Archive for the Seduction Category
Going up, going down, but always leading astray
From Apple Insider
Apple: iPods built to last 4 years
By Katie Marsal
Published: 12:00 PM EST
Apple Computer says its iPod digital music players are built to last four years and have a failure rate that is lower than other consumer electronics devices.
Although there have been several accounts in which the iconic music players have been called faulty devices, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris recently told the Chicago Tribune that iPods have a failure rate of less than 5 percent, which she said is “fairly low” compared with other consumer electronics.
“The vast majority of our customers are extremely happy with their iPods,”Kerris said, adding that Apple builds the players to last four years.
However, a survey conducted by Macintouch last year found that out of nearly 9,000 iPods owned by more than 4,000 respondents, more than 1,400 of the players had failed. The survey concluded that the failure rate was 13.7 percent, stemming from an equal mix of hard drive and battery related issues.
Apple’s fairly recent decision to embrace solid-state NAND flash memory at the core of its most popular iPod models, rather than hard disk drives, is likely to improve failure rates. Flash memory lacks the moveable parts contained inside hard disks, making the storage medium significantly more durable.
According to the Macintouch survey, flash-based iPod shuffles and iPod nanos indeed sport a much lower failure rate than their hard disk drive-based counterparts.
Apple’s iPod turns five years old this October.
The opposite of seduction
I agree with Manolo. Crocs are certainly the opposite of seduction.
Visually, they present an interesting juxtaposition: They share some elements of their proper function1 and the the colour. Other than that, the perception, for a viewer (or owner) looking for a seductive experience, couldn’t be different.
The seductive experience is not a question of comfort, either, but of the experience of wearing these shoes, mainly for girls Äìthis is a gender specific issue, I am sureÄì. What drives this experience is the appearance, the way the shoes look and what that may mean. Crocs encase whereas Blahnik reveals the foot; Crocs protect feet whereas Blahnik hugs them with the straps; Crocs have holes for ventilation (implying smelly, sweaty feet?) whereas Blahnik has bows; Crocs widen the feet whereas Blahnik lenghens the legs, hinting at, enhancing other parts of femenine anatomy and provoking a specific way of walking.
I’d like to do an experiment. I’d loke to wear each of these of a different foot and hop from one to the other… I wonder what kinds of psychological impact may this Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde study bring…
- Preston, B. (2000) The function on things. A philosophical perspective on material culture. In Graves-Brown, P. ed. Matter, materiality and modern culture. London: Routledge [back]
Explain the astray bit II
Metro, Thusday 20 July 2006
Note to self: Not to lose sight of the object of study
Please remember, before attempting to write anything on seduction:
1. Seduction is a relational enterprise;
2. Seduction invokes the possibility of a change, from positive to negative;
3. Seduction may lead me astray in my efforts to theorise, research, examine, explore;
4. Seduction will resist any mode of production;
5. Seduction (first order simulacra) is what my research is about. Not attraction, fascination or any other third and fourth order simulacra.
Correspondence as a form of seduction
Two of my favourite books on seduction (Titian: Nymph and Shepherd and Les Liaisons Dangereuses) are epistolar. This, together with the impossibility of touching the shoes I described below suggests that distance (appropriate distance, not too close, not too far) may be an essential component of seduction.
In Search of a Lost Screw
“In one of his books Morelli talks about a Neapolitan who spend years sitting in the doorway of his house looking at a screw on the ground. At night he would pick it up and put it under his mattress. The screw was at first a laugh, a jest, a communal irritation, a neighbourhood council, a mark of civil duties unfulfilled, finally a shrugging of shoulders, peace, the screw was peace, no one could go along the street without looking out of the corner of his eye at the screw and feeling that it was peace. The fellow drop dead of a stroke and the screw disappeared as soon as the neighbours got there. One of them has it; perhaps he takes it out secretly and looks at it, puts it away again and goes off to the factory feeling something that he does not understand, an obscure reproval. He only calms down when he takes out the screw and looks at it, stays looking at it until he hears footsteps and has to put it away quickly. Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw. Picasso takes a toy car and turns it into the chin of a baboon. The Neapolitan was most likely an idiot, but he also might have been the inventor of a world. From the screw to an eye, from an eye to a star…”
Cort?°zar, J (1998) Hopscotch. London: Harvill Press
Clearly, the Neapolitan was the victim of seduction. Wondering what type of screw could have such a power, I embarked upon the search of at least one of the qualities that would make me look at and keep a simple screw. DIY shops and designer shops were no good as the screws came in boxes of indistinguishable hundreds. My screw had to be noticeable, if not unique. [note: the screw is already becoming MY screw]. I looked for designers (Alessi, Starck, Kartel, Newson¬Ö) in the hope of them being interested in such a modest object. Corkscrews is the closer they get to it and the cheerfulness of that object slightly defeats the purpose of my quest. I am not looking for a gloomy object, but one that strangely leads the owner astray.
The internet is always a good source for unexpected and inexplicable things. I now know everything about screws, or rather, fasteners and bolts, in all their shapes, heads types, measurements and history but haven¬ít found what I am looking for. I suddenly have a lucky thought and, in the brink of despair I decide to adjectivise the word screw with artistic qualities. I type ‘bright coloured screw’ -always in singular- into Google and what I get is not altogether hopeless. The brightness, the size, the shape of the head and the narrowness of its spiral indentation have something fascinating about them:
I think I would like to buy one of these and further the experiment by furtively looking at it time and time again…
Laura Gonzalez (born Bilbao, Spain) is an artist and academic. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. 
