New Short Film In Progress

I'm making a three minute surrealist short film. I'm really into the director, David Lynch, and I plan on drawing heavily from his works. One scene I'm very interested in is when the main character is shown walking in this industrial landscape.  You can watch the clip here, the scene I'm interested in is at about 6 minutes in. This is a still of the shot.

"Eraserhead" David Lynch 1977

I've noticed that the overcast lighting takes away the shadow of the main character walking. It adds to the motif of bleakness that I'm interested in recreating. Furthermore, in my film I will incorporate heavy sound that will complement the visual images' production of my themes: a distanced sense of self, anxiety, and bleakness. David Lynch is very well known for his "atmospheric dissonance" that accompanies the "natural" sound in his films. My sound will come from recording various machines humming to produce what I envision will create a "cyclical groan". 

Another filmmaker that I will draw from is Luis Bunuel, specifically his well known short film "Un Chien Andalou" from 1930. This is a clip from the film:

With Bunuel, I'm really looking at the relationship between each shot and the lighting techniques that he uses. I'd like to use these types of shot-shot relations in my own film. A single statement to summarize my (as of now untitled) film:

In this surrealist short film, a woman, played by Rachele Krivichi, experiences a bleak, yet anxiety filled reality. The film incorporates other relatable themes, such as the feeling of a distanced sense of self.

The Human - Interface Interaction

I read Lev Manovich's article "New Media From Borges to HTML", it was sort of interesting, you can find it here!. I was intrigued by Manovich's thoughts on comparing new media to software design. Let me back track first though; the idea of this article is to try and figure out what we can call "new media". What is encapsulated by the set: new media art. Obviously this will be difficult to set limits or bounds because it's difficult to draw lines anywhere in the art world. Manovich points out the the true artists of the new media era are the software designers that have made it possible to actualize artists' projects. The section of Manovich's article I am most interested in is his discussion of the human - computer interface interaction. He calls this the most interactive work because of how often the user can manipulate what they're seeing in front of them. An example I can think of is someone created micosoft word, the possibilia of outcomes within any single document seem endless, yet each one can be personalized because of the easy to use host software. The interface that Manovich is describing is "deeper" into the technology. He gives credit to Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and others for being the artists who have made the new media era possible.

It's interesting to think how new media art is different from art that came before it. When we think of art we often think of a painting, sometimes film or photography too; these are static (relatively) pieces. The new media art that Manovich is talking about is interactive. There isn't a sense of a static piece because the art interacts with the viewer/participant/user. This is a cool change in the history of art. Now, I'm not saying that art wasn't ever interactive before new media projects were made available, but the processes of creating a new media piece make sure there is interactivity on some level.

Another article I recently read was the introduction from "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This was a complex reading. They bring to the text an idea of what they call a "rhizome". It seemed upon my reading that the rhizome was a way to introduce philosophical concepts of objects not being represented as just a thing, but as a multiplicity of relations. This is interesting, but I could not draw a clear focus out of the text that I read. The idea of multiplicity and their concept of identity being within mutual relations.

Janet Cardiff

Recently I've been doing some research on Janet Cardiff. Shes a Canadian born artist who is most known for her audio walks and installations. Frequently (especially more recently), she collaborates with her husband George Bures Miller. You can see pictures and other samples of her work at her website. Cardiff's audio walks involve the participant listening to her voice as she guides them through an existent landscape (be it a museum, park, downtown area, etc.). The art of the audio walks are to add in another landscape, an aural one, presented and constructed by Cardiff.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

In my research I focused more on Cardiff and Miller's installations. These installations produce a variety of exciting interactions between the participant and the artwork. A couple of examples are "The Killing Machine" 2007: an installation that focused on capital punishment and drew the participant into the work through their activation of the installation via pushing a red button.

"The Killing Machine" Cardiff and Miller 2007

"The Killing Machine" Cardiff and Miller 2007

Cardiff's installations and audio walks emphasize the relationship between the viewer/participant and her artwork. This serves to draw complex parallels between Cardiff's fictional created space and the reality of the participants' perceptions/actions. In doing this, Cardiff has intertwined the notions of concept and content within artwork because her installations blur the distinction between theatricality and reality. Another example to show this is an installation Cardiff and Miller set up at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The show was called "Pandemonium" and it was a sound installation set up on top of an abandoned prison.

"Pandemonium" 2005-2007. Cardiff and Miller.

The sound installation creates a psychologically intense atmosphere (which is probably an understatement). Sounds run throughout a sectioned off wing on a 15 minute loop. The sounds wax and wane and eventually climax. This brings up the notion of the disembodied voice, another theme present in much of Cardiff's work. However, the rhythmic sequences that Cardiff and Miller create cannot be heard from all over, the participants' position within the vast installation largely determines which sounds they will hear, and thus, their experience.

Janet Cardiff has worked on many more installations and, though I did not focus on it as much, her audio walks are very important as well. I have become very interested in this artist and hope to see her work sometime in the recent future.

The Medium Is The Message

I read a chapter of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is The Massage. It was difficult for me to unpack all of  what McLuhan is arguing, but going over it a few times, I can see that he's pointing out things we already know. "The medium is the message" is a concept that is supposed to change our ideas of what we actually perceive. McLuhan describes scenarios in which people are more concerned with the medium, or the device that transports an idea or message, than the content that the medium presents to us. He gives an example of a non-English speaker tuning in every night to listen to a BBC news broadcast that he can't understand. Why? Because the medium is the message. Stimuli's effects on us aren't wholly described by how we interpret the content of any medium. You don't get cancer from watching a certain television program, you get cancer from sitting with your face in front of a big light box (i know that it is not proven that t.v. gives you cancer, it was just an example i came up with to support this idea).

McLuhan also brings up an idea that I am interested in. It is that we are surrounded now (even more so now since this book was written in the 60's) by a plethora of mediums that we do not understand at all. In the "information era" we're all too concerned with the content and give no importance or thought to what the medium is. It's interesting, but I actually see it as not that important in the scheme of things. I don't think that McLuhan would realistically argue that we always always always consider the medium the message, period. Content that is expressed by a medium is often more important, I think McLuhan is just trying to illuminate the idea that the medium holds a lot of weight for the "meaning" of any artwork or other stuff...

I Made Movies

Recently I uploaded some short films that I made to YouTube. The first film, entitled Some Speech Resembles Vomit" is a mash-up of found footage I collected on the internet. The film is a commentary on how I don't like how people market themselves to others as if they're trying to sell something. I find that mentality pretty easy to see through even when it's masqueraded by the common "I just thought you would love to hear about this" front. Anyways, I've embedded the video here, but you can also check out My YouTube Channel. Here's "Some Speech Resembles Vomit" (please excuse the typo in the video).



The next film I made is called "Thinking About People Telling Me Things Makes Me Bite My Nails", it's about my own feelings of anxiety that accompany the feeling of being marketed to, or targeted, or "on someones' radar". I added sound in from a washing and drying machine cycling through their respective actions. The anxiety that I often feel in my life just kind of rolls over me which is represented by the gears turning around. The sharpness of the anxiety that I experience is illustrated by the chopping of carrots. Also a side note: I'm allergic to carrots. Here's the video:



My third video is called "Anxiety". I've represented my feelings of anxiety about the issue of being marketed to by directing two of my friends through some musical improvisation. I framed the video so that the windows on the house outside look like piano keys in the closer window. The blurred effect that comes in and out is through a manual focus on the camera I used; the purpose that this focus shift holds in the video is the distorted perception of reality that anxiety puts me under. Tim Honig plays trumpet in the film and Peter Mancina plays Bass.

The Photographer, The Laborer

Yesterday at Lawrence University I went to a lecture given by Frank Lewis. He spoke about the history of photography, specifically about how photography is a medium that historically has appreciated and noticed the worker. Photography's capture aspect has the ability to freeze the worker and fixate on his/her craft. By doing this photography can emphasize the laborer as an individual, which goes against how I think a lot of people consider the worker "a piece of the machine". Frank Lewis mentioned that the worker was portrayed now not only as an extension of the machine, the worker is much more. The worker has his/her craft and is empowered and appreciated. Frank Lewis also alluded to the idea that because photography has historically emphasized the importance of the worker, photographers were the first artists that weren't necessarily thought of as a part of high culture. The lecture gave the image of photographers and their subjects holding a very noble role in the history of art and society. These ideas brought me to think about the role of the photographer today and how technology has given pretty much any asshole with a digital camera and a Flickr account the chance to call themselves a photographer. I think that degrades the idea of the photographer and the parallels that Frank Lewis illuminated between the photographer and the worker. However, I think that there is still a separation between the photographer as a true artist (whatever the fuck that means) and the asshole with a digital camera; I got the chance to see some really great artwork in an exhibition following the lecture. Two of the artists are my teachers, Julie Lindemann and Johnny Shimon; it was really great to see some of their artwork featured in an exhibition about the worker within photography. They have a feel to their work that presents an image of the worker as a real master over their craft. They had a book written by Julie Lindemann and Johnny Shimon that featured a lot of their work laying out in the exhibition and I got a chance to read a little of it. I was very interested in one part specifically that talked about how the older worker more readily identifies him/herself with his/her craft whilst the younger worker has aspirations for something "more" or at the least an identity separate from their craft.

Technology and Society

Raymond Williams wrote an article entitled, The Technology and the Society, in 1972. I was expecting the article to be about the content of television, movies, magazines and other media is linked in with the culture at the time of publication. The article was much different than that; it was about the causes and effects of technology and how it changed the notion of social communication. Williams discusses how technological advances happened as a result of many different developments (military uses and the ability for corporations or the state to broadcast to people are among a few). Williams nicely put it this way: "It is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communication preceded their content". This idea brings my assumptions about the reading forward and I can place my own thoughts in this style of thinking. While the television was invented long before 1972, Williams brings up an interesting point. The ability to broadcast was there before people had to worry about what they were watching. And since the introduction of of new technologies in social communication, people have pushed the envelope along the lines of how much sex can I sell? How much violence can I get away with showing? Yeah, we want to see these things and we should have the choice to see them, but we only care because we know they exist on television. I'm not advocating censorship, I'm just saying theres a bunch of dumb shit out there.

Furthermore, I watched some experimental videos in my class. After reading Williams' article, I can see how these artists have used the existing technologies as a major on their content. William Wegman is an artist who clearly spends time contemplating the role that television and similar video technologies have in society and he creates art that fucks with our expectations of what video should be. But that's the idea for a lot of experimental film makers I think. I dont think that cheapens it, they obviously have more of a message or direction if they're good, but this is something film makers look at. I think this is a weird video, but his dog stuff is kind of weird to me:


I dont think it's fair to look at experimental video by writing it off as dumb shit. But it's not fair to give dumb shit the title experimental art. This particular video might be close to a gray area.

Decasia

Mash-ups are basically remixing existent art (sometimes other media that isn't considered art) and presenting it in a different, often augmented way. A lot of people thing this idea is really dumb, and that the original creator should be the only person who takes credit for their productions. I understand this argument, but I think that it is naive to hold this stance. I don't find the literal usage of other artists work much further away from an artist being extremely inspired by another artists work. I dont mean to argue that mash-ups are that simple either, they can be much cooler than that. I watched the film, Decasia, by Bill Morrison, and it was awesome. Basically, he took found footage and made an experimental film that brings the nature of decay to the forefront of our minds through the use of mashing together decaying old film and juxtaposing these obscure scenes together with an intense rhythmic soundscape. I found the movie extremely compelling and often terrifying. The sound was so intense and perfectly mixed with the video; it was really impressive. My initial response was that the film was like a David Lynch short film mixed with a Godspeed track. William Burroughs wrote an article about mash-ups and i found his position about how they are beneficial to the art world very similar to my own. Mash-ups can be used in a variety of mediums, even across mediums. The concept of the mash-up is an easy way towards understanding what experimental art can be. Rearranging finished products, or really anything, and reproducing it with your own artistic vision is very cool.

New Photos Uploaded

I've created three sets of ten images that focus on or respond to the notion of surveillance in contemporary life. You can check them out on my Flickr page. My first set is Appleton in autumn; for people that live in Appleton, we know that it's a pretty quiet place. I find the images in this set somewhat comical because they show authority figures and signs that presume dangerous or "bad" things go on here, or would if they weren't around to stop them. Within this set I like the photo of the sign near the park and the text that says "turn em' in" because I think it shows this theme very effectively. In my next set of photos, I took pictures at Project Bridges, the preschool I work at. At a preschool surveillance is obviously important because we teachers use surveillance as a means to help kids. Some of the pictures represent this theme, but others are just more playful images that use surveillance in some other way such as kids taking care of animals or surveying/considering the idea of time. Finally, for my last set I took pictures at the Fox River Mall. The text in the first photograph sets up the mood for the entire set; it's about marketing and the individual's lack of a personal identity that comes from being forces to self-survey from the lens that marketing culture imposes on the consumer.

The Internet as a Host for Artwork

This last wednesday, at Lawrence University, Rachel Crowl gave a talk about Web 2.0 and spoke a little bit about what it means to be an artist that experiments with new media. For clarification on what exactly Web 2.0 is, here's a video presentation that is awkward but informative.



Rachel Crowl deals with technology issues that the Lawrence administration encounters, I'm sure she wouldn't like that description of her job, but I didn't pick up enough on what exactly she does for the school. She definitely is really busy and is extremely knowledgeable about technology, the history of the internet, and was overall very informative about all this stuff. She spoke about blogs, such as the one I'm writing on now, and told us that they were the first form of democratized self-publishing. I think this makes sense and it definitely does put some power into the hands of individual people in the sense that an individual can post things to the web for free, you dont have to be a writer for a corporation. The social component of contemporary blogging (or related to blogging) websites acts as what Rachel Crowl called the glue that holds them together and makes them successful. What does this mean for artists? Advancements in technology and the user-friendly nature of the internet has given rise and vast amounts of popularity to websites like Flickr, which host photography. Other websites host other art forms, but photography, or photos of art are probably the most easily recognized art forms on the internet. This gives everyone (artist or not) an equal opportunity to post their content to a host website. I asked Rachel a question along the lines of, doesn't it frustrate you that this puts an artist's work on the same level as a 13 year old's family vacation photos? Outside of how many views a person gets, it's difficult for many uninformed people (maybe someone with an untrained eye) to distinguish between art and bullshit. And even that (the views) doesn't mean all that much; marketing yourself and playing into the game can get you more views than actually having a unique artistic outlook. Should the artist feel an aversion to these types of host websites because it puts their work on a level that seems to degrade it on some level? Rachel Crowl responded by assuring me that it's not the platforms that suck, it's the people that post shitty content. And it's you the viewer who ultimately has the choice whether to look at something or not. And you know, I definitely agree that there's a lot of stupid shit out there for viewing, but I still feel like using an online host that is so immensely populated by users kind of takes a little bit away from my work. It becomes so user friendly and so accessible that my artistic intent, (not to mention the technical skills that art can show) isn't even noteworthy anymore. Overall, I don't like the message that you put out there by using a host website for your content; it's like I'm advertising to someone, I don't like that. Rachel Crowe definitely had an attitude that said "technology is here to help us, to make things easier for us". And for the most part I agree, but I still often feel like it makes it easy for the everyday assholes to try and give the world a message that I don't want to hear. Furthermore, I think that it makes it easy for malevolent authorities to keep tabs on us. Maybe that's delusional, but whatever. I don't really feel that comfortable participating in this technological charade. I really think that it's only as addictive as it is because the internet is a gratification based host and the user can hide is some amount of anonymity.

Dan Leers Talk

So, Dan Leers is a curator at MOMA, he graduated from lawrence, and he's a normal human being. Basically Dan Leers gave a talk today at Lawrence and told us his life story (as it exists on paper), with photos to back it up, over the past 10 years. Why would I want to hear about a 30 year old's life story just because he went to the same school I did? Maybe because he knew a lot about a photographer that has a lot of images that are very thought provoking, compelling, and overall just amazing (Henri Cartier Bresson). And if Dan Leers had given a talk that focused on Cartier Bresson's work or travels (or even better, both), I would have been interested. But really, what the fuck am I supposed to respond to? He told us what he did (again i emphasize, on paper, because he didn't tell us anything else about his life than what he could put into a resume) over the past ten years, all the while praising MOMA and Lawrence University. While MOMA is one of the best, if not the best, modern/contemporary art museum, Dan Leers is not an artist, he has (seemingly(from the talk)) a very uninteresting perspective on anything, and is a curator, which I've learned from his talk is simply a combo between an "artist's bitch" and "MOMA's whore" (putting that in quotations only serves the purpose of trying to become exempt from being an accused masogynist). He hangs artwork and learns about what that artist's life is like... and he gets paid for it; he's got a cool job, but it seems like he's nothing close to an extraordinary human being. The best part of the presentation was that I learned Cartier Bresson followed "the political action" of his time. Also I saw some projected images I hadn't seen before, which I thought were really great. Overall I don't want to hear how great Lawrence is or how fun Dan Leers' job is.

I have no videos or photos that I think are relevant... except a description of how to become a curator.

The Coming Insurrection

For other information maybe or maybe not closely related to the idea of surveillance in contemporary culture, check out The Coming Insurrection (PDF of The Coming Insurrection). It was written by the Tarnac 9, a group of French Anarchists that are responsible for terrorist activity in France in the early 2000's. It's fairly interesting, albeit too radical for me in its final chapters. Also:

Does Surveillance Mandate More Than Self-Awareness?

In reading about the panopticon, the nature of surveillance seems to be useful in monitoring the activities of prison inmates. The method of doing so makes the inmates experience a mandated self-awareness. They become their own surveillance by the way that the prison's architectural design and guard system is set up. The purpose of bringing this up is that upon reflection, we can see that new media holds a very similar role in our society today, but not just for prison inmates, for all of us. High tech military surveillance watches over other countries via satellite, google earth is probably a few generations away from giving us live updates on towns (supposedly for directions from place to place), and all new cell phones come equipped with digital cameras and movie making software. The point is, our notion of privacy has evolved in this new digital age. We are always under surveillance; all we have to do is leave our homes, but even then cable companies monitor the television shows and websites that we view, and how do we know all this information isn't sold to the federal government? Since the Patriot Act was passed post 9-11, we all know that the government will go to any means of invading privacy in order to "protect the ordinary American", but how do we know the government hasn't gone further than that. So much of our personal information is out there, what reasons does the government have NOT to collect it and use it for whatever their interests may be. An even scarier idea is the thought that large corporations could be buying this information for their own malevolent use. We know they already do this in some capacity, (thats what spyware and adware is, right?), but there's no way to find out if it's done more malevolently because of course they would keep it a secret. But anyways, government and corporate conspiracies aside, there is no doubting that at least in some capacity the American individual is under surveillance more than they are readily aware of. Most of us think about surveillance as a way of making sure people do the right thing, or are doing what their supposed to be doing(bosses monitoring employees' web access), and we all adhere (or otherwise face the penalties) to breaking the rules that surveillance is in place to preserve. We're conscious of doing so also. We change our behavior when digital cameras are present just like how when we were kids and we would change our behavior when our parents were watching. It took me this long to bring it up, but this analogous to what happens in the film Standard Operating Procedure by Errol Morris. The film is about the role of digital cameras as either surveillance or their pictures as evidence in the Abu Ghraib scandal that hit the American media a couple years ago. In this film we saw compelling evidence that the digital camera opened a door for a performance. In the famous incidents at Abu Ghraib that have been deemed "criminal action", the way that the interviewees described the events makes it seem like the events occurred for the camera. Specifically, in the film Sabrina and Lynndie (both guards at the prison) described other men forcing acting inhumanely towards the prisoners in front of the camera. Of course there is the possibility (and i would even argue more than possibility) that other instances of abuse occurred off camera, but the evidence that we have is only photographs mixed with after-the-fact statements. The photos and the way that the interviewees described the events made the prison guards seem like they were proclaiming "look what we can do!", as a manifesto of power over the Iraqi inmates. Also, the fact that one of the guards, Graner, passed the photos out to the other guards further backs up this idea. While Sabrina has claimed that she "was trying to display the horrors of what happened" in her letters at the prison and after the fact, her smiles and thumbs ups (basically overall display of unaffectedness) show that she was also a victim of this. The digital camera as a surveillance tool in the end is important in this instance because it made the guilty parties guilty. Although this is an important aspect of the film, the biggest impact that the film had on me was further solidifying my utter disgust with military personnel. The discussion in the film about higher up government officials "ghosting" individuals (or making them never have existed within the facility), military intelligence officers condoning (at the least, if not ordering) abuse to prisoners, and the fact that no one besides the people caught on camera served any time in prison for the abuse at the prison, I think, points to the notion of a vast network or military groups that will cover anyones ass who ranks high enough. They can do whatever they want, wherever they want, and make it disappear; it's like the fucking x-files except in real life and without aliens (in this case). At the risk of sounding too much like a conspiracy theorist (I think that my general distrust of the military, the government, and most wealthy figures of authority is clear enough at this point), I'd like to summarize the role that I see surveillance taking on in contemporary American life. It's everywhere, not always used malevolently (even if politically motivated), but most likely has severe psychological effects on the people within our cultures. I don't like to think I'm being watched for being an ordinary civilian, but the digital age has made it possible for unknown forces to monitor just about anything they want and get away with it unscathed as long as it's paid for or in the name of national security. I don't distrust the surveillance tools; I distrust the people behind them.

Response to "Augmenting Human Intellect" by Douglas Engelbart

I read "Augmenting Human Intellect" and for a large portion of the reading it was difficult for me to transform the words that Engelbart uses into visuals in my mind. Reading about frameworks which are just systems for computer processes is entirely what we take for granted when we think what a computer does (or should be able to do). When I try to imagine a world where data is stored either in peoples minds or as text in a book or related medium (analogically?), it is clear that Engelbart's ideas were meant to make a digitalized framework that is analogous to the human mind, but doesn't have the shortcomings that the human mind has (forgetfulness and/or other general absentmindedness). The frameworks for data serve as somewhere closer to physical, though arguably digital isn't physical, structures of data collection. I find it really fascinating that someone could conceive of creating a data storage space (that is also capable of designing programs) that exists as something different than physical storage; of course now we take this type of not-wholly-physical, existent space for granted, but back before computers and the digital age, how could someone conceive of a place that is somewhere between the physical and mental and put data there. So to relate this whole thing to that twilight zone episode, I can see how difficult it would be to understand or comprehend something like a computer, which could easily lead to fear. In contemporary America, and many, many other places in the world, digital space is necessary for all modern conveniences, whether we can conceive of what that digital space is or not, it's a normality.

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