I am thinking of this as an installation- or a project that I would like to expand further
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
in memoriam
when i first learned html in a class called intro to the internet i never thought about making something useful i just wanted the internet to be there for art
Market fantasy
hey, here is my montage experiment!
I use the idea about market to practice
every tiny link between different footages.
The connection could be time, space, events, subjects
even music or words.
enjoy it!
MOUNT ANALOGUE
MOUNT ANALOGUE: Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing
My project is an online version of René Daumal's novel "Mount Analogue". By combining text from the novel, original video (from appropriated sources - a mix of music videos, cartoons, nature documentaries, etc.) and hyperlinks to tell the story, I am attempting to encourage detours, new directions and even possible dead-ends within the original text (appropriate, considering that "Mount Analogue" thematically deals with a group of mountaineers on an absurd quest for enlightenment, and that Daumal died before actually completing the novel). Currently, I have only been able to complete and upload a few pages (unfinished portions end in dead links - not intended as the "dead-ends" mentioned above).
My project is an online version of René Daumal's novel "Mount Analogue". By combining text from the novel, original video (from appropriated sources - a mix of music videos, cartoons, nature documentaries, etc.) and hyperlinks to tell the story, I am attempting to encourage detours, new directions and even possible dead-ends within the original text (appropriate, considering that "Mount Analogue" thematically deals with a group of mountaineers on an absurd quest for enlightenment, and that Daumal died before actually completing the novel). Currently, I have only been able to complete and upload a few pages (unfinished portions end in dead links - not intended as the "dead-ends" mentioned above).
Here is a link to my montage this week "Bicycle, tree, dog, projector".
I used sixteen millimeter film which I recorded then onto a digital camera and edited digitally. In it I was thinking about the shifts that can happen between time spaces through the video camera. Through video one can move from three-dimensional space to flat space, from real memory space to moving image space, all filtered through a round ticking space that is the progression of one image after another.
Milan, mid 80s. Still in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Match day at the stadium, 4 miles farther.
 | It's a Saturday afternoon. Or Sunday. "Hey dad, can we go see the match?" "We don't have tickets, I'm sorry we can't." "Dad, can we buy tickets?" "Next time, but you know what?", dad whispers, "If you go on the roof of the gallery, you can see the stadium". "..." "Dad, can we see the players from the roof?" "Well... I'm sure you can." |
Monday, September 28, 2009
DVBlog contribution
A must see for all of us:
http://www.dvblog.org/movies/09_2009/versions_oliver_laric.mov
http://www.dvblog.org/movies/09_2009/versions_oliver_laric.mov
GemelosTimeProductions
First my contribution this week. From unused footage and wordgames through the text-to-speech feature in the computer which is a fundamental part of my body of work:
How far can three spice boxes take you?
This is the idea I worked on.
How far can three spice boxes take you?
How could one delineate a path through smell. How would a whiff remind you of some place far away, something that you loved or something that got stuck in your mind.
How would you reconstruct/deconstruct it. Would there be an image/ a broken string of words that would mean/feel something like that fleeting whiff?
Much as I am trying to edit the title as 'How far can three spice boxes take you?...on my index page, am not getting through. It still reads, 'Montage Exercise'.
So I let the computer have its way..:)
This was my first attempt at working with html. I loved it.
see you all tomorrow.
One of us...
Thinking about Todd Browning... Anyways I decided to do a google map, using some footage that I shot this past April. I've been having major difficulties cutting this short together and figured I would use this mapping process as a way to figure some things out spatially.
Hope this link works: Phone Tag/Play
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Flicker Philly
Rose Lowder is the inspiration for this test. Her films are shot frame-by-frame in 16mm with the Bolex, but she alternates frames among different subjects. She does this by a complex ordering of the content of each frame. She will, for example, assign one subject to every other frame on a roll of film by shooting one frame, then covering the lens and shooting a frame of black (unexposed), then shooting another frame of the subject, then another black. When finished, she rewinds the camera and exposes the unexposed frames on a different subject and a sort of in-camera superimposition effect is created. It can also be considered a "flicker film," because of its strobing effect.Please see below for my video interpretation of this structuralist method of filmmaking. The superimposition of simultaneous images is my form of montage to describe the fragmentary experience of the visuals of an urban landscape seemingly at odds with itself. In what ways can perspective and time be altered by the patterned or random ordering of frames which compose a time-based media like film? How much time must be assigned to any one image for it to leave its impression upon the viewer?
Untitled from Joe Kraemer on Vimeo.
Free sound database!!!!
http://www.freesound.org/
I promised Alessandro that I would give him the information to this Creative Commons free sound database, so here it is. Just register and tons of downloadable sounds for free.
Enjoy!
I promised Alessandro that I would give him the information to this Creative Commons free sound database, so here it is. Just register and tons of downloadable sounds for free.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Value of life
In 1981, Maya Lin, at age 21, submitted her design for Vietnam Veterans Memorial Public Competition.
It is a black granite wall with a V-shape, stretches over the green grass plain. It is so sharp that it seems like a wound on the ground, like a wound caused by wars in our memory, which would never be healed. The reflection of visiters overlape carved names of 58,253 fallen soldiers on the mirror-like surface. It’s like a door between the livings and the dead, through this window they see each other, they communicate with time.
The design was initially controversial for what was an unconventional and non-traditional design for a war memorial. Think about the meaning of war memorial, the way Lin did it is just like what Postmodernists were seeking “re-creation of traditional ‘classical’ values”. A statue of soldiers’ image could merely define those casualties’ occupations, not the feeling we receive from wars or the lesson we learn from history. Those are truly the core value of our life. It doesn’t matter how tall it is, how precious material it made of or how vivid scene it is if the memorial never arouse our emotional reactions. Postmodern architects tried to reform the value of relationship between cities and people, just like Lin tried to express the value of connection between wars and human.
The design was initially controversial for what was an unconventional and non-traditional design for a war memorial. Think about the meaning of war memorial, the way Lin did it is just like what Postmodernists were seeking “re-creation of traditional ‘classical’ values”. A statue of soldiers’ image could merely define those casualties’ occupations, not the feeling we receive from wars or the lesson we learn from history. Those are truly the core value of our life. It doesn’t matter how tall it is, how precious material it made of or how vivid scene it is if the memorial never arouse our emotional reactions. Postmodern architects tried to reform the value of relationship between cities and people, just like Lin tried to express the value of connection between wars and human.
Eventually, she won the competition.
Initially, it seemed to me that Goodman was claiming there can be no hierarchy whatsoever between any opposing realities or claims. This belief in complete subjectivity is a major part of Postmodernism with which I am unable to agree.
However, upon further reading, I found this quote, “That right versions and actual worlds are many does not obliterate the distinction between right and wrong versions”. Therefore, I decided that this essay could be read as having more to do with a human perception of reality than with reality itself. It seemed to be concerned with different ways in which one might crop or edit a view.
If a person is only able to view tiny, pieces of a vast and expansive whole then it would follow that many small fragments might appear to be in opposition with one another, even though they are a part of the same larger substance. The first visual example I thought of involved a Gary Hill video where one begins to get the sense of a room through cropped images of various objects and fragments of walls. By the end of the video, one thinks one has a sense of the room he was in when documenting. However, this is a question that remains open, for who is to say that the photos in the video were all taken in one room? There is something in this ideology that has to do with the way in which scientists work, isolating variables and testing results.
I am interested in what Words, Works Worlds had to say about the distinction between “saying or representing on the one hand and showing or exemplifying on the other”. I think I am more interested in works that achieve the latter. Illustration is often less revealing than an embodiment. Similarly, a fictional work can often get at realities that nonfiction is unable to touch, because fiction does not operate under the guise of carrying an untainted truth.
The City of Science and The City of Magic (a world I am creating)
(esta es una lectura rapida de una escenario complejo. voy a partir del sentido de ciudad pero debo switch to english). now that i have done that there are some considerations that should be pointed out. one, there is no right way. two, the only purpose to write this is so that you can get information out of me. of course there is the fact that this is pure fiction, fun fiction made for readers to enjoy. that is all. dont go any further thatn that. with that being said i should mention the fact that i am sitting in a computer which purpose is for people to make music and as i write this i am not making it so i feel uncomfortable. i am pretty nervous about breaking the rules here in this building.
the character in this story has a double personality, one is a bdsm machine and the other is a calm relaxed buddhist. both are traped in the body of a middle aged man. there is another character, a woman, his lover. she is called the dragonfly and she is a super heroine, or an anti super heroine. she is also a single mother. this dudes occupy the realm of a fantasy land and in fact are comic book characters that may or may not make it to the shelves. in their world there is a problem going on. there are zombies rumbling the streets. these zombies are in fact poor people. they are scary for the middle class people and are totally controlled by the high class people. the basic problem for the characters is that the high class people want to get rid of the middle class people and turn them to zombies too. so this man with a double personality and his lover are trying to find a way through it. of course their main concern is the kid and in the end of the story the kid is the only one that makes it through the annhilation of the middle class people of this fantasy world.
their city is called the city of science, and it is a city divided by a huge magical mountain. it is said that the mountain was put there by the christian god to stop the citizens of the city of science to obtain the absolute power. the legend says that the mountain was placed there to divide the city of science from its counter part, the city of magic. it turned out that the city of magic is actually the city of religion, and that religion negates science. in the city of religion they know that that one god that placed the mountain is only one of the gods that populate the earth, so they laugh when they see the people of the city of science believing only in one god and forever stopping themselves to reach heaven. the city of religion occupies the same place that the city of science occupies, and who the citizens of science see as zombies are in fact the priviledged citizens of the city of religion. the religion of the city of such is a polytheist religion, or also, one could say that the city of religion is the city of millions of religions. every citizen in the city of religion is allowed to believe in as many gods as he or she wants.
our characters are citizens of the city of science, therefore they cannot realize that the city of religion is right there before them. so, they cant realize either that the annihilation of the middle class is not such a bad thing because once they die they will become part of the city of religion and live forever in heaven. what sets them aside though of the normal citizens of the science is that they do have certain connection with religion or what citizens of science know as magic. what happens is that the dragonfly's mother was an angel that came from the city of religion and had a family with a man of the city of science, which is dragonfly's father and also the mayor of the city of science.
the mayor is the villain of the story. this man actually imprisoned his wife and used his son to obtain power in the city of science. his son is a shape shifter and the fucker was using his son's dna to make soldiers out of the zombies by injecting them with a dna modifier that turned them from low class people to carnivorous soldiers. he imprisoned his wife because obviously she was against this kind of action being done to his son and to the people. they also had another child, the dragonfly which, as one could predict can fly. the dragonfly's daughter mortimer, can run through walls and that is how he gets his ass out of the city of science in the end of the story.
the reason why dragonfly's lover M has a double personality is also linked to magic. he used to be two separate individuals that fell in love with the dragonfly. by the way, her real name is estefania. this two man where a) an documentalist anthropologist form flacso and b) a musician. the musician is the actual father of mortimer and that is why the kid has such heavy metal name. alex, the musician was a heavy metal turned noise conceptual artist that made lots of money in the middle of the nineties when he found his marked, basically, so rich guys and lads from brooklyn. the other dude manuel, worked his way to grad school only to realize that grad school sucks because it makes life pretty predictable after you get your phd. this two guys met estefania in different moments of their lives.
alex met her when they were teenagers, she got pregnant really young. they were both punk rock fans going through some ruff times cause both had run away from home. estefania run away when she found out her father was into shady businesses and alex never explained estefania why she left his home. truth is, he left home because his mom, which widowed at an early age didnt really care about her kids. she was a thirties kind of a woman, bohemian and hooked in the drug of opium. they were really well off but by the time he run away from home there was little left of his fathers money.
manuel met estefania when he came back to ecuador after completing his graduate study. he was fascinated with this ex punk rocker single mother that reminded him of tank girl. the dude was actually a comic book junkie when he was a kid. well, she wasnt that keen on him and rejected the man. curiosly he met her again in a stipclub. the person he met at the stripclub though wasnt really her. let me explain.
remember i told you about estefania having a brother who was exploited by his father to make dna modified soldiers out of zombies. well, this kid was really fucked up in the head. being abused by his father since he was a kid, a shape shifter as he was, having no real identity, this kid, who could see that his father had a daughter that he did take care of developed an addiction towards his sister. of course estefania didnt know about him, he spent the days in the basement in a little cell his father had made for him, next to his mother's. there were a few times in which he had been able to sneek in the house and look at what was going on. the maid knew he was there, she'd sometimes be nice to him. well, so he wanted to be this girl that was getting all the atention. he's dad was totally sick though, he'd make him shape shift into his sister and fucked him as well as famous actresses, models, neighbors. sick.
when manuel saw estefania in the stripclub he felt lucky. he paid her for a lap dance and after that pushed for having some personal time with her. he didn't know it was estefania's brother. and when estefania's brother figured that this man actually knew where his sister was and how she behaved and all that, he played along the idea of really being estefania. but that couldnt last for long. the poor kid was actually pinpointed by the police, controlled by his dad and was taken prisoner againg. manuel thought it was estefania who they were imprisoning, and was surprised when he met her again by luck in the city some months after.
now, there is something you need to know about the city of science. the mountain that is in the middle of it has constantly been inspected to try to figure if the legend of god placing it there just to limit the citizens is true or not. whoever did that along the years didnt get any real results other than some stories about tunnels from which people had come. at the time our story takes place, something happens though. the economy of the city of science is based on mining. they needed the iron for the machines and stuff during the industrial era and in the post industrial times the have been looking for copper for the computer manufacturing. they mine in the mountain. they dont care if it is a magical mountain or not. they have maked it look pretty scary with all the scars from the mining on her body. the way the city is structured has the poor people, the miners living closer to the mountain, with the factories as a second ring-kinda shape to only after have the rich areas be. of course after the rich areas there is a huge landscape of miserable homes with roads and ways to make the workers be able to get to the mountain and work. a little part of the mountain has been kept as a national park with trees and stuff. with all this being said, there should be pointed the moment the city is living right now. it is not easy to tell this and not feel a little stupid: they have found the tower of babylon.
the tower of babylon was hidden inside the mountain. the goverment knows about it, but the actual population can see this ancient structure being unveiled more and more everyday. word on the street says that they are going to turn it into a super high tech mall. actually some architecture studios have already proposed some of that stuff. the expectation is present throughout the population. it'd be the only thing people talked about if it wasn't for the fact that the zombie plague is also happening. obviously the two are connected. it is not that hard to make the math. the government has found the tower of babylon and with that they might be able to reach the city of magic and therefore overcome the curse the christian god has placed on them but they dont want to make that benefit all the poor people they have around. they want to keep the magic for themselves and if some of the benefits can be shared well then they'll give some to the poor. the middle class is also a problem, that is why they are chasing them, they dont want the middle class to figure out the potential of the tower of babylon and they keep all those young professionals working on proposals for malls, museums, living soultions and trowing down the religious truth to the fact that they have found the fucking tower of babylon. Estefania's father is way up there in the government making sure everything goes the way it should having his son being looked for after he escaped and all. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, he escaped after estefania escaped.
there is still so much more to tell, let me hang in for a second. do some internet checking.
the character in this story has a double personality, one is a bdsm machine and the other is a calm relaxed buddhist. both are traped in the body of a middle aged man. there is another character, a woman, his lover. she is called the dragonfly and she is a super heroine, or an anti super heroine. she is also a single mother. this dudes occupy the realm of a fantasy land and in fact are comic book characters that may or may not make it to the shelves. in their world there is a problem going on. there are zombies rumbling the streets. these zombies are in fact poor people. they are scary for the middle class people and are totally controlled by the high class people. the basic problem for the characters is that the high class people want to get rid of the middle class people and turn them to zombies too. so this man with a double personality and his lover are trying to find a way through it. of course their main concern is the kid and in the end of the story the kid is the only one that makes it through the annhilation of the middle class people of this fantasy world.
their city is called the city of science, and it is a city divided by a huge magical mountain. it is said that the mountain was put there by the christian god to stop the citizens of the city of science to obtain the absolute power. the legend says that the mountain was placed there to divide the city of science from its counter part, the city of magic. it turned out that the city of magic is actually the city of religion, and that religion negates science. in the city of religion they know that that one god that placed the mountain is only one of the gods that populate the earth, so they laugh when they see the people of the city of science believing only in one god and forever stopping themselves to reach heaven. the city of religion occupies the same place that the city of science occupies, and who the citizens of science see as zombies are in fact the priviledged citizens of the city of religion. the religion of the city of such is a polytheist religion, or also, one could say that the city of religion is the city of millions of religions. every citizen in the city of religion is allowed to believe in as many gods as he or she wants.
our characters are citizens of the city of science, therefore they cannot realize that the city of religion is right there before them. so, they cant realize either that the annihilation of the middle class is not such a bad thing because once they die they will become part of the city of religion and live forever in heaven. what sets them aside though of the normal citizens of the science is that they do have certain connection with religion or what citizens of science know as magic. what happens is that the dragonfly's mother was an angel that came from the city of religion and had a family with a man of the city of science, which is dragonfly's father and also the mayor of the city of science.
the mayor is the villain of the story. this man actually imprisoned his wife and used his son to obtain power in the city of science. his son is a shape shifter and the fucker was using his son's dna to make soldiers out of the zombies by injecting them with a dna modifier that turned them from low class people to carnivorous soldiers. he imprisoned his wife because obviously she was against this kind of action being done to his son and to the people. they also had another child, the dragonfly which, as one could predict can fly. the dragonfly's daughter mortimer, can run through walls and that is how he gets his ass out of the city of science in the end of the story.
the reason why dragonfly's lover M has a double personality is also linked to magic. he used to be two separate individuals that fell in love with the dragonfly. by the way, her real name is estefania. this two man where a) an documentalist anthropologist form flacso and b) a musician. the musician is the actual father of mortimer and that is why the kid has such heavy metal name. alex, the musician was a heavy metal turned noise conceptual artist that made lots of money in the middle of the nineties when he found his marked, basically, so rich guys and lads from brooklyn. the other dude manuel, worked his way to grad school only to realize that grad school sucks because it makes life pretty predictable after you get your phd. this two guys met estefania in different moments of their lives.
alex met her when they were teenagers, she got pregnant really young. they were both punk rock fans going through some ruff times cause both had run away from home. estefania run away when she found out her father was into shady businesses and alex never explained estefania why she left his home. truth is, he left home because his mom, which widowed at an early age didnt really care about her kids. she was a thirties kind of a woman, bohemian and hooked in the drug of opium. they were really well off but by the time he run away from home there was little left of his fathers money.
manuel met estefania when he came back to ecuador after completing his graduate study. he was fascinated with this ex punk rocker single mother that reminded him of tank girl. the dude was actually a comic book junkie when he was a kid. well, she wasnt that keen on him and rejected the man. curiosly he met her again in a stipclub. the person he met at the stripclub though wasnt really her. let me explain.
remember i told you about estefania having a brother who was exploited by his father to make dna modified soldiers out of zombies. well, this kid was really fucked up in the head. being abused by his father since he was a kid, a shape shifter as he was, having no real identity, this kid, who could see that his father had a daughter that he did take care of developed an addiction towards his sister. of course estefania didnt know about him, he spent the days in the basement in a little cell his father had made for him, next to his mother's. there were a few times in which he had been able to sneek in the house and look at what was going on. the maid knew he was there, she'd sometimes be nice to him. well, so he wanted to be this girl that was getting all the atention. he's dad was totally sick though, he'd make him shape shift into his sister and fucked him as well as famous actresses, models, neighbors. sick.
when manuel saw estefania in the stripclub he felt lucky. he paid her for a lap dance and after that pushed for having some personal time with her. he didn't know it was estefania's brother. and when estefania's brother figured that this man actually knew where his sister was and how she behaved and all that, he played along the idea of really being estefania. but that couldnt last for long. the poor kid was actually pinpointed by the police, controlled by his dad and was taken prisoner againg. manuel thought it was estefania who they were imprisoning, and was surprised when he met her again by luck in the city some months after.
now, there is something you need to know about the city of science. the mountain that is in the middle of it has constantly been inspected to try to figure if the legend of god placing it there just to limit the citizens is true or not. whoever did that along the years didnt get any real results other than some stories about tunnels from which people had come. at the time our story takes place, something happens though. the economy of the city of science is based on mining. they needed the iron for the machines and stuff during the industrial era and in the post industrial times the have been looking for copper for the computer manufacturing. they mine in the mountain. they dont care if it is a magical mountain or not. they have maked it look pretty scary with all the scars from the mining on her body. the way the city is structured has the poor people, the miners living closer to the mountain, with the factories as a second ring-kinda shape to only after have the rich areas be. of course after the rich areas there is a huge landscape of miserable homes with roads and ways to make the workers be able to get to the mountain and work. a little part of the mountain has been kept as a national park with trees and stuff. with all this being said, there should be pointed the moment the city is living right now. it is not easy to tell this and not feel a little stupid: they have found the tower of babylon.
the tower of babylon was hidden inside the mountain. the goverment knows about it, but the actual population can see this ancient structure being unveiled more and more everyday. word on the street says that they are going to turn it into a super high tech mall. actually some architecture studios have already proposed some of that stuff. the expectation is present throughout the population. it'd be the only thing people talked about if it wasn't for the fact that the zombie plague is also happening. obviously the two are connected. it is not that hard to make the math. the government has found the tower of babylon and with that they might be able to reach the city of magic and therefore overcome the curse the christian god has placed on them but they dont want to make that benefit all the poor people they have around. they want to keep the magic for themselves and if some of the benefits can be shared well then they'll give some to the poor. the middle class is also a problem, that is why they are chasing them, they dont want the middle class to figure out the potential of the tower of babylon and they keep all those young professionals working on proposals for malls, museums, living soultions and trowing down the religious truth to the fact that they have found the fucking tower of babylon. Estefania's father is way up there in the government making sure everything goes the way it should having his son being looked for after he escaped and all. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, he escaped after estefania escaped.
there is still so much more to tell, let me hang in for a second. do some internet checking.
Melody making
World-making, through the words of Goodman, is a practice that always relates to how we live our framed reality ("a matter of habit"), and so aspects of it, and try to make our own way constructing different paths in it. And the very paths we build this way, are themselves worlds, coherent with the structure we used to make them emerge (De-Composition, Dis-Ordering, De-letion, De-Formation, or whatever else). And usually, our approach to world-making is seldom an exclusive one, and we find ourselves involved in many layers of world-creations at the same time.
Schizos?
The chances that world-making is a schizophrenic attitude are great. But this is how we (quoting part of Alexis's post) inhabit the world. And the aim is, as viewers as well as makers (and both inhabitants), to re-interpret habit (reality), and broaden our knowledge/identity, physically or mentally using some of its aspects.
And generally avoid atrophy. (because the habit of despair is worse than despair itself)
I think creation, as makers, has to do with a cosmogony, in which all the samples obtained through "w-making", resonate with each other in melody. Which is to say, when we hold those fragmented worlds and find our own position to view/enjoy them, in a glance.
Thus, recognition is the most rewarding aspect in cosmogony. So, if the practice of creating worlds through abstraction, sampling reality, may be a long trip, recognition and revelation are just a glance that completes and shapes identity (both of the work, the maker, and viewer).
Finally, I here echo Alexis's questions (what are the structures that allow us to resonate, through our creation, with the viewers?), and I would say that recognition (man-to-man, man-to-idea, idea-to-idea), is probably what holds that maker-viewer relationship together.
(Doesn't the same gratification comes out when, in a new song, we hear a sample of an older song or soundtrack, or we distinguish a specific sound, even though perfectly inscribed in a brand-new, exciting, awesome melody?)
Speaking of melody...
Schizos?
The chances that world-making is a schizophrenic attitude are great. But this is how we (quoting part of Alexis's post) inhabit the world. And the aim is, as viewers as well as makers (and both inhabitants), to re-interpret habit (reality), and broaden our knowledge/identity, physically or mentally using some of its aspects.
And generally avoid atrophy. (because the habit of despair is worse than despair itself)
I think creation, as makers, has to do with a cosmogony, in which all the samples obtained through "w-making", resonate with each other in melody. Which is to say, when we hold those fragmented worlds and find our own position to view/enjoy them, in a glance.
Thus, recognition is the most rewarding aspect in cosmogony. So, if the practice of creating worlds through abstraction, sampling reality, may be a long trip, recognition and revelation are just a glance that completes and shapes identity (both of the work, the maker, and viewer).
Finally, I here echo Alexis's questions (what are the structures that allow us to resonate, through our creation, with the viewers?), and I would say that recognition (man-to-man, man-to-idea, idea-to-idea), is probably what holds that maker-viewer relationship together.
(Doesn't the same gratification comes out when, in a new song, we hear a sample of an older song or soundtrack, or we distinguish a specific sound, even though perfectly inscribed in a brand-new, exciting, awesome melody?)
Speaking of melody...
class="MsoNormal">Being of poets today’s entry nonetheless than Walt Whitman who claimed:
Starting from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands—lover of populous pavements;
Dweller in Mannahatta, my city—or on southern savannas;
Or a soldier camp’d, or carrying my knapsack and gun—or a miner in California;
Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring;
Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
[…]
Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.
I don’t think this was mere philanthropic spirit but rather the expression of a contemporary artist playing with words at that time and creating complex structures out of them in order to define their identity and their crisis. Confounding or diffusing personal limits as a prelude of post-modern schizophrenia is only a natural and previous stage. And although poetry can re-define a word by means of its metaphors and analogies, a word will always carry in it its root and will therefore have this meaning all along.
The charm of poetry is allowing us to see the words, or to be kinesthetic (synestesic?) about them even by creating vocal contrasts or antithesis. These expressions contribute more to the understanding of the world and us than historical or political recounts.
Even if words are words, they must enter the perception system by the physiological apparatus of the ear. Even if images are images they must enter the brain through the eyes. These all results in re-realizing the fact of the body as the interface through which we receive all this metaphors. Even our dreams happen through the body and could not happen anywhere else. That is why I disagree with Goodman when he says that these multiple worlds differ in response to theoretical rather than practical needs. Practical needs are those of the physical world, of the body. And since our interface with life IS the body all of our possible worlds differ in response to practical needs.
Truth is not important but no one can elude it. The truth of the body allows for multiple alter egos to live within us or, in other words, to allow us to access various kinds of “symbolic capital”.
Fragmentation and eclecticism started showing up in Dance in the 1950’s and 60’s and not as an ideal but as an embodiment: bodies were newly trained in techniques that allowed to use the articulations of the feet and legs in order to fragment the body by giving in to gravity.
AND UGLINESS: Fortunately this new way of thinking has allowed for the arts to show us as we are: infinite (paraphrasing Huxley)
Worlds in "Hiroshima Mon Amour"
In Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), the multiplicity of worlds is demonstrated in the opening sequence. A French woman and a Japanese man lie together in a bed in Japan. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing," he tells her. "I saw everything," she replies. "I saw the hospital--I'm sure of it. The hospital in Hiroshima exists. How could I not have seen it?" "You didn't see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima," he insists. The camera seems to justify the woman's belief in having seen Hiroshima by floating through the hospital and visiting a museum for the atomic bomb, showing for us the viewer what she claims to have seen. But he maintains that she knows nothing of Hiroshima.
Thus, Resnais portrays a complex version of the multiplicity of worlds. This is related to Goodman's idea in "Words, Works, Worlds," that, "We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described," (pg. 3). Only here it is with both words and symbols that worlds are described. There are the woman's words and the photographic depiction of those words, but are these proof that the woman shares with the Japanese man an experience of the same world: his world? The fact that she is absent from all of the shots in this opening scene calls this into question, almost as if a third world of the camera is created apart from the other two. Whether or not she did in fact perceive the hospital with her own eyes does not draw her into his world as a Japanese native, where the experience of Hiroshima is something different from a non-native. As Goodman says, "Knowing cannot be exclusively or even primarily a matter of determining what is true," (pg. 21). She may relate to this world and Resnais' camera may relate to it, but these are worlds apart, separate yet intersecting.
We inhabit so many
Worlds, worlds, worlds.
This text presents a major idea that most of us could spend hours contemplating. What strikes me is that texts such as this one only provoke more questions, rather than leading to practical answers and I am certainly curious...
Functioning in a "World" inhabited by many and "worlds" inhabited by a singular, subjective, self. This term also seems to function as a point of view or perspective or even identity. How one navigates one's nationality, ethnic identity and other socio/political/cultural markers as well as their own temporal world which seems to change as well chronologically move through time.
What is interesting is how we as media makers, artists, performers etc. construct or perform worlds for an audience. What formal considerations or devices or methodologies do we each use to encourage viewer identification, how is it that we create resonance? How is it that we vivify the life experiences of ourselves and others? Questions...
A world for consideration:
"Dream-work," translation, codes, anti-texts
Freud conceptualizes his "dream-work" as a process by which the "latent content" of a dream (i.e., its symbolic and/or metaphoric "meaning") is converted to the "manifest content" (i.e., the symbols and images which compose a dream and convey this meaning) that we, the dreamer, experience. This is, essentially, an act of translation - usually not a direct one, and one in which "latent" elements are often combined, confused, taken out of context or rendered into their own opposites.
Having recently read DeCerteau's "Walking in the City," I could see close connections between Freud's "dream-work" and DeCerteau's conception of walking in an urban environment as a kind of "speaking." DeCerteau writes, "[The] verbal relics of which story is composed [words]... are juxtaposed in a collage where their relations are not thought... articulated by lacunae... they produce anti-texts [within the text itself]." In DeCerteau's conception, walking/speaking is also an act of translation - one which necessarily seems to contest, or at least challenge, societal norms. With this in mind, we could place DeCerteau's conceptions as forms of Freud's "dream-work" - a rendering of the surrounding landscape into a different code which breaks down established structures. At the very least, these processes seem to be connected in that they function on the level of the unconscious.
Both Freud and DeCerteau do have a certain level of cautiousness about this "translation" as an act of personal freedom and agency, however - there are only a limited number of "codes" with which we can effectively "translate" that which is around us. These translations partake of the same logic - and the same problems - as the Situationist dérive. As Debord notes in Theory of the Dérive:
The psychoanalytic perspective, of course, reaches back to myth (Oedipus) for the foundation of these "conservative" operations of chance - the essentially normative codes with which we "translate" our "dream-work." From a filmmaking perspective, we can take the same approach to film genre - by looking at how generic codes, even on an "unconscious" and "spontaneous" level, shape our perceptions of moving image work. I would venture to say that generic codes can play a large role in our ability to perceive moving images, the basic reception of a message (i.e. "What makes a good film?"). Thinking in this manner can render genre into an effective tool for the film or video artist with a mind toward experimentation (manipulating points of genre and/or character identification, etc.).
Having recently read DeCerteau's "Walking in the City," I could see close connections between Freud's "dream-work" and DeCerteau's conception of walking in an urban environment as a kind of "speaking." DeCerteau writes, "[The] verbal relics of which story is composed [words]... are juxtaposed in a collage where their relations are not thought... articulated by lacunae... they produce anti-texts [within the text itself]." In DeCerteau's conception, walking/speaking is also an act of translation - one which necessarily seems to contest, or at least challenge, societal norms. With this in mind, we could place DeCerteau's conceptions as forms of Freud's "dream-work" - a rendering of the surrounding landscape into a different code which breaks down established structures. At the very least, these processes seem to be connected in that they function on the level of the unconscious.
Both Freud and DeCerteau do have a certain level of cautiousness about this "translation" as an act of personal freedom and agency, however - there are only a limited number of "codes" with which we can effectively "translate" that which is around us. These translations partake of the same logic - and the same problems - as the Situationist dérive. As Debord notes in Theory of the Dérive:
If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes... An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four Surrealists... From that perspective, [tadpoles] could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the Surrealists, since they have the advantage of being "as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality," and are thus "truly independent from one another."
The psychoanalytic perspective, of course, reaches back to myth (Oedipus) for the foundation of these "conservative" operations of chance - the essentially normative codes with which we "translate" our "dream-work." From a filmmaking perspective, we can take the same approach to film genre - by looking at how generic codes, even on an "unconscious" and "spontaneous" level, shape our perceptions of moving image work. I would venture to say that generic codes can play a large role in our ability to perceive moving images, the basic reception of a message (i.e. "What makes a good film?"). Thinking in this manner can render genre into an effective tool for the film or video artist with a mind toward experimentation (manipulating points of genre and/or character identification, etc.).
Monday, September 21, 2009
Timelines of Nearness/Distance/Desire
Hi, I'd like to share a Google Maps link with you.
Link: <http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=109899784700202007919.000473a0025046044708c&t=h&z=12 >
Link: <http://maps.google.com/maps/
The Eiffel and The Itinerant
I don’t remember seeing the Eiffel Tower.
I have a picture of my mother holding me in her arms, against the Tower.
Is it the Eiffel Tower or some thing else that in my mind is etched as the Eiffel?
I have no means of finding that out.
As I transit in Paris, I think of its presence.
And as my plane takes off, the desire to see it from above makes me do stupid things.
On my flight from Paris to Philadelphia, a co-passenger is upset about not being able to spot The Eiffel. He complains and in the same moment takes a picture of himself, thrusting the camera into my face.
The lure of this view from above is empowering in the same moment it deceives.
The totalizing view of the spectacular eventually turns out to be a myth.
The distance between the viewer and the object desired- to- be- seen makes it impossible for these positions to interchange. And as technology permeates into our most intimate spaces and emotions, I wonder if these positions of the viewer and the viewed could be collapsed; or interchanged. The scope of haptic digital arts/technology that would locate ‘touch’ as a means of pulling the viewer into the narrative is inviting but what if one is dealing with something more than distance as represented as by points of origins/ends. The idea of distance as embodied by class and gender; an idea one confronts repeatedly working in the context of erstwhile ‘Third World’ economies.
In ‘Machina’ Perloff puts forth a fascinating history of how the Eiffel came to be ‘seen’. While Joris Karl Huysmans would call it a ‘folly of an iron monger’ for Barthes this upward thrust meant a celebration of a kind of materiality, a physicality that at its best could just about appropriate an idea of the physical.
Never reach anything beyond that. Never signifying anything more.
It was ‘popular’ in that sense.
For Huysmans the Eiffel represented a ‘vulgarisation’ of the aesthetic form.
For Barthes, this very absence was to be celebrated. He notes, “It was not in the spirit of a period commonly dedicated to rationality and to the empiricism of the great bourgeois enterprise to endure the notion of useless object, unless it was declaratively an object of the Arts”.
It is interesting to note that in July 1913 the Eiffel sent the first global electronic signal that seemed to promise what the poets and painters were to call ‘simultaneity’.
An idea of surveillance was built into the idea of the tower: As Perloff notes, trench warfare and bombing made the idea of watching the enemy within a radius of 45 degrees, obsolete.
In that moment of its obsoleteness, the Tower came to be celebrated for its emptiness. Its attempts to speak no more than what it stood as: an overarching iron structure, a feat of architectural accomplishment signifying at best a past and a function that had ceased to exist.
For Barthes, the Tower shoots up like an act of rupture. A symbol of subversion not only because of its non-aesthetic form and an aggressive straddling together of material. But because it was a gesture by which the Past could be said NO to.
“Take a pencil and let your hands wander…It shall be the Tower”, he says.
The conjunction between the materiality of the Tower as it existed once it ceased to justified by a ‘rationale’ and Language as a way of traveling but going nowhere marks the moment where a linear relationship between he signifier and the signified cease to exist. The Text suggests that a neat line cannot be drawn between the expository and poetic modes of discourse.
Language, in the spirit of the post- industrialist /postmodernist landscape, becomes a site of rupture. It follows a dreamlike logic of the subconscious where the signifier and signified are no longer monogamous.
This brings me again to the Plane journey.
Every time it begins to taxi, I am reminded of my inability to dissociate myself from its hurtling speed. The moment is there in front of me, on my in-flight entertainment screen that after showing me the speed at which I am hurtling over computer generated map imagery, leaving behind the past and present all mixed up,
slips into a popular Bollywood movie.
Or let me put it this was-I choose to slip at the push of that button there.
And in that moment I often want to think of the pleasures of being the itinerant seller of home remedies I interviewed sometime back in a ‘ghetto’ in New Delhi.
(Within parenthesis, let me acknowledge that I have been uncomfortable with the word ‘Ghetto’ ever since I learnt what it meant.
It embodies a notion of the inside of the ‘ghetto’ as against the outside of the larger City. My experiences of growing/living in one in New Delhi, India, have been quite the opposite.)
So I was talking of the pure pleasure of walking through the streets and not follow an imposed order.
Much like my current ramblings on the google maps where I think that one of the ways of subverting/redefining order (in this case Google) could be through re-inventing the idea of journey. Becoming like Language as a means of traveling and going nowhere.
To arrive at a personalized sense of order/disorder through taking on the labyrinth of the street. The pleasure of a zero-perspective as against the ‘ wave of verticals’, to use De Certeau’s term. The idea that the Concept –City ruptures with urban spatial practices.
So who is the most ordinary of spatial practitioners? What does spatial practice in its most ordinary sense mean in times where the boundaries between amateur and professional practice are fast disappearing?
In an era where more than a million cameras would flash in any given moment...what would an image mean?
Am thinking with hope of going nowhere.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Constructions of place
The posts to the blogs on the week of Sept 14, a week my mother was born in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, a week which ends with the end of summer and the beginnings of something else, a week marked by ongoing kinds of international struggles: global warming controls, militarism and terrorism, wildlife culls, drought (Mexico, Kenya). A week in which I anticipated responses on the local: the here and now, the alleys, streets, homes, markets, encounters, relationships, altered realities, pathways, conflicts, dangers, loves, senses, and collages of a Philadelphia landscape.... I find instead, curiously and with many questions, an arts agenda on the part of my fellow bloggers that concerns worlds far away.. in some cases, worlds never visited. Whereas, in a prior generation, a mantra called for local acts and action, in the subset of another, the body is extended over global (and, in so many ways, imagined) terrains and their narratives. There is much to be considered about the poetic, rhetorical, political, and aesthetic characteristics of this sense of extended imagination, and about the senses of longing, absence, banality, and sentiment that run through the works. Some works employ textual overlays and others point to subtexts, some of which many be obscure. Some connect to videos posted by anonymous sources, to uncredited found footage, to strange sounds. In such works, the materials are removed from spatial specificity. But to what ends? And works point to power and hidden voices. What is revealed about the power dynamics of the media subjects and their makers?
As media artists engaged in practices that are powerful and impose positions or break down prejudices which of these works opens the world and which close it down? What choices are shaping your interpretation?
Then two the question of media choice and artistic decisions. What transforms the ordinary and mundane into a form that is expressive and transforming?
Here is my map. Also the link is as follows:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=109449909800225471375.000473776f9ba7853eb19&z=11
I have been having difficulties with YouTube. I uploaded all of my video content today and some of the clips are missing the video (the audio, surprisingly, is there on all the clips). All I get is a black screen. I'm hoping this is just YouTube taking time to process my videos and that they will be there in the morning. --Joe Kraemer
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=109449909800225471375.000473776f9ba7853eb19&z=11
I have been having difficulties with YouTube. I uploaded all of my video content today and some of the clips are missing the video (the audio, surprisingly, is there on all the clips). All I get is a black screen. I'm hoping this is just YouTube taking time to process my videos and that they will be there in the morning. --Joe Kraemer
PERSONAL SPACETIME
This is a video clip to be used in (and an early test for) PERSONAL SPACETIME, an interactive DVD/web video project exploring the idea of virtual travel. I'm interested in the ways that media technologies (especially online media) might allow us the feeling of having "traveled" to a place that we have never physically visited. This same experience also occurs in dreams, perhaps leading to a sense of déjà vu. Composed from found YouTube video clips, this video (to be incorporated into the larger project) is a rendering of one place that I have "traveled" in my own dreams.
PERSONAL SPACETIME from MT Vassallo on Vimeo.
Technical difficulties resolved
My video is up on Vimeo. Compression changed the quality of the movement, unfortunately.
I enjoyed Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City," and this piece is a response to it. Particularly I was interested in the subversion and jerry-rigging of systems that people engage as they try to get what they need to live and move within institutional concepts and spaces. The suggestion is that the seen and unseen effects that our corporeal and subtle-body movements and energies leave upon a space can map the use of spaces and time, whether through presence or absence of what has passed by. This started me thinking about light and how its movement might be used to map the movements of an unseen body. I'm also interested in vernacular expressions -- such as social dance and music-video conventions -- and am wanting to exploit the characteristics of these vernaculars much better than I have done here.
Plus, Michel de Certeau is somehow funny, and glowsticks are funny, and this song is called "Amziguous."
I enjoyed Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City," and this piece is a response to it. Particularly I was interested in the subversion and jerry-rigging of systems that people engage as they try to get what they need to live and move within institutional concepts and spaces. The suggestion is that the seen and unseen effects that our corporeal and subtle-body movements and energies leave upon a space can map the use of spaces and time, whether through presence or absence of what has passed by. This started me thinking about light and how its movement might be used to map the movements of an unseen body. I'm also interested in vernacular expressions -- such as social dance and music-video conventions -- and am wanting to exploit the characteristics of these vernaculars much better than I have done here.
Plus, Michel de Certeau is somehow funny, and glowsticks are funny, and this song is called "Amziguous."
Il Salotto di Milano (The Living Room of Milano)
jerking off: a map of deceitful sex
"I am catholically ready to oppose lust but not to oppose sadness"
the map
This is a map that I plan to keep developing as I travel around the world. The shapes drawn on it will be modified and developed until it gets to resemble a barroque painting. As of now only the areas in this list are enriched with video art:
-europe's arm (black tears)
-north america's penis (lonely subway vision)
-north america's butt cheek (the blue building)
-china's hair (a girl from china)
-south america's chest (magic pond on ceiling)
-central america and the caribbean's left arm (weird shaped islands I want to be at)
-europe's torso (china today) *song
TG
09/15/09
the map
This is a map that I plan to keep developing as I travel around the world. The shapes drawn on it will be modified and developed until it gets to resemble a barroque painting. As of now only the areas in this list are enriched with video art:
-europe's arm (black tears)
-north america's penis (lonely subway vision)
-north america's butt cheek (the blue building)
-china's hair (a girl from china)
-south america's chest (magic pond on ceiling)
-central america and the caribbean's left arm (weird shaped islands I want to be at)
-europe's torso (china today) *song
TG
09/15/09
My map!
Here is my map, from 2007 my Prague trip :)
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=116020786429586918982.000473a45429b1994acd0&ll=50.083582,14.430542&spn=0.040866,0.077162&z=14
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=116020786429586918982.000473a45429b1994acd0&ll=50.083582,14.430542&spn=0.040866,0.077162&z=14
Monday, September 14, 2009
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
In an age where we have come to easily understand time in a format that is anything but linear, one is often forced to draw parallels between simultaneous happenings across the globe. This easy sense of the quick ebb and flow of information is natural to a contemporary ten year old on the internet. Last fall on a flight to Chicago I heard a young college student behind me exclaim, “Oh shit! I forgot the GPS!” His companion, equally exasperated responded, “Oh no! How are we going to know where to go?” They kept repeating this over and over to one another until one finally realized, “Oh. I can just google-text for the phone number, call the place and get directions.” The concept of stopping at an airport store and consulting a map was entirely inconceivable to these early twenty-somethings. Not only had information itself fractured and changed, but the way we go about getting it has as well.
As I perused the readings, I found myself looking for a common link between them. What I found was that they all deal with human perception and the fragmentation of spaces—whether they are real three-dimensional spaces, depicted spaces or ideological spaces. The movement away from things that are whole and solid to realms that oscillate between here and there is reflected as easily in the loss of space between starting point and destination caused by railroad tracks as it is in Postmodern Art where there is a rejection of the single truth, or the concept of the lone artist genius in a vacuum. The readings I found to be most interesting (on a pure level of pleasure from reading) were the Schivelbusch readings, because they illustrated in an entertaining and informative way the psychological shifts that human beings underwent when confronted with an invention of monstrous consequences.
FROM AMBARIEN ALQADAR: Anti-Narratives and Collag
Posted on Behalf of AMBARIEN ALQADAR who does not yet have access to the blog...
Anti-Narratives and Collage
I want to begin my response by going back to what I was doing a couple of days back. Santiago, Oscar and I were filming for the Bolex exercise at the Philly Zoo.
I had just arrived from India a week back.
The idea in my head while I was at the Zoo was ‘What makes one more of a Tourist-leaving a familiar place or going to a new place’?
Before I left New Delhi, I found myself obsessively making pictures of home, familiar people and streets I knew and loved. And here in Philly I was doing the same. The Zoo was a perfect place for this.
These pictures (in India) were being taken in all kinds of ways-on grainy mobile phone cameras, professional cameras, as video and stills, audio with a blank screen, collected objects, postcards, kitsch and street art work, visits to rural artists park, objects sold in specific locations/bazaars. An overabundance of these objects and images provided an almost physical interface to some of the ideas that I found evocative in the readings.
David Harvey in ‘The Condition of Post Modernity’ 39-65 proposes that a ‘change in the structure of feeling’ in the era of advanced capitalism becomes the organizing principle for a series of stylistic reorientations to emerge in the fields of Architecture, Planning, Literature and Philosophy. Central to this change is a recognition of human consciousness as decentered and fragmented. Architects are to learn more from popular street forms than from an engagement with broad theoretical ideas. The Novel marks a shift from ‘epistemology’ to ‘ontology’; a shift that can be understood as a move away from concerns/pursuit of ‘Knowledge’ to the ‘Being’. Planning stresses urban design as a collage of highly differentiated spaces and forms and there emerges an idea of the ‘Collage City’.
Central to understanding this shift are the works of Foucault and Lyotard. Infact Lyotard describes Post Modernism as ‘an incredulity towards mata-naratives’; broad theories that explain the existence of phenomenon and events. The ‘local’ emerges as a unique determinant. In practice, this urges a practitioner to think around issues of ‘positionality’ and articulation of multiple perspectives. Foucault’s proposal to understand power as not only located in the State Apparatus but as permeating through the everyday as power capillaries, reaffirms the importance of the local. Foucault’s concept of the ‘Heterotopia’ is reflected in Cinema- in films like Citizen Cane’ and ‘The Blue Velvet’ where the narrative strategies give space to heterogeneity, fragmentation and suspension of the worlds they dwell in. By ‘Heterotopia’ Harvey proposes that Foucault means the ‘co-existence of an impossible space’; ‘a large number of fragmentary possible worlds or incommensurable spaces that are juxtaposed over each other’. The emergence of Collage as a narrative by itself finds a strong proponent in Derrida who proposes that ‘ the Collage is the primary form of postmodernist discourse’.
The idea of understanding the ‘Collage’ as a lyrical juxtaposition of often contradictory materials and forms is echoed in Perloff’s ‘Invention of The Collage’. He goes on to explore how a desire to work with different, contradictory forms, materials and representational techniques leads to a re-definition of ‘a picture as a window to reality’ in the field of painting.
This brings me to the point I started with- given that with an overabundance of sense, impulses, memories, objects, smells, forms, formats, uploads and downloads, what are the new narrative strategies one could think of? As a practitioner, how much relevance does the idea of ‘Collage’ has given that we work across media platforms across time zones combining it all into one. What could be the organizing principle if in the end one does want to say something despite the chaos and breakdown; infact if one wants to make it a part of what one is to say. With a democratization of media technology as far as even into the Third World, what are the ways in which one is to distinguish professional practice from an amateur one. Or is there even the need to do so. What if one arrives at a form where the artist/producer and audience/consumer binary is dissolved and reaffirmed in the same moment….unendingly.
Am thinking. -- AMBARIEN ALQADAR
Shrinking of Space / Jet Lag
I've been taking a moment or rather several, to reconsider the “shrinking of space” a concept presented within the third chapter of Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey. Even without my reconsiderations, the idea itself is incredibly engaging; that the advent and subsequent proliferation of locomotive as well as other forms of mechanized high speed travel, has transformed and continues to alter our spatial perceptions of time and space, namely individuals living within societies heavily dependent on such technologies. As Schivelbusch further explores this notion within the text, his arguments focus primarily on the temporal/spatial disorientation of travel as experienced through the socio/cultural relationships between individuals and geographic locations. Physical people and physical places, there is much attention paid to the external geography. Conversely, my curiosity and reconsiderations lie within this concept, the “shrinking of space” as imagined through the perspective of internal geography. As we travel through physical/external/geographic space, is there a possibility that our internal/emotional/psychic selves are undergoing a similar transformation, a reorientation of time and space. What is it to travel between geographic and emotional plot points simultaneously? If this is the case, how do we accommodate this transformation? Does the experience of traveling a great distance over a shorter time- period affect our processes of acceptance and resolution? At this point, there are more questions than definitive answers.
However, in these ever expanding moments I am reminded of a very physical (as well as potentially psychological) consequence or reaction to the experience known as the “shrinkage of space”, Jet Lag (desynchronosis). How ironic that our bodies, our physical selves would rebel and defy our quest for locomotive expediency, forcing us to embody and literally carry the extra time gained through rapid long-distance travel. I’d now like to offer the multimedia performance piece Jet lag by Diller Scofidio (1998) as example of a piece of multimedia/multichannel/conceptual/performance art which deals with this specific subject as well as also our experiences of “space time consciousness”. <3
We can thank collage for a bunch of other art that we like even if we don't like collage
Perloff’s essay defines collage as a perceptual art as much as a visual art, and in this concept we find the ground-breaking shift in the author-viewer relationship that occurred with the development of such forms in the early 20th century. With these forms, the viewer seems to be given more responsibility for the act of viewing, and collage seems to be asking the viewer to see double: It is itself and it is also something else. The “something else” may be representational (as in stamps arranged in the shape of a vase) or it may be relational (as new formal “dialogues” between objects placed next to each other), and the viewer is required to shift focus and perception in a way that reminds me of a perceptual illusion (see image, left). The viewer must train himself to perceive an image through multiple readings, no two of which can stay in focus at the same time because of their substantial difference. Their duality can’t be reconciled, and I think this results in a frustration as well as a pleasure – a sort of tension of the image that is itself the art of collage. The examples of collage that Perloff considers fine art use materials in a skill-less way to create a very skillful reading or thought – the art is in the use or juxtaposition of materials and not in the craft. Thus, the rendering is largely unskillful but the concept is advanced thought … so the thought is the art, and so forth, and then … hello, conceptual art!
Efficiency and communication
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In reference to the railroad travels it is generally thought that the time we gain by getting faster from a place to another will give us some more extra time to occupy differently. This notion of “buying time” or “buying minutes” is what really has turned time into a commodity and it is precisely why it is so strange that in a positivistic age, like that during which these texts were written, they can say that a quantitative notion of time will devitalize it.
The sense that the rapidly connecting points along a railway could lose a sense of “local identity” oversees the fact that through these new connections, identity starts to be redefined as a patchwork or a quilt rather than as a mono-textural, mono-aural, mono-tonal fabric.
The collage/montage patchwork/quilt is a permeable membrane that allows for the observation of both sides of it through different light, or even to observe it merely as a souvenir designed for a tourist rather than a true traveler. You just have to observe the movement of a passenger’s eyes when riding a train and trying to catch to something in the landscape, to realize that these movements are nothing else than the Rapid Eye Movements one is submitted to when in deep sleep and dreaming. To go further, this type of movement is also present in the passenger to-be standing on a platform and observing their incoming train. Both sides of the window begin to dream with eyes open!
Thus, the origin of “stress” as a pathological concept rather than just a fatigue of materials. But then again our references are mostly western-centered(I will appeal to our Indian peer to confirm the fact that all these descriptions do not apply to their railway system, and traveling in India as I did in every type of coach –even “upper” class- is very far away from boring). We must listen to other voices describing travel to understand others’ point of view (for example see the rendering of traveling camera movements in early Japanese animation to realize how the reality gets divided into three carefully choreographed planes rather than the European loss of depth).
Political deliriums of “equality” or “democracy” in a train system, or considerations of why the lower classes don’t read during the voyage frankly deserve no attention. Once again the “embarrassment” felt by the European has to do mostly with their way of life than with the railway system. You can only be embarrassed in a time like the first industrial revolution if you are conscious that you are becoming an individual and as such are pursuing your own individuality. This can only happen if you no longer live in a community (communitas) but in a society that is in expansion. In turn this definition of the individual is in direct relationship with the individual’s “private property” and “private life”. But then again “private life” and “personal space” have different interpretations in different parts of the world and in a time such as the one described the merit an artist has is to be able to communicate something really private and make it public.
Probably that is why one observes a mania for listing or cataloguing and is why, in spite of the different media and materials available most art can still be seen in terms of collage and montage. As long as there is interpenetration of meanings and materials, as long as there is dislocation of meanings, shrinking, splicing and scrambling of techniques; as long as this leads to a transformation, the communicative intent of art will be met. Because the “material dictates the form” and when the material is the time or epoch in which we live, this is the only form possible: a visual and spatial solution to communication.
The moving walkway
I wonder if I am going a little off-topic with this, we will see.
The moving walkway
In Panoramic Travel, Schivelbusch exposes some the history and consequences of how train travel affected human perception of the landscape. One of its most interesting passages, [p. 60/61] tells us that, according to Benjamin Gastineau's La Vie en Chemin de Fer, "the motion of the train through the landscape appeared as the motion of the landscape itself. The railroad choreographed the landscape". And again [p. 61] "the steam engine, the powerful stage manager [...] sets in motion nature clad in all its light and dark costumes [...]".
Probably one of the most recurring depiction of the train traveling (and later of the airplane traveling), is this sense of standing still, while feeling the landscape running around us and under our feet. This is true especially in childhood experiences and memories.
Going off Schivelbusch's context just a bit, I find there is no major issue against the idea that the terrain is moving, and not us.
In fact, even if the vehicle we find ourselves on is moving between two given points, our perception and our reconstruction of space in a specific instant could easily be that of a traveling-without-moving experience.
When it comes to perception, it is seldom a matter of historical-logical context and/or perspective in which that perception is inscribed. Instead, as for optical illusions or other visual techniques (like trompe-l'oeil, for instance), or even for the viewing of moving image in film, it is a matter of being hit by a glance. And that glance, I believe, it's something of a completely different nature from its rational contextualization, (occurring later in time). With that said, of course defining that glance is other that the glance itself.
For Example, Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucida), tried to divide our visual (and sensorial, in a general way) experience between the Studium and the Punctum, being the Studium our logically and rationally mediated attention toward an object, and the Punctum being the "glance", the emotionally and instinctually almost-non-mediated perception of that object.
And this is the moment of visual experience I'm here referring to.
La Région Centrale, a 1971 keystone in experimental filmmaking by canadian artist/musician Michael Snow, really gets the point (you can watch a brief excerpt here). It describes a deserted mountain landscape (through time, during a 5-day shooting), by moving the film camera around 360 degrees in all directions. He did so by building a unique mechanical structure that allows the rotation of the camera in every possible direction.
What we see is not a camera moving in the landscape, though. By not seeing the camera structure at all, we perceive the movement OF space, not IN space.
The film is about 3 hours long, and this reiteration of movements, somehow absorbs us and allows us to slowly remember our first instinctive impression of it (the Punctum?).
We're not in the movie at all as charachters, and the landscape is here the main event.
Just like train traveling often becomes, for a short time, an absorbing experience in which our motion is subordinated to the landscape motion itself, in La Région Centrale we are invited to concentrate exclusively on our impressions, too.
And, like the readings on collage and postmodernism told us, our relationship with reality is changing constantly, because reality itself isn't one, and neither they are explainable in a uniform way.
About our train travel, depending on what's the topic of our arguments, it really could be valid both us (vehicle) moving into space, and space moving for us, non-moving beings.
The result of this last a perception is so powerful, though, that even changes the way we perceive or define ourselves in that moment.
As I said, I personally feel transported in a condition of "traveling childhood", as if an indefinite number of traveling possibilities are open in that very moment.
And again, when it comes to perception of motion in space, both in physical or moving images space, maybe the glance it's not an issue of us exploring the space as active watchers, but it is the space that revolves and moves around us, usually for just an extremely small amount of our time.
And if we are not the main characters in this picture[s], the space/landscape is. So, we can probably let ourselves go through different paths of perception and try to enjoy the show.
The moving walkway
In Panoramic Travel, Schivelbusch exposes some the history and consequences of how train travel affected human perception of the landscape. One of its most interesting passages, [p. 60/61] tells us that, according to Benjamin Gastineau's La Vie en Chemin de Fer, "the motion of the train through the landscape appeared as the motion of the landscape itself. The railroad choreographed the landscape". And again [p. 61] "the steam engine, the powerful stage manager [...] sets in motion nature clad in all its light and dark costumes [...]".
Probably one of the most recurring depiction of the train traveling (and later of the airplane traveling), is this sense of standing still, while feeling the landscape running around us and under our feet. This is true especially in childhood experiences and memories.
Going off Schivelbusch's context just a bit, I find there is no major issue against the idea that the terrain is moving, and not us.
In fact, even if the vehicle we find ourselves on is moving between two given points, our perception and our reconstruction of space in a specific instant could easily be that of a traveling-without-moving experience.
When it comes to perception, it is seldom a matter of historical-logical context and/or perspective in which that perception is inscribed. Instead, as for optical illusions or other visual techniques (like trompe-l'oeil, for instance), or even for the viewing of moving image in film, it is a matter of being hit by a glance. And that glance, I believe, it's something of a completely different nature from its rational contextualization, (occurring later in time). With that said, of course defining that glance is other that the glance itself.
For Example, Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucida), tried to divide our visual (and sensorial, in a general way) experience between the Studium and the Punctum, being the Studium our logically and rationally mediated attention toward an object, and the Punctum being the "glance", the emotionally and instinctually almost-non-mediated perception of that object.
And this is the moment of visual experience I'm here referring to.
La Région Centrale, a 1971 keystone in experimental filmmaking by canadian artist/musician Michael Snow, really gets the point (you can watch a brief excerpt here). It describes a deserted mountain landscape (through time, during a 5-day shooting), by moving the film camera around 360 degrees in all directions. He did so by building a unique mechanical structure that allows the rotation of the camera in every possible direction.
What we see is not a camera moving in the landscape, though. By not seeing the camera structure at all, we perceive the movement OF space, not IN space.
The film is about 3 hours long, and this reiteration of movements, somehow absorbs us and allows us to slowly remember our first instinctive impression of it (the Punctum?).
We're not in the movie at all as charachters, and the landscape is here the main event.
Just like train traveling often becomes, for a short time, an absorbing experience in which our motion is subordinated to the landscape motion itself, in La Région Centrale we are invited to concentrate exclusively on our impressions, too.
And, like the readings on collage and postmodernism told us, our relationship with reality is changing constantly, because reality itself isn't one, and neither they are explainable in a uniform way.
About our train travel, depending on what's the topic of our arguments, it really could be valid both us (vehicle) moving into space, and space moving for us, non-moving beings.
The result of this last a perception is so powerful, though, that even changes the way we perceive or define ourselves in that moment.
As I said, I personally feel transported in a condition of "traveling childhood", as if an indefinite number of traveling possibilities are open in that very moment.
And again, when it comes to perception of motion in space, both in physical or moving images space, maybe the glance it's not an issue of us exploring the space as active watchers, but it is the space that revolves and moves around us, usually for just an extremely small amount of our time.
And if we are not the main characters in this picture[s], the space/landscape is. So, we can probably let ourselves go through different paths of perception and try to enjoy the show.
Postmopolitan Mag + the end of capitalist postmodernism
Being advertising the official art of late capitalism, Art has found its location in the academic arena. Which makes the academia a sort of museum of non capitalist art. The process of exploring different social dynamics than capitalism has not yet stopped therefore outside of it there is still the chance for art to produce new meanings that can define postmodernity. The collage can serve different objectives than to sell commodities. This being said while taking collage as a postmodern mechanism of composition. Collage and Montage replace painting and cinema while music finds its way through modernism and postmodernism due to a mysterious quality that will not be discussed here. Hidden inside of the musical market of the last 30 years, poetry arises and can be used to make a list of the "stations" a train of postmodernity travels through in an imaginary route that is proposed below. This is an exercise of freedom:
-Posmodernism within class domination
-Posmodernity as a time period
-Posmodernity and the tower of Babel
-The body
-Poetry
-Language
-Knowledge
-Institutions
-Determinism
-Polytheist
-Materialism
-Otherness
-Feminism
-Peace
-Moral
-Heterotopia (Foucault)
-Character
-The New
-Construction of meaning
-Medium and Message
-Solidarity vs. Competitiveness
-Collage – Derrida – Montage
-Unstable
-Cultural artefacts
-Happening
-Raw
-Author
-“the authors of posmodernity”
-Picasso
-We should not even try to engage in some global project
-Action
-Decision
-Justice
-Relativism
-Psychological
-System
-The bomb and madness after that schizophrenia Lacan
-Pragmatism
-Our society produces schizos
-Motif
-Canon
-television
-late capitalism
-car
-inflation
-diversity
-indifference
-cultural logic of late capitalism
End
PD: there is a particular interest in the chance of "naming" these "stations" as the particular method of this exercise to avoid the modernist production of "un-namable" mass produced copies.
Truly Gomez
09/08/09
-Posmodernism within class domination
-Posmodernity as a time period
-Posmodernity and the tower of Babel
-The body
-Poetry
-Language
-Knowledge
-Institutions
-Determinism
-Polytheist
-Materialism
-Otherness
-Feminism
-Peace
-Moral
-Heterotopia (Foucault)
-Character
-The New
-Construction of meaning
-Medium and Message
-Solidarity vs. Competitiveness
-Collage – Derrida – Montage
-Unstable
-Cultural artefacts
-Happening
-Raw
-Author
-“the authors of posmodernity”
-Picasso
-We should not even try to engage in some global project
-Action
-Decision
-Justice
-Relativism
-Psychological
-System
-The bomb and madness after that schizophrenia Lacan
-Pragmatism
-Our society produces schizos
-Motif
-Canon
-television
-late capitalism
-car
-inflation
-diversity
-indifference
-cultural logic of late capitalism
End
PD: there is a particular interest in the chance of "naming" these "stations" as the particular method of this exercise to avoid the modernist production of "un-namable" mass produced copies.
Truly Gomez
09/08/09
The railway Journey P33-45
The author mentioned the invention of railway annihilated the traditional time and space continuum, which formed by older transport technology. Next he talked about duration(the time spent getting from one place to another on a road) is not an objective mathematical unit, but a subjective space- time. [p.36]
After several decades, people become more and more conscious about this concept nowadays. This comparative time perceptual theory gradually has been developed in some psychology areas. The most notable example is waiting phenomenon. When we are waiting in line for something, the time perception we receive would be expended extremely. William James, the noted philosopher observed: “Boredom results from being attentive to the passage of time itself.” Or easier as we said: “A watched pot never spoils.”
I guess I'll go first...
In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the idea of "panoramic perception," where the viewer experiences the sense of sight through the apparatus of the machine. In this case, it is the traveler riding upon a train moving at a very high velocity. The train window becomes a frame of sorts or a new perspective through which to view the outside world. "As the traveler stepped out of that space [outside], it became a stage setting, or a series of such pictures or scenes created by the continuously changing perspective," (pg. 63-4). The idea being that now the visuals are something to be experienced altogether, in fast motion, rather than individually with each minor detail worth observing, as was the case with travel by foot or stagecoach. "The motion of the train through the landscape appeared as the motion of the landscape itself. The motion of the train shrank space, and thus displayed in immediate succession objects and pieces of scenery that in their original spatiality belonged to separate realms," (pg. 60). This is very much akin to the effect created by motion pictures in that they are composed of individual frames, each belonging to its own spatiality, that become an entirely new entity when traveling through the apparatus of the projector at the rate of twenty-four frames-per-second.
This idea of trains creating a new way to experience vision in a manner parallel to motion pictures was employed by film and video artist Bill Brand in his 1980 public art piece, "Masstransiscope" (http://www.bboptics.com/masstransiscope.html). Painting a series of images, arranged horizontally upon the wall of a New York subway line, of a specific size and distance from the passing trains, Brand was able to use this idea of panoramic perception to create an animated motion picture. To the viewer, a traveler upon the subway, this is experienced through the apparatus of the subway train, framed within the windows looking out on the passing scenery. It is dependent upon the high velocity of the traveler and how his vision is under the influence of his mode of transportation. It is a perception we take for granted today, but was an entirely new way of seeing at the advent of the railroad.
In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the idea of "panoramic perception," where the viewer experiences the sense of sight through the apparatus of the machine. In this case, it is the traveler riding upon a train moving at a very high velocity. The train window becomes a frame of sorts or a new perspective through which to view the outside world. "As the traveler stepped out of that space [outside], it became a stage setting, or a series of such pictures or scenes created by the continuously changing perspective," (pg. 63-4). The idea being that now the visuals are something to be experienced altogether, in fast motion, rather than individually with each minor detail worth observing, as was the case with travel by foot or stagecoach. "The motion of the train through the landscape appeared as the motion of the landscape itself. The motion of the train shrank space, and thus displayed in immediate succession objects and pieces of scenery that in their original spatiality belonged to separate realms," (pg. 60). This is very much akin to the effect created by motion pictures in that they are composed of individual frames, each belonging to its own spatiality, that become an entirely new entity when traveling through the apparatus of the projector at the rate of twenty-four frames-per-second.
This idea of trains creating a new way to experience vision in a manner parallel to motion pictures was employed by film and video artist Bill Brand in his 1980 public art piece, "Masstransiscope" (http://www.bboptics.com/masstransiscope.html). Painting a series of images, arranged horizontally upon the wall of a New York subway line, of a specific size and distance from the passing trains, Brand was able to use this idea of panoramic perception to create an animated motion picture. To the viewer, a traveler upon the subway, this is experienced through the apparatus of the subway train, framed within the windows looking out on the passing scenery. It is dependent upon the high velocity of the traveler and how his vision is under the influence of his mode of transportation. It is a perception we take for granted today, but was an entirely new way of seeing at the advent of the railroad.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Collage and digital media
In her essay "The Invention of Collage," Marjorie Perloff loosely defines collage as the "transfer of materials from one context to another, even as the original context cannot be erased." Discussing Futurist collage at length, she comments that "[the Futurists] reconcieved collage as propaganda art, an art that directly bombards the senses," presenting an "intellectual challenge to the viewer [and raising] the issue of code and message." On the other hand, she characterizes Picasso's collage works as striving to unify diverse sources under a single meaning - essentially, as extended metaphor.
What use do these concepts have for work in time-based arts, for film and digital video? Non-digital formats can most definitely partake of Perloff's idea of collage; the physical nature of analog media (i.e. optical printing, etc.) will always leave a trace of the original source. Digital works, however, unify different types of media - using current technology, almost any audio-visual media can be easily digitized and combined/remixed with any other media. As much as the "edges" of different media formats might be seen within a digital "collage," they are all essentially composed of the same materials (that is, 1s and 0s). Digital artists striving for a "collage" aesthetic must, in a way, actively seek to have the different sources they work with not cohere exactly and seamlessly - essentially, they must strive for imperfection. Does this preserve the original context, as Perloff stipulates? As digital media allow for an infinite number of exact reproductions, the original context may become lost or obscured, or buried within a single, unified aesthetic. In this way, digital "collage" works might be much closer to Picasso's sense of collage - one in which the individual parts give rise to a distinct, individual meaning only on very close inspection.
This is not to say that the Futurist conception of "propaganda" collage is not something that cannot be recreated in a digital form; the sort of "verbal-visual overkill" that Perloff sees in Futurist collage is something I often attempt in my own video work.
What use do these concepts have for work in time-based arts, for film and digital video? Non-digital formats can most definitely partake of Perloff's idea of collage; the physical nature of analog media (i.e. optical printing, etc.) will always leave a trace of the original source. Digital works, however, unify different types of media - using current technology, almost any audio-visual media can be easily digitized and combined/remixed with any other media. As much as the "edges" of different media formats might be seen within a digital "collage," they are all essentially composed of the same materials (that is, 1s and 0s). Digital artists striving for a "collage" aesthetic must, in a way, actively seek to have the different sources they work with not cohere exactly and seamlessly - essentially, they must strive for imperfection. Does this preserve the original context, as Perloff stipulates? As digital media allow for an infinite number of exact reproductions, the original context may become lost or obscured, or buried within a single, unified aesthetic. In this way, digital "collage" works might be much closer to Picasso's sense of collage - one in which the individual parts give rise to a distinct, individual meaning only on very close inspection.
This is not to say that the Futurist conception of "propaganda" collage is not something that cannot be recreated in a digital form; the sort of "verbal-visual overkill" that Perloff sees in Futurist collage is something I often attempt in my own video work.
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