Final Project

This video project was an experience, perhaps with a proceeding adjective of learning, collaborative, transcendental? I approached this collaborative video with an intention to be truly collaborative, as I like to be a sole creator of my art. However, when I started considering what collaborative actually meant, I kept coming back to the notion that the work would automatically be lesser than what I could have done myself. And although our video turned out great, and has equal merit as any video that Kelly, Steph, or I could have done on our own, my personal vision was not realized. Collaboration essentially means compromise, which means no one gets what they want to the degree they want. Which is an interesting way to approach art. Early on, I decided to prepare for sacrifices, prepare for someone else to tell me what to do. So I did that. Now I don’t have to do it ever again.
The second issue was production. If this video was a first draft of a story, the second draft would be written in half the time and be twice as good. We ended up scrapping half our shots because the wind ruined them or because the microphone was too far away to hear me speak the lines. Oh, but it only begins there. I also discovered how hard it really is to act, to memorize lines, or even improv lines. If we did my vision of this project my delivery would have been completely different, with a fast-pace, rote quality to them, instead of the lazy, rolling delivery which my group preferred. Then when we got into the computer lab, we had to learn this program, which frustrated us for quite a while before we got the hang of it. Even then, Final Cut Pro can do a million things which we never figured out because we just didn’t have the expertise in using it. Finally, we started stripping away every extraneous clip and editing cuts because we couldn’t get the damn program to do what we wanted. So in essence, Final Cut Pro is our fourth team member, one with a lot of influence on how our project turned out.
However, I don’t want to sound like nothing turned out how we planned it. Since we were three fiction writers, we all preferred a project with a narrative. We all agreed on the progression and the tone of the piece, which is half the battle right there. There wasn’t a single part of this project that we didn’t do together. All three of us met for storyboarding, filming, and editing. The final product turned out well, although how well it turned out compared to what we each would have done if we had our ways is something we won’t know.

The Definitions of Apocalypse

Our group has come up with a concept of what we want to explore in our video, which is at least partly, the contextual inhabitation of space. If our world is changed, how does it affect our manner, our humor, our every day movement? If the apocalypse were to destroy everything we know, how does one reframe the world so as to regain authority over it?

Here are two videos: “Lumieres” from Putative Moment

http://dvblog.org/movies/02_2009/pm/pmtrain.mov

http://dvblog.org/movies/02_2009/pm/pmobscuredbyclouds.mov

They are categorized as documentary, so their style is one of capturing realism. The films do not have effects added to them, although they do remove sound, which is an interesting technique to disassociate the audience from the text. The train video especially has the viewer expecting noise but their expectations are not met. This doesn’t so much as move a viewer away from reality, but forces the viewer to experience reality differently. The light becomes more apparent, the movement of the train intensifies, the movement spreading in radial causality against the plants, all stand out more without the sound. The sound would dull out these things and simulate a “reality” which we are all used to. When sound is removed, the definitions of the objects we are looking at changes. This also happens because of the title, a literal renaming of what we are supposed to be looking for. It is not a train or a moon, but “Lumieres”. Calling them lights changes their prescribed function in the world, and therefore their possibilities are changed.

I think this is what our video will try to do. I don’t know since we haven’t filmed it yet, and these things have a tendency to change drastically to best laid theory. But interaction with the world in an unprescribed manner is our goal, something which most writers are trying to do anyway, only with words instead of video.

Studies in Stop Motion Studies

David Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies presents people in a space separated from time, and in his words, “meditated by digital technology.” There are a plethora of cell phones and IPods, individual digital devices which project the subjects’ individual identity out of their physical space. Also, the viewer of this work also has to permeate at least two digital technologies, one being the camera Crawford used to take these pictures, and the other being the website in which they are presented. This layering of digital technologies both shortens space (by bringing Tokyo into my living room), and lengthens time (the moments happened six years ago and they are still happening). A tunneling effect (seen in series 11, clip 6) forces us to pay attention to the materiality of the piece. In this clip we move through four distinct spaces, inside the train, the platform, through the windows of the other train and the space beyond. All those spaces are then flattened into one picture.

The subjects themselves are encased within the very limiting and defined space of a subway car. However cell phones transcend the physical boundaries of the car, allowing a greater freedom and a larger space for the individual. It is noticeable that older people and people with children do not have digital devices on them, and in fact don’t seem to have any distraction from their immediate space (series 10, clip 13-14/series 11, clip 6). This shows a displacement among older subjects who have typically become used to being in a physical space without a need to project their identities elsewhere, and parents who have their second identities sitting next to them or in their lap.

The projection of identity is also seen in the advertisements in a lot of these frames. Identities have been forever changed by image culture, and representations of a self seem to need to be multiplied. These multiplicities are in each frame, as each expression subtly changes (or exaggeratingly changes). An example of this is in series 12 clip 9 where a girl is reaching into her bag and produces a chapstick between to fingers as if she were presenting it in an add. Of course in her hand is a cell phone and her outfit is coordinated. These are products of image, where her identity is reduced in three frames to an advertisement for chapstick.

That clip has more motion than most and motion might be the most important aspect in these series. Motion by definition is space/time, except space and time are increasingly separated by digital technology. The smaller the space and the greater the time means decreasing motion. In these frames, the subjects do not move that much. However, their surroundings are moving so fast the shutter speed cannot catch the light and it turns into a blur. Essentially the outside world is moving exasperatingly fast to the point of incomprehensibility while the physical human subject is staying still. We have machines, including subways, to have motion for us. However, the identity of that subject is moving still, transported by the camera and cell phones, transported through time and space, and continuing to exist. This can be seen in series 12 clips 17-20, where a girl is sleeping and doesn’t move at all while the background changes substantially. That is why there are 4 clips dedicated to this girl. Her immobility. Her disembodiment from her surroundings. And of course in the last clip she wakes up and looks around, the frames catching her turning one way them 180 degrees the other way, creating a fast movement. Wake up! it screams.

WAKE UP!

The Teleology of the Recommendation Age

Chris Anderson quotes Frog Design, who says “we are leaving the information age and entering the recommendation age,” where the influx of information has become unmanageable in its raw state and needs to be whittled down in order to give it context. This context is what gives meaning to the information, and this context seems based in phenomenology, where the reviews are real, and have impact to real people. These recommendations are no longer fake, scopic information (like billboards, big advertisers), but have been rooted in the “real” world of perception. It is odd to say a “real world of perception” since schizophrenia is an undercurrent in perceptionism and indeed our entire culture. If perception is real only to one person, then there is an automatic disconnect between the information being passed from one user to another. “I think this is good,” is a perception. Algorithms merely group these people together, automatically filtering out dissenting opinions. “I think this is good, but…” A rating scale is another form of flattening, except instead of allowing for a lot of diverse perceptions into the picture, it creates a rigid grid of categories which delineate instead of merge, which cordon-off instead of letting opinions mingle.
The next question one might ask is what happens when there are too many recommendations to sort through and we have the same problem the information age ran up against. When recommendations grow too ubiquitous and are enfolded into the information in which they are trying to sort, another infrastructure will have to be formed to help us sort. It seems like this could repeat infinitely. If the answer to this is that you just dig further and further into your niche, until there are a workable number of recommendations to deal with, doesn’t this just cordon us off more? If more and more groups have to be cut out in order to get at something manageable, doesn’t that seem like a teleological quest?

Digital Genre

I want to respond to Erin Costello’s blog and her questions on aesthetics in digital poetry. If there is one thing that an MFA student should be able to see is what other MFA students deem as “good writing.” We might not always be able to define why something is written well or written poorly, but when it is there, we know it. Digital poetry however is a new genre, even though it has technically been around our entire lives. The usual envelopment in the texts does not transfer to the digital realm. I think this has a lot to do with the new language one has to learn in order to write in a digital medium, and synthesizing the two can be a very tough task indeed. Perhaps the term digital poetry is throwing us off. This is really a whole new genre, one that abides by its own rules, just as fiction has different rules from non-fiction or film, and because this is a whole new genre, we have to create new guidelines for determining what is good. Our innate sense of good writing will most likely guide us here, but also our senses have not really been bolstered by years and years of other people guiding us to what is good. We are going to have to be those people for the next generation. So we better start figuring out this genre, and do it fast.

Records

In 1989 Pierre Nora wrote an article called Memory and History: les Lieux de Mémoire in which he talks about recorded history in a binary opposition to memory, where the more we archive, record, and write down, the less we have to remember. This remembrance, Nora claims, is a collective memory directly linked with who you are—place, traditions, family, etc. Although I disagree with a lot of Nora’s argument which is in the vein of an old man yelling MTV, he brings up an important question of what is recorded and what should be recorded. Twenty years after Nora’s article, our quest to archive has been amped up exponentially with the advent of digital technology. The ease of recording anything is profound, every genre of life having a recording device attached to it. However, I believe a larger aspect of this is the modern time compression, where the world space is shrunk and in order to get through all the information one has to move quickly and keep on moving. We do not know what is important to record and what isn’t because there is not enough time to contextualize. Or perhaps there is too much space to contextualize it, as we are all living on the world scale now. My sound project is wrapped up in the idea of what is important to record, and the recording devices themselves. Each moment in time has become important. Each moment in time is also different for every person, so we have bllions of recordable instances at any one instance. So what do we keep? What do we excise? Are the words “Thank you” more important to record than someone saying, “I’ll see you tonight”? Is anything more important than anything else if we can record it all, then manipulate it later?

Culture jammers and the pawns computers make us

The Yes Men are hackers, culture jammers, both isolated and interconnected more than most. This is a strange dichotomy. Hackers and culture jammers cannot belong to a group, outside of the general ethereality of being called a ‘hacker’, a term which seems to be as vague as saying one belongs to the human race. If they belong to too a larger hacker group, they become the targets.
Their MO is one of subversion of power.
The culture jammers’ method is a cell operation, where a few people attack a specific target, then disappear. If one hacker is caught, there will be another to take his place. The cell operation is extremely hard to stop, and if the operations can be carried out through the democratic anonymity of the Internet, then it becomes impossible to stop. In fact, this is where most of the subversion is taking place, as the connectivity and the anonymity make it ideal for hackerism. The Yes Men, for instance, began with a website, which connects a person on a global scale while keeping them isolated. Your name’s Granwyth? Sure. Why not. Who’s going to know? Interviews that take place via satellite, conversions that take place over email, seem up for grabs to whoever wants to claim themselves as being true. This truth is something modernists strived for, a hegemonic grip on what is real. The Yes Men tear down that hegemony left and right, along with any concepts of what is “true”.
It is interesting that the Yes Men chose a huge phallus as a satirical prop, since the subversion of the hegemony is a feminist action, toying with patriarchical ideas of trust. Of course, some might argue that the anonymity of it all doesn’t account for liminal experiences.
The Yes Men also blur the lines between virtual reality and reality, as whatever their personas are in the virtual world are mimicked in reality. Usually it is the opposite, with AIM and Facebook displaying real people virtually, or there is a complete rift between the two, like in second life where there doesn’t have to be any relation between real and virtual characters. But the Yes Men have to become WTO members because that’s what their persona is in virtual space.
In the context of the Yes Men this might not seem like a stunning conclusion. They are only a few guys playing elaborate practical jokes for a specific purpose. But the idea of virtual technology reversing psychologies—the computer manipulating humans instead of humans manipulating computers is a large, and to some, terrifying concept. It makes me question my attachment to my computer. How influenced are we by these machines. Is the computer using me as a vessel to play out its virtual experience? Of course, it must have the most boring existence in the world if it manipulates an MFA student in Boulder, CO, where the time is equally passed between reading theory and watching anime.

Poetics of Virtual Space

Although I have many issues with Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, he does have some interesting insights into the house as a daydream space, which is both realized by the author and also realizes the author in a reifying movement. Bachelard is referring to the childhood space (in a very limiting manner by the way) as a secure, safe place which is seen always in a positive light (apparently he had a really happy childhood). However, this daydream that is both made by and makes the human agent sounds a lot like Kate Hayles theory of Informatics. Essentially it is a recursive feedback loop only instead of the loop coming between a computer and a human, the loop finds itself in memories. Bachelard applies this idea to memory space, which isn’t all that different from a digital feedback loop.
However, a large part of the digital feedback loop deals in reproduction without destruction—or how a digital image can be reproduced infinitely without limitations (essentially). Can memories do the same thing? If a memory is altered, doesn’t it destroy the original, making the new memory the genuine? That seems to put a giant knife through the heart of human agency as a form of the genuine, or essentially it makes us postmodern.
So what if we apply Bachelard’s idea of the memory to a computer. A computer can replace the original item with a new one, but it can also hold both simultaneously. It’s history, say in the cache files or your browser history, can also be manually changed through the code, wiping what one could call the genuine history out of reality. A skilled hacker would leave no traces of a coding change, which automatically calls into question the computer’s hold on what is “true” even within its own programming.
I don’t have a lot of answers here, but I found Bachelard’s memory loop toward agency something worth appropriating and overlaying on the digital realm. If computer memories are so easily alterable, then so are human memories according to Informatics. However, if those memories actually reify who we are as humans, then the ability to change memories takes on a very immediate concern. When we toy with our computers, we are really toying with ourselves. Perhaps we should have more respect for what we do with our computers, respect for our own agency, not only with words or images, but actual physical alterations. Or we can just keep downloading porn.

Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]

Talan Memmott’s piece Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] speaks toward a multiplicity of texts which combine and recombine, both informing each new artist and changing the previous one. Not only are portraits of the artists a collage of all the other artists’ portraits, the perspectives, tones, styles, and sizes are all jumbled together, making the reader very aware of the composition. When the illusion of reality is destroyed, the picture is flattened. The same thing happens in the text as well. Repeated phrases and anecdotes are transplanted over time and space, flattening the depth of the text, making no mistake over the “truth” of the biography’s reality. Although the flattening of the painting is a very modern idea, the flattening of the text is a postmodern one, where multiple texts form an intertwining reality where it is not a matter of picking which one is true, since they are all on equal footing. Unless a reader is intimately familiar with these painters, the initial stories sound reasonable and entertaining. However, as the reader progresses through these texts, the overlapping of these lives becomes obvious, forcing a revision of the preceding texts in the light of this new information. This could be construed as a reflexive information loop, where the base information changes as it is filtered through the reader and back to the texts. Binary code could considered a way to flatten signifiers since binary is based in the fact that there is one signifier for every signified: 0=no, 1=yes.
The piece is designed to show how previous texts inform latter texts, and vice versa. The title of the piece places emphasis on the author/reader relationship, highlighting the “Other” as a symbiotic intertwining of the two. Memmott’s composition of these artists changes how was see them, pointing toward the larger idea of how each artist has changed the others as well. The format plays into this fact, by having the reader participate in the time-space release of information. A reader can skip artists or skip some of the text if one so wishes, which will invariably change the reading of the piece. However, the piece is also designed to begin with a different artist each time it is loaded, with (I assume) a random algorithm for which artist comes after the next. This creates all kinds of readings based on the interaction of the piece.
Although this piece favors the interconnectivity of all “texts”, there are a lot of “texts” not represented. We are given a time frame of 1746-1954, but the artists are all Western cannon painters. Painters, necessarily because of they deal in self-portraits the most, but a simple feminist reading of this piece would have to point to lack of women and non-western artists. Although there were considerably fewer female artists during this time, the piece’s flattening, an equalizing effect, would be a perfect opportunity to include the marginalized as having an equal ground as “texts” that inform all other texts. Obviously an all-inclusive writing of the piece would be impossible since there are infinite texts, which is why Memmott narrows it down in time and medium. However, even within these frames and infinite amount of texts are left out, something which must be done if the piece is going to be made.

Hypertext's slow, painful death

In a fit of hypertextual, post-human ecstasy—churned up in the maelstrom of the new fictional frontiers where for writers and critics entire new genres can be created, transcended, and deemed passé in a single piece of work—it is easy to appropriate language from older technologies and older criticism and slap it onto the new. After all, the life span of new technologies are being shortened in what seems to be a logarithmically descending scale, where markets don’t have time to become saturated before the product is supplanted.
For artists working in these technologies, there is hardly enough time to learn the parameters of a new program—let alone test them to their limits—before the cutting edge is past them. (Alan Sondheim’s digital pictures and video’s attempt to stretch the coding boundaries of a program {and he seemed quite proud of this fact, as if it were something that isn’t also done by every elementary school student playing around with Microsoft Paint or cheat modes in Wolfenstein 3D.}) The result of this leap-frogging through the new frontier is the fact that terminology can become sloppy, and like a hypertext itself, the criticism can dissolve into endless paths of nano-definitions and semantic arguments. Espen Aarseth attempts to inclusively define the new digital literature as ergodic literature, an all-encompassing term that is then broken down into subcategories. (Ergodic: of or pertaining to the condition that, in an interval of sufficient duration, a system will return to states that are closely similar to previous ones.)
However, as any group attempting to hold a digital literature contest finds out, these sub-categories can whittle down to a singular genre for a singular piece (appropriate in a digital coding where one sign has one signifier). But what is considered a digital poem? A film with words? A sound bite using digital recording? Because the definitions of these new genres are so hard to pinpoint, they are too often glossed over, more for ease of argument than anything else since any essay could drown in endless defining of these new terms.
Considering hypertexts, Aarseth addresses one specific terminology which I find very important. Linearity is one of the main issues involving hypertexts, and it is often off-the-cuff-ly(?) described as non-linear as opposed to a linear progression of a novel, a byproduct of its materiality. Although hypertexts are aware of their materiality and disrupt the normative progress of a narrative, that does not make the text non-linear. Multilinear might be a more appropriate terms here, because, as Aarseth argues, it deals in topography instead of tropological (Cybertext, 45). He goes on to argue that the nodal sequence of the text is still interconnected, just in a different graphic plane than, say, a novel.
Of course, hypertext could be considered passé even now. One no longer needs to be a hacker/artist to create a hypertext fiction as there is Storyspace, a program designed specifically for hypertext, and in fact Shelly Jackson used this program for Patchwork Girl and My Body, and used it in a straightforward manner (Adrienne Eisen’s Six Sex Scenes is even more bland format-wise. It doesn’t even have pictures). Because hypertexts are kind of a one-trick pony, the writing becomes foregrounded, carrying the majority of importance of the piece (as opposed to the technical revelations). And because the writing necessarily has to be aware of its materiality, fragmented, personal stories, compiled through fragmented memories emerge—everywhere. I am not saying that all hypertext is written in this manner, but it sure seems a lot of it is. The material seems to insist upon it, as author cannot ignore the multilinearity of the format and has to justify it in the project of the piece. It seems like there are a limited number of ways to do that fictionally, and fragmented memories, fragmented bodies seems to be a popular one. Unlike a program like Adobe Photoshop, where even the programmers do not know the endless permutations of what it can do, hypertexts, by the clinical definition of them, are rather limited. Newer technologies for creating texts have come after Storyspace, and unlike the technology of the book, there is very little room for adaptation to changing times. Instead, the whole program is replaced with something, just like the tape cassette was wiped out with the invention of the more convenient technology of the CD. That analogy might be slightly fallacious, as hypertexts are still extant, and will probably be around as long as there are a type of computer interface in which it can be read. However, who knows how long that will last?