Tinker Twain

My purpose for revising this blog from the 2/26/09 blog is two-fold. The first being that last week I was barely among the living with illness and second, the way our (Leta and I) sound project turned out is different enough from our original thoughts that I thought it best to explain it more accurately.

Us

To understand where how we ended up where we did, one must understand that Leta is a laywer and I am writer (she is also a drummer).

Our Process

The Texts

Our interest in creating a text driven sound piece still remains (as I mentioned in my previous and now deleted blog) in some kind of destruction and creation of text, physically, legally and figuratively. We first recorded ourselves reading The Tinker Law, a previously banned passage of James Joyce’s Ulysess, a passage from Mark Twains Tom Sawyer, and the U.N. freedom of expression law. Leta then thought it might be interesting to whisper these passages, so we did. It was creepy.

The Twain passage:

“I love you so and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart with your outrageousness By this time the dental instruments were ready The old lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom's tooth with a loop and tied the other to the bedpost Then she seized the c hunk of fire and suddenly thrust it almost into the boy's face The tooth hung dangling by thebedpost now But all trials bring their compensations” (Twain)

was found by searching for the word “love” in the public domain google books version of Tom Sawyer and chosen because of the strangeness of the dental instruments phrase. Mark Twain’s novel was chosen because the banning of Twain novels is so well known and wide spread. We chose Ulysses for the same reason. The Ulysses passage: “Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft, soft, soft hand. I am lonely here. Oh, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me (Joyce, 49) was chosen by me as it’s one of my favorite Ulysses passages but also because it was banned (most likely because it was seen as pornographic). The laws were chosen by Leta (she’s the lawyer) and both deal with freedom of expression and creativity.

The Sounds

Our first editing job was to infiltrate the whispered texts of the laws with the whispered texts from the banned books. We took the actual texts of the laws and the banned books and carefully pulled out words from the banned books then placed them carefully into the freedom of expression laws. Laws can aid in the creation (or more specifically the protection) of art and expression but laws like the Tinker law actually can destroy these freedoms. By inserting previously banned texts into these laws, I see this as a chance for art and expression to infiltrate law instead of law infiltrating and impacting expression.

Our goal then became that every sound in our sound piece would be made from our original recordings of sound. They still of course had to do with the destruction or creation of text. The sounds that made it into the final version are: a lighter, a typewriter, encyclopedias being dropped and the sound of Leta writing on a sketch pad with a pencil. We altered these sounds using Audacity, some even developed a kind of beat. These were layered over the whisper/text tracks to form the project.

The following are some sound pieces that are similar and/or influential to our piece:

Cornelius Toner

Text Sound Compositions on UBU

If you can't beat them, join them...Then beat them

A Discussion of The Yes Men’s Methods

After watching The Yes Men, Derrick and I were discussing the film and I was surprised to hear him voice skepticism over their culture jamming methodology. I was surprised because this was coming from the Adbusters reading (see his comment on my last post....) man who prides himself on once being called an 'urban hippie.’ His anti-capitalist heart seemed primed and ready to be swayed by The Yes Men’s agendas and methods, but alas it was not. Why? His blog will no doubt contain more details, but what I gathered from his argument was that he is skeptical of people who use hack methods that are hypocritical. For example, buying boxes of McDonald’s food, supports one of the corporations The Yes Men are attempting to expose. Another example is that of the dress shirt that Andy purchases at the thrift store in preparation for the Australia job. As you have probably guessed by now, I brought up my discussion with my dear friend Derrick Mund not to call him names, but to disagree with him.

First, I believe that hypocrisy can be excused in the name of irony, satire and the exposure of other (especially worse or more harmful) hypocrisy. I realize that sounds rather hypocritical, but I believe that the overall positive impact that The Yes Men have on their audience, the world and the targeted organization(s) outweighs the detailed wrongs in their methodology.

Second, it makes sense to fight fire with fire. In other words, it makes sense to challenge the leaders of the WTO and other organizations by infiltrating and becoming part of their system. These leaders are not going to listen to an urban hippie talk about their role in world starvation and paid slavery caused by unfair trade and globalization. Correction, an urban hippie would never even be granted an audience with these leaders in the first place, forget the listening part. The WTO knows there is dissent among the citizens of the world in regard to their policies; therefore, anyone attempting to challenge them outside of their niche would not be surprising and would likely be written off immediately. When you are challenging people who are so used to only listening to people just like them, pretending to be one of them to push your agenda is creative, innovative and most importantly, effective. Nothing proves this more than the first conference in Europe that The Yes Men hacked in which nobody from the audience seemed to notice Andy’s strange presentation. The same outcome occurred even with the absurd Finland slavery phallus presentation. He and these presentations were in context, in a medium that framed as legitimate, so who were the audience members to question the legitimacy of the WTO representative? Luckily in the latter case, questions were asked and The Yes Men got the exposure they wanted.

Finally, the bottom line here is that by using their own flawed methods, The Yes Men expose the WTO’s flawed methods and this is clearly effective. Effectiveness is key and in this case the moral implications of this effectiveness is more important than minor moral inconsistencies in methodology. What is one sweatshop T-shirt and $100 at McDonald’s compared to worldwide media exposure of one of the root causes of the problems? I do believe that individual social responsibility is important and can undoubtedly make a significant impact on the world if large scale participation ensued. I think that would be fantastic but even then, there will be hypocritical elements to your cause. Unless you have removed yourself from Society as we know it, you are immersed in, rely on and survive because of the system that you are trying to challenge and improve.

So Derrick, I think you are an idealist and to be honest we need more of you. In the mean time, we have people like The Yes Men- hypocrites who make an impact.

A Spectre is haunting the World-the Spectre of Hackerism

When I first started reading McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, my brain first recalled the anti-capitalistic Sociology courses I took in college and then moved on to publications like Adbusters, before I came to the obvious conclusion that I have of course heard all of this before. But Wark seems like a well educated (or well knowledged as he would likely prefer) and intelligent person who knows enough about economics, Marxism in particular, that led me to believe that he is clearly not writing in a vacuum. Marx and Engels are present in Ward’s manifesto and the two works are in clear dialogue with each other in what seems almost like an updated (technological replaces industrial) version of the Communist Manifesto.

Although there were arguments I found to be compelling (though as I said before, arguments I have heard before) such as his comparison of offices and factories, education and imprisonment, it was hard for me to take this manifesto too seriously. Maybe that was Wark's point. The entire abstraction section is written in abstractions which is absurd if not funny and really, there are very few concrete moments in the entirety of the first 59 points that I read (which makes the reading tedious and often confusing). Sentences like the following cannot have been written for the primary purpose of being understood:

“They must become the means of coordination of the statement of a movement, at once objective and subjective, capable of connecting the objective representation of things to the presentation of a subjective action.”

The language throughout the manifesto is clearly not directed at an uneducated audience which actually makes the content and the arguments of the manifesto more interesting. Here is a manifesto that is arguing for information to be truly free as it calls for an end to privileged ownership of information, and yet one has to be extremely privileged in order to access the information provided in this manifesto. They must have been provided with the means to obtain education, advanced literacy access to a computer with an internet connection and enough time to read it. The manifesto does however, come around again and respond to this contradiction. Wark argues that information is like any other commodity-until the larger economic inequality problems are solved, information, like food or money, will be distributed unequally. The manifesto is self conscious that it is a part of this inequality and perhaps uses that contradiction, paired with its absurd style, to draw attention to that problem.

As an artist/writer/whatever, I of course was drawn in by the representation section of the manifesto.

“All representation is false. A likeness differs of necessity from what it represents. If it did not, it would be what it represents, and thus not a representation.”

Again this is not a new argument and it is and has been applied to language. Words are not things alone, they point to other things, they represent. Even in the attempts of concrete poets like B.P. Nichol whose words appear to simply exist and not represent anything else, words always point to something else. And those words, those representations are a socially constructed phenomenon that we all share and use to communicate, to express ourselves, to exchange information. Yet, we still try to control and privatize it. This relates back to Wark’s discussion about the absurdity of owning shared information, especially now that information is as much as if not more of commodity than anything else.

Finally, I felt like Wark was actually helping artists by explaining the societal factors that influence why we cannot simply provide our work for free. It is not the individual’s fault but Society’s. Our hands our clean, what a relief.