On blogging...


Well, I guess I'll just be honest. It just wasn't for me, at least not in this format. I could see wanting to have a personal blog later in life, posting random stories or bits of wisdom that I might have obtained by then, but I still feel weird about using blogs for academic work. I don't like the fact that all of the comments I got on my posts were spam from random people. I also encountered numerous problems with the blogger site that I found annoying. Furthermore, I am a much better writer when I write in other formats. Even when I would write first in a Word document and paste into my blog, I felt like knowing that I was writing a blog made my writing sloppier. Maybe it was also the knowledge that the rest of the class would be reading everything that I wrote that made me uncomfortable.

Most of all I just found it impossible to keep up with the 2 blogs per week. I will regularly go on little breaks from the internet where I unintentionally neglect to check my email for a week, and during these breaks I would also fall behind on blogging. I am interested in technology, but I am also very interested in making sure I do not become dependent on it. I felt like the blogs on top of all of the emailing this school makes me do were tying me to my laptop.

But then again, it was cool to try something new. And there were definitely times when I enjoyed the group aspect of it. Honestly, if it had been one blog per week that might have made all the difference.

Tagging


All this about folksonomies reinforces my belief that language requires explanation. Language is always changing and transforming, and needs to be explained in order to make sense.

This is the essential problem with tagging - different forms of the same word, one word that means two things, inconsistencies like this that screw up the whole system.

However, Flikr's cluster function seems to do a pretty good job of evading these problems. By allowing users to choose which associate group they want for a single word, the system skirts the issue of missing the desired information due to mislabeling.

I really wish that search engines had a similar function, and I bet that in a few years they will. By accepting the multiplicity of meanings in our language and working with them, Flikr has made an important step. They have in a sense overcome one of the built-in obstacles of our system of language.

Back to something we read about a while ago...

All of this about the democratizing power of the internet makes me very skeptical. I think it is good that if one has the access and knowledge they can put something out there on the web, and of course it is useful that anyone with access can search for information for free online, but these things do not necessarily add up to democratization. It is incredibly scary that there is no monitor for what goes up on the web, and hence what is available to those who look for it.

Far from promoting equality and helping people, much of the information available online is harmful and hateful. Communities of white supremacists that have figured out the internet post instructions for building homemade bombs and encourage their members to "take action" against those in their lives that go against their beliefs. Pro-ana sites provide forums where anorexic girls can go when they feel hungry and need "support." They sign on and say they are thinking of eating and other users bombard them with words of encouragement like "No, don't eat, you fat pig!" Not to mention the many degradations that women, children (and probably animals) have suffered thanks to internet pornography.

In short, yes, the internet provides free information for those who want it, but for every person out there using it to try to promote equality and human rights, there is someone out there using it to destroy those same things.

Constructing Identity Online


I have never felt the slightest urge to participate in Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, or any other online "friend" community. And frankly, until I took this class, I thought that I was the norm. I thought that the only people who resorted to these communities were people who lacked the social skills necessary to acquire real life friends.

I guess I was completely off, because lately I feel like I'm actually the odd man out. It seems like now everybody does this stuff, but I still really don't get it. If it has something to do with people's desire to articulate their identities, it seems completely counterproductive. As we have discussed in class, most of these sites don't allow for much individuality at all. You can choose your favorite movie and your favorite TV show, but there is no place to describe things like your family life or intellectual interests. Why would anybody want to waste their time trying to force a webpage to approximate their entire personality when there is no way that it can? Especially in the case of Facebook, where the people in the community are the same people that exist in these people's actual college community, what the hell is the point? Why don't they just go actually see and talk to these people? They must realize that real life is a much better arena for self-expression than a formatted personal profile.

There is this passion for meanlingless communication among my peers that I really don't understand. Because I refuse to sit online and have long AIM conversations about nothing with people who live right down the hall from me, I get criticized for having "bad AIM etiquette." No, I don't enjoy spending my free time writing blogs about my daily activities so that random people can read them. I'd rather live my life than waste it producing empty words.

I hate to say it, but I think alot of this fascination with "communication" is just insecurity. I guess people really feel good when somebody "pokes" them. But imagine how good it would feel to actually spend time with that person instead of having passing interactions online. If people would just get the confidence to interact with the people they wanted to interact with, maybe we could cut all the crap.

Shaviro

I really love this book, especially for the way it is written and formatted. I want to write another blog later about some of the points Shaviro makes, but I just wanted to get down before class my reaction to the way he put his book together.

Each section has a clear title that gets you thinking even before you start to read. If you were to just flip through and look at all of these subtitles, you would naturally start to think about some of the ideas that Shaviro is interested in. He uses catch phrases and familiar expressions to get our associative juices flowing. Within each section, he does not feel compelled to draw clear connecting lines to other parts of his writing. He allows his readers to make these connections on their own, juxtaposing ideas suggestively instead of arraging them into an organized heirarchy.

I find it very appropriate that this book guides you through thinking about the concepts of connection and networking in a fragmented, non-linear way. Connected is a collage of musings on ideas related to these concepts, such that one could read the sections in a random order and still walk away with all of the things that Shaviro wants us to think about. Much like our navigation of the hodge-podge of media that exist in the modern world, in reading this book we must piece together distict ideas to create meanings.

Writing in this way allows for the reader to easily store the information in a fragmented and associative form. While we often mentally store information within the structures of argument that we first see it in, this pieced-together format allows us to take each section and store it mentally in whatever compartment it fits best. Because ultimately all of our knowledge cannot fit into a heirarchical structure, it is inevitable that our brains store things associatively. The unusual writing format that Shaviro uses is refreshing to me because it encourages this natural associative thinking.

The goal of art used to be the imitation of life, and while many people are still impressed by a really realistic painting of a bowl of fruit, I think modern art has represented a key change in this goal.

We are still after mimesis, but I think we are now much more concerned with replicating the unconscious.

In contemporary art, music, and film, we see a consistent desire on the part of the creator to mimic human psychology. Whether it is the eerie sampled laughter and mumbling in the background of a Pink Floyd song, or the dark and confusing editing style of Mulholland Drive, there is a certain body of contemporary art and media that is very concerned with the area of the unconscious mind.

Like 60's performace-based art that encouraged people to recognize themselves as animals (i.e naked people playing in meat), newer forms of older media (like experimental writing) seek to restructure themselves in this more animalistic sensibility.

In this desire also comes a desire to turn to more process-oriented art. This work is centered around the idea of exposing the internal, which is ultimatley the goal of the artistic exploration of the unconscious. Process-oriented work is also extremely psychological by nature, as it depends on the artist's will to simply make and their fascination with the process of making, rather than the desire to see a certain result.

What people are looking for in media is empathy. We want to see media that emulate our personal experience of life - that is what engages us. Most traditional types of media attempt to create this sense of empathy in the viewer through the use of characters. Typically, there is one protagonist that we are supposed to identify with throughout the story, and it is through the vehicle of this character that we recieve any meaning that the author intends to convey.

In the database narratives that we have seen, characters are used very differently. They are part of the scenery rather than representatives of the viewer. They are tidbits of information rather than all-encompassing symbols. And when we are not given enough substance within characters to identify ourselves with them, our empathy goes instead to the author. Confronted with the disjointedness of the narrative and denied a certain person's story to follow, we can't help but think about the process by which the piece was created. In experiencing a part of the piece we inevitably conceptualize the whole.

This is what is key to me about database narrative, the fact that it forces the viewer to acknowledge and imagine the existence of a whole that they are not able to see. Even in Soft Cinema's structural view mode we are not capable of processing the actuality of the structure. We know it is there, and we marvel at how it must be configured, but we can't see it clearly. We are forced to understand in a different way than we are used to, and in my mind any art that makes you think differently is good art.

In thinking about the differences between Soft Cinema and Tracing the Decay of Fiction, I started thinking about how the interactivity of the latter played into their relationship. Though both are database narratives that need not be seen in a certain order, Soft Cinema assigns random order to its sequences while Tracing the Decay of Fiction lets the viewer interact spacially, which corresponds to the triggering of different segments. It would seem that this interactivity would allow more freedom, and indeed most of our class preferred the second of the two database narratives, but I feel that by allowing users to interact, the creators are also placing certain limitations on themselves. When the progression of the narrative is contingent upon the viewer's engagement, the creators must cater to the viewer's desires.

While Soft Cinema is free to be crazy, Tracing the Decay of Fiction must adhere to some kind of logic that placates the viewer in order to keep them interested. For example, if in Tracing the Decay of Fiction clicking on the left side of the screen did not take you to the space directly left of your current location but instead to an entirely different world, you would probably feel less motivated to keep clicking. If more clicking leads only to more confusion, the viewer will start to associate their own involvement with their lack of understanding.

The way that the viewer can navigate spacially is a very strategic move in this piece. By organizing the narrative in terms of a cohesive mapped space, the creators allow the viewers a sense of logic. However, we have no way to control or predict which scenes we will see in those spaces, so we are still subjected to randomness, just not upset by it.

While I agree that it is a more pleasing experience to explore Tracing the Decay of Fiction than Soft Cinema, I believe that there is something to be said for art that you just observe and do not change yourself. Taking out that direct element of interactivity allows for another more internal type of interaction. When we see that something is designed for us to play with, we tend to assume that this is its primary purpose. We get too excited about the fact that we are clicking and lose touch with the fact that this experience has been engineered for us in order to spark thought. In contrast, when we see a piece of art that is completed and finalized, we know to think about it in a certain way. We wonder at why certain desicions were made by the artist, and our speculations on why the piece is the way it is become our interpretation of its purpose. When we are the ones doing the 'clicking', we start to think that we are making the desicions, when really we are only following one of the paths that the creator has laid out for us.

I don't think that this is a fault with Tracing the Decay of Fiction, but rather with the way that we read it. Like somone said in class, we feel like it is a video game rather than an art piece. This is one hurdle that interactive art will have to jump - the way that interactivity has taken on such a shallow meaning in today's culture.

In class we talked a bit about the database narrative as a process-oriented art form. While traditional art tended to aim toward perfect replication, modern art has tended to engage the process of art-making, encouraging the viewer to look beneath the surface of art and contemplate how it came into existence.

Why has this change occured? When the first super-realistic painting was shown to the public, I'm sure they were blown away. They must have thought it was magic to see such an accurate representation of a real object sitting on a flat rectangle of canvas. But over time, more and more painters became capable of such realistic depictions, and that magic factor was lost. As technology has developed, we have seen this process with countless forms of art. Today, even a VR-type interactive video game experience might not give us that feeling of amazement. We are desensitized to realism. And so there has been a lerge branch of artists that have shifted their focus to the means by which art is made, and how these processes speak about the concept of art and the human relationship to it.

I looked at a slide today in one of my classes of a sculpure by Janine Antoni. Shaped like a cube that had been attacked and worn away at the corners , the piece was made of chocolate which the artist had modified by method of chewing. Cleverly, the work was titled Gnaw.

Like Antoni, those who work in database narratives are instructing their audience to see not what is on the surface, but the process that put it there. In doing this they are forcing a certain type of interactivity. As we look at the cube, we will inevitably imagine Antoni on her hands and knees gnawing fiercely at it. Her piece makes such a visceral statement about the art-making process that we will not be able to help thinking about how our own bodies relate to it. Similarly, a database narrative will force its reader to imagine the author's complete structure for the work. By blatantly declaring itself to be a non-traditional narrative, it forces those who read it to relate to the idea of authorship in a new way. And once we have begun to reconceptualize the process of storymaking, it will follow to reevaluate the process of experience-making.

This is why I love process-oriented art so much. I love interacting with something that makes you insanely curious about how it came into existence. I love looking at an object and thinking that the person who made it must either be completely insane or utterly brilliant or both and just wondering how the hell they thought to do it. I would like to see all art made with the goal of inspiring such curiosity. That which we have seen just a hint of but do not yet understand will always be what captivates us, and what pushes us to do our deepest thinking.

Kinder

"In Western academic theory, narrative is traditionally perceived as a mode of discourse containing actions and characters that interact and change according to laws of causality within a spacial and temporal setting. Yet by privileging nonlinear storytelling and communication, new digital media help us see that in a much broader cognitive and ideological sense narrative is also a means of patterning and interpreting the meaning of all sensory input and objects of knowledge."

This is exactly what I have been thinking about since we first started talking about the nature of narrative, and I love the way Kinder articulates it. I wrote a blog a while ago about the tendency of those within our culture to want to see the world as orderly, and to desire a definitive end to each action they undergo. We want things to fit into patterns so that we can make sense of them. When we do not understand things we feel powerless. I am very interested in these cultural constructions that surround our idea of narrative, and the ways that new media help us rethink them.

I really like thinking of narrative instead as a basic building block of the human experience - the process of taking in information and attempting to understand it. When we look at narrative in this way, it becomes essentially the same as the aporia-epiphany. It becomes a much more accurate representation of the fundamental way that we rationalize our world - by categorizing and weeding through all of the input we are constantly receiving and attempting to make sense of it.

By redefining the narrative, we also enable it to work cooperatively with the database. Rather than presenting two opposing methods of exploring information, they become two parts of the same concept. Databases are constructed with large (but finite) supplies of information, and then narratives are constructed by selecting small pieces of that information and interpreting their relationships.

The way that the essential processes of selection and combination are exposed in database narrative makes it an ideal form of new media. We know that we are thrown off by pieces like these, and that uncomfortable feeling makes us search for what it is that is different here. With database narrative this discomfort is the key to pushing us into a place where we can appreciate the process of story-making. We are forced to confront the fact that while there is no set path, there is an underlying engineered structure.

This gets into the idea of process-oriented art, which I will explore in my upcoming blog...

Manovich

I can't help but feel a bit beat over the head with the whole depressing reality of the illusion of choice in our society. Manovich has example after example of how new media follow the menu-selection format, and my head keeps swimming with more instances within American culture on a more general level. Do we choose Abercrombie or Gap? Pomona or Brown? LA or NY? I mean, for that matter, republican or democrat? What does it matter? Will our "American experience" be significantly changed? Probably not. Our lives are more likely to be changed by random occurances. Ohya, one more I just have to get out there: PEPSI OR COKE? I mean really, people. That's just ridiculous.

It's just kind of funny and sad to me that people are captivated by the illusion of choice even though we all must realize on some level that we are not really in control here. We allow ourselves to be satisfied with choosing the ways that we will modify our personal worlds to make them more pleasant (like choosing a desktop background, if you will) and never even attempt to change the problems that are at the core of it all. Because the day we are born we are set into the system, we grow up thinking it is the only option.

Really, if everyone just dropped the routine all at the same time, we could change everything. For example, if one election every American actually got educated and got up and voted for the candidate that best exemplified their beliefs, we might have a very different political environment. But half of the people in this country are too fed up with knowing that their beliefs don't matter.

So I guess I'm just afraid that as new media continue to develop, they will only become more reason for all of us to sit in our rooms plugged into things, making insignificant menu selections and neglecting to make real choices in our real lives.

But what can we do?

Manovich

I found Lev's exploration of art's history of physical contraint very interesting. I study mostly art and art history, and I have always been bothered by the starchy feel of the more traditional arts - academic painting, bronze and marble sculpture, etc. The unpleasantly rigid and formal feeling that these works give me is likely my response to this trait that Manovich discusses - the essential imprisonment of the body. In order to look at these more traditional works, one must remain still and stand in a certain position. Even the artist who makes such works must sometimes constrain themselves in order to achieve such presicion.

I find it extremely interesting that most of the art I appreciate in history is art that has broken this tradition of immobility - I am a fan of art that challenges. I love the way that over time, art has become more mobile. We are at the point today where contemporary sculpture/installation requires viewers (if we can even use this term anymore... "experiencers?") to climb inside art, to wear it, eat it, ride it, play it... the sky is the limit. The artists who make these pieces are also using all sorts of liberating processes. I saw a presentation in another class by an artist who, over a two year period, made a sculpture by encouraging oyster shells to grow together in certain formations. Every so often he would put on a wet suit and dive into the water, where there were an abundance of sharks, and swim around making sure that the pieces of shell were fusing correctly. Making art for this man is an experience essentially different from the experience of making a drawing by placing your arm into a mechanical device that controlls its position.

In my own work I also try to break the tradition of immobility. I try to make pieces that you can play or interact with, or at least need to walk around to appreciate. I think that most contemporary art makes a clear effort to separate itself from more traditional art, and a huge portion of the difference between the two is this monumental difference in the way that we physically engage art and interact with it spacially.

McCloud

I think it is very interesting to think about the economics of internet art/music and how they affect what kind of art is produced. McCloud's point about the difference between the statements "Try this, it's really good" and, "Try this, it's really good and it's $35.00" rings particularly true for me when it comes to how the music industry has been behaving in response to iPod/iTunes domination. Now that we choose new music with such carelessness, there is great value for new artists in having a distinct genre association or sound that potential fans can identify with. A more experimental-sounding group will have a hard time growing popular through the internet simply because their label is not clear. And so, like it often does with economics, it all becomes a question of appeal, of advertising. Is is a coincidence that all of these new rock/indy/hipster bands (whose music has spread like wildfire due to the techno-philic nature of its young hip subculture) have names that sound the same? The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines, The White Stripes... I think not. The climate of popular music right now encourages clear-cut genre divisions.

Yes, American consumer culture has always encouraged this type of label-based advertising, but I think the internet only pushes things further in that direction. Even more basic than the necessity for labels to make things desireable is the necessity for labels to make things understandable. This reminds me of the essential problem we have read about with the internet where specific file names and paths must be known in order to access information. If a musician wants to spread their music via the internet, she better be damn smart about how she presents herself. The images and text that identify her must make it clear what she is about, and in a good advertisement will also make whatever this is seem appealing...

Just thinking.