In and Out of Time: Video Art Symposium.

The Symposium which took place on Saturday at Atlas in regards to the Video art exhibition currently going on at the BMOCA brought some interesting speakers and topics. To my misfortune I missed the lecture on Jeremy Blake which supposedly was very interesting. Instead I made it for the lecture on “Looking at Music” (currently an exhibition at the Moma) from Barbara London who is the Associate Curator of the Department of Media at the Moma. Then Chip Lord who was of the 60’s and 70’s video/media group Ant Farm, Gary Emrich who is a former CU grad working in video art and teaching at RMCAD, followed by video artists and CU professors Dan Boord and Luis Valdivino, and finally Steve Seid who worked with the San Francisco Center for Experimental Television in the 60s. It was interesting to attend the symposium for me to begin to get an idea of the history of video art but also to see the aesthetic differences occurring within its world; ultimately I felt I was trying to understand other aesthetic ideals rather than relating to them from my own.

Of the different speakers, I was very intrigued by what Barbara London had been working to curate and the aspects of early music videos as being video art or the reverse video art as the music video (and walked out with an extreme urge to remix Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’). Although she was not an incredibly strong speaker she brought some interesting ideas to the table to define video art as a medium but also helped firm my understanding of its history. The same falls in line for Chip lord, but in regards to the work which Ant Farm was producing this is where I first began questioning the aesthetics of video art – both of my own personal aesthetics for what I appreciate in video but also theirs. Time is a factor here though, that being that they were working in the 60s and 70s on the forefront of video as art, but still I felt uneasy as to whether what they had done was video art or maybe performance… and was it good or were they just there during its start. To counter my thoughts on this maybe I do not have a fully developed aesthetic for video art and am to warped by our modern media culture which for video art, as they say, stands on the shoulders of giants… if you would in any way refer to them as giants. Then comes Gary Emrich, who I was not impressed by but I must admit to being annoyed by his attitude in the presentation which I felt was, oh, rather cocky. So, I was turned off by this man who seemed to think of himself as something ‘hot’ (my perception/outside opinion – he could be a wonderful person… in person) but I was also turned off by his work at BMOCA even before seeing him and couldn’t help but think of it as being a Nam June Pak rip off – but (I’ll try to justify him) really I suppose it is hard not to draw upon the one superstar and the pioneer of video art as a medium – and by this I’m referring specifically to his display at BMOCA, that of 3 small televisions lined up next to one another. Ok, but the guy has an obvious background in video art with his father having been a cinematographer and him currently being the video art prof at RMCAD – and he’s using video art as a method for storytelling and activism which are both rarely incorporated in my own work, so again we’re back to the question of aesthetics. His work at BMOCA is quite different than his other work and to me it had a much greater feeling of composition than did any of his other pieces, and in terms of video as collage his new piece began relating to me but there was something missing… something very unfulfilling in the end. We then moved onto Dan Boord and Luis Valdivino, who were entertaining to watch introduce their films even though they hardly did that – they seemed like an odd performance act. With them though, my aesthetic taste was really called into question but also opened up and elaborated upon (am I apart of a group of new video artists being born who just want to make video art an offshoot of Hollywood cinema? Am I so shallow and diluted that production value is the basis for my judgement? I’m not saying that production value is not important to consider but as the defining point of aesthetic appeal, I’m hoping not…). Maybe it was the humor in their first piece that broke the bad taste in my mouth, but it was the piece regarding Jack Kerouac that made me appreciate their kind of documentary-esque approach to video art and their incorporation of the small production aspects into their work that I began to appreciate. Reflecting back to Emrich, I may have taken in his work a little more harshly than I thought but he still didn’t bring an aesthetic pleasure to his video work like these two. None the less, all of the aesthetics as to what the content of video art is to be had been very different than my own, but my aesthetic for video is still developing – I know I do not share the same tastes as these artists but now have them to consider in the creation of my own work – no more overly abstracted strictly collage based pieces… The final speaker was Steve Seid, who brought with him a typed essay to read to us while flipping through a powerpoint… a Symposium on video art and all he has is an essay and powerpoint… He spoke of some very interesting things which occurred in video art in the 60s and 70s but they were ultimately rather obscure. They did present me with an idea of the shoulder which I stand on though – hand built synthesizers and the beginning of live video performance – that being video manipulated as it went out on the air (even though he made it sound as if most likely no one was watching it). His images did spark my curiosity but I was disappointed not to be able to see a version of their video work or even hear some of the effects created by these hand made synths…

I made it through his lecture although a good deal of people had left during it… And walked out with my aesthetic taste to consider – the work done in the 60s and 70s are the shoulders we stand upon, namely Nam June Pak, but also Ant Farm and the SF Center for Experimental Television. But content wise I do not think like the documentary type pieces nor imagine things similar to the psychedelic explorations of the Experimental Television center – and think video art is much greater than what Emrich creates; I am impressed with the direction Jeremy Blake has gone in but am not about to begin where he left off…

writing is music (spooky poetics)

In some ways their consciousness works differently,
one high frequency and one low frequency,
a streamed numeric sequence,
what holds them together is the machinery of culture.

We are embarking on the first steps toward transforming the species.

A relation between a determinate and an indeterminate,
outside of time,
there is only the moment of thought,
and every story leads to another story.

Another story to another story,
core myths from the binary opposition,
a phonetics of graphology,
I have to flip into sampler.

It was paved over and made into a co-op,
a world of constantly evolving networks,
figure out different ways to create,
while the notion of the avant garde becomes obsolete.

The outside world crushing you with media bombardment.

A series of events based on indeterminancy,
without resorting to tired vanguard poses,
figure out different ways to create,
bypass the notion of an authority.

DNA sequencing to
telepresent robotics to
nano-engineering to
space flight;

We now exist on an evolutionary scale.

Nets and bets,
tasks and masks,
codes and modes,
it just all flows.

Parallel actions occurring simultaneously in separate spatial dimensions but also on separate temporal planes.

Topic to topic,
culture to culture,
website to website,
thought to thought;

Situationist style generative psychogeography.

I flip the script and float,
taking our own alienated consciousness,
recombining them to create new languages,
creating seamless interpolations between objects of thought.

Double movement,
binary stratification,
transience of meaning;
Encoding.

Skewing the sciences of perception. Seeing sound hearing vision.

Absence and presence,
form and function,
sign and signified,
text and textuality.

A theater of networks,
marking and registering simultaneity,
representing the space between dreams,
exploring ideas of synchronicity.

Home is where your cell phone is,
while a logic of dispersion creates the new gathering spaces,
visual crafts extend our sense of telepresence,
and cipher the traffic of plural meanings that bombard us at every moment.

The beginning. That’s always the hard part. This outcome, that conclusion.

In some ways their consciousness works differently,
one high frequency and one low frequency,
a streamed numeric sequence,
what holds them together is the machinery of culture.

We are embarking on the first steps toward transforming the species.

A relation between a determinate and an indeterminate,
outside of time,
there is only the moment of thought,
every story leads to another story.

(Selections from Rhythm Science by Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid)

Promotion By-Pass

Digital Video for Remix Culture – Collaboration between myself, Christina Song, and Cassie Mckeown.

Special Thanks to Alex King and Mito Media for allowing us to incorporate some of their footage within the video as well.

Détournement is the Method of the Message

Give praise to the Situationists. The grandfathers of our modern day counter-culture – graffiti, culture-jamming, and the remix. I should probably approach this from a more neutral point of view for academic purposes and not to mention the way Guy Debord writes (with hope its only the translation…) but there is something extremely exciting about the premise of Détournement.

You could say that the 20th century was the beginning of modern man, it brought great war, tremendous prosperity, and innovation on all levels at speeds never before thought possible. We have yet to truly distinguish ourselves in the 21st as being something other than the continuation of their successes, that’s debatable and surely there is time for that later. It greatest accomplishment, which made it the powerhouse it was other than being later in time than previous centuries, was the industrial revolution whose fruition really become apparent in the first 20 years. That said one thing we did not account for, and why would the capitalist mindset even provide time for its consideration, was the psyche of modern man in such a world. It seems to me that this may be the subconscious, if you will, origin of the Situationist International and Guy Debord. Sure, there were the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Expressionists whose ideologies must have had influence upon them. But it was the world, the modern man, the production, the advertisements, the boring walls, and the stereotypical. The desire to slap others awake and say “look how fucking boring this is!” Insert Détournement, an idea to subvert the Pop and the commercial and inspire one to question “why?” Through the daily life of modern man we are barraged by the propaganda of the machine we have created working full circle to hold us down. It is the act of changing the message that catches the imagination and inspires innovation but also awakens one to the emotionless cycle they travel through daily.

It is no difficult jump to see the present day version of such tremendous yet underground thought. Graffiti culture may relate more to the ideals of the Situationists at this point in time than the mindset of the early 80’s graffiti artists bombing train in inner city New York. We hardly even need to justify the relation to Ad-Busters and the whole of culture-jamming. The Remix culture stands not far either pushing for originality in creation through the incorporation and re-appropriation of modern culture in an effort to redefine and re-imagine. The remix artist may be the culmination of the objective side of Détournement, taking and recreating often with more artistically open messages than the original entailed but always relating to the original yet distinctly different. It is the culture-jammers that carry on the Détourned political ideology and passion. While the graffiti or now more properly defined street art world act as the public artist working against the dullness of the modern landscape. These acts carry out the mission of Détournement, for even in the new millennium we are the prisoners of our own creation and mustn’t forget the emotion of daily life.

That said, the horrible genius of modern society is its adaptation to adversity. Where the Situationists may have helped inspire the radical acts in Paris in 1968, in present day the struggle is twice the difficulty. Where once counter-cultures where pushed away and feared for their different views, they are embraced in present day as another market to sell. It is the brilliance of the modern world, make the counter-culture consumer-culture. As hard as the street artists, culture-jammers, and remix artists attempt to stand against the dreary sight of over produced, over advertised, thoughtless culture creating the stereotypical, boring, and emotionless the more excited people are to include it and dilute it into the mass until the threat is no more. The Détournement is Détourning the Détourners. The guises of the modern system make you expect to see someone countering the mass in such a way that it is an included paradigm as if just another aspect of the algorithm that predicts a stereotypical life.

Response to the work of Timothy Weaver

To preface my critique of his lecture, theory, and work I think it is key to note his background – having studied microbiology and bio-chemistry in his “past life” before beginning his career in the arts. He received his MFA in Sculpture at the University of Colorado and has since progressed on into the world of digital media while teaching at the University of Denver.

With a rather rich and unique background, Weaver certainly brings interesting and new perspectives to the arts as well as a wealth of knowledge on the scientific level. With such a background he has been able to develop several very intriguing ideas to explore within art utilizing his technical expertise. These thoughts are of the biological narrative, that being the untold story or history expressed through species, environments, and even enzymes. He spoke of trying to finding new ways to tell the narrative but it seems that largely his work finds new narratives to tell if not even producing a new narrative. In his efforts to express these narratives he is also exploring and helping to develop new ways of interpreting data, for instance turning sonic data from proteins and converting it into midi information to be an aspect in the audio portions of his work. This data combined with pieces of research explore narratives from the extinct relations to homo sapiens and their difficultly living in the past, the migration pattern of the monarch butterfly, to the extinction of species of birds with the combined exploration/appreciation of the ‘hylaea’ or ancient forests.

These works present theories and progress the possibilities of digital media through his research and incorporations. His work as a whole though does not convey the same impacts as his theory though… Regrettably I found myself disappointed in his work after listening to his theory, his writings are overly complex for what he is trying to account for, and all the while the tools and resources he uses to develop his work bring great excitement. The digital work seemed all rather hollow. And I must point this out – in his piece “Homounculous” he was using an audio loop out of garageband. Maybe its hypocritical of me to highlight that being such a proponent of re-appropriation that I am, but to me there wasn’t much effort to make it his own past the generic output of the audio source. I was extremely intrigued in his thought on genetic life and death as well as its relation to culture but these ideas simply do not come through in his work.

This is not conclusive and with hopes our discussions with him today should set my opinions.

Drama of a Remix Culture

At the turn of our century, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré … pointed out that what was being discovered was not new THINGS but merely the new RELATIONSHIPS between things already existing.

Nam June Paik, Art and Satellite, 1984

I actually just had to read this for another course but found it to also be incredibly pertinent to both this discussion on “open culture” as well as to the problem of properly defining “remix culture.” As for what kind of overall culture we exist in, and maybe blind or apathetic, Lawerence Lessig may be so inclined to describe as a “police state” and a “controlling culture.” This is without regard to other issues like the Patriot Act or the Department of Homeland Security. Rather the rights to our intellectual property which we pertain and what we may obtain, or as Lessig might describe as a world complicated by lawyers. So in such a world where the copyright stands as a symbol of complete protection from everything else and Mickey Mouse is the untouchable but ever controversial icon of control and lawsuits, what happens in the digital age where everything has already been copied several million times? The idea itself is certainly not obsolete and through things such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and groups like the RIAA, who are working to prosecute people breaking copyrights online, we are witness to the more conservative approach in intellectual property and the their determination. They are out patrolling the internet and tracking IP traffic in an attempt to establish what they see as being a safe environment where their work is protected and cannot be stolen, copied, or remixed. On the other side stand the proponents of “free culture,” where in a sort of anarchist view of the world they feel that everything should be free for them to have, contribute, and distribute. So cold war.

It is not truly a battle of Left versus Right or really Right versus Wrong, as Lessig likes calling it, but really varying opinions on how the internet should be ruled within our economic system plus the additional wild west factor. Personally, I am completely for “free culture” and do not think for a minute that the internet should be ruled or controlled, am zealous about the possibilities of the remix, and feel that the internet should be motivated as an intellectual forum for further advancement in the arts and sciences as well as general education. Obviously not a perfect world though, and truly in our capitalist system such an ideal might ultimately destroy the life which allows me the ability to explore, create, and share as it stands. Needless to say, complete “police state” control is in no way acceptable and is ultimately extremely harmful to the possibilities and progress of the internet and the act of creativity as a whole. Art is on all levels a public act, this being acknowledged, the possibilities that the internet has opened through constant and opened connectivity have only begun to be realized. Its almost to easy to say ‘thankfully there is Creative Commons.’ And others too, who stand a little more in the middle of the debate, retaining the rights to intellectual property but opening it up to the creative world in an effort to share and enhance. The difficult aspect to these organizations is that they are still up and coming and largely unheard of while really who doesn’t know about the RIAA or at least what they do? The balancing point is ultimately intellectual property which embraces the technology through Creative Commons or Copyleft. It is unfortunate that ultimately should everything be free and open authorship may be lost and vice versa if everything is filtered and controlled the creative acts will diminish.

It is particularly entertaining, though, that truly this is not a new topic to be discussed and has been pushed in our face nearly a century ago. The work of Duchamp and the Dadaists put this very controversy at our feet, with works of art such as L.H.O.O.Q. from Duchamp in which he had simply re-appropriated an image of the Mona Lisa and drawn a on a mustache. Obviously nothing has really been solved since then, other than the endless debate over his readymades, and is now truly kicking down the door with anticipation for a resolution. In the midst of the struggle though digital art is truly beginning with cut, copy, and remix as key terms to its manifesto of love for all art but with a desire find “new relationships between things already existing.”

In my own work, I have only begun to explore these possibilities. I feel most successfully in my remix film Oblique, but in all honesty everyday the possibilities seem to expand exponentially… Programs (like MIT’s Processing) which only arrived on my plane of view a year ago seem like old news. From my point of view it seems that I am growing with what maybe the second generation of digital artists, and the gears are turning ever faster and possibilities ever further. In appreciation and excitement for this, we must remember

…We can say that the “work in movement” is the
possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous
invitation to indiscriminate participation … the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work tobe completed. He does not know the exact fashion in which his work will be concluded,but he is aware that once completed the work in question will still be his own. It will notbe a different work, and, at the end of the interpretative dialogue, a form which is his
form will have been organized, even though it may have been assembled by an outside
party in a particular way that he could not have foreseen. The author is the one who
proposed a number of possibilities which had already been rationally organized,
oriented, and endowed with specifications for proper development.

-Umberto Eco, The Poetic of the Open Work

CODE Remix (Flusser+DISTANCE)

Ok, so I’ve finally got this up… I was really hoping to have binary information up for the images but unfornately after getting pages and pages of code it crashed dreamweaver several dozen times. After trying to do everything by hand and freezing a computer I’ve finally given up. I really don’t understand why using the code as text would still mess with everything so much but whatever, I’ll save it for later investigations. Anyway here is my alternate version, hopefully still enjoyable…
P.S. be sure to role over the images…

processing

Routing Link

Borges and I (+Gabriel Remix)

Assignment: Remix “Borges and I” so that it becomes “your” short work of pseudo- autobiographcal fiction.

My life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, and years ago I tried to free myself of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity. Little by little, I am giving over everything; besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive. Like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; perhaps because what is good belongs to no one. I am quite aware, through perverse custom, that all things long to persist in their being. Perhaps mechanically now, I shall remain to say that ours is a hostile relationship, it is no effort for me to confess I recognize myself less. Falsifying and magnifying things, but the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. Those games belong to Spinoza, but his pages cannot save me. If it is true that I am someone, I walk through the attributes of an actor in a vain way, but not in myself. The laborious strumming from the mythologies to the language and to tradition look at the arch of an entrance hall of an exaggeration. Not even valid pages contrive this literature that justifies me. I live and I shall have to imagine other things; I do not know but go on living to have achieved one thing.

Exercises in style

If, then…

If I hadn’t been out at midday while the weather was so fair then I would have not been crammed into such small quarters of the bus with so many strangers. If I hadn’t taken the S bus out of convenience, though, then I would not have seen such a peculiarly looking young fellow with such a long neck and small head. Although, if he had not put up such a fuss at his neighbor for stepping on his toes (he assumed with purpose), I would then have paid no attention. Of course if there were more buses in circulation during such moments of congestion then the bus would surely not be as full nor the young mans feet trampled. I think if he also hadn’t been wearing such an absurd hat with a plaited cord rather than a ribbon, then his neighbor might have given slightly more respect and been more apologetic. Certainly if the young man had more confidence too he would not have cowered away so quickly from his callous neighbor rather then fleeing the confrontation for the first available seat.

If I hadn’t seen the strange young fellow again not two hours later, though, then I would not have thought twice of the experience on the bus or let it take space within my memory. This brief second passing would not have occurred if I hadn’t been passing by the Cour de Rome in the front of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and I would then have not been witness to his friend who had taken it upon himself to help the young man with his sense of fashion. If he hadn’t purchased such a cheap over coat then the buttons would have been raised to bring the lapels closer together, which his friend advised he have mended straight away. I thought it a shame though, if he had been a better friend then he would have told him to get rid of that frivolous hat.

*Based upon the book Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau.