Here are a few short readings for my crit this Monday.
1st link is an article from rhizome that I enjoyed, especially where he is discussing the idea of defaults.
2nd link is the complete interview with kevin bewersdorf that I quoted in my slide show earlier in the semester.
3rd link is an excerpt from the artist statement of aids-3d, a duo that i've been interested in recently.
i'll also include 1 paragraph from mckenzie wark's 'a hacker manifesto', which i started reading but have yet to finish..
[128] Information expresses the potential of potential. When unfettered, it releases the latent capacities of all things and people, objects and subjects. Information is the place upon which objects and subjects come into existence as such. It is the plane upon which the potential for the existance of new objects and subjects may be posited. It is where virtuality comes to the surface.
And for good measure, a youtube video that has nothing to do with my work
I'm gonna be showing some found footage stuff i've been working on for crit next week, so I'm looking to give y'all some readings! Or perhaps viewings.
Here's a link to watch A Movie, which is damned near impossible to find anywhere.
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/3-9tCeFX0Eo/
I would apologize for the sheer obnoxiusness of the site, but I kind of like it.
Oh, look at this site too.
www.everythingisterrible.com/
Oh, and since it would only be appropriate to somehow bring Star Trek into this, check these out:
http://www.jandrewedits.com/
I love how the Star Trek closing theme is becomes this kind of punchline theme, used in a totally different context.
The video by Paul Chan I mentioned didn't actually have a long title. It' called "RE: The Operation" and is available at Video Data Bank. The nice thing about VDB is that you can go there and watch their whole list and archival collection in their space at SAIC. The bad thing about VDB is that purchasing a copy of something they distribute takes a lot of money.
The other video I mentioned is Johan Grimonprez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (on Art Torrents).
This weekend, my wife (Renée), son (Jasper) and I traveled a few miles southwest of Iowa City to the Kalona Fall Festival. Like Solon Beef Days or Hoover Days (West Branch), such near by celebrations are a reminder that Iowa City is not much like Iowa. All in all, it proved to be an enjoyable way to spend a cloudy Saturday afternoon.
Kalona, IA, hardly makes it on to the map, but it is noteworthy nonetheless as having large Amish and Mennonite communities. (To be accurate, the Amish live in a smaller community outside of Kalona). These two faiths evolved out of the Anabaptist religion (a splinter group of Christianity that believe in adults entering the faith through baptism, rather than infants being baptized into the faith). Both groups, to a varying degree, live a simple life with simple surroundings. Just on the short drive to the festival, we passed several horse-drawn carts. It was this odd juxtaposition of old world simplicity with more contemporary entertainment that made the festival such a fascinating place to be. For example, while walking through the Mennonite Historical Society’s museum I stopped to watch two elderly women with hair bonnets hand quilting. At the exact same moment I could hear outside a youth drum troupe playing along to Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like a Record). Across from the Mennonite Apple Butter stand and demo tent was a funnel cake and deep-fried Oreo vendor. Elsewhere, Mennonite children were watching from behind a wire fence a chainsaw artist sculpting something like an eagle out of a tree trunk (and the artist had “Art at Full Throttle” on his protective chaps). It was wonderful. It was bizarre.
But I left thinking about what the purpose of the festival was. Was it an opportunity for visitors to learn more about the history and the unique people of Kalona? Or was it just a fun weekend. I can’t help but think, since the Mennonite Historical Society had such a large presence, that part of their aim was to share their heritage. Yet, does it take chainsaw artists and dogs on treadmills to entice an audience to this space?
I don’t know. But later, after my stomach calmed down from the Oreos and after Jasper fell asleep still clutching the balloon from the festival, I got on the internet to learn more about the Mennonite and the Amish.
I was watching this documentary, Full Battle Rattle, on a slow Sunday. It shows the simulated Iraq that the US Army maintains here in America, in the Mojave desert. Quite interesting to look at, as performance art and theater. I'm not gonna review the whole film. It's on Instant Watch on Netflix if anyone is interested, quite neat. The part that I found quite odd was after a simulated attack on the foward operating base. Medics were treating simulated casualties on actors and a Chaplain was praying over an injured man that turned out to be a mannequin. The prayer the Chaplain gave was not at all indicative of the "false" nature of it, asking for help and safety for this "man".
I was watching this documentary, Full Battle Rattle, on a slow Sunday. It shows the simulated Iraq that the US Army maintains here in America, in the Mojave desert. Quite interesting to look at, as performance art and theater. I'm not gonna review the whole film. It's on Instant Watch on Netflix if anyone is interested, quite neat. The part that I found quite odd was after a simulated attack on the foward operating base. Medics were treating simulated casualties on actors and a Chaplain was praying over an injured man that turned out to be a mannequin. The prayer the Chaplain gave was not at all indicative of the "false" nature of it, asking for help and safety for this "man".
This week Rhizome published this interview with the creators of Processing. Some interesting stuff in there, "I don't intentionally constrain my work, but I always feel constrained by the limits of my mind. This is one reason I write software, to remove some constraints at the expense of others. I write software to draw millions of lines in a few seconds, to make thousands of calculations and decisions in a fraction of a second, to go beyond what my mind can imagine without its digital extension. Writing software makes it easier to work with systems and to imagine detailed networks – this is my love."
“One of the hottest events in town… The Moth is an evening of unashamedly old-fashioned storytelling…the performances are enthralling, funny and moving, with a typical New York intensity.”
- The Times (London)
Friday was the first local attempt to host The Moth in Iowa City. Chris Mortenson, a third-year graduate student in Photography, organized the event at Public Space One.
For the uninitiated, The Moth is a weekly, hour-long radio show broadcast on some National Public Radio affiliates. Since the inception and tremendous popularity of This American Life, nonfiction radio has experienced what may be its biggest resurgence since the advent of television.
The inaugural Iowa City Moth Night was a success in the eyes of its co-organizers and all of the attendees I spoke with. Five people told stories, including Josh Eklow and I from Intermedia Workshop, and approximately twenty-five people attended. The audience felt receptive to the stories, which ranged from funny college anecdotes to bittersweet personal revelations.
[image-Google search: storytelling]
The Moth’s format—people submitting their name to a pool from which storytellers will be randomly selected to tell 5-minute stories around a loose theme—is really inviting. Some participants are writers or experienced monologists while others are people who don’t work in the language arts and are not accustomed to formal storytelling. This variety makes the content far more interesting than a group made up of people from one field. The event has the potential to bring together people from truly disparate backgrounds and establish a unique level of intimacy.
The Moth’s mission statement is encouraging:
The Moth is dedicated to promoting the art of storytelling. We celebrate the ability of stories to honor the diversity and commonality of human experience, and to satisfy a vital human need for connection. We do so by helping our storytellers to shape their stories and to share them with the community at large. One goal of The Moth is to present the finest storytellers among established and emerging writers, performers and artists; another is to encourage storytelling among populations whose stories often go unheard.”
The last sentence, in particular, is refreshing. Living in a UNESCO City of Literature sometimes has an unfortunate effect on literary events--people take themselves too seriously! I can’t count how many times I’ve left Iowa City readings in disgust at the stuffiness. The Moth, however, has the potential to buck this trend and create a challenging, supportive and FUN storytelling event each month. All in all, The Moth Iowa City is off to an auspicious start.
Once I got home last night, I still had Katie's nonfiction piece in my head. Eventually, this lead me to my bookcase where I pulled out Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us. Forché wrote this collection of poems after working in El Salvador where she witnessed many human rights violations and eventually the country's 1979 coup d'état. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking little book that explores some similar topics as Katie's piece. Katie, if you haven't already read it, I'm happy to loan you mine. (Interestingly, Forché is also from Detroit.) The last line of this poem seems to wander into a similar place as where Katie's piece also took me.
The Visitor
In Spanish he whispers there is no time left. It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat, the ache of some field song in Salvador. The wind along the prison, cautious as Francisco's hands on the inside, touching the walls as he walks, it is his wife's breath slipping into his cell each night while he imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country.
If you were interested in Teresa's reading on game theory, you may also want to check out this article by Wendell Barry that we read last spring in the Art & Ecology course..."Faustian Economics: Hell hath no limits."
3am. Zero hour. Just got done making a T-Pain related blog. Can't sleep. Better turn on my Xbox and watch something instantly on Netflix. I guess I shall watch Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
Oh boy! A controversy in the art world. Yes, abstract paintings are not generally liked by people who don't study art, haha! My kid could paint that. They should've called this documentary that instead! Oh, wait, that was a documentary too.
Teri Horton, the film's hero is a trucker who found a painting in a thrift store for five bucks, and maybe, oh maybe it's a Pollock. I go to the thrift store a lot, but I've never found anything worth 25 Million dollars. I saw a lady on Antiques Roadshow on Thursday who had a blanket worth 35,000 dollars. One time I found a videogame that goes for 60 bucks used on Amazon, and I got it for 4 dollars. Does anyone wanna make a documentary about that?
Who is narrating this film? I like him. He's making this story seem very fun. And important. Important, but still fun.
Who is this documentary for? With references to CSI and such, it would seem to be talking to Joe Sixpack. Is it for people in the artworld, which seems to be the Evil Empire of this film? Probably not. I think this film seems to be made for people like me, with an interest in art, but also highly accessible documentaries, available for instantaneous streaming on a gaming console. Very stylized. They are making this documentary about a painting seem very fluid, fast, highly entertaining.
You know, Teri. You find treasures in dumpsters and thrift stores. These things can turn out being worth big money. You thought your found painting was your big find. You should've found a baseball card. They're less snooty.
Her son wants her to sell the painting. I find things at thrift stores that I could sell for a great deal. Maybe I will.
How funny that she's a long-haul trucker and she's in this Pollock controversy for the long haul.
These art world experts are being so glib in their attacks on science. I won't believe that their attitudes are common, as I've met quite a few art historians, and why would they study art history if no one is interested in advancing our understanding of historical art?
works by Samuel Beckett, Charles Broskoski, Harm van den Dorpel, Ida Ekblad, Thomas Galloway, Jodi, Tobias Madison, Ilia Ovechkin, Christopher Pappas, Hayley Silverman, Ola Vasiljeva, Damon Zucconi
I've posted a few PDF's in my Intermedia Folder (npietran) under Public. Here is a recent tid-bit that goes along with my readings and interests...
From:
A version of this article appeared in print on August 23, 2009, on page MM22 of the New York edition.
EXCERPT FROM:
THE ETHICIST
By RANDY COHEN
Published: August 18, 2009
A friend of mine was a tour guide in Alaska. He tells me that his boss planted a taxidermy moose and bear off in the distance. Apparently, the chances of seeing a live moose or bear on such an outing is about 10 percent, and no one wanted to disappoint the mostly nearsighted and elderly tourists. Deception — yes! Unethical? JANICE FISCHER, AUSTIN, TEX.
To arrange this ludicrous, if benign, contrivance to deliberately fool the clientele is a kind of lie and hence unethical. If during a tour, however, a shirtless Alec Baldwin happened to race through the clearing and some folks mistook him for a bear, a very handsome bear — he is a hairy man — so be it. The guide would have no duty to set them straight and could simply keep silent.
I just received this lecture announcement in my email from International Programs' listserve. Thought some of you intermedia-minded folk might be interested:
Joanna Demers, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Southern California, will present a lecture titled “William Basinski, Tape Loops, and Mourning” as part of the International Programs series “Taping the World: The Global Legacy of a Neglected Technology.” The lecture takes place on Tuesday, September 15 at 4 p.m. in room 101 of the Becker Communication Studies Building.
Demers specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular and concert music. Her work has appeared in Popular Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Social Science Research Network, and her monograph, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity won the 2006 Book of the Year award from the Popular Culture Association. Her next book, Listening Electronically: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
“Taping the World: The Global Legacy of a Neglected Technology” is a Major Project initiative of International Programs, funded by the Stanley-UI Foundation Support Organization. Professor John Durham Peters and Associate Professor Kembrew McLeod are co-directors of the project which will investigate the cultural, historical, aesthetic, and political imprint of tape recording as the single most important medium of sound recording in the last century.
Copyright has been on my mind lately, as I'm sure you know, from my comments surrounding the intellectual property issues I saw with Post Secret, as written about on this blog and in class. So when I logged onto Hulu, looking for the newest episode of the world's greatest drinking show, Three Sheets, and was offered a film called RiP! A Remix Manifesto, I figured I had nothing better to do for an hour and 26 minutes. Well, looking back on it, there were plenty of other things I could have done that would have been more worthwhile than watching this film, so, in an effort to derive some sort of benefit from that time not spent playing Xbox, I am writing this review.
I do like, in particular, that the film, having the word manifesto in its subtitle, actually does present a manifesto, first and foremost. It is this:
The one toe in, one toe out nature of the filmmaker's presence in the film kind of bugged me. Get in or get out, my man! I don't need to constantly know that Girl Talk is your favorite musical artist for you to tell me about Girl Talk. The fourth time Gaynor referred to Gregg Gillis this way, I nearly closed the window and gave up.
Somewhere in the middle of the film, the message gets a bit muddled. Gaynor takes up the cause of people sued by the RIAA for downloading songs using the internet. While this is certainly an interesting debate, I feel that Gaynor fell into a common trap for full-length documentaries: only having about 45 minutes worth of argument. Gaynor spends quite a bit of time dealing with these copyright infringers, but never notes that while his whole argument up to this point has been that creation is based on the past and that the past must not be controlled too tightly in order to allow for new things to be created, downloading a song and listening to it does not create anything, except for a fuller playlist on your iPod. There is a large difference between Gregg Gillis cutting up a song to form "the folk art of the future" and someone pirating something because they disagree with the copyright that supposedly protects intellectual property.
The "open source" nature of the film was fairly interesting, with Gaynor clearly marking clips that had been submitted and created by others.
The film ends in Brazil (or Brasil, as I prefer to spell it), where remixing has become a way of life, from DJing classes being taught in communities to keep kids out of favela-based gangs to the national government infringing on a patent in order to produce aids medication cheaply for all of its citizens.
This is the part of the review where I would complain that the film was only preaching to the crowd and will not likely change any copyright rules in America, which the film argues is what must happen to change the way the world thinks about copyright law. The film argues that copyright law has been written by and for by corporations, but doesn't offer any reason why THEY might want to change it. There must be some sort of evidence to show that opening copyright can actually make companies money. The films claims they are just in it for the money, something Disney and Warner and all their pals would probably not deny.
The film credits all samples contained there-in and encourages people to share it and remix it, implying a creative commons copyright that looks little something like this:
Now that I think about it, the film seems to advocate Creative Commons in practice, but only briefly mentions it and espouses a stance closer to CopyRiot.
