affective ~ vernacular

[bauzeitgeist]

[affective-vernacular]

What a dream.

[affective-vernacular]

From Fandom to Collaborative Education

Arcosanti, January 2019 (not quite Brutalist, but a beautiful concrete beast nevertheless).

Through my research of Tumblr-centered discourse and theory it became evident that the notion of fandom is prevalent. My initial thought was that this is not the Tumblr I am familiar with - I associated the term fandom with obsessions over TV shows like Dr. Who, the oeuvre of Joss Whedon, or My Little Pony, as well as Comic Con, Gen Con, Dragon Con, and any other nerdy conventions. (No offence to the nerds, I too have periphery nerd interests, I just hadn’t yet associated them with Tumblr). Early in my research I wondered whether I did in fact follow fandoms through Tumblr but simply never thought of them as such, and this was confirmed while reading Annette Koh’s (2020) critical essay of urban-themed Tumblr fandoms:

The concrete behemoths of mid-twentieth-century #Brutalist architecture had Tumblr fan clubs who celebrated the much-maligned buildings as exemplars of design rather than failures of modernism…Niche fandoms found each other and shared their transformative works, what fandom calls the creative adaptation of other people’s published work. There was a Tumblr devoted to redesigning subway maps for greater legibility, which struck me as a kind of fanfiction for public transit. Cartography as art was enthusiastically embraced, with a boomlet in hometown maps constructed from hand-lettered neighborhood names. Maps also rendered unfamiliar cities knowable, the overwhelming massiveness of Moscow or London or Tokyo turned into a friendly tangle of crayon-colored subway lines (pp. 337-338).

It is true, I am a member of the brutalist fandom, I’ve been following architectureofdoom and bauzeitgeist for years. What other fandoms am I a part of? Antique art ephemera, strange compositions, outsider art, demure collage, 60s psych GIFS, old photos of old buildings, retrofuturism, poetic space memes – my fandoms may be less nameable, but they exist, there’s a defined aesthetic connecting me with my followers and those I follow. Not only did I frequent Tumblr to experience ‘a mood’ or the affect created by my highly curated dashboard feed, but also to connect with the feeling of being around people who get it. Without having to ever explicitly state the fact, it felt like I had managed to surround myself with likeminded people in a nebulous world that existed within me, through the internet, and within others as though we connected as a kind of hive mind ruled by twee poetics, light melancholia and beautiful absurdity.

In 2017 Allison McCracken, who has extensively researched Tumblr phenomena and co-edited the 2020 ebook: a tumblr book: platform and cultures, wrote an article that focuses on the “peer education” (p. 151) that the digital platform fosters. My Tumblr participation waned in 2015 as I neared the end of my 20s, yet it seems that just as I left, an increase in collaborative activity, information sharing and circulation began within and amongst Tumblr communities, which mirrored and reverberated off the rising erratic political and social energy that continues today. McCracken sees more in the platform than just a meeting of minds: “For many youth, Tumblr has become an alternative, tuition-free classroom, a powerful site of youth media literacy, identify formation, and political awareness that often reproduces cultural studies methods of media analysis” (p. 152).

The consideration of Tumblr as a vibrant, multimodal digital space of intersecting thoughts, evolving literacies, symbiotic pedagogies and ongoing cultural critiques, evokes the New London Group’s (NLG) call for a redesign of educational approaches. Their collaborative 1996 article, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies", radically suggests a designer-like approach to the revisioning of teaching methodologies. NLG’s focus was on the notion of multiliteracies, both “to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies... [and to] account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (p 61). Is it possible that Tumblr has organically developed into the kind of pedagogical environment that NLG was envisioning? Not only does the platform allow for the rapid exchange of cultural information, but also supports and fosters various text technologies, while concurrently allows users to design both their outward-facing persona, and their incoming feed of content. NLG further describes their technologically and culturally diverse vision:

A pedagogy of multiliteracies, by contrast, focuses on modes of representation much broader than language alone. These differ according to culture and context, and have specific cognitive, cultural, and social effects… Multiliteracies also creates a different kind of pedagogy, one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes (p. 64).

In a current reality where we are constantly balancing our mindless technological obsessions with news-induced anxiety and wellness sentiments, it’s exciting to see that the space within a social media platform echoes, cultivates and carries forward a radical call for change from our recent past.

Whether used as a “backchannel” (2018, p. 363) within a formal education setting, as Melanie E. S. Kohnen advocates for in "Tumblr Pedagogies", or simply integrated into one’s recreational learning routine, Tumblr affords its participants with a space to explore content, learn socially, and connect to other likeminded individuals and their own sense of self.

Reference List

[fever-monument]

Jay Duplass sang Bill Callahan and we felt it in our hearts.

[affective-vernacular]

Affect

I am currently an occasional Tumblr user, but in my early 20s I was enveloped in the aesthetic environment of this ambiguous and consuming social media platform. Before deep diving into academic research on the topic, I began by asking myself, what is Tumblr is all about? Amongst real life friends, it is and was not as ubiquitously utilized as other social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter – the only people I knew who used it were a small collection of art school friends. Yet although it is not heavy on the side of social media, Tumblr still technically counts as such. As a user, you are continually viewing and judging other users’ collected personas and gleaning pieces to curate your own; it’s just more likely that you don’t know that user in real life. Although the platform allows for direct communication between users, most of the interaction in Tumblr is through ‘liking’ or ‘reblogging’ a post, or by adding a pointed comment or tag to that post. The communication in Tumblr is constant, but it is subtle, and conveyed through the reciprocal sharing of media, imagery and poetic or coded content. The visual focus may seem similar to Pinterest, but it really isn’t – Pinterest functions like a collection of things one might like to own one day, or make, or visit, etc. There is a consumeristic focus about Pinterest, and it’s unlikely that a user would even notice an individual user’s content as it is lost in the see of algorithmically generated posts. Alternatively, Tumblr’s attention is on the collection (or hoarding) and sharing of an aesthetic, not simply to assemble ones’ wants, but to share and curate an inner expression of self: I am a collection of geometric GIFS, failed utopias, brutalist architecture, abstract shape forms, conceptual art, space imagery, retrofuturism, weird art films, and absurd poetry.

Tumblr is all about the discovery of ones’ emotive and aesthetic self through an array of alluring text technologies, with a strong prevalence of visual modalities. In the 2015 book Network Affect, Alexander Cho wrote a chapter called "Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time", in which his exploration of his own Tumblr experience so aptly resonated with my own, I was taken aback. He describes his introduction to the platform as follows:

“…images cascading upon images upon images, an endless saturation…Tumblr as a whole is a massive churning machine of evocative photos, image aggregation on steroids, 37.5 million posts per day. It was disorienting, no one explained very much with words, there were no “profiles” like Facebook, there were no “friends,” there were no clear ways to traverse or search the network–just post after post of expressionless images traded from one anonymous Tumblr user to another” (p. 43).

Like me, Cho picked up on the strong emotive elements of the platform, yet unlike me he was able to name what I thought of as Tumblr’s vibe as something more concise: affect. He explains, “My feeling of disorientation upon first entering the space was like being immersed in language that didn’t quite make sense–all there was was the gist. I sensed that there was something else being circulated here, something that resisted definition and classic semiotic formulas. It seemed from the first moment I was in the space, that Tumblr traded in affect” (p. 44). Cho continues and provides a definition for the elusive concept, “Affect is generally conceived as a force or intensity that exists somewhere in between an embodied, sensorial experience and the naming of an emotion.  In other words, affect is a moment of suspense, a shift, an attunement between entities” (p.44).

The attractive, unexpected and temporal element of affect emerges from the seemingly endless Tumblr dashboard scroll as microblogged moving and still images, fragments of written text and the occasional audio or video short are displayed before the viewers’ eyes. Bolter (2001) ruminates on the dilemma that, “neither the written nor the spoken word seems able to exert such power” (p. 56). Yet perhaps Tumblr provides a space that succeeds at blending both modalities in a kind of “reciprocal remediation” in overdrive, where both “ekphrasis, prose [trying] to represent images (or sounds or sensory experience)” and “reverse ekphrasis” along with other multimodal experiences collaborate to produce a distinct point of view.

Reference List

[olt-deactivated20180224]

[angstravaganza-blog]

Since the virtual is unliveable even as it happens, it can be thought of as a form of superlinear abstraction that does not obey the law of the excluded middle, that is organized differently but is inseparable from the concrete activity and expressivity of the body. The body is as immediately abstract as it is concrete; its activity and expressivity extend, as on their underside, into an incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension of pressing potential.    It is Bergson who stands as a philosophical precursor on many of these points: the brain as a center of indetermination; consciousness as subtractive and inhibitive; perception as working to infold extended actions and expressions, and their situatedness, into a dimension of intensity or intension as opposed to extension; the continual doubling of the actual body by this dimension of intensity, understood as a superlinear, superabstract realm of potential; that realm of the virtual as having a different temporal structure, in which past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present, and as having a different, recursive causality; the virtual as cresting in a liminal realm of emergence, where half-actualized actions and expressions arise like waves on a sea to which most no sooner return.

Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect (via angstravaganza-blog)

[nobrashfestivity]

 Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Radiating Affection, from their book  Thought-Forms, 1901

[affective-vernacular]

I can’t believe this exists and I didn’t know about it!

You can see the whole book here.

[affective-vernacular]

Art Meme / GIF Meme

Still trying to perfect the art meme...

[affective-vernacular]

My first art meme! / My first meme!

[affective-vernacular]

The GIF

Frank Stella’s “Firuzabad” (1970)

The GIF, (hard or soft G, you pick) is a short, looping animation. It’s not a video, where you are required to press play – it’s already in action and appears to stay that way indefinitely. There’s the movie/TV show GIF set made up of a collection of still shots that display the (hopefully poignant) close captioning; there’s the seamless looping art/design GIF, which might show a visual illusion, free flowing shapes, or tessellating geometry; there’s the movie scene GIF (not in stills, but in full-action) usually of a funny or absurd scene; there’s the homemade stop-motion animation GIF… I could go on – really, a GIF can be of any moving image. 

Jennifer Malkowski contributed a chapter titled “Tumblr’s Gallery of Loops: GIF Art Beyond Reaction GIF Culture” in the 2020 ebook, a tumblr book: platform and cultures. Malkowski’s writing situates the GIF in the context of fine art, as well as homes in on the “art GIF”, or rather, the GIF that serves as art. Malkowski provides an explanation for why Tumblr as a social media platform has become known as a creative GIF hub, “Tumblr has defined itself as the most aesthetically driven social media site that supports animated GIF uploads. While Tumblr users have a wide variety of aesthetic preferences, the site’s community has defined itself broadly as one that cares about taste, manifested not just in what TV fandoms one belongs to, but in one’s demonstrated visual sensibility” (pp. 359-360). Although I respect a TV show GIF, or a meme GIF, (two disparate ideas collaged in a moving image to make a joke,) I am personally drawn to the mesmerizing perfection and aesthetic magnificence that is the abstract art GIF.  There’s something embarrassing about being taken by the purity of this kind of formalistic art GIF, it’s like being an art student obsessed with the geometric beauty of early Frank Stella works, when people are making works about real things like racial inequality, gender identity and political unrest. But there’s room for all the art GIFs on Tumblr, ones for zoning out, ones for laughing and ones for critical thinking. 

Malkowski also highlights a structural affordance, further linking Tumblr with the GIF, “Another technical quality, if a more abstract one, that strengthens Tumblr’s hospitable environment for GIF art is what Louisa Stein calls “the infinite scroll”: a constantly replenishing, bottomless depth of content as the user scrolls ever-downward. Stein describes this infrastructure as creating ‘an aesthetic of abundant multiplicity and multidirectional flow . . . a sensation of limitlessness.’  This spatial limitlessness is mirrored in the temporal limitlessness of the animated GIF, creating an intangible affinity between Tumblr as a platform and the GIF as a format” (p. 359). The image Malkowski conjures reminds me of Bolter’s (2001) writings on the hypertext, where, (in somewhat dated language) he claims that the “World Wide Web offers us the experience of moving through a visual and conceptual space different from the space of the book…” (p. 45). I wonder if the flow of the Tumblr dashboard, filled with moving images amongst a curated collection of other media is the kind of “spatial writing” (p.45) Bolter imagined.

Reference List

[gifmovie]

[skinned-teen]

Pierrot le fou

[frutescene-deactivated20140904]

[affective-vernacular]

“I want to make a case for attention to this smallest and most innocuous of Tumblr practices, for I believe it encapsulates the queerness of time on tumblr and hits at how users trade in affect across the site. The repeating GIF is a perfect moment of refrain, to invoke Deleuze and Guittari (1987). Their explication of the refrain: “It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges, and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 348)” (Cho, 2015, p. 51).

Reference List

[anoiseannoys-deactivated2015010]

[affective-vernacular]

“For the GIF in many respects belongs to the class of media swirling about on the Internet that Hito Steyerl dubs the “poor image”: “Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard . . . compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution. . . . It transforms quality into accessibility.” This transformation applies well to a poor image like a low-res, compressed video file of a feature film, but Steyerl’s description reveals a unique attribute of the low-res GIF among other poor images: it was never expected to be a quality image. Internet users rely on GIFs to communicate feelings, not to provide deep aesthetic experiences. If a feeling can be communicated clearly through a jumpy, degraded loop, then the GIF’s poor image becomes a useful commodity” (Malkowski, 2020, pp. 357-358).

Reference List

[joewaine]

[affective-vernacular]

“Refrain, as it applies to Tumblr: user-created emotional/temporal prisms that span its multiplicity and simultaneously help define it as a set of urges, wants, and hurts, refracting affect through the rhizome in a nonlinear and hardly literal way” (Cho, 2015, p. 52).

Reference List

[aqqindex]

François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, Proposal for a Meteorological Sculpture, 1974

[volvulent]

[affective-vernacular]

Peter Max

[hillergoodspeed]

stayed home tonight and made a gif