a new media saga

forget that crappy old web page...

2006-12-13T04:26:00.000-08:00

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

first draft of corporate map index.html site

2006-11-20T16:56:00.000-08:00

Blithe Riley Lecture

2006-11-15T11:14:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-07T07:44:00.000-08:00

tada

yes, cyborgs are complicated

2006-10-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-10-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

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

Siobahn Rigg

2006-10-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

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.

final audio piece

2006-09-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

listen here

worth1000 entry

2006-09-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-23T13:03:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-04T11:31:00.000-07:00

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.