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.