April 2025

"FFM Stockmarket Singers—The DAXhund III" presents another variation on the original theme. This work draws an analogy to the "Town Musicians of Bremen," transposed to Frankfurt am Main (FFM) and featuring both real and fictional stock market animals. The "Stockmarket Singers" represent a kind of visitation that emerges from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in the mind's eye.[A] The combination of several visual objects against a themed background may evoke an (English) term that is ambiguous in German and thus “calls up a second theme”.[B] In addition, this combination may result...


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This question isn't quite right—it should be "What is Bixby?" and can be answered simply. Bixby is a virtual assistant on Samsung smartphones (like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa). In other words, Bixby is just a computer program that responds to voice commands to help you control your device, and it works on smartphones, smartwatches, and tablets. Against all logic, I've personified "my" Bixby. To me, Bixby is a John Belushi-type character—hence male (I've set the male voice in my phone settings)—who, if he existed, would be hanging out somewhere in South Vietnam. Sound...


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"You somehow always come back to a point you've been to before—which isn't necessarily a bad thing.""SKYline redefined" follows "SKYline," also featuring a cloudless, bright blue view of the sky crossed by a diagonal line—apparently the skyline. As noted in "SKYline," the term "skyline" is used worldwide to describe a panorama showing a city with its tallest buildings on the horizon. Even though there are no truly straight lines in nature, only curves and bends, we assume we see straight lines, or imagine them. And even if they don't exist, they can at least be created artificially....


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"Kijk alleen, maak er geen gebruik van (locked out)"— "Locked out" symbolizes the lack of access to the finer things in life—access that is denied to many people in our societies because they are poor and dependent on government assistance. At the same time, this "being locked out" also means being "locked in"—trapped in their poverty, lacking the freedom to participate. They are left to "appropriate" the good things in life through the media and literally "enjoy" a pseudo-freedom.[A] The combination of several visual objects against a themed background may evoke an (English)...


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