Remixing ‘Deep Remixability’: trying to get it right

INTRODUCTION:

I was pretty much amused by the political aspect of the essay ‘Deep Remixability’, if we fail to perceive it this way then we might face a problem understanding the social aspect of media today.

After having mentioned DJ Spooky’s vision of sampling and its importance as an art practice in one of the chat sessions, Andy pointed out that I should be looking at the concept of ‘deep remixability’ by Lev Manovich as the next development on the form of sampling.

Having read the essay, I decided that it would require another reading to really grasp the essence, so the next time I read the article, I decided to take notes for myself in order to follow the thread of the author’s thoughts.

‘Deep remixability’, the essay, mainly discusses the new hybrid language of moving image that emerged during the period of 1993-1998. 1993 is the year Adobe launched their software After Effects, the application that enabled people (from all levels) working in media to produce commercials, music videos, motion graphics, TV graphics and other types of short non-narrative films and moving image sequences in a hybrid form.

Hybrid has become the norm, Manovich argues since with After Effects one can do a lot of things: editing, designing, compositing, creating special effects, animating… all on a desktop computer or a laptop.

BRIEF HISTORY:

Manovich refers to the ‘Velvet Revolution’ that happened when Central and Eastern Europe peacefully liberated themselves from the Soviet Union. ‘Velvet Revolution’ the term came to express the smoothness of the transformation, that of the velvet smoothness.

He uses this metaphor to explain the aesthetics resulting from the transformation in moving image.

NEW CULTURAL LANGUAGE:

Different media met within the same digital environment, they interacted in a new way that did not exist before and that could not be imagined or predicted ahead before the invention of the algorithmic language. Now with algorithms, all the data became digital, so the different file formats became compatible with every other software, and this is where the new language of the hybrid emerged based on the logic of remixability.

Having set that the logic of the new hybrid language is that of ‘remixability’, not only of the content of different media or simply their aesthetics, but their fundamental techniques, working methods, languages, and assumptions. All the moving image categories, when united under the common software environment, they create a new metamedium.

The work produced in this new metamedium cannot be referred to as ‘remediation’, since what the computer does is simulate all media, not only its surface appearance, but also the techniques used for their production and the methods of viewing and interacting with the work in these media.

The author argues that After Effects constituted a new stage in the history of media, with new aesthetics and the production of new media species, based on the interaction of the different media in the same software environment (typography with 2D animation and cinematography for instance in the same melting pot being After Effects). The end result is ‘new cultural species’ in Manovich’s words.

TECHNIQUES AND PARAMETERS CHANGE:

Digital compositing was essential in enabling the development of the new hybrid visual language of moving images. Its original mission was to support the aesthetics of cinematic realism; instead it liberated the many media from the fake (or fluent) flow and enhanced the visibility of the mixes. This is how it enabled media ‘remixability’ and soon became a ‘universal media integrator’.

Its importance lies in the fact that it transformed the basic unit from ‘frame’ to ‘visual elements’. Manovich uses the After Effects’ interface again to argument the shift from ‘time-based’ to ‘composition-based’. In this software, visual elements are placed in the composition windows, these elements can be manipulated and conceptualized as independents objects that could be accessed, revisited and edited back endlessly. Therefore, the main issue that this software is suggesting is space as opposed to time, in the author’s words.

He also refers to cinema in the modern times, how it was perceived as a series of photos placed in a sequence, when projected create the effect of motion. This is where the term ‘moving pictures’ or ‘moving image’ come from. Since today all media are conceived differently (being created in either a 2D or 3D worlds), contemporary terminology that defines moving image would become: ‘modular media composition’.

To recap, hybridization is not:

- A simple mechanical sum of the previously existing parts, it is new species being generated

- Simply adding the content of different media or adding together their techniques and languages

- A simple remix as it is commonly understood in contemporary culture

This is where the term ‘deep remixability’ emerges.

Effect is simulated and removed from its original physical media (that of fluent realistic effect in cinema realism) >> manipulation could be happening in many ways (since it’s now based on visual elements instead of a frame) >> parameters are independently animated (one could change an animation for instance over time) >> numbers are controlling the algorithm >> simulated depth of field maintain the memory of the particular physical media which it came from >> it becomes a new technique which functions as a character in its own right >> it has fluidity and versatility that did not exist previously >> ambiguous relation to the physical world.

SOCIAL FACTORS THAT LEAD TO ‘DEEP REMIXABILITY’:

The author names the following factors:

- The rise of branding

- The experience of economy

- Youth markets

- Web as a global communication platform

These factors are not enough to lead to the new aesthetics, instead he would mention a fact being ‘softwares used in production environments are not set out to create a revolution; they are created to fit in already existing procedures, job roles and familiar tasks.’ This is were the result to ‘deep remixability’ shapes:

‘Software are like species within the common ecology, once released, the start interacting, mutating, and making hybrids.’

CONCLUSION:

The essay is beautifully ended by the conclusion below:

‘Following the Velvet Revolution, the aesthetic charge of many media designs is often derived from more ‘simple’ remix operations - juxtaposing different media in what can be called ‘media montage.’ However, for me the essence of this Revolution is the more fundamental ‘deep remixability’ (...). Computerization virtualized practically all media creation and modification techniques, ‘extracting’ them from their particular physical media and turning them into algorithms. This means that in most cases, we will no longer find any of these techniques in their pure original state.’

The article could be found on the following link:

http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/manovichessay/

DJ Spooky speaks about his album 'the secret song'

DJ Spooky speaks about his album ‘the secret song’, a music and film project, he says that 'the album is inspired by philosophers, is inspired by economists, and history of jazz, dub, rock, and above all a will to be bring them all together. If you think about what sampling is, it’s essentially about collage, it’s an art practice based on centuries taking out text out of context...'
DJ Spooky defines the process of working on the album. On a personal note, it's a turning point from the loops mode to the sampling mode and the use pre-existing footage is essential when narrating a certain era, using the footage as witness material must be present.

Dr. Riley Crane (MIT) and the 10 Red Balloons DARPA Contest

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Riley Crane
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Burroughs and Gus Van Sant

‘On William Burroughs and Beyond’ is a video screening that took place yesterday on the theme of Burroughs, the American poet.
Among the videos played, 2 were directed by Gus Van Sant, one a 2 minutes video ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ dating from 1990 and another of a 9 minutes video ‘The Discipline of D.E.’ dating from 1982.
The first one is based on the poem ‘Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986’, written by Burroughs for the book Tornado Alley, ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ shows Burroughs reciting an accusation ballad, critical of all political and social groups in America, to include for instance the KKK, the America that never allows anyone to mind his own business, the betrayal of the human dream, and so on…
The second video, it was a narrated version of a short story by Burroughs where the spectator learns the laws of "Do Easy" which is the quickest and easiest way of doing things. The video also discusses the complications that can arise from the quest to perfect each movement in order to find the most efficient way of doing everything - even nothing. Mastering the D.E. for instance requires repeating the same sequence the same way actors repeat the same shot to take it right.

What interested me is the style Burroughs uses in the different videos, in the first video he's sharp, sarcastic, a little bitter for those who might contradict him on his political statements, and in the second video he plays a game, he's got the elegance and focus to lead the spectator (or reader in the case of the book) into his sequential maze of thoughts.

I thought that I could propose this to myself: try to master the skill of trying to say what is to be said in serenity, even if the content of the sentence is sharp, try that in life and while wrapping up the narrative of the project, see where it could take me.

Indie Film 'The Girlfriend Experience' by Steven Soderbergh (2009)

The film, now showing on the big screen, made during the 2008 USA presidential elections, discussing issues like money, work, the economy, and set up around a Manhattan call-girl, is far from being a sex film, rather it is a political film about prostitution in the contemporary term, the economy and ethics of that subject matter.

The style of the film is playing on docu-fictional cinema, it is a beautiful sweet masterpiece free from add-ons and extra long shots. The after taste of the screening for me was: 'why do we keep busying ourselves with trying to figure out the more specific and the bigger picture, spontaneity and condensing thoughts might be a solution, the solution.'

1W13 The times that remains

'The Times that remains' of Elia Suleiman (2009) is a 'semi biographic film', about the director's family, archived since 1948 until recent times. The scenario is based on the director's father diaries and his mother's letters to family members who have left Palestine to other countries, escaping the Israeli occupation. Arab-Israelis is the main theme of the film, the film is neither a documentary nor a fiction but somewhere in the 2 playgrounds at the same time; And the film does not follow a traditional form of narration, It is based on archival matters to which the director added his sense of irony and melancholia, and shaped the whole in a series of short scenes, each could be a short on itself, but when placed together, the scenes constitute some sort of a narrative flow, or a continuation.

1W9 Project Proposal - final version

1- Working Title:

A foot kicking a ball: Narrative falling apart in the VJing playground

2- Aims and Objectives:

It all started when I realized that I am intrigued by storytelling and how it can be used in the visual field, being a practitioner in graphic design. I recollect stories and link them with concepts that I am recently becoming aware of, despite the fact that I don’t have great communication skills, which makes my storytelling experiences a bit complicated. And being from Beirut, in the Middle East, my character has been molded in a way that politics and economy is a vital interest.

Based on an incident of a football hitting my face when I was four years old, to my nosebleed ruining the removable collar of my mother’s dress, to the boutique where my mother purchased this dress and the boutique’s high stature, to the deterioration of the middle class’s economical situation in Beirut the nineties, I will be looking at football practice and its implications on the sociopolitical, discussing the ‘bread and circus’ phenomenon, driven by personal narrative and subjective judgments.

Far from being a novelist and intrigued by little stories, the accident of the football strike is the start of a narrative leading to a VJing project. VJing (in my case) comes from living in Beirut, a city renowned for its nightlife despite the destructive civil war. So I figured that the best way of campaigning an idea (bread and circus) is through this hub. I want to explore the logic of digital moving image in general and VJing in particular in relation to narratives, therefore I will be writing short stories related to my theme, filming, editing, animating and juggling between the audio and the visual. The lack of communication skills from which I suffered during my teenage years, its repercussions and the nature of the VJing medium directed me to wanting the narrative to fall apart in the VJing playground. If a narrative is deciphered, does it become a set of databases? I will be looking at Lev Manovich’s ‘The Language of New Media’ to discuss this concern. In my previous experience in graphic design, I have found a comfort zone to initiate the projects, that is the mood boards I create at the beginning; how can a mood board be translated in digital moving image and will it help in randomizing the course of events? An arbitrary decision of a football player is random, and randomness is a valid concept in the digital arts world. In Christiane Paul’s words digital art did not develop in an art-historical vacuum, but has strong connections to previous art movements among them Dada, Fluxus and Conceptual Art. As for interactivity, a football game is naturally interactive. How could one embed meaning in VJing? Would that be altering the role of this means? Devising a system that allows freeing my personal narratives from the traditional form and throwing them in the VJing arena will be developed through loops of filmed and animated material.

3- Context:

Process

From a historical point of view, a wide range of thinkers has studied the issue of mass-supported sports and its consequences. I will be looking at Theodore Adorno, Marc Augé, Roland Barthes and Herbert Marcuse in this part of the research.

To start, defining ‘bread and circus’ seems essential. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, ‘bread and circus’ is a ‘terminology used to explain the offerings, such as benefits or entertainments, intended to placate discontent or distract attention from a policy or situation.’

Theodore Adorno speaks about how the removal or reduction of the ‘bread and circus’ or what others term as ‘useful lies’ from mass culture will threaten the continued operation of the market and society as well as higher philosophical truth.

Elena Bertozzi, in her paper ‘At Stake: Play, Pleasure and Power in Cyberspace’, describes playing football as a ‘socially permitted aggression’. In a football game, the player reads and anticipates the action of the other, never quite sure what will really happen. Mastering football is a matter of time and skill. In the aftermath of a match, the idea of restoration of dialogue between the two teams, two enemies or two competitors is omnipresent: so much so that one can see the relation of football to politics, to rulers or governors using ‘bread and circus’ policies to fulfill and distract the governed in their basic needs, diverting their attention away from politics and interfering in the political scene.

Jean-Marie Brohm and Marc Perelman, in ‘Football: From Ecstasy to Nightmare’, discuss the illusion big football games provide society’s masses. It is presented as a ‘social elevator’ for poor people. The ideology behind these big football games is that of war, an apology for physical force. Fanatic supporters encouraged and promoted by the shadow of multiculturalism – or a form of belonging in the sectarian, national, regional or ideological sense.

Marc Augé, in ‘An Ethnologist in the World Cup’, speaks about how, during big football games, the masses reclaim symbols of the republic, the flag and the national anthem which otherwise are confiscated as the property of right wing nationalists. Augé studied the football language through television screens. On small screen televisions and monitors, audiences watching a football match plunge into a so-called ‘voluntarism of imagination’, that is, the tendency of the spectator to go beyond the game by screaming and trying to visually force the relatively small-scale football players to get closer to the ball and score. This phenomenon arises from the fact that the screen is small; therefore the simulacrum of the field is a field in reduction or a micro-field. This implies football players and the ball appear in miniature, making the viewer imagine that the process of getting a goal is actually quite simple. Later, Augé speaks about ultra big screens displayed in public spaces; here, the player appears larger than usual and thus, the ability to imagine is reduced to zero. In this case, the spectator’s perception with regard to the scale of the football match becomes more complicated: The screen enlarges players, giving back to the audience, as in their early days of movie theaters, their childhood perceptions… a period where all adults appeared as giants. For Augé, the relation between the public and the television screen is revealed at the end of the match. Suddenly the event is no longer inside the screen but totally outside it. The screen is, in this case, reduced to its modest role as witness or substitute with the mere task of giving older and sick people a reflection of what is happening elsewhere. The remarkable fact, at game end, becomes the urge instantly felt by each viewer to meet the crowd. There’s something to share, something that doesn’t exist outside the sharing process; and that is the object that the screen cannot contain. It is at the same time the victory and the limits of the media… the moment when television screens become abandoned by all those who rush to the streets to congratulate each other.

Roland Barthes in ‘Mythologies’ continues the case study of mass-supported sports using the boxing scene in Paris in the 1960s. In trying to understand the football scene, one needs to question the core subject of popular games where the central event happens outside the playing field in the football sense or the arena in boxing: The delirious crowd, the intellectuals glued to their television screens and the public literally colonized by magical passes or punches.

According to author Michael G. Horowitz, philosopher Herbert Marcuse ‘sees history as an endless confrontation between reason and imposed ignorance’… The ruling class, Marcuse insists, will resort to anything to preserve its privileged position, from the artificial creation of pointless wars and weapons to the maintenance of a sterile morality to a massive ‘bread and circus’ campaign designed to numb you into bliss with new cars, football and moon landings.

I will also be looking at the repercussions of capitalism on society and humankind in general, as well as looking at the concept of ‘Normalization’ and the ‘potential’ and ‘achieved’ society by Marcuse to further support my mission.

In trying to argument the medium (VJing) in relation to the content, I will be reading about new forms of representation. I will be looking at the ‘instantaneous’ according to Paul Virilio who would argue, “Where the last century's revolution in transportation gave rise to an era of generalized mobility, our own tools of instantaneous transmission are reversing the tendency. With the dissolution of the scale of our human environment (prefigured by the telescope and radicalized by the satellite), the very reality of the world is reduced to nil (or next to nothing), leading inevitably to a catastrophic sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon. Having lost our sense of the journey in the commutation of space during the industrial age, we now lose departure in the age of electromagnetics and the speed of light.” I will also look at the connotation of museums and the choice of wanting to interact live with a crowd in a nightclub.

In placing ‘bread and circus’ at the center of my narrative, I will try to argue that it is not mere coincidence that the economy in Beirut in the nineties deteriorated, leading to my mother’s inability to buy her wardrobe from this fancy boutique. Inflation was a post war fact in Beirut; nevertheless Beirut had become a potential ‘winning’ project, or at least that is what the leaders wanted people to have faith in… the mere existence of the country on the map was a victory; debt was not an issue. Politicians in Lebanon were thus investing in the economy of football, consuming football practice and football teams rather than empowering diverse institutions.

Practice

Having researched the historical background of the football theme, I do not wish to portray football as a main issue. Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon in their film ‘Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait’ managed to immerse the viewer in an awkward situation, not to film the actual ball but the star player during a football match, without showing the actual game. They were playing on the ‘ordinary’ mentioned in the beginning of the film when the sentence appears on the screen, “Who could have imagined that in the future, an ordinary day like this, might be forgotten or remembered as anything more or less significant than a walk in the park.”

Storytelling becomes the main issue behind the foot kicking the ball. It is in Marc Amerika’s words that I find the pathway to follow; in a Tate Intermedia Art interview, he describes the novel in the digital field as what print cannot contain. Amerika remixes personal narrative, philosophical inquiry, spontaneous theories and cyberpunk fictions that investigate the emergence of digitally constructed identities, fictional personas, narrative mythologies and collaborative networks. He has been working on expanding the concept of writing to include multimedia formats... He starts with a written and then tries to locate different kinds of audiences through the Internet, in nightclubs, museums, galleries, etc… For him net art is trying to blur the boundaries so the difference between cinema, digital video, digital narrative, net art and so on… is to be revisited.

At this stage, I will investigate Lev Manovich’s ‘Soft Cinema’ project that relates to the above concerns.

Watching Amerika’s films and his technique of expanding the concept of writing, I want to come out with a personal narrative about the football story and see how I can make it fall apart in a VJing environment.

Challenging a medium was the main subject to ‘Five Obstructions’, a documentary by Jørgen Leth and Lars Von Trier about ‘The Perfect Human’, a film created by Jørgen Leth in 1967. In ‘Five Obstructions’, director and mentor of Lars Von Trier, Jørgen Leth, is invited to recreate his film in five different ways or experimenting with the narrative in five different ways, each time, carrying a set of obstructions placed by Von Trier. The outcome is heart breaking, and in a way, made me wonder about the flexibility of the digital moving image field, how endless the possibilities of the outcome are. Thus the idea of VJing becomes a means to an end, where the video loops that I will create are the main content I will be working on, while their order is to be decided later.

Another contemporary practitioner in the digital arts field whose work serves as a support to my research is Jill Magid, an MIT graduate whose work revolves around the theme of recognition and identity. In her exhibition ‘Authority to Remove’ at Tate Modern, she challenges technology into sensuality, using spy cameras, videos, texts, emails on intranets, narratives, performances… to engage the systems in romantic journeys, juggling between the profile of artist, surveillance subject and surveyor. Fairly political, she questions issues of identity, power, protection and trust… It is the playfulness and challenging the system once again that comes to mind whenever I mention her work.

At this point I should try to treat the sharpness of the narrative tone in a subtle way, this will be defined once I proceed with the project’s experimentations. For instance, when I speak about the narrative style (or maybe is it too early to discuss this issue) the fighting ignorance with ignorance and corruption with an even more corrupt mentality, I think of Rose Jackson’s comment on Rebecca Horn’s artwork ‘Concert for Anarchy’ (1990) when she says, “My first visit to Tate Modern was memorable due to this piece (among others). I love grand, surreal spectacle and it doesn’t come much grander or more surreal than a piano hanging from the ceiling. It seems slightly ridiculous and makes you wonder – what’s the point of it, but then again… why not? Where else in life would this fit?”

Narrative falling apart is a challenge, narrator in Wim Wender’s ‘Wings of Desire’ states: “With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, but apart and one doesn’t know anything about the other… What is wrong with peace and its inspiration doesn’t endure and that its story is hardly told? Must I give up now? Then mankind will lose its storyteller. And once mankind loses its storyteller it will also lose its childhood.” What Wim Wender is discussing sounds like narrative in a problematic environment – in his film it is the divided Berlin, in my research project it is football as entertainment in the sociopolitical economical scene.

4- Methodology:

I will be reading novels, theories related to the theme and visually translating them into mood boards, watching films and shorts and experimenting with VJing gigs in nightclubs. This is crucial for the theory usually helps me come up with ideas. I will keep track of this material on my blogspot, using it as an archive and interactive space.

I might produce a digital application form to be filled by Lebanese citizens, to help restore bits of my memory by telling me what happened with them in 1985, the year the football struck my nose.

Coming up with narrative bits based on my research process seems to be the first step in the execution of the project then working on deciphering it into small units. Then I will start filming and editing to create small loops inspired by a part of the narrative. Working on my technical skills in pure date (VJing being a means to an end) will enable me to start experimenting with randomizing the course of events.

5- Outcomes:

How to diffuse my narrative and make it fall apart?
The idea of using the screen’s full potential, experimenting with its dimensions, emphasizing details and scrutinizing wide thoughts, creating a sort of a visual dictionary / library sounds like the best possibility at this stage.

I will go into VJing as an end, clubbing is the dramatic end to this project when everyone’s there; the people with a drink in their hands are my target audience. It sounds appealing to me to expose my childhood memories and come up with statements full of extreme brouhahas to a bunch of nice people chilling in a club environment.

6- Work Plan:

Unit 1: Week 1 – 60 Research, development and practice
To read, watch, research, report on the blogspot, write the narrative, come up with visuals, figure out ways and styles of filming, edit and create loops to experiment, learn pure data and contact Ed Kelly.

Unit 2:Week 30 – 60 Reflection and presentation
Finalize the narrative and the visuals and apply in the VJing environment.

7- Bibliography:

Essays:
• Elena Bertozzi, “At Stake: Play, Pleasure and Power in Cyberspace”
• Marc Augé, “An Ethnologist in the World Cup”; http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/08/AUGE/10819
• Jean-Marie Brohm and Marc Perelman, “Football: From Ecstasy to Nightmare”

Catalogs:
• Jill Magid, “Authority to remove”; Tate Modern, September 2009
• Tate Members; 1958-2008

Films:
• Wim Wender, “Wings of Desire”
• Jorgen Leth and Lars Von Trier, “The Five Obstructions”
• Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, “Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait”

Books:
• Theodore Adorno, “Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life”; Verso, 2006
• Paul Virilio, “Open Sky”; Verso, 2008
• Roland Barthes, “Mythologies”; Seuil, 1970
• Herbert Marcuse, “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”; Routledge Classics, 2002
• Lev Manovich, “The Language of New Media”; The MIT Press, 2001
• Mark Hansen, “New Philosophy for New Media”; The MIT Press, 2004
• Peter Lunenfeld, “The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media”; The MIT Press, 2000
• Pramod K. Nayar, “Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cybertechnology”; Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2004
• Christiane Paul, “Digital Art”; Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2003
• Michael Faulkner and D-Fuse Editors, “VJ: Audio-Visual Art + VJ Culture”; Laurence King, 2006
• Onedotzero, “Motion Blur”; Laurence King, 2004
• Paul Auster, “Oracle Night”; Henry Holt and Co., 2003

Websites:
• onedotzero.com
• Mark Amerika: Interview with Tate Intermedia Art:
tate.org.uk/intermediaart
markamerika.com
• Lev Manovich's Soft Cinema: softcinema.net/?reload
• Beirut on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beirut
• jillmagid.net
• rhizome.org
• Yasmin - moderated list for art-science-technology interactions around the Mediterranean Rim: media.uoa.gr/yasmin
• beonlineb.com
• arcadefire.com

1W7 The Narrator in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire

One more resource on the storytelling subject

As he climbs the library stairs and bumps into one of the angels, the narrator in Wim Wender's 'Wings of Desire' says:
'With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, but apart and one doesn't know anything about the other. I am an old man with a broken voice... but the story still rises from the depths and the slowly opened mouth repeats it as clearly as it does powerfully. A liturgy for which no one needs to be initiated to the meaning of the words and sentences.'
...
'Finished with the sweeping over the centuries as in the past. Now I can only think only day by day. My heroes are no longer the warriors and kings but the things of peace, one equal to the other. The drying onions equal to the tree trunk crossing the marsh. But no one has so far succeeded in signing an epic of peace. What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn't endure and that its story is hardly told? Must I give up now? If I do give up, then mankind will lose its storyteller. And once a mankind loses its storyteller I will also lose its childhood.'

1W5 A FOOT KICKING A BALL: ROMANCE OF FOOTBALL NARRATIVE IN THE DIGITAL FIELD

I was four years old when we left Sanayeh in Beirut and moved back to our village in South Lebanon to escape the next battle zone. These were years of war, so school was dismissed early, and summer vacation that year started way ahead of time… in the middle of February.

We were two kids, my older sister and I, living with our parents and grandparents with our main entertainment being watching the plants grow and the flowers blossom. My mother’s efforts in providing us amusement included, one day, an outing to watch a football game at the only playing field in the village. Upon our arrival, one of the players kicks the ball and the ball hits me squarely in the face. As my nose starts bleeding, my mom quickly takes me into her lap and places my head on her shoulder. She runs back with me towards our house to nurse my injury.

That day, my nose bled so much it ruined the removable collar of my mom’s brown checkered dress she had bought from Carel. It was a sparkling day, that’s what I remember. The crisp colors of the green grass and the red blood still shine in my mind whenever I reconstruct the accident in my memory. After the incident, my mom’s dress lost its sublime quality as the blood stains on the collar couldn’t be removed; and the dress without its collar no longer held any of its original appeal. It was its raison d’être, the only indicator of its Bauhaus connotation. I kept seeing the dress left lying around somewhere in her bedroom. Every effort had been made to remove the stains; but unfortunately, nothing could solve this glitch.

Years later, when I was to turn 17, my mother finally declared that she was no longer able to buy any more items for her wardrobe from Carel. It was then that I realized the economic situation of my family was no longer as it was during wartime.

Fourteen years later, the accident of the football hitting my face, the nose bleed, its consequences and my mom’s subsequent declaration would become like a wake-up call for me. I would question its implications. It was so connected, like threads woven with threads, like links in a contour of an amorphous form, a timeline and a grid, a population and a country.

I began deciphering the elements of my story. I thought about the strike of the football, the blood as a form of art, the reconstruction of the scene in my memory with the crispness of its colors, football practice, the implications of identity and nationalism in a game, my mother’s brown checkered dress and our financial situation pre and post war. I revisited the Bauhaus sensibility, the bread and circuses phenomena, sports in general, and the case study of Lebanon, in specific, with its public and the excitement, slogans and chants of Lebanese sports teams, the inherent sectarian and regional distribution of these teams, the representation and the aftermath of football…

Elena Bertozzi, in her paper ‘At Stake: Play, Pleasure and Power in Cyberspace’, describes playing football as a “socially permitted aggression”. In a football game, the player reads and anticipates the action of the other, never quite sure what will really happen. Mastering football is a matter of time and skill. In the aftermath of a match, the idea of restoration of dialogue between the two teams, two enemies, or two competitors is omnipresent: so much so that one can see the relation of football to politics, to rulers or governors using ‘bread and circuses’ policies to fulfill and distract the governed in their basic needs, diverting their attention away from politics and interfering in the political scene.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ‘bread and circuses’ is a terminology used to explain the offerings, such as benefits or entertainments, intended to placate discontent or distract attention from a policy or situation.

Philosophers such as Theodore Adorno speak about how the removal or reduction of the ‘bread and circuses’, or what others term as ‘useful lies’ from mass culture will threaten the continued operation of the market and society, as well as higher philosophical truth.

It was therefore no accident or mere coincidence that my mother’s inability to buy her wardrobe from Carel was declared at the same period some leaders in Lebanon were buying football teams and encouraging youth to focus their attention to sports in the country. In post war Beirut, we can actually discuss the economy of football, neo-liberalism, and investments in similar institutions rather than in cultural projects.

The new economy of Beirut of the 90s, based on a credit system, was cutting its way into the shadow of football practice consumption and the consumption of football teams. Inflation was the post war fact; nevertheless Beirut had become a potential ‘winning’ project, or at least this is what the leaders wanted people to have faith in… the mere existence of the country on the map was a victory; debt was not an issue; and we should keep the game going.

Jean-Marie Brohm and Marc Perelman, in an article entitled ‘Football: From Ecstasy to Nightmare’, discuss the illusion big football games provide to society’s masses. It is presented as a “social elevator” for poor people. The ideology behind these big football games is the ideology of war, an apology for physical force – or a socially permitted aggression in Bertozzi’s words. Fanatic supporters encouraged and promoted by the shadow of multiculturalism – or a form of belonging in the sectarian, national, regional or ideological sense.

Marc Augé, in an article entitled ‘An Ethnologist in the World Cup’, speaks about how, during big football games, citizens (or the masses) reclaim symbols of the republic, the flag and the national anthem which otherwise are usually confiscated as the property of right wing nationalists.

Roland Barthes, in his book ‘Mythologies’ continues the case study of mass-supported sports using the boxing scene in Paris in the 1960s. In trying to understand the football scene in Beirut of 2006, one needs to question the core subject of popular games where the central event happens outside the playing field in the football sense, or the arena in boxing: The delirious crowd, the intellectuals glued to their television screens, and the public literally colonized by magical passes or punches.

In Lebanon, a major redistribution of local football teams would take place after the war ended according to the surviving sectarian and ideological alignments. I will not tackle this issue in my final outcome but researching it and putting it out there is essential to assimilate the situation.

A series of rules in the Lebanese Football League is obligatory, among which is the fact that in the Lebanese Football League, league seats are distributed according to the sects, similar to the method used in the Lebanese parliament’s distribution of seats; that is, the head of the league must be Shiite, the league secretary must be Druze, one of the head’s deputies must be a Sunnite and the other a Christian; the rest are represented by one Armenian, six Christians and six Muslims.

According to sectarian, national and ideological associations, the chants of a team’s public represent or adapt to changes or events in the domestic political scene.

As for Lebanon’s regional distribution, all the areas are represented except for the Bekaa valley.

As long as Lebanese society remains in the shadow of such delineations (such as sectarian ideology) and the neo-liberal tenets which highlight rivalry and competition, football as a metaphor for ‘friendship, solidarity, and fraternity’ will never come to pass. It will remain a paradigm of war, battle and combat and the illusion of unity will remain hanging in temporal stage, or virtual unity.

Martin Heidegger in ‘Murder of the Body: A Jury Verdict Pending’ discusses the video game culture, saying that “our culture is fascinated with the immaterial body which knows no aging process and may overcome even death.”

In this spirit, I want to create a video (or series of loops, depending whether I want to publish the final narrative as an interactive project), based on stories – both narrative and informative – to discuss my society and culture as seen through a football match.

Marc Augé studied the football language through television screens. According to him, on small screen televisions and monitors, audiences watching a football match plunge into a so-called “voluntarism of imagination”, that is, the tendency of the spectator to go beyond the game by screaming and trying to visually force the relatively small-scale football players to get closer to the ball and score.

This phenomenon arises to the fact that the screen is small; therefore the simulacrum of the field is a field in reduction, or a micro-field. This implies that the football players and the ball appear in miniature, making the viewer imagine that the process of getting a goal is actually quite simple. At a later stage, Augé speaks about ultra big screens displayed in public spaces; here, the player appears larger than usual, and thus, the ability to imagine is reduced to zero. In this case, the spectator’s perception with regard to the scale of the football match becomes more complicated: The screen enlarges players, giving back to the audience, as in their early days of movie theaters, their childhood perceptions… a period where all adults appeared as giants.

The relation between the public and the television screen is revealed at the end of the match; suddenly the event is no longer inside the screen, but totally outside it. The screen is, in this case, reduced to its modest role as witness, or substitute with the mere task of giving older and sick people a reflection of what is happening elsewhere.

The remarkable fact, at game end, becomes the urge instantly felt by each viewer to meet the crowd. There’s something to share, something that doesn’t exist outside the sharing process; and that is the object that the screen cannot contain. It is at the same time the victory and the limits of the media… the moment when television screens become abandoned by all those who rush to the streets to congratulate each other.

I will be researching throughout my project the football language and technical terms, with elements or techniques such as ‘replay’ and ‘slow motion’ that allow for a more clinical decipherment of an arbitrary decision, or the exploration of a detail that otherwise could not be seen. In a way, these visual techniques used to present a football match to TV screen viewers, teach us how to see. It urges the viewer to encourage, to be inside the event. After all, a football game is half-carnival, half manifestation; it is a feast to re-conquer something that resembles reality.

At this point, I have a vague idea of the type of imagery, but I was thinking of the video game type as a possibility to include icons representing players and football teams, the ambassadors of this intense sport’s event; an event which becomes, for mere mortals, an occasion to measure one’s history to the larger history, or to history simply.

More than any other sport, football remains one etched into our memory: It possesses, to a high degree, the force of souvenir, incomparable mixes, a rare aroma provoking drunkenness that blends the past with the present, myth and ritual.

It is not by accident that, twenty years later, I still recall the football hitting my face that day in my parent’s village. It has become the alarm that wakes me up every morning.

I am intending to proceed by interviewing a leftist economist ‘Kamal Hamdan’ regarding the issue of the economical situation in 90s Beirut, since I think I have some kind of a lack in this area. Then I will continue doing my readings on the narrative in the cyberspace, for that I have to start from earlier theoreticians who wrote about structuralism and narration, to include Roland Barthes’ ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ and contemporary practitioners to include Mark Amerika’s way of describing the novel in the digital realm. For the style, I will be going through a whole range of narrative approaches from animation series (for instance Beavis and Butt-head) to comic artists (David Shrigley per se), television shows (the MTV Jackass world) and other forms of art that included narration. Then, I will start writing a script, using both personal stories, and trying to link them to the economical, social, and national aspects of the Football and political practice and aftermath. I will have to research potential visual elements, potential style (deconstruction style so far) and location hunting for the filming spots. Once I decide on the final outcome, I will have access to a tutorial to the relative software needed to start the actual realization of the project.

The narrator's voice

One aspect I would like to emphasize during my research is my narrator’s voice that could be described as follows: extremely judgmental, promotes laziness, ‘jackassness’, ‘airheadness’ and extreme honesty to the silliness extent.

It is an aspect that is inspired by David Shrigley’s artwork, Music Televisions’ ‘Jackass’ show, the famous ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ 90s animated series, and some underdeveloped politicians in their spontaneous -off the camera- manners.
To brief the reader about the jackass world, their official website states that it is ‘an entertainment world gone mad with high production value and professionalism, Jeff Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville, and Spike Jonze brought the amateur, lo-fi fun of jackass to television in what seemed like a lark but became an influential smear of pop culture crap. Sociological ramifications aside, sit back and pinch a loaf off with an absurd bevy of stunts, pranks, and silliness…’

As for David Shrigley’s contemporary artwork, in an article entitled 'Come to me those who labour or are heavy laden and I will give you rest and a nice hot cup of tea’, the author gives a brief and thorough glimpse of Shrigley’s art, he says ‘David’s drawings and sculptures are concerned with the unreported tragedies of everyday life, or with the confines of daily routine which breed a kind of autism. Time and again Shrigley will conclude his pieces with a pessimism, which must be taken as thinly-coded despair: ‘They eventually found him hanging beneath the bridge.’ (Small Town Blues, 1995); ‘Failure to complete what one has started’ (Failure, 1995); ‘The hopes and dreams of worthless losers’ (Things in Bits, 1995). And yet there is a morbid fascination in following the narrative logic of Shrigley’s drawings, partly because the despair is delivered with unique comedy, and partly because the blatancy of his tragic pronouncements is wholly recognizable as an articulation of our darkest moods or fears. Shrigley’s notion of the brute indifference of fate towards the frailty of lives and communities provides a paradoxical frisson of pleasure when it is described with neither saving clauses nor intellectual qualification: we seem to experience the enjoyment of having our worst fears justified.’

Having read the above-mentioned artists’ statements; I realized that the idea of using this style of narration in my project is a strategy that consists of fighting ignorance with ignorance and corruption with even a more corrupt mentality.
The narrator believes that ‘politically correct’ is an act of ‘don juanism’, imported and bottled and does not suit the narrator’s way of thinking.
Dealing with a narration that tackles the political/economical, I gave myself the right to use this technique.

I have been doing some reading on narration in general, and came up with some valid questions. In regard of ‘Beavis and Butt-head’, MTV describes the two characters as no one does ‘deliberately unintelligent and crude ‘… ‘They (Beavis and Butt-head) became self-appointed arbiters of "cool." And Beavis and Butt-head loved stuff that was cool. But, for the most part, Beavis and Butt-head spent their time just sitting on a couch making fun of MTV's music video staples and talking about stuff that "sucks." Apparently, a lot of stuff sucked back then.’ This applies to the Lebanese political scene, there is so much junk on television, shows hosting politicians, opinionated, corrupt, and but still leaders in the whole sense of the word. It is in this direction that I wish to take my project on the speech level. Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘the storyteller’ (excerpted from the book ‘Illuminations’) made me realize that narration is a very vague word.

According to Benjamin, ‘the art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.’ From this point, the whole narration aspect that I wish to work on is doomed, but then Benjamin would argue that ‘the earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) it its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing. What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular/ the storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life.’ Having read this, I thought about the print form and narration, it is not my intent to go into publishing a printed book, my research will be showcased somewhere between the digital moving image and the interactivity…

It is in Mark Amerika’s words in an interview with Tate Intermedia Art where I find back my pathway of the process. ‘Amerika remixes personal narrative, philosophical inquiry, spontaneous theories, and cyberpunk fictions that investigate the emergence of digitally constructed identities, fictional personas, narrative mythologies, and collaborative networks.’ In the interview, I learned that he has been working expanding the concept of writing to include multimedia formats. He starts with a written and then tries to locate different kinds of audiences whether through the Internet, in nightclubs, museums, galleries, etc… he started his career as a novelist, and at a certain point, he wanted to see his writings in a different form, other than in print, this is how he ended up in the digital art form. As a cultural background, Amerika is fascinated with foreign films, not only because they come from different parts of the world, but he’s also intrigued by the subtitles, that translate dialogues of what is being said as a form of art. Foreignness in general is intriguing for him. This comes from his love of reading, he argues. So this is how he came with the idea of having the subtitles persona always present in his films - but they are never seen in his films - it is a way of creating another persona effect within the context of a narrative drift. At a certain point in the interview, he thought of how could his writing appear in this foreign film environment? The subtitles were written first and then you had to read the subtitles to understand the cinematic experience. He would question who are we when we become a sort of virtual representation of ourselves/ when we switch roles, now that the media apparatus is allowing us to switch more fluidly, and then states that we no longer have to think of a character as an entity composed of social psychological realist elements… since we are becoming a fictional identity. For him, net art is trying to blur the boundaries, so the difference between cinema, digital video, digital narrative, net art and so on… is to be revisited, he would insist on the why does he have to succumb to the logic of independent cinema and send my works to film festivals and why succumb to the logic of video art in the art galleries and why succumb to the idea of breaking up my work and put it in multiple parts on youtube and then anyone can see it when they want to, in that particular format. The aesthetic of mixing up the physiological and the cinematic is very appealing to him.

For more info about my references, please check the follow links:
http://www.davidshrigley.com/
http://www.mtv.com/shows/beavis_and_butthead/cast.jhtml
http://www.jackassworld.com/
http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/mark_amerika.shtm#16367

and the book: Walter Benjamin 'Illuminations'

1W1 Presenting myself and my proposal

My name is Maya Chami, I am graphic designer working in the field since 2002. Other than the market’s work, I have been working independently on graphic interventions in a Lebanese newspaper, an initiative that intended to provide graphic designers with a space to get involved in the public sphere through an idea with social or political dimensions. This graphic intervention became a statement, a weekly narration of political, social and even poetic thought – presented graphically.
After some years of work, with a focus on various aspects of design for print media, I have reached a stage where I am seeking a further education to enhance my capabilities as a designer in the digital moving image and the digital arts field, and this is why I opted for The MA in Digital Arts Online at Camberwell College of Arts.
Recently I have worked on a stop-motion short in order to experiment with the relative technique; it’s a story that I have written that recounts the incidents that my uncle encountered the night of his death. This project was entitled playground 1956-1994, portraying in a way Beirut the battleground that he used as a recreational area.
It is has been a while now that I started to realize that I love storytelling and could easily use it as visual material. I recollect stories that I remember and link them with concepts that, just now, I am becoming aware of. I don’t have great communication skills though, which makes my storytelling experiences a little bit unusual, for me at least. I am intending to research non-linear narratives, it could help me discover some pathway.
Being from the Middle East, I am involved in the social political economical or not? I still have not decided, I am still researching and resisting this idea. But living in Beirut is definitely what molded my character. I am a city person, cannot stand being in nature for more than three hours. Beirut is a sea city (on the Mediterranean), sunny most of the time, I don’t consider the sea as nature; it is mainly the trees and its insects that get on my nerves.
The project proposal that I am wishing to work on is based on an incident. I was 4 years old when the war in Beirut started, so school was dismissed early this year and we escaped to the village for an early summer vacation in the middle of February. Our village in the south was very boring, so the main source of entertainment was to watch the plants grow and the flowers blossom. My mother’s efforts to entertain us including one day an outing to watch a football game in the only playing field in the village; Once we reached the football field, one of the football players kicks the ball and the ball hits me squarely in my face. As my nose starts bleeding my mother takes me into her lap and places my head on her shoulder. That day, my nose bled so much it ruined the removable collar of my mother’s brown-checkered dress she had bought from ‘Carel’. It was a sparkling day. The crisp colors of the green grass and the red blood still shine in my mind whenever I reconstruct the accident in my memory. After the incident, my mother’s dress lost its sublime quality as the blood stains on the collar couldn’t be removed; and the dress without its collar no longer held any of its original appeal. It was its raison d’être, the only indicator of its Bauhaus connotation. I kept seeing the dress left lying around somewhere in her bedroom. Every effort had been made to remove the stains; but unfortunately, nothing could solve this glitch. ‘Carel’ is a fancy boutique in Beirut, targeting mainly upper middle class and the high-class society. This is where she used to buy all her wardrobe as far as I remember.
Years later, when I was to turn 17, my mother finally declared that she was no longer able to buy any more items for her wardrobe from ‘Carel’. It was then that I realized the economic situation of my family was no longer as it was during wartime.
Fourteen years later, the accident of the football hitting my face, the nose bleed, its consequences and my mother’s subsequent declaration would become like a wake-up call for me. I would question its implications. It was so connected.
I began deciphering the elements of my story. I thought about the strike of the football, the blood as a form of art, the reconstruction of the scene in my memory with the crispness of its colors, football practice, the implications of identity and nationalism in a game, my mother’s brown-checkered dress and our financial situation pre and post war. I revisited the Bauhaus sensibility, the bread and circuses phenomena, sports in general, and the case study of Lebanon, in specific, with its public and the excitement, slogans and chants of Lebanese sports teams, the inherent sectarian and regional distribution of these teams, the representation and the aftermath of football…
It was no accident or mere coincidence that my mother’s inability to buy her wardrobe from ‘Carel’ was declared at the same period some leaders in Lebanon were buying football teams and encouraging youth to focus their attention to sports in the country. In post war Beirut, we can actually discuss the economy of football, neo-liberalism, and investments in similar institutions rather than in cultural projects. The new economy of Beirut of the 90s, based on a credit system, was cutting its way into the shadow of football practice consumption and the consumption of football teams. Inflation was the post war fact; nevertheless Beirut had become a potential ‘winning’ project, or at least this is what the leaders wanted people to have faith in… the mere existence of the country on the map was a victory; debt was not an issue; one should keep the game going.
In my research I will be discussing the illusion big football games provide to society’s masses, the ‘apology for physical force’ and the ‘socially permitted aggression’, reclaiming symbols of the republic including flags and national anthems, delirious crowds, intellectuals glued to their television screens, and the public literally colonized by magical passes. I will also be examining the relation between public and the screen, the clinical decipherment of a player’s arbitrary decision, the abandonment of the screen at the moment of victory when a game ends, the viewer that becomes a member of a nationalist crowd...