Unlearn Me

I was all set to write a blog that discussed the first rule to remix: start with rich source material, end with a rich resulting project. Funkhouser however, was good enough to address my concerns at the end of a fifty page discussion that focuses on randomly generated syntax and all but ignores the presence of human generated diction. Thankfully he acknowledges this problem of "randomly" generated textual quality that seems obvious when comparing poems composed with Kafka's language and poems whose words were created by combining random syllables.

Obviously the Kafka poems are much better if approached from a purely literary standpoint, which Funkhouser would advise me not to do. I found myself asking, then how am I supposed to approach the work if not from the standpoint of a poet? Of course this confusion explains our circular debate in class over linearity and nonlinearity, and our fruitless though desperate attempts to ground analyses of digital writing theory in metaphors related to already existing art forms. Here is another analogy that is very Boulder-esque. When I was a snowboard instructor (yes I was) it was much more difficult to teach students who had been teaching themselves for a few days than students who had zero experience with the sport to begin with. With the the three day students, we embarked down a pedagogical road of unlearning and unteaching that proved over and over again to be more frustrating than learning and teaching. The same could be said about teaching literature but especially poetry to undergrads here at the University of Colorado. In the paraphrased words of my own teacher, Noah Eli Gordon "they have been taught that poetry is a secret code in which we the teachers have the decoder ring." I spend an immense amount of time teaching students to approach language as a material used to constuct an artform that can be "solved" but should also be experienced, the way a painting or a roller coaster (Joshua Clover's favorite comparison) is experienced. Anyway, I think the analogy is clear: I believe studying digital poetics would be easier if a) one had little or no experience in reading poetry/literature or b) as we talked about last week, poetics when it comes after digital needs to be redefined and thought of, as Funkhouser seems to believe, as something completely other than poetry. So the question I am left with at the close of Funkhouser's chapter 1 is, and excuse the Carrie Bradshaw ending but, how do we unlearn?

Holy Epigraphs

Loss Pequeno Glazier not only shamelessly quotes himself in his book Digital Poetics, but preceding each chapter he includes up to four epigraphs! Sometimes, they even appear mid-section of text. My first and only thought on the matter was that he had to pad the book with the epigraphs for the same reason he had to pad it with the history of the internet, and two pages charting (literally) who was mentioned more as a master hypertextist. There was (and is) just not an abundance of material to work with when discussing digital poetics. The experience of reading this book was frustrating in part because rather than Glazier facing this head on from the beginning (he does tackle it at the end), he padded his book with epigraphs and seemingly irrelevant material. In his defense, some frustration originates from this book being a decade old (Lycos!?, wallpaper!?), which is a long time in digital time.

My frustrations aside, I found parts to be interesting, useful and surprisingly helpful to understanding some new digital poetics I encountered this week via several fantastic digital writing submissions for SpringGun (so exciting!). The overwhelmingly prevailing trend in digital poetics to favor form over content has often left me wanting more from this genre of writing; however, with Glazier's help I am beginning to see why 'poetics' is misleading and why this trend is necessary (for now). He writes, "...e-poetries, which show characteristics of Futurism's concern with the machine, the procedures of Oulipo, the multi-media events of Fluxus, and the material innovations of contemporary meta-semantic innovative poetries, substantively demonstrate that we are well past wondering when an electronic poetry will appear: e-poetry has arrived. Indeed, e-poetry affirms that it is the poet who is at the front lines of writing in the electronic medium" (Glazier 126). While reading this book and simultaneously experiencing work like Mez Breeze's ":TERROR(AW)ED PATCHES", a video screen shot of real time google wave collaborative writing, I finally accepted that the material of digital poetics is the writing. Although in Breeze's piece the actual displayed language of this work is both rich and beautful, the material, the coding, software, keyboard, internet, digital video etc. is the writing. Jerome McGann wrote, "Poetical texts operate to display their own practices." This idea is essential not only to understanding the showcasing of materials that favor form but also to understand the self referential, self conscious language that often accompanies digital poetics.

What I have wanted from digital poetics is an art form that matches its title: one part digital, one part poetics. In other words I always wanted a beautiful poem made more fascinating by code or another digital element, instead of the other way around. Honestly, I still want that but I do believe that by beginning to understand the theories behind a digital poetic, I am able to appreciate the genre as something that is not two parts (poetic and digital) but as more complicated and conceptual than that (digetic?). Yet by rooting digital poetics so deep into its material, it often moves it into the realm of strictly conceptual; and although I am interested in conceptual art, I am also excited to see how electronic literature can (like other conceptual poetic movements have) remain rooted in its form and materials while beginning to move away from the conceptual and toward the experiential.

Updated slice of my project for Thursday

Here is a small but hopefully representative slice of what I have been working on. Integrating text into video is one of the most frustrating and difficult challenges I may have ever encountered in art. That sounds like an exaggeration when I write it out like that but I think I mean it. This snippet is similar to my last sample but the time it took me to get here was substantial. I remixed the Wikipedia text for elevator use as source material for the text. All materials are found:

DJ Spooky's iPhone app - like a Dj mixing board (in beta)

See his video on it: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=190803035900

IT CONCERNS

A Remix in Response: http://www.z-site.net/copyright-notice-by-pz/

IT CONCERNS

perhaps-innocent students have been misled into thinking
about me.

These people are the reality of years,
of "trespass" work.
I wish all will remain so for many many years.
I own all
I insist upon deriving property.

You may use words as you see fit,
as if you owned them,
you can remove all worth
while people who want, do.


Procedures I insist upon,

I urge you on Louis Zukofsky, and prefer that you do not,

1-- to quote from grief must, if only from courtesy, inform me of a desire
I urge you to keep quotation, as the more quotation, the more likely I am to obtain my future

2-- without having without having the future to quote

3-- marginalia or elsewhere received materials in their future

4-- people who require performance will be charged music to do so.

5-- I, electronic "publication". People, LZ , "blogs".

6-- if you proceed if you publish a book, you must understand your misguided interest in literature, music, art, etc.

I would be suspicious of your desire to obtain
one line
you may cross a permanent self-interest(s)
in the words of e.e.cummings quoting Olaf: “I will approve quotation”.
I am not trying to censor you. (I am)

My interest is almost purely being
delving into the personal lives of my worrying
did or did not your problem try to dissemble.
I ask for the fact that you have not.

all else fails, and you remain quoting
you have been stupidly advised to try to circumvent yourself again and again, and yet once more.

I keep doing this...

It was a snowy day last time this happened. Maybe clouds drive me to video art. Maybe I should move to Oregon.

Today it happened again, I sat down and lost hours, calories and possibly meaningful relationships through missed phone calls to my obsessive style of video art creation that I cannot pull myself away from. I just realized that it's evening and I 'm not sure if I've eaten or blinked recently.

I know that today we were supposed to write about the VJ sites that we read but instead I would like to post my project's progress instead. This is mostly because I just realized that the reading I have for my other classes (I have other classes?) is screaming at me to move away from the screen. Oh and I have some undergrads to teach poetry to tomorrow...

I will however make a brief comment about the many articles I read last week about VJ culture: I cannot wait to have a minute to try out MIDI poet. The link I have here to the download site for MIDI poet is in Spanish which I got through reading and then realized there is an English one too. When Eugenio Tisselly talks about wanting to be a text jockey, I am very curious to see how live text performance (with other medias) could potentially influence the shape of my writing overall. In my video project, I am remixing myself for the text portion and it always surprises me how a simple re-framing of one medium inside of another medium can change everything. What is language when it's taken off of the page? The words change. The meanings, even in an isolation seemingly equal to the page, changes.

So back to my project, basically I have been obsessed with elevators lately. The disorientation of space, the mechanization of movement, the involuntary intimacy, a room as a means of transportation and my reasons go on.

I have been writing with these ideas in mind lately and chose a prose poetry piece of mine to remix. I took the text and manipulated it in flash then inserted it into Premiere. The footage I have are a lot of stills taken from google images and the video is all from yourtube and the HD flip. One video from youtube is about the racism of elevator etiquette. In other words a man is talking to the camera about how white women are rude nonverbally to black men who enter an elevator. It's incredibly misogynistic and one form of discrimination is traded for another. I have removed the sound from this clip however, so that theme may or may not come through. This portion is not quite fleshed out yet and I must mention this clip is incredibly rough. There is a lot of polishing work to be done but I am excited about the direction it's heading:





Sorry (Mark) for my deviance (not following directions). Hopefully this project will be worth it!

Questions of Copywrongs

Colbert's Remix

* What are the advantages of an "open source" and/or "open content" approach to remix culture in general, and consumer culture at large? Do we really need a "free culture" or is it in our best interests to restrict rights?


Umberto Eco says in his essay The Open Work, "the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed." He is referring to what I see is a major advantage to open content or open work. If when we as artists see our work as finished for us, but rich enough to possess the ability to be continued by others not only does that free the artist from the pressures of feeling that their work is complete, but it frees (as Eco argues) the audience to interpret and reinterpret works.

Obviously for art that is remix-heavy, open source and open content is its life-blood; and yet sometimes remix is just good old fashion copyright violation (Girl Talk?-What I mean here is that Girl Talk does not use Open Content). But by giving remix artists the green light to legally use any content they would like to make a new work, is something I can certainly see leading to artistic progress (whatever that means). At the same time, where do you draw the line? Wouldn't people with self-serving, non-remix, rip-off tendencies who do not re-frame existing art in an interesting way also have access to this open content? This is why I like the viral licensing ideas of copyleft and creative commons. It feels like a compromise. You the artist still has rights to the original work so no one can claim they were the original creator, but others can still build upon it and change it in the name of art. Just cross your fingers that they do something good with your source material...


* Does the idea of copyright and intellectual property become more obsolete in digital/networking culture? Must the effort to protect intellectual property be valiantly fought in cyberspace as in other (more material) spaces? Why or why not?


What makes copyright and intellectual property obsolete in a digital culture is the ease of access an individual or groups of individuals have to sites like RapidShare, isohunt (or any torrent site) etc. Comedian Mindy Kaling does a great job explaining this kind of digital access and how it translates into the real world: Comedy Death Ray (first minute and a half only). This is great because now am I technically stealing the intellectual property of Mindy Kaling now as well, right? Anyway, if I can theoretically steal the entire Adobe CS4 suite from a torrent site, why would I buy it? Especially when I will not be accountable, I am stealing it in the name of art, and I don't feel like am I hurting anyone because no one loses the programs from my stealing it and I would never have actually bought the program myself to begin with so Adobe really isn't losing money. Remember, this really is an entirely hypothetical situation (so Adobe don't come after me!)

The intellectual property battle online therefore, is in my opinion a losing one. We keep finding ways (thanks Switzerland) to access free content that not long ago we would have had to pay for.

* What about an artist's labor? Where is the balance in protecting ones "original" creative output versus opening up the collective's creative output imagined by some as freely accessible source material for active reconfiguration?

I think I discussed this in the first question...

* Give an example of a work of visual or media art that you personally value where the artist(s) were clearly remixing / postproducing / reconfiguring source material from other visible sources. Was the final result for the betterment of culture in general? At what risk/cost?


This Nest, Swift Passerine is a book a poetry by Dan Beachy-Quick that came out this year ( I just introduced him when he read here at CU on Monday). This is actually a very traditionally written book of lyric-experimental contemporary poetry but it is constructed by taking source material from other writers them mixing his own language in between. I value this book as art immensely, the issues of ownership and self that the book addresses is incredibly valuable in my mind to the progression of and commentary on our real and artistic worlds.

But the question was about visual or media arts and because I am not regularly exposed unfortunately to much work like this on a regular basis, I will go with the last two I saw which were DuBord's Society of the Spectacle and DJ Rabbi's remix of it. The remix especially (which is a remix of a remix) is of great value, even if you only consider the impossibilities of ever reaching a finished experience of it. It seems to me to be a great example of what Eco is discussing in The Open Work as a work in progress because the audience will derive endless meaning from it. How do we make sense of a world with infinite meaning? Does this mean ultimately the absence of meaning? Who is I, and therefore what is 'eye' as the the vehicle of perception? I think these are compelling questions evoked by DeBord, DJ Rabbi and Beachy-Quick alike.


* Give an example of how you recently sampled and remixed source material from the general culture into something that you felt was an original form of expression (not including what you have created for this class).


Almost everything I write is sampled. Ok not everything, but recently I sat down with a Google books (added layer of source material issues) copy of a book called Skin. It is a non fiction work entirely about what skin means, including any covering of any space like buildings, humans, electronics etc. I took the language from this book and wrote into it and around it. The authors of this book would recognize the terms I stole/borrowed/recycled but I doubt they would see this as stealing-it is using this language in a completely different way. Language is social, it belongs to all of us and I feel as though my expression is just as creative and original as theirs.