Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Film Making Today is...
Film today is the most recent media anachronism, it just has yet to be fully replaced by a popular medium.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
An Archive of Racisms, On "Programmed Visions" By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and designed by Raegan Kelly
"You are the mouse, assemble and read the archive," is the charge given to users of "Programmed Visions", an associative collection of texts discussing or illustrating racism in the current issue of Vectors. The user is guided through the articles (never cited or annotated or titled) by clicking portions of the text that lead to another article or portion of an article. The user decides how much of each text to read before clicking on any number of links associated with a specific part of the article. The arguments range from quantifying the social roles Italian immigrants based on region of emigration to the necessity of eugenics. Though the content of this archive is determined by the author and its presentation by the designer, the user dictates the order and extent to which the information presented is read. All archives operate this way, however, "Programmed Visions" makes a point about the way archives are used and experienced: The user is able to click away from the texts at hand to view a map of the archive and where s/he has already visited. Any text may be revisited through this map. But, there is no linearity to the archive, so the user must trace her/his steps by words that are associated with each text. Race is simply a subject matter chosen as an entry point into a discussion about archives and interactive databases.
Depending on how much of each article the user reads the next article in succession will be different or an article may be happened upon multiple times. A most thorough user of "Programmed Visions" will still be frustrated by these events. A user's opinion of racism will certainly be shaped by the order in which the texts are read. The author's opinion of racism is not evident here, but her opinion of archives is clear. Opinions based on research is incomplete, is the argument Hui Kyong Chun is making. Though the database provides a diverse and subtle representation of writings on the topic of racism, it is not a complete archive: It was selected and arranged by individuals who understood that their work would be read by others. None of the articles are objective, therefore, no archive could ever be objective. A user will most likely finish the piece having her/his opinions validated, mostly, by the texts encountered. This is both the strength and flaw of an archive.
This is the same paradox that makes Vectors a challenging and frustrating journal to follow. The pieces are all thorough, but because of their interactive nature take quite sometime to fully navigate and even longer to digest, let alone comprehend. The nature of the interactive database, a medium that many of the texts fall into, is one that complicates the agruments at hand by not manipulating the user's order of experience of the texts. In such pieces as "Blue Velvet" the argument is plainly drawn, however, "Killer Entertainments" presents an information set that the user must navigate and form ideas of her/his own. The topic of racism is inflammatory, and the pieces here seem intended to inflame. One piece suggests that America has just under 1,000,000 "degenerates" born every year (the piece is dated only by the statistics that the globabl population is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 billion); another suggests that all "Liberal" studies that are run by white instructors to white students that feature writings by black artists only breed a further subconscious racism. This presentation is often viewed among media producers as being subjective: Give a reader enough information to sort through at His convenience and He will form His own Objective opinion. This writer's frustration with the interactive database is made concrete by Hui Kyong Chun in "Programmed Visions" by presenting a hyper-charged topic in a format that is intrinsically manipulative and flawed.
That does not, however, mean that the writer finds Vectors or any of its presentations to be discredited by this piece. All journalism is just as subjective as Vectors, but this journal has recognised it by publishing a piece that illuminates the flaws in two of its main topics of focus: technology and race.
Depending on how much of each article the user reads the next article in succession will be different or an article may be happened upon multiple times. A most thorough user of "Programmed Visions" will still be frustrated by these events. A user's opinion of racism will certainly be shaped by the order in which the texts are read. The author's opinion of racism is not evident here, but her opinion of archives is clear. Opinions based on research is incomplete, is the argument Hui Kyong Chun is making. Though the database provides a diverse and subtle representation of writings on the topic of racism, it is not a complete archive: It was selected and arranged by individuals who understood that their work would be read by others. None of the articles are objective, therefore, no archive could ever be objective. A user will most likely finish the piece having her/his opinions validated, mostly, by the texts encountered. This is both the strength and flaw of an archive.
This is the same paradox that makes Vectors a challenging and frustrating journal to follow. The pieces are all thorough, but because of their interactive nature take quite sometime to fully navigate and even longer to digest, let alone comprehend. The nature of the interactive database, a medium that many of the texts fall into, is one that complicates the agruments at hand by not manipulating the user's order of experience of the texts. In such pieces as "Blue Velvet" the argument is plainly drawn, however, "Killer Entertainments" presents an information set that the user must navigate and form ideas of her/his own. The topic of racism is inflammatory, and the pieces here seem intended to inflame. One piece suggests that America has just under 1,000,000 "degenerates" born every year (the piece is dated only by the statistics that the globabl population is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 billion); another suggests that all "Liberal" studies that are run by white instructors to white students that feature writings by black artists only breed a further subconscious racism. This presentation is often viewed among media producers as being subjective: Give a reader enough information to sort through at His convenience and He will form His own Objective opinion. This writer's frustration with the interactive database is made concrete by Hui Kyong Chun in "Programmed Visions" by presenting a hyper-charged topic in a format that is intrinsically manipulative and flawed.
That does not, however, mean that the writer finds Vectors or any of its presentations to be discredited by this piece. All journalism is just as subjective as Vectors, but this journal has recognised it by publishing a piece that illuminates the flaws in two of its main topics of focus: technology and race.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Three of a Kind or the Subtlety of Silence, on "Three Songs" by Nathaniel Dorsky
Song and Solitude. There are grasses in extreme close-up. There are ripples in a pond and doors opening. There are cityscapes or humanscapes, but mostly both; however, this is the case when there isn't landscape. One thing the writer is sure of, there is lots of sound, it was just hiding behind Dorsky's soundtrack career choice: silence. There should have been the sotto melody carried on the breeze through the grasses, the secrect passed among the ripples in the pond, the tenured complaints of the door hinges, the mechanical longing of cars passing. The negative space created by the idle speakers hangs around the images like cigar smoke in the rain; the Union theatre was draped in a velvet emptiness that drew the eye to screen, held it there, absorbed it.
The absence of a soundtrack laid the laurels of the filmic experience entirely on the shoulders of image. The images shifted silently, sometimes unnoticed by the writer, between spaces and times and lighting conditions and subjects. Where a softly focused tree branch would be unrecognizeable beyond slashes of darkness across a dim frame, the film would quietly progress through other images of nature in the city before returning to the same image only more focused or the same subject but pulled back. Like the music form suggested by the first noun of the title, Song and Solitude returns to visual, same or similar shots, before shooting off to explore other ideas related to the refrain. Where the rippling pond or the blurred, dead branches anchored the film, the city scapes or other nature shots explored the reaches of their silent world. This structure of verses and refrain created a meditative atmosphere, induced a meditative state in the writer, the viewers. The images, striking, were given a new light as the viewer was asked to block all audio and simply look. Even those bustling city shots of patrons entering and leaving a coffee bar, cars sitting at a stop light were given a gravity of isolation. The solitude of the title is one of peacefulness: The viewer is alone in the theatre but far from lonely.
Winter. Winter in Dorsky's San Fransico is not the winter of the writer's Milwaukee: A heavy icing frosts the city; flakes of snow dance and spin around the corners of buildings; wind howls at the University, causing students to step lightly across the frozen sidewalks and brown, slushy intersections. Dorsky's Winter is quiet, despite the silence of the soundtrack. A thundercloud in silhouette, framed by two buildings of SF's skyline, is not dramatic or imposing. It is impressing and comforting. When the rain of this winter comes as it must, there is little falling beside the physical action. The droplets seem to hang in the frame, the viewer's mind. The silence does let let this rain, this winter, become frantic or isolating.
However, it is not the physical, actual, silence that comforts the audience into a state of contemplation and rapt. But, the artist's projection choice of silent speed, 18 f/p/s, when the footage was all shot at 24 f/p/s, causes an imperceptible floating. Each of the images in this and all of Dorsky's work (all shot and projected at the aforementioned speeds, respectively) has a gravity to it, as the event or movement of the shot unfolds at a speed fractionally-slower-than-real time. Those shots that are familiar from the first piece, or foreshadow the refrains of the third, carry with each the atmosphere of silence and a slow-motion flicker. However, that gravitational pull one feels toward Winter is not unique, neither are the images, nor the editing. Indeed, both the technical and contextual elements of Winter are exactly the same as those found in Song and Solitude and Sarabande, as well as those found in the Alaya or Triste.
Sarabande. A traditional Latin-via-Baroque dance lends its name to the third film in this trilogy. The latin version of this is a triple time performance that blends the 3 and 4 beats of a measure to cause a rhythm unique to the dance. European culture adopted this technical anomaly, slowed it down to revel in the beauty that one variation to a typical dance can birth. And Sarabande similarily is slow and revelatory. Again, many of the images are shared with the previous two pieces, but there is a technical variation. The editing puts the images, whether of nature or of civilization, in different orders, causing the content of each to interact differently. These pieces both draw on and illustrate Eisenstein's montage theory: the content of each shot contains an individual meaning, but the points at which each is conjoined creates a larger meaning.
Every shot in this program, Three Songs, could stand alone and have a resonance and specific meaning. But, Nathaniel Dorsky has put these images into very different orders, causing their edited associations to arouse in the viewer a understanding of his/her world that could not have been achieved in any other way. These three films were made at different points in the artist's life, giving each a unique meaning. Sarabande is a very different portrait of a place in time from that of Song and Solitude, even though it shares technical and content elements. This is the power of cinema, the pairing of such concrete things as images and technical strategies to create such personal and subjective experiences. This is a power that is not fully understood until the final piece has spun through its tail. The cumulative effect is of three pieces so frustratingly similar that they could not be more dissimilar. As an argument about this power of cinema, a soundtrack could only have felt contrived and manipulative.
The absence of a soundtrack laid the laurels of the filmic experience entirely on the shoulders of image. The images shifted silently, sometimes unnoticed by the writer, between spaces and times and lighting conditions and subjects. Where a softly focused tree branch would be unrecognizeable beyond slashes of darkness across a dim frame, the film would quietly progress through other images of nature in the city before returning to the same image only more focused or the same subject but pulled back. Like the music form suggested by the first noun of the title, Song and Solitude returns to visual, same or similar shots, before shooting off to explore other ideas related to the refrain. Where the rippling pond or the blurred, dead branches anchored the film, the city scapes or other nature shots explored the reaches of their silent world. This structure of verses and refrain created a meditative atmosphere, induced a meditative state in the writer, the viewers. The images, striking, were given a new light as the viewer was asked to block all audio and simply look. Even those bustling city shots of patrons entering and leaving a coffee bar, cars sitting at a stop light were given a gravity of isolation. The solitude of the title is one of peacefulness: The viewer is alone in the theatre but far from lonely.
Winter. Winter in Dorsky's San Fransico is not the winter of the writer's Milwaukee: A heavy icing frosts the city; flakes of snow dance and spin around the corners of buildings; wind howls at the University, causing students to step lightly across the frozen sidewalks and brown, slushy intersections. Dorsky's Winter is quiet, despite the silence of the soundtrack. A thundercloud in silhouette, framed by two buildings of SF's skyline, is not dramatic or imposing. It is impressing and comforting. When the rain of this winter comes as it must, there is little falling beside the physical action. The droplets seem to hang in the frame, the viewer's mind. The silence does let let this rain, this winter, become frantic or isolating.
However, it is not the physical, actual, silence that comforts the audience into a state of contemplation and rapt. But, the artist's projection choice of silent speed, 18 f/p/s, when the footage was all shot at 24 f/p/s, causes an imperceptible floating. Each of the images in this and all of Dorsky's work (all shot and projected at the aforementioned speeds, respectively) has a gravity to it, as the event or movement of the shot unfolds at a speed fractionally-slower-than-real time. Those shots that are familiar from the first piece, or foreshadow the refrains of the third, carry with each the atmosphere of silence and a slow-motion flicker. However, that gravitational pull one feels toward Winter is not unique, neither are the images, nor the editing. Indeed, both the technical and contextual elements of Winter are exactly the same as those found in Song and Solitude and Sarabande, as well as those found in the Alaya or Triste.
Sarabande. A traditional Latin-via-Baroque dance lends its name to the third film in this trilogy. The latin version of this is a triple time performance that blends the 3 and 4 beats of a measure to cause a rhythm unique to the dance. European culture adopted this technical anomaly, slowed it down to revel in the beauty that one variation to a typical dance can birth. And Sarabande similarily is slow and revelatory. Again, many of the images are shared with the previous two pieces, but there is a technical variation. The editing puts the images, whether of nature or of civilization, in different orders, causing the content of each to interact differently. These pieces both draw on and illustrate Eisenstein's montage theory: the content of each shot contains an individual meaning, but the points at which each is conjoined creates a larger meaning.
Every shot in this program, Three Songs, could stand alone and have a resonance and specific meaning. But, Nathaniel Dorsky has put these images into very different orders, causing their edited associations to arouse in the viewer a understanding of his/her world that could not have been achieved in any other way. These three films were made at different points in the artist's life, giving each a unique meaning. Sarabande is a very different portrait of a place in time from that of Song and Solitude, even though it shares technical and content elements. This is the power of cinema, the pairing of such concrete things as images and technical strategies to create such personal and subjective experiences. This is a power that is not fully understood until the final piece has spun through its tail. The cumulative effect is of three pieces so frustratingly similar that they could not be more dissimilar. As an argument about this power of cinema, a soundtrack could only have felt contrived and manipulative.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Do Octopi Hear Electric Emmylous or Every Novel is a Sequel; On "Electric Sheep" by Amy Globus
"Every novel is a sequel," writes acclaimed novelist Michael Chabon in his thesis on popular culture, Maps and Legends. The future cannot exist with out being firmly rooted in the present and past. Everything that will happen does so in response to something that has happened or is happening. This is the basis for Amy Globus's "Electric Sheep". By referencing Phillip K. Dick's sci-fi opus, Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep, she is engaging in the same conversation as Dick and Chabon, but in her own voice, from her own time and perspective. The Dick novel details the exploits of individuals who are targeting robots, a malicious but necessary member of their society. Globus chooses the octopus as the misunderstood creature of fear, one that is relatively benign is the present world. The soundtrack is a mostly forgotten pop-country ballad by Emmylou Harris run through digital audio processors. This gives the video an echoey, faux-space feel, that engages both with Dick's novel as a projection of the future and engagement with the past.
The visuals force viewers to reassess in a disturbing light an animal that rarely crosses the thought of contemporary American culture: The Octopus. The creature is shown in extremity, squeezing through glass tubes, contorting like a body artist warning against apocalypse. The majority of the shots are close- to extreme-close ups. It is easy to forget that one is watching an octopus as the frame is filled with pink and orange folds of flesh, the suction cups pulling the subject through the frame. This intimacy with the viscera of the octopus is disturbing; the animal seems to to ebb and and flow, expand and compress, a gelatinous part of the water.Because the octopus is relatively foreign to the quotidian aspects of the daily life, these images are arresting, disturbing. The octopus is isolated from the water or any oceanic environment; it is enclosed in a sterile environment for the purpose of the video frame. By abstracting the octopus from any recognizable surroundings the viewer is only given portions of the animal's anatomy to consider, creating a sort of alienation of the subject with in the viewer's world. But, the viewer is also alienated with in the world of the video, these images would not be nearly as disturbing if given a context such as a PBS Nature special. There is nothing to connect the viewer to the contemporary world, and so, these pictures, video technology aside, could have been from any time, there is no context for these images. However, like Dick's novel and Chabon's thesis, the octopus exists here and now, but when given prominent light, out the safe context of scientific study, it seems unnatural, threatening, and futuristic.
Where the images are disturbing and abstract, Emmy Lou Harris's "Wrecking Ball" stirs that sleeping part of the brain where nostalgia lay, best left alone. The digital effects applied to the track are simple: reverberation and and delay, along with a few awkward mechanical groans. The tinny, empty sound that (in this piece) alter this late-career hit for a country legend, invokes many of the half-assed science fiction movies that purport that outer-space is an endless nothing of echoes and vaguely mechanical noise-scapes. Many will recognize "Wrecking Ball" and will be confused (much as this writer was) by the Garage Band effects applied to the piece. However, the choice to use this semi-forgotten song with cheap digital effects causes the viewer (experniencer?) to wonder if the present trend (in popular music) to use sampled chord structures and drum loops lends itself to a future of a minimally altered past. In an era when so many "legendary" artists and bands from 30 yrs. ago are touring just to capitalize on their status as "legends" it is necessary to wonder what the future of culture will offer. The answer, according to Amy Globus, is one of the past filtered through technology. The effects applied to "Wrecking Ball" are such that anyone could have applied them with their trendy iMac. These effects sound cheesy and outdated to the contemporary ear, even though they are current in consumer technology. The soundtrack suggests that the future will be recongnizable as a relic of the past, but filtered through a digital medium.
These visual and audio elements combined cause a thesis on a contemporary world moving toward a strange and disturbing future that is undeniably rooted in what we are comfortable with today. The piece ultimately warns viewers thatt though the future may be frightening (the octopus) or cheesy (Emmylou remixed), it is a concept that is only reassessing the ignored portions of the present. Like Dick's robots which are grown out of the labor-saving devices that are currently taken for granted or the hit songs of yesterday that we've forgotten about until they are again staring us in the face. These very specific examples of a future rooted in the past, become a metaphor for something much larger. The distopian worlds of Phillip K. Dick or the wasteland of Cormac McCarthy's the road all have a back stroy that relate to a forgotten factoid that blow up into an undesirable future. The piece warns that, like an octopus, a politician, if left unconsidered, can turn into something disturbing and threatening.
The visuals force viewers to reassess in a disturbing light an animal that rarely crosses the thought of contemporary American culture: The Octopus. The creature is shown in extremity, squeezing through glass tubes, contorting like a body artist warning against apocalypse. The majority of the shots are close- to extreme-close ups. It is easy to forget that one is watching an octopus as the frame is filled with pink and orange folds of flesh, the suction cups pulling the subject through the frame. This intimacy with the viscera of the octopus is disturbing; the animal seems to to ebb and and flow, expand and compress, a gelatinous part of the water.Because the octopus is relatively foreign to the quotidian aspects of the daily life, these images are arresting, disturbing. The octopus is isolated from the water or any oceanic environment; it is enclosed in a sterile environment for the purpose of the video frame. By abstracting the octopus from any recognizable surroundings the viewer is only given portions of the animal's anatomy to consider, creating a sort of alienation of the subject with in the viewer's world. But, the viewer is also alienated with in the world of the video, these images would not be nearly as disturbing if given a context such as a PBS Nature special. There is nothing to connect the viewer to the contemporary world, and so, these pictures, video technology aside, could have been from any time, there is no context for these images. However, like Dick's novel and Chabon's thesis, the octopus exists here and now, but when given prominent light, out the safe context of scientific study, it seems unnatural, threatening, and futuristic.
Where the images are disturbing and abstract, Emmy Lou Harris's "Wrecking Ball" stirs that sleeping part of the brain where nostalgia lay, best left alone. The digital effects applied to the track are simple: reverberation and and delay, along with a few awkward mechanical groans. The tinny, empty sound that (in this piece) alter this late-career hit for a country legend, invokes many of the half-assed science fiction movies that purport that outer-space is an endless nothing of echoes and vaguely mechanical noise-scapes. Many will recognize "Wrecking Ball" and will be confused (much as this writer was) by the Garage Band effects applied to the piece. However, the choice to use this semi-forgotten song with cheap digital effects causes the viewer (experniencer?) to wonder if the present trend (in popular music) to use sampled chord structures and drum loops lends itself to a future of a minimally altered past. In an era when so many "legendary" artists and bands from 30 yrs. ago are touring just to capitalize on their status as "legends" it is necessary to wonder what the future of culture will offer. The answer, according to Amy Globus, is one of the past filtered through technology. The effects applied to "Wrecking Ball" are such that anyone could have applied them with their trendy iMac. These effects sound cheesy and outdated to the contemporary ear, even though they are current in consumer technology. The soundtrack suggests that the future will be recongnizable as a relic of the past, but filtered through a digital medium.
These visual and audio elements combined cause a thesis on a contemporary world moving toward a strange and disturbing future that is undeniably rooted in what we are comfortable with today. The piece ultimately warns viewers thatt though the future may be frightening (the octopus) or cheesy (Emmylou remixed), it is a concept that is only reassessing the ignored portions of the present. Like Dick's robots which are grown out of the labor-saving devices that are currently taken for granted or the hit songs of yesterday that we've forgotten about until they are again staring us in the face. These very specific examples of a future rooted in the past, become a metaphor for something much larger. The distopian worlds of Phillip K. Dick or the wasteland of Cormac McCarthy's the road all have a back stroy that relate to a forgotten factoid that blow up into an undesirable future. The piece warns that, like an octopus, a politician, if left unconsidered, can turn into something disturbing and threatening.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
On New Orleans, Racism and Blues; And Iraq, Entertainment and Efficiency
The Vectors online journal is a magazine that discusses world and domestic events that have contemporary resonance with issues of art and technology. The journal's title does an excellent job in explaining the format for the arguments. Though strait-forward texts preface each of the articles with an Editor's Introduction and an Artist's Statement, each of the essays is in a relatively interactive multimedia format that best illustrates and delineates the points and the material. "Blue Velvet" directs the user through a series of arguments that are separated by an interlude of falling words, however, the user has no control of the order in which these arguments are read. "Killer Entertainments", however, presents a series of videos that are presented in three screens and though each screen has videos in succession, the user may watch any of the screens in any order as well as cycling through the videos at her/his leisure; each video has text that, by a vector, is suggested reading.
New Orleans was, prior to Katrina, a predominantly Black city; women also outnumbered the men. It was seen as a quintessentially American city, a bohemian one: a city that produced jazz, birthed the Delta Blues, and made much of America cringe. However, the Contemporary New Orleans, our New Orleans, is home to a majorities of Caucasians and Men, unlikely to produce any new art, unlikely to embarrass the rest of the country. The essay, designed by Erik Loyer, is set-up with a floating, swaying, drifting city/seascape that has words, words like delimitation or covenants, cascading upon it. Some words can be clicked, these are the titles of each of the twenty-four chapters. As the chapter title is clicked, the user is plunged beneath the the surface of the city/seascape into the depths of the argument, of the problem; alongside, the audio that is paired with the image is shifted from an uneasy water world into a roiling drum loop. The prose, written by David Theo Goldberg and Stefka Hristova, has the feel of a playful lamentation, like David Foster Wallace on a cheerful day. They use complicated phrasing ripe with adjectives as nouns and switch their adjectives and nouns to change the meaning of the phrase and deepen the meaning the chosen words. They reference Salmon Rushdie, Lucinda Williams, and Albert King among those cited. They use blues phrasing and rhyming, they begin with a breif portrait of the city and 24 chapters along end by re-dressing it. The city's Blue Velvet, "too soft to touch," is replaced by a Homogenous, prescribed whiteness, blankness. The words themselves are not always printed in uniform size and format: they sometimes jump across lines or break off at phrases or schew into one another or drift toward the top of the screen, partially obscured. Though the delivery is playful, the subject is grave. Racism, Goldberg and Hristova argue, is at fault for the Catastrophe that cast Katrina, a hurricane, as the enemy. The Catastrophe is not just a natural disaster or a social crisis but a complication of both by timing. Racism, though not as public as the days of Jim Crow, is a product of corporate redlining that uses business statistics to racially profile and discriminate inidividuals as investment risks. The essay is about racism and Neo-Liberalism, the writers's word for Bush-ite privitization, but uses the city's former disposition to the artistic as a vehicle for this essay, which in itself is a sort of Blues.
"Killer Entertainments" on the other hand is directly about a technology, its wartime uses and the technology spawned from those uses. The user is directed through a series of videos shot by soldiers in Iraq, each video is linked to texts that describe the geographical area shown in the movie and describe a concern that is depicted or raised by the movie. The user is control, though. S/he may watch the movies in any order and read the texts with the suggested video or at any interval. The videos are taken from weapon-, helmet-, vehicle-, and hand-held cameras; some are taken from terrorist websites, some are used as models for video games. Words are flown over the video players and the user can click on them to be expanded or just wait until they fly off again, the wrds are fleeting. Sometimes these words are breif excerpts of dialogue from the video, "fuck these bitches up," sometimes an explanation of how the video was edited to look less haldheld and boringly linear, "B-Roll." The final argument here is much more complex and than that of "Blue Velvet," the user is not directed toward a specific conclusion but is given an information set about a technology using various technologies, sources, and media. A conclusion maybe drawn during the reading of one text but over turned by the issues raised by the next video. Perhaps the inclusion of an anecdote about a 60 Minutes interview will shape the user's opinion of the use of video and media in War, perhaps it won't. The goal seems less about persauding than about informing, the user is left with an impression of the uses for these videos, but the opinion about whether it is ultimately good or bad is entirely up to her/him.
New Orleans was, prior to Katrina, a predominantly Black city; women also outnumbered the men. It was seen as a quintessentially American city, a bohemian one: a city that produced jazz, birthed the Delta Blues, and made much of America cringe. However, the Contemporary New Orleans, our New Orleans, is home to a majorities of Caucasians and Men, unlikely to produce any new art, unlikely to embarrass the rest of the country. The essay, designed by Erik Loyer, is set-up with a floating, swaying, drifting city/seascape that has words, words like delimitation or covenants, cascading upon it. Some words can be clicked, these are the titles of each of the twenty-four chapters. As the chapter title is clicked, the user is plunged beneath the the surface of the city/seascape into the depths of the argument, of the problem; alongside, the audio that is paired with the image is shifted from an uneasy water world into a roiling drum loop. The prose, written by David Theo Goldberg and Stefka Hristova, has the feel of a playful lamentation, like David Foster Wallace on a cheerful day. They use complicated phrasing ripe with adjectives as nouns and switch their adjectives and nouns to change the meaning of the phrase and deepen the meaning the chosen words. They reference Salmon Rushdie, Lucinda Williams, and Albert King among those cited. They use blues phrasing and rhyming, they begin with a breif portrait of the city and 24 chapters along end by re-dressing it. The city's Blue Velvet, "too soft to touch," is replaced by a Homogenous, prescribed whiteness, blankness. The words themselves are not always printed in uniform size and format: they sometimes jump across lines or break off at phrases or schew into one another or drift toward the top of the screen, partially obscured. Though the delivery is playful, the subject is grave. Racism, Goldberg and Hristova argue, is at fault for the Catastrophe that cast Katrina, a hurricane, as the enemy. The Catastrophe is not just a natural disaster or a social crisis but a complication of both by timing. Racism, though not as public as the days of Jim Crow, is a product of corporate redlining that uses business statistics to racially profile and discriminate inidividuals as investment risks. The essay is about racism and Neo-Liberalism, the writers's word for Bush-ite privitization, but uses the city's former disposition to the artistic as a vehicle for this essay, which in itself is a sort of Blues.
"Killer Entertainments" on the other hand is directly about a technology, its wartime uses and the technology spawned from those uses. The user is directed through a series of videos shot by soldiers in Iraq, each video is linked to texts that describe the geographical area shown in the movie and describe a concern that is depicted or raised by the movie. The user is control, though. S/he may watch the movies in any order and read the texts with the suggested video or at any interval. The videos are taken from weapon-, helmet-, vehicle-, and hand-held cameras; some are taken from terrorist websites, some are used as models for video games. Words are flown over the video players and the user can click on them to be expanded or just wait until they fly off again, the wrds are fleeting. Sometimes these words are breif excerpts of dialogue from the video, "fuck these bitches up," sometimes an explanation of how the video was edited to look less haldheld and boringly linear, "B-Roll." The final argument here is much more complex and than that of "Blue Velvet," the user is not directed toward a specific conclusion but is given an information set about a technology using various technologies, sources, and media. A conclusion maybe drawn during the reading of one text but over turned by the issues raised by the next video. Perhaps the inclusion of an anecdote about a 60 Minutes interview will shape the user's opinion of the use of video and media in War, perhaps it won't. The goal seems less about persauding than about informing, the user is left with an impression of the uses for these videos, but the opinion about whether it is ultimately good or bad is entirely up to her/him.
On ACT/REACT or Why I don't Chew Gum (Normally)
Milwaukee Art Museum's ACT/REACT exhibit offers a glimpse of the art that may be on a quickly approaching horizon, interactive installations. These pieces all engage with technology and question the roles of the artist and observer, as per John McKinnon's point. Where Marcel Duchamp's work, and many of the pieces by other artists in the Sensory Overload exhibit, deal with these questions by creating art that was ordered and assembled in a shop, or asks the observer to bring their own experiences of life and art museums to a piece. Like those pieces, the ACT/REACT exhibit demands the same of visitors, only in a more physical manner; Camille Utterback's Untitled series and Janet Cardiff's To Touch especially engage these specific questions.
Utterback's work uses a computer program and sensor matrix to project a "painting" based on the broad and subtle movements of an observer. The images are abstract and shifting, allowing an observer to engage with the visual contributions of the previous one. This is entertaining and novel, especially in an art gallery. Where interactive art is common place within the popular culture in the form of the video game, Art Museums have been slow on the uptake. ACT/REACT replaces a Wii-mote with cameras and sensor matrixes, creating complicated computer programs that interpret an observer's image or movements. These installations creatively engage a viewer for a short-time, but unlike a story-based video-game or many of the pieces in Sensory Overload, they fail to engage the viewer for a lengthy period of time. Unlike video games, Utterback's work is to let the observer actually create an image; however, the actual work of art is the computing program and installation, the projection is a sort of by-product of the craftsmanship to engage an audience. Though more complicated than the programs of Snow Mirror or Healing #1, Utterback's work is similar to the paintings of Jacques Louis David, impressive in the technical realm, but not very interesting. Also like David's work, Utterback's work is most profound within the context of art history as a step to an interactive art that is ultimately more engaging and satisfying.
The one exception to this is Cardiff's To Touch. This piece connects two artistic elements through the observer's touch: a weathered wooden table and audio. The table, alone in a room, stands alone as sculpture, the observer reaches across normal boundaries of acceptability when viewing sculpture and touches it. That act then transforms the piece by introducing the audio element. Intimate voices, swelling music and other soundbites become tied to portions of the table through the visitor. The pocked and cracked surface of the table pairs a specific feel (a sense very often neglected by the fine arts) with these sounds; it feels as if the visitor is brushing these sounds out of the textured wood. Had this piece been just the table, it would have engaged the observer with many of the same questions of appropriation and technology that Duchamp did. The audio alone as an installation would have questioned the need for an image and quotidian nature of hearing. And an audio collage that is based on movements of an observer would have been uninterestingly similar to David Rokeby's Very Nervous System (most of the ACT/REACT exhibit seem to be banal, visual variations of Rokeby's work, Utterback's the most so). But, when these elements are paired through the physical act, the Visitor creates connections between sensory experience of touching, the visual impact of the table, and the shifting soundscapes they are eliciting. The subtlety and complexity of To Touch engage art history and the arguments of McKinnon in a much more meaningful way than the rest of the exhibit.
The other pieces, like Healing #1, Deep Walls, and Echo Evolution, engage the visitor and the questions of art and interactivity in relation to art in much less interesting or memorable ways. The greatest strength of these and the other pieces in the show is novelty. Viewers' certainly enjoy themselves when walking through, past and over the various exhibits, but the experience is quickly lost as s/he moves onto the next piece of technological wizardry. Like a paint by numbers kit that is in the style of Van Gogh or the tasted pleasure of chewing gum, there is little lasting effect of ACT/REACT, aside from To Touch.
Utterback's work uses a computer program and sensor matrix to project a "painting" based on the broad and subtle movements of an observer. The images are abstract and shifting, allowing an observer to engage with the visual contributions of the previous one. This is entertaining and novel, especially in an art gallery. Where interactive art is common place within the popular culture in the form of the video game, Art Museums have been slow on the uptake. ACT/REACT replaces a Wii-mote with cameras and sensor matrixes, creating complicated computer programs that interpret an observer's image or movements. These installations creatively engage a viewer for a short-time, but unlike a story-based video-game or many of the pieces in Sensory Overload, they fail to engage the viewer for a lengthy period of time. Unlike video games, Utterback's work is to let the observer actually create an image; however, the actual work of art is the computing program and installation, the projection is a sort of by-product of the craftsmanship to engage an audience. Though more complicated than the programs of Snow Mirror or Healing #1, Utterback's work is similar to the paintings of Jacques Louis David, impressive in the technical realm, but not very interesting. Also like David's work, Utterback's work is most profound within the context of art history as a step to an interactive art that is ultimately more engaging and satisfying.
The one exception to this is Cardiff's To Touch. This piece connects two artistic elements through the observer's touch: a weathered wooden table and audio. The table, alone in a room, stands alone as sculpture, the observer reaches across normal boundaries of acceptability when viewing sculpture and touches it. That act then transforms the piece by introducing the audio element. Intimate voices, swelling music and other soundbites become tied to portions of the table through the visitor. The pocked and cracked surface of the table pairs a specific feel (a sense very often neglected by the fine arts) with these sounds; it feels as if the visitor is brushing these sounds out of the textured wood. Had this piece been just the table, it would have engaged the observer with many of the same questions of appropriation and technology that Duchamp did. The audio alone as an installation would have questioned the need for an image and quotidian nature of hearing. And an audio collage that is based on movements of an observer would have been uninterestingly similar to David Rokeby's Very Nervous System (most of the ACT/REACT exhibit seem to be banal, visual variations of Rokeby's work, Utterback's the most so). But, when these elements are paired through the physical act, the Visitor creates connections between sensory experience of touching, the visual impact of the table, and the shifting soundscapes they are eliciting. The subtlety and complexity of To Touch engage art history and the arguments of McKinnon in a much more meaningful way than the rest of the exhibit.
The other pieces, like Healing #1, Deep Walls, and Echo Evolution, engage the visitor and the questions of art and interactivity in relation to art in much less interesting or memorable ways. The greatest strength of these and the other pieces in the show is novelty. Viewers' certainly enjoy themselves when walking through, past and over the various exhibits, but the experience is quickly lost as s/he moves onto the next piece of technological wizardry. Like a paint by numbers kit that is in the style of Van Gogh or the tasted pleasure of chewing gum, there is little lasting effect of ACT/REACT, aside from To Touch.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
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