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Eighteen Years Under One Banner: The BolesBlogs Constellation at Thirty

Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of the Boles Blogs Network gathering under a single domain. That formation date is 2008. Writing under one of the network’s earlier names, however, began much earlier, in 1996, when Go Inside Magazine opened a small storefront on a web that still ran on dial tone and patience. The full arc now covers thirty years, fourteen blogs gathered under the BolesBlogs banner, a sister site on SquareSpace launched during the pandemic, and a stubborn argument about what publishing ought to feel like when the writer answers to nobody but the reader.

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The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

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What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

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Scientific Aesthetic and Dramatic Medicine

Last week, we announced three new additions to the Boles Blogs Network — Panopticonic, Carceral Nation and Memeingful — and today we are delighted to announce two more sites we have added to the network!

The first is ScientificAesthetic.com — that site used to be a website, but we’ve now made it more interactive in our ongoing effort to help bring The Arts to Science.  We’ll be writing and wondering about the ways our innate aesthetic informs how to we relate to, and think about, science.  Scientific Aesthetic has two logos you’ll be seeing along the Network.  The first is the name and the second is the semiotic idea of name:

 

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Welcome to Scientific Aesthetic

We welcome you to ScientificAesthetic.com where we bring The Arts to Science to create understanding and foment meaning! !  We hope you enjoy our two logos:  One explains it all and the second suggests everything.  You’ll see both versions floating around the web in the weeks, decades, and centuries to come:

 

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