Sudeepas

The Safe Bottle LampThe BBC and Shell World Challenge is calling for nominations for 2010.  This is the most interesting annual project, where small projects from all over the world are sent in, ten are chosen and explained, and then you can vote for the one you think ought to win.  The projects make life better, safer, easier; they employ local people, they are hugely innovative, they have already started up without a lot of cash and now are asking for the World Challenge prize to take their project a step further. 

Last year's winner was Dr Godakumbura of Sri Lanka who designed a safe kerosene lamp in response to the unsafe use of ordinary bottles full of kerosene with a wick.  These look remarkably like Molotov cocktails, with similar results.
 
The Safe Bottle lamp is still a bottle, full of kerosene, with a wick.  The bottles however, are locally blown with thick glass, cooled slowly so they are unbreakable and have flattened sides so they don't roll if they are knocked over.  They have a screw-on metal lid that fixes the wick securely.  They are made for about a quarter. 
Money goes a long way in some parts of the world. 

Redesigning something that is already in use, just making it safer, more efficient, more ecologically aware, more local seems to be an intelligent use of design skills.   It is less about invention that it is about refinement.  There is both a humility and an anger in redesigning a lamp made from easily found discarded drinks bottles that works after a fashion, is free, and which sets people on fire.

I hope it is different now, but when I was at school we were taught to invent, from scratch, everything, then refine one's own precious idea to aesthetic perfection and then dream about imposing it on the world.    This is not useful.   The safe bottle lamp is. 

small countries

strangemaps: January 17 2010

This postcard from Australia, posted on strangemaps:  If Canadians worry that they are never mentioned in the news, or acknowledged that we are in Afghanistan, or have oil reserves the size of Iran's, or are the second largest country in the world after Russia, think how Australia feels.  All I've heard recently is the problem with tourists climbing Uluru and Kevin Rudd's apologies to Aborigines and the child labourers sent from Britain between 1920 and 1970.  They were sent to Canada too, but we haven't apologised yet.

Australia clearly is very large, yet looms small in the global imagination.  As Patrick Brown said once when someone complained that Canada was never in the news: 'Get down on your knees and thank God that Canada is not in the news.  Places in the news are inevitably about disasters, wars and corruption.'  I paraphrase.  When Canada was proud to be a middle power, we were not particularly well-known for our mediative, behind-the-scenes role between the large powers.  Now we are in the news for our four Fossil Awards. 
It is hard being a large country with a small reputation.

W J Turner's Miss America

W J Turner. Miss America. London: Mandrake Press, 1930About 15 years ago I built twelve feet of glass fronted bookshelves, floor to ceiling, in the back room.  These unfortunately cover the only socket in the room, so I have to pull a handful of books out each time to plug and unplug lamps.  The handful I pulled out yesterday included W J Turner's Miss America from 1930, sandwiched between The Razor's Edge and Reading English Silver Hallmarks.  I don't ever remember seeing it before, which is a problem with libraries – one forgets what one has.

Today if someone wants to rant about something they blog it.  This book is 169 septets about the daughter of an architect who, dismayed at how his skyscrapers last only twenty years before being replaced, travels to Europe and comes up against a kind of decadence that really depresses him.  Meanwhile his daughter glimpses another kind of life, of freedom, gender ambiguity, equality, but returns to the US for a conventional marriage which ends in a Reno divorce.
 
Miss America is a long meditation on the gaucheness of all new world cultures compared to Europe.  Turner was Australian and in the 20s and 30s was on the edge of the Bloomsbury group and Ottoline Morell's Garsington parties.  They loved tall handsome colonials, especially those who wrote poetry.  They were seen as a kind of curiosity – the same attitude they had to Mark Gertler, the painter who was  beautiful, Jewish and from East London. 

Here, the evanescence of the American city and its buildings means that in the US nothing need last, nothing is important enough for any kind of commitment.  There is no longue durée.  Strangely, this is not liberating at all, everything becomes measured and rote, fulfilling functional requirements only. 

...
But Time to his employers was more real
To be amortized duly to a dime—
"In twenty years we pull the damn thing down
Two decades is too long for one old town!"

3
Those words 'the damn thing' sank into his brain,
What a description for each fair creation
With which he laboured to adorn his city!
Upon each site and prospect lay this stain—
Most durable of arts (life can be witty!)
To flourish so conspicuously in a nation
That builds for change and never for duration!

I live in a city which, like 1920s Philadelphia in the long poem, is in a continual process of tearing itself down in response to development pressure, to make room for the bigger and the newer.  In theory this ought to give architects and their clients great scope for innovation and invention, but instead it seems to entrench a conservatism that is unwarranted.  Turner was writing about this in 1930.  

small moments

Derek Jarman. The garden at Prospect Cottage, 1989.I see that I bought this book for $7 at a second-hand bookstore, sometime in the late 1990s.  How could I have missed it the first time round?  My copy is Derek Jarman. Modern Nature. The Overlook Press: Woodstock NY, 1994.

March

Monday 6

Weeded the back garden, wired over the fennel the rabbits keep cutting back, planted two new irises and montbretsia.  At 5:30 I sat on the old wicker chair facing the setting sun and read the newspaper.  A slight chill descended; a choir of gnats floated by, golden sparks catching the last rays of the sun.  The wind got up, bringing the smell of the sea; a russet kestrel flew by.
  Extraordinary peacefulness.

Sunday 12
Warm overcast day with a sea mist that triggered the foghorn at the lighthouse.  Worked on the front garden, weeding; planted carnations and more sea kale seedlings.  Spent the evening assembling objects from the flotsam and jetsam gathered on the beach.

Tuesday 21
The heavy rain has left sheets of water reflecting the grey sky lying on the sharp green of the spring fields.  All along the rail embankment to Ashford the buds are breaking on the hawthorn bushes.  There are drifts of primroses everywhere. ... Deep in the middle of the woods, in the most secret glade, primroses are blooming, the only ones I have found; but there are carpets of violets almost hidden by their bright green leaves.
   The unobservant could walk by them without noticing, as the leaves and flowers create an almost perfect camouflage, the elusive purple vanishing in the green.

small tools held in great affection

my all-time favourite tool: little hammer, hatchet, screwdriver, nail puller, wire cutter, pliers and whatever that top bit is called that cuts the heads off nails.  Sturdy, dates from before the 1950s, a novelty item perhaps, but surprisingly useful it has been.  And it is so tiny.
 
Is there a name for tools that combine many functions?  where something can be a hammer and an inch later a wirecutter?  It is the opposite of that other attitude: the proper tool for every job.  That is what Lee Valley is based on.  No, this little handy dandy does not expect anyone to use it with great finesse, its function is to be helpful as one is muttering and banging around in the basement and hey presto! there it is, a tiny hammer to knock out a cottar pin wedged in the handle at the back of a clock, as happened this morning.  

Humour me, I'm on my holidays and such things loom large.

small objects of absolutely no importance at all

There are small objects in the landscape of one's daily life, so small as to be invisible, yet one misses them when gone.  Pen knives are one such item.  I'd always had one in the car, but when my car was broken into last year it disappeared. 

No problem I thought, I'll get another.  Well, they don't exist anymore it seems.  None at the hardware store, and I had to explain to the clerk what they were.  At Canadian Tire I was taken to a locked cabinet of fearsome blades, each capable of skinning a moose.  The Knife Store had Swiss Army knives but nothing with just a simple blade: the basic Swiss Army knife seems to necessarily include scissors.  There was one lovely slim knife but it was $65 and the blade was very thin.  Good for — what?  committing murder?  not a sturdy pocket knife for peeling oranges in the car, cutting cheese at the campsite, whittling bits of wood for some obscure reason.

I found above penknife, two blades, nice pearly handle for $6 in a junk store, which had many.  A bit rusty, but that can be dealt with.  I mention this apparently insignificant and quite mindless expedition into pen knives and their disappearance on the occasion of the iPad -- a lovely thing, I would dearly love one although they won't be in Canada till the summer.  I'm certainly not against new technologies and still have one of the early iPods which has a physical presence that is as smooth and heavy as any hand held artifact in a museum: it is like a chrome pebble in the hand.  As is this penknife, worn absolutely smooth in someone's pocket over many years. 

What I find so interesting about the present is that while we live with mega-technolongical advances, the small sensuous qualities of objects are holding their own.  Although we could live our lives as avatars in cyberspace, it is still important to touch beautiful surfaces.

artists in small towns

Hill Strategies Research sends reports every so often on the status of the arts and artists in Canada: how many are there, where do they live, how much do they make.  Always the results are surprising and seem to confound general expectations. 

The study that came out today is about how many of our artists live in small and rural towns: as many as in Toronto and Montréal combined.  Vancouver, with the highest concentration of artists (2.35%) of the large cities, would rank only 21st among small municipalities.  Previous Hill Strategies studies have pointed out the sub-poverty income levels of Canadian artists, so this might have something to do with where they live.
47% of all Canada's artisans and craftspersons live in small towns, 35% of our visual artists do.  Cape Dorset is the centre of Inuit carving and printmaking.  West Bolton is in the Eastern Townships with 10% of its labour force in arts occupations.  Denman and Hornby Islands off the east coast of Vancouver Island have been intense centres of island crafts, arts and music since the 1960s.

Lou Lynn, of Monday's post, lives in Winlaw, BC in the quite remote Slocan Valley.  The work isn't all rural wood carving and fiddle music, it is as sophisticated as the work seen in urban centres.

Since the Massey Report of 1949-51, the arts have been seen as the way to confirm and support the development of an independent Canadian identity. It is surprising that so much of that identity is still investigated, and developed, in rural Canada.  

Lou Lynn: retro-active

Lou Lynn. Tools as Artifacts. 2009. glass, bronze

There used to be a junk store in Inglewood that just sold tools.  Most of the stuff I have came from it, a few pieces were bought new when I first moved to Calgary – my hammer and saw, and when the old CPR fellow across the alley died his son came to clear out the house and told me to take what I wanted from his father's workroom.  Which I did, except for the 4' piece of steel rail bolted to the bench.  

What I love about these old wrenches and planes, rakes and shovels, saws and chisels is the excellent steel of which they were made and the beautiful handles, satiny with long use under pressure. Compared to new tools with their bright dayglo colours and plastic handles, these old pieces are quiet and still, dark and graceful.

Lou Lynn, a sculptor living in the Slocan Valley, has had an exhibition, Retro-Active, travelling around the province this past year.  She works in bronze and glass, using the heft and monumentalism of basic tool shapes.  Some of the pieces are very large: cast glass adze heads, so large one's hand is Lilliputian.  Tools as Artifacts, 38 bronze and glass pieces pinned in a long line on the wall, are hand-scaled and like many old artifacts, each piece looks like a tool, but the function is unclear.  A piece with a bronze handle and a frosted glass prong is both humorous and mysterious.

In the Nanaimo Museum & Gallery installation Helen Sibelius, the curator of the retrospective, has paired Lynn's work with mining and forestry tools from the museum's collection.  These are no less mysterious: a half-inch thick iron spike like a 6-foot long knitting needle with a small wood handle at the top.
 
In all of this it is the small details that are so poignant.  A plain turned wood handle has a tiny line inscribed half an inch from where it joins the steel: a small, non-functional reference to a ferrule.  Lynn's sculptures makes much of these small details: she isn't making tools, but she is very aware of the hands that made tools, once, and all the small vanities they added to them.

Lou Lynn. Ladle. 2009 bronze, glass, 56 x 46 x 26cm.

Jaclyn Shoub

Jaclyn Shoub. At This Point in Time. 2004Jaclyn Shoub works with large photographs, removing information in a process of distillation.  They are highly painterly as the removal of much of the photograph is done with a brush and solvent: one knows one is looking at a photograph, but so much content is leached from the surface that these landscapes become magical.  Shoub removes everything about the landscape except for the marks of human occupation which appear small and fragile.

For On Site 23: small things, we have been sent a narrative, a short story written in notes, as the beginning of an architectural process.  This narrative, which you will read when 23 is published in May, also has a delicacy – it describes the process of removing a building from public perception, so that the architecture is everything but the building. 

Both these two works are the opposite of abstraction, where one thinks of an essence and then displays that essence.  These start with the large and complex environment, urban or rural, and remove everything but a thin line of meaning.  What we are looking at is almost incidental to the fullness of life and world but, incidental or not, is extremely important to us.

small urban things

Projet : Concept développé par Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner. Crédit photo : Leblanc + Turcotte + SpoonerMontréal recently held a competition for the design of new bus shelters.  The design chosen was by Leblanc + Turcotte + Spooner.  The press release outlines a way of thinking about urban design that all cities might adopt. 

Montréal has 'made a firm commitment to making such competitions a widespread practice, promoting innovation and excellence in architecture and design, and continuing to position Montréal as a UNESCO City of Design. This project is a concrete illustration of our willingness to ensure that Montréal’s designers play a paramount role in shaping our city’s future.  This design competition is one of the five shukôs, or creative challenges, issued on September 30, 2008, by the Mayor of Montréal. Besides providing tangible impetus for creativity in design and architecture, it aims to widen access to public design commissions to greater numbers of practitioners.'

The Ville de Montréal has within it the Design Montréal office, which runs the competitions; its mission is to improve design throughout the city and to position Montréal as 'a city of design'.  This is how a city uses its designers and architects. 

The bus shelter competition was a public, not a private, initiative involving the Ville de Montréal, the Société de transport de Montréal and the Québec Department of Culture, Heritage and the Status of Women.

The shelter is good too: free standing, modular, a communications column containing digital components and back-lit ads, and an integrated solar system freeing the shelters from dependence on the grid.  The bench is interesting - more like a perch.  Calgary's latest bus shelters have seats divided by a small handrail, presumably to make it impossible to sleep on the bench – a nice little punitive touch.  In Austin, Texas, the downtown bus stops had a row of flip down seats on the side of the building lining the sidewalk. 

Bus shelters are small projects that look after the street.  They project the way a city looks after its people.


small countries

Teemu Kurkela. Finland Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

Expos are strange things.  What are they for?  The Seville Expo was a chance to present post-Franco Spain to the world.   It seems that the Shanghai Expo is an opportunity for the world to present itself to China.  Each pavilion struggles to something about the identity, the ambitions, the intentions of its country.

Finland's pavilion, by Teemu Kurkela of JKMM Architects, is a serene bowl floating in a lake.  Minimal, calm, the sky looms large.

The Netherlands pavilion is an antic figure-eight street of little houses.  It looks much more interesting on site than in the presentation rendering, which looks absolutely mad.  John Körmeling is the architect; on his website is a left hand column of conceptual ideas often for highway treatments -- sections of roads that  float off into the sea, etc.  The right hand side shows the Expo project, called Happy Street.

One does get a sense of the intensity of the Netherlands: it has 16.5 million on 33,900 sq km, the size of Nova Scotia.  The open landscape of Finland has 5.4 million people on 338,000 sq km, half the size of Saskatchewan.  These two countries are small in area and population.  They both seem to have a clear idea of how to do a pavilion that says something significant about themselves. 

Is Canada too big?  I ask this rhetorically, as our pavilion says nothing that I can recognise about this country.  

John Körmeling. The Netherlands Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010

climate and weather

Steve Sopinka has been discussing with us a project to develop a climate zone map for building.  The climate zone map for planting tells you what species of plants will survive in specific areas and is well known to gardeners.  Calgary is zone 2b because of its elevation, the mountains and its chinooks, föhn winds that come from Pacific weather systems and which wreak havoc with plants who wake up on a balmy January morning thinking it is spring only to be blasted with -30 the next week.  Within zone 2b however there are frost pockets and warm spots.  I live in the lee of the downtown with all those tall buildings blocking the wind and giving off heat and so I can garden to zone 4.  North Bay is zone 3b . Vancouver Island is mostly  7a and b, parts of the Fraser River delta are zone 8, meaning they can grow almost anything.

There is a building corollary to all of this: with each climate zone come various fine-grained built responses.  Tarps, amusing as I find them, are one.  For example. 

We are launching a call to contribute to a database of local building traditions.  This database will include specific examples of local building habits, from form to roof slopes to door placement, with a hazarding of why things are built the way they are.  The stepless door, so famous in Newfoundland, is not about climate, or weather, or materials, but is about social propriety.   The ubiquity of the tarp, a building material in its own right on the west coast, is not about propriety, it is about rain. 

This project is outlined on this page: climate zone building responses.  A rather dull name, but you have to start somewhere. 


tarp archaeology

This might be the end of my disquisition on tarps for now.  It stopped raining, got some more pictures, found some more conditions, shall think about them for a bit.  They have so many applications, from storm walls to weed killers.  Most are blue, some are silver and really beautiful.  They are the foreground to many glorious touristy views, the background to the back yard.  They appear where unnecessary, they are slowly buried when forgotten.

With weather comes architectural adaptation.  We have been taught the traditional responses to weather: the tight roofs on the Nova Scotia shore where any roof with an overhang would be ripped off by horizontal Atlantic winds, the deep eaves on the west coast which protect the walls and the foundation from quietly endless vertical rain.  The steep metal roofs of Revelstoke shed great snowfalls into the sideyards; the prairie two-storey frame house, an almost perfect cube, has an extremely low surface to volume ratio, minimising heat loss.  These are the broad strokes, none of which prepared me for the finer grain of tarp culture.   

tarpology

I'm beginning to think that tarps also indicate ownership, that the pile of leaves on the boulevard covered in a tarp indicates that you have intentions for these leaves, they are yours, they aren't abandoned leaves. 
These pipes in the yacht club parking lot ought to be fine in the rain; no one is worried that water will run in the ends, no, the tarp appears to tidy them up.  The sight of a bright blue tarp is preferable to a pile of pipe lengths.  I find this a bit curious, but clearly I don't quite get the nuances of tarpdom yet. 

I grew up here and can't ever remember tarps everywhere.  Dark mildewed canvas, yes, and tarpaper, lots and lots of tarpaper.  There was a small house on the way to school that was only tarpapered.  It is now stuccoed, but for twenty years the tarpaper did its job.  Now it would be neatly faced with bright blue plastic.  

Tarps R Us

Midland Liquidators, immortalised in Bob Bossin's Nanaimo, and the heart of Island tarp culture.

Tarps are everywhere here, as water is exceedingly thin and can get into the tiniest of hairline cracks in gaskets, flashing, window frames, putty, sealed joints. Woodpiles are tarped, there are tarps on cars, tarps on boats, this morning saw a pile of rocks covered in a tarp, something completely inexplicable.  And because it rains so much, all organic matter is leached from the garden leaving it a gravel bed, you see a lot of piles of manure and topsoil covered by tarps. Deck furniture is tarped, lawn mowers have tiny tarps, roofs have huge tarps.  The mad lady who walks on the path by the yacht club beach wears a tarp. 

Midland Liquidators used to actually be a liquidator, full of tools and work clothes mainly, and once, unforgettably a stand of high-end eyeglasses of which I bought many.  Dad and I used to go down and look at stuff – screwdrivers that worked at right angles, clever pliers and such.  One of my earliest memories when I would have maybe been five, was going with him to Capital Iron in Victoria, a gaunt old warehouse of tools, hardware and navy surplus, oiled wood floors and dim light bulbs up in the rafters.  Neither my father or I were particularly handy with complicated building.  He was a librarian and I generally smash things together with lots of nails and glue, but we found such places endlessly fascinating.   It is quite tough at Midland now, a serious contractor's tool store, but, the tarps, the tarps.

small things: tarps

My new, very small garage.  Is this inventive?  Absolutely not, it is cultural.  This is the west coast where it rains interminably and tarps are a way of life.  The large thing would be to have a two- or three-car garage.  The small thing is to protect a leaking window seal.

small things: Josep Muñoz i Pérez

Josep Muñoz i Pérez. New Door, Foment de les Arts i del Disseny, Barcelona.This is one of the projects that has been sent to us for On Site 23: small things.  It is a door on the Plaça dels Ángels, dominated by the chapel entrance to the Convent dels Ángels in Barcelona.  Muñoz' project was to push the entrance to the FAD into view. 

That's it.  The whole project, which won several awards, is a door.  It wasn't just one part of a larger project, the FAD existed, and needed a presence on the Carrer dels Ángels.  Can an architectural commission be smaller?   Barcelona is stacked with young architects, and has been so since the mid 1980s.  As a result, every detail, every litter bin, every bollard, door handle, window frame, sign, news kiosk, bench and handrail has been designed by an architect.  And these architects treat every project, no matter how small, as the making of their reputation and the development of their architectural voice. 

I weep at the really horrible nature of the utilitarian objects in the public domain in our cities, and how institutions that should know better: art galleries, publishers, design schools, libraries either camp in some other building and accept the generic details of their host, or treat their entrances as just a way to get into the building.  That sense that the contents of the building can spill outward into the public realm is missing.  Doors here shut the outside out and the inside in. 

Is an appreciation of small urban moves, marginal architectural interventions, possible here?  We can all think of how things could be better, but what does it actually take in terms of approaching city parks departments, or transportation departments (the heart quails) with self-generated projects in hand?  Because if we wait for them to make a move, we will be old and grey before it happens.

small things: ice fishing huts

Paul Whelan. Ice Fishing Hut on Lake Simcoe, 2008.

Both Steve Sopinka and Paul Whelan wrote, in different articles, about ice fishing huts in Ontario for On Site 21: weather.  The Globe & Mail had a piece on them last weekend, and Rob Kovitz has released his long in the making book, Ice Fishing in Gimli. a novel.  Kovitz's book is huge, complex and about Gimli, and winter, and Canada, and takes its name from a study Kovitz did about 10 years ago of the ice fishing huts on Lake Winnipeg. 

Beautifully crafted little pieces of architecture housing one or two people who spend long days in them with a fishing line dropped through a hole in the ice, ice fishing huts are on their way to being one of the enduring and iconic images of the Canadian winter. 

Although a highly individual activity, the collective of huts form a community of sorts, with unwritten rules and oral traditions.  They represent a culture that is local, historic, spatially precise, half-sport, half-social with an architecture that has developed from it.  Perhaps one can buy a little garden shed from Rona or Canadian Tire and adapt it to sitting on the ice, but Sopinka's and Whelan's research indicate that this is not really what happens.  These huts are handmade with considerable care and attention. 

Vernacular architecture is a form of building limited by the scope and scale of the individual builder, working with ordinary tools and found materials: things are put together in ways that make professionals both blanch and wonder why their education battered the impulse to make things out of them. 

Ice fishing huts are small, the tradition is long, the lake is huge. 

small things: lipstick

The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945. The Imperial War Museum, London

Last Remembrance week The Relief of Belsen (2007) was on TVO.  It was both drama and documentary, intercut with Richard Dimbleby's BBC footage taken in 1945.  The ambulance crew which had been sent to the prison, and subsequent Red Cross and military reinforcements were played by actors, no one played the survivors of the camp, they were all shown in the intercut documentary portions.  The ambulance crew did not know it was a concentration camp; the horror of their discovery was manifest and enormous, the task of humanitarian rescue nearly impossible as thousands died even as they were trying to give them proper nourishment, medicine, clothes and bedding.

This is an excerpt from the diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Gonin DSO who, in the film, was shown as the head of the medical team:

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Such a small thing, a lipstick.

small things: Zoe Keating

Zoe Keating.  Pop!Tech, 18 October 2007 at Camden Opera House. 

video by Kevin Fox

A small assemblage of cello, Keating, laptop, a short composition of 9 minutes, a huge, complex and beautiful sound.  The large thing would be to compose a piece of music, find an orchestra to play it, record it, get it distributed, etc, etc.  The small thing is to sort it all out yourself with what you have: talent, new technology and an idea, or several ideas, and your own website.   

Issue 23 (call for articles) will consider small moves, small projects with large consequences.  New technological changes in the arts seem to appear when the art form is at its most corporate and most proprietal. Photography was seen as the death of painting, which was not what happened, however small cameras put the making of images into amateur hands.  Music sampling put the making of music into the hands of disenfranchised youth: it didn't kill off the recording business, it just allowed individuals to make and reproduce music themselves.  One might see all inventions as reinvigorating overstuffed productions that force audiences to be passive consumers.  New technologies are constantly put into the hands of ordinary people who use them in personal and idiosyncratic ways.  And these things start out small.  And then they get big.