Untitled

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Mais l'important n'est pas la chute, c'est l'atterrissage

La Haine

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bae af

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komorebi -

(Japanese) - showers of flight ; sunlight that filters through trees ; filtering between leaves.

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#LettersFromTwitter is a curation of Twitter updates written by faceless strangers on the Internet. Each page presents a narrative quilted from individuals regarding a wide variety of predetermined subjects. The juxtaposition of the 140-character confessions with each other re-contextualizes the whole concept of Twitter, bringing it a more tangible feel and distancing it from the digital realm. In doing so, #LFT hopes to explore certain themes: to underscore the fine line between the public domain and private space and its increasing imperceptibility as the audience is handed a piece of private and unsought information.  It also ventures to examine the construction of the self—how social media creates a dichotomy between two identities: the authentic and the scripted self. And finally, #LFT aspires to help us step back from the individual elements and details, allowing us to examine a composite image of society as a whole, the collective voice of the masses. And with this new perspective, we may be able to perceive the common thread that runs through each of us, making us interconnected in ways that we have yet to recognize.

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i can't find "The Me Is The Message" reading anywhere

placeholder post till I do so I don't forget

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Reading Response to Keeping It Online by Ben Radin

The quote that opened up the brief essay was, to me, reminiscent of the philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It implies the necessity of a relationship between subject and observer. I think that the same can be extended beyond museum pieces to art in general, even though it is more essential in a gallery space, which is solely for presentation and viewing.

I feel like the article didn’t really provide a solution to the initial and most important question: How is Rhizome able to support its promise of preserving digital art works? Who is paying for the unavoidable expenses, and will this source be able to hold out for the future years to come? How is Rhizome so certain of its alleged permanence, both in terms of hosting and ever-changing technology? Since the Internet is so fluid and transitory, it is so hard to preserve art and almost impossible to plan for its future. It is so strange to think of the web as a medium but it’s also very liberating because as I become more exposed to these art pieces, I begin to think of the many different possibilities and methods of art creation.

This essay was very strange for me to read for another reason. I realized again that the Internet is already premade. It is not a tangible, physical, organic substance that we can examine under a microscope like ink, paint, or clay. Somebody has preprogrammed what we “perceive” to be the “web” (or more visibly, the browser). This external force is so inaccessible and far from our minds that it’s essentially invisible to us—and yet it is the very thing that controls the longevity of the art we make now. (This was sort of a tangent but it was just a really weird thought to have.)

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Peer Blog Review - Chloe

http://chloe-fain315.tumblr.com/

Chloe's blog is up to date with all the readings and covers more than the required amount of posts. Her reading responses are thorough and insightful--she usually summarizes the highlights of the essays and uses those as her point of departure to delve into her own perspective. She references other things that we have read or learned previously. She also brings in outside references, which is even better. More often than not, her posts include "remind me of" somewhere in its paragraphs, which I think is great because she is able to relate intermedia to an external realm of experience. And then usually towards the end, she brings to the table her own confusions and questions, or opens up the discussion even further with a follow up question. Skimming over her posts, I am able to view some arguments and essays from new perspectives. She brings to the surface certain sides of the argument from/of which I never considered. Overall I think she did a great job, and the only possible critiques I could have of her page would be that she could post on progress on her final project, and that she should post more outside influence/inspiration (not that she needs to, it would just be nice to see more of what she's interested in).

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Reading Response to Constant Dullaart's Interview

Although he doesn’t discuss it in conjunction with financial responsibility, I especially appreciated his perspective on authorship. It seems as if I always see the request for credit in terms of money, legality and recognition. Authorship is always discussed in terms of “I did this first (so give me my credit and pay me some money),” so it’s refreshing to see it being called on in pursuit of discourse instead of personal needs. I still do think that there are cases in which it is necessary to credit the original author though, but it is mostly in order to support deserving artists who could expand the field of art.

Constant responded well to the interviewer’s (extremely basic) question about (basically) commercializing and monetizing Internet art. What I don’t understand is why an artist would actively push for the commoditization of art. I value art that is open to everybody and isn’t only exclusive to those who have the means to acquire it—I don’t think art should even be “acquired.”  But I found his comments interesting all the same, especially the point about The Xerox Book and the wait for a curator to do the same to Internet Art.

His comment about the immateriality vs. materiality of Internet art was also interesting in that he opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about the Internet. Redefining the meaning of “material” to include the Internet also redefines the Internet for me. It isn’t just a space but a tool. It’s not just somewhere you can do stuff in, but something you can do stuff with. I had previously thought that this was an obvious fact but the way that Dullaart discusses it actually recontextualizes Internet Art in my perspective. He also discusses the term “Post-Internet Art” and offers Guthrie Lonergan’s term “Internet Aware Art,” which I agree is more appropriate. Internet Art is still too recent to really call this new period “Post-Internet,” and not everyone is as well versed to the Internet medium as these artists are.

Overall I thought that this interview was extremely informative and enlightening (no thanks to the interviewer’s lame questions).

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Critique Reflection

 I found most of the suggestions made during my presentation to be very useful to the construction of my project, if not simply affirmative of ideas that I’ve already set myself out to do. These suggestions I have noted below:

×        Different, subtler paper texture

×        Separate tweets into 140 characters

×        More tweets

×        More specific keywords to make paragraph incoherent

×        Randomize keywords

×        Hash tag sign

×        Pop up window on clicking tweets

×        Make birds look more clickable

  I definitely decided that I wanted to make the webpage have a more physical, tangible aesthetic. I wanted to be detached from the digital realm, despite that (or maybe because) it is the source of my data. Essentially, I wanted to recontextualize the whole concept of Twitter and public/private status updates, and the most obvious way to do this is to display the content in a different presentation and layout. I still wanted allusions to be made between the content and Twitter, so I decided to keep some elements (i.e. the birds) while changing their actual appearance.

In the example I showed in class, I used both hash tags “anniversary” and “marriage.” There weren’t very many tweets collected into one paragraph because I actually found it very difficult to find a lot of usable, non-commercial, personalized tweets in the feeds. There are always series of tweets at the very top that are obviously advertising or commercial, which I’ve chosen to filter out of my project. Collecting highly personal tweets actually takes a lot of time to dig up. This makes me worry about the high degree of personal interference involved with the project, but I felt that this could be a part of the study as well.

In terms of technical details, it won’t be too difficult to actually change up the layout to set a more subtle paper texture as the background or to randomize the keywords at the click of a button. This would involve some simple jQuery, as will the pop up windows. Incorporating the hash tag sign would require me to change the font, which is easily done. Making the birds look more obviously clickable should also involve some simple Photoshop manipulation.

The last suggestion I was considering is separating the collection of random tweets into 140 characters, to emulate Twitter’s parameters on submitting status updates. I’ve done this to one keyword and I don’t think it turned out very well. This will actually make the separation between the individual tweets more apparent, making the paragraph model rather useless. I will attempt to cut every 140 characters again with different keywords using shorter individual tweets to see if it is possible to still have disjointed narratives in 140-character paragraph form, but if this fails I will be reverting back to the single paragraph model.

Overall, it seems as though there are just a few decisions to experiment with and finalize, some housecleaning sort of tasks, but mainly a lot of effort to put into finding suitable, relevant tweets. 

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Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry examines the complex intersection of artistic practice and social activism as seen through the life and art of China's preeminent contemporary artist.

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Reading Response to "Jeremy Bailey's Interview"

I find Jeremy Bailey’s art rather curious simply because it is so bizarre and nonsensical. Before reading this interview, I wasn’t really able to take him seriously as an artist, but I now sort of understand the theory behind the performances. The essay is still difficult for me to follow, which is frustrating because I want to unify this lucid interview with his completely insane videos. It is double frustrating because I can sense his ideas just out of reach of my comprehension.

Bailey seems to be performing first and foremost for the camera instead of an audience. But at the same time, the camera’s reflective quality as opposed to transparency makes Bailey his own audience. I personally don’t understand the appeal of watching oneself perform. He claims to study his own body and its relationship to the camera, but I don’t understand why or what about your own body you would study, and am curious to find out. I only see a sort of narcissistic impulse in that activity. But I liked his point about the artist’s eyes veering off screen towards the monitor to catch their own visage on the screen. It reminds me of walking past mirrors and reflective windows and impulsively, subconsciously glancing at your own reflection.

It is slightly jarring to read such a rational interview from Jeremy Bailey considering his performance videos that I have seen in the past. The Bailey in the videos seems completely different from the one being interviewed. The contrast between his two personas makes me really curious as to the purpose of his eccentric behavior during his performances. I realized later on that the actual interview could be considered a performance as well, especially since it was conducted through email. This medium provides a safer, more private space to comport oneself in a particular way, as opposed to having a live or personal interview. The variance between his behavior also reminds me of a video I saw of Andy Warhol in an interview, where he behaves very strangely and answers robotically. For a few fleeting seconds, Warhol suddenly breaks character and begins to laugh, before he recomposes himself back into his monotonous, impassive persona. This takes me back to a point I’ve mentioned before—the dichotomy between the authentic and scripted self. Given that everything can be a performance, how can you really discern what is authentic or scripted anymore?

(I realize that my reading response probably veered off topic but I don’t sufficiently understand Jeremy Bailey’s core tenet just yet.)

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Reading Response to Umberto Eco's "Travels In Hyperreality"

  Eco’s essay “Travels in Hyperreality” was really interesting in its exploration of constant recreation and renewal, and its relations with performance, capitalism, and especially identity. He examines the contrast between the artificial and genuine, giving Disney and museums as examples of recreations pretending to be the real thing. Disney has mastered the art of artifice so well that the appeal of theme parks overshadows the appeal of reality itself.

He relates this idea of artifice to capitalism when he asserts that the establishments in Disney are so immersed in its “pretend game” (so to speak) that it can actually be difficult to reconnect yourself with reality once you’re inside the park. The famous Disney icons populate the place so much and the replica is so enveloping that you don’t realize how much you are consuming the brand’s products when you enter their stores. The degree of totality compels you to play a part in its pretend game. Does society use this technique to lure consumers to buy into capitalism? Las Vegas is dripping with fabrication, and it is precisely for this reason that it attracts so many people. It exists as a sort of “dreamland” where visitors can spend the weekend wasting away in luxury before returning to the reality of Monday to Friday nine to five’s.

Reflecting upon the term “hyperreality,” I am able to come to two options: an object portrays reality so well that it becomes indistinguishable and even more perfect that reality; or it attempts to imitate reality to the point where it is excessive and obviously artificial. When you examine the context even slightly, it is easy to recognize the plasticity. However, despite these objects’ and places’ simulated nature, we still buy into the scheme. We bask in it, as shown by the examples of Disneyland and Las Vegas. Eco paints a dark picture of this phenomenon, which I completely understand. We retreat slowly into these capitalist schemes cloaked under fabricated reality. But to bring in a different perspective—one that I don’t necessarily agree with—what is so wrong with taking a break from a (frankly) often-bleak reality and diving into a synthetic and untroubled fantasy world? 

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Ben Sullivan of Nouvelle Vague

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BAM of Nouvelle Vague

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(Late) Reading response to The Gift Community by Hyde

The Gift Community talks about two opposing types of economies: one that values possession and ownership, and another that values giving. Most people today are familiar with the former type, but there are cultures that attach importance to the latter. I find this extremely interesting just because the nature of ownership is now so established in our culture. We are so used to associating a higher social status with a greater number of properties and assets that the concept of giving away to gain a higher standing seems completely alien.

Hyde brings up an artist’s predicament: Art is supposedly isolated from the market economy. But how does one actually employ this, given that this system is now such a standard? Art subsists through the circulation of ideas, from inspiration to collaboration. It is not always an original thought or piece—artists must conceive of their creation from something already extant. If art depends upon the free flow of ideas then it arranges itself as a gift economy. But how do you juggle this as an artist who must make a living off of his creations? In the contemporary world there are copyright and legal struggles, financial implications, etc. that are tied with art creation. This makes it difficult for separation of art as a solely gift community.

An example of this would be the street art phenomenon. Street art came about as a rejection of the exclusive gallery art space; these artists wanted to challenge the notion of erudite knowledge and culture. They didn’t believe that art should only be reserved for the elite; they wanted to bring art to the people. The movement began to share art with the public and the rest of the community, making ideas flow freely through the culture. But more and more recently, street art is becoming less of a subversive movement because pop culture has come to embrace it. Street artists are becoming more famous, causing “underground” street artists and fans to label them as “sell outs.” Works by Banksy and Shepard Fairey (among many, many others) are being sold at millions of dollars—street art is merging into the market economy.  

Does this detract from street art’s being a gift community? It could. I personally believe that this depends solely on the artist’s intentions—if he starts prioritizing his income over his creation, then I see a lost cause. But I don’t think it is impossible to be a professional artist while maintaining your artistic ideals. I thought that a good example of such an artist is Banksy. While he could be called one of the richest and most famous contemporary artists in the world, he still creates incredible pieces both in terms of visual imagery and message. His work is sold at millions of dollars and he has been involved with numerous exhibits in galleries, but his street work still serves to share his message to a wide audience. And the fame he gained from his art’s involvement with the market economy does not stop him from sharing his ideas to the community. As a well-known figure not only in the street art world but also in pop culture, he is able to disseminate ideas more freely and efficiently, benefiting the ideals of art as a gift community.

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Reading Response to "My Chuck Close Problem"

I thought that Scott Blake’s “My Chuck Close Problem” essay was really strange. Although I understood the question he was trying to raise, it was hard for me to take him seriously. The tone and language employed throughout the article suggested to me that Blake was looking for validation for his loss to Close by resorting to petty name-dropping. I thought that quoting the communication between himself and Close was particularly indicative of this, as is nitpicking at Close’s interview responses and providing very particular counterexamples against them. The article manifested as a diatribe against Chuck Close instead of focusing on the more deep-seated issues of appropriation versus plagiarism.

            However, even though Blake only discussed the topic in terms of his own situation, he did touch upon the debate (albeit very lightly). Where do you draw the line between appropriation and plagiarism? This question is something that I’ve been struggling with since I’ve been interested in art. Personally I feel that it requires a certain amount of personal talent, skill, and effort to lay claim on an artwork, even though it has borrowed elements from other sources. If it makes a clear reference or allusion to the source but refrains from claiming the same actual “space” (if that makes sense) as the original, then that seems to be a clear indication of appropriation. But even this definition has its limitations because there will always be counterexamples. I don’t completely understand the process that Close or Blake used for their respective artworks but I feel that they are dissimilar enough from each other that it shies away from plagiarism. Blake also clearly references Close in the project’s title, as opposed to hiding his sources as Fairey evidently did. If anything Close would be the one guilty of copying, given the evidence that Blake presents (if they are valid). An important question that we now have to consider, however, is this: how do we translate the distinction between appropriation and plagiarism into the legal field?