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.

print project photos

First: I am VERY sorry for the horrible color! I think my color shemes have not converted very well to web colors, which is un fortunate... maybe there is some other problem I don't know about?

I altered an admissions brochure for my Print project. I think these images work best in "real life" in the context of an actual admissions brochure like the one I made for hallwalls. I pasted my pages on top of the original brochure pages, and I've heard several people say that they couldn't tell which page I ahd altered until they went through the brochure a few times.

I tried to be conscious of each page saying something specific, and I tried not to be too incredibly critical. I wanted to show how admissions exaggerates certain aspects of St Mary's in order to "sell" our school to prospectives, while also giving examples of things that admissions hasn't advertised in the past but I still think are really cool about this place. I like how my chan ges and the fact that people know its an altered brochure makes them look at the original admissions info more in depth, more critically.

One of the main challenges I had in this project was how to make new paqges that used the same compositional elements as the old pages. I had toruble finding the kinds of photos that admissions uses: photos with a focal point on one side and then a lot of empty space for text blocks or additional pictures. I also had some trouble deciding exactloy how to phrase some of my new texts. I ended up going with my intuition, but I think in some places (the seahawk text, for instance) I could have been more clear or explicit about my intent and in other places (the jock page text) I could have been less tongue in cheek and thought more about exactly how I wanted to make the connection between athletics, alcohol culture, and sexual assault clear but unoffensive.

sftp troubles? not anymore!

Brooks figured out what was wrong with my original link! now it's fixed

Siobahn Rigg

Siobahn Rigg's microarmy (is a tool for microanalysis) lecture was a nice departure from the many painters and modern-esque sculptors who I've seen explain themselves in LI321. I was excited about the lecture because I knew it had to do with performance and interactivity, conceptual and practical elements I've tried to incorporate into my art work. I found it particularly interesting when Rigg discussed the way that she got sick of feeling like she put a lot of work into something and then nobody saw it (the microarmy project), so she changed tactics and made her work even more ephemeral and interactive (trade talks). This is soemthing I've struggled with as well: the sense that spending hours in the studio is useless if no one sees my work, that what I really want to do is have a conversation, not present a monologue.

Although I enjoyed hearing about Siobahn's artistic adventures in Pittsburgh, I kind of wanted more theroy out of this lecture. I wish Siobahn would have talked more about the context of her work.. it seems in reading a lot of the other blog entries that people didnt understand how or why this was art, and unfortunately, to the average person on the street, performance doesn't necessarily make sense. I feel like I know quite a bit about the art that's happening today, and especially the art that's happened in the last fifty years, but even I felt as though I didn't exactly understand the goals that Siobahn was trying to persue through her projects, or even how calling it art furthered those goals. For instance, I can understand why cooking a meal in exchange for a story about work in Pittsburgh would be a desireable thing to do, but why was it art? Just because it was situated in a gallery space? Would it have worked better in a restaurant? I'm sure Siobahn has thought a lot about these kids of questions, but the lack on answers in her lecture was the missing link for me in understanding her process and decisions.

Perhaps its just too bad that artists like Siobahn have to justify their work in order to connect to an audience. Then again, I suppose that sitting in that lecture I was the second or third level removed from her primary audience, (the people who ate lunch with her) so maybe it isn't so important whether or not I understand.

These kinds of questions are what I was trying to get at the end when I asked Siobahn about what the goals of the Rt. 1 project are. I mean... there must be some reason why she is making these appointments to walk rt. 1 all over the east coast.. there must be some connection she is tryign to make between Celebration Florida and the Rt. 1 that I know in College Park Maryland. I don't get why she didn't talk more about those connections, and instead she showed us a video of a rocket launch...

Response to Turing

I read a bit of Turing for an Art History paper I wrote last Spring, and many of the ideas that he presents in this article are similar to those I came across in my research. For instance, at the end of the article in discussing the computer as a child who can learn to play the Imitation Game effectively via various methods, Turing discusses the way that the human learning process has to be broken down into its component parts in order to transfer this process to a machine. This is the same task that the artist I was writing about, Harold Cohen, used to make a computer that could independently draw pictures. Cohen started out the program for this computer by loking at cave paintings and thinking about the basic elements of drawing: basic forms that could signify something to an observer. Turing claims that a basic form that a computer who needed to be able to verbally communicate would have to know is a system of logic.

It was also interesting to me how much the article got into th practical considerations of hardware (the discussion of legs, eyes, etc) because I would think that a programmer would be much more interested in the internal parts of a computer (the brain, so to speak) than the external parts. Of course, the external parts can provide data that can be analyzed by the internal parts, and I do admit that both internal and external must be designed with the other in mind, but I would not have anticipatd the concern for these elements. I also was surprised by the way Turing treated the ESP argument, and the fact that he actually gave it some validity. The style of the whole rest of the pice was so cold and calculated and scientific that when he spoke of how serious a problem ESP could be in the acceptance of the Interrogation Game, it seemed kind of funny.

I also think that this article shows its age in some of its objections, and in Turrings constant references to storage space. As far as I know, a lot of the ideas that he brought up in the article are no longer issues because computers today are so fast and so small. Interestingly, I think many people today would probably say that they don't think a computer can win the Interrogation Game. I would guess that this opinion is based on their everyday contact with computers that are not designed to win this game, and if there were linguistically gifted computers in our everyday lives, I'm certain that everyone would be more likely to think that computer thought was happening all the time.