On the subject of technology

An interesting article by the artists AIDS 3D (David Keller and Nik Kosmas) on technology, art, fear, Luddites, utopianisms and the end of the world: IMG MGMT: Hubris/Nemesis/Whatever.

project -

Reading for Nov. 4

For next Wednesday, please read the excerpt from Getting Under the Skin, by Bernadette Wegenstein, provided in the DOCUMENTS section of Blackboard as two pdf files:

Wegenstein Preface
and
Wegenstein Phenomenology

Please concentrate most specifically on the last seven pages of the reading, "Phenomenology". All other pages are provided to give context.

Please post a "position paper" on this reading by next class.

Some criteria for thinking about relational projects:

What is the work being freed from? Formally? Aesthetically? In terms of process?
What is the work being freed to do? "

How is "environment" established?

How are participants engaged?

How does the work relate to other/older artistic traditions?
how does the work situate itself outside of "art"?

How can it be judged? By what criteria?

waking up is hard to do

So, this is the result of the collaboration with some of you guys.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

01. Alessandro/Alexis




That's what I heard
That's what she heard
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

02. Alessandro/Marcelo




That's what I'm hearing
That's what he's hearing somewhere
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

03. Alessandro/Doris



That's what I kept hearing all the time
She was looking like she heard nothing. She was somewhere, but not there.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

04. Alessandro/Joseph


Hey, listen. He said.
To what?
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

05. Alessandro/Sarah



....
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

06. Alessandro/Ambarien




....

Bilingual communication

With this project, I would like to experiment different ways of communication between various language. For example, Chinese and English is two separated linguistic systems. The origin of Chinese came from pictures. Ancient Chinese then simplified those pictures and developed a series characters to use in reading and writing. Unlike western languages using combination of sounds and letters to create words, Chinese uses combination of images to create words. Visually, an English word doesn’t show any meaning in itself (here I mean the image of the letter combination.), but every Chinese character would express the its original meaning by its structure. Thus, you “read” an English word (with sound) you know the meaning of it, but in Chinese you may just “see” a character, then you get the meaning.

 

According to above, we could get a conclusion that sound and images are the most basic way for communication. (Try to think about those ancient uncivilized people.)  The interesting thing is people usually generate different feelings towards to the same images. When they use “an images”(A Characters) to express their thoughts about “the image” (the character), how could we tell the grey zone? Especially, for people who are never trained by this “characterical” system, (People who don’t know Chinese.) they use a intuitional way to use the language without knowing it.  

 

I was inspired when I am reading Chinese and English books. When I am reading English one, I need to real read it (or say it) more than recognizing them as a image. But in Chinese, even I just flip pages not  read it, I still could “see”  some character which could give some images. Maybe it is because of the different mother tongue. Maybe we could find out together?

 

Anyway, guys, we’ll have a Chinese class tomorrow! 

NEWSFEED

This video was created entirely from clips of cable news programs (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc.), to comment on our TV news coverage and viewing habits; like many of my other short non-narrative/abstract videos, it uses this appropriated footage for a hypnotic (or simply overwhelming) effect.



It is now common for many institutions (offices, schools, cafes, etc.) to contain screens (of one kind or another) set to a constant live feed from a cable news channel. To use a particularly salient example, these screens can be found (typically broadcasting CNN) throughout the Temple campus, including the Annenberg Hall Atrium.

I would like to install this video piece on one of these kinds of screens, in the place of the usual (CNN, Fox News, etc.) content. In the most simple variant of this installation, this video would simply replace the content of one out of many of these screens, or be added amongst the already existing screens. For example, I could place a third screen, playing this video (on a loop), between the two that already exist in the Atrium.

Preferably, this piece could also be installed on a single screen or monitor in a somewhat isolated location (to continue the earlier example, a hallway somewhere in Annenberg Hall). This screen would be playing the commonly found feed from CNN or another network; however, the screen would be equipped with a motion sensor, and switch to the above video whenever a person came within a certain distance (say, 10 feet of the screen on either side of the hallway).

The Onion Project

The Onion Project

For me, a kitchen represents the tension between the technological and a-technological in interesting ways. It is a space where notions of desire and technology come together- inhabitated as it is by a projection towards a certain way of life where technology can boost efficiency and so there is that extra bit of leisure. It is usually located in the interior of the house, and so, can be understood as an ‘interiorized’ space.

Unlike a western kitchen, that will be equipped with a mixer-dishwasher-electric chimney-oven unit, an Indian Kitchen will be empty to begin with. Then there will be a microwave brought in. It will be kept on that particular shelf from where it is most visible to people moving in and out of the living room. A mixer unit, a blender, vacuum cleaner a grill oven, an electric chimney, modular designs shall happily follow.

But there will be things that will be insistently done manually, by hands. Chopping onions would be one them. Onions are used world over as a primary flavoring ingredient. Indian food is particularly heavy on its use and at times cooking a meal would involve chopping atleast more than two pounds. But this would be insistently done by hands. By the end of it, you would have wept a bucket. But then, you will forget and redo the ritual once again. You will talk about how pleasurable and tactile, how some things are just better done that way.

I conceive this project as a kitchen slab set up in front of a camera. Much like the kind of interface that exists in the way a small built in camera is placed in a laptop screen. Unobtrusive and yet there. Women will have the choice to walk in and begin by thinking aloud to one question: how many pounds of onion do they think or remember they would have chopped. This, they will do while chopping onions placed on the side with an assortment of knives. This everyday, banal activity will slip into a way of recounting and remembering, the kind that happens when one is aware of being trapped and free at the same time. There will be oral histories, vignettes from time past, projections into the future, whims, fancies, desires, sighs and whispers.

Situating the project within the kitchen helps me critically engage with the notions around the idea of women and work in capitalist, global economies; where work within home means no work. This creates a series of ironies with the way work is understood, tied to notions of material exchange and economics in global economies. I think combining it with video projections of many women doing many different things in the kitchen, counter building it with the place of women in monumental spaces and corporate workcultures, is relational as an idea and can be explored further. It also helps me thinking around the idea of a south Asian Kitchen as an installation.

Relational: KIOSK, SURFACE, BOOTH

This installation involves the participation of three persons simultaneously. We will take turns and everybody will have a turn.

I will do it in the classroom we use on the third floor because I intend to use the digital visual presenter and the overhead projector present in that room. I suppose that means I will not present until after 3pm?! OK?

Sketches and everything will be shown that day.

The university provides most of the toys. I will bring some more. YOU will provide the fun.

In the meantime watch Bill Viola.

Short Reading for This Week

Here is a short reading by Guy Debord, Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, that may be helpful to keep in mind as you "construct your situations" this week:
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/313

For further reading/viewing on Guy Debord, here is his film, The Society of the Spectacle, on YouTube, in nine 10-minute segments. Bad quality, of course, but you will get the idea/ideology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g34XVscFkIs

cell phone puppet show

Hey!

for my project i want volunteers,
that means

you
and
you
and
you
and
especially
you!

to bring your cellphones with cameras
in which

YOU HAVE TO HAVE RECORDED A VERTICAL SALUTATION LIKE

hello
this is mr zangilolammi's cellphone
and i like to meet people that enjoy tattoos
an italian food!
i am from the city of milan
where people think they are really tredy
but they are not,
HOW ABOUT YOU?

***it is important that you keep the "how about you part?" since we are going to make a puppet show in which we are going to make our cellphones talk to each other.

I will bring a little theater for our puppets
and of course
my cellphone camera to record the show.

we can also have a little enriched show

IF

you guys comment to this entry and propose DIALOGS

i'm just introducing the method


WE SHALL BE THE FIRST CELLPHONES ACTORS OF THE YOUTUBE AND VIMEO

HOORAY FOR relationship artwork (i dont remember very well the name of this artform we are using)

:)

lots of hapiness

Yours truly gomez

PD: I will post a cell phone diagram in a second!
PD2: make your cellphone a costume!

For my project, I wanted to deal with issues of representation (not the representation vs abstraction "representation", but closer to the taxation without representation type of "representation". Mainly, I wanted to address a few of the problems and frustrations that occur when the person representing oneself has a limited understanding of one's own interests or agenda. I am not sure just yet which aspect of this I want to focus on, but I wanted to create an interview session where questions are asked to two people. One person writes down their answer without speaking, the other person is the "voice of the people" and must try to answer in a way that he or she feels would best represent the other person's opinion. As I am writing this down it sounds a little like some sort of dating gameshow, how well do you know your husband or something. I would like to preferably have two people interviewing who don't know one another well, as this is generally what happens in governments and even smaller scale clubs with leaders. I think the person will be selected and then the class should vote on who will be representing whom. There will be a live feed video projection of the written answer while the person is talking. I am still working the kinks out I think. I am not sure, it would be preferable if the person answering had their own sort of agenda, different from the seated person, but I am not sure how this would be incorporated yet. Hopefully it will be sort of silly.

subscribe to this!! :)

The fma and the mfaprogram lists are the most important ones! the other two are extra

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Assignment for Project #4, due Oct. 28

1. Create a design for a relational piece that engages social relationships, either in its creation or its presentation

2. You don’t have to create the whole piece, but your design should include:
— “situation” that engages at least one social relationship in the class and/or makes a commentary on social relationships in the class.
— representation of the piece (sketch, verbal description, diagram, etc.) that indicates how the piece works in its situation
—A video clip that you have created for the piece, or that has been created by your process/design
3. Be prepared to demonstrate the piece in class on Oct. 27, using projected video or video playing on a laptop screen.

programas de television espontanea

I want to propose the creation of programas de television espontanea, in which people will gather and shoot something with their video cameras. They can use their cell phone cameras. Long shots are advised. The people gathered will concentrate on making a tv show of their own or a movie or a video installation, with the particularity that they have to see it afterward, together. It is also advised to be relaxed. They can drink alcohol or do drugs (at their own risk) or have sex. The content of their programa de television espontanea doesn't have to be explicit. It has to be smart, smart enough for them to want to see it right as they finish it. It resembles the moment in which one takes a picture with a digital camera and sees it right after for the sake of some self gratification. Cell phones with cameras can be provided for programas de television esponanea enthusiasts and children can play too.

This idea came from the unplanned practice of this and was found as it was occuring to the artist and his friends/enemies.

The programas de television espontanea do not have to be stored or kept. They can be deleted if their is not enough space in the cellphone or if the group or individual wants to make a new one. There is also no particular time of day for the p. d. t. e. to be performed. This format can also work well for a gallery setup.



Here,
an example






Truly Gomez

the idea of suddenly having a sense of displacement, when you see something unexpected at any level, and especially in the urban perception, reveals something and basically finally gives a meaning to a determinist walk.
But the same could be said of the act of viewing, too. How the off-screen becomes relevant in this relational aesthetics?
Is it just a matter of surprising the viewer? It's a too easy answer.
The trick quickly dissipates and leaves nothing behind itself, no real experience, no scars.
The consistency of what turns a piece inside out relates more, I think, to the idea of how sincerely and "naturally" a known element inside a world, decides to deal with our knowledge of it, and present itself back in a different (slower, faster, negative, positive, brighter, darker, but ultimately "known") fashion.
Instead of an off-screen, we're in the middle of a flickering screen, where the flicker reveals many other screens we might already know.
How, or when, the maker "puts" the screen onto an order, and "plays" (musically) this order, is what counts. But this screen is a hook that, as Micheal Tom wisely noticed, speaks of the relationship between personal making and the mainstream (either as language or icons).
Speed and repetition are side or later values, that reveal the syntax of our experience, not the kind of space we go through.
Space and materials are declared. We're apparently in a familiar, recognizable field. We are at home. But asleep and making our way through memory and dreams.

and...

Dance with Camera

September 11, 2009 - March 21, 2010

Dance with Camera is an exhibition and a screening program that explores a crossover between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features art works in film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space. Screenings elaborate the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films. Dance with Camera, spans seventy years of art and film, and features over thirty artists and filmmakers between its exhibition and screening program.

VIDEO AS A SOURCE OF LIGHT

LIGHT ATTACK!

‘uses a custom mobile projection setup installed in a car
to project an animated virtual character onto the cityscape.
Short pre-recorded video loops are arranged into seamless motion
patterns by the computer software, allowing interaction with the
architecture and passers-by in real-time.’

More from Studio Daniel Sauter.

We must desperately seek this next step where all arts will combine skills and crafts towards the creation of events. Whenever we see this happen it is very satisfactory; like in the videos there have been lately where a few people begin to dance and then all the people in the video end up being part of a choreography too!

For me the main thing about contemporary art is that it is defined by the quest for a new form; and in doing that many artists have made use of video in various ways. This in fact is creating a new way to see but also a new way to participate in the artistic event. I think participation is the key so that the audience does not feel like in a museum seeing objects on a pedestal and the artist does not feel like being the object on the pedestal.

Audience participation and involvement is the key to communal construction of sense and sense memory. In terms of video installation or better, the use of video for the purpose of the communicative purposes of the contemporary artist, I must say that we must remember that primarily projected video is light and as such it should be treated.

Video might contain very interesting images but I would like to use it in my own work mainly as a source of light to generate a different kind of narrative when projected onto an architectural or organic (human?) surface...or by creating an architecture with light with which the human performer can interact and also invite a viewer to participate in it.

Relational art, incorporation and the cinema

The emergence of "relational art" roughly concurrently with the emergence of video (and video installation) art is not a coincidence; both represent a radical departure from earlier artistic traditions. Taking cues from Pop Art, media theory and DIY/counterculture movements, these newer forms of art emphasized audience interaction, deconstructed popular forms and further de-mystified the vaunted qualities of the traditional "art object" (Benjamin's "aura"). These forms of art are, as Oppenheimer suggests, essentially fluid - "fluidity" is their essential defining aspect. Both video art and relational forms suggest systems of incorporation - as videos make use of older aesthetic traditions or are placed within larger artistic contexts (dance, theater, installation, etc.), while relational forms draw in (sometimes unwitting or even unwilling) persons into the social environments they create.


Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho

What implications does this have for us - studying the production of experimental/alternative media and art within the context of a program grounded in documentary and fiction filmmaking ("the cinema") - and for media arts in general? The natural progression of the ideas of "incorporation" and "relational art" leads to dialogue. While Bourriaud's conception of "relational" work stresses the involvement of a social context, media artworks embracing this same concept often form dialogues with the mainstream cinema. Past generations of media artists (in particular, the artists of the 1960s and earlier that Bourriaud's work attempts to break with) avoided the subject entirely, placing themselves in radical opposition to the mainstream; artists of the "relational" generation (such as Douglas Gordon, above) are much more willing to interact with, borrow from or make use of Hollywood and the like. How can we, as emerging media-makers, make use of this same concept in our works? Do we still exist in a period of "relational" art-making - or are we moving on to a next step?

The place for Video...

You walk into a humongous, white lobby in a gallery. It reminds you of a drawing room you visited sometime back with sounds of crystals, chinaware and spotless linen. The colours are pastels and gold. You see an artwork and find it closed in terms of how you are trying to read it. This inability humbles you down even more. The gallery space in that moment asserts a kind of territoriality that fixes you as a viewer and just that. It also crystallizes ideas of High Culture, Intelligentsia and Elitism; all in one.

The world was a very different place post the Second World War. Rapid urbanization meant an increase in the speed and stimuli of human interactions across territories and topographies. Isolated places opened up in minds and maps. It was a world of Leopold Bloom, the shell-shocked character from Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. In an era of overarching fragmented- ness, what were the key ideas through which art making was to be redefined? How were art works not to look like ‘lordly luxury items’ in this new urban context?  Baurriaud proposes the idea of ‘Relational Aesthetics’ as a key concept that defined practice for many artists who emerged in Europe through the 1990s. Relational Art, as he points out, took as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and social contexts rather than an assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space. In that sense, it meant an ‘urbanization of artistic experience’. It also meant a breakdown of the traditional ways in which art was to be exhibited, seen and displayed. To be taken around an artwork, in many ways is to be taken around that big house of whose drawing room you were reminded in the beginning.

Contemporary Art resembles a period of time that has to be experienced, or the opening of a dialogue that never ends, suggests Borriaud. The City, in contrast to Nature, becomes the ‘tangible symbol and historical framework of the state of encounters imposed on people’. More so because of possibilities of lasting encounters. This gave rise to a form of ‘art with intersubjectivity as its substratum’. The position of the viewer and the viewed interchanging, mirroring and being mirrored, like a kaleidoscope. The moment of the encounter between the viewer and artwork becoming as much a part of art making because now there is an engagement with the process. There has to be a ‘collective elaboration of meaning’. In that sense an art exhibition becomes a site of an encounter, very much like the City, where waking around can lead to utterances, whims, fancies and trigger memories. In that sense, an art work represents a ‘social interstice: a free space and periods of time whose rhythms are not the same as those that organize everyday life and they encourage an inter-human intercourse which is different to the ‘zones of communication’ that are forced upon us’. With ATMs, automated systems, computerized helplines, the overall shrinking of the relational sphere, contemporary art becomes political in its engagement with ways of problematising it.

1960s also saw the emergence of what John Hanhardt calls the emergence of the Video Art. In an increasingly hyper-meditated world, the almost instantaneous quality of video to be shot and transmitted became a way ‘to reject the notion of the heroic, existential artist self portrayed in abstract expressionism’. In this, Video became one of the primary modes of work and expression for Contemporary artists characterized by a quality of ‘liveness’.  There was a way in which Video was undeniably ‘real’ and yet it was possible to alter real time and create a spatial and conceptual distance from the televisual or cinematic experience.

For contemporary artists of the time, who were trying to situate art practice in the everyday and work with perceptual dimensions, Video became a means of working with notions of intersubjectivity; almost simultaneous, fragmentary and ever changing. Video installations became spatial –temporal art forms that cold include the vast heterogeneity of making and viewing artwork. As Chrissie Lies notes that an installation as a hybrid work of art demands a critical distance and physical presence of the viewer to complete the work. Critical distance enables viewers to move between immersion and contemplation, so that she can both experience and analyze the work’s intention and content. The viewer’s physical presence is crucial because the elements of video installations are arranged by the artist as part of a gestalt in a complex cybernetic loop of technology and mid/body that form a conversational communication system between the artist and her viewer. As an ‘expanded art form’ to use Hanhardt’s term, Video made it possible for the ‘representational’ to extend into the ‘spatial’. The ‘collage’ and ‘de-collage’ that the placement of monitors in 3D spaces created, there emerged a possibility of an intertextual dialogue of the viewer with the material and herself.

As Bourriad notes, Gabriel Orozco’s opening of the ‘social infra-thin’ (inframince); that tiny space of everyday gestures that is determined by the superstructure; Braco Dimitrijevic’s Casual Passer-by series and Sophie Calle’s engagement with strangers point to a larger trend that emerged at the time: the formalization if convivial relationships has been a historical constant since the 1960s. the generation of the 1980s picked up the same problematic, but as against the 1960s emphasis on relationships internal to the world of art that called for linguistic subversion and privileged the ‘new’ , the emphasis was on external relationships in contexts of eclectic cultures. All of this was to be eventually directed towards what Guattari suggests-aesthetics must above all accompany societal mutations and inflect them. The poetic function, which consists in reconstructing world of subjectivation might therefore be meaningless unless it too can help us to overcome the ordeals by barbarism, by mental implosion and chaosmic spasm that loom on the horizon and to transform them into unforeseeable riches and jouissances.

And if the live quality of video could transform the landscape of contemporary art so tremendously, my current engagement remains what could be the newer modes of artistic articulation in times where technology is more omnipresent than ever. The Sony Portapacks and the Bolex are now replaced with Cellphone Cameras with which we shoot and archive almost instantaneously. In the same moment, we encounter thousands of mega bytes of data and ton loads of image pixels on youtube that for me potentially alters the notion of found material. And everyday, we meet so many more strangers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aesthetics of commercial

When we are asking ourselves “ how aesthetic could be used and injected into tissues that have been rigidified by capitalist economy?” We basically separate art from our daily life. The capitalized and civilized society is an inevitable environment nowadays, which we find aesthetics in.  It is related to us and influences us since the time we were born. We analyze the structure of economy and capitalism, and we figure out what has been ignored or missed under this construction. Then we generate our own unique aesthetics toward this world rather than escaping from it into an irrelevant “art craft”.     

 

For me, that’s the reason I do admire the aesthetic courage of Andy Warhol, the leader of Pop arts. Which doesn’t mean Pop Arts is the only true arts. He penetrated the capitalized and economic world and saw the essence of the society. He didn’t pursue a narcissistic aesthetics to distinguish himself from the common.  He built a bridge between his aesthetics and human to connect the relationship between his action and viewers. It could be seen as an extraordinary art form, which will create another artistic generation like he did. His aesthetics exists,  not limited in his art work, in his point of view of art and his action to deal with art. He merge his aesthetic into his understanding of the world.

 

I think he is a good example to prove what Guattari mentioned in our reading:

“The only acceptable goal of human activities is the production of a subjectivity that constantly self enriches its relationship.”

The article "Video Installation: Characteristics of an Expanding Medium," calls to mind an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum called Act / React, which provides a fascinating glimpse into video installation as a medium where computers generate content based on the actions of the viewer. Whereas installation seemed to start partially as a reaction to television's submissive state of the viewer, this seems, to me, to signal how that focus has shifted from television to the internet and the interconnectivity of the body and the computer. With many of the pieces at this art show, the fingerprint of the artist seemed obscured by the fingerprint of the computer program. The roles of artist and computer programmer become synonymous. The viewer, meanwhile, is responsible for both sending and receiving the information which is processed by the computer into the aesthetic and spatial experience. I feel like this complicates the role of the artist, but in what way?

relational aesthetics

The reading relational aesthetics has an interesting premise: that contemporary art can engage people by forming a kind of mini community that occurs as people happen to experience that art together. I agree that watching an installation is different from watching a movie.
Thinking of that, however, made me think about the opposite, where two people might inhabit the same room physically but are in completely different spaces through the use of electronic devices such as ipods, cell phones or blackberries. Every day when I take the subway, even in a very overcrowded train, people situate themselves as to create more space for themselves. In fact it is rude if someone looks at another person deliberately or an extended period of time. Occasionally, there are people who might break these social conventions, such as young children, or some unusual adults. However, there are still unspoken codes for appropriate behaviour that people seem to follow.
Bourriaud's raeding about art that can start a conversation between people is a good one, however, I wonder in the context of everyday museums and galleries, where there are still, "look, don't touch" policies, how it can be applied so there is more engagement between people.

picking up the threads....

Media Art Theory and Practice Class,
I have thoroughly enjoyed lurking on your MTAP blog, as you have dived into questions and forms of narrative mapping, assemblages, rhizomatic story structures, interactivity, self-organizing systems and emergent forms, labyrinthine film structures, multilinear narratives and more. For the second part of the semester, we will continue from this platform of investigation into

— representation and presence (or "presentation"), where we focus on media art practices that vacillate between memory/the archive/the sign and works that bring attention to the here and now

— authorship and participation, where we look at historical and current trends to question the relationships and processes through which art/media art is made and circulated

— embodiment: the idea that subjectivity is inseparable from the images we generate and integrate, with special attention to the space in-between the body and the screen.

We will start with two readings:

IN BLACKBOARD COURSE DOCUMENTS: Excerpts from Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, reprinted in Participation, Claire Bishop, editor, Documents of Contemporary Art, 2006;

and

ONLINE: Video Art Installation: Characteristics of an Expanding Medium, by Robin Oppenheimer, published in Afterimage, March 2007.

I look forward to your responses on the MTAP blog this week, and to seeing you in class on Oct. 21.

project (sort of)

Project Description

“In the act of overlaying and combining, borders and meeting points are formed, so that the images used by these artists are, by their very essence, viewed with reference to other, different images and combined as such. Crucially, however, these borderlines act as a blending that represents the point at which things become combined: a point of disappearance signifying a relationship between things, and not their distinct separation. There are borders to be crossed: points of transferral at which at which clear division disappears.”

-Collage, Assembling Contemporary Art, 153

“Collage, I think, is indeed a yearning for a lost world and reflects a universal sense of loss.”

-John Stezaker in Collage, Assembling Contemporary Art, 27

This project is an attempt to reconcile the different aspects of my identity in relation to culture and geography. By collaging together different elements, I create a narrative that takes the shape of a fragmented self-portrait. I appropriate traditional imagery from Pakistani culture, deriving influences from truck art to mughal miniature painting, while retaining a sense of newness with the use of technology. The motifs and patterns become symbols which contradict and contrast imagery from the western world, family photographs, and torn up images.

autonomy

Dia de Muertos

Not much to say. Limited by that primitive tool called powerpoint.

Quoth the raven, nevermore.

can't upload my power point work on web.

tried hosting it to backpack, didn't work.

A brief introduction to my work-Nilofeur this time is on a secret

mission to runway. The plan is to meet the Masked Woman in Paris.

More tomorrow.

Celestial vs Oceanic

Here is my quest to the sky.
Hope you enjoy it. I will have to do a sound intervention, later in the process.

Please don't drown.

++++++++++++++++++

P.S. (I noticed that adobe flash player has some annoying security issues - especially related to redirection to other websites - so I'll try to post the direct link to the flash file, and I hopefully this might solve the issues)

The Third Horseman

(Note: sound is out-of-sync on this posting; proper sync version to follow.)

The opening of a short sci-fi/cyberpunk film created entirely from footage appropriated from YouTube video clips, with original recorded dialogue (for the moment, both voices in the dialogue are mine - I didn't have time to find someone else to read the lines or significantly alter my own voice in post).

PPPPProject!

hey, there!

This is my project: Time Labyrinth

try more times! you may find out what you never saw!

enjoy!

Messin' Around with HTML/FLV

Click it!

To do list:
Work with embedded audio
maybe some .swf files (gotta talk to Joe about that one?)
and other things...

Home Sweet Home

MY PROJECT

URL: http://astro.temple.edu/~tuc19460/Slumhouse1.swf

If anyone finds they cannot access this, please comment & let me know, because I'm not sure if I correctly set this up on My Backpack. I think you need Adobe Flash 9 in order to view, so that may be an issue too.

Last Year at Marienbad

Here is a version with English subtitles:

Here is a Eutopean project (Le Courbusier) and the hallway of the Tyler building leading to the separate pods of the building.

I keep thinking about these random but organized systems that appear out of patterns as discussed in Johnson’s Emergence. It is so interesting to me how scientists were able to make connections between a pattern established by an animal and a pattern that could construct an artificial brain. The structure of the city mimics the structure of the brain, from macro, to micro, these patterns repeat themselves. Thinking from the bottom up instead of the top down is a very interesting idea. It seems so similar to the way in which many artists work. And yet I cannot think of an artist off the top of my head who deals with this process specifically.

This week in another class we have been reading about Debord and the Situationists. There has been a great deal of discussion in this class about urban planning and the way in which most Eutopean architectural solutions with socialist agendas have become abandoned spaces. This must be due to a lack of understanding of smaller patterns of individual behavior that might need to function on a small level within a larger space.

It is interesting to think about the challenge of urban planning as finding a space that exists in between an entirely utilitarian and an entirely liberalist space. If one thinks of this bottom up system of planning, does urban planning become obsolete? Must the way to fix the social, capitalistic structure that exists not come through a changing of the outer structure (the layout of the city) but through some change in social behavior on a smaller scale?

My feeling is that the architecture of a building definitely determines patterns within itself. The new Tyler building is an example of this, because the building has separated each department into a different pod in the building, with a closed off door. The result of this is that I (a sculpture major) have never once been to the Photography department and had to search and search to find the metals department. The building cannot completely dismantle cross-disciplinary work, as there are a few classes that bring students from different departments together. However, in its physicality, through issues of inconvenience, it does discourage interactivity. The building becomes an obstacle to overcome if one wishes to reach out to another department. The sometimes helpful but also questionable aspect of this, is that the building keeps the administrators in the front of the building and out of the way of the art installations.

FATHOMS

An Oulipian sketch on our topics

http://www.unknownterritories.org/FATHOMS/

la nueva novela

Me gustaria poder escribir en mi idioma/i'd like to write in my own language/para poder hablar de la nueva novela/to be able to talk about the new novel/la nueva novela es un index multipolar/the new novel is a multipolar index/entonces es necesario sentir el dicho en el propio idioma/therefore it is necessary to feel the saying in one's own language/simplemente para despues aduenharse del idioma de "el otro"/only to appropriate "the other"'s language later.

I'd like to make an exercise of new noveling right in this corner of the web and start a novel in a blog, as a blog:

"La Libelula"

Speaking to the Rhizome

It’s true MTV, where is the cinema within the Rhizomatic model? In hindsight, given our current position as members of a larger digital community, it might be said that Deleuze and Guattari were envisioning the development and use of interactive new media forms.
In looking at the wave of hypertext/new media/internet art from the early 90s up until now you will find evidence of the Rhizomatic method or philosophy. Within these forms the creation of multiplicity is conceivable, the participant once referred to as spectator or even viewer is now a free agent, able to interact with an art work as they see fit bypassing notions of a beginning, middle or end or traditional narrative or literary structures or hierarchies.
On the contrary does "true" multiplicity even exist?, these works perhaps do not embody a “true” rhizome. Just as with literature, or with cinema where there are clear conventions to the construction of meaning and how a spectator navigates through a text, these conventions also exist within the formation of new media art. As the architect or artist of a project I so choose how and where my agent with enter into the text or work, and I more or less consciously Guide their navigation. I have seen all possible beginnings, middles and ends? Does this make sense? I have the foresight because I understand all desired outcomes? Does this make sense?


I offer the example of a Rhizome containing Rhizomatic works: http://www.rhizome.org/ (has anyone been to the New Museum? Is it “fun”?)

I also offer one of my favorite pieces of old school net art: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War

"The Myth of the Ant Queen" was a fascinating article and it left me with many more questions. I will now be much more conscious of my decisions and movements as part of a pattern. I can't help but think of IBM's commercials about "building smarter cities" as an attempt to corral all of these movements, trends, crimes, money spent, and personal narratives of the urban landscape into some sort of comprehensible computer data stream. Every time I pass through the turnstile into the subway, does that send a little click into the mainframe? A series of 1s and 0s indicating one passenger at the Lombard - South station on the SEPTA orange line at 12:35pm on Wednesday, October 7, 2009? One loaf of Dutch Country whole wheat bread purchased for $3.59 plus tax at the South Square Supermarket at 7pm on Monday, October 5, 2009 with a PNC Bank check card in my name. Does each little detail add up to something? What could that possibly mean? It must mean something...

Anyways, I also wonder what role do shantytowns play as urban environments. Do they resemble the mold of Manchester with their explosive growth in a short amount of time, considering the recession? Are they just like any other neighborhood within the city - a moving of people together that share similar attributes? The shantytowns seem to lack the planning and government services of the surrounding area in which they reside, but government does sometimes intervene. I doubt there is a queen, metaphorically or actually, within such communities, but perhaps some other driving force compelling them to act in such ways as to survive. Where does the order emerge?

The Medium IS the Message !?

The contemporary artist should not worry about its medium but rather constantly seek one that is able to carry the responsibility of the communicative effort he/she intends. By this I mean that if for one communicative idea the use of language is suitable then use it; if dance or performance is suitable, use it; if sculpture or video is suitable, use it. But use it only if it is strictly necessary, in other words use it only when nothing else can achieve one's communicative goal. My personal quest is that of trying to find a new form or define a new form for a particular need I within a certain creative process.

During that quest I have begun to need dance less and to use it in a less gratuitous way. Now I require more of other mediums like visual arts and theater.

Marcelo Rueda

Following are some ideas I want to share with you and I consider relevant to this week's readings:


From Gabriel Orozco's interview:

"One day I was in France and I saw the Foucault's Pendulum, and as you know it’s the way that it was proved that the earth moves. You have this pendulum hanging from very high which is constantly moving because the earth is rotating, and I found that fascinating. It’s a permanent motion sculpture. It’s a science too, but at the same time you can consider it as beautiful as...now okay, I don’t want to say a beautiful sculpture because I think it’s much better as an instrument for science, but anyway...I am an artist and I look at it as a possible sculpture. So then I decided why don’t we transform a billiard? What happens if one of the balls in the billiard is a pendulum? I also decided instead of having a rectangular table to have an elliptical table or an oval table. So then we will play closer to laws of the universe. And then when we put this hanging ball with the oval billiard table which is called “Oval Billiard Table with Pendulum,” you can play a game, but you add complexity because now you have time involved. And you have an element which is the elliptical bands. You cannot count on them anymore."

Game-based sculptures by Gabriel Orozco

A Game of Petanque with Sam Renseiw

Narrating the City: What is it?

I have this bit of conversation stuck in my head from the times I traveled in the over-crowded New Delhi, India. It was the everydayness of taking the bus in the morning, reaching work, working and returning back home. I can’t possibly recall the volume of conversations on which I might have eavesdropped or listened purely due to physical proximity- Delhi buses are packed and you stick together as you stand, trying to get where you want to.

 It might have been one of those days maybe.

Two women, one elderly and another in her early 20s board a 507.

At an overcrowded entrance: elderly woman to the other: ‘Push hard. This is Delhi’.

Can a City be narrated through a broken chain of bits and pieces of conversations, utterances picked up in its arcades, avenues, the dangerous and the not so dangerous streets? As against the panoramic skyline as the fingerprint of the City, with corresponding notions an omniscient narrator, what if it is narrated from multiple locations in its everyday where a multitude of narrators find themselves grounded in. What would be the form of that made of narration?

 Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ provides a meaningful reference point to understand the inherent fracturing of the linear form that corresponds with the Metropolis becoming an ‘interconnected web of complexity’, Johnson, ‘The Myth of the Ant Queen'.

The notion of complexity as experienced in urban environments is understood I two ways by Johnson. One is the ‘sensory overload’; something that feels like ‘a scab against an original wound’. The experience forms the basis if works such as ‘The Arcades Project’ by Walter Benjamin and ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce. As Mary Ann Doane notes in ‘The Emergence of Cinematic Time’ that with the advent of mechanical reproduction in the industrial age, a discursive thematics of excess and over saturation started. The excessive and unrelenting continuum of mechanical reproduction is accompanied by Modernity’s understanding of Temporality as an assault on senses.

 The other is the understanding of complexity as a ‘self-organizing system’. This is not the experiential city. It is the city where a patterns of signals emerges where one expected the unplanned noise. The precondition is a rhythm of the everyday, something or someone who happens to be somewhere in the city as a part of a crowd and who chooses to narrate. Narration in this case is more than just a question of coordinates. The map itself begins to ‘flicker’ with the layers of stories and myths that are being beamed from a multitude of coordinates. Something like the Freudian notion of Memory that he describes in terms of resistance and engraving.

 This notion of the multiple nodes of narration and the idea of the narrator herself being a living, seeing person like you and me, as put forth by Robert Grillet’s ‘From Realism to Reality’ makes way for a practice of narrating the City where boundaries between content-form, objectivity-subjectivity, narrator-narratee, construction-deconstruction, memory-present, imagination-reality, high art-popular forms, professional and the amateur continuously dissolve into each other in multiple ways.

Here, I would want to introduce you to the Pad.ma ; a project that has challenged my own critical thinking around documentary/experimental/ narrative work.  PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use. To read more about the project go to: http://godaam.pad.ma/about. You can browse by categories such as Authorship, Art, Censorship etc. To view the city archive, you can goto http://godaam.pad.ma/find?f=category&q=Cityscape. For media practice in our times, the immediate question the archive poses is that of who has the power to narrate. In this case it could be a mobile upload possibly shot by a migrant who works as a set attendant on million dollar budget Bollywood film shoot by the night.

A rhizomatic cinema

Deleuze conceives of the rhizome as "an assemblage" which expands outward at random; rather than moving along direct, "vertical" paths (the "tree" model), the rhizome "encompasses a multiplicity."

But where is the cinema in all of this - what, can we (as media makers) make of all of this? Compared to the written word (the main topic Deleuze addresses within his introduction), the cinema seems much more bounded - within the frame, within classical cinematic conventions, within the division of labor (director, cinematographer, editor, etc.), within means of production, promotion and distribution, etc. How can we reach outside these conditions to "encompass multiplicities" within a film (aside from the obvious answers - that is "moving beyond the frame" through "expanded cinema"/installation)?

Speaking of Joyce, Deleuze writes, "Joyce's words... shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclical unity of the sentence, text or knowledge." By the same token, a rhizomatic cinema must shatter the unity of the conventional/mainstream cinema, upset the order of our expectations, to move outside of it on chains of reference to encompass the whole of our modes of cinematic experience. It must create a space in which "the world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity of ambivalence or overdetermination."

Suggestions for a rhizomatic cinema
Stage an exhibition of anonymous YouTube clips; title it, "New Films, New Filmmakers."
Screen a marathon of all the films in the Friday the 13th slasher film series.
Create a shot-for-shot remake of a forgotten B-movie.
Edit clips from the TV series Law and Order: SVU into a feature-length romantic comedy.
Give the camera to someone else.
Make a "cam" bootleg of a feature film.
Select three mainstream Hollywood films; screen Act I (first 20 minutes) of the first, followed by Act II (20-70 minutes) of the second and Act III (final 20 minutes) of the third.
Recreate a porno film without any of the sex scenes.
Claim exclusive exhibition and distribution rights to the Lumière shorts, Le Voyage dans la lune (1902), Birth of Nation (1915), etc.
Release an old VHS bought at a thrift store as your first feature film.
Hire an independent company to make your film for you.
Scratch DVDs and then return them to the video store.
Do something boring.
Etc.

The importance of being Pattern

(mmm... that's a cheap title)

Is pattern, and its repetition, a behavioral/organizational mode?
Following Steven Johnson's Emergence, yes. He dwells into the idea of self-organizing systems and finds the fundamental role played by patterns, and the distance they keep from any kind of masterplan or pacemaker. A basic series of rules and operations create a pattern that repeats indefinitely and could make a defined system regulate itself. As the patterns interact, even slightly, difference emerge, and development/shrinking occurs.


Then, is Marienbad (or Karlstadt, or Fredericksbad) a self-organizing community?
Trying to apply the above considerations to the movie Last year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), we realize, at first, that most of them seem out of context, mainly because the fundamental condition of self-organization is a minimum or absence of plan.
Therefore the movie, technically speaking, cannot guarantee this, since Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais carefully prepared every shot, cut and voice.
But still, the "impression" is that of such an "autonomous" system.

"There were notices everywhere: Quiet", says the narrator re-telling and re-creating the labyrinth of the hotel corridors where the two main characters probably met; such warning tells us about a place that need only behaviors. Voices here are not needed anymore, and all the other human beings we see in the movie are silent, still, even if they talk. What they say is immediately non-relevant.

But, we wander in this labyrinth through the unfolding of the main character's memories. Why?
Probably the quest of our character, following minor glimpses, changes, and glitches in his repetition, is far more effective than just the accurate description (which we found, rhythmically) of a place and the behavior of its inhabitants.
The repetitive structure of the place and memory, the doubtful experience of deja-vu, construct a powerful and dense space made of hallway shots from different places, but linked and explored as a whole. The gestures, contacts, and movements of the two (three) characters are linked and made fluid through montage, revealing the differences while maintaining similar movements of men.
Movements, those, that are just all occurring in front of us. Nothing has been hidden, in terms of what we need to know about the plot. And knowing if everything happened last year, a month, a day, or a second ago, does not make any difference.

As Robbe-Grillet said, the time of Marienbad is there, the time of the story coincides with that of the viewer, 1 hour and a half. And even if another time is evoked or suggested (or desired), we find answers or motivations that keep the events in the present.
We don't need to unravel the mystery, to find when they actually met, or if they ever did.
The elements are there, as they are in the Nim game the two male characters often play in the movie. The objects are on the table, but even getting through the game itself means to lose, move, switch and miss some of the pieces.

Marienbad is an effective self-contained moment, and questions are ultimately not needed, for the viewing experience.
Perception and repetition create a coherent space, memory is constantly put into question, and ways of seeing the space, too. Crucial questions for us as makers.
Robbe-Grillet and Resnais render this questions statements, and Giorgio Albertazzi's journey through memory becomes ours.

P.S. what happens when space has different values, other than the obsessive and claustrophobic ones? Here's two examples, that very quickly came into my mind. One. And, two.

The Private New Novel

When I was reading about the definition of the New Novel, I couldn’t help to think about a question: Is a diary could be a way of the New Novel? Or what is the difference between them? As mentioned in the reading “ The New Novel is only concerned with man and his place in the world”, a diary represents an entire world that belongs an individual. But because the author is the only reader of a diary, the world he created in the diary exactly concerned all objects (past present and future) in his life. The problem is: we don’t really publish personal diaries to public, could we see it as a form of the New Novel in literature?

 

In addition, a diary is also relatively subjective as what the New Novel pursuits. Here I mean because the author of a diary is the only omniscient, omnipresent narrator and character in it, simple we can see he is the God in the New Novel, also the absolute objectivity and subjectivity.  In fact, a diary creates a universe other than the one we live. The sense of time, space and incidents become a circulation which flows between the only giver as well as taker.

 

I think, at least a diary could be a kind of private New Novel. How do you think?