Web Cinema

After watching/reading/experiencing Boulevard by Peter Horvath, I wondered how it was much different than a movie trailer. Then I thought, how many movie trailers have I seen that have three screens and poetry? Probably zero, but the piece does have a trailer like feeling which turned me off at first because I wanted to see cinema done in way I had never seen it done before. As I experienced more and more of his work, each piece seemed to enrich and build upon the previous ones; therefore Horvath’s work seems to work better for me when analyzed in context as a group as opposed to individually.

Although Horvath’s work is very visually driven, I was interested in his use of sounds in his projects. The mood is quickly set, if not dictated by music in pieces like Boulevard, Tenderly Yours and Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects. In Boulevard and Tenderly Yours the music and voice overs are slow, sad and reflective whereas the music in Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects is first triumphant then eerie. By itself, the music in Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects would almost be happy and upbeat, but grouped with the images of war and destruction, the tone moves quickly from happy to frightening and sad. The soundtrack of Boulevard and Tenderly Yours on the other hand, fit perfectly with the images of isolated, confused and sad individuals lost in an isolated, confused and sad world. The text and voice over in these two pieces appear in incredibly strategic moments to not only assist in telling the story but to be apart of the story as well. For example, in Tenderly Yours the womans's voice disappears when the woman disappears.

Text in Triptych: Motion Stillness Resistance appears in the title while also acting as labels for the different looping video panels. Unless text appears in one of the semi-randomly generated videos, this is the only text that appears in the piece. It is enough however, to draw attention to how similar motion, stillness and resistance are to each other. In motion there is stillness, in stillness there is motion and in resistance there is stillness and motion, usually in conflict. This piece also uses video and text to expose the arbitrary nature of labels. Had he chosen something like: Nature, Culture and Society, I probably could have made an argument about how these made sense as well. At first I did not see the point in the random and endless looping of the video, but now I see it as relating to this idea of arbitrary labeling in relation to understanding the world.

As far as the other artists go, I had seen the work of YHChang before so I didn’t want to spend too much time talking about it. Unfortunately, the more I see of her work, the less I enjoy it. Mostly because much of the pleasure of Chang's work is derived from the element of surprise. The first time I saw Dakota, I thought the pacing and strange way not every word could not be quite read, was exciting and interesting. Also exciting and interesting were the words themselves, as they are often racy and as unexpected as the motion of the work. Then after seeing the same technique over and over in every piece, it gets less and less interesting. So in a way I see Chang’s collective works to function in the opposite way as Horvath’s collective works.

I will continue my search for additional web cinema this week and post them here as I find them.

I Want It All

In David Streitfeld's Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It, the saddest moment for me was the moment when he described one of my favorite places, Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, OR as an example of an entity that has been negatively impacted by the changing habits of book buyers. I love books. Physical, paper books. But I also believe that technology and the screen not only provide readers with exciting changes in how they can access books but to writers for creating new ones as well.

So as I read these articles I struggled to figure out how I should best resolve this kind of contradiction. I came to the obvious conclusion: I want it all. I want to get my news for free without having to worry about how the journalists and photographers are paid (for example the article linked up above), I want free access to music whenever I want on IMEEM, download songs for free on BitTorrent, to sell my books online, save money on text books, watch Family Guy, Arrested Development and The Office for free and when I want on Hulu and I want Boulder Bookstore, Powell’s, Bart’s CD Cellar and The Video Station to all stay in business.

Is it possible that some of the problems with having infinite choices is that a) we really believe it and b) we have a constant and misguided sense of entitlement to it? When (and I say when because I think this is inevitable) most physical stores go out of business, making way for more and more online markets, some of our choices as to where we can buy music, movies and books are taken away. Maybe the very reason why I find online media access so appealing (the infinite choices, or at least the illusion of such) is the same reason why I don’t want Powell’s to go under. I am so used to getting everything I want that it is unfathomable, unfair and frustrating that a choice could just be taken away from me. I, like David Streitfeld seems to be, am upset that physical marketspace is disappearing but don't for example want to give up my emusic account. The internet has spoiled us. With every dollar, we as consumers cast our vote for where we think goods and art should be purchased, so why can't we just get behind those votes?

What Anderson seems to be getting at in his intro of Long Tail is that art’s move to the online market is giving more choice to the consumer in what they are exposed to and experience as opposed to when there were only six channels and a handful of records. But what about having the choice between browsing, the physical experience of discovering an aura filled object and downloading code that is projected as Ulysses on your Kindle ? There is a clear distinction between physically browsing the ballroom of Boulder Bookstore or the blue room in Powell’s and clicking through titles on amazon. There is something so wonderfully human about physically browsing books, records and movies and I still want that to be available to me; but until I use my votes ($) in the physical world I think I would be selfish and unrealistic to think that I can have something that I only support in theory.

P.S. Ok so I am at work right now and our tech guy just showed me this cartoon on book technology on this gaming site that I thought I would share: Progress

Digital Poetry: Is it good or just a good idea?

Before I really begin my analysis of Stephanie Strickland's 1997 talk, Poetry in the Electronic Environment, I have to admit that there are very few digital poems that I have come across and have actually enjoyed. I know that it is for this reason that I am so fascinated with digital poetics-I see it as an exciting new challenge for writing. Granted, I have only been exposed to a limited amount of digital poems so I am speaking from a humble and somewhat inexperienced standpoint. Either way, I feel I have read/experienced enough digital poems to have formed an opinion and here are some examples of digital poems I am convinced by, or enjoy: Dakota by Young-hae Chang, Dim O'Gauble by Andy Campbell (and other poems on New River) and Lollipop Noose/Hangman (below) by Todd Seabrook.

I suppose I should define what I mean by 'enjoy' and 'convinced'. When I enjoy a poem, or any work of art it is because the work evokes a strong emotional response from me. By convinced I mean more of my intellectual response to the piece. In other words, if there is a small or absent emotional response to the work, I would like there to be an interesting conceptual aspect to it that stimulates me intellectually. Maybe I am a reader response critic when it comes to digital poetics...

In Dakota, I enjoy the pacing of the poem, the simple but strong visual impact that the music and motion that text makes and the lack of reader control. At the same time, I think the writing is the weakest aspect of the poem. In what other form of poetry or writing is it ever true that a reader can say the writing is weak but that the piece is still strong? This is where my dilemma, or my conflict with digital poetics lies. I guess this is why I constantly fight the urge to call digital poems, digital poems. They aren't just poems because poems are words and paper. Digital poems as Strickland details in Poetry in the Electronic Environment have the potential to be much more than that. She seems to take the stand that this is better and in one sense I agree with her but on the other hand, I don't. I agree that digitizing writing carries the potential for creating an intersection between art and text and even text and text that was not possible with just the page, which ultimately can be seen as 'better' than the page. At the same time, I have rarely seen a digital poem that contains writing that is as interesting as the piece is conceptually or technologically. Strickland says in her discussion of hypertext and poetry (keep in mind this was spoken in 1997):

"In general, I think one could say about contemporary hypertext poetry that radical innovation does not reside at the level of the alphabetic text, with the major exception of authors who are themselves programmers. For those using off-the-shelf products, the changes reside in how to structure and divide text and how to accommodate the powerful set of co-players the text has acquired, that make for on-screen reading experiences both more radically individual and more adventurous than page-reading."

It is the last sentence here that really interests me because she slips in that digitizing poetry can make reading more adventurous and radically individual. The potential for the adventurous and individual qualities of interactive textual art is definitely there, I will give her that. The question that keeps badgering me however is, is that what readers of 'poetry' are looking for? What are readers of poetry seeking? Are we interested in the mere idea of a digital poetic more than the actual works themselves? As a poet and a reader of poetry, to oversimplify, I am drawn to poems whose words are sonically pleasing, intellectually challenging and semantically interesting at the same time. I hold the same standards to digital poetics and maybe it is my ideas about this new art form that need to change in order to appreciate it more or perhaps, it is the art itself that needs to come a little further and better realize its full potential.

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.

Choice and Interactivity in the Flash Animation piece, RedRidinghood By Donna Leishman

When I viewed RedRidingHood by Donna Leishman another retold fairy tale came to mind, or rather a collection of them. That collection was Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber which retells fairy tales like Bluebeard and Little Red Riding Hood from a more progressive, feminist and contemporary culture perspective. Carter changes plot lines and characterization in order to comply with these agendas. She also plays with setting in a way that makes the time period associated with her fairy tales ambiguous and leaves the reader without historical context.

In Donna Leishman’s Flash narrative, RedRidingHood I see some of the elements Carter uses on the page also being utilized by Leishman, such as time/age confusion in the dream segments and most obviously, characterization and plotline changes. Of course some major differences in these two approaches is that Leishman’s medium contains music, is interactive which allows for multiple versions of the story, and it is the audience who decides which story line to pursue by clicking on textual and pictorial objects. But the main and most obvious difference is that Leishman is able to use very limited amounts of text and no speech to tell her story. Neither the page or traditional animation would be able to accomplish this video-game like 'choose your own adventure' storytelling in quite the same way. Furthermore, besides the interactive flash medium being, for lack of a better word, fun, it also adds a crucial complementary layer to the story that is being told.

I realize that there are quite a few original versions of the story but the one I will be referring to is the one in which the wolf swallows the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood whole and is then saved after a hunter comes by and splits the wolf’s stomach open freeing the two women. The hunter then kills the wolf by filling him with stones. As far as Leishman’s tale goes in comparison to the traditional Little Red Riding Hood story, the former humorously changes the wolf into a teenaged bad boy with wolf-like arms - a much more realistic threat to a modern day little girl than a wolf. One of the most fascinating plot changes comes at the end of the waking sequence (which is also always the ending for the whole story) in which Red is shown with a large belly ‘sleeping’ on the bed where the audience has just seen the wolf badly disguised as her grandmother. The utilization of Flash at this point allows the audience to roll their mouse over Red’s stomach to see that the wolf is inside her and in the fetal position. This medium again, allows for the ambiguity of what happened between the wolf and Red to be told without having to use any words. Because the picture of the wolf inside Red’s stomach looks like a fetus, one can easily infer that Red has either had sex with the wolf-boy and is now pregnant, or that she has simply eaten the wolf and he is now in her body. A final possibility is that she had sex with him and then ate him, but Leishman deprives her audience of such closure and I find myself not wanting it to end and wanting more (but in a good way). The whole situation is complicated by the “hunter” coming in and holding a gun to her head while she slowly opens one eye in an evil expression. I concluded that she was simply going to do to the hunter what she had already done to the wolf, whatever you choose to decide that was.


On the main page of RedRidingHood on eliterature.com the following is said about the work:
“The author quotes Roberto Simanowski's description, "'Little Red Riding Hood' from a feminist perspective? ... Leishman's rendition of Red Riding Hood is inundated with hybridizations of the traditional fairy-tale narrative: the wolf pre-existing as a picture in her diary, as a dealer at the 'flesh market,' an angel which does not stop to rescue her."

Leishman uses the interactive elements of flash in order to play with the ideas surrounding the importance of choices, free will and the consequences of the decisions one makes in life. This is an atypical approach to what is really a typical theme in the coming of age narrative: a young person makes a choice between A, B and C which can lead them to choices D, E, F, G, H, I and so on until an eventual outcome is reached. What sets Leishman's narrative apart from this is that the audience, misguided or not, feels some control over the character. At first I felt God-like as the person who can choose what happens to Red in her life, but then as I continued to play the piece over and over again making as many different choices as I could, I realized that in both Red’s waking and dreaming lives, the outcome never changes. At least in her dreams there are a variety of decisions that can be made to change what happens next, but the eventual outcome (the blank green screen with the endless sound of an alarm clock) is still the same in every dreaming section regardless of what road Red took to get there.

One argument that the story seems to be making and I do believe in fact that it is making several, is that choices in life, even in the total freedom that our dreams provide, are not only not as important in determining an outcome as we might like to think but also that we are so often faced with what look like decisions when the choice has really already been made for us by forces outside of our control. Like the end of the waking sequence, the beginning of the animation does not change and it is not until the audience has to choose between letting Red sleep and waking her up that any real decisions are made. If you choose to keep her awake however, that is really the only decision you as the audience will make in the whole experience. The piece leads the audience to believe that you have been apart of Red’s decisions up to this point since you had to click on some windows in order to get to your current point in the piece, but the reality is, those are the only choices the audience has in order to move on to the next frame. When the two choice are between a single set action or staying in one place forever, the choice begins to look less and less like a choice at all.

Click here for an Interview with Donna Leishman