Fight, fight, fight

15 years ago people were pegging digital tools as having the potential to change established systems and the dominant culture's influence in general. Until 2008, I didn't think it would happen. Obama's election was exactly what we had been hoping for when we first ran out to buy our first laptops in the late 90' hooking up our almost 256mb system to our phone lines and using the Internet. But the big revolution never came. Information wasn't changing our life styles or choices. We were too hypnotized by the glitz and overwhelmed by the plans we soon had to purchase to have the Internet. Storm clouds cleared when we elected President Obama and we were hopeful- then, we were not. In the last few months we have seen two governments toppled on the strength of Twitter, blogs, flicker, etc. People in Tunisia and Egypt shook things up and succeeded. Will things go array as they have here with conservative hew-haws holding on tight at all costs? Who would have thought that we would have lost the Net Neutrality War? The working class is still struggling everywhere and there are still starving artists. My Korean colleague died at the end of January because she starved to death. She was an amazing filmmaker and screenwriter who only had enough to pay the rent. Her thyroid condition made things much worse helping to sign her death sentence. To be honest, I would expect something like that happening here in the US. Our system of having artists help themselves seems to have spread.

In the latest essay I read from Digital Dialectic, “ 'We Could Be Better Ancestors Than This': Ethics and First Principles for Art of the Digital Age” by Bob Stein- the main point is to make tools accessible for everyone to make art, live, function because it is just unethical not to. Stein is a publisher and was part of the Voyager company who developed “Who Built America” a disc by the American Social History Project. Apple refused to distribute it with an educational bundle for schools when Voyager refused to edit the sections about abortion and gays (for Trekkies out there: can you see images of Captain Janewood refusing to comply?). The matter was resolved and Apple continued distributing it. I haven't looked up where Stein is now, but I don't think he is advising the president's people.

I naturally side with Stein on: keeping the system fair and changing the dominant culture's control over it, getting digital corporations to re-evaluate in bigger terms not just from the cash, Id and ego perspective, and to fight fight fight for what will make the world a better place from all aspects (spiritual, mental, and emotional).

Go get Linux!

Almost struck out, but along came a Russian

Thank heavens that Lev Manovich wrote an essay in this book (“What is Digital Cinema?"). If he hadn't I think I would have used the first of three strikes. The Digital Dialectic isn't a horrible book, I just feel that some of the writing isn't very seductive. I totally avoided the book for a few weeks. After a great start with discovering Buffalo Heads through the dedication, I found the first essay to be dull. Trying to alleviate the situation I jumped around but dozed off. Manovich was manna from heaven! He is so specific in his writing and gets to the point. His thesis pretty much is that digital cinema is a beautiful bigamous marriage between the photograph, painting and collage. His describing the loop as a function comparable to photography's capturing the decisive moment felt as if my brain had gotten a dusting. His essay seemed to be his book in a nutshell, and I wonder which came first.

I don't think I will read the entire book cover to cover. I've decided to select some essays instead. My next book is more theory so I may do this again instead of using a strike. The next essay will be on ethics and the digital world. Let's see how it goes.

More soon

Was I writing a blog or something?

Well I got sucked up into a vortex of holidays and grant submissions. I've managed to crawl to my bookcase and get the next book. It is another theory book. TO be honest, I wish I could switch it up for a fiction, but the inner nun in me has got me by the head with gun to stick with the plan. I must read what's there in the order that it appears in. sigh.

So, it's The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media edited by Peter Lunefeld. 1999 MIT Press.

When I see the dates on the New Media books I've been reading, I feel like Sam Tyler the lead character in the British TV series "Life on Mars". Seeing 1999, and the thought process that went along with the compiling of the book makes me assume that I already know everything that is about to be discussed in the essays. Rather arrogant. Why? It doesn't seem as if anything in the New Media field has advanced so much. If anything it seems to have reached a plateau. in terms of new projects, challenging ideas, ground breaking innovation....If anyone out there (hello, crickets) has suggestions send links please.

Lunefeld opens the book with a dedication, " To Gerald O'Grady for what he built". I found some exciting information:

Gerald O'Grady was a visionary it seems. A champion for the arts and the fusion of technology with it. His work on archiving the work of the Civil Rights era is incredible, and he received some impressive awards in support of it. How does it happen that a name like this passes along like a blur in our history when it should be a household name? In photos he looks like a Detroit car/ad man. Never would have pinned him for an art revolutionary. As I google here and there I can't help but want to go into one of my rants about how removed our society is from seeking solidarity with the arts. by this I mean making it possible for everyone to have the opportunity to work and explore without the stresses of living, surviving, and diving into life in 21Century NYC (or other urban trench).

For more on O'Grady read below. It looks like a new edition to the case. Also provides reason to get moving on the shelf.
Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990
Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel (Eds.)
Paper / November 2008
Images and texts document the legendary Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo when it set the world standard; a history of the program and examples of work by "Buffalo heads" James Blue, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, Gerald O'Grady, Paul Sharits, Steina, Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.


More soon.....

and yet more theory to read

It has taken me forever, but I'm done with Lev. It is certainly a must read for all artists practicing today regardless if they use digital media to produce their work or not. The rise of digital media has truly changed how we relate to visual information largely because I think our relationship to sensory experiences in the everyday has changed. We have the ability to have entire control over creating a virtual world, simulating any situation we want, to whatever degree of perfection we care to have. As a result, the demand for artists to match this has tripled and our audiences have grown more fastidious. Perhaps this is why there are an overwhelming number of design programs on TV. The public seems to crave pleasingly aesthetic environments and programs give them accessible tools. Maybe all this simulation has led to a want for more real experiences. more performances. Forget Marina Abramovic. She's been around for a while, yet it is now that her work and the work of many other performance artists is in demand. Is it because she's met the required 30+ year career deadline? Or is it because the zeitgeist wants to experience the palpable again.

The next book is more digital theory. I don't think it will match Lev Manovich. He's an incredible writer and thinker. I will drudge. I don't know when the first fiction is coming up. I will have to look at the list again. I have a theory I will move faster through fiction....


copyright AliciaGrullon 2010

Hypermedia, Hyperlinks, Manovich

Some good friends were over this past weekend and we got on the topic of motherhood. Basically, most mothers forget about themselves. I know I have. At times, there isn't a minute during the day to put on a clean shirt. I find I'm most comfortable in a pair of baggy and would love to think about myself for an hour while indulging in a manicure/pedicure. Something has re-programmed in me to not think of me the individual but as me the group member.

I also don't think about what a hyperlink is anymore, I actually just look for them automatically when reading an online article, Tweeting, etc. It is interesting how Manovich asks how to analyze what a hypermedia link is. For me, it became mildly trippy experience. For instance, I don't think of hyperlinks at all in relation to Hypermedia and how hypermedia is “a network of information containing nodes interconnected to be relational links”. Nor have I considered hyperlinks to be independent from the contents in a document, separating themselves from all other elements and keeping their identity from blending in. (Manovich, p.41) Now looking at a page I see these hyperlinks reluctantly agreeing to be on the page free agents on loan almost. It wouldn't surprise me if we'd need to pay patent or royalties even for using them. New Media it seems reflects our individualistic society, our longing to be unique. Everything is customized to make us feel as if it were so. We receive recommendations from Amazon, Google, etc. based on information we've typed in and reconfigured through a game of what will most likely be perfect for us. It is easy to get lost behind the computer, on the Internet looking through our particular reading list, followings, and friends. We get into a zone: It is our time.

The Internet and revolution of interactivity was meant to give us more freedom. That's how it was billed. With the shift from constants to variables Manovich mentions came “choice” and “freedom” restructuring live assistance to menus of options and automated machines. This drive towards choice has led to many having no choice in the reconfiguration of their jobs. Makes me think of Jason Reitman film Up in the Air and the plot by the junior exec to have people fired over a web cam- easy, cost effective, and clean.

Our world today seems to be calling for a group consciousness, one that has to be fully aware of what is occurring around us. Social networking sites have really played a part in combining our post-modern tools and attitude with the constant to collaborate for greater good. Yet, I know one a many people who dislike it when their Friend on Facebook puts up a cause he wants to get everyone fired up about. Is it because our “me” time is being interrupted?

Where does art stand in all of this? I'm up to the part where I re-think what I'm seeing on screen as data.....

More Lippard Plus Artists

Gosh, that was a pretty long hiatus from the blog. It has been on my mind to sit and write. Life has taken over. With an upcoming exhibition and a million life things to do, my focus was everywhere but here. Writing this is centering. Reading has been confined to stints in the bathroom after the kids are asleep or after work is done. Subway reading is a luxury I treasure beyond words. All in all, I have been sloooooow.

As I promised in my last entry, I googled some artists in the book that I wanted to look up and see what they were doing now. There are some big names Lippard mentions. I stuck to the lesser known big shots.

David Chung: http://www.davidchung.com/
In the chapter called Mixing, Lippard covers some amazing artists whose work resonates loudly with current events in the US. It is almost a bit uncanny how much this chapter belongs to the here and now. Was Lippard on some sort of time machine when she wrote it and didn't realize it? I am sure that these artists are very well known by those much better versed when it comes to names. I must confess, that this was the first I heard of David Chung and I was impressed. It goes without saying that by the mere size of his canvases Chung is stationed in LA. Where else would he have the space to explore the pictorial plane with such dramatic line and gusto. His name attracted me. Having a history in Korea and returning there last year, the big boom of the Korean art world is dynamically impressive for me. There is so much ordered passion in the details of work by many Korean artists as well as in Chung's. His imagery is a symphony of graffiti and Korean motifs, northeast Asian symbols such as the crane, swooping above a tangle of monochromatic beams. His 1988 piece Seoul House” an electronic rap opera, was an early piece sited by Lippard. The video on his site is pretty good for showing the documentation of a live piece and left me wanting Chung to create more live pieces. He found a way to collaborate with ethnomusicologist Pooh Johnston and composer Charles Tobermann that mirrored the cross cultural identity the US carries within it. When so much media focus recently (albeit misinformed for the most part) on cross cultural relations, it is refreshing to see something smart, non-sensationalist, and dignified.

Larry Beck (Chnagmiut Yup'ik): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_James_Beck
I was disappointed to see this artist had passed away in 1994. The link above was the only more or less comprehensive link on him and his work I could find. He died in 1994, a few year after the publication on Mixed Blessings. He had a tremendous career working with Tom Robbins in performance collaborations with the Shazam Society (worth a good research paper if ever) and in his own rite with mighty sculpture. In his caption, he notes that he is an Eskimo but also a 20th Century American who lives in a modern city with junk yards, industrial waste, trash cans that float on the shores of ancient beaches where his ancestors found driftwood. His pieces involve using modern found objects to create masks influenced by traditional old Inuit art. They are as amusing as they are poignant. As I was reading his bio on wikipedia, I read a sentence that struck me: “He experimented with casting several small masks, based on traditional Inuit forms, in aluminum and bronze, but he was still uncomfortable with the fact that the masks represented a complete contradiction to his western art training. This and peer group pressure kept him doing abstract work.” Reading this sentience reminded me of an interview I heard on WBAI with Ellen Lupton on her new book about indie publishing companies. In her interview she mentioned that the business of publishing is based on keeping people out because there is so much money involved with publishing a new author that it is really an economic risk. Is art's aesthetic based on financial risk thus affecting our interests, judgments, and choices? Beck deserves a retrospective in a major way. But who will do it? With any luck a museum devoted to Native American Arts will do so, but what about the bigger institutions like the Guggenheim, LAMOCA, Gettysburg, etc.? Will they take the chance and re-program the aesthetic?

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/chaTheresa.php
A tragic end like that of Ana Mendieta, Cha died at a point in her career where she was hitting incredible momentum. Her book “Dictee” is already on my list of to buy after I finish this project. I want to devote more time researching her work. Her work is contemporary to Mendieta. Their work both transcends from the material to the another plane that is universal. Both begin from the female and from there invest their energies into transcending limits within materials. I had heard of Cha before this book, but to be honest had not seen any of her work and only heard of her fame and tragic death. Her work is simple but deceptive in leading us to think that it's core is not complex. She had a retrospective that traveled to Spain organized by UC Berkley according to La Fundacio Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. There is a foundation under her name with images and documentation on her work.

I think I am going to devote one more entry to Lippard. The bookcase has to move forward. I don't know if I am going to use a first strike for this book. I feel as if I'm committing heresy just thinking about doing this let alone it being a Lucy Lippard book, but the project must move forward and at this pace, I don't want my audience to forget about me. So here's a deadline I'm sticking with: August 17. The week before is going to be filled with opening exhibition jitters and work. New live art piece. Exciting!