In Dangerous (January 2012), McKenzie starts her text by recalling a memory that occurred when she was 6 years old. In her story, she makes it clear that even as a child, she knew she was smart and that when taking a reading test, she was misunderstood by the proctor; she knew she what she had said was right but the proctor did not agree. She states that after this incident, she became dangerous; even at this young age, she knew she was right and did not question herself, even after being corrected by an adult.
In this text, McKenzie is trying to point out how stereotypes make people try to fit into boxes, even when these boxes limit them to flourish into better people. She also talks about how whenever people defy these limitations, they become deemed as “dangerous” because they are not who society wants them to be. In this post, the author is being aggressive but does come off as angry. McKenzie is assertive, dry, at times harsh but mostly hopeful.
The author is hopeful that the audience she is writing for, mostly young black women, will dare to defy these limitations. She is hopeful that through her words she will be able to convey a message of resistance, and that she will inspire at least someone to push harder. McKenzie’s text is not only an autobiographical text describing her personal experience and thoughts, but it also reads as a call for action; maybe even a manifesto of liberation. Although McKenzie does not directly address her audience, she manages to create a piece that is inspiring and persuasive and that has the power to move a large group of individuals.
In creating my final project, I had to consider who my target audience was, and I decided that for once I wanted there to be a practical product that was not gendered. Sometimes it gets kind of ridiculous:
Like what the hell world, get it together!!
This clearly shows that Mulvey’s assessment that hegemony forces the minorities to view things through the mainstream point of view. Sadly, in this case, the minority is women. I think that it is horrifying that these kinds of products are seen as acceptable. Objects that men and women use exactly the same way, but they have to be gendered because the world needs women to stay pink and frilly and out of the way so they can’t threaten the patriarchy.
All this does is teach little girls to conform to society, and to think of themselves as innocent and fragile.
oh my god i have been so interested in this idea since last semester. this not only happens with products but roles and ideas. i have been playing with the idea of appropriating things that are meant to be done/worn by women and doing them/wearing them as a man. not as a way to become more feminine but as a way to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, why are these terms still a thing
i guess jaden smith (will smith’s son) is a perfect example of what i’m trying to say. he wears dresses because he believes that clothes are gender free and they shouldn’t be gendered.
I found this video on my Facebook feed in the morning I have watched it twice already.
I think both the performance, and the video that came out of it are both really great. There is this sense of anonymously and universality that come by removing the face of the figure, but at the same time because of the silver/reflective/metallic element of the mask and the way the video “glitches” the entire thing has a robotic/mechanical feel to it. People feel safe to act negatively towards the performer because they do not see her as a person; she is dehumanized by the lack of face plus she has no eyes anymore so she cannot see them (I do not know if she actually was blinded by the mask or not, but her eyes do not show and hence people can’t feel her stare). I find this similar to the way people interact in online media, because of the possibility of anonymity and dehumanization of others through avatars/usernames/etc., people are more confident being violent. All the (visual and linguistic) references to computers and internet culture in the video then make sense.
I specially enjoy the way the video is put together because it uses the idea of hypermediacy to its advantage. It makes us aware that the video is a machine that should be working properly but it’s not. The artists use this as an analogy to talk about society. This girl walking around the street should not be a problem since she is living her life and sexuality up to her own standards, but we can tell by the way people on the streets react that this machine (the people on the streets/society) is not working as it should.
It’s incredible how violent people can get when they are faced with something they do not understand.
Over the weekend, I did my final project for this class, which consisted of 24 hours of editing images of people from different races/ethinicities to make them resemble a white male while live streaming it online.
Although I could go on about the ideas behind my project, I’d rather write about the experience of doing this project. This project took me a long time not only while performing but also while getting ready to do so. I had to become familiar with software I had never used (Ustream Producer, FantaMorph), I had to come up with a method that would decrease bias in my project, to make sure I was respecting the culture of everyone, etc.
Although performing this piece was not the most fun, it was definitely worth it. In the process it let me know that I am committed to the things I create and that I am willing to give a lot of time to it. It also let me think about images as media through which messages can be conveyed and how many times using an image is not the most effective way to say something, which is something that Picturing Texts mentioned in one of the chapters we read. Sometimes it’s better to write something down or sometimes the most important part is not the final image but the process through which it was created. The piece also made me think about visual languages and methods developed by artists in their work.
I had 20 minutes to edit each image which was definitely stressful and kept me actively working, but it let me come up with the most effective ways to transform people. Repetition of process made the entire process easier.
I don’t feel like I can put my experience into words at this moment.
I found this image this week and thought it was relevant to everything we have been reading related to Ferguson. The author of the image is very clever in comparing an angry bear to the way police men treat black people.
At first I believed this image was something that the author had found and worked over, but after a quick Google image search, I was not able to find an original, so I think the author made the entire thing.
Even though this might not be “authentic” because it pretends to be something that it is not, the author used this idea to be able convey his or her message across. The infographic makes police officers seem like a threat for black people, in an almost humorous way, but the joke stops when we realize that this is actually true, and what is being shown in the image could actually be applied in real life to survive an encounter with an officer...
Lucas recites marketing slogans and taglines (of past and present) culled from the web to a soundtrack of royalty-free beats. Using her own vocal chords, and a contemporary…
This past week I have been looking at artworks by my Video Art II professor. I think she is really great and admire her as teacher and an artist. I decided to share one of her pieces in my blog post because it is a good example of remediation. In this piece, she collected slogans and catch phrases from different brands and websites that “shape her life” and recited them in a video/performance/song.
She is appropriating written words and changing their medium and context. Even though her piece may seem humorous and, maybe even ridiculous at some point, she questions the influence corporations have in our daily lives and opens up a conversation.
*** TRIGGER WARNING *** (i.e. discussing the rhetoric surrounding rape)
The Image above uses extremely powerful wordplay derived from absurd quotes about rape and reapplies them with respect to going in the water. It highlights the logical fallacy involved in such statements such as Missouri’s Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin who’s infamous quote, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” is paralleled by the bottom text.
Recently, I saw this on my Facebook and decided to share it publicly on my profile. First of all, I was attracted to the subject matter of the photographs. Also, I was attracted to the different medias the author decided to post the images, probably because I have recently acquired an interest for the possibilities of art in digital and online environments.
I think the author of the images is very bold. She has decided to show herself bare and exposed, which takes guts. Also, she is strong in her conveying her message and she knows exactly what she is trying to achieve when making and posting those images.
This story is very strongly related to Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The fact that the images have been censored talks about the patriarchal regime we live in. As Mulvey’s text, these images intent is to fight against this and try to raise awareness that it exists. The photographer argues there is nothing wrong with posting these pictures. And she is right. After all, it’s just blood, and there are thousand of images with blood on Instagram.
For my final project, I want to make an online performance. I will be editing pictures of different “minorities” (ranging from race, gender, and sexuality) to make them appear as “white, heterosexual, christian males” as possible. At the same time, I will be recording my screen and broadcasting it live on the internet. The people will be able to join the stream as I am performing, but I will also make sure to record the broadcast in order to have documentation of the performance. This project is not only something I am making to cope with the cultural shock regarding the fixation of race and ethnicity in this country, but it also critiques the regimes of normality that we deem accurate, and that have been set as standards by the “white, heterosexual, christian, male” figure. We follow these rules blindly and ignore the rules of our own groups in order to become normal. I understand this is a borderline project and I understand that if I am not careful enough it could go really badly, and this is why I am still working on completely planning out the process.
Facial Weaponization Communiqué: Fag Face is video text by Zach Blas that talks about facial recognition techniques that have been implemented in our daily lives. It was intended to be shown in a fine arts context, inside a gallery space and online on Vimeo. Mostly to be seen by people interested in contemporary art. The text tries to raise awareness of the surveillance culture that is slowly merging into our daily lives and to critique it and resist it. Blas is an artist and a writer, he currently holds a PhD from the Graduate Program in Literature at the Duke University. Although this project may have a different target and purpose, it relates to mine in its focus of disguise and illegibility and critiquing an existing system.
On The Census, Who Checks 'Hispanic,' Who Checks 'White,' And Why is an article talking about racial questions in the American Census and how they have been changed across the years. This article is mostly intended to reach people who worry the most about racial issues, which would be minority groups. Demby claims that the government has to give people more options to identify themselves with. “We don't live in — and we never have lived, frankly — in a black/white/other world.” The author of this article has many years of experience writing about race and politics, and has worked in important publications including Huffington Post and New York Time. This article is very relevant to my project, since I will most likely be using these questions from the census in order to create my process of finding images to edit in my performance. These “racial options” are institutionalize and are the ones accepted and implemented by the government, an official institution.
Demby, Gene. "On The Census, Who Checks 'Hispanic,' Who Checks 'White,' And Why." NPR. NPR, 16 June 2014. Web. 23 Mar. 2015. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/06/16/321819185/on-the-census-who-checks-hispanic-who-checks-white-and-why>
This video text informs the viewer about the online performance Google Maps Road Trip by Marc Horowitz and Pete Baldes. They made a road trip across the United States using only the arrows on Google Street View. I was more interested in using a trailer of the performance as my source, but that video has been made private by the authors of the piece. This piece greatly informs the project I want to make, it is an online performance that has broadcasted live on the internet. Even though the topics touches are differ, this performance piece has inspired me to focus on the process of doing something rather than the final product, and to show this process as the final product.
Google Maps Road Trip. Perf. Marc Horowitz and Pete Baldes. YouTube. N.p., 18 June 2012. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI58NtVKa5M>.
In this article, Grayson Perry CBE, a very recognized British artist, talks about the regime of what he defines as the “Default” man. He touches many different points that critique the way this regime works and the way it has spread across the globe. He claims people from different races, genders and sexualities want to be deemed normal and therefore try to become the Default Man in various ways. His final statement is that Default Men should loosen their grip on power and let others partake on it. This article very strongly relates to my piece. Every claim that the author makes is something I am trying to address through my project. I also strive to be able to talk about the different groups in a similar way he does, without offending anyone in the process, but making my point across.
Perry, Grayson. "The Straight, White, Middle-Class Man Needs to Be Dethroned." The New Republic. N.p., 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. <http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119799/straight-white-middle-class-default-man-needs-be-dethroned>.
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