigil. The rest are nothing more than fancy and well-camouflaged advertisements and PR projects.

Among these is Lufthansa’s “Love is a Journey” (“Be inspired by Marc’s journey…to a very special destination”), an animated look into “Our Industrial Future” for GE (“Connecting ourselves, our world, and our machines for a more brilliant and inspired future!”), and a downright bizarre video for Mini-Cooper called “Real Memories” (“Follow Max down a mysterious road to uncover his past”).

This is not journalism. And that would be fine, if there was a clear separation on the website between videos purely for advertising purposes and those attempting to tell more serious stories. Instead, on the NYT VR site, all the videos are lumped in together, with little to distinguish between them, easily risking misleading viewers. (Imagine if scattered on the front page of the Times were both real news stories and disguised advertisements). If the Times wants VR to be taken seriously as a medium for independent journalism, it cannot continue to straddle both the newsroom and the business side.

Even the VR content the Times has produced in a strictly journalistic capacity has not been without its fair share of problems. Therein lies the other dilemma of the future of VR. How will we, as a society, react to VR content, especially when it comes in the form of supposedly unbiased and unmediated journalism? Will we blindly accept what we see when we strap on the headsets as unfettered reality? Much in the same way of some human rights campaigns, VR in its current state has often come off as sentimental voyeurism, an experience strategically designed to pull on the heartstrings without actually touching on any of the real issues at hand in a critical manner. +++ On November 7, 2015, 1.3 million Sunday subscribers to the Times received a curious cardboard package with their morning paper. The cardboard turned out to be a make-ityourself virtual reality headset, which connected to readers’ iPhones and enabled them to download and view “The Displaced,” an 11-minute video following the lives of three child refugees from war-torn countries—Hana, a refugee from Syria; Chuol, a boy from South Sudan; and Oleg, a nine-yearold living in Ukraine. For the first time in the history of the Times (and mainstream news), virtual reality had been used to create a journalistic video, available to anyone with the tendollar cardboard headset and an iPhone.

by Jack Brook illustration by Juan Tang Hon

In one scene, Oleg and his friends explore the bombedout ruins of their school as Oleg speaks in a voice-over: “Before, when the teachers would yell at us, we’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if the school blew up?’”

He climbs over a desk amidst piles of rubble.

“I would never say that now.”

A haunting silence follows. Look up and you see the white, cracked ceiling of the school; look down and you see the dirt, the same as Oleg stands on, with its strewn chunks of concrete and school supplies.

There is certainly an expectation to empathize, largely due to the sense of pseudo-intimacy between viewer and subject throughout “The Displaced”—subjects break the fourth wall by constantly staring at the camera. This intimacy is heightened by the fact that for any sort of moving VR shot, the subject must physically bring the camera along with them (the director cannot carry the camera or she will be in the image). In “The Displaced”, this means having Chuol, the Sudanese boy, place the camera in his canoe as he paddles through the swampland. Or it involves sticking the camera with Hana in the back of a truck full of Syrian refugees, all of whom seem to be casting shy, smiling glances at you.

Such intimacy conveys enormous power, but what results from this newfound, one-sided relationship? VR implicitly disguises the fundamental underlying truth that what you are seeing is a fragment of someone else’s existence. This fragment is only a very small sample of their life (often contrived, since VR creators usually have to ask their subjects to re-do certain actions) and of everything the person has gone through to get to that point. VR may, under the right circumstances, have the capacity to be a vehicle for genuine compassion and lead to meaningful action. Unfortunately, what “The Displaced” really provides us is more like an illusory experience founded on the promotion of the specific corporate interests of T-Brand Studio. At best, with Lufthansa’s “Love is a Journey”, NYT VR provides a fancy spectacle in service of a brand.

At worst, with “The Displaced”, it offers the creation of a pseudo-reality that commodifies and aestheticizes human suffering.

It’s along the lines of seeing a powerful photograph but nothing else. There is certainly a reaction, but it feels hollow without a deeper context for what one is seeing. Feeling present does not correlate with genuine understanding. The most powerful kind of empathy stems from careful and nuanced understanding, and that is what is needed to affect change—not oversimplified sentimentality.

“It [VR] is an experience, and we hope that experience equals a memory,” says Michael Villaseñor, creative director of marketing for the Times. It’d certainly be exciting to consume our news at the level of a visceral experience. But do we really want that? The danger with VR being used in this way is that, while it may try to make us feel, it doesn’t necessarily make us think in the same way a thoughtful feature story or documentary might. Sidney Levin, executive producer of T-Brand studio, says of VR: “You are like a ballerina in a box, you can spin around but can’t actually get out of the box.”

The comparative distance of text and video means that they allow us to not only look into the box but outside of it as well, separating us from the people whose stories we consume and enabling us to perceive their relation to the bigger picture, and there is something to be said for that.

JACK BROOK B’19 still reads print stories.

The College Hill Independent

CANNON CLOTH T-Shirt Gun Spectacular Walk into any Goodwill and you can find an anthology of cotton t-shirts that span a certain American experience.

There’s Megan’s baby shower: It’s a Girl!; Utica Race for The Cure in Honor of Nanny: Forever in Our Hearts; Kappa Kappa Gamma LSU Game Day Grill ’Em Banquet for Underprivileged Kids 2012; Palm Spring Rotary Club BBQ & Brews Charity Event; Museum of Modern Art Presents Frida: The Love and Life Exhibition; and so on. My mother has accumulated the most t-shirts in our family; she’s a marathon runner with a portion of her closet devoted to the many fun runs, trail runs, and charity runs that she’s taken part in. The evolution of the free t-shirt has taken on a personal meaning for her as a competitive runner; once markers of her performance, they’ve come to threaten her accomplishments and cardio integrity.

“Before, the t-shirt was the prize for winning. Now you get one if you show up.”

I didn’t think about the spectacle of free t-shirt consumption until my brother and I went to Monster Nation: Destruction Zone, a touring monster truck rally, over winter break. Right before the finale, the lights dimmed and the crowd fell silent. “This is How We Do It” began to blare from the speakers and soon the MC for the night, Ross Z. Bonar, a small man in a lime green striped shirt with spiky hair, came out from onto the stadium floor. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have loved every second of having you out here tonight.” The crowd began to cheer until Ross Z. Bonar lifted up his hand and continued: “Now there’s just one more thing to do before we get to the finale. Before you leave tonight you will have the chance to get something signed by your favorite participants.

So we thought a few lucky folks would like to have one of our t-shirts that are available for sale outside of section A...for free.” Just as he finished his sentence five or six men ran out into the stadium towards different sections of the audience wielding t-shirt guns behind their backs. By the time Ross Z. Bonar had finished saying the word “t-shirt,” the audience, in a kind of Pavlovian response, had begun to surge towards the bottom of the stadium. By the time the men had spread out on the stadium floor at their designated sections we had transformed into a mob begging to be shot. Soon the stadium was filled with the swoosh...thunk sound of t-shirts shot from canisters propelled by C02 tanks. +++

March 4, 2016

Debuted in the early 90s by NFL mascots, the t-shirt gun has since evolved into a cultural phenomenon. Now we have an industry that specializes in militarized t-shirt propellants.

We’ve departed from the tranquil, Oprah-inspired era of finding free items placed under our seats, and arrived at semi-automatic weapons that spray t-shirts into audiences.

The t-shirt gun is an American invention born in the golden era of TV infomercials and Billy Mays-style advertising. It has continued into another era, one in which high-intensity television salesmen and ads are not enough to capture the ever-elusive American attention span. We need military-grade t-shirt launchers. The Missourian, a newspaper in Columbia, Missouri, published an article titled: “Missouri’s new T-shirt cannon: 24 shirts in 5 seconds.” In the article, Missouri University’s athletic director David Grinch has refocused his efforts on the t-shirt gun. It continues, “‘The focus has to be about how can we better entertain,’ Grinch said. ‘The way we consume our entertainment now, we don’t take a lot of breaks.

And neither does the gun.”

Google “t-shirt gun,” and hundreds of websites offer an array of different guns and styles. For instance, tshirtgun. com claims to be the original t-shirt launcher, offering t-shirt guns like the Bleacher Reacher Mega starting at $1999, or the T-Shirt Gatling Gun, self loading and capable of shooting 8 t-shirts per second, starting at $4000. The website states that every barrel is made out of Lexan, a material used on space shuttles: “By using a clear LEXAN barrel you never have to second guess what is about to be launched into your audience.” These are guns that could endure space expeditions to Mars and still reach nosebleed seats. They also offer the Bud Light sponsored ABV: an “apparel bombardment vehicle”, price upon request, which in a Purge-like scenario could easily take to the streets as a fully equipped military vehicle. Aircannons.com also offers custom designs so you can “Build Your Brand with a Customized Air Cannon”. With this they note: “For the Professional Bull Riders Association, we built a tank with a turret that swivels 360 degrees.”

It isn’t the military t-shirt launching paraphernalia but rather the performance they produce that is necessary for Hanes cotton t-shirts to be worthy of falling over stadium seating. This scenario is fully articulated on aircannons.com before you enter their website: “The mascot loads our Air Cannon with a t-shirt, pulls the trigger and ‘boom!’ The t-shirt soars into the audience.

by Mary Catherine Nanda illustration by Amelia White

The fans erupt into a mad scramble to grab it out of the air.

But that’s only the beginning. Again and again t-shirts fly into the crowd. The fans are going crazy. Sure, the fans come for the game. But they also expect more. They want to be entertained.”

The language that surrounds t-shirt launching advertisements holds disturbing implications. The threat of violence within the free t-shirt spectacle is apparent; it provokes a feeding frenzy in which pink-faced, middle-age white men in cargo pants knock over Miller Lites, nacho chili cheese, and small seven year old girls in the row in front of them for a Dick’s Sporting Goods t-shirt. It creates an experience that can be simulcasted on Jumbotrons and converted into viral youtube videos. We don’t want to be handed a Wendy’s t-shirt at the end of the show. There’s not a sentimental value attached to the t-shirt that makes us want to own it. Catching a Wendy’s t-shirt shot from a semi-automatic gun in a crowd of two thousand people makes us want the t-shirt. We have a story for the ride home; a tangible object that gives us small talk and reminds us of both the event and our physical prowess.

The free t-shirt also speaks to a peculiarly American logic.

To my knowledge, everyone at Monster Nation was fully clothed. And yet, a crowd of over two thousand people was willing to put their hands in the air and perform for a free t-shirt emblazoned with Subway logos. This in itself raises questions surrounding the price of the t-shirt and the extent to which we’re willing to be exploited for it. We don’t really want Subway t-shirts. But we want to engage in the spectacle of getting one. Aircannons.com and Tshirtguns.com have discovered that people don’t want to just show up anymore.

This is the power of the free t-shirt complex. These are halftime shows enhanced with military grade, semi-automatic machines wielded by dancing mascots. We do expect more.

We need to be a part of it and we want something out of it. It has become instilled into the rituals of American entertainment. We show up to things we don’t care about for t-shirts that we don’t really need. Regardless, we had no choice in the matter as it was being propelled through the air by a gun specifically designed for t-shirts. There’s no option to not want it.

MARY CATHERINE NANDA B’18 caught the Wendy’s t-shirt.

ARTS

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(DIS)

Ancient Indigenous Urbanism at Chaco and Cahokia There is a hushed-up story of Native North America, of vast civilizations of enormous complexity and knowledge that spanned this continent before the arrival of European colonizers. This story, absent from the consciousness of most Americans, tells of the monumental Native American city of Cahokia that now lies beneath St. Louis, once home to twenty thousand people and adorned with hundreds of earthen pyramids. It speaks to us, through finely-crafted multistory stone walls still standing in the deserts of the American Southwest, of pilgrimage sites built at Chaco Canyon in commemoration of intricate cycles of sun and moon.

And it speaks of how the Native inhabitants of this continent faced, struggled with, and responded to many of the same issues that plague societies today.

Our ignorance of the past is selective. Certain civilizations of antiquity, particularly the Romans and Greeks, anchor the American sense of history and identity. State and national capitol buildings take the form of ancient Mediterranean exemplars, upholding an imagined tradition that begins in Athens and ends in Washington D.C. Yet even the most extraordinary accomplishments of the Indigenous civilizations of this continent remain unseen and unremembered. This is due, in part, to the fact that ancient North Americans did not develop a written language—but they didn’t need to. Their history was meticulously preserved in oral traditions and stories, and physically present in the form of ancestral sites and artifacts left behind by prior generations. However, many of the material traces of ancient North America were obliterated through colonial practices—and, disconcertingly, many sites continue to face increasing threats today.

The attempted erasure of ancient North America was aided by two frameworks used to describe Native Americans since the 1600s: the “noble savage” and the “savage savage”. Early colonizers and their heirs perpetuated the notion of a continent of savage savages, bloodthirsty Stone Age barbarians with infantile mental capacities and no science or sophistication. Once Native Americans were no longer seen as a threat, these same colonists began to see the noble savage, simple and at one with nature, unbothered by the squabbles plaguing “civilized” Europeans. The real story of Chaco and Cahokia defies both of these types: the ancient inhabitants of North America were urban planners and skilled farmers, visionary architects and astute scientists, powerful and subjugated, and ultimately resilient in the face of hardship.

Archaeological research as shared in documentaries, school curricula, outreach programs, Native-run tribal museums, and other outlets has the potential to disseminate the stories of ancient North America civilizations that so often go untold. This is one version of that hushed-up history.

City on the Mississippi Cahokia’s first residents situated their settlement along the Mississippi River on a piece of earth now called St. Louis. By 1000 CE, it was an urban center of staggering scale. Thousands of sprawling residential structures, immense plazas, and some two hundred smaller pyramids and earthen mounds defined the urban en-

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vironment of this Native American metropolis. Modern St. Louis, where concrete streets and buildings now entomb most of Cahokia, did not match it in area or population until the mid-1800s. The ancient inhabitants constructed enormous earthen pyramids that towered above the fertile ground, reaching toward the heavens. The largest of these, Monks Mound, stood 100 feet tall and covered an area equal to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

At times of ceremony, people gathered in a Grand Plaza the size of fifty football fields, feasted on corn grown in the fertile soils of the Mississippi, and drank the Black Drink—a beverage, brewed from the leaves and bark of holly plants that sent minds buzzing with caffeine and induced vomiting as a purificatory prelude to ritual activity.

The sky-watchers of Cahokia understood, venerated, and marked the movement of heavenly bodies in their architecture and urban planning. The entire city grid is oriented consistently 5° off of north, and various mounds oriented to commemorate the shifting positions of the sun and moon throughout the year.

At Cahokia, public works projects coordinating thousands of people, agricultural prowess, caffeinated ceremonies, community-wide feasts, and knowledge of astronomy combined to form a society by no means “uncivilized” or “savage.”

The people of ancient Cahokia grappled with their environment and with the use and abuse of power much as we do today. Recent scientific work used strontium isotope analysis of teeth to discover that nearly one-third of the city’s population were immigrants from across the Midwest. Some archaeologists now suggest that the downfall of Cahokia may have been due in large part to social tension arising from 20,000 people of diverse ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds attempting to live together in a densely packed area. The city’s challenges remind us that the image of enlightened, peaceful astronomers is neither accurate nor helpful.

Social inequality was also a grim reality in ancient Cahokia. The burial of a forty-year old man atop 20,000 seashells organized in the shape of a falcon strongly indicate his high status in comparison to the city’s commoners. Accompanying his burial were pits filled with the bodies of sacrificial victims, many of whom were women. Eventually, Cahokia’s struggles with ethnic tension and social inequality were further stressed by the onset of drought and climate change.

Sound familiar?

A Desert Capital While Cahokians constructed pyramids, the people of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico were simultaneously constructing Pueblo Bonito: four stories high, containing 800 rooms, and the largest building in North America until the 1800s.

But even more impressive than architecture, perhaps, was the ability of indigenous Southwestern peoples to coax an abundance of corn, beans, and squash from a harsh land of little rain. In a time when, for most of us, food comes from the supermarket, it is all too easy to forget the marvel that is planting, tending,

The College Hill Independent

REMEMBERED CITIES

by Robert Weiner illustration by Peggy Shi

and growing one’s own subsistence—especially in a rain-starved desert.

Like in Cahokia, knowledge of astronomy played a major role in the Chaco culture, tied to agricultural cycles and more esoteric endeavors. The Chacoans carved a spiral petroglyph known as the Sun Dagger atop a sandstone butte that uses light markings to mark the movement of the sun and moon throughout the year on the same carving. Many of Chaco’s Great Houses were also built with orientations to the cardinal directions and extreme positions of the moon in an elegant and symmetrical pattern of alignments that stretches for miles. True scientists of the sky who communicated their knowledge across generation using oral tradition.

Stored inside of the walls of Pueblo Bonito was a cache of rare artifacts imported from the jungles of Mesoamerica far to the south. Tinkling bright bells of copper, conch shells used as trumpets, and brilliantly-colored, speaking scarlet macaws; all of them carried on foot from Toltec and Maya lands to the open deserts of New Mexico. Chacoans also consumed frothed beverages made from imported chocolate that, like the Cahokians’ Black Drink, stimulated the mind.

Equipped with these material manifestations that proved their connection with the divine, Chaco’s religious leaders rule over a vast constituency twice the size of Ireland. Chaco-style Great House buildings were constructed in more humble farming communities throughout the American Southwest seemingly overnight. Members of these villages would periodically gather in Chaco Canyon for ceremonies. During these gatherings, people exchanged pottery and corn grown in their communities to participate in bedazzling, sensuous rituals of somatic and cerebral stimulation—cacao percolating between vessels for frothing that evoked the bubbling of life-bringing springs and rain, copper bells glimmering in the sunlight, the bellow of conch shells echoing off the canyon walls, and iridescent macaws squawking words and names.

The power wielded by Chaco’s elites was immense, and like Cahokia, Chaco had its sinister side. While most members of society lived in small scale single story residences on one side of the canyon, a few privileged and healthier individuals lived inside the monumental, astronomically aligned Great Houses themselves. The oral traditions of the Pueblo and Navajo people speak of the abuse of power at Chaco, resulting in societal rot that threatened the very core of their culture, identity, and way of life. Eventually, it seems, when rains ceased to come and the ceremonial leaders’ power began to wane, the people of Chaco stood up against the unequal society that had developed. Before leaving, they purposefully sealed the doorways and windows of Great Houses, an act now seen as a deliberate symbolic expression denouncing the Chacoan lifestyle of hierarchy and the abuse of power.

After leaving Chaco, the Ancestral Puebloans (formerly known as the Anasazi) underwent a chaotic transitionary period of violence and drought that ultimately resulted in largescale migrations south to the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. This is where the descendants of ancient Chacoans, today’s Pueblo Indians, settled and fundamentally reorganized their society—in response, some suggest, to the trauma of inequality and exploitation at Chaco. This reorganization of society saw the establishment of a more communal way of living that emphasizes collective benefit of the group over individual aggrandizement. The new ways of social organization developed by Pueblo people after leaving Chaco have allowed them to sustain their language and culture and to resist 500 years of colonialism to a degree unparalleled in the United States. A powerful story, but one that rarely reaches a larger audience.

for the “lost civilization” of mound-builders. Likewise, the archaeological sites of the Southwest were attributed to the high Maya and Aztec civilizations of Mesoamerica.

The Maya and Aztecs, unlike inhabitants of Cahokia and Chaco, were assisted in their political, architectural, and mathematical endeavors by the use of a written language. This set them, in the eyes of the colonizers, one step closer to the Old World civilizations, and one step further from savage.

Archaeological research eventually swayed public opinion towards accepting Native Americans as the builders of sites throughout the developing Republic. But our modern day ignorance of these ancestral Indigenous North American sites perpetuates the same colonialist attitudes that refused to recognize the accomplishments of Native American peoples. This forgetting is a direct result, and a strategy, of conquest and subjugation. Popular media outlets like Ancient Aliens that seek alternative, extraterrestrial explanations to the accomplishments of the past are only the latest iteration in a long line of attempts at dehumanization.

In the Midwest, the evidence was destroyed through the building of cities.

Most Cahokian mounds were leveled and demolished to make way for burgeoning St. Louis, a process echoed in countless sites throughout the region. While some remains of Cahokia are preserved within a state park, most of the remaining traces of the ancient Mississippian culture lie covered by the urban sprawl of modern American cities. Occasionally, a mound still can be seen rising along a highway, but few recognize such nondescript hills as traces of a remarkable civilization. Archaeological research has begun to revive awareness of Cahokia’s story. The history presented here heavily indebted by the scholarship and insights of Tim Pauketat, Steve Lekson, Scott Ortman, Randy McGuire, and Anna Sofaer, who have worked to bring this knowledge to the fore. But in a contemporary culture that regards the ancient past as irrelevant, the attempt often falls on deaf ears.

The traces of Chaco’s past scattered across the Southwest are currently in danger of being destroyed by fracking. The Bureau of Land Management has announced plans to lease 6.2 million acres of land surrounding Chaco Canyon for fracking with the potential to damage and destroy hundreds of Chaco buildings and roads. Many of these sites have never been documented or excavated, and Pueblo people, archaeologists, environmental activists, and other concerned voices have banded together to stand up against this act of erasure. Like the leveling of Cahokia’s mounds, fracking in the San Juan Basin has the dire potential to further obliterate the Chaco culture from our collective memory, and, perhaps worst of all, to obliterate the sites that physically anchor the oral traditions of the today’s Pueblo people to their ancestors.

The story of ancient Native North Americans shared here—a history of achievement, intellect, social strife, and survival strategies—smashes to bits the picture of primitive, at-one-with-Nature Indians we are fed in grade school. It is an archaeological and cultural heritage that needs to be protected and preserved so that the remarkable past of Native American peoples remains written, not solely in words, but on the landscape; a history book of stone, earth, and pottery fragments that proclaim the millennia of birth, life, death—and ultimately hope—in Indigenous America.

ROBERT WEINER B’16 looks for stories in the landscape.

The Cover-Up How is it that these pieces of Native North American history remain so unknown?

The answer lies in colonial practices of historical erasure that live on—and must be resisted—today.

When European settlers in the Midwest first encountered the platform mounds of Cahokia and other ancestral Native peoples, they frantically sought to deprive the North Americans of their humanity and heritage by insisting that Native Americans had not built them. Over the following centuries, Euro-Americans advanced a nonsensical list of more credible constructors—Israelites, Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Hindus, Vikings, Celts—such that nearly any of the Old World societies seen as a forebear to the Euro-American tradition was a candidate

March 4, 2016

OCCULT

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WHO CARES?

Medicine and Colonial Modernity

In the mid-1800s, when cholera was killing people by the thousands in South Asia, British historian and member of the Indian Civil Service W. W. Hunter reflected on life in Jagannath, a town in India: “the squalid pilgrim army of Jagannath, with its rags and hair and skin freighted with vermin and impregnated with infection, may any year slay thousands of the most talented and beautiful of our age in Vienna, London, or Washington.”

This statement reflects more than the pervasive racism of the time; it shows a basic understanding of disease as potentially infectious, something that can spread from person to person. Breakthroughs in Western science during the colonial era expanded this understanding.

European doctors were studying anatomy and germs, finding cures, rooted in the scientific method, that could combat diseases. This created the field of biomedicine, which focuses more on fighting diseases than promoting overall health and wellbeing. Biomedicine, which dominates today’s health care methods, seeks to provide people with immunity to diseases through vaccination and identify microorganisms responsible for illness.

Biomedical developments in Western science generated power in the form of knowledge for European colonizers: it enabled them to decide which behaviors and descriptions were normal and which were pathological, and additionally provided them with a superior understanding of how to counteract injury or disease whenever they thought it was beneficial.

Colonizers held immensely powerful leverage against populations that did not have the same knowledge of body and anatomy as they did. Colonial medicine projects involved mass vaccinations and forced quarantines that were targeted at combating the kinds of diseases that could spread throughout populations, such as cholera and smallpox.

European colonizers would have understood the harmful consequences of diseases like cholera, but they would also have known about the effects of starvation and malnutrition and dehydration that resulted from their subjects’ inadequate access to food, water, and other essential resources. However, these ailments were not at all the focus of health campaigns in the colonial era. If an indigenous person were dying of dehydration, the health consequences would fall only upon that person. On the other hand, if the indigenous person was dying of smallpox, then there existed the possibility of transmitting the disease to a European body. +++ Colonial medicine was only one of the tools of the empire used to justify colonial presence: the violence that occurred as a result of its implementation was collateral damage in the civilizing mission. Western law, like Western medicine, was also employed in colonial states to organize and establish colonial presence. In her book Juridical Humanity, Samera Esmair uses the British rule of Egypt to present the idea that colonialism did not simply dehumanize subjects, but rather established a transformative process through which the colonized were required to adapt to their oppressors’ strict definition of ‘being human.’ The British created a juridical category of “human” and incorporated Egyptian people into this category, using legal language involving human rights to legitimize colonial oppression. This allowed for the British to exert violence that Esmair describes as “properly measured, administrated, and instrumentalized... Only pain that serves as an end is admitted. Useless, non-instrumental pain is rejected.”

As is described in Mixed Medicines by Sokhieng Au, the colonizers “exploited both by imposing Western medicine and by withholding it.” The decision to impose Western medicine upon the person with smallpox but to withhold it from the person with dehydration is a form of violence akin to the selective humanization process that Esmair describes in Juridical Humanity. Medicine allowed colonizers to decide whose body needed caring for and whose body was disposable, much as the law allowed the colonizers in Esmair’s examples to decide who was human and who was not. +++ The end of World War II ushered in a new era with the birth of many newly formed nationstates and the dissolution of European empires. Health was universally declared to be a human right, and standards of health care were designated as major developmental concerns. Alongside the creation of many international development programs, the UN founded the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948 as a specialized agency to deal with problems in international public health. The WHO is dedicated to ensuring that the human right to health is upheld around the world, stating in its constitution that “the highest attainable standard of health [is] a fundamental right of every human being.”

How does one fulfill this goal of ensuring universal access to high standards of health care? Medical anthropologists such as Paul Farmer advocate for a biosocial approach to dealing with disease. Under this approach, diseases are not simply seen as biological phenomena. The

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likelihood of developing an illness is strongly correlated with social factors such as poverty and underdevelopment, as these conditions dictates a person’s access to clean water, adequate nutrition, and hygienic surroundings. Factors such as gender, race and political environment are also strong determinants of susceptibility to illness. Biomedicine and advancements in biotechnology thus cannot be seen as the “magic bullets” that save the lives of people suffering from disease. Medicine might help individuals, but as long as social and developmental problems are left unaddressed, for every person that you cure with biomedicine there will always be another person who gets sick. The social and political environment itself facilitates sickness.

Despite the strong body of knowledge indicating the potential effectiveness of a holistic, biosocial approach in treating diseases worldwide, national and especially international health efforts after WWII rarely attempt to solve global health problems in such a manner.

Biomedicine and other immediate provisions of medical services are cheaper than long-term investments in infrastructure (like sustainable health systems), so most aid agencies utilize “costeffective” strategies such as vaccinations and other immediate interventions to promote health worldwide. These strategies remain plagued by the legacies of colonial medicine.

A classic example of an international health campaign that perpetuated the colonial mentality under the guise of cost-effectiveness is the Smallpox Eradication Programme (SEP), which partnered with the WHO in the 1960’s and 70’s to combat smallpox in India and Bangladesh. At the time, India had the highest incidence of smallpox outbreaks in the world.

In response to this, the WHO sent Western physicians to “supervise” medical professionals in India and try to contain smallpox in the country. Their real mission was clear: eradicate the disease in a cost-effective way. For this reason the SEP organized mass vaccinations across the country and set up quarantines to contain people who were carrying the disease.

Accounts of the Smallpox Eradication Programme by a Western doctor, Paul Greenough, feature narratives of American and British physicians breaking down the doors of houses and pinning people down on the floor in order to vaccinate them. Crowds of medical staff, led by Western physicians, surrounded entire villages so that their inhabitants could be vaccinated with or without their consent. There was a far greater sense of urgency on the part of the West to eradicate smallpox in India than there was on the part of Indians themselves. This sense of urgency, of course, confused the Indian population who were facing myriad problems aside from \smallpox. At the time, there were non-infectious health problems such as soaring child and maternal mortality rates, alongside social, political and developmental challenges such as an influx of Bangladeshi refugees fleeing war in their home country, starvation, lack of access to clean water, and rural isolation.

The motivations of the WHO to eradicate smallpox in India were, at least to some extent, rooted in the principles that drove colonial medicine. Smallpox is an infectious disease which had the potential to spread to the developed world through ever-increasing globalization and trade. There wasn’t nearly as much attention given to the other problems India was facing, health-related or otherwise, as there was to the eradication of smallpox. Greenough’s accounts of the SEP contain one anecdote of an elderly woman who refused to receive vaccination if she did not get food. “Why do you care if I die of smallpox? I am already dying of starvation. Give me food instead.” +++ After WWII, post-colonial states inherited the cultural logic that lay at the foundation of colonial medicine. Medical anthropologist Steve Ferzacca writes in the Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology that the binary that European colonizers drew between the dirty, wild, and magical societies of the colonized versus their own clean, modern, science-driven human civilization was absorbed and appropriated by post-colonial governments: “Ironically, the very categories of rule imposed by colonial regimes became measures of progress and development for post-colonial states.” The language of this binary was revised: no longer was there native versus European; now there was traditional versus modern, rural versus urban, developing versus developed, and Third World versus First World.

The use of cost-effective strategies to deal with global incidences of disease can be viewed as a façade to cover up the fact that international health campaigns continue to perpetuate the legacies of colonial medicine by operating along these colonial binaries. The most significant target of international health agencies like USAID, The Global Fund and The Clinton Fund (all of which are headquartered in the US and Europe, with American and European administrators) are diseases such as malaria, HIV and neglected tropical diseases in the developing world. It seems naïve to assume that the work done by these organizations is solely motivated by the desire to improve the health and wellbeing of people around the world. Their

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by Rani Chumbak illustration by Paridhi Mundra

efforts are dedicated towards containing infectious diseases and preventing their spread from rural populations into urban populations, from developing countries into developed countries, from the Third World to the First World. What they call “aid,” others might call “security measures.” +++ The human right of access to health does not mean access to shipments of vaccines during an outbreak of an infectious disease, it means being allowed to live in conditions where the risk of disease is actively minimized. The trend has been observed time and time again: there is an infectious disease outbreak in a country prone to such incidents because of underdevelopment and instability; the Western world jumps in to help the people of the afflicted country; the disease is eradicated through biomedical interventions; then the West pulls out their funding and resources after the threat of infectious disease has been minimized.

A decade ago, for every $0.50 it spent per death by non-infectious disease, the WHO spent $7.50 per death by infectious disease. This money was spent on programs such as vaccination campaigns, quarantines, and the provision of preventive technology such as water filters or mosquito nets. Much controversy has risen over the decisions of global health bodies and international aid agencies to focus efforts almost entirely on eradicating infectious diseases in the developing world. This approach ignores the double burden of disease that developing countries face: low-income countries (even the poorest ones) have more deaths from noninfectious diseases than from infectious diseases. Additionally, low-income countries have greater incidences of non-infectious diseases than developed countries do. Non-infectious diseases require far more attention and resource allocation than what was being devoted to them at the time. Even as it tries to reduce this skewed ratio at present, 44.4 percent of the WHO’s budget is dedicated to combating infectious diseases while only 8 percent is dedicated to combating noncommunicable diseases and just 13.4 percent is set aside for helping create stable health systems.

Colonial medicine was used in order to protect the health of the European colonizers, and the conduct of current global health campaigns still seems to be following a similar principle.

Victor G Heizer, director of health in the Philippines during the American occupation of the Philippines at the start of the 20th century, stated, “As long as the Oriental was allowed to remain disease-ridden, he was a constant threat to the Occidental.” More than 100 years later, Gayle Smith, a director at the White House National Security Council, stressed the importance of taking action to fight the spread of Ebola by referring to it as “not just an African disease,” evoking the same language as Heizer in stating that it was a “threat to humanity.”

The WHO has declared the current “global emergencies” to be HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Hysteria and public outcry have erupted over several infectious disease outbreaks over the past few years, such as SARS, bird flu, swine flu, and (more recently) Zika. The fact that people in the developing world are dying from non-infectious diseases like cancer, or that they are dying from broken health care systems and structural violence such as terrorism and ethnic conflict does not constitute a global emergency. The emergency only arises when people can transmit the threat of death to the developed world in the form of infectious disease.

RANI CHUMBAK B’16 is using a pen name.

March 4, 2016

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Thoughts on Museum Curation

by Brock Lownes illustration by Iris Lei

The Whitney Museum in New York was the first museum dedicated solely to the work of living American artists. Eighty-four years after its founding, the museum has become one of the largest centers of contemporary art in the United States. Last year the Whitney Museum completed its move from the historic Breuer Building, a brutalist ode to modernity located on the Upper East Side, to a newly built, Renzo Piano-designed art center in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district. According to the art blog Hyperallergic, the new building “has already been called everything from dull and badly proportioned, to pragmatic and deftly executed, to highly crafted and masterful with its ‘social engineering.’” To inaugurate the new building, Donna De Salvo, Deputy Director For International Initiatives and Senior Curator, found herself with the challenge of not only overseeing the process of organizing a museum, but also of building an exhibition that shaped the Whitney’s extensive collection of American art into a cohesive historical narrative. Her response was a five-floor inaugural exhibit with more than 600 works by 406 artists in an exhibit titled “America is Hard to See.” As this relocation garners attention, the Whitney stands at a historical juncture: Donna De Salvo and the rest of the staff at the Whitney have been tasked with the work of readjusting and re-examining the way their museum collects, exhibits, and organizes artwork. Traditionally, museums strive to display their collection’s time-tested masterpieces in an effort to create something of a visible history of art. Curators like De Salvo, however, with their gazes set on modern and contemporary art, are in a sense trying to display what might be this history’s future—placing canonical works alongside those of the living and recently deceased, hoping that somewhere in that juxtaposition a new conversation, a new thread of history might emerge.

For the inaugural exhibition, De Salvo and her team curated an ambitious show centered around the ever-changing meanings of “American Art,” which suggested that these meanings, rather than simply marking historical successions, could find a way to exist all at once. The exhibition’s structure unfolds along disparate lines, allowing viewers to reassess the museum’s collection while retaining some semblance of a historical narrative. Ultimately, the format of

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the exhibit creates the conditions for encounters with both famous and unknown modern and contemporary artworks.

On December 18, Donna De Salvo came to Brown to discuss both the preparation for the Whitney’s move downtown and the responses the new building and its inaugural exhibit have solicited. I had the opportunity to sit down with De Salvo before her lecture to talk about the concerns and developments that accompany the museum’s institutional changes. +++ After semesters of hearing about the Whitney’s storied exhibitions and biennials in class, and having taken a short trek to the RISD library to check out every museum catalog written by De Salvo, I was now waiting for the real Donna De Salvo in the ground floor conference room of Brown’s Granoff Center. The room was a brightly lit, clean-lined, contemporary art space, a setting perhaps similar to the Whitney Museum itself. De Salvo entered, a woman with short sandy hair, trendy glasses, and a tote bag. With a warm disposition yet an air of unmistakable authority, she reminded me of a fashionable teacher—here to educate me about something that was at once far beneath her and precisely what she was interested in. I proceeded to frantically present her with Portuguese sweet bread. She was flattered and a bit confused—a loaf of bread was not what she was expecting. I tried to quickly explain it was a Providence delicacy, to which she nodded politely. Off to a smooth start, we both laughed. I read my prompts, and she reassured me that she was, in fact, “very happy to be here.”

I opened by asking De Salvo, as a female curator, what steps she was taking to move past the ubiquity of the white male subject and subjectivity in art. The broad question was met with a short reply: “Race and class issues are both stumbling blocks in museum culture.” She added that one’s “history and cultural background inevitably inform how you see the world.”

I mentioned Michelle Obama’s speech at the opening of the new Whitney building. In

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her speech, Obama discussed the issue of diversity in typically white, cultural elite spaces, explaining: “You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.” Though De Salvo showed interest in the remark, her response was again couched in noncommital language: “It’s very interesting when you do a show of, say Archibald Motley of the Harlem Renaissance, which just closed, or a show of Glenn Ligon, an African-American artist. You see a different audience.”

While De Salvo and other prominent contemporary curators are quick to pay lip service to notions of equal representation—touting the fact that they show work by Glenn Ligon or other prominent Black artists—in practice these gestures still often provide space for racism to exist.

For instance, at the Whitney’s most recent biennial, Joe Scanlan, a white, New York-based artist, was commissioned to show some of his newest visual work as well as a series of performances.

But these works, though created by Scanlan, were signed by Donelle Woolford—a Southern, Black, female artist persona Scanlan ‘created.’ While the Whitney claimed these works were simply “challenging and provocative,” many found them blatantly racist—sensing that Scanlan was both participating in a sort of neo-blackface performance and implying that a Black, female artist would necessarily garner more attention than her white, male counterpart. Though the artist collective YAMS—largely comprised of queer, Black artists—protested the performance and refused to show their work in the biennial, the Whitney stood by its curatorial decisions, leaving the works displayed and the performances running.

While De Salvo herself assured me that she and the Whitney are interested in displaying not just the white-male view of modernism, but the “multiple modernisms” that occur across gender, racial, and geographic lines, it remains unclear whether this stated interest is enough to truly confront such pervasive issues. De Salvo is right that her responsibility as a curator is to ensure that the museum has a commitment to its artists. Yet in conversation, it became clear that discussing representation in museums is one thing and establishing a nuanced position is another. +++ These questions of curatorial responsibility also extend to the realm of finance. Donna De Salvo previously worked at the Tate Modern in London, an institution that receives almost half of its funding from the British government. The Whitney, on the other hand, gets little money from the US government’s National Endowment of Arts; instead, they rely on a tax deduction system that encourages private donation. Comparing the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s systems, De Salvo said, “The financial part is always a complicated issue in terms of where you take money from, who you don’t take money from. We look at that. At the Tate they do not take money from cigarette companies. The Whitney used to, when Philip Morris was in business. A lot of people have problems with it. My dad died of lung cancer. I did a show where Philip Morris was a sponsor. It’s a complicated issue of, ‘Well, the show was able to happen, what do you do?’” De Salvo didn’t mention that the Whitney continued to receive support from Philip Morris Companies (which changed its name to Altria in 2003) until as recently as 2008, when the tobacco corporation decided to end the relationship and move all of its operations out of New York. “I believe that we have a mission in what we do,” De Salvo continued. “It’s about the public good. That you are able to do something that supports artists, that brings the school kid to the museum—someone has to pay for it. It’s a real [sic] problematic issue in the United States.”

What is the cost of taking private donations? How do these donations influence the content of museum exhibitions? De Salvo argued that donors and board members who contribute money to the Whitney hold no sway over the content of the museum’s exhibitions, unlike at many other museums. She added that the Whitney has no exhibition committee of the board.

And yet while there are bureaucratic walls that keep public museums and private collections separate, the systems of social cooperation and institutional arrangements within the art field are by no means clear. Whether it’s an artist having their piece added to a collection, collectors being placed on the board of a museum, or a gallery sponsoring or aiding curators in an upcoming exhibit, these systems of patronage and symbolic representation do inevitably lead to conflicts of interest, financial gray zones, and an ambiguous sense of morality. Discussing the critical consensus of contemporary art, De Salvo admits: “Let’s face it. We are trading a very subjective enterprise. So what is right? What is wrong? I have a difference of opinion with my colleague over certain works.” This is why the industry has developed an intricate signaling process where the approval of a handful of galleries, collectors, and museums determines what is good and valuable. Critical and economic points of consensus typically converge. Museums too often focus disproportionately on an elite group of international artists and estates.

When prodded with questions on market and museum collusion, especially in regards to board members at the Whitney, De Salvo’s final comment was, “Look, people come to us because we have expertise, and they are interested in art, and they want to collect work.

Sometimes, do those works go up in value as a result as an exhibition? Yes, that’s true. The question is, do you make the choice to show a work because that’s what you’re trying to achieve.

That’s different and that’s what a gallery will choose to do.” Ultimately, “I am happy for the artist,” explained De Salvo. “The only thing that I get bothered by is when an artist does not benefit from the work and the sale. If someone buys their work and then they resell the work,

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they’re flipping the work. The artist doesn’t get the money. The collector gets the money. That bothers me more. The artist should be supported.”

Economic relationships within the art world often go undisclosed. Galleries keep sale prices secret and are particular about who they’ll sell to. Galleries want their artists to succeed and the price of their artworks to increase. They just need to make sure price is also validating critical and institutional reception. Often museums begin to take notice and give extra consideration to artists who gain a lot of traction in the market. De Salvo, predictably, commented that “no one is exempt from the art market.” +++ The art and architectural theorist Hal Foster wrote in his piece After the White Cube, “A central role of the museum is to operate as a space-time machine in this way, to transport us to different periods and cultures—diverse ways of perceiving, thinking, depicting and being—so that we might test them in relation to our own and vice versa, and perhaps be transformed a little in the process. This access to various thens and nows is especially urgent during an era of consumerist presentism, political parochialism and curtailed citizenship.” Bringing together the past and present of art history, De Salvo mentioned in our conversation that “art language is a continuum of language the way it evolves over time.” She is making a genuine effort to make the Whitney live up to utopian visions of a museum free of private interest and market ideology. The language of art that De Salvo referred to is by no means autonomous from outside influence.

Our conversation ended on a passionate note. De Salvo, reflecting on the museum experience that she created, said “I think art has the power to communicate. It can cross geography, language and sometime it can even cross political ideologies. I think we need that more than ever. The culture is in such crisis that to have a place, or a space, that somehow allows for some degree of exchange or debate, whatever you want to call it.” The new Whitney is a closer step in this direction. I don’t necessarily think this space currently exists, but the urgency with which it is articulated speaks to its necessity.

BROCK LOWNES B’17’s latest installation is made of Portuguese Sweet Bread.

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HOW’S MY DRIVING?

by Julian Fox illustration by Teri Minogue

I remember the feeling of driving a car for the first time.

The freedom I felt, most likely ingrained in me from movies like Mad Max, Taxi Driver, and Death Proof, and from Ford F-150 advertisements, was probably just petty masculinity; but that car made me feel invincible. By then I had heard about Google’s self-driving car project, and as I clumsily drove up my street, the idea of replacing human-controlled cars with autonomous, self-driving machines seemed ridiculous.

“Who would want a computer to interfere with this feeling?”

I wondered. Later, as it started to rain and windshield wipers whisked away the raindrops without my command, I realized the machine was doing more work than I had originally thought.

The strange truth I had come to realize is that self-driving cars aren’t in our distant future—they’re already here. I would like to think that my car that day was operated solely by me and my rugged-individualism, but my car could automatically shift gears, deploy the airbags in a collision, and even trigger the windshield wipers if it detected water on the windshield.

It’s easy to think of driving as a single task. When we talk about driving, we usually talk about the task of going from one point to another in a car, ideally without breaking any laws or hurting the occupants. But driving is comprised of smaller tasks: changing lanes, shifting gears, exiting freeways, stopping at intersections. It is in these small tasks where automation takes place. Think of soap dispensers, automatic doors, supermarket checkouts, streetlights, flights, personal banking. As small tasks inside of larger tasks become more and more automated, we hardly notice that our everyday tasks are assisted by computers.

As we program past the smaller tasks and entrust everlarger responsibilities to machines, the debate over what

for the slick future the exhibit envisioned. Throughout the next twenty years, GM and RCA developed scale models of automated highway systems to test electric currentguided cars. The Space Race would lead to the next major development in the early 1960’s: the ‘Stanford Cart’, originally intended to be a lunar rover, was equipped with video cameras and sophisticated image-processing abilities, and, according to tech folklore, successfully crossed a chairfilled room without human intervention. The coming decades would bring German engineer Ernst Dickmanns’ VaMoRs and VaMP, which reportedly could drive relatively unassisted from Munich, Germany to Odense, Denmark. Carnegie Mellon University’s NavLab and Stanford led technological development throughout the 2000’s fostered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Grand Challenge. The DARPA’s contest offered cash prizes to the development team whose autonomous cars could best navigate increasingly complicated obstacle courses, and heavily popularized the budding technology to the public. Soon the Silicon Valley tech companies took notice started to vie for dominance in the market. In December 2014, Google emerged victorious when it unveiled the first marketable, self-driving prototype.

In terms of looks, Google’s model didn’t exactly fit in with the traditional muscle and power design ethos of American car manufacturers. The car was smaller than the average Sedan and looked like a cartoon VW Bug with cutesy mouse-like headlights and rounded windows. Mounted on the car’s roof was a black cylinder which stored the light-detecting and ranging unit, also known as the LIDAR. The car drove by rapidly spinning the LIDAR 360 degrees to capture a highresolution map of the car’s surroundings, which the navigation unit then used to guide the car safely through the streets.

mous technology failure were reported in a fourteen month timespan of test driving. More recently, a Google car struck a public bus when it attempted to avoid sandbags in the middle of an intersection in Mountain Valley, California. While no injuries occurred, these accidents have raised the anxieties of Californian driving agencies and regulators.

These incidents, however, haven’t hurt the Google engineering team’s resolve: they have a different mission. As Google CEO Sergey Brin said in a recent interview: “We don’t claim that the cars are going to be perfect. Our goal is to beat human drivers.” After all, self-driving cars don’t need to work perfectly, but simply cause marginally fewer accidents than humans. To present another analogue: if an intelligent computer performed a surgical operation at a greater successrate than a human, surely most of us would opt to have the machine to perform the surgery. Indeed it would seem irrational to put thousands of lives at risk by not implementing autonomous cars because we couldn’t figure out a way to save a select few. Google’s cars, with programming flaws and all, already cause far less accidents than we do.

constitutes human ability and intelligence intensifies: Sure, Deep Blue could beat Kasparov in chess, but can it handle a conversation? IBM Watson can answer Jeopardy questions, but can it enjoy a song? Siri can listen to my requests, but can it understand sarcasm? It’s going to take a lot for a self-driving car to be considered as good as a human driver, though that won’t stop the companies in Silicon Valley from trying.

The only human input the car required was pushing the start button and selecting the destination on the navigation system. For the remainder of the car ride, the passenger would simply sit in the seat while the car navigated to its destination; however, an operable steering wheel remained in case the car encountered dangerous situations.

The prototype was heavily scrutinized. Reviews by Forbes and Gizmodo stated that the car was fundamentally useless and imagined that it would only serve to crowd and complicate the current driving system, rather than revolutionize it. MIT Technology Review wasn’t exactly kind either, beginning its review with a biting question: “Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn’t drive itself in 99 percent of the country? If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car.” Despite the impressive feat of Google’s historic unveiling, the popular skepticism of a self-driving machine remained. However, the widespread assumption that humans made better drivers than machines would prove to be overly optimistic.

scenario to be unlikely, there are plenty of instances of minor ethical decisions the car might have to make: If a car stops abruptly to avoid an accident, should it consider the safety of the car driving behind it? If a car’s headlights or tires become damaged during its drive, should it shutdown to comply with government safety regulations? To circumvent these ethical problems, Google’s engineers intend to make their cars intelligent enough so these scenarios will never happen. But this solution seems short-sighted; surely a car will run into an ethical scenario like this at least once.

However, it’s not the self-driving cars that have to make a decision, strictly speaking. After all, humans are the ones who program the car’s software to make these decisions in the first place. We’re able to give the program our basic human abilities like quick reaction times and calculations, but when it comes time to program these ethical decisions, we react with confusion and fear. The question then isn’t ‘Can machines drive better than a human?’ but ‘What does it even mean to drive like a human?’ How can we outsource our ethics when we don’t know what our ethics are?

For these reasons, it’s unlikely that we will ever have completely automated cars. Rather, we will probably have cars that make the majority of our driving decisions while we steer the wheel in the case of a perilous situation. When I drove for the first time, the car made me feel more alive. I still remember that sense of freedom and responsibility whenever I get behind the wheel. When I’m driving a car, I decide what is important.

+++ Google, Uber, and Tesla are already making investments in self-driving technology. Apple, too, is rumored to be in the business of driver automation. Massive hiring projects are already underway to support the research and development facilities of Silicon Valley companies.

Market disruptions within the automobile industry are guaranteed to happen, because, as the Economist noted, these self-driving car developments will likely shrink traditional car manufacturers’ share of the market. The competition, fueled by the tremendous financial reward for early market capitalization, is unprecedented. “This is an arms race,” said University of Michigan professor Larry Burns for an article in the Atlantic, “You’re going to see a new age for the automobile.”

As it turns out, this race for self-driving cars has been going on for a while. The first driverless car dates back to the 1920s when Houdina Radio Control’s radio-controlled “Linrrican Wonder” traveled up Broadway. Then, a decade later, the 1939 World’s Fair installation “Futurama” captured the public’s imagination. The “Futurama” was a streamlined cityscape with a completely automated expressway network teeming with self-driving cars. As the Great Depression began to subside, the private and public sectors alike longed

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+++ Humans, as it turns out, are terrible drivers. In 2013 alone, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 32,719 people died in car accidents. Most of these accidents were caused by distractions, fatigue, and intoxication. According to recent study by McKinsey and Company, by 2050 these fatal accidents could be reduced by 90%. In nearly 1.7 million miles of testing their prototype, Google has reported only twelve minor collisions; all of these collisions were actually caused by other drivers. That’s not to say there haven’t been any hangups. 272 minor incidents of autono-

+++ The concept of self-driving cars replacing human drivers becomes more convoluted when we consider the consequences of a computer taking on the role of an ethical actor. Take, for instance, a scenario in which a pedestrian crossing-light malfunctions and ten people are led into the middle of a road in the immediate path of a self-driving car. The car can’t stop in time but it can avoid hitting the pedestrians by steering the car into a wall, risking the life of the passenger. What decision will the car make? If you consider this high-cost

JULIAN FOX B‘18, for one, welcomes our robot overlords.

TECH

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THREE POEMS

by Anna Bonesteel illustration by Michaela Walls

Good morning Hell, I cruise. Through life, much like sand through the hourglass, or a fish in the stream. I keep tabs on, the white horizon, a gracious breach whale in the desperate scourge indecent desert today. I cruise. Hell, I cruise, tho the grey is, confusing, The sky is sort of white and sort of not, the sky is (here we delve into the precise blade of the skein, since to be a sky in here needs a sword or a blade today, For what am I to focus on, if not the blade of the determined life span of my arm span towards the misty heavens, For, and four again, the meters of sky sand in the measure of arm span, of breach span, where the horison slips and sinks with not mine control and the remote sky smokin up alas! See, plus, see, plus, plus, For if one total thing is to hold consistency in the life span of my life it must be the sky Since my ear bones and hammers are slipping with pride and from this I can tell what is up up up, which is the best of my own abilities the jewel in the crown of orientation of a hot fog nite round this head of mined.)

Stories I tell my roommate who is my best friend He’s usually very receptive. He has one quirk. He thinks nothing is very flat. Actually it’s all flat everywhere. I had a dream I met his mom and she told me to go into this room full of all sorts of mid century modern furniture and look out the window, and it was halloween and I saw myself a million or twenty times over wearing all the different halloween costumes I have had over the years, for instance the witch, or the cat, and then I turned around and saw the color of my eyes in the mirror but just exactly that, the color, all everywhere total fill and totally flat and super-zoomed, the real trouble with the color of the sky is that once you get up up up, away from the atmosphere and the hot air balloons and to where it really matters all it is anywhere is black.

The final cruise I used to like art but I got over it. I want to drink a big glass of water. I’m 15 years old and I’ve never flown a kite. Some people say they want to be wrong. I wish I could be wrong but it hasn’t happened yet. I made three hundred dollars. Norm says just make what you like. I don’t want to make anything. I should eat the orange. I hate faith especially in churches. I don’t like you and I still want to hypnotize you with my big beautiful eyes. Everyone loves to get lost in my eyes. Everything is essentially the same. I live on top of a huge pyramid. It’s a miracle I get hot water. I pray a lot. The ocean is full of little tiny earth worms and no water. We don’t have a lot a time left.

I ate the orange. I want to draw snow out of my fingers. I want to lie down on the ground and take my sweet time. You fucker. Everything is essentially exactly the same.

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The College Hill Independent

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Friday

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Alice in Wonderland, Jr. The Stadium Theatre, 28 Monument Square, Woonsocket // $10–16

23rd Annual Rhode Island RV & Camping Show & Sale RI Convention Center // starts 1pm Friday, ends 5pm Sunday // $0–$10

This show is for kids. In it Alice “raps” with a bubble-blowing caterpillar. So smoking is not appropriate for kids but white people rapping is. #IndyTrendWatch.

Friday at 10am and 7.30pm, Saturday at 7:30pm, Sunday at 2pm.

Looking for the perfect RV or for a new lover who also loves RVs? Come look at RVs and snag special deals at this event. Meet local RV enthusiasts who will join you and your two kids on your next camping trip, filling your ex-husband’s empty campfire seats. There will also be talks on such topics as “Rving— What it’s all about.” (Hint: love).

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Back Bay Chocolate Tour 131 Clarendon St, Boston, MA // 10.15am // $48

Food Trucks Bruce in the USA In Roger Williams Park The Met, 1005 Main St, Pawtucket Carousel Village // 7pm // $15 Advance, $20 Day Of Roger Williams Park Carousel Village, 1000 Elmwood “The World’s #1 Tribute to Bruce Ave // 4:30–8pm // free Springsteen and The E Street Band.” The planet named after So many food trucks! Food trucks Bruce in 1999 sure gives them are what makes Providence a a run for their money, though. quirky, fun place to live. It’s what separates us from Fall River. I would be willing to wager a taco that the carousel will also be in operation.

But the carousel is inscrutable and I take no responsibility for it.

DMX with DJ Chubby Chub Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel // 8pm // $36 Advance, $40 Day Of

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DMX apparently died and returned to life last month, according to an Indy editor. He is going to be in Providence.

See the play based on Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name.

Runs March 4, 5, 11, and 12 at 8pm, and March 6 and 13 at 2pm. The Players are in their 107th season right now. Call or email the office for tickets and prices. (401) 273-0590.

Plenty of samples, tons of information about chocolate. It’s less than a mile and takes 2 and a half hours.

What does this mean? Perhaps it means many pieces of chocolate.

Or it means that you have to eat the chocolate reeeeeeaaaaaaally slowly.

Murder is Announced The Barker Playhouse, 400 Benefit St // see description vvv

Newport Seal Tour Bowen’s Ferry Landing, Newport // daily // $22 for 1hr, $42 for 2hr

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Have you gone to this yet? Do it! Also, Save the Bay is a super cool environmental non-profit and you should feel good about giving them $22 in exchange for chilling with seals.

Tickets at www.savebay.org/seals

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Weekly Aurora

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French Film val: Jean de 1057 Kingstown Peace Dale // 2pm

Dyke Aurora

FestiFlorette Rd, // free

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8pm

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Sets by DJ Afternoon, DJ Top Pelican, VJ V’Jay, & VJ My Mommy.

From the event description: “This night is about Dykes. So if you are one, please come and bring friends!

If you are a friend of the Dykes then you are super welcome here too!”

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Work it Out: The Work and Labor Play Manton Ave Project, 55 Putnam St // 7pm // pay what you can A play written and performed by children from the Manton Ave Project’s TAG Team afterschool playwriting course. Performances Friday at 7pm, and Sat/Sun at 2pm. I think it’s so cool that these kids learned about Rhode Island labor history.

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Blues 7pm

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Space Travel on a Thursday AS220 // 9pm // $5 “An electronic music trip, paired with sci-fi projections provided by the Arkham Film Society.” There will also be some live film-scoring being done by members of the bands Watermelon, Goon Planet, and Dog Hospice.

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Part of the Peace Dale Library’s 2016 French film festival. Showing of Jean de Florette (1986), staring Yves Montand and Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu is basically in every single French movie and isn’t a very good actor, in my humble opinion. Seeing him in all these French movies has kind of become a weird Pokemon-card-collecting kind of game for me. Gotta catch ‘em all. .

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Wednesday

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Free blues and jazz jam hosted by Paul Alexander Williams and the Who Dat Band. Happens every week, there’s a first for everything.

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Drive-By The Theatre //

7pm

Truckers Columbus // $25–30

The alt-country rockers been touring since the See the veteran road riors again, or for the first

have ‘90s. wartime.

Antonio’s Trivia Night Antonio’s Pizza, 727 East Ave, Pawtucket // 8pm // free?

Team trivia competition every Wednesday night at Antonio’s in Pawtucket. There are also prizes, but the Indy does not know what they are.

Rhode Island Fact of the Week: in 1988 the Palace of the Grand Master was the site of a famous throw-down for European politicians.

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