MacNab argues that in each disaster there is pattern of energy that is its essence– that is in fact characteristic of each disaster’s human element (all disasters have them–we are such messy solipsists as a species). Numbers, especially, have deep psychological and cultural resonances, even as they simply mark what is present structurally in the disaster or entity.  The figure that I chose to embody the disaster was, oddly, a mathematical probability graph. It is dissying possibility as well as a tacit acknowledgment of its role as a phantasm: nothing can really graph the disaster as it’s happened– no probability curve, no spreadsheet is up for it.  In most of the images, I’ve chosen to figure this abstraction as a monster: Leif Erikson and Odin each get to take shots at it. It also reminded me of a post-industrial incarnation of the beasts that attack in Ragnarok, the end of the world in the Norse Eddas.

It is striking graphically: primary colors for the boxes and a tripartite structure of rigid squarish branches and more triangular branches. MacNab writes that “In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored,” and, as in dialectical thinking, it is composed of the prior one and two, and yet more than it. Three often apears in these images: a figure (human), the monster (the probability graph) and some graphic element, be it an additional picture (foreclosed house, etc) or just a shape.

A further pattern I’ve noticed in my designs is a fondness for gradients. Although I am still getting thehang of Adobe Illustrator after a couple years away from it, I found the gradient a useful way to convey visually and affectively what I thought the disaster was about: the opposition between hard and fast rules (the graph monster) and the areas of gradation in our strange late capitalist lives. It was also a rather effective way to evoke both explosion (nuclear, perhaps) and implosion (black holes, even) in the same circular pattern. MacNab doesn’t make use of gradients, but I presume that’s because she’s primarily working as a print artist: there are certain limitations when working in a printed medium. One of the parameters of this assignment was that the logos be easily disseminated and intuited.My images are actually rather easy to replicate (I could assemble the raw bits in less than ten minutes, usually) and intuit and yet, I hope, there is a feeling of both dread, of a choice made to “defend” ones territory, even against the absurd and terrible abstraction of the credit default graph. I didn’t limit myself to the confines of print media but instead thought about what would via an electrate sensibility.

I have two favorites from this batch of logos and one chosen, final product.  The first is the the rainbow gradient protester-cum-copper with the default graph in the background. I feel that this juxtaposition of images captures what Klingmann deemed as essential in branding experience in casino architecture: the visual icons of the disaster. In my case, a term came into usage about half way through my blogging experiment (my disaster is still on going!): the saucepan revolution. The images of protesters and a cop, nailed with chunky fermented dairy product, have, if my blog stalking is any indication, reached  “icon” status. The placement of these images on a square, shifting background from warm, fiery colors to cool colors at first glance oversimplifies the possible subject positions one can take up in the disaster– participant (warm color) and enforcer (cool color): however, I feel that the gradient challenges this simplistic, but intuitively potent construct.

The second favorite is the one I’ve chosen to go with. Its much simpler and cleaner, in terms of design. In it, Odin is tangled up in some plant or snake life–I like the ambiguity as it could be either/both: Odin was impaled in a tree for several days while he learned runes AND he fought snakes during the Norse end of the world: Ragnarok. During Ragnarok, volcanoes explode, things flood, a battle that is all but certain defeat for the gods is waged, anyways, because that’s what norse gods do: yes, the norse gods die, although the survivors on earth (about two of them) restart human civilization.

Even if this allusive baggage isn’t immediately intuited from the image– although Icelandians and probably Scandanavians in general would do so–the image of a man tangled, knifing his way through, speaks to the subjective experience of the economic crisis as well as ironically commenting upon it. This is the great “battle” of our times, only it is fought against mathematical models,  indifferent banks, and lots of red tape. The simple positioning of “us” and “them” becomes less possible, although the urgency to take up “arms” (pots and pans!) does not.  The Credit graph lurks in the back like a further snakey, viney thing to be taken contended with. The “third” figure in this image is the yellow–>black radial gradient. Yellow was chosen because, first, it was the only primary color not present in the graph. The radial itself also evokes images of an implosion or explosion: the limits of human production and experience as well its implied subsequent nadir. It also, as MacNab argues, is a circle: it is both everything and nothing, unity and void. As noted elsewhere in my blog, I think that this sums up the contradictions that the present economic crsis has laid bare.

None of this is to say, however, that I planned any of this like this in as cooly formulaic terms as laid out. For me, what was most important was the confrontation between a single figure and a strange monster, even as the use of a graph and a mythological figure pointed to the impossibility of such a cofrontation in “real life”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7871256.stm: This links to an excellent mini report on the Saucepan Revolution as reported by Icelandic Bloggers: a major part of the discourse surrounding the collapse in Iceland has been shaped by bloggers. An excellent example of sharp, sardonic blogging from Iceland on the disaster is  The Icelandic Weather Report: http://icelandweatherreport.com/. These bloggers enact a more “traditional”, “journalistic” electrate praxis: see news, report, foster dialogue in the cracks left open in official discourse, get people angry, etc. Truth be told, public inssurection is much easier to incite, model, and conceptualize when you’re working with a nation with the population of my hometown in northern Alabama.

But this project– usually– is oriented differently towards the disaster– rather than forcibly revealing “its truth” as an object external to this series of nattering posts about which some “truth” can be discovered, this blog seeks to listen to the images and sounds coming in from the disaster and to hear what it says not about Iceland, Icelandic politics, or even the future of blogging as political praxis, necessarily. Instead, the hope is that the blog embodies and enacts (the two are necessarily linked) a kind of receptiveness and self-reflexivity towards the disaster. The disaster will speak through me, through this blog, and to the larger concerns of the human condition– but as channeled through my own existential orientation, as determined by my primal scene.  I’ve noticed, however, that many of the blogs from iceland about this crisis, while less fragmentary and still preoccupied with the idea of the disaster being primarily meaningful in and of itself rather than illuminating of “life in general” (the two are by no means mutually exclusive).

Part of this task is trying to make the disaster into a graphic nugget of affective information: an emotional/intuitive one two punch of “damn” and “now what?”.  Klingman argues that one of the more noteworth strategies employed by architects in Las Vegas is their ablity– their need in this placeless, anonyous globalized economy–to reduce a place and hisotrical moment into a series of iconic features, dehistoricized, decontextualized, but nevertheless potent in their ability to be instantly understoood.  And so, to communicate the disaster, I must find some iconic features to play with. Earlier posts have described the natural scenery of Iceland and the means by which we explain the economic meltdown to ourselves: images from the protests themselves– not actually the disaster but a manifestation of it, a reaction to it– follow below:

These are great photos for sevearl reasons, but what struck me was their pre-made “iconicity”: the dark light, the dour yet resolved expressions testify, even wthout narrative, to a moment of resolve and interrogation, of witness to the disaster itself.  I plan to use them as best I can to make something that speaks to disaster as concretely and figurally as possible.

An Economic indicator from Iceland, c/o the Economist

And, if you really, really crave information and graphs about Iceland’s impending economic doom, savor this link from the Central Bank of Iceland:

http://www.sedlabanki.is/?PageID=548

Inflation: Iceland

Iceland's international investment position

All of this reminds me of a recent podcast from Planet Money–NPR’s excellent show about the global economic crisis. Wednesday April 15′s podcast was called “Godzillions on Parade”. Thesis: Big numbers are impossible to really perceive or conceptualize–arguments about the global economy and potential debt loads of countries and companies who accept help are doomed to pointlessness in small part because we just cannot get our minds around these numbers: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/04/hear_godzillions_on_parade.html.

There is much the same problem inherent in trying to represent Iceland’s recent disaster in ways that actually speak via images in an immediate, visceral, intuitive way….

To continue the inventory–Captialism, the archive of images:

Credit default swaps are actually incredibly complex transactions and the images that the math mad geniuses use to represent them (to themselves!) are a wee bit tricky. What’s beneath is an image of that expresses the probability that a debt will be defaulted upon per go round of rate adjustment. My knowledge of sequences/series and probability petered out in 2002, so I can’t explain it intellectually. I am, however, on a purely (stupidly) aesthetic level, struck by its tripartite structure, its tidy branching and proliferation of what is presumably pain and distress. It’s almost as if dialectical thought and rhizomatic thought attempted to merge themselves graphically: many have abandoned the idea that history has a teleology like Hegel’s ultimate truth/being/whatever, but the idea that two things could merge and produce something greater than the some of the parts– fundamentally altering what was formerly contradictory, is still seductive. Perhaps part of its sexiness is its ostensible and often bull-headed simplicity as a model.  By contrast, rhizomatic thought cannot orient itself with respect to top, bottom, hierarchy, etc, as as such this ordered, linear model doesn’t begin to capture it literally, although its branching evokes it for me, if only because I realize that this model is overly simplistic and leaves out any number of complex trades and trading contexts that would make this graph more meaningful but less communicative.

The Mathematic Agony and Ecstasy of Credit Default Swaps: modeling magic

Iceland’s currency–the kronur– wasn’t always worthless, though. It was once perfectly respectable multicolored paper that circulated throughout a country with the population of roughly half of Austin, TX, slightly less than my adopted hometown of Lexington, KY and almost exactly the population of my actual hometown of Huntsville, Alabama (395,645 for the metropolitan area).

Below is a smattering of Iceland’s currency, prior to its redesign:

And,  at immediate right, is some of the newly designed 5,000 kronur note. Given the current rate of inflation– 17.1% as of November 2008– 5k krona notes just don’t have the pizzazz they used to:

Disaster: Scene/Location in Culture– Iceland

—Norse–viking settled Possible images: of Vikings– Teutonic blondes with horned hats? Images of Norse Gods: Odin, Freija, Thor, Loki, Valhalla, anything from The Ring Cycle.

—Contemporary: see film depictions earlier in blog: strange depressive welfare state with anxieties/angst over future prior to boom, post boom. Images of young folk at bars with older citizens “on the dole” are literally the scene of the disaster

Contemporary/political:

—Citizens took to the streets to protest the government’s complicity in the neoliberal banking policies that landed the tiny nation in this mess. But they did so with kitchen implements: pots, pans, food, spoons, etc. It has become known recently as the “saucepan revolution” or the “kitchen revolution” depending on what media source you consult. Pots and pans have the added benefit of providing the visual/conceptual pun on  “domestic”: the problem is “domestic” (versus global/international) as well as “domestic” in the home sense– a movement of Icelandic women have argued that this crisis was brought on by men and masculinist economic policies and thus women should have a shot at running the country

–Citizens also burned a lot of things.

–Citizens also tended to drape things with pink fabric, especially macho national heroes

Disaster: Scene/Location in Space

What I’ve already discussed in the blog: Iceland is cold, icy, snowy, geyser studded, and often dark.

Post on “Sat On Your Lap”

I hear the above song/video as a tart and self-reflexive word on humility (and its failures) when one is attempting to actually “learn” something– or when one is undertaking such a serious pursuit as “attempting to learn something”.

And I go back to the drawing board, although truth be told I never left it and probably won’t leave it by project’s end.

Part of the challenge in branding my disaster is that its “site” and “iconography” are debatable: credit default swaps, overleveraging, etc, are all American manifestations of the global economic crisis and they are, at that, highly abstract. My disaster, in fact, could be read as a the triumph of abstractions over the material world: Marx’s famous quote, that has likely shown up in this blog before, seems apt: “All that’s solid melts into air..”. In this case, however, its as though the world economy was a saturated solution and that extra droplet was forced in, and, in skittering across the surface, drew all its sister molecules into a discernible precipitate.

The above is not literally what happened. Nor is it a particularly inventive or illuminating way to look at the disaster as it occurs, regardless: metaphors are useful, so far as they go. But, they only go so far as to link two concepts together in a relatively static fashion, however evocatively accomplished.

A figure or metonym, however, is not only what this blog has been tasked to produce, but also a means of producing an association with greater fluidity and  registers of resonance.

So, to begin again, a quote from an essay by Bill Brown bout Virginia Woolf’s short story “Solid Objects”:

“The fragment appears in “Solid Objects” as the figure of the material metonym whose metonymic function has been arrested–the unconsummated metonym, as it were. The unconsummated metonym is the figure, or the conceptual image, that Woolf offers us to think the object/thing dialectic, to think the world anew. John collects broken parts that are not really parts of anything determinable: “it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass.” His materialism, where parts are related not to wholes but to other parts, enacts a kind of redemption that refuses the (Heideggerian) temporality of recuperation.”

Like Blanchot in Writing of the Disaster and John and his indeterminable fragments, the figure is the fragment by which the other fragments are held in a constellation– a sort of totality that makes intuitive sense no matter where you choose to pick it up (really– orion, cyngus, and caseiopeia would all make sense no matter how they are oriented). And so, so much for the time being for Malcolm Gladwell’s hair, frission, and perpetual motion. Even my cells!

This is a clip from the Glenn Beck

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”

Ostensibly, this is all about America’s much vaunted, mythologized, and commodified history of civil disobedience involving caffienated beverages. Hilariously, G-Beck or Ol’ Blue Eyez, claims that he has no role WHATSOEVER in stoking this “revolt”. Is this revolting? Yes, but actually not much way in the way of disobedience. There is no longer an “outside” of images. There is no, was no “real historical moment” that we can have direct access to: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Society of the Spectacle). So, the mediated relationship here is between folks who find the US government in its current incarnation especially, to be a little too tax-y and oppressive-ish.

Althusser’s definition of ideology is useful here:“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”

Or, going back to Biel: what actually happens in history isn’t what counts. It’s that the  supposed “external”  “true” “objective” “historical” “collection of facts” are actually a narrative that we tell about ourselves. In this case, the myth of this economic collapse, with Iceland as its starting point is one we tell ourselves, on the surface, about “greed’ and “irresponsiblity”. But where it really fits in is in a larger conversation about what makes a nation state– what does it mean to be part of a larger collective identity in an increasingly homogenized place that is forcibly leveled by economic entanglements. Anxieties surrounding national, personal autonomy are the flip side of the practically compulsive need to accumulate that the crisis has forced us all to radically reconsider, as if by getting enough stuff we could create a permanent sculptural spatial sense of self in this ethereal world. Taking clothes as a paradigmatic example, stuff literally secures the borders of our fleshy envelopes.

Society of the Spectacle and W. mashup: