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.