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week 15: 24/7

Jonathan Crary describes and critiques humanity’s ever-increasing reliance on technology and subsequently growing refusal of natural functions such as sleep in 24/7. With the rise in availability and accessibility in technology, “the demand for mandatory 24/7 immersion in visual content effectively becomes a new form of institutional super-ego” (47). People see increasingly less value in inherently necessary actions such as sleep because while void of conscious thought, people lose the ability to work productively. Crary provides examples of government projects and psychological forms of torture that involve attempting to reduce necessary sleep time and the long-term effects of living without sleep.

(The images are from No Game No Life, an anime in which two siblings enter a virtual world structured around videogame-like law)

According to Crary, humans act as disposable devices for economic systems such as capitalism to develop and flourish; “when people have nothing further that can be taken from them, whether resources or labor power, they are quite simply disposable” (44). While Crary refutes Stiegler’s ideas that “the standardization of experience on such a large scale [. . .] entails a loss of subjective identity and singularity” (51), Crary’s belief that “a new blandness flourishes everywhere that accelerated consumption has become normalized” (56) seems like an almost overly cynical approach to modern society’s attachment to technology. Crary neglects the benefits to a society in which technology is readily accessible to a large percentage of the population, thus allowing processes such as communication as a whole to develop into a largely available action. Although Crary believes that “many who celebrate the transformative potential of communication networks are oblivious to the oppressive forms of human labor and environmental ravages on which their fantasies of virtuality and dematerialization depend” (49), humanity will nonetheless continue to attempt to move toward a world submerged in virtuality.

Jennifer Muraoka

week 14: time tracking

RescueTime is an online application that promises to “Measure Your Digital Life” by tracking the amount of time users spend on specific websites throughout the day, therefore promoting productivity through awareness of how and where users typically choose to spend their time. RescueTime is different in comparison to other productivity-tracking software in the sense that it runs without the user’s instruction. In an almost unsettling fashion, RescueTime constantly monitors where its users are online in order to provide accurate productivity reports. RescueTime’s existence as an entirely computer-based application shows the great extent to which people rely on computer interaction throughout a typical workday.

In RescueTime’s premium setting, users pay nine dollars a month for added features such as blocking distracting sites, tracking offline activity, adding notifications, and logging daily highlights. Although the application offers offline tracking, the offline activities rely on users’ technology-related usage; RescueTime is limited to user interaction with computers and phones. Using applications similar to RescueTime, people are essentially paying capitalist corporations to watch their every online interaction, thus adding to the “externalization of the individual into a site of non-stop scrutiny” that the “paradigm of full-spectrum dominance” (32) supports.

According to Crary, “A 24/7 world is a disenchanted one in its eradication of shadows and obscurity and of alternate temporalities” (19). RescueTime creates such a world, void of “shadows an obscurity,” through its detailed reports that expose users’ every interaction with their computers; everything becomes visible with RescueTime’s time-tracking. Crary asserts that “The most important recent changes concern not new machine forms of visualization, but the ways in which there has been a disintegration of human abilities to see” (33). While in a sense, RescueTime attempts to rescue its users from the disintegration of human sight by showing break-downs of productivity, the application is actually another example of what Crary describes as “comparable to the glare of high-intensity illumination” (34).

Jennifer Muraoka

week twelve: databases, protocols, and additivism

Manovich believes that there is an inherent “anti-narrative logic” (4) to the Web, implying that by clicking through screens and exploring the databases that are websites, users can experience unique journeys through the endless expanse of digital data that is the internet. However, Galloway theorizes that the internet runs under a hierarchal system of protocols that dictate the communication process of computers accessing and sharing information with each other through a DNS addressing protocol. While Manovich sees the internet as a place where people can learn to understand the world “through a catalog rather than a narrative” (21), Galloway views internet interactions as a highly controlled process that is not “a vast, uncontrollable meshwork” (165). Manovich’s idea that a person using the internet freely is “the ‘user’ of a narrative traversing a database” (9) contradicts Galloway’s theory that the user experience is constantly controlled by protocols.

The two agree that “The most extensive ‘computerized information management’ system existing today is the Internet” (162), but they discuss different aspects of computer culture. Manovich talks at length about the narrative vs database views of the world and explains how the two could potentially work together through mediums such as film, while Galloway explains his ideas regarding protocol rules that control people’s use of what initially appears to be a free-flow of information on the internet.

http://3dprint.com/38144/3d-printed-apartment-building/

The Additivist Manifesto predicts the future as a place where “planetary pixilation” will transform the world into an entirely artificial, plastic landscape. While the manifesto provides interesting speculation about a world where “all matter has mutated into the clarity of plastic,” such a world is currently unrealistic. According to the article “Shanghai-based WinSun 3D Prints 6-Story Apartment Building and an Incredible Home,” the title says it all. A China-based company, WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co, successfully completed an apartment building out of an “ink, which includes construction waste such as concrete, fiberglass, sand, and a special hardening agent.” The building, though created by means of a 3D printer, looks similar to buildings made by traditional tools and technology. The building is far from the plasticized reality described in the manifesto, but the 3D technology behind the apartment is a step toward a 3D-designed world.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/04/tech/innovation/dna-face-sculptures/

The manifesto’s notions regarding “posthuman machines” and creating complex biological material such as DNA and stem cells with lab equipment comes to life in artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s project, “Stranger Visions,” which features 3D-printed faces of people based on random DNA samples found in things such as a single strand of hair. The sculptures depict “a general likeness” to the sample person and combine biological processes with the 3D printing process the manifesto revolves around.

Jennifer Muraoka

week 11: postproduction + bourriard

Pierre Huyghe supports Bourriard’s Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World in the One Million Kingdoms documentation by explaining how he “decided to give the copyright back to the sign” of his character, Anlee. Instead of trying to prevent others from using his ideas, Huyghe does what Bourriard believes is only natural in a postproduction world: Huyghe entirely opens Anlee’s existence to other people’s interpretations. In a society where “it is no longer a matter of starting with a ‘blank slate’ or creating meaning on the basis of virgin material,” people are constantly creating art by choosing to “not make a distinction between their work and that of others, or between their own gestures and those of viewers.” However, I found it ironic that after explaining Huyghe’s views on Anlee’s independent existence as an image free from copyright, the documentation video itself ends with a copyright text. Cheng’s explanation about the process of converting a “truth in the wild” into an ideal relates to Bourriard’s ideas regarding the ways through which people’s perceptions of other people’s art can lead the former to remix the latter’s work into postproduction art. People can interpret Anlee in as many ways as they want, but in every different version, the character Anlee is still the true Anlee; people see truth in art that already exists and when they apply their version of truth to the piece they become a “remixer of realities.”

https://www.facebook.com/shitpostbot/?fref=ts

The Facebook page “ShitpostBot 5000” epitomizes Bourriard’s concept that “the idea of newness [is] merely a stimulus” because the page posts randomly generated memes that take random, well-known and not well-known images and pairs them with random texts from older memes. Huyghe’s mindset in allowing Anlee to be an image that is free for people to use and manipulate at their own will is similar to the way in which “ShitpostBot 5000” uses postproduction idealism to create new combinations of unoriginal content. Both are examples of the “new form of culture” that the DJ’s and artists in Bourriard’s piece exemplify.

Jennifer Muraoka

Newhive by jennmuraoka

Week 8: Cyborgs

Cyborgs are the hybridized bridge connecting man to machinery and technology. Today, cyborgs and modern humans are essentially the same thing; people are increasingly invested and reliant on their technology, to the point where technology is inseparable from the notion of a modern lifestyle.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer revolves around Case, a hacker who lives in a futuristic society where nearly all people have physical forms of technology imbedded in their bodies, and his job freeing an immensely powerful artificial-intelligence from its constraints. In Case’s world, people have chips installed in their heads, commonly have upgrades to their bodies through cosmetic and practical surgeries, and can fully submerge themselves in virtual realities, blurring the lines between the physical world and the digital one. Gibson’s book clearly defines cyborgs through its description of its characters: Molly’s imbedded sunglasses, retractable blades hiding beneath her fingertips, and super-human reflexes are prime examples of ways in which people in the Neuromancer world modify their bodies to incorporate technologies that work to their advantages.

Although the characters in Gibson’s world are still only part of a fictional landscape, real humans have been developing into cyborgs since the beginning of their infatuation with implementing technology into their daily lives. Modern technological advances in medicine have allowed not inherently disabled people to acclimate to their new lives with ease unavailable to earlier patients.

The above photo depicts Claudia Mitchell, the first woman with a bionic arm, high-fiving Jesse Sullivan, the first person to have a bionic arm. People who require body attachments and modifications look the most like traditional man/machine cyborgs because of their visibly mechanical limbs; however, most people in today’s society can be considered cyborgs in the sense that they rely on technology to live their everyday lives and use the online world in ways similar to Case’s use of technology such as his simstim gear and the Matrix cyberspace.

In An Overview of The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway describes cyborgs as “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (151), referring to cyborgs’ technological background in the digital world that stemmed from progress benefitting the military and grown by capitalistic companies. Cyborgs are “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self [that] feminists must code” (163) and therefore are a necessary element when viewing postmodern feminism. Haraway argues that the concept or myth of the cyborg is able to move social boundaries by changing people’s perceptions of the natural world; “the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (150). Overall, Haraway’s ideas regarding cyborgs as human/machine hybrids that can support feminist theories and are an essential part of living alongside machines implies that cyborgs are everywhere in modern society because of technology’s always increasing prevalence and availability in people’s lives.

Jennifer Muraoka

Week Seven: McLuhan-Inspired Website

From his introductory statements in “The Medium is the Message”, Marshall McLuhan asserts that “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (9). McLuhan believes that technological advances always produce personal and social consequences. The “new technology,” or “extension of ourselves” that McLuhan refers to throughout the chapter can be anything that increases man’s innate physical and mental abilities.

In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan provides examples of “extensions of ourselves,” such as “clothing [is] an extension of the skin” (38-39). ][umanLeather is a United Kingdom-based company that is comprised of “specialists in producing exquisite and exclusive products for an extremely discerning clientele.” The company uses “the finest leather known--human leather” to create accessories such as belts and shoes. ][umanLeather takes McLuhan’s idea literally by creating items that extend human skin with more human skin. Although ][umanLeather might not have been directly inspired by McLuhan, the company is a clear example of how technology extends humanity’s natural skin.

][umanLeather’s artistic medium of human leather eaves a greater impact on people than the actual products the unconventional material forms (wallets, belts, and shoes). This contradiction, in which the medium is more profound than the end product, is an example of McLuhan’s idea that “The medium is the message.” http://www.humanleather.co.uk/humanleatherbelts.html

Week 5: Utopia + Technology

Jennifer Muraoka

The group Anonymous is comprised of an international community of online hacktivists (hacker-activists) who desire freedom from the censorship limitations of the internet. From its beginnings on 4chan, Anonymous’s unidentified members plotted increasingly complicated stunts that started as intentionally almost cruel pranks aimed at specific groups of people and grew to protests targeting actual social problems. Through internet chat channels, “Anon” members met to discuss their ideas and make plans for protests such as the 2008 Church of Scientology walk, where thousands of Anonymous members marched past Scientology churches donning Guy Fawkes’s “V for Vendetta” masks, which are now a symbol for the group.

Although some people view the group as a positive force that targets societal issues related to the prevention or inhibition of internet freedom, others see Anonymous as a “dysfunctional marriage between a particular strain of countercultural utopianism and the boundless faith in technology that first appeared in the 1960s” (Chen). In their 2010 Operation Payback, Anonymous members managed to disable Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal websites in order to address the big companies’ decisions to stop funding WikiLeaks, a website that provides documents and information that is usually inaccessible to the public. Although the group began as a place to “troll” people, Anonymous has grown into a larger organization that relies on its members’ hacking skills to create a community of activists and like-minded people who are able to bring public attention to internet security and the sense of freedom that modern technology may lack.

Links to Anonymous-featured articles: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/masked-avengers David Kushner http://www.thenation.com/article/truth-about-anonymouss-activism/ Adrian Chen

newmediatheorypractice

(via Taisuke Mohri’s Latest ‘Extra-real’ Graphite Drawings)

week three response

Jennifer Muraoka

word: art

Hansen begins his chapter on art with the affirmation that “Art is a notoriously difficult concept to define” (1). Through his explanation of art’s history and people’s continuously changing views of art, Hansen comes to the conclusion that although there is no formal definition for “art,” modern advances in technology and new media art have turned art into “a way of paying attention” (18).

I had a difficult time searching for a single image that encompassed all of what art is (finding a single image that does is probably close to, if not, impossible). I decided on these two images by Tasuke Mohri and OMOCAT because both show vastly different styles of art and combine elements of new media art with traditional practices.

first image: Although Mohri used a pencil to draw the woman, his image has a realistic depth that a lot of traditionally created art has in common; however, the woman’s face is slightly distorted because of its nearly perfect symmetry. Her unnatural beauty, accentuated by the cracks and glitch-like blurs around parts of her face, remind viewers that Mohri’s works are modern works of art. Mohri combines aspects of traditional and new media art to create pieces that show art’s malleable definition in the context of modern forms of art.

second image: I have always been a fan of OMOCAT’s work. This gif epitomizes new media art (to me) because OMOCAT’s use of pixel art, digital painting, and movement. This piece, titled “PRESS START,” clearly illustrates modern dependence on technology, art, and media through technology, art, and media. The gif represents art’s loose modern definition in a time when digital techniques are increasingly prevalent in art’s creation.

newmediatheorypractice

Week 2 Response

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction revolves around Walter Benjamin’s idea that art’s aura, or sense of authenticity, “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction,” thus allowing art an entirely new distance from its original “dependence on ritual.” Benjamin explains that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity;” modern people prioritize bringing things spatially and humanly closer through mechanical reproduction over preserving authenticity, therefore contemporary art often lacks the uniqueness inherent in traditional art. The magical quality that art sometimes has refers to the piece’s aura. In his Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilem Flusser, like Benjamin, discusses the importance of magic in images; however, Flusser’s take on magic is that “the magical power of images lies in their superficial nature” (9). While Benjamin regards magic as a characteristic specific to original art, Flusser thinks the opposite, finding that “the technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our ‘reality’” (10). Both original artworks and reproduced images hold senses of magic in the ways that their histories can be interpreted as well as the ways through which they can alter human perspective by replacing “events by states of things and traslat[ing] them into scenes” (9).

Benjamin’s beliefs regarding the benefits of contemporary art’s fading aura supports F.T Marinetti’s concept of futurism in his “Futurist Manifesto.” As technology allows people access to increasingly easy and accurate products of artistic reproduction, art loses its “unique phenomenon of distance” while simultaneously gaining the ability to reach and relate to various people. The loss of aura represents a shift in human perception, therefore artists must learn to work with and create new art types that are “designed for reproducibility.” Benjamin’s ideas reinforce Marinetti’s belief that people should not “waste all [their] best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past;” modern artists must learn to disregard the past in order to create innovative works that can capture people’s interests.

Modern forms of art such as film and photography are types of reproducible art because their ability to reach large numbers of people in a consistent state makes having an original product with a sense of authenticity difficult. Benjamin’s belief that “if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes” suggests that contemporary society disregards tradition, as mirrored in contemporary forms of art.

Jennifer Muraoka

newmediatheorypractice

Week 1 Response

“The next year McCulloch, along with the brilliant young mathematician Walter Pitts, was to publish a paper entitled ‘Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,’ which suggested that the workings of the brain could be modelled in terms of a network of logical operations. This paper was extremely influential both in presenting a model for understanding the operations of the brain, and in modelling the operations of machines in terms of mental processes” (55). Digital and mechanic advances changed the ways people look at and understand the human mind. Technological developments had an increasingly noticeable influence over various fields of study, foreshadowing technology’s future control over not only military advances and professional studies, but also people’s daily lives. The photo depicts the strong connection between the way people currently think and technology.

Jennifer Muraoka

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