Essays | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Detroit and the Aral Sea

September 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] A few weeks ago when we visited Detroit, all I could think about was the Aral Sea. Why would a visit to […]

Categories: End of Times, Environment, Essays, Representation • Tags: Aral Sea, Detroit, disaster

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Walmart and the Significance of $17.00

November 19, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] If I were exiled to the proverbial desert isle and could only bring five photos with me to contemplate the human condition—five […]

Categories: Essays • Tags: globalization, Walmart

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My Farmville Obituary: How Endless Growth Killed My Farm

May 28, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

I was a late arrival to the virtual land rush. Tens of millions of homesteaders had already staked their claim and were well along their way to becoming successful farmers when I sowed my first plots of vegetables. By the time I raised a barn, sunk a few trees into the digital soil, and met a few of my neighbors I was anxious that I would never catch up. Others already had giant chicken coops, multiple cow milking operations, pig […]

Categories: Essays • Tags: FarmVille, games

Visualizing a Changing China Through Word Frequencies

December 17, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

This evening I spent a number of hours playing around with Google Labs Ngram Viewer, a fantastic tool that graphs word frequencies found in the huge collection of scanned books amassed by Google Books. It is as easy as choosing some keywords, selecting a language collection, choosing a timeframe and hitting return on your computer keyboard. In a flash the viewer graphs the frequency that the words occur in Google Books over time. Choosing multiple words separated by commas adds […]

Categories: Essays • Tags: China, Google

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Shanghai Expo 2010: Better City, Better Line

June 19, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

Shanghai offers truly magnificent sights. To me, the city is at least as beautiful as any of China’s famous natural scenic spots such as Huangshan or Guilin. It is even more impressive, however, because in a mountain or forest all you need to do is build some trails, chain off some vistas, and set up a few hotels—the scenery is already there. Shanghai, on the other hand, as been nearly entirely rebuilt over the past two decades and everything in […]

Categories: Bodies, China, Essays, Exhibitions and Fairs, Photo Essays • Tags: Expo 2010, lines, Shanghai, waiting

A Haunting Photograph Revisited

June 9, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

In late spring 1999 I spent nearly four weeks traveling from Nanjing, where I was living at the time, overland through Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan. Fodor’s had hired me to update some chapters in their China travel guide, and after a year of fieldwork the opportunity to do some solo travel–and get paid for it–was a welcome opportunity. While most of my memories of that trip have faded, a select few are still very clear. I can’t remember […]

Categories: Essays • Tags: China, memory, Nanchang, Photography, revolutionary martyrs

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Using an iPad in China

June 3, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

I often travel to China with student groups or for research and never leave home without my MacBook. It is the place I keep things to read, write fieldnotes, store the many photos I take and keep in touch with friends and family through e-mail, Skype and Facebook. Lugging it around always seemed a bit much, and after a drop at the Tokyo airport last January that left a nasty dent in the corner of its otherwise immaculate aluminum frame, […]

Categories: Essays, How To • Tags: Anthropology, China, fieldwork, iPad