Re: Hactivism, Baldwin, MF DOOM

Been a while since the last blog post, hasn’t it? Well we’re back in full force now and we’re here to talk about hactivism. So, let’s get started.

The first piece I’ll be talking about is the Nikeplatz “piece” and I will—admittedly—approach this piece harshly. This piece generated quite a bit of discussion in the class due to its confrontational nature. Traditionally, this piece is rooted in the tradition of “culture jamming” (the grassroots phenomenon that involves estranging what corporations have made commonplace; later co-opted by (now) shit-rag Adbusters). As such, the piece takes easy-target Nike and attempts to show the invasiveness of corporate entities in the public sector. In doing so, they (0100101110101101.ORG) publicly purport (through pretending to be Nike representatives) that Nike will be buying Karlplatz and erecting a gigantic “swoosh” logo in the center, in addition to renaming Karlsplatz to Nikeplatz.

While pieces like Nikeplatz succeed in calling attention to the invasiveness of corporate entities into the public sector, they fail to generate anything beyond mild disgust from civilians. In interviews with passerby, most people express disdain for Nike and the desecration of a historically rich public park, but seem to do so only out of expectation. In other words, people know that they should be against such a thing happening, but fail to ever generate enough bile to put a stop to it. I spoke in class of Berlin’s Sony Center, a series of buildings so Japanese and out-of-place that its presence next to Berlin’s historical Tiergarten and .5 mile distance from the Brandenburg Gate makes it correlate to the Nikeplatz project. The only difference here is the fact that the Sony Center is an embraced cultural center, whereas the Nikeplatz project wasn’t. Again, the disgust generated by the Nikeplatz piece seems generated only out of expectation. This is all to say that, while I enjoy “jamming” pieces like the Nikeplatz project, I feel like the piece fails because it fails to motivate and inspire people. Who’s to say it didn’t, though, right?

The most successful type of hactivism comes from—to me—Keith Obadike’s Blackness For Sale. The piece simultaneously estranges and perverts the sort of bidding forum that Ebay is, commodifies something that we would like to believe isn’t commodified, and is self-aware/self-aggrandizing enough to joke about blackness.

Given the blog’s limited word count (or suggested word count), I’d like to talk about Craig Baldwin and the film Sonic Outlaws for the remainder of the piece. Simply put, I thought Sonic Outlaws was a masterpiece of archival and documentary film mash-up. Archival footage has long been a love of mine and to see it used to such an effect was inspiring.

Baldwin’s “thesis”—as he called it—was something that I had no problems buying into. Essentially, he believes that archival footage, commercials, orphan films, etc. are what give the best glimpse into the times in which we live. Therefore, when we look at the 60s, it’s best to look at the commercials and b-movies that were being made to really familiarize oneself with the time period. Sonic Outlaws plays upon this thesis, remixing old films (from time periods that were nonetheless heavily invested in copyright law or like-legislation) into saying exactly what he wants them to say (be it anti-Copyright rhetoric—and I don’t mean that in a bad way—or a “sign of the times” vignette). It’s pastiche with a message and a distinct speaker (though, those doing the speaking are all different) and I think it works, especially as a form of hactivism. For example, it’s hard to imagine CNN Concatenated without first looking at the work Baldwin was doing in the 80s and 90s. Hell, he’s still doing it and that’s exactly what he was doing in our class on Thursday; remixing his thesis through a variety of DVDs (god knows what would’ve happened had their been a film projector there) and talking a mile-a-minute.

Really, there was only one thing I didn’t enjoy about Baldwin’s presentation and that was his reluctance/refusal to admit rap and hip-hop into the world of “art” and not entertainment. Baldwin drew the line between his work as art and the work of “sampling” forms like rap and hip-hop, stating that the latter use sampling merely for entertainment. I will give Baldwin the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s not familiar with the work of DJ Spooky or, more importantly, MF DOOM. I say this because, were he familiar with either of those artists, such a distinction would be inexcusable. I suppose that’s what my generation will be around for, though, to make sure the likes of Rap, Hip-hop, and DJ artists will be canonized—rightfully—as art.

If you’re not familiar with MF DOOM, here are some clips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewc1hixzYPY&a=gnZBoqWK7kw&
playnext_from=ML

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFHkEzxg66s

If hactivist rhymes (dropping smart, political verses in an album full of archival samples and persona developing) aren't enough, then the samples at the end ought to do it (which segue neatly into the next song).

Re: Curatorial Website

Here's the link to my curatorial website:

http://www.electroniculture.net/garry

I trust you can copy and paste? Blogger's link embedding wasn't working...

Explore. Some pictures are links and the link to my curatorial essay is embedded in the title: net.entities.

RE: Rhythm Science

To the remixologist, ideas and theories are latent in their creation and creations. They’re there if you want to look for them. A poem I write might have as much to do with my daily routine as it does the movie I watched last week, the vidya I played the evening prior, and Baudrillard. Paul Miller’s book Rhythm Science is a physical object that expresses this philosophy. In other words, Rhythm Science is both a manifesto on the state and ideology of modern remixologists and a naturally occurring phenomenon. Break it down: rhythm science is as much a manifesto as it is a necessary and inevitable byproduct of technology and postmodernism coming together in sort of harmonic, remixed synthesis. Take it further: the internet has become a giant repository of music, images, words, and miscellany that can be sampled and sprinkled into anyone’s art (or thoughts, or dreams, etc.).

Inherent in Miller’s manifesto/essay/autobiography is the idea that there is no originality. There is innovation and hybridization. Re-appropriation is as difficult as being original (or it would be, if there was anything that could be referred to as “pure” and “original”). This is as much a vindication of rhythm science as it is a byproduct of postmodernism. Already, the reader should be aware that Miller’s book is as a much a practice of rhythm science as his own description of rhythm science. Need proof? Ralph Waldo Emerson’s more than willing to vindicate this sentiment: old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.

Take this as an example: there is no originality, just endless (not random, but recombinant) hybridizations of ideas. These hybrid ideas are, for all intents and purposes, “new,” but are inextricably linked to their origin. In many ways, then, rhythm science/Rhythm Science is an extension of Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex; the rhythm scientist outlines, emphasizes, and distorts memories, semantic-links, old theoretical texts, “found sounds,” etc. Like Bush’s concept of the Memex, the technology (i.e. in this metaphor, texts from the past, memories, imagination, etc.—Thoughtware, Wetware) is there and it is up to the user to dictate how they will flow and combine; the user orchestrates the way information—be it emotional, visceral, intellectual, sonic—will be stored. The DJ does this each and ever time they craft a song, just as I am doing right now in making this piece simultaneously convoluted and clear. Rhythm science/Rhythm Science relies on this play (as Derrida would say) and is this play.

Most interesting in rhythm science/Rhythm Science is what you’re experiencing right now. A subject-in-synchronization state that occurs when a reader/listener/subject experiences a text/mix/work. Miller argues that the concept of subject-object relation (between a person and an object/idea/theme) is no longer relevant; it is an anachronism and it is false. Rather, our postmodern world has created (or perhaps it has always been latent) a style of experiencing art that is a synchronization with the art (or any stimulus, really) and not a subject position. In Miller’s non-verbatim words, the cross-cutting and culling of different samples, themes, and ideas allows the viewer/listener/person to experience the world through the viewfinder of the creator; they synchronize with the work. Extrapolate that further: in a subject-in-synchronization relationship, your own synchronization (personalized and individually influenced as it is) is its own mix. What you take from this is your own, but it’s influenced by these words. Is there a better way to demonstrate the pseudo-thesis of Rhythm Science than to make the text a meta-reflection of this? After all, does this blog tell you more about Rhythm Science or my own active-remixing of my experience with Rhythm Science?

P.S. All this and we’ve not even touched on the C-Side or the Internet. The ever-present outline of Side-C is cast on every forward-facing page of Rhythm Science. The C-Side is itself—like the book—both thesis and practice. It shows rhythm science at its best and it features MC slots from some of the most intelligent and experimental remixologists of the past century.

RE: Talan Memmott

It’s something about the discordant piano, the horror-movie background noise (a sort of red-death waltz chamber in a vacuum), the face looking like Scrooge’s dead friend Jacob Marley, and the ghostly text—popping up across the screen at a rate that seems faster than it actually is—that has me trying to remember is Hugo Ball ever seemed this strange when I read his work years ago. Wait. Go back.

I’m researching Talan Memmott, internet artist and creator of “The Hugo Ball,” a piece of flash animation that combines all of the words from Ball’s sound poem Gadji Beri Bimba in a random remix. For those who don’t know, Hugo Ball was a Dadaist artist and poet. If you don’t know what Dadaism is, you’re hopeless. Seriously, though, you ought to know. Back to the subject at hand. Hugo Ball achieved poetic fame for writing a series of “sound poems,” poems that featured made up words and no discernible grammar. As such, these poems relied upon performance and interpretation (i.e. creative liberty with regard to inflection and speech).

Playing off of some of the tenets of Dadaism, Memmott’s piece relies on collage. The Hugo Ball reconfigures the words of Gadji Beri Bimba into new structures, juxtaposing words off of one another and injecting pauses at random. The pace of the speaker (as stated above, a sort of Jacob Marley stuck in a mirror/crystal ball) is feverish and quick. The pauses are most certainly random. The speaker’s face contorts rapidly, most likely assigned a different posture for each word or each syllable. The piece, then, is truly a collage of what it is to perform something like a sound poem.

My initial reaction to the piece is one of puzzlement. The theme the piece evokes is a hard-to-place brooding and haunting. The piece haunts you, but I can’t help but feel that it misses the point. Wait. I’m uncertain because the piece so deftly distills Ball’s conception of the collage into a piece of net art, but it subverts this by having the same exact performance of each “sound word” every time. In other words, the configuration of the poem itself is different each and every time, but the way they’re pronounced remains the same, simultaneously injecting spontaneity into the piece while negating it. One must, of course, entertain the idea that Memmott simply did not have the tools at his disposal to create several individual pronunciations of each word, in which case the aforementioned complaint would be null.

In some ways, I can’t help but feel that Memmott’s piece mocks the originator. Dadaists attempted to reject form in place of spontaneity, yet Ball’s Gadji Beri Bimba rests on the page in a static position and Memmott’s random generator, The Hugo Ball, both calls attention to its static source text while commodifying (i.e. ROLL OVER TO HEAR A PERSONAL RECITATION OF GADJI BERI BIMBA) the one element (the performance) that made/makes each version of Gadji Beri Bimba unique. Regardless, Memmott’s piece only mocks Ball slightly. One could make the case that it actually picks up where Ball left off; it further subverts any sort of stylistic “form” by creating a random arrangement of Gadji Beri Bimba and thus implements technology in a way that reinvigorates some of the loftier ideals (i.e. elimination of form, pure spontaneity, pure chance) of the Dadaists from a technological approach.

Anyway, this has been one of the most scatter-shot blogs I’ve written all semester. I’ll continue to mull this piece over and come back and edit or refine some of the musings that you’ve stumbled upon.

For those only (for now) casually interested in The Hugo Ball, here are some caps to whet your interest:

RE: net.art

So, there are a million things that can be said about net.art, but for the sake of expediency, let’s start with answering some questions with regard to the net.art. The first question that we’ll consider is seemingly simple: what is net.art? I think a simple definition (one that will undoubtedly be subjected to my own scrutiny and revision as the semester goes on) is a piece of work developed with the intention of dissemination and placement in the context of the Internet. As such, net.art relies entirely upon the Internet as a medium to exist. Therefore, a photograph of the Mona Lisa is not net.art, but is, rather, art on the net. Also, the art itself may deal with themes that are both web-bound and non-web-bound.

That said, the two questions that were asked after this first question become slightly irrelevant. If the net.art fulfills the criteria I’ve stated, it can still be displayed in a museum—though, the net.art manifesto might disapprove of this—the Internet or anywhere else that is possible. As such, the places where one can find net.art are similarly only limited by publicity, placement in places such as museums (or not), and other social factors. It seems, though, that the most natural place for a piece of net.art would be on the Internet where individuals using a home/work/whatever computer can access it.

On to the introduction to net.art reading. Some sections seem incredibly ambitious and others seem very prophetic. The first quote that I’ll pull from the introduction lists this as a specific feature of net.art:

Vanishing boundaries between public and private.

This seems very true and is currently being grappled with by artists from media not exclusive to net.art. Net artists, however, do have an obligation to consider whether their art ought to be made public or private. This facet raises some interesting questions about the very nature of net.art. If a work of net.art is made private (i.e. shown only in a gallery, despite existing at an undisclosed location on the web), is it still net.art? Does net.art depend upon a “public” level of accessibility? I would think this violates my criteria for what net.art is and would, therefore, still be considered net.art. However, this would violate one of the tenets of this introduction to net.art, so this was, at least, being considered and interrogated from the very conception of net.art.

The second quote, which I’ve pulled from the introduction, lists this as a specific feature of net.art:

[The] disintegration and mutation of artist, curator, pen-pal, audience, gallery, theorist, art-collector, and museum.

As we know, this hasn’t happened—at least not to my knowledge. There exists still in net.art the desire to have works recognized, written about (theoretically or otherwise), and it appears that distinguished digital-art websites (i.e. Rhizome, Turbulence) have taken the place of the museum with regard to net.art. So, disintegration no; mutation, yes.

Finally, let’s take a look at some questions raised by my tooling around with some early (and not-so-early) works of net.art. The first question that came to my mind while I was perusing these old “galleries” was: What happens to the art when the link no longer works? It seems as if the writers of the net.art manifesto foresaw the role things like bandwidth would play with regard to distribution and publicity, but it also seems as though they didn’t adequately prepare for the repercussions of things like broken links, a lack of server space, and improperly backed-up data. Coming across a repository of user-generated anecdotes and stories relating to “happier days,” I was saddened to see that the data was lost somewhere. Other times, the “art” (be it algorithm based or otherwise) would yield things like this:




Or this, the dreaded “404”:




One of the pieces that interested me most was a newly begun piece called “FUJI” (from the Turbulence website). It was of particular interest to me because of the break it signified between older, Web 1.0 works of net.art, and newer Web 2.0 works of art. Whereas the latter seemed entrenched in asking questions like, “what is the self in the digital realm? what is being in the digital realm? etc.” the newer works of net.art I encountered were more interested in playing with and investigating artifacts of the Internet age. Thus, FUJI is a project that melds a year’s worth of webcam images of Mount Fuji (culled from several webcams) together to create a sort of time-lapse.

This, however, by no means de-values the earlier works of net.art, but merely places them in their historical context. And, if anything, it validates the earlier works of net.art by signifying that, perhaps, those works elucidated the sorts of philosophic themes they were plumbing. And, of course, this is only based on a very brief, cursory survey of early net.art., so I am no doubt making broad generalizations.

Here are some pictures of FUJI:

RE: Digital Narratives

On to digital narratives. Of the five digital narratives that I read/experienced/navigated/etc. I found Six Sex Scenes and DAKOTA to be the most interesting to me; more on that later. The initial question that seems to need addressing with regard to these narratives is to their “conceptual framework.” Works like Six Sex Scenes seem to mimic the cognitive semantic map. In other words, the use of hypertext links allow for the user to navigate through the thoughts and intentions of the author in much the same way that the author would remember these events happening. In that regard, the conceptual framework of the pieces themselves is analogous to Bush’s concept of the “memex.” Rather than being scientifically-rooted (that is, they are not meant specifically for researching), these narratives are personal, autobiographical, and experiential. Works like Six Sex Scenes appear—whether artificially or not—to be autobiography, whereas works like DISTANCE (which asks, “Is technology a veil?”) try to represent—through narrative—the way in which the author has tried to navigate her own experience to long-distance, communication-based media. So, these digital narratives are capable of being autobiography and a great deal more.

Because these digital narratives run the gamut from autobiography to translation—or distillation—of experience, a question is begged of the reader: are these events really non-fiction? In other words, are these true experiences? In my experience, this question has been put to rest in the world of non-fiction. Currently, whether an expression/outshoot/love of postmodernism or not, I encounter people who have no problems with the embellishment that occurs when someone tries to write non-fiction. I believe that the lines between fiction and non-fiction are eroding and that there is no such thing as objectivity. On a tangent, if there were such a thing as objectivity, it would present itself in an incredibly fascistic manner to the writer of non-fiction; it would dictate their writing to a paralyzing degree.

That said, I see this play between fiction and non-fiction (which is most apparent in MY BODY, Six Sex Scenes, and DISTANCE) as a natural artistic offshoot of Internet phenomena like Wikipedia (or, perhaps, the other way around, as I believe many of these narratives pre-date Wikipedia). Such a website asserts that there is an “absolute truth” that can be achieved through labor and scholarship (the collective efforts of those people who wish to see “truth” achieved); in doing so, Wikipedia commodifies “truth.” What these artists do, then, is distort this premise by embracing subjectivity in their work (whether it be the hyperbolic, break-neck dialogue/monologue of DAKOTA or the fantastic, sensual writing in MY BODY) and thus allow their work to more closely represent “reality.” I think a better articulation is to say this: these artists embrace fiction in a way that makes their non-fiction works even more so. While the artists “manipulate their data,” they do so in a way undoubtedly reflects their relation to reality and thus achieves a closer approximation of their experience or narrative. Because these narratives are intentionally digital, Laporta’s question, “Is the virtual, real?” is especially relevant. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer; I equivocate.

Finally, there is one more aspect that I would like to touch upon. In redridinghood, I stumbled upon the artist’s “thesis.” It reads:

Does point and click interactivity destroy the story?

I think, to a certain degree, that it does. Take this hypothetical: someone is navigating redridinghood. They get to the point in the story where they are “supposed” to click on the correct window to further the story. This person, however, clicks every window but the correct window and gives up. The story, for this user, has effectively been destroyed (unless you want to make the case that this is the story, bold one).

Therefore, do the other texts we’ve read destroy or pervert the narrative? If I missed a piece of MY BODY, did I miss the point? I would think the artist who works with digital narratives intends for the user’s navigation to dictate the story, but works like DAKOTA show an artist who does not wish for the reader/viewer to control the flow and temporality of the piece. Thus, there appears to be conflict between whether the user should be allowed—or not—to dictate the movement of the piece.

Insomnia

For your (my classmates) consideration:

If you're at all interested in video games and theory, but have no place to discuss both in practice, I would suggest you take a look at this website:

Insomnia.ac

It is, without a doubt, the only place on the internet where one can find essays from Baudrillard and Nietzsche nestled up against video game reviews (ranging from the most recent Grand Theft Auto to 1990 Nintendo Famicom console games) and game-related commentary. I cannot recommend this site enough.