Last night I wrote a poem/monologue that I think will work nicely with our video project. Since I felt our project was so much about motion and architectural patterns, movements, and navigation, I used language that’s chiefly concerned with distance, location, light, connection, angles, and architecture in general. My main tension I think can be partially summed up in the line “I want things together that have previously not met.” What’s interesting here is that this kind of video footage seems familiar, it feels like it has “met” before. I think our challenge moving forward is to create a sense of “uncanny” in the way Pound would use the term (simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar) through juxtapositions of movement, language and sound. What the language does, (especially by using the “I” sparingly) is vaguely locate a voice that is or has spent time navigating these images and sounds, one who can de-familiarize them or give them to an audience in a new way. I like the idea of text rather than spoken language for a few reasons. I think first it creates more distance between the audience and speaker—text is harder to locate than a specific voice. Secondly, it’s simply harder to read and pay attention to the sounds and images which I think makes it a richer landscape to navigate and experience. Text is also important in navigating a city space or a public area. Thirdly, you’re constantly being bombarded by newspapers, ads, books, screens, t shirts, maps, marquees, etc that change the way you navigate a space and that have largely evaded our video footage. I’m still debating including a “you” in the text—I want to implicate the audience in some way, mostly because it’s such a passive video; it’s more soothing than chaotic. If the “you” doesn’t implicate the audience, it will at least suggest narrative, architecture, homogenization at some level. (It would be ideal if the “you” was equivocal or plural).
I’ve learned that poem you set out to write is never the poem you end up with and it’s been no different with the video project. Obviously collaboration complicates that, but I think we’ve worked well together and so far the video experience has been a good one—we had some problems with some of the footage being in AVI format and so we weren’t able to use it, but overall we’ve been able to do what we set out to do.
I also want to say that I’ve had a great semester in the seminar. The challenge is always making your art relevant, new, dynamic and as fully aware of other art and artists as possible. I feel like I’ve learned and been exposed to quite a bit of interesting material, artists, thinkers, etc that are helping me revise and rewrite what art can be and its possibilities. ie Crawford’s Stop Motion studies has really helped me situate and explain Marc Auge’ s concept of the non-place and kinds of body discipline. I really feel like the seminar has done what I hoped it would; make me a more versatile writer and thinker.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Motion, architecture, and narrative space
So I’ve been thinking about my post-modern studies paper a lot lately and I can’t help but let it inform this video project and my fascination with narrative and Auge’s concept of the non-place. From the start I wanted to do something with public transportation and faces and the language one finds on trains, bus stations, etc whether it be ads, newspapers, maps, or books and then I realized Crawford already did that project with his stop motion studies. Now I think I’m trying to more or less ignore facial gestures and different body disciplines and focus more on motion, architecture, perspective, borders, and text in general.
Derrick and I went to Denver yesterday and got a lot of great bulk video walking around downtown and riding the light rail—we focused on the movement outside the window and the intersection of lines, people, and buildings, rather than anything inside the train itself. I want to try to film in what Auge would call a non-place, ie supermarkets, hardware stores, graveyards, boulder falls, etc because these are places that are inherently full of narrative space, histories, and language. While we’re interested in using a mix of different frames and a contrast of motion and stillness to create these equivocal moments of narrative, we’re also considering using text to “label” what you’re watching. For example if we were to show boulder falls in a frame, the text might say, “This is a waterfall.” But we also want to play with the text and its semantic relation to the images a bit more. Rather than simply mislabeling the waterfall as “a tree” later we might slightly tweak a phrase, for example: “This is a waterfall” to “This is the deadliest waterfall in Colorado.” This qualification drastically changes your experience of the otherwise beautiful, non-descript waterfall and creates a particular response—suddenly you’re looking at a place of death as part of a larger collective, having a collective experience. The “this is” construct is important in making the connection feel given or expected, so that when the unexpected noun/adjective/verb appears the stability and integrity of narrative and language is immediately implicated. (If we do our job right) our hope is that these moments would suggest multiplicity and equivocation more than simple failure or collapse.
Perspective is something we’re still trying to figure out. Our favorite shot was taken sitting on the light rail where Derrick and I filmed the same landscape out of the same window, but from two different angles. Our thought is that if we put these next to each other or sandwich another frame with them we could again make a statement about multiplicity and narrative through movement rather than text. We’re also thinking about other ways of doing this—whether we both move through a hardware store together or use still shots in the produce isle of the grocery store I’m not sure yet. We’re also still figuring out how many frames we want and how they should work, whether they’ll always be there and just turn off and on like little tvs or if some will disappear, get larger, smaller, move around, etc. Right now I prefer a symmetrical three frames that turn off and on to give the piece a greater sense of stability and architecture since there is going to be so much juxtaposition and chaos happening already.
Derrick and I went to Denver yesterday and got a lot of great bulk video walking around downtown and riding the light rail—we focused on the movement outside the window and the intersection of lines, people, and buildings, rather than anything inside the train itself. I want to try to film in what Auge would call a non-place, ie supermarkets, hardware stores, graveyards, boulder falls, etc because these are places that are inherently full of narrative space, histories, and language. While we’re interested in using a mix of different frames and a contrast of motion and stillness to create these equivocal moments of narrative, we’re also considering using text to “label” what you’re watching. For example if we were to show boulder falls in a frame, the text might say, “This is a waterfall.” But we also want to play with the text and its semantic relation to the images a bit more. Rather than simply mislabeling the waterfall as “a tree” later we might slightly tweak a phrase, for example: “This is a waterfall” to “This is the deadliest waterfall in Colorado.” This qualification drastically changes your experience of the otherwise beautiful, non-descript waterfall and creates a particular response—suddenly you’re looking at a place of death as part of a larger collective, having a collective experience. The “this is” construct is important in making the connection feel given or expected, so that when the unexpected noun/adjective/verb appears the stability and integrity of narrative and language is immediately implicated. (If we do our job right) our hope is that these moments would suggest multiplicity and equivocation more than simple failure or collapse.
Perspective is something we’re still trying to figure out. Our favorite shot was taken sitting on the light rail where Derrick and I filmed the same landscape out of the same window, but from two different angles. Our thought is that if we put these next to each other or sandwich another frame with them we could again make a statement about multiplicity and narrative through movement rather than text. We’re also thinking about other ways of doing this—whether we both move through a hardware store together or use still shots in the produce isle of the grocery store I’m not sure yet. We’re also still figuring out how many frames we want and how they should work, whether they’ll always be there and just turn off and on like little tvs or if some will disappear, get larger, smaller, move around, etc. Right now I prefer a symmetrical three frames that turn off and on to give the piece a greater sense of stability and architecture since there is going to be so much juxtaposition and chaos happening already.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Crawford, Horvath and Video Narrative
Crawford’s stop motion project was really interesting both visually and conceptually. It’s strange that he mentions narrative and his investment in narrative in his artist’s statement. I’m curious how narrative is formed in these frames; we have motion and subways that are being propelled forward but at the same time the motion is constantly being pulled back, restrained, and possibly negated. The stifled feeling this creates is sometimes stressful but at other times comes across as fluid and quite beautiful. I think narrative also comes from different reactions—the smiling, the snarling, etc. There seems to be narrative hiding behind the smile in particular. I’m thinking of Certeau here and possibly Auge; internalized conceptualizing systems, micro-histories, body discipline, and other meaning making activities. There’s language and labeling everywhere in these frames—newspapers, ads, books, signs, etc are constantly influencing the subjectivity of the passengers and their response to the camera.
I couldn’t get all of the Horvath videos to work on my computer, but as I progressed and watched more I found his body of work to be quite dynamic and versatile—I really liked “Album” in particular, I thought the pace of the piece was one of the more natural and relaxed ones that I found. I loved the cuts and the work with the music which is so hard to match up with motion in general. Album also had a different more collaged sense of narrative than works like “Boulevard” or “Tenderly Yours.” We get a fairly clear domestic space/experience occasionally interrupted by obscured bodies, faces, clocks, white noise, etc. It suggests an evolution of the family unit—the simplicity, safety of it seems to be threatened by post-modernity, chaos, war. Horvath also seems quite invested in bodies and faces as the measure for expression and selfhood in general. I think “Boulevard” in particular did some interesting things in that respect.
“Boulevard” collages and juxtaposes two to three frames of video on the screen giving us glimpses of the city, the countryside, the highway, etc. The images are almost always moving, advancing forward. What the collage does and what some of Horvath’s shots do is play with (in this case a female) body and the way film and bodies simultaneously reveal and conceal. We get these moments of vulnerability—the woman is at the city overlook without a coat looking cold and the voiceover is saying something to the effect of “she had big dreams but look at her now.” Other times I think the body and face act as mask—we have mannequins (although since they’re retro and very much sex-objects I think Barbie, patriarchy, misogyny more than mask), we fly by a King Lear marquee which fits with the tragedy and monologue style of the film, but the reference to theatre is also self-reflexive in a way; she’s putting on a show, her body is acted. The film has an almost noir feel to it but it might be more along the lines of the “college art film,” the unsatisfied woman, the horrible men—some of the dialogue like “I want to fall in love with him after he puts his dick in me” made me cringe a bit too.
“Tenderly Yours” reminded me of some European modernist love story—a Good Morning Midnight of sorts (maybe it’s because she’s so French). It was also very similar to “Boulevard” in terms of the narrative, the pacing, the melancholy tone and isolation of the woman. The narrative itself and the way it’s told from a distance really emphasizes this and further removes the woman from the memories, actions, etc. Again the body is obscured but I think in a different way with different effect—it seems obscured by memory, especially in the initial love-making scene. It makes me think of the body as so physical, hyper-physical in a sense that memory, language, narrative can’t touch or get at. One can never reproduce the body.
I couldn’t get all of the Horvath videos to work on my computer, but as I progressed and watched more I found his body of work to be quite dynamic and versatile—I really liked “Album” in particular, I thought the pace of the piece was one of the more natural and relaxed ones that I found. I loved the cuts and the work with the music which is so hard to match up with motion in general. Album also had a different more collaged sense of narrative than works like “Boulevard” or “Tenderly Yours.” We get a fairly clear domestic space/experience occasionally interrupted by obscured bodies, faces, clocks, white noise, etc. It suggests an evolution of the family unit—the simplicity, safety of it seems to be threatened by post-modernity, chaos, war. Horvath also seems quite invested in bodies and faces as the measure for expression and selfhood in general. I think “Boulevard” in particular did some interesting things in that respect.
“Boulevard” collages and juxtaposes two to three frames of video on the screen giving us glimpses of the city, the countryside, the highway, etc. The images are almost always moving, advancing forward. What the collage does and what some of Horvath’s shots do is play with (in this case a female) body and the way film and bodies simultaneously reveal and conceal. We get these moments of vulnerability—the woman is at the city overlook without a coat looking cold and the voiceover is saying something to the effect of “she had big dreams but look at her now.” Other times I think the body and face act as mask—we have mannequins (although since they’re retro and very much sex-objects I think Barbie, patriarchy, misogyny more than mask), we fly by a King Lear marquee which fits with the tragedy and monologue style of the film, but the reference to theatre is also self-reflexive in a way; she’s putting on a show, her body is acted. The film has an almost noir feel to it but it might be more along the lines of the “college art film,” the unsatisfied woman, the horrible men—some of the dialogue like “I want to fall in love with him after he puts his dick in me” made me cringe a bit too.
“Tenderly Yours” reminded me of some European modernist love story—a Good Morning Midnight of sorts (maybe it’s because she’s so French). It was also very similar to “Boulevard” in terms of the narrative, the pacing, the melancholy tone and isolation of the woman. The narrative itself and the way it’s told from a distance really emphasizes this and further removes the woman from the memories, actions, etc. Again the body is obscured but I think in a different way with different effect—it seems obscured by memory, especially in the initial love-making scene. It makes me think of the body as so physical, hyper-physical in a sense that memory, language, narrative can’t touch or get at. One can never reproduce the body.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Digital space is here to stay
I thought Chris Anderson’s introduction to The Long Tail was interesting coming from a non-market, non-economic background. I think he’s right to say his hypothetical “Ben” is growing up in a different world in terms of information and the way culture or entertainment is being consumed. I’m interested in “this shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards” (8). Personally, I’m skeptical of this development in terms of its long term subversive power (which I think is the attitude Anderson takes here), but it seems to be a very powerful idea indeed.
My guess is that the market hasn’t caught up yet with the developments he mentions, but that it’s going to with a vengeance whether we recognize it as such or not. We constantly have new models replacing the old ie iTunes replaced the BMG catalog, netflix replaced Blockbuster, and Amazon replaced the retail catalog to name a few. Anderson’s argument is that these models are better because now instead of choosing between 100 things, you get to choose between 10,000 or more. This seems problematic in some ways--what about that video store I loved and the employees that could recommend me amazing films and give me different personal insights? What about that music store? that book store? But regardless, whether “mainstream” as we know it dies (American Idol, McDonald’s, South Park, NBC, Disney, Sony, Starbucks) it’s undeniably changing and undeniably powerful and here to stay for the time being. In fact, the only two things that really seem to be drastically changing market-wise in this introduction are movie and music consumption and distribution. Maybe it’s because these are the two forms of art/entertainment that everyone consumes in some way whether you’re 8 or 80, and they both are able exist dismembered from packaging; the kind of physicality you can hold in your hand.
Maybe because I’m not as engaged with digital communities or the web as others, I don’t understand the quote: “[today] The cultural landscape is a seamless continuum from high to low, with commercial and amateur content competing equally for [sic] attention” (6). It depends where you go on the web and if you’re like me who visits larger commercial sites like Facebook or CNN or NPR you get adds for Mercedes Benz, Slumdog Millionaire, Netflix, Sports Illustrated, Washington Post, Hershey’s, Advil—it’s essentially the same things you get in a television commercial. I also think this statement starts leaking pretty quickly when you take it outside the internet and apply it to other spaces like an urban one—you have local fliers, posters, advertisements, and graffiti (depending where you are geographically), but they’re drowned by a commercial and linguistic landslide of road signs, billboards, shopping malls, marquees, logos, maps, etc. Here, I’m constantly engaged in narrative, narrative space, and micro-histories ie “Boulder Historic District” or “Since 1985” that saturate, organize and orient. In a city I think those “niche” markets are always there, but they have to access you through the tradition channels—newspaper, newsletter, radio, flier, or physical interaction, and ultimately stay invisible. It also depends on how you experience or access a city space (or whatever space you navigate)—whether you walk through it, around it, whether you drive it or see it from a plane, but maybe as Kelly is suggesting, that is changing.
We are starting to experience these physical spaces differently—the supermarket, the gas station, the movie theatre, the stadium, the airport, are all being infiltrated by screens that require your skillful manipulation to successfully navigate those spaces. But so far, the technology hasn’t made these places obsolete or replaceable or revolutionized—it doesn’t yet drastically alter my experience there, but the offspring of that technology may soon.
My guess is that the market hasn’t caught up yet with the developments he mentions, but that it’s going to with a vengeance whether we recognize it as such or not. We constantly have new models replacing the old ie iTunes replaced the BMG catalog, netflix replaced Blockbuster, and Amazon replaced the retail catalog to name a few. Anderson’s argument is that these models are better because now instead of choosing between 100 things, you get to choose between 10,000 or more. This seems problematic in some ways--what about that video store I loved and the employees that could recommend me amazing films and give me different personal insights? What about that music store? that book store? But regardless, whether “mainstream” as we know it dies (American Idol, McDonald’s, South Park, NBC, Disney, Sony, Starbucks) it’s undeniably changing and undeniably powerful and here to stay for the time being. In fact, the only two things that really seem to be drastically changing market-wise in this introduction are movie and music consumption and distribution. Maybe it’s because these are the two forms of art/entertainment that everyone consumes in some way whether you’re 8 or 80, and they both are able exist dismembered from packaging; the kind of physicality you can hold in your hand.
Maybe because I’m not as engaged with digital communities or the web as others, I don’t understand the quote: “[today] The cultural landscape is a seamless continuum from high to low, with commercial and amateur content competing equally for [sic] attention” (6). It depends where you go on the web and if you’re like me who visits larger commercial sites like Facebook or CNN or NPR you get adds for Mercedes Benz, Slumdog Millionaire, Netflix, Sports Illustrated, Washington Post, Hershey’s, Advil—it’s essentially the same things you get in a television commercial. I also think this statement starts leaking pretty quickly when you take it outside the internet and apply it to other spaces like an urban one—you have local fliers, posters, advertisements, and graffiti (depending where you are geographically), but they’re drowned by a commercial and linguistic landslide of road signs, billboards, shopping malls, marquees, logos, maps, etc. Here, I’m constantly engaged in narrative, narrative space, and micro-histories ie “Boulder Historic District” or “Since 1985” that saturate, organize and orient. In a city I think those “niche” markets are always there, but they have to access you through the tradition channels—newspaper, newsletter, radio, flier, or physical interaction, and ultimately stay invisible. It also depends on how you experience or access a city space (or whatever space you navigate)—whether you walk through it, around it, whether you drive it or see it from a plane, but maybe as Kelly is suggesting, that is changing.
We are starting to experience these physical spaces differently—the supermarket, the gas station, the movie theatre, the stadium, the airport, are all being infiltrated by screens that require your skillful manipulation to successfully navigate those spaces. But so far, the technology hasn’t made these places obsolete or replaceable or revolutionized—it doesn’t yet drastically alter my experience there, but the offspring of that technology may soon.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Let's make digital poetry
In Stephanie Strickland’s talk given at Hamlin University (Go Pipers!!!) in 1997 she spends a lot of time describing and explaining what digital writing is (here it’s just hypertext—snore) and how it’s the future of writing. My first question is why? Why, in 12 years hasn’t this exploded onto the literary scene? Why aren’t poets churning out digital works? This year at AWP they were running workshops explaining what the hell a digital poem is and where you might go to find one—Strickland is still up there talking about the computer as the real future of the poem but it still seems like she’s all alone in her enthusiasm and conviction. It just really still feels like a subculture of artists at this point. Is it nostalgia for the physical page that’s holding us back? Skepticism about digital art’s integrity? Fear of computers or collaborative partners? To me, hypertext is dead mostly because it’s boring—sure it might be interesting to talk about conceptually and metaphorically for about 5 minutes but I’m really interested in the more complicated collaborative efforts of journals like New River: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/07Spring/index.html
or even Born Magazine that really push the limits of what can be done visually, sonically, and interactively. Much of this stuff is valid art, and most importantly for me, contains some good writing. I think it’s unwillingness or laziness or selfishness to collaborate and talk to other disciplines and artists that’s really unfortunate here and I really think that’s what it’s going to take to produce interesting innovative work.
I think her doubting space metaphors to describe the internet is interesting—something I think Mark brought up within the first few weeks of class. Mostly because you have this new hugely popular innovation and for the first time we get to really name something new as a society. I think Mark pointed out that most of our language for the internet comes from books and talking about books—“pages” for example “scroll” for another which is an interesting kind of space and special referent. What was so exciting about the internet (and computers in general) during the recycle and conservation phase in the 90s is that it was going to eliminate paper—oh, we were going to save trees and not have to shuffle through papers anymore but with printers and who knows what we actually doubled our consumption of paper. I really believe that we’re not ready to let go of the book—its physical “thing-ness.”
Strickland talks a little bit about “orientation” in a digital space and I think it’s exactly this that’s so overwhelming to the average web navigator—the question of how do I even begin to navigate or position myself in all this chaos seems to me to get at the root of the post-modern question. Lostness and being lost is something we’re still terrified of I think and why there are so many publications and writings stuck in what’s maybe modernism or something at least “safer” in a sense.
or even Born Magazine that really push the limits of what can be done visually, sonically, and interactively. Much of this stuff is valid art, and most importantly for me, contains some good writing. I think it’s unwillingness or laziness or selfishness to collaborate and talk to other disciplines and artists that’s really unfortunate here and I really think that’s what it’s going to take to produce interesting innovative work.
I think her doubting space metaphors to describe the internet is interesting—something I think Mark brought up within the first few weeks of class. Mostly because you have this new hugely popular innovation and for the first time we get to really name something new as a society. I think Mark pointed out that most of our language for the internet comes from books and talking about books—“pages” for example “scroll” for another which is an interesting kind of space and special referent. What was so exciting about the internet (and computers in general) during the recycle and conservation phase in the 90s is that it was going to eliminate paper—oh, we were going to save trees and not have to shuffle through papers anymore but with printers and who knows what we actually doubled our consumption of paper. I really believe that we’re not ready to let go of the book—its physical “thing-ness.”
Strickland talks a little bit about “orientation” in a digital space and I think it’s exactly this that’s so overwhelming to the average web navigator—the question of how do I even begin to navigate or position myself in all this chaos seems to me to get at the root of the post-modern question. Lostness and being lost is something we’re still terrified of I think and why there are so many publications and writings stuck in what’s maybe modernism or something at least “safer” in a sense.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Better Late than Never
So like I said I’ve been deliriously sick for about a week and so it’s been pretty difficult to keep up and not think crazy thoughts—I’ve been watching a lot of television and the new fad in cable news (at least last week) is to really probe and dig deep and make inflammatory, over-simplified statements like “racism is over,” the logic being that if we can elect a half-black man from Kansas and educated at Columbia Law, we’re ready to do anything. Sean Hannity for example believes this but I’m not convinced we agree on what racism means or what being racist is now—I think that he’s right when he says only a small minority of Americans are racist, but I’d argue that what he means is open and unashamed racism—you’re not marrying my daughter I’ve got a shotgun kind of racism. Sure, we’re no longer doing violence against blacks, latinos, or Asians, (for the most part) and we’ve mostly done away with open racial slang (great), but racial preference is rampant; we’re not hiring—black unemployment is double white, blacks make less money etc. So obviously "racism is over" is an absurd statement and deserves about one minute of someone’s time that has any intelligence but it still made me angry and so I wanted to tackle some sort of social/racial issue with my sound project (also I’ve never tried to create a politically/socially driven piece of art so it could be interesting) the theme being “dialogue.” So I sat at the tv with a microphone and recorded people discussing race and racism for a few days mostly on pbs and fox news (mostly because of the discrepancy between intelligence and respect, and just because it would give me a wider range of voices and kinds of voices). Basically what I’ve done is collage, mash, and break up different voices—to make them mostly intelligible, but also allow them to interact, play, contradict, compete. I couldn’t help myself trying to make Sean Hannity sound like a jerk and a moron though—I cut him off and looped moments of stuttering or stumbling over words, but I also feel that the privileged middle aged white man doesn’t need the last word or the loudest voice in this situation. I tried to give a louder voice so to speak to those with the smallest voices—the everyday people protesting the NY post after the chimpanzee cartoon they ran. Here’s the link to the article/video: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/20/hundreds_protest_ny_post_cartoon_seen
(By the way, if anyone wants any of the clips I used they’re all on my flash drive that I’ll have with me in class). I featured the NY post protests because I think that whites still don’t understand the anger and residual anger blacks feel everyday—it makes me think of that song “Cop Killa” by Ice T that was a big deal in the early 90s that politicians condemned and damned so thoroughly. Maybe it went too far but I think it highlighted a racial gap—white people just couldn’t identify with black skepticism and anger toward authority and more specifically, police. I tried to include as many marginalized voices as I could—women, latinos, blacks, etc. What I thought was really interesting was that after I used a clip of Martin Luther King Jr I realized just how marginalized his actual voice has become—it’s been boiled down to the “I have a dream” bytes which are just so different and watered down from the way he actually talked. So my project is not without bias or preference but I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily—maybe it’s too easy to pick on Hannity like I did and it’s more difficult to really make a smart conceptual project. I hope I’ve still done that while also having some fun in the process. The music that I’ve used underneath the vocal clips is Alias’ “Kill My Television” which is how I felt at the time of its selection, but I ultimately used it for its emotional quality, its versatility. It’s quiet and repetitive enough to compliment vocal audio very well, and since it’s mostly empty, it makes for a perfect instrumental accompaniment that really augments the language and vocal intensities of the individual people I feature in the project. At times it also obscures the “dialogue” so to speak (I say “dialogue” because no one’s actually talking to each other—they talk past each other or to no one most of the time) and rises above the language which I also think is interesting and part of the “aliveness” maybe of the sound???
Also, Gabe can vouch for me that I ran into several problems with the files of my project corrupting and so I lost a bit of it and am now working with an older version that I’m going to try to get in shape for the presentation tomorrow. See you then.
(By the way, if anyone wants any of the clips I used they’re all on my flash drive that I’ll have with me in class). I featured the NY post protests because I think that whites still don’t understand the anger and residual anger blacks feel everyday—it makes me think of that song “Cop Killa” by Ice T that was a big deal in the early 90s that politicians condemned and damned so thoroughly. Maybe it went too far but I think it highlighted a racial gap—white people just couldn’t identify with black skepticism and anger toward authority and more specifically, police. I tried to include as many marginalized voices as I could—women, latinos, blacks, etc. What I thought was really interesting was that after I used a clip of Martin Luther King Jr I realized just how marginalized his actual voice has become—it’s been boiled down to the “I have a dream” bytes which are just so different and watered down from the way he actually talked. So my project is not without bias or preference but I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily—maybe it’s too easy to pick on Hannity like I did and it’s more difficult to really make a smart conceptual project. I hope I’ve still done that while also having some fun in the process. The music that I’ve used underneath the vocal clips is Alias’ “Kill My Television” which is how I felt at the time of its selection, but I ultimately used it for its emotional quality, its versatility. It’s quiet and repetitive enough to compliment vocal audio very well, and since it’s mostly empty, it makes for a perfect instrumental accompaniment that really augments the language and vocal intensities of the individual people I feature in the project. At times it also obscures the “dialogue” so to speak (I say “dialogue” because no one’s actually talking to each other—they talk past each other or to no one most of the time) and rises above the language which I also think is interesting and part of the “aliveness” maybe of the sound???
Also, Gabe can vouch for me that I ran into several problems with the files of my project corrupting and so I lost a bit of it and am now working with an older version that I’m going to try to get in shape for the presentation tomorrow. See you then.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
SoundProject
I’m sorry this is so scattered and brief-- i’ve been sick with that flu for a week
I’ve actually got a good idea of what I’m doing for my sound project and have about half of the recording done as of right now—it’s going to be a mix of hip hop beats and news samples primarily from DemocracyNow! and Sean Hannity with a focus on racism and racial dialogue in America. The clips are everything from headlines of hate/race crimes to disparity statistics to one-on-one debates. The idea is to show how race is still a real and volatile issue that has not gone away and will not go away just because we elect black men president or because x amount of time has passed since slavery, civil rights movement, etc.
The music i’m going to use is “Kill My Television” by Alias who is a musician from the Anticon label out of the bay area—I plan on cutting it up quite a bit and looping it underneath the vocals for effect.
Today I’m going to bring in the clips I have recorded and show some of the music and clips that I was thinking about using---It’s hard to say what i’ve been directly influenced by. I’ll try to bring in some of that as well, but I feel like discussing my project as it is now and getting feedback as I move forward is more important right now.
I’ve actually got a good idea of what I’m doing for my sound project and have about half of the recording done as of right now—it’s going to be a mix of hip hop beats and news samples primarily from DemocracyNow! and Sean Hannity with a focus on racism and racial dialogue in America. The clips are everything from headlines of hate/race crimes to disparity statistics to one-on-one debates. The idea is to show how race is still a real and volatile issue that has not gone away and will not go away just because we elect black men president or because x amount of time has passed since slavery, civil rights movement, etc.
The music i’m going to use is “Kill My Television” by Alias who is a musician from the Anticon label out of the bay area—I plan on cutting it up quite a bit and looping it underneath the vocals for effect.
Today I’m going to bring in the clips I have recorded and show some of the music and clips that I was thinking about using---It’s hard to say what i’ve been directly influenced by. I’ll try to bring in some of that as well, but I feel like discussing my project as it is now and getting feedback as I move forward is more important right now.
Monday, February 9, 2009
hackers, yes men, and media bias
After reading a bit more about hactivism and watching the yes men I have a better grasp on what/who a hacker is and what it means to be one. I’m still very much interested in the term “class” rather than group, club etc. Mostly it has to do with the loaded nature of the word, but also its conceptual, amorphous, and possibly fractured nature—especially when compared to a term like “group” or “club.” It seems to me a hacker is someone who utilizes technology to cause some sort of societal disruption in order to achieve a socio-political mean. Like any collection of people, I’m skeptical that the hacker class is homogenous.
I was thinking about Wark and the idea that all hacks are important. Well I saw this one today in the February 9th edition of the Colorado Daily: “A hacked electronic highway sign in northwestern Texas carried an international message that seemed to predate, well, the use of electricity. The sign Friday briefly flashed: ‘OMG The British R coming. They R watching you.’” I guess I can see importance here more in the idea of possibility than anything else—that in this case hacking highway signs can be done anonymously and successfully. But again, as far as importance goes I bet 99% of drivers simply laughed at its ridiculousness and dismissed it outright. What’s frustrating about that to me is that in the highway context the message isn’t even funny—what context is appropriate? Why not use this opportunity to put up actual information/inform the public? Maybe statistics about police profiling, pulling over minorities, illegal car searches, etc. How different would the message have been if it was “The government is coming. It is watching you” or the like? Maybe that’s just as easy to dismiss because of its dramatic 1984-esque language. I don’t know if I have an answer to the question: if you had access to the sign what would you write on it? What I’m wondering is: is this a commentary on hactivism itself? Is it that self-aware? Or is it that clueless? It’s hard to tell. I guess like the yes men, it’s more about media attention, and getting the concept moving, rather than the actual event or the message conveyed during the event itself. However, the blurb fell under the headline “WTF?” which is this highly dismissive entertainment section of the paper which also featured blurbs entitled “One Monster Doughnut Run” and “Man Hits Brother with Tire Iron over Jeans.” It’s clear that here they’re not interested in actually informing; there was no attempt to contextualize hactivism or scrutinize the incident with any significance. I don’t mean to criticize the Colorado Daily (maybe I should), but you can see that most news agencies consider hacking “fun” and “entertaining” more than anything else.
The only news program I’ve found that considers hactivism and the yes men a serious and important cultural force is the NPR program “Democracy Now!” with Amy Goodman. This is from the November 13th 2008 edition of their program:
“Yes Men” Spoof NYT, Denounce Iraq War in Latest Hoax
And the Yes Men have struck again. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of copies of a fake edition of the New York Times were handed out in New York and Los Angeles. The front-page headline declares an end to the Iraq war and an admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. Other fake stories report the congressional passage of universal healthcare, the public ownership of oil giant ExxonMobil and the use of evangelical churches to house Iraqi refugees. The paper is said to come from the Yes Men, a group responsible for several hoaxes meant to highlight corporate and government complicity in unpunished crimes. One previous prank had a Yes Men member posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to announce responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, forcing the company to remind the world it had done anything but. The Yes Men say the hoax resulted from a collaboration of many people, including a few New York Times staffers. Activist Jordan White was among those handing out copies of the fake newspaper in New York’s Times Square.
Jordan White: “Well, see, the thing about this is, is that, you know, we just got a new president elected. It’s a very big year, and it’s a big promotion for change and stuff like that. And, you know, it’s just the sort of thing of like, I don’t know, maybe that—could we achieve it? Maybe it’s so, maybe not. But it’s something to kind of look forward to.”
The paper also pokes fun at the New York Times editors, who apologize in a fake editorial for echoing the Bush administration’s faulty claims on Iraqi WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It also contains a fake resignation letter from columnist Thomas Friedman, who says he has no business to ever write again after vocally backing the US invasion of Iraq. The prank edition of the New York Times is available online at nytimes-se.com.
I think that this program and programs like it are the most important in spreading the yes men message and giving it legitimacy—it’s not just fun and jokes; this issue of the “New York Times” isn’t simply another version of “The Onion.” Part of Democracy Now!’s support has to do with their stance on the iraq war, the American media, and how they have been quite transparently in support of the yes men’s socio-political ideologies/agendas since their inception. Obviously it’s hard not to take a political stance when reporting on these guys—I’m imagining a fox news report about them loaded with terms like “pranksters, funny men, liberal activists etc.” When I went to the website and searched for the same NYT incident I found the terms “pranksters, liberal activists, and prankster group.” They used the space of the article to undercut and dismiss the yes men agenda without engaging its contents and used the incident as fodder against the New York Times as an example of an irresponsible liberal paper.
I was thinking about Wark and the idea that all hacks are important. Well I saw this one today in the February 9th edition of the Colorado Daily: “A hacked electronic highway sign in northwestern Texas carried an international message that seemed to predate, well, the use of electricity. The sign Friday briefly flashed: ‘OMG The British R coming. They R watching you.’” I guess I can see importance here more in the idea of possibility than anything else—that in this case hacking highway signs can be done anonymously and successfully. But again, as far as importance goes I bet 99% of drivers simply laughed at its ridiculousness and dismissed it outright. What’s frustrating about that to me is that in the highway context the message isn’t even funny—what context is appropriate? Why not use this opportunity to put up actual information/inform the public? Maybe statistics about police profiling, pulling over minorities, illegal car searches, etc. How different would the message have been if it was “The government is coming. It is watching you” or the like? Maybe that’s just as easy to dismiss because of its dramatic 1984-esque language. I don’t know if I have an answer to the question: if you had access to the sign what would you write on it? What I’m wondering is: is this a commentary on hactivism itself? Is it that self-aware? Or is it that clueless? It’s hard to tell. I guess like the yes men, it’s more about media attention, and getting the concept moving, rather than the actual event or the message conveyed during the event itself. However, the blurb fell under the headline “WTF?” which is this highly dismissive entertainment section of the paper which also featured blurbs entitled “One Monster Doughnut Run” and “Man Hits Brother with Tire Iron over Jeans.” It’s clear that here they’re not interested in actually informing; there was no attempt to contextualize hactivism or scrutinize the incident with any significance. I don’t mean to criticize the Colorado Daily (maybe I should), but you can see that most news agencies consider hacking “fun” and “entertaining” more than anything else.
The only news program I’ve found that considers hactivism and the yes men a serious and important cultural force is the NPR program “Democracy Now!” with Amy Goodman. This is from the November 13th 2008 edition of their program:
“Yes Men” Spoof NYT, Denounce Iraq War in Latest Hoax
And the Yes Men have struck again. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of copies of a fake edition of the New York Times were handed out in New York and Los Angeles. The front-page headline declares an end to the Iraq war and an admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. Other fake stories report the congressional passage of universal healthcare, the public ownership of oil giant ExxonMobil and the use of evangelical churches to house Iraqi refugees. The paper is said to come from the Yes Men, a group responsible for several hoaxes meant to highlight corporate and government complicity in unpunished crimes. One previous prank had a Yes Men member posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to announce responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, forcing the company to remind the world it had done anything but. The Yes Men say the hoax resulted from a collaboration of many people, including a few New York Times staffers. Activist Jordan White was among those handing out copies of the fake newspaper in New York’s Times Square.
Jordan White: “Well, see, the thing about this is, is that, you know, we just got a new president elected. It’s a very big year, and it’s a big promotion for change and stuff like that. And, you know, it’s just the sort of thing of like, I don’t know, maybe that—could we achieve it? Maybe it’s so, maybe not. But it’s something to kind of look forward to.”
The paper also pokes fun at the New York Times editors, who apologize in a fake editorial for echoing the Bush administration’s faulty claims on Iraqi WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It also contains a fake resignation letter from columnist Thomas Friedman, who says he has no business to ever write again after vocally backing the US invasion of Iraq. The prank edition of the New York Times is available online at nytimes-se.com.
I think that this program and programs like it are the most important in spreading the yes men message and giving it legitimacy—it’s not just fun and jokes; this issue of the “New York Times” isn’t simply another version of “The Onion.” Part of Democracy Now!’s support has to do with their stance on the iraq war, the American media, and how they have been quite transparently in support of the yes men’s socio-political ideologies/agendas since their inception. Obviously it’s hard not to take a political stance when reporting on these guys—I’m imagining a fox news report about them loaded with terms like “pranksters, funny men, liberal activists etc.” When I went to the website and searched for the same NYT incident I found the terms “pranksters, liberal activists, and prankster group.” They used the space of the article to undercut and dismiss the yes men agenda without engaging its contents and used the incident as fodder against the New York Times as an example of an irresponsible liberal paper.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
what a hacker thinks what a hacker wants
The first two questions I had when first encountering McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto were: “what the hell is a hacker?” and “is he poking fun at revolutionary speak, the importance of his cause?” Wark places himself (whether ironically or not) in the midst of the Marxist/Anarchist tradition where he appropriates the language, style, and tone of the Communist Manifesto (there are sections titled, property, class, production, abstraction, etc) in order to explain and define a new societal class; the hacker. This hacker class is above, beyond, and outside “constructed” society which means they are not really even a part of it in the traditional sense—they operate outside its boundaries and laws in order to de stabilize and create new societal dynamics within the old system. Wark spends most of the manifesto attempting to detail the “new conditions of oppression, struggle” which for him are primarily information based. Therefore the work brings up questions of expression—how does/should a marginalized group express itself? Part of what this manifesto serves is giving a voice to this “class,” but it’s also about the recognition of power and the declaration of power and ultimately, legitimization and acceptance of its existence.
Because it is a manifesto and appropriating this grand revolutionary language, the piece is highly abstract and difficult to literally interpret or reduce. To return to my first question: “what is a hacker?” It’s not totally clear by the end of the manifesto what this is, but because I assume Wark is part of this class I’ve been able to come away with these bullet points:
Hackers operate outside of what we traditionally call society
Hackers live in the virtual (computers?)
Hacker identity is fluid
There are “ever-new” versions of reality, or as Wark says “the actual”
Hackers produce these new versions
Hackers will change the concept of property, ownership
Hackers believe in the unconditional free flow of information and the knowledge to use it
Hackers promote an alternative practice to everyday life
What I think is particularly interesting is his assertion that information has been has been turned into a kind of physical property and sold as commodity through (but not limited to) institutions of education and higher-learning. He asks, “whose property is knowledge?” This is what I find truly revolutionary about the piece and what makes me think he’s putting this out there with some sincerity; this seems like an actual problem/dynamic that many people would agree exists and should be solved or changed. That seems like a problem the internet has created by simply existing.
I’m not sure what 1989 revolts Wark is speaking of although I might guess it could be Tiananmen Square or Tibet/China unrest—maybe even the Florida race riots. Most likely he’s talking about some unseen hacker revolt that was squashed by the government—but by leaving out that specificity there’s no limit to how large the “1989 revolts” can be. I’m interested in 1989 as a turning point or springboard that would allow this manifesto to be written
Because it is a manifesto and appropriating this grand revolutionary language, the piece is highly abstract and difficult to literally interpret or reduce. To return to my first question: “what is a hacker?” It’s not totally clear by the end of the manifesto what this is, but because I assume Wark is part of this class I’ve been able to come away with these bullet points:
Hackers operate outside of what we traditionally call society
Hackers live in the virtual (computers?)
Hacker identity is fluid
There are “ever-new” versions of reality, or as Wark says “the actual”
Hackers produce these new versions
Hackers will change the concept of property, ownership
Hackers believe in the unconditional free flow of information and the knowledge to use it
Hackers promote an alternative practice to everyday life
What I think is particularly interesting is his assertion that information has been has been turned into a kind of physical property and sold as commodity through (but not limited to) institutions of education and higher-learning. He asks, “whose property is knowledge?” This is what I find truly revolutionary about the piece and what makes me think he’s putting this out there with some sincerity; this seems like an actual problem/dynamic that many people would agree exists and should be solved or changed. That seems like a problem the internet has created by simply existing.
I’m not sure what 1989 revolts Wark is speaking of although I might guess it could be Tiananmen Square or Tibet/China unrest—maybe even the Florida race riots. Most likely he’s talking about some unseen hacker revolt that was squashed by the government—but by leaving out that specificity there’s no limit to how large the “1989 revolts” can be. I’m interested in 1989 as a turning point or springboard that would allow this manifesto to be written
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
distance makes the heart grow fonder
Distance, created by Tina La Porta in 1999, is an experiment in digital writing that collages web cam photographs with fragments of faux or cliché poetic language such as “interaction is immediate/leaving traces on her screen.” (I feel like I have to make a disclaimer here and say the language leaves a lot to be desired—personally I feel Distance would be a much more interesting image-only work). The images play with shades of light and dark and their power to simultaneously conceal and reveal. In this case though, light and dark are primarily used by La Porta as a means of concealment; the photos contain pieces of bodies, faces that are partially obscured whether that be by shadow, washout, or the physical rupture/fracture of the web cam frame. Also, when whole faces are presented (and often close up to the camera), their expression, accessories (like sun glasses), or posture prevents the viewer from interpreting them. The idea of face as mask in this context of connection and distance is quite interesting actually, and for me, raises two particular questions: “how can one ‘trust’ the body or interpret it correctly?” and “assuming translation errors constantly happen in personal interaction, what’s going to happen with you have this obscuring technological filter (or several filters) situated between you?” Immediately the first frame of the work draws attention to the artificiality of the medium and the difficulty of “connection” where we get the obscured profile of a woman (possibly named Susan) entering a chat room and the words “Ready to make a connection, she logs on” underneath it. At first, the image looks indiscernible, then through whitewash the nude back of a woman, then finally my eye found her hands on a keyboard and the profile suddenly came into view. (Some of these are almost like a magic eye poster where the larger image only comes into view after a certain amount of familiarization). Throughout the piece there’s nothing fast, immediate, or easy about connecting—and even when you think you’ve discovered what the collage hides you’ve got to deal with fragments, both linguistic and imagistic. Plus there’s another layer of complexity: the people in the photos are trying to connect and you’re trying to connect through them, viewing their attempt at connection. There’s something very voyeuristic and inherently intimate about the work especially these more vulnerable moments of nudity—chests, breasts, stomachs, legs etc, where I felt like I was a trespasser. That I think is an interesting dynamic that could have been explored a bit more—what makes someone uncomfortable and why. It’s strange because you can have some kind of real time physical intimacy—chat, reveal yourself on camera etc, but there’s never a consummated touch. Here even when a connection is made so to speak, they’re ultimately left to ask “when will you be on again?” They’re both tied to the technology and isolated by it; they’re only able to wonder what their voices sound like, what their rooms look like.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Eisen's Six Sex Scenes
Adrienne Eisen’s Six Sex Scenes is a hypertext of short anecdotal narratives invested in physicality, rationality, violence, language, and order. I found the first, “The Rap y” to be immediately playful with linguistic manipulation and slippages of meaning. Here therapy becomes “the rap, the rapy, the rape” and “the rapist” simultaneously. I love the self-awareness, the humor at play in these narratives: “He says we're the only couple he sees who hold hands throughout the whole session.” There’s a tension between physicality “the taste” (being irrational and feminine) and reason (the masculine). In this situation, the speaker really has no voice—she’s being dominated (and sociologically raped) from the beginning by this system of therapy created by men, run by men for men to justify their behavior.
The piece “You Suck” also presents the reader with multiple meanings in language. The phrase “you suck” is both commanding oral sex and insulting the “you” by threatening his masculinity. The humor comes from a combination of the campy rhyme scheme aabbcd, the explicit material, and the ambiguous phrase.
I thought that “Sunday Afternoon” was helpful to look at next to “The Rap y.” Again, we have this strange intimate encounter with men that’s both physical and dominating. While the speaker is being spanked by her father she says, “I can tell there's no blood because Dad's hand runs so smoothly up and down my butt, in between my thighs.” This is so disturbing in its sensuality, sexuality; the speaker complains that she’s too old to be spanked—she’s fourteen and pubescent which makes the act all the more perverted and overtly sexual. The speaker describes the climax and ending of the spanking session as “Every time the belt hits, my arms wrap tightly around his thighs and he groans” and “faster and faster and then, he stops.” Here and in other moments throughout the narrative, the speaker uses the language of sex (possibly rape) to describe the encounter in order to complicate and confuse the dynamic between the two and our own perceptions of what is physically happening. Like Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Walz,” we’re left questioning the health of a particular paternal relationship and the reality of that relationship. The piece makes me ask: how do you code this experience properly with language? It’s so bizarre, physical, unique.
One thing that’s really bugging me is that Six Sex Scenes would never be published in print for several reasons. I think that why “Sunday Afternoon” fails as literature is that its ambiguous “sex/punishment/incest” tension is ultimately too overt, in your face so to speak. It’s hard for me not to simply read the piece as a metaphor for incest which is both uninteresting and expected in its simplicity. Mary Capanegro’s “The Daughter’s Lamentation” is a good example of how to write an incest story (if that even happens in the story)—by its conclusion, through ambiguities and multiplicities of meaning, the reader can’t be certain of anything. Similarly, I think why “My Papa’s Waltz” works has to do with both the overt and subtle violence of the language that creates multiple readings/meanings. I’m suspecting that the quality of writing when it comes to digital writing/art suffers in general, although Shelley Jackson breaks this mold, I think.
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