INFOWEB

In reading both Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's excerpt From a Thousand Plateaus and Lev Manovich's article New Media from Borges to HTML I was left with the idea of expansive information.

While Deleuze's and Guarttari's language was difficult to follow the main idea I grasped was the connectivity between all objects and subjects, and the breaking down of barriers. Every piece of information or every object leads you to something else.

Similarly to Picasso's "Guitar Player"(pictured to the left), visually illustrated the idea of how glorified shapes of well known images become these arrows pointing to eachoether, leading our mind along this invisiable plane in a multiplicity of directions.

Manovich talks about "a massive branching structure as a better way to organize data and to represent human experience," rather than a typical outline or equation where one thought and another one thought will give you a certain specific answer. At this point in time I can google search the word "thought" and in .12 seconds have 51 million links to choose from. Each link saying something slightly or starkly different then the last.

These two readings were very interesting because it seemed as though they were considering this type of thought (expansive information) as a new thing. When really this connective information idea has been going on way before new media ever existed. From a Freshman Studies class we know Borges' Library of Babel originally published in 1941, way before the wave of new media, and yes while Borges is extremely creative and brilliant...he did not think of this concept on his own.

There has always been the idea of Akashic records, which are in a sense the complete archives of human experience, and can only be accessed through an intense psychic experience. The idea is all the same, an everlasting imprint of information that is interconnected in every way despite same and time.

Buce Nauman

...more to come

T.M.I.T.M

McLuhan

"The Media is the Message" by Marshall McLuhan is one loaded article. My initial response is severe discomfort at the statements he makes. McLuhan, according to wikipedia, is an educator, philosopher, English professor, and communication theorist. McLuhan died in 1980, and this article can still make me uneasy.

The title of the article alone is a brash statement: "The Media is the Message." This tells me that no matter what my idea or my opinion may be portraying the real message is the medium, and my own creativity takes the back seat. And I obviously would like to think that this is not true. While I agree in the point that the medium is a very important and specific choice, and I cannot disagree more that the medium is the message, it is a part of the message, but it does not take over.

In McLuhan's discourse on the electric light he says that all things that operate under the light become the content of the light. What I am writing right at this moment are my ideas, in my own words, and are passed through my nerves and make my finger muscles move and type and then the letters on my keyboard are pressed which then is processed through my laptop and appear on my computer screen. My thoughts are limited by the computer by the secondary nature of where the ideas are now captured, but they do not originate from the nerves, muscles, keyboard, computer or blogger.com, and therefore do not belong to them. And yes, my message is shaped by my medium, but in the same sense that water is shaped by the container that it resides in. The water will not lessen, or become the object, but will adapt.

McLuhan makes some interesting claims about Shakespeare, and the economy, but the one statement that really stood out to me was this, "...our human senses, of which all media are extensions, are also fixed charges on our personal energies, and that they also configure the awareness and experience of each one of us..." What bothers me, is that media is now considered a human sense, a new way of perceiving. I do not perceive with my computer, but my mind and my sight and my independent thoughts.

I don't want to post any videos in this blog post, or make any links, because I want to make the point that I can explain myself and my ideas without the full extent of the medium. My ideas are not just a blog.

Remixalot

When I read, look or listen to something these days I can see what may have influenced this idea. There is always something somewhere that inspired someone, and that had an influence on their own idea. Does an influence make something unoriginal? No, I don't think it does at all.

When reading Lawrence Lessig's "Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Community" Lessig begins talking about the remix culture from the standpoint of inspiration. People are constantly inspired by what is around them, and use other peoples ideas and opinions as a starting place for their own to form. This type of thought evolution can be sticky, because as Lessig points out, copyright laws become a pretty big issue. However, Lessig made me start thinking about why other people take it negatively when someone enjoys their idea enough to cite it, or expand on it, or refer to it.

It's kind of an insane concept (people getting perturbed when others want to borrow or expand their ideas) because it has been happening for hundreds of years. Stravinsky, Beethoven, and many other well known composers would take a theme or a melody from someone else's work and expand on it to make a whole symphony, or quote a theme to honor another composer that they admire, or to use it for contextual support.

While many could look at copyright as a limitation, I think it would be best to look at it like a challenge. How can one jump through the loopholes, trick the system, and still use other people's material. Many people such a Girl Talk , I say people because I feel uncomfortable calling him a musician, become master remixers, cutting and pasting music and sounds, finding similarities within different pieces and creating a whole new experience. The music changes meaning, and Lessig talks about this. This remixing is everywhere in every form.

Currently many clothing and apparel stores are taking a green initiative and getting creative. Upcycling is the new term being used by many clothing manufactures when they take old clothes, cut them up and paste them back together to create a new garment without creating new fabric. Many designers on etsy.com use this process of clothing making as it a green, less expensive way of making high quality items with high quality fabrics.

So remix. Use, borrow, steal, hijack, pocket, expand, twist. Just be creative about it.

Three Minutes.

I created three short videos, and they all stemmed from one original clip:

This is the first video that I shot, and I ended up liking it a lot more than I initially anticipated. It shows this subtle relationship between the water cup and the butter and the space surrounding the objects. From here I knew that to create my other two videos the subject matter would have to thematically relate through subject relationships and their interaction with their environment.

So, the second video: "Buttercup" is an explanation of the same relationship established through "Table Top Dances" however this video takes a different approach to the relationship. It does this by the addition of footage from the youtube.com site of National Geographic. The footage focus's on a snake fight which ends in one snake eating another snake. So comparing the butter's and water cup's relationship with that of the two snakes allows the video to send a different message. The sound in this video is a clip from the aria "La Vergine Degl'Angeli" from Verdi's opera "La forza del destino" I only used about 15 seconds of sound for the entire clip and looped different sections as well as altered them.

My third and final video, which was created completely from clips that I had harvested from youtube.com, shows yet a different relationship. I harvested a video clip from National Geographic of an octopus eating a shark, and a clip of a girl eating a hamburger. This is to show a dual relationship between the eater and the eaten and then the two subjects that are similar (the eaters, and the eaten). The sound for this video comes from the clip of the girl eating, which is on a loop of her biting into food, so the constant sound of chewing is apparent.

These three videos are all connected through visual and thematic content, plus I think they reflect a style of my own.

Connectech.

We just keep wanting and wanting. We, being humans, and our wants being more connectivity through advanced technology. However the connections we are desiring, we being the general collective, are from afar.
One of the first technologies were letters, which allowed us to share our lives, thoughts, and desires with people far away from us. Letters became high-tech when they morphed into the form of telegraph, and then became non-tangible when they morphed into e-mails. These different correspondence tactics sound like the life of a pokemon: evolving and with that adding new strengths and weaknesses to its infirmary.
We then move to television, which brought more of a visual aspect to the idea of far away communication. Raymond Williams' article The Technology and The Society simplifies the television's affect on society, which is an interesting way to examine television, but falls short. Williams comes up with nine succinct explanations regarding the impact of television, and then comments on them for the entirety of his article. While he makes the point that at first television was merely a tekky-science project, and those involved were not aware of its potential, he cops out and blabs on about society. I say its a cop out because it's easy to mention the word society in the context of television: "society created television," "society is affected by television," "society dictates television". Well, duh. It's also a cop out because we could have substituted any present day social communication device for "television," or for that matter any past social communication device.

The video posted above is obviously a Monty Python satire, but I post if for a specific reason. Williams explains that one of the main reasons that the television became so technologically advanced was for broadcasting the news, however in this video which was first aired in 1975 on BBC2 one of the main spoofing points they are making is the gibberish that appears on the news. Furthermore, it is easy to say nothing while seemingly saying something.
Fortunately this video brings me to the idea of short films. The TV now becomes internet TV, and these short films become museum quality art (or land you a job on Sesame Street like William Wegman). Short films like Amphbians by Anthony Goicolea, are ways of making art, and moreover making video art without breaking the bank or being a cinematographer for a major motion picture. However, I'm not sure if the art quality can really happen in a short film without that cinematic cast. I am a big Lord of the Rings movies fan, and I am more captivated during this 3 minute trailer, even with the sound muted, than during Amphibians

A comparable short film maker, William Wegman, the man behind the dogs on Sesame Street, makes his short films a little more interesting. While Amphibians tries to say something, it can't because of the limitations of its technology. Wegman uses his technology to his advantage, and uses the medium is a successful way in his short, eccentric films like plunger.

Recut

Both William Burrough's article The Cut up Method of Brion Gysin and Bill Morrison's film Decasia pose a serious question about the validity of art. Burrough's pushes the idea that anyone can write poetry and can/should recut and rearrange famed poetry, while Morrison basically stitched together decaying film and digitized it. Both of the initial creative starters were created by other people (the poem/old film), but are recreated into something new. Is this art? Is it only art when the concept changes and a new idea is conveyed.

The following two video's are "trailers" for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining made in 1980. The first video is what many would consider an accurate representation of what you can expect to see if you watch the film. The second video is a "recut," which entails a mash up of different scenes from the movie, set to different music, and the product is completely different than the first "trailer."

Are they both art?

-Yes, defanitely.

Are they both Stanley Kubrick's art?

-Questionable.

From here I wonder if this type of art will only work with certain mediums, and will fail in other mediums. The current and ever-so-popular TV series Glee is known for its mash-ups of songs, in which multiple pop songs are smashed together....which can be considered either a good or bad thing. Decide for youself.

Survey Me.

We like to survey.

I like to look, and maybe creep, it lets me know that we're more similar than we may believe.

So I surveyed to prove some points of linkage between all of us.

My first set "Car Check" is a look into anonymous cars around Lawrence University. The owners or drivers had no idea there car was photographed, and none of the items that can be seen were staged in any way. These pictures were taken during weekdays, and during school hours. I can guess that these vehicles belong to students who move their cars every morning (or park illegally), faculty and administrators based upon where the cars are parked and their absence during nights and weekends.

When taking the photograph I wanted to include the inside of the car as well as the environment surrounding the car, as ones environment helps dictate ones actions and habits. I tried to include as many reflections as possible to allow the viewer multiple viewpoints. I also tried to stay out of the picture for the most part.

Why does this tie me together with other human being? I feel comfort at the fact that I'm not the only person who leaves random paper on the floor of their car, or buys shitty food to snack on while driving. I am not the only driver who may try to conceal certain things under the seats or leave trash at the helm. My windows may be dirty, and I will not clean them, and so does some stranger who parks in the lot next to the Lawrence University Chapel.

This is the same reason we watch TV shows like "MTV Cribs" or why this youtube.com video "Celebrity Cars" has 71,000 views. We like to see how others live to rationalize our own habits, we like to compare and contrast.

Does this make me any less of a creep? Maybe not. However, I didn't infringe on anyones personal space, I was free to walk around, and the windows weren't tinted, and I didn't have a goal in mind other than capturing images. In my mind that makes me less creepy than a traffic camera or hidden light cameras that have the aim at catching you in a bad decision.

My second attempt to continue to link the human race together, was to attempt to capture (on film) the human itself; Set: Practice Check. As a flutist at Lawrence, I spend many days and nights enclosed in a small, humid, windowless, blanched practice room. I tried to find a glorified photo on the Lawrence University website, but for some reason, they choose not to advertise them. After long hours spent inside these tiny rooms, us musicians can tend start doing odd things. It is frequent to see the hazy eyed musician wandering around the Conservatory basement, humming a repeated melody and moving their fingers rapidly at their sides. Here is the recent "Kaleidoscope" video from Lawrence University's youtube page.

This gives you an idea of life at the con: chaos+rehearsals.

So I decided to go a little further and capture life inside the practice room. Most of the practice rooms are this very small rooms, with a retro feel. The doors are heavy and wooden, with two tiny windows which allow those walking around to see in, but make it hard for the musician inside to see out. Many freshman, and some upperclassmen who dislike the lack of privacy tape pieces of paper over the windows to allow for a private session. However, most of us don't really care and would rather be caught in the act of smelling our armpits or picking our nose than dealing with a piece of paper. So, I decided to exploit that by taking pictures of people through the small windows in their practice rooms.

Yes, I felt like a creep. These are people I know, and people I play in ensembles with. Some of the images are blurred because I felt the urge to move quickly through the hallways, in order not to be seen (by both those practicing, and those walking around). Some noticed, some didn't notice, it didn't matter because I felt totally weird. It was easy to take a picture when there was sound coming out of their room, I felt like it hid me, just as it hid them. However. when I would stand there, and they would take a break from their playing, I felt like I was going to be caught. While most of the musicians probably wouldn't mind, I felt like I was violating something, I can't really explain it, but I was looking at something I wasn't supposed to.

So how does this link us? Well, a practice room is like, "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf. It is a space to create, like an artists studio, or a tablature for a writer. I am looking over their shoulder, seeing how they create, and comparing it to how I create. Humans create, and we have thrived because we have learned to create together.

My final set termed "Nature Watch" links humans in a different way then what I have been doing. Rather than spying on others and observing their habits, I decided to showcase our ability to watch, compare, analyze, contrast, and make informed decisions. As humans we all have this innate ability to change with our surroundings, an ability to adapt to survive. As the season is shifting and the environment is sporting the change of the changing weather I decided to photograph what we notice. Leaves change, trees change, the ground changes, the plants change, and this is how we know our environment is transitioning. While we can only use our eyes through these photographs to understand the change (rather than being able to smell, feel, hear and taste the difference in the air) this sense is powerful enough.

Please view the complete sets of these images on my flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/etracyowens/sets/

Web 2.0 is such a strange concept because it is putting a tangible name on something that I find so completely intangible. The internet is not something I can hold onto, smell, taste or hear, but this thing that floats around and find its way into our computers through some type of energy waves. We cannot physically enter into an internet space, (unlike the characters in Futurama). However this internet place: version 2.0, is where we see things happen. We can peruse Facebook to find out the latest news in our social circles, visit the website of the Washington Post to see what is new in the world, or even just turn on our supersmart-phones for a live rss feed on your screen of all of that information.

Rachel brought up many interesting points, but the one point she made about the loss of text in the evolving world stuck out. She said Facebook is mainly about the pictures, twitter about the limitation of the "tweet" and how we crave a short version of a story/picture rather than a "wordy" article. This pushes us away form words and into the image. The question I then pose is whether this is better or worse for the artist? Immediately, I think that this is evolution toward the age of the artist, the image and the power therein, an age in which words are just a subtle afterthought, either slightly clarifying or part of the art itself. Lee Manovich's article Art after Web 2.0 explores the idea of marketing strategy, and I think that this is exactly why the image is so powerful. The image draws an immediate connection between two or more thoughts and/or memories, while text can be mysterious, confusing, and unclear. The internet is marketing constantly. In the Futurama episode I linked to above, immediately after entering the internet" the advertisements were all they could see, and had to fight through them.

As I am writing this blog, Lawrence's internet continually fails, and starts back up, an ongoing cycle. Watching video's on youtube becomes challenging, as the videos do not load, and searching for images on google just doesn't work as the images don't load.

So as a final note, and with sincere hope that the blog will find a second to load through all the failing internet cycles, I leave this final video.

If the internet is going to loose all text eventually...then yes it will probably be taken over by porn, which at that point will be a pretentious art form as well.

Le Joie

Bresson's portrait of Igor Stravinsky, who was on of Bresson's favorite composers, and used his "Rite of Spring" to annoy his grandmother.

The Impassioned Eye directed by Heinz Butler is a film about photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. He sits at a small desk with a glass of white wine, a collection of his photographs, Chopin floating in the background, and comments on the pure joy of photography and the moment of the image. There is a constant comparison between the emotion pulsing through the music and through the pictures, the unexplainable organization that one experiences when experiencing either medium. He doesn’t say much when he shows a picture, but rather lets the image speak for itself, until an outside person is introduced who comments on his photography.

He said in order for him to take a photograph there needs to be a sense of objectivity, an appreciation of the image rather than ones own bias coming through the image. I think it’s easy to find ourselves taking pictures, or looking at ones of ourselves unappreciative of ‘the’ or ‘our’ form. An image in Bresson’s eyes is much more than our own specific aesthetic view, it is our moment of coincidence when we can capture the beauty of a scene unexpectedly. Photography is the formal aspects of art mixed with the joy of the moment.

His American photography captures extremes. There are the glamorous aspects of the American culture, as well as the culture that no one talked about, we can see an insight into Marilyn Monroe as well as the poverty and racial issues in Mississippi. We see everything for what is, there is no hiding in his photographs, every face is captured exactly, perfectly, he captures the moment before the fleeting moment and finds something real, unblemished and time-stopping.

While I am unsure if Bresson would appreciate Moby being the music behind a montage of his photographs (as he played lots of Bach, Chopin and Beethoven in the film) this is still a good way to see a lot of images. My favorite is at 1:24.

Bresson traveled the world, and not taking pictures, but finding pictures, and capturing them. It is an effortless venture for him, there is no staging, but rather finding the moment, and being patient enough to wait for it. Just as a musician warms up, or a composer or writer begins to write, or a painter dabs a thick color onto the canvas, Bresson takes pictures, he captures as much as he can, as he finds joy in the moment. There is no sadness in his eyes, but this sense of the world and the beauty one can find in it if they only choose to look. He is a thinker, and a finder and a listener, and I think that is what makes him so successful, his awareness of his surroundings and is passion for being surrounded.

Here is an excerpt from another film "L'amour tout court" or "Just Plain Love," which will hopefully give you an idea of his personality, and his character and presence.

Surveillance on Display

Erol Morris's film Standard Operating Procedure was a series of snapshots into a world of self-incriminating surveillance. Just as the set of these military police perform for their digital cameras at Abu Ghraib, they perform for Morris, allowing themselves to tread the boards for yet another lens.

I believe that Morris aims to paint us an idealized picture of Abu Ghraib. The antagonist of the film Lynndie England appears not in the soft lighting of a Barbra Walters interview, but in a cold, dark light which shows her as some kind of evil even before she opens her mouth. This is not a warm environment, not even warmth you feel from a tape recorder interview (which is not warm at all), but a Clarice/Lector rapport.

Is this considered public surveillance? Yes, an on-T.V. or movie interview are types of censored public surviellance (the filmmakers being the censor), the interviewees are the surveilled, and are totally aware of it. The difference between this film and the self-surveillance the MP's took on through their digital snapshots could come down to the lack of smiles and thumbs up in Morris's film.

Their interviews are only subsidiaries to their photos, maybe more quasi-vignettes to be typed in italics on museum board and posted underneath their matted digital prints, surveillance on display. How very so Well Live in Public/Josh Harris of them.

Josh Harris chose self-surveillance on his own accord, as did the MP's of Abu Ghraib, and both were doing it to prove a point, to show something. Instead of righting an autobiography or researching and writing a Bob Woodward-like article, we now default to the image. The power of the image and more-so the power of the film (complete with Hollywood magic and dissonant music) are relaying messages to the greater public at a speed far greater than the written word. While some argue that we are de-sensitized to "heavy" images, like the ones taken at Abu Ghraib, filmmakers like Morris and Harris continue to take them to the next level. Morris's reenactments, subjectivity and mere camera technology enhance the power of the image. I could enhance the contrast, take down the exposure and add a sickly, green tint, and make any image appear a bit more sinister.

The first posted picture is the famed prisoner pyramid, complete with two military police in the background giving us an Ovaltine smile and Uncle Sam's thumbs up. The second picture is a mass grave from the Holocaust. Differences? Similarities? Yes, I know that this is a stark contrast, different context, difference scales, but both of these images are strong, heavy and disturbing. Forced piles of bodies, captured on film, naked and helpless.

"Artificial Memory"

An idea that really struck me about Englebart's article was the original simplicity of his ideas and how they translated into complex machinery. His idea of information storage and its technological organization was taken directly from the constitution of file cards. Englebart essentially improved the file card organization process by eliminating its physical presence, which in turn cuts down on human error like misprint, damage, or loss of information all together.

While I really like this idea of storing information outside of both a tangible object and our own mind, I found that I had the same reservations as Englebart who says, "The price I pay for this 'augmentation' shows up in the time and energy manipulating artifacts to manipulate symbols to give me this artificial memory and visualization of concepts and their manipulation." When I buy an external hard-drive, I'm not buying it so my computer won't gum up and slow down, I'm buying it as an extension of my brain, of my own memory. However I'm not sure I agree that I'm augmenting my human intellect by storing my information elsewhere. My potential intellect isn't any greater with this supplemental technological memory, its just like having a pocket-sized library, its just a pocket sized reference.