final audio piece

listen here

worth1000 entry

My entry to the Counterfeit Art 9 Contest

My image is an altered MC Escher dawing. I put in 5 extra layers.. that's five small alterations to the original.. can you find all of the edits? One is particularly small.

This was way more fun than I had expected! I used the Filter>Extract tool a lot, as well as Filter>Distort>Diffuse Glow to make everything I added look as grainy as the original.

Nelson and fantics

I question the continued relevance of Nelson's call to action in his definition of fantics. Fantics, as he describes them, are the interface through which the user participates in new media. Nelson claims that computer experts should not be the ones who define fantics, but instead that it is users who can best describe their needs and figure out ways to achieve them. This is a very pro-capitalist response, but I think many of the problems that Nelson brings up have been solved by the market. For instance, the way that windows appear on a computer screen, and different ways of interacting with these windows have been presented by IBM and Apple, and users have the opportunity to choose between the two options. The quality of design, and tendency towards ease of use is a result of the need to convince individuals to buy computers. If computer experts were doing all the designing for their own needs, I’m sure certain things would be different, but because the personal computer is a marketable product that must be sold directly to its users, the companies that make computers have to have a sense of fantics built into their production process. I think the reason why Nelson did not address this point is because he was not thinking of the computer as a product in the enormous way it is today.

That beings said, I’d be interested to learn more about the history of computers that exists between this current moment and the moment at which Nelson was writing. For example, the internet (which it almost seems that Nelson predicts at some points in this article) developed in a slightly similar way, as I understand it, with experts beginning the process and the space slowly opening up for the general user. A similar dominance by capitalistic development seems to have taken place on the web, with corporations now attempting to eliminate net neutrality and make the totality of the internet into a commodity. So the process is on of expertise leading to a short period of apparent democratization leading to corporatization. I hope that the corporatization period can be followed by a re-democratization, yet it might be more productive if this dialectic churned out something entirely new. What that would be, I’m completely unsure of. It would be interesting, though, for me or you to be able to have a say in how our interactions with computers occur, as I think most people today take those interactions for granted as a specified process that makes a good enough amount of sense.

I guess I would say that online art I’ve seen through this class and through looking at the ART333 class blog is an example of ways of re-democratizing or taking back control of the fantics. By extrapolating certain technologies and re-configuring them to completely different uses, groups like the Critical Art Ensemble are able create arrengemtns of interaction with new media that work specifically for them. Had they tried to work within the existing options presented, their creativity would have been much more stifled, or at least they probably would have ended up with a much less novel final product.

I was exploring the Second Life website and it’s interesting to me that on the one hand, this “alternate universe” provides users with the opportunity to build what it’s creators say is “almost everything” but on the other hand it merely continues the process of the capitalization of new media space by setting up a system of purchasing land and creating a virtual marketplace that can translate into tangible income in the real world. This seems to be yet another continuation of the fantics of new media. I assume these aspects of Second Life weren’t present directly from the beginning, but that they were added as people felt they wanted the virtual world to mirror the real world. I’m finding it hard to make the point I want to make.. but I really think that not everyone wants to use a virtual world to have a parallel marketplace interaction to that in the real world, and that this fantic decision might be a mistake on the part of the creators of Second Life.

angela, songs, and new sounds

I think the piece I finished for tuesday turned out ok. I definitely liked playing around with audacity and making a mess and thinking it was cool and pomo and weirdo and all that, but I think that for my next piece I want to have a better conception of my desired outcome when I begin so that I can tell at the end if I've reached my purpose. So.

One other thing I liked about my first draft audio project was that I did incorporate a little conceptual meat. For instance: my focus on the idea of what it means to be in prison in america (and the idea of [prison] escape, at the very end) and a re-interpretation of the words in some of the songs to further this concept. I had fun twisting the end of the funk song from talking about kicking out the commies to talking about breaking out of jail. And I liked how when I slowed down the word prison and/or changed the tone, it sounded kind of like a jail cell slamming shut.

I think for my next piece I'd like to continue with the concept of prison/the prison system, but go back to my original idea of having a consistent beat in the background. In some ways, this seems to me like I'm just trying to emulate a "real dj" which would be a lame reason to do something that I think will be kind of difficult, but on the other hand its an appropriation of a known medium to a new prupose. Although, it's probably not that new of a purpose since remixed songs with a consistent beat have, I'm sure, been used to talk about political people and their ideas many times before.

I also want to incorporate some speeches, maybe speeches by angela davis herself, or speeches about her, or even just audio clips about the prison system. I'm interested in this just cause I had fun working with words and phrases for the first draft, and I think it would be cool to splice and pull out words to emphasize and then maybe even create my background beats from adjusting the speeds of the words themselves.

burroughs

Two thoughts occurred to me while reading this article:

Following from the ideas about applications to the digital world mentioned in the introduction, I immediately thought of the project I did last year on Harold Cohen and the concept of computer as artist. The way the introduction discusses chance operations and spontenaeity as determinants of artistic outcome seems to correspond to the way Cohen used his program AARON to come up with original drawings. And I think the person writing the introduction, as well as Burroughs in the article, made a really apt point in discussing the ways that this kind of spontenaeity can reinvigorate a tired artwork/piece of writing. For Cohen, I think putting the spontaneous elements of drawing into the hands of the most logical of chance operators (a computer, which can be programmed to be absolutely random) allowed him to explore completely new ideas of authorship, and the origination of drawing itself.

As I was reading, I was also trying to figure out other applications of the cut up method to visual arts. In poetry or writing, the elements (words, or even letters at a more basic level) are pretty distinct and obvious. In older forms of poetry, too, there are some very clear guidelines or forms that the elements (words, for instance) must fit into. So using the cut up method can already have some restrictions or limits. But with visual art, especially a two dimensional piece, the elements appear to me to be much more complicated. You could take and image, cut it into pieces on a grid, then glue it back together in a different configuration, but I'm pretty sure most people who talk about collage aren't thinking of that method. More likely in my mind (maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough) is a way of looking at images from a printmakers perspective, where different elements overlap and blend into one another. This, I think, is more how the surrealists thought of their collages, were they had different elements that they randomly scattered on a page and then glued down.

Of course, here we're still being very literal.

I see what Burroughs is saying about film and photography. His applications of the cut up method to these media is very non-literal. What he's really talking about here is juxtaposition, for instance the juxtaposition of two photographs on a roll of film, or two scenes or shots in a movie. It's kind of interesting, cause another one of the ideas I got from this article is the way that a cut up method can democratize the elements of a whole. So you can have a really incoherent sentence produced by taking apart a paragraph and shufflig the words around.. and that sentence is incoherent because the elements are not organized hierarchically in the way a "normal" or "correct" sentence is organized. There's no arrangement of subject-verb-noun, so each word must be taken at face value, and the reader becomes reaquainted with these words thru their new placement next to uncommon matches. Similarly, in terms of images, unusual placement tends to merit reconsideration of something dry.