Oh, final blog!

It's odd to come to the end of something, especially in these final weeks when all I can think about is final essays, student essays and swine flu. But I would like to say that I've enjoyed this semester and that I've come out the better for it. Something I struggle with is the integration of other arts into my own, even though it's something I would like to aim for. Having a forum in which to look at and discuss art forms that do go beyond the confines of the page has begun to come up in my own writing, I've noticed, and I don't think that I'll be so strictly limited to paper in the future. Video in particular has been fun--I'd like to play more with that.

Anyway. As for the project.

Well, it's no secret that my group has run into technical issues. (Oh, camera! Stay still!) FCP has also proven its own difficulties, but for the most part we've overcome them so I won't concentrate on that.

Instead, I'd like to focus on the collaborative experience, as it's quite different from working as I usually do--solo. Alone, I'm allowed to mix image, voice or whatever however I wish. This doesn't always work out; more often than not, I have a clear idea of what the story-line is but fail to communicate it to folks. (I'm glad to have learned the word "dis-narrative" as that's what my writing always seems to be.) I'm a control freak who loses control of the work. So working collaboratively has been significantly different. In a good way. For one thing, Todd and Stefanie are on the opposite end of the spectrum, writing-wise: their stuff has a point, or at least, a place to which it is going in a clear and direct manner. For another, they don't hesitate to make their points of view known--they know what they want and they're apt to fight for it. So, my own approach has adapted: I've discovered the joy of having something that people actually understand.

Working together, we've all had to give up on shots that we wanted to keep. But I think we've got something to be proud of (even if it does jump a little oddly in places). I mean, it's pretty good, given that this is our first time ever using cameras and FCP. I for one quite like our opening sequence and I'm surprised at how we incorporated unplanned shots (those moments when Todd is at his most frustrated because he's forgotten a line or it's the eighth take or whatever) into the final product and the way in which they have affected the tone of the piece. It's very different from what we had originally planned--it's darker than we had meant for it to be in some instances.

I think, though, that if we had the chance to do this again, we'd do it significantly differently ... and better. See those airplanes? Hear those birds? Pretend they aren't there! Please!

P.S. Did anyone ever watch Project Greenlight? Because I'll be the first to admit that our editing process has been pretty similar to John Gulager's editing process. Except, you know, without the super-fancy equipment and threat of Bob Weinstein watching our film project to tell us whether we will ever have a future or not.

Labyrinths: movements, definitions, and so on.

I have a confession to make: I used to be an art major. Back before... back before I was not. So it's been really interesting to return this manner of looking at the world that I have not used in a long time.

I'm really taken with the immediacy of image and the authoritative power of perception. It seems to me that with writing, the narrator/speaker is always suspect: we as readers know that the narrator is a construct of the writer and so we are suspicious of his/her motives, honesty and so on. I don't think the same is true of the purely visual. I mean, it is something constructed: shots are set-up just so, editing happens. But the immediacy of image (and perhaps also people's natural inclination towards voyeurism) is so commanding that we trust it almost without question, and I'd like to play with that sense of trust.

Perhaps I'm too taken with Kubrickian labyrinths, but one of the things I'm looking to do as we move into filming is to play with the spatial awareness of the body. Since ours is a character all on his lonesome, I've been thinking about how to define his relation to the world (and this upturned, apocalyptic space) in terms of visuals.

In looking for examples of how image and space can be played with, I came across At times it seems that I awake: a short film by Anke Lanzon. It's about... a dog. And it begins with an extreme close-up of this dog--so much so that there's no doubt whose mind-set we'll be subject to and for whom we must have sympathies. The fact that aspects of this dog are obscured by the close-up makes it (the dog) seem more clear somehow--that closeness is disconcerting, but there's something in being that close visually to something else (something that I don't think we Americans do as we've got a rather large bubble of socially impenetrable personal space in our culture) that makes us feel intimate with the dog. The long-distance shots play with this, too: there's an emotional control at work in the set-up of this film.

The tension of closeness v. distance is something we're looking at: our character's intimacy with his surroundings, the objects he finds and his quest for humor are things that need to be communicated in terms of camera distance. Movement is also important here: how the character moves through his space is also going to define his relationship with, just as the dog's movement through its space and its interactions with objects (the sponge ball, walls) defines that relationship.

I'm also interested in the prevalent whiteness of this, in the color-scheme. It's over-saturated with whiteness (or sometimes, brightness, which has the same effect) and this over-saturation gives the piece a sense of detail and closeness that I find interesting--a reflective quality, both in the literal and narrative sense. This predominance of one communicative color is something that I'd like to replicate in our own filming. As I scout locations, I'm looking for places that are uniform in their color scheme.

"Silence that Speaks Volumes" ...and the other way 'round, too.

In class on Monday, I'll be discussing with my students the concept of theatricalism (stage is stage! actors, actors! audience, audience! everybody knows about it!) and how this became a popular thing once film was recognized as the best medium for realism. But watching all of these--I don't know, I'll call them film-texts--makes me think about the authority of the writer/artist/director/whatever is presupposed: we trust the w/a/d/w, and there's not much that s/he has to do to earn that trust.

Perhaps that follows my earlier post on screen literacy: we trust the narrator or the eye of the camera because books and television are first introduced as learning tools. (Or, they were for me--thanks PBS!) Having learned from these things, we imbued them with authority. And while literary narrators may have their biases (first person, anyone?) we still expect to have something revealed either by that first person or by other concrete and significant clues in the text.

So it's a little dis-jarring to not be able to trust the narratorial eye at all, which is how I feel with regards to YHC's LES AMANTES DE BEAUB0URG.

We start with this quote from Duchamp: "Chaque mot que je vous dis est stupide est faux." It sets us up to distrust the narratorial eye, the meditation on Duchamp, Duchamp himself and everything that follows in his footsteps (whether that's an artist in pyjamas or television or nothing). It's all very off-putting, and I think this is because the "narrator" doesn't even seem to want me to view the text. The large french text cannot be read in real-time--it occurs too quickly. Additionally, the text feels too large: I have to hold the screen away from myself in order to see each word (for what time I can see it). The english text does not occur concurrently to the french--it's going at its own pace. And while it's easier to read (on account of the slowness and smallness of it), it's weighted down by the large text on top of it. You can't have an intimate moment with that english text, or I can't. I feel judged by the french text, its presence is so prominent.

Which leads me to another aspect of the mistrust of this text: there's something suspiciously Lacanian about it. It has desires beyond myself; it doesn't just want to read by me. It brings up the ideas of Dovetailing Details--it's a coded work and it's reading and performing itself. My own presence is incidental: it doesn't really need me. So! Lacan: there's a quality of maternal tension to this, given my earlier statements about the authority of this medium but also this particular example's disregard for the reader. I want it to be authoritative and I want it to acknowledge me as a reader, just like a developmental child wants its mother to acknowledge and validate itself. The meditations on nothingness and somethingness also contribute to this: it's like the maternal phallus. The text is fairly explicit about its lack of substance with its repetition of "RIEN." There's nothing there, but we want there to be so we construct a presence from that absence. (The text does this too, I think, which is maybe the only thing that reveals a sort of narrator behind the scenes.)

It's the same with the narrator: there isn't a clear narrative in the text and the narrator does little to reveal him/herself (instead obscuring his/her presence). I mean, I like it. I think it's fun and it offers a sense of relief (I don't want people to psychoanalyze me after they've read something I've written). It's just a little dis-jarring, is all.

The Glorious World of Cut-up. Or: Screen Literacy and Gen Y: A Musing or Two

Earlier in the semester, I had my 1191 students do a cut-up poem. We brought into the classroom different media (mostly magazines, but some birthday cards and other such, too) and destroyed them. Then we crafted poems from them. My students were quite whiny about this. "This isn't writing," they said.

"Yes it is," I said.

They still said it was not.

I don't mean to complain: we had a long and drawn-out discussion regarding the merits of cut-up (or not, as most of the students would have it). I finally got (most of) them to see that almost any act of creation is a sort of cut-up--that we're not inventing words, we're borrowing them from an already established lexicon and that with standardized English (which I have political feelings about but that's not here nor there) our lexicon is really already quite limited. Thus, cut-up is just another limitation. My art students took to this easily, I think perhaps because visual art more clearly steals (can't take much of a photograph if there isn't any object in the camera's field of vision). And that was my example--getting students to understand textual cut-up through visual cut-up. That's when it clicked for them.

So, it's interesting to me that Kevin Kelly travels the other way. He writes:

In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases.

I think I need to send this article on to my students.

But what really gets me is that mine is a generation that is already screen literate: I know of no one my age who has not seen a movie, a television show or a badly edited home movie. We even know when to call something badly edited--that's how well we know how to read the screen. There are accepted conventions for the screen--we know immediately what chiaroscuro lighting suggests about the mood of a scene; we know what close-ups are good for. So I wouldn't agree that,

The bottom is where the action is, and where screen literacy originates.

I'd say it's something pretty inherent to Gen Y, us latch-key kids who watched TV until our parents finally came home. We understood it pretty thoroughly before we started to hack it.

Kevin Kelly also says,

Rewriting video can even become a kind of collective sport.

Why, yes! It can! And that's exciting. I love the collaborative aspect of the media I find in my life. (Even now, I spend my Friday afternoons reading fan translations of Shonen Jump and parsing the particulars of a difference in translation. Oh ho, nerdy!) I got into writing by making comic books with my best friend. Had we had access to a video camera, think of what we'd be doing now.

So mostly, I agree, Kevin Kelly. I agree vehemently. Screen literacy is pretty cool. We are a people of the screen, and we should be jazzed about it.

"And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull!"

In considering the axises through which we approach language (as are laid out in Dovetailing Details Fly Apart -- All Over, Again, In Chreods by Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo), I wonder whether this control of language is something that pertains to our conception of ourselves as evolving beings--as something beyond human. I'm not exactly jazzed about that idea. I like the evolutionary stage at which we already are, and feel distrustful of anything that implies we can control our own destinies via the constructed.

That idea--the one I distrust--seems to be the meat of Strickland's and Jaramillo's argument:

We believe it is possible that an expanded sense of 21st -century reading, that is, an expanded appreciation of the resonance in lines of poetry, loops of code, and chreodic patterns, can develop into a practice that allows us to 'read'—and choose among—our generating futures. These are presently read mainly in data and the data displays of scientific visualization. We feel our possible futures need a broader audience, one that can be both warned and heartened, as were people of old by their reading and hearing; an audience themselves equipped to disclose and generate possible futures and, from these, find and choose a life-sustaining necessary path.

There is another quote in particular that I found to be interesting.

It is the role of the artistic coder to question the coding languages, both through self-reflection and by using them for unintended purposes.

I'm interested in the conception of this artistic coder--who is s/he? Is s/he a mere poet or something more god-like and striking? (Or do I have it wrong to begin with, and all poets are de facto gods?) So much of the rest of the essays centers on how coded language/coding manipulates the reader, hiding something from him or her (the invisible machinations of the code, the internal functions of the machine) and here we are led to consider the coder behind it all, rather like a god in the power that s/he weilds. It brings up odd thoughts: if our understanding and evolution (mental and otherwise) is being guided by technology, who is guiding the technology? Is open-source code the thing that will carry us into the future? Or rather, something closed off, learned only on college campuses and not available in a For Dummies booklet?

And what purposes can be unintended, and for whom? Poet-gods? Lay readers? Folks who code for function and not for art?

The idea of self-reflection is even more interesting: if we can get away from the discomfort of the uncanny valley, to what extent can we impregnate the technological with our own selves? And to what extent, then, does it impregnate us? I know myself because I have seen myself in a mirror--what if that mirror were more than mere object?

All of this leads me to further questions: what exactly is the human reader? Is the human reader one who has human eyes only? No contact lenses, no glasses? No artificial constructs to begin with? Aren't I as a human already a coded being, seeing with eyes manufactured by a culture, socialized since in utero? And what of those who are not technologically savvy--who have lacked access or ability. Are they more purely human? Are they disallowed from having a voice in our future evolution?

Perhaps it's my television viewing habits or the death of my laptop, but I've been thinking lately of fallibility--both of human experience and of technology. Perhaps it's that both have sprouted from the same source that both fail--perfection cannot be attained. Perhaps it's that imperfection that makes both so wonderful and I should get over my fear of technology. Misplaced brackets in code are beauty marks; I don't understand the internal machinations of the human body, either; human beings in motion are performers of their own functions, too.

Ultimately though (or today, anyway) I don't trust technology or objects of human construction. However impressive these things are as real-world Athena-children, I'm not sure of what they add to my experience and distrust even more those who would foist them upon me.

Anyway, I've got what seems to be a fitting video for y'all. (Though anyone who has not yet seen BSG 4.5 ought to avoid it, for the sake of significant spoilers):

Soundings

In looking for other sound works, I've been drawn to works which feature the female voice. The sound works of Yoko Ono and Kristin Oppenheim have been intriguing to me, then, due to their distinctly feminine voices. Yet I want something more playful, something closer to my own plans for our sound project.

And then I came across Storm-Riders by Dick Higgins.

For my own sound work, I've been considering a sort of remix (though I have yet to choose an original text to work from, as I am tempted by all sorts of things), which is essentially what Higgins has done here. In an interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Higgins said,

[Storm Riders] collages the first Moral Essay by Alexander Pope and my own poems from a set in which all the nouns and all the verbs begin with 'St', spoken by characters whose names begin with 'St'. These 'St' people are then referred to where all the nouns appear in Pope's original text, so that I have Alexander Pope talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe or Alfred Stieglitz or Igor Stravinsky and people whom obviously Pope could not have known.

The sound performance itself is fairly straight-forward, a simple recording without much after-mixing. The initial non-textual sounds serve to disorient and to set a mood and also remind me of the odd crocodile sounds we crafted as a class in sound lab--something not quite musical, but not simply a sound effect, either. In fact, they seem cinematic, like some of Higgins' other sound works.

The text performance and scripting drive this piece--Higgins' literary voice and Pope's literary voice clash, and this is what I find to be interesting. The clash is disconcerting, and that unease is helped by the reintroduction of non-textual sound elements, the obvious anachronisms and the way in which the remixed text is read. (Also! I really think that one of the readers sounds like Vincent Price! That is spooky, too!) The "st" sound is hard to hear (as in, it's grating, not too soft) and contributes to that feeling of unease.

My initial plan in approaching this project had been to appropriate a misogynistic and ugly text, to remix it and to find something approaching beauty in it. (A sort of hactivism, too, I s'pose, as this text I had most strongly considered is emblematic of a religion who has more than some political influence in my home state.) Now, however, I'm feeling a bit more ambitious. I'm considering other texts to work with and wondering how many voices exactly I can incorporate into this project--and I'm wondering if my own voice will suffice. Perhaps this is something that will be better suited by a collaborative effort.

I am hacker and so can you!

In my last post, I posed a number of questions regarding Wark's AHM which I'll now attempt to answer, as I've had some time to think on it all. Mostly at stake, in my mind, was the presentation of truth. I asked: Can the vectoralist class be a presenter of truth? The answer: Well, yes. I was forgetting my Badiou. Truth is universal, and can therefore be presented by anyone.

Perhaps more pressing, though, is the question: How can one achieve the presentation of truth rather than the representation of it? This is the question to which I don't have a solid answer. In watching the Yes Men documentary, I was struck by the response that each audience had for each outlandish and offensive presentation. Folks hardly blinked at the Management Leisure Suit and didn't seem upset at all by the direct comparison of remote workers to slaves. (Though, historically, this isn't surprising: women were used as unpaid labor for household management and after slavery was abolished, share-cropping and Jim Crow laws curtailed institutional freedoms for people of color. Corporate entities --governments included -- seem content to allow slave-labor to continue.) That so few people were phased, phased me, and put into action right before my eyes the need to defend Truth (that universal and just thing of which Badiou writes) and not just "truthiness." But how to do it if you can't get folks outraged or involved with it? What do you do when folks aren't questioning the status quo? The Yes Men just keep on presenting, which is all one can do, I suppose. You can't force people to adhere to truth, or it loses some of its sheen.

But what happens when the audience is responsive? With the ECON students, did the Yes Men ever let their true motives be known? Did they discuss how the presentation affected real world policies and how these students who would soon enter the business world could enact humane policies that would change the status quo? Those students were disgusted, but did they go on to take direct action in the world?

Looking at yesmen.org, it seems that they are content to leave that sort of work (which is not fun and which, more often than not, is tiresome and exhausting) to others.

What benefits does mischief have over more traditional protest?
None! For chrissakes. This is like asking if the bangles in the cake's icing are better than the mustard. (Who asked this question anyhow?) Even if we were the bangles (we are not), we would look like crap without the icing. If we were the mustard (we are not), we would taste like crap minus the lollipop. And so on. Traditional forms of action are more important than ever today: street protest, direct action, rallies, politics, lawsuits, letter-writing… All this and more is needed for change to happen. Plus, what we do is traditional[...]

While the trickster is indeed an archetype that can lead one to the truth, it's not sufficient. Do the Yes Men reach out to these other and perhaps more traditional forms of protest? Should they? Should it be the other way 'round?

As for my own membership in the hacker class, well. Hmmm.

I'm a degree candidate with enough money and funding to "reach for the moon!" My own writing is fairly traditional and realistic (though I do happen to think that reality undermines itself, as it isn't always such a wondrous thing). I sign petition, online and otherwise, and have participated in street art. But being a culture jammer is in vogue, and I think one would be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn't consider himself or herself to be some sort of culture jammer. Even crazy members of the ruling class perceive themselves to be a vital sort of hacker, doing the good thing in the culture wars we all hear about. So I'm a sort of hacker and I'm not -- as is everyone else, I think.

Whatever the answers to and ethics of all of this, I really, really want one of these suits. I would wear it everywhere. So Kafka-esque! And really, if Gregor Samsa's transformation into a vermin wasn't a demonstration of culture jamming, I don't know what was. Anyway! The suits: