Jasper’s Wardrobe
Disseminating Parallel Futures
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Bricolage Traveller Girl Street Fashion
via flickr.comI met her in Coffee To The People. This is where the traveller kids hang out. She collects scraps of cloth on her travels and adds them to her Magic Outfit. I think she should exhibit in a gallery.
Virtual Tour of San Francisco's Queer Counterpublic Street Fashion
Gay Pride, Dyke March & Pink Saturday
This is version 1.1 of my Dancing Jasper Map. It is an example of the relatively unknown medium of Locative Data Art. I am using the Geo Spatial Search capabilities of Flickr and Programmable Google Maps to create a complex cartographic representation of my my deterritorializing line-of-flight through Queer Carnaval Space on the afternoon of June 26th 2010.
One of the themes of my recent work is how to publicize and broadcast ethnographic data from a counterpublic. These kinds of images usually propagate within the boundaries of one Counterpublic such as (mostly white) Lesbian and Gay Hipster, Mainstream Gay, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer People of Color, or the panopoly of straight counterpublics. Publicity tends to be intra-public rather than inter-public. The Social media tend to reinforce these dynamics as individuals act as distributed filters for what reaches the Interior of the Counterpublic.
When mobiles like Photos cross the membranes of the counterpublics they change meanings. To use Bruno Latour's language they are not faithful allies. Images do not transmit my intent, or the intent of the original "fashion statement" as they circulate.
A audiovisual data archive like Flickr undermines these membranes between publics to some extent. But my "immutable mobiles", my images are decontextualized on Flickr as individual photographs. They are absorbed into the FlickrSphere, and abstracted away from Ethnographic and Counterpublic Context. In a sense Flickr commodifies the photos within the framework of the Attention economy. They become an attention commodity. I get thousand of eyeballs a day, but these eyeballs are instantiated as consumers, rather than as members of my Art-Public.
This Temporal map is an iteration of my goal to create a different kind of Immutable Mobile. This is photographic data that refuses to be decontextualized.
The javascript code for this piece is Open Sourced under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license I created the psycho-geo Google Project to house the code for my Locative Data Art. . Please reuse and remix it. Drop me a line if you would like to get involved.
Coming Out Of The Closet and Performing Femme in The Public | My New Dangly Earrings
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Hi Sweetpeas,Last time I wrote with the realization that I was beginning a zigzag back into Becoming-Femme. My gender transitions have been a dialectal journey between the poles of the Masculine Closet and a Femme Visibility. In true dialectical fashion I learn more and integrate more with each swing.This new iteration of my Public Persona, today's Jasper has interesting properties.- My outfit is composed of black skinny jeans and a woman's black velvet jacket. Any vintage store will have a couple of this blazer style, I got mine for 5 dollars.
- My t-shirt gives a flash of color with the dour blacks.
- All of these items are feminized cuts and colors, which are based upon originally male clothing.
- These items provide an interesting and subtle field in which to practice Coming Out of The Closet.
- In the sixties French designers (YSL) created these outfits for females who were experimenting with Masculine Publicity.
- I have long curly hair. The taboo on long male hair was broken in the sixties. But it can add to an overall transgression.
- I condition my hair, which strangely feminizes my long hair. I guess Males can have long as long hair as they do not take good care of it. Jewfro's, dreadlocks and greasy ponytails are genderless, but long curly locks have power.
- I have subtle black eyeliner on. Eyeliner functions as a hypnotic agent. It creates the illusion of oversized pupils and eyes. It draws you into eye contact, but it can be subtle.
- Sometimes I play with necklines too, especially with a jacket.
- Dangly blue earrings. These are an interesting mix of Masculine and Femme.
Sometimes they evoke a fetish reaction. I find it flattering, but also a little weird. Yesterday a woman was interacting with me, her eyes will kind of glazed over and her jaw goes just a little slack. I felt her focus go internal as well. With women it is subtle and it gives me a thrill, but I have also had men just stare at my stocking-covered thighs while talking to me. Their lack of awareness was stunning.This is a familiar refrain for women who have men talking to their cleavage, but Public Male Roles are "designed" in such a way that they never experience being a "Public Object of Desire". Before I first experienced being sexually harassed by the Masculine Identified I had no point of reference to understand how powerless it can make you feel, or paradoxically how exhilarating it can feel to be "Publicly Desired" when you feel in control.Society institutionally separate the lifeworlds of Male and Female genders, by raising females with the experience of their bodies as public and vulnerable while male bodies grow up armored behind walls of fabric or gym induced muscles. This produces two genders, the Public gender and the Private gender, the embodied-emotional gender and the abstract-reason gender, object and subject. These form mutually exclusive gendered points of view. This is the rational for saying that men cannot be feminists, because they miss the social experience of being a "Public Object"Happily though, experience is not immutable. Publicly Bending Gender on the street was a Copernican Revolution for my lifeworld and my understanding of the feminist Point Of View (POV). I contend that it does not take a lifetime of sexual harassment on the street and creepy older men to understand the "Woman POV". The reality of harassment, and feeling unsafe in Public is so disorienting that it completely destabilizes a "Man POV".As more and more Feminine Males Come Out of the Closet and experience a "Femme POV" while retaining the label Male, this will hopefully destabilize the Regime of Gender, and achieve some of the non-identitarian feminist, genderqueer and post-feminist goalsCute and disturbing at fm gallery
Audio File attached
JPG Photo attached
Fri Aug 6 20:00:01 PDT 2010
Just 'Say it & Mail it' Google Map Location
Accuracy is within 17 meters.
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Krowswork has a great show at artmurmur in Oakland
Audio File attached
JPG Photo attached
Fri Aug 6 18:40:20 PDT 2010
Just 'Say it & Mail it' Google Map Location
Accuracy is within 76 meters.
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Reigniting the Enlightenment Project by Banishing the Superstition of Gender
August 3, 2010 | Berkeley, CA | Boy Street Fashion & Street Art
This outfit is Jasper in High Boy. This is the masculine leg of my Gender Dialectic. This is the fashion retreat where I am in hiding. I learn a lot during these camouflaged periods. However by not giving publicity to my feminine gender, I pay a price. My connections with other women become more formal and distant. I stop performing homo-social contact with other women. A part of me withers, a part that is emotional and vulnerable, and thus begins the dialectic swing back towards Public Femininity.
I have started to think the word interiority as Habermas uses it, describes this "Place" within me that is developed in Girl Society and made Unrepresentable in Boy Society. The Masculine gender is inscribed through the magic trick of making male interiority disappear, this is related to the phenomenon of Male clothing hiding the body. In a very strange sense male are treated as abstract socio-linguistic entities in the Public Sphere, while female bodies and interiorities are both seen and talked about in Public. I represent a new movement of Males who want to exist as fully developed human beings, but find the social constraints of The social Gender "Man" to be too constraining, so we identify publicly as Woman.
I feel that this is a continuation of the Enlightenment project and the struggle for Individual Liberty. I contend that our social practices of Institutional Education and a centralized mass-media Public Sphere reproduce the social practices of gender. The free, decentralize media ecosystem of Twitter publicity plus the giant cloud-based Audio-Visual-Textual Databases like Youtube, Flickr, and Wordpress, finally allows us to continue the enlightenment project of banishing superstitions like the rigid dichotomies of Sex, Gender and Sexuality.
Male Nude With Camera & Penis Ornamentation: Up Your Alley, part II
via flickr.comJuly 30 2010,
This little teddy bear shows us how how the Male body and the penis are not intrinsically threatening or dangerous. Masculinity requires masculine clothing and other semiotics of power. Naked a man is feminine and tender.
The American social taboos around Penis Publicity have an ironic effect. The Masculine Myth is so fragile, and so ready to evaporate with just a few rays of sunshine, but the left and right of society is united its fear of male sexuality and naked males. Many Radical Feminists seem to equate seeing a penis with violation, and would surely advocate using the powers of the state to suppress Male Nakedness if our post-protestant culture did not already ban the male body from "The Mediated Public" except in its gym-mediated Hyper-Masculine form.
We are in a strange dialectic where a Counterpublic solidifies what it is reacting against.Wooden Fort on the Marin Headlands, California
July 29th 2009
This is taken on rodeo beach in the Marin Headlands.
The Marin Headlands are a reclaimed military territory. I stayed in the Old Infimary of of a 1907 Defensive Fort. The houses were built as a panopticon in a horseshoe a ring around a central (training?) field.The Dutch Republic of 1608-1672 produced the First Print-Mediated Heretical Counterpublic v2
Updated July 30 2010 v2
Luckily for you, my readers, early modern history has been a keen interest of mine, so I can fill in some of Habermas' historical gaps regarding the Dutch Republic.
- Fernand Braudel published volume two of the extremely influential Civilization and Capitalism in 1979. In it he shows Amsterdam and The Dutch Republic as the commercial and financial center of Europe between roughly 1550 and 1700.
- Habermas' traces the public sphere to post-1688 England. He also views financial capitalism, and the power of the Bourgeois class as emerging at this place and time. We now know that Financial Capitalism has a much longer European history starting with the city states Venice and Genoa in the south and migrating to the Spanish Empire's financial center in Flemish Antwerp, and from there to the Amsterdam in the 1500's.
- The Dutch republic was unique in being a pragmatic confederation of City States without a centralized government, devoted to Commercial Empire and Laissez Faire economic policies. Without a strong state, heresy and innovation blossomed
- Holland became the European center of printing in Europe from 1585 until the rise of Capitalist London in the 1700's. Dutch printers were skilled at evading censorship. They built an industry around printing banned and heretical books in foreign languages and then smuggling them into autocratic states like England and France. In france the phrase "Dutch Books" literally meant banned books.
- Holland functioned as a viral host for dangerous ideas from the margins. In the world of ideas this Dieism, Pantheism, Christian Rationalism and even Atheism. Science, Art, Heresy and Commerce flourished. This is the true beginnings of the European Enlightenment.
- The Spinozaist Public formed in Europe around the banned books of of Baruch Spinoza, written in the 1670's. Spinoza inspired atheism was being debated behind closed doors in many parts of Europe. Conservatives had a great moral panic and Spinoza became a byword for subversion.
- Monarchists and and Orthodox Calvinists took control of the Netherlands in a Junta in 1672, which resulted in a purge of many of the key supporters of the republic in Holland, and the installation of the Gereral/Prince William III as hereditary leader of the Dutch Armies.
- After the successful Dutch Naval Invasion of England during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 William III and his Wife Mary as King and Queen of Britain. Parliament forced William to concede a great deal of Royal Authority to Parliament as a condition for his enthronement as King.
- At the same time as William III's clique sucked the life out of the Dutch Republic, he presided over the great English Enlightenment Liberalizations of 1688-1700 which lifted the autocratic yoke on expression, reason, religion and commerce.
- London became the most disruptive european cultural-economic center while the Dutch Republic faded under the Authoritarian Stranglehold of the House of Orange, and its allies the orthodox Calvinist Church.
Jonathan Israel scholarship along with that of Braudel is responsible for "rediscovering" the Dutch Republic. Dutch history was written by the Dutch Constitutional Monarchists. It took an outsider like Israel to put the Dutch back at the center of the Enlightenment and the birst of Modernity.
google book of Israel's Book on Spinoza and the Early Radical Enlightenment
a compressive deflationary contraction and an accelerating systemic collapse of activity due to over-investments in hyper-complexity
Cheery Economic News to Get Your Week Started
I missed this when it was published a few days ago. Worth a read.
I visited the Slate Political Gabfest podcast yesterday. These otherwise excellent, entertaining, highly educated folk (David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and Daniel Gross, in for vacationing John Dickerson) were discussing the ramifications of the economic situation on the upcoming elections. They were quite clear about not being able to articulate the nature of this economic situation, “…this recession, or whatever you want to call it…” in Ms. Bazelon’s words. What’s the point of sending these people to Ivy League colleges if they can’t make sense of their world.
Let’s call this whatever-you-want-to-call-it a compressive deflationary contraction, because that’s exactly what it is, an accelerating systemic collapse of activity due to over-investments in hyper-complexity (thank you John Tainter). A number of things are going on in our society that can be described with precision. We’ve generated too many future claims on wealth that does not exist and has poor prospects of ever being generated. That’s what unpayable debt is. We have such a mighty mountain of it that the Federal Reserve can “create” new digital dollars until the cows come home (and learn how to play chamber music), but they will never create enough new money to outpace the disappearance of existing notional money in the form of welshed-on loans. Hence, money will continue to disappear out of the economic system indefinitely, citizens will grow poorer steadily, companies will go out of business, and governments at all levels will not have money to do what they have been organized to do.
via harpers.org - Jasper Gregory
I am Body Positive, Femme Activist. I document and publish Hyper Local San Francisco , in order to create a Life-Positive Media Ecosystem. 
