forget that crappy old web page...

here's my final project: adventures on rt. 235

first draft of corporate map index.html site

here

Blithe Riley Lecture

My favorite part of Blithe Riley's lecture was the interview she showed with Lee Krasner. For one thing, it was cool to connect a face and a voice with a name and images that I've studied in art history classes. It was almost like being able to ask Lee Krasner those questions myself, with her so big and so direct up on that screen. It seems like the interview project that Blithe has been working on with the Video Data Bank is a really valuable resource for artists and art historians.

Then, the link between that work and the Belief Objects project where an interview is the central element of the "art" as it's been going thus far, makes sense. I wondered whether the two women who started the Video Data Bank had any training in how to interview, and what exactly Blithe has learned from remastering and editing all those videos. I also found Blithe's brief discussion of her collaborator's patented interview technique for advertising execs fascinating. I wodner whether the fact that the collaborator is doing an interview project separately form her company is.. legal.

I think it's interesting how both Blithe and Siobahn are using the interview format as a way of producing art... it's very much like the Critical Art Ensemble's absorption of scientific ways of knowing in their artworks. And other contempoary art folks, too, I guess.. it's a melding of the disciplines and a collapse of disicplinary boundaries. I was having a ocnversation the other day with a friend about somehting that Jason Watson said in his contemporary printmaking lecture about some artists being jacks of all trades and masters of none. While, on the one hand, I do want to learn a lot of new skills (as wide a variety of skills as possible) I do think that the expansion of the definition of art promotes that kind of broadness wihtout depth. But really, developing a broad range of skills are what art school (esp. liberal arts school) is about. I guess if we want to expand the definition of art to include advertising, sociology, and the natural sciences, then we have to develop a new strategy for obtaining knowledge and information.. we can't just expect ourselves to know everything about a certain topic.. hence: Blithe's collaboration with another artist on the Belief Objects project.

Rev Billy Response

So.. I'm obviously biased about this performance.. I was one of the organizers and have been following the Rev for a few years.. it was a thrill to see all those people in Monty 25, and a thrill to hear back from the performers afterwards that they felt fantastic about the show, that they got so much energy from the audience, and that they felt like something had happened in the room, somethign had clicked or twisted or.. that they had gotten through.

But, for me, here are some highlights of the performance:

-the Benedictions: Blessed are you.. the way that the choir responded in their voices to the plac that Billy was in his phrase, the way that their back up singing was a total complement to his preaching, to his praising

-the Sermon: wow. So that was a 20+ minute improvisation! He said afterwards that he thought the sermon went really well, and that he would probably do it two or three more times in the next few performances. He said he came into it with a vague structure of where he woud start and end and a few points in between, but he said he didn't know he was going to relate the post-midterm election situation to post-9/11 til he started actually saying it.

I think the most moving part for me was his discussion of the 714 stories each of us has inside, and the way that these 714 stories have something in them that is true about America, that is completely unmediated and real, and that these are stories of ourselves, our families, our country. It was thinking about racism, the way we all hold that story inside us, that really got to me.. the way that we all have that kind of story, and the way that a story that powerful can actually be let out.. someday.

I also really enjoyed, in the lecture Friday morning, the discussion of breaking through the commodity wall (is that the right term?) which I felt really embodied the art work that I want to do. It's an interesting balance that they described, between the way that doing these performances helps build a community of performers, thereby breaking down the commodity wall, and how the performances themselves are an example of performing that breakdown (both literally, and because, as savitri said, the actions are a performance of community). I would like to wrok through this idea of commodity wall (maybe in my final project for my drawing class?) but I would really like to think or read a lot about it first... I thought it was interesting hwo they answered Fereshteh's question about digital self promotion.. savitri insisting so firmly that now is the time for honest face to face interaction as a method for radical change, and that digital interaction just mediates a real (messy, emotional, necessary) experience that we have been avoiding for too long.

So how can real experience fit into a digital art class? How can I do some sort of final project that uses the idea of real live experience in a.. digital way?

first flash animation website

tada

yes, cyborgs are complicated

The advantage to completing my reading assignment a bit later than most people in the class is that I get to scan through folks' responses before writing my own. While I agree with the general sentiment about the complexity of the style of this article, and I DO think that is a worthy thing to discuss (for whatever group of people would subscribe to the theory behind Haraway's essay) in terms of distribution and accesability of ideas. I also think that the article had a lot of interesting stuff to say that I could understand. Granted, it took some mental elbow grease to get to the good stuff, but I think I got something out of it in the end, though maybe not everything Haraway might have intended.

I thought one of her most interesting central points was an essential re-defining of the term cyborg to include us all. We are all cyborgs (especially women, and especially especially women of color) because we all are a melange of elements that are undefinable, a mixture of the aspects of a technological society and a more traditional one, a transitional phase between two points. We can not define ourselves distinctly as one thing or another, but must be thought of as a combination and recognized for our in-betweenness.

Haraway continually redefines terms throughout this article, thereby marking "our time," i.e. this postmodern era, as a dynamic and exciting one. (Quite contrary to what Francis Fukuyama would say... I think..) Her table of comparisons (Representation : Simulation, Family/Market/Factory : Women in the Integrated Circuit, Public/Private : Cyborg citizenship, etc.) reconceives terms of the past into their techno-age equivalents. This method of re-naming changes the emphasis of the terms themselves, while pointing to the essential undefinability of these words in an ever evolving society. It's quite fascinating: she says these things as though she knows what they mean, when in reality the terms are so complex and mediated and new and related to so many other terms that it is basically impossible for all readers to understand her points in the same way. It's probably pretty difficult for her to even know what she is telling them because of the multiplicity of meanings for the words she uses.

Then again, I think part of her intent in the stylistic choices of the essay was to question our use of language. She touches on this in her discussion of Malinche, who adopted the language of her oppressor in order to survive. Perhaps this can be seen not only as a linguistic metaphor for women's actions throught history, but a visual one as well. For instance, maybe in order to survive in this capitalist culture visual artists have to adopt the tools of capital to produce in a way that will be menaingful for society (I'm thinking of Andy Warhol, Banksy, and the folks who use advertising imagery to subvert advertising). And then Haraway discusses the role of the liberal and radical in current cyborg discourse... perhaps her feminist usage of the word cyborg itself is an adoption of the language of the oppressor (capitalism? men?) to survive the new 'homework economy' where women are (Haraway says) forced into... I'm not exactly sure what.

There's a significant tension in the essay between women's active role in their situations of oppression and the activity of others who put them into situations of oppression. In other words, I wasn't really sure whether the 'homework economy' was a good thing or a bad thing for women. I guess Haraway was saying it was a difficulty, but not passing judgment. This is an effective argumentative method, considering one of her central theses is that identity is not universal. The homework economy can be good for some women and not for others and this doesn't really say anything about women generally except that each one experiences the world differently.

I also wanted to mention the werid way that misspellings and letter replacement began to take on a more and more prominent role towards the end of the essay. At first, I thought the misspellings were typos, but then I realized that there was a pattern: replacing 'ti' with 'd' and so on and so on. I didn't exactly get why Haraway was doing this, but I thought it might be a sort of transition into an even newer language, and through this transition she's encouraging her readers to pay more attention to the way we use language now (kind of like how she uses the idea that we are all cyborgs to discuss/clarify the place of women in society). The way that many of the misspellings and letter replacements were patterned made me think that she was trying to replicate the work of a computer that is tasked to make those kind of replacements intentionally... was she trying to be more mechanical or automatic? Was she trying to exhibit cyborg traits (simulation of the human propensity to create typos... but not exactly understanding this and so doing it in a very mechanical and un-human way)?

made history: close looking

My favorite photos in the gallery show are the pair Tchaikovsky and After Tchaikovsky, of the soldiers with the piano. In the first image, five soldiers sit and stand around a piano in a bombed out home. In the following image (the frame immediately following the previous image on the contact sheet, the wall text informs the viewer), the camera zooms in toward the broken wall, past the piano, to the (now only) three soldiers who are pointing their guns toward something outside the frame. The wall text implores us to question where the other two soldiers from the previous frame have gone. Into a bunker to hide? Ran away? Killed?

I think this pair of images exemplifies the reasons I like this whole exhibit so much. The pictures themselves ask powerful questions, questions that it is unlikely we will ever be able to answer. The exhibit is well planned to lead the viewer to these questions: wall texts guide the way the viewer reads the images. By calling the viewer's attention to the five soldier/three soldier difference in the Tchaikovsky images, the wall text also opens up the images to further narrative examination and interpretation. Whose house was this? Who are the soldiers shooting at? Where is the rest of their unit?

Many of the photographs are evocative even without a wall text, but I found the texts incredibly useful for getting into the time and place of these images, for being able to relate to many of the subjects as people and not as representation. Of course, some of the subjects are meant to be seen as people in true situations, but in fact, I learned in the gallery talk that some of the images were staged. In these images, the viewer is forced to call into question sincere feelings that one might have for the subjects: sympathy for the dead, fear for fighting soldiers, or joy at a victory must be examined more critically once the viewer finds out that not all the images are "authentic" or documents of actual (unstaged) moments.