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!
Showing posts with label art blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art blog. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Friday, November 12, 2010
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
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
Tuesday, August 31, 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.....
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.....
Friday, July 2, 2010
Book 1, Shelf 1: Lucy Lippard Mixed Blessings
When I started reading Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, I had forgotten that I requested a book from the public library: Democracy, by Group Material and the Dia Art Foundation published in 1990 the same year Mixed Blessings was. Keeping to my rules, I haven't read it. I've browsed through the table of contents and noticed some incredible writers, among them Henry Louis Gates Jr., bell hooks, and Bill Moyers. These names have put my mind in the perspective of Lucy Lippard's world during the late 1980's when presumably she starting writing Mixed Blessings. Call them post-colonial, progressive, liberal, radical or realistic, the rhetoric of the writers I just mentioned are by no mean subtle. The late 1980's marked a continuation of thought that had its roots in the 60's movements and begged for a different world order to emerge. Mixed Blessings was written at a crucial time for art, a period filled with unfinished business and final battles for equal representation, artistic expression, and total inclusion. Reminisent of 1968, something was in the air. Countless people were dying of AIDS (and still are), Nelson Mandela was freed, East and West Germany reunited, the Cold War ended, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and some listened to Madonna's Vogue. The capitalistic game was a foot and the Guerrilla Girls could afford to put advertising on the side of buses in New York City. Old world structures were dismantling and artists were reflecting it (e.g. Group Material's Democracy).The Culture Wars were waged in full swing by conservative Americans such as Jesse Helms wanting to take back “their culture” so that it reflected the ideas and beliefs of “American” people.
As I've been reading Mixed Blessings, I am overwhelmed by the amount of information that is jammed in it. It almost seems like Lippard was writing a last will and testament on the day before Warsaw's Nazi seize. Lippard's voice can sometimes be so prophetic as well as have a scared-straight quality. There have been moments though when her writing seems aggressively romantic bordering cliché: “...is not imprisoned by her cultural sources, but freed by them”1. Considering that the book is devoted to the unearthing of, “a little-known explosion of art by women and men from many different ethnic backgrounds”2, it is pretty thin (total 270 pages with notes and bibliography). Was it little-known to the publisher? I get the feeling that Lippard was influenced by the momentum of the time. She just wasn't getting on the band wagon of collaborative groups when she wrote Mixed Blessings. She wanted to be a cultural bridge between two co-existing and separate art worlds, those in and those kept out.
I visited El Museo del Barrio the other day, and seeing it's revamped space I discovered new artists that were making dynamic art throughout the 20th century. Visitors around me were amazed to discover them and their history in a silenced existence. I kept Lippard's book in focus asking myself as I walked through the space, “Has her goal to inform the public of art made by people 'of different ethnic backgrounds' been successful?” As I sat on the train reading the second chapter "Telling", I noticed the name of an artist whose work impressed me and my friend at the museum. It was a video made in 1958 which consisted of reedited news reels from WWII and the Korean War. The footage was manipulated and rearranged in such a way to magnify the absurdity of war propaganda. The piece's formality was exceptional. It was by Rafael Montaňez Ortiz. On page 94 of Mixed Blessings, is a photograph documenting a performance piece, Communion with Trees, in Italy on the property of Fluxus artist Robert Watts in 1988. I found out that Ortiz was not only “pioneering the performance art field”3, but was also the first director of el Museo. My friend pointed out that our tour guide had failed to point out Montaňez Ortiz's piece.
Lippard, Lucy Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, New Press: New York, 1990
1. Lippard, Lucy Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America,p. 67
2. ibid, back cover
3. ibid, p. 93
As I've been reading Mixed Blessings, I am overwhelmed by the amount of information that is jammed in it. It almost seems like Lippard was writing a last will and testament on the day before Warsaw's Nazi seize. Lippard's voice can sometimes be so prophetic as well as have a scared-straight quality. There have been moments though when her writing seems aggressively romantic bordering cliché: “...is not imprisoned by her cultural sources, but freed by them”1. Considering that the book is devoted to the unearthing of, “a little-known explosion of art by women and men from many different ethnic backgrounds”2, it is pretty thin (total 270 pages with notes and bibliography). Was it little-known to the publisher? I get the feeling that Lippard was influenced by the momentum of the time. She just wasn't getting on the band wagon of collaborative groups when she wrote Mixed Blessings. She wanted to be a cultural bridge between two co-existing and separate art worlds, those in and those kept out.
I visited El Museo del Barrio the other day, and seeing it's revamped space I discovered new artists that were making dynamic art throughout the 20th century. Visitors around me were amazed to discover them and their history in a silenced existence. I kept Lippard's book in focus asking myself as I walked through the space, “Has her goal to inform the public of art made by people 'of different ethnic backgrounds' been successful?” As I sat on the train reading the second chapter "Telling", I noticed the name of an artist whose work impressed me and my friend at the museum. It was a video made in 1958 which consisted of reedited news reels from WWII and the Korean War. The footage was manipulated and rearranged in such a way to magnify the absurdity of war propaganda. The piece's formality was exceptional. It was by Rafael Montaňez Ortiz. On page 94 of Mixed Blessings, is a photograph documenting a performance piece, Communion with Trees, in Italy on the property of Fluxus artist Robert Watts in 1988. I found out that Ortiz was not only “pioneering the performance art field”3, but was also the first director of el Museo. My friend pointed out that our tour guide had failed to point out Montaňez Ortiz's piece.
Lippard, Lucy Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, New Press: New York, 1990
1. Lippard, Lucy Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America,p. 67
2. ibid, back cover
3. ibid, p. 93
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