DJ Spooky - on information - instrumental reason

DJ Spooky At TATE Modern London 2010 from Nonlineari.nteractive on Vimeo.

on 'Material Memories' by DJ Spooky

Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, in his essay entitled “Material Memories: Time And The Cinematic Image”, lyrically writes about the different themes that constitute the art of cinema, time, screen, projection, unfolding images through action, rhythms of fragmentation… and the list is long…

I have regained this old habit of taking notes. While reading a text, and to be able to concentrate more, I used to write the keywords that interest me on my notebook, or write a shiny sentence that makes great sense to me on as a side note, now with the ‘reading from the screen’ mode, copy pasting and recompositing the author’s text to understand it in my context is my latest way or grasping… this is what happens below, reading and taking the parts that interest me, or chaptering the information with titles to suit my agenda.

MNEMONICS IN TOTAL FILM

First, DJ Spooky would refer to the films by Maya Deren, ‘Ritual in Transfigured Time’, ‘Divine Horsemen’ and ‘Meditation on Violence’. He speaks of her exploration of “ritual time, and visual time, as part of a new history unfolding on the white screens of her contemporary world.” He says that Deren “sought a new art to mold time out of dance, a social sculpture carved out of celluloid gestures and body movements caught in the prismatic light of the camera lens”, quoting her "in this sense [ritual] is art, and even historically, all art derives from ritual. Being a film ritual, it is achieved not in spatial terms alone, but in terms of Time created by the camera." He would add that “in the lens of the camera the dance became a way of making time expand and become a ritual reflection of reality itself. Film became total. Became time itself - a mnemonic, a memory palace made of the gestures captured on the infinitely blank screen.” This description stimulates the reflection on the material to be filmed; upon reading this article, I thought about filming people watching the football matches in public venues. In Beirut, and am positive everywhere in the world, all the pubs and cafés replace their menu chalkboard with a flat screen television whenever there’s a big sports related event happening, this year (June 2010), it will be the world cup taking place in South Africa.

SEQUENCE AND THE ACT OF AUTOMATIC WRITING

Then DJ Spooky would bring up the “Surrealists' walking dream put into a contemporary context. Andre Breton first stated the kind of will to break from the industrial roles culture assigned everyone in Europe back in 1930: ‘the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly as fast as you can, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.” DJ Spooky argues that “automatic writing as described by surrealists, ‘letting subconscious thought become a formalized artistic act’ gets flipped, becoming a gangsta dreamtime remix, like an open source Linux coded operating system, psychogeographic shareware for the open market in a world where identity is for sale to the highest bidder”… “Set your browser to drift mode and simply float: the sequence really doesn't care what you do as long as you are watching. ‘Now’ becomes a method for exploring the coded landscapes of contemporary post-industrial reality, a flux, a Situationist reverie, a ‘psychogeographie’ - a drift without beginning or end...”

SYNCHRONIZED TIME

Dj Spooky describes Chronos, the Greek god of Time, as a cannibal: “he devoured his children and left the universe barren. From time all things emerge and into Time all things go. Chronos at the heart of Europe, Chronos at the crossroads becomes a signpost in suspension - multiplication of time versus the all-consuming one track time, one track mind.”

DATA OR FRAGMENTS AS I WOULD LOOK AT IT FROM MY APPROACH

“A million intangibles of the present moment, an infinite permutation of what could be... the thought gets caught... You get the picture… In the data cloud of collective consciousness, it's one of those issues that just seems to keep popping up… it's that flash of insight, a way of looking at the fragments of time. Check it: visual mode - open source, a kinematoscope of the unconscious: a bullet that cuts through everything like a Doc Edgerton, E.J. Maret or Muybridge flash frozen frame. You look for the elements of the experience, and if you think about it, even the word "analysis" means to break down something into its component parts.”

A NOTE ON THE ESSAY OR CONTEXT AS METATEXT

He would say: “As I sit here and type on my laptop, even the basic format of the words I write still mirrors some of the early developments in graphical user interface based texts, still echoes not only in how I write, but how I think about the temporal placement of the words and ideas I'm thinking about. It's a world-view that definitely ain't linear but came out of the graphical user interfaces invented by the likes of Alan Kay, and Douglas Engelberts, and Ivan Sutherland - stuff that let you move into the screen and interact with the icons and objects on the monitors surface. Into the picture, into the frame... Context becomes metatext, and the enframing process, as folks as diverse as Iannis Xenakis, Kool Keith aka Dr. Octagon or Eminem can tell you, like Freidrich Kittler, ‘Aesthetics begins as 'pattern recognition.'”

REPETITION

Or “the multiplying effects of digital media on self representation… the sense here is one of prolonging the formal implications of the expressive act - move into the frame, get the picture, re-invent your name. Movement, flow, flux: the nomad takes on the sedentary qualities of the urban dweller. Movement on the screen becomes an omnipresent quality. Absolute time becomes dream machine flicker… Digital codes become a reflection, a mirror permutation of the nation.”

A STORY ABOUT THE ‘CUT’ (FLOW, RUPTURE, AND FRAGMENTATION)

And he tells a story to add up on the context and the metatext: “Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to simply tell it as a story. It's been a while since one autumn afternoon in 1896 when Georges Melies was filming a late afternoon Paris crowd caught in the ebb and flow of the city's traffic. Melies was in the process of filming an omnibus as it came out of a tunnel, and his camera jammed. He tried for several moments to get it going again, but with no luck. After a couple of minutes he got it working again, and the camera's lens caught a hearse going by. It was an accident that went unnoticed until he got home. When the film was developed and projected it seemed as if the bus morphed into a funeral hearse and back to its original form again. In the space of what used to be called actualites - real contexts reconfigured into stories that the audiences could relate to - a simple opening and closing of a lens had placed the viewer in several places and times simultaneously. In the space of one random error, Melies created what we know of today as the ‘cut’ - words, images, sounds flowing out the lens projection would deliver, like James Joyce used to say ‘sounds like a river.’ Flow, rupture, and fragmentation - all seamlessly bound to the viewers perspectival architecture of film and sound, all utterly malleable - in the blink of an eye space and time as the pre-industrial culture had known it came to an end.”

SELECTION AND THE MECHANISM OF STREAMING COORDINATING SHIFTING CREATING A NEW WAY OF THINKING THROUGH AN ACCIDENT

“Whenever you look at an image, there's a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply create a sense of order. The end-product of this palimpsest of perception is a composite of all the thoughts and actions you sift through over the last several micro-seconds - a soundbite reflection of a process… The eyes stream data to the brain through something like two million fiber bundles of nerves. Consider the exponential aspects of perception when you multiply this kind of density by the fact that not only does the brain do this all the time, but the millions of bits of information streaming through your mind at any moment have to be coordinated. Any shift in the traffic of information - even the slightest rerouting - can create, like the hearse and omnibus of Melies film accident, not only new thoughts, but new ways of thinking. Literally. Non-fiction, check the meta-contradiction... Back in the early portion of the 20th century this kind of emotive fragmentation implied a crisis of representation, and it was filmakers, not Dj's who were on the cutting edge of how to create a kind of subjective intercutting of narratives and times - there's even the famous story of how President Woodrow Wilson when he saw the now legendary amount of images and narrative jump-cuts that were in turn cut and spliced up in D.W. Griffiths's film classic Birth of a Nation called the style of ultra-montage ‘like writing history with lightning.’”

THE MONTAGE OF ATTRACTIONS, THE MIX, SIFTING THROUGH THE NARRATIVE RUBBLE OR THE INDEXICAL PRESENT

“Film makers like D.W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Oscar Michaux, and Sergei Eisenstein (especially with his theory of "dialectal montage" or "montage of attractions" that created a kind of subjective intercutting of multiple layers of stories within stories) were forging stories for a world just coming out of the throes of World War I. A world which, like ours, was becoming increasingly inter-connected, and filled with stories of distant lands, times and places - a place where cross-cutting allowed the presentation not only of parallel actions occurring simultaneously in separate spatial dimensions, but also parallel actions occurring on separate temporal…”

… “What Mikhail Bakhtin might have once called ‘diacritical difference’ now becomes ‘the mix’ or as James B. Twitchell says … the ‘carnival of the everyday’ in the images and sounds that make up the fabric of … daily life: ‘[the situations are] homologues (having the same relation) of each other and semilogues of those in the genre. Entertainments share diachronic and synchronic similarities; they refer to individual texts as well as to all precursors and successors — every programmer’s worst fear is that we might change the channel.’ If you compare that kind of flux to stuff like Dj mixes, you can see a similar logic at work: it's all about selection of sound as narrative. I guess that's traveling by synecdoche (figure of speech meaning part is made to represent the whole). It's a process of sifting through the narrative rubble of a phenomenon that conceptual artist Adrian Piper liked to call the ‘indexical present’ “I use the notion of the 'indexical present' to describe the way in which I attempt to draw the viewer into a direct relationship with the work, to draw the viewer into a kind of self critical standpoint which encourages reflection on one's own responses to the work…”

TO PLAY OR NOT

“Griffith's: it's all about how you play with the variables that creates the art piece. If you play, you get something out of the experience. If you don't, the medium becomes a reinforcement of what's already there, and or as one critic, said a long time ago of Griffith's Intolerance: "history itself seems to pour like a cataract across the screen…”

IMMERSION AND TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING

Describing his method: “Like an acrobat drifting through the topologies of codes, glyphs and signs that make up the fabric of my everyday life, I like to flip things around… Contemporary 21st Century aesthetics needs to focus on how to cope with the immersion we experience on a daily level - a density that Sergei Eisenstein back in 1929 spoke of when he was asked about travel and film: ‘the hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical slogan, without recourse to the help of suspect dramatic or psychological past’. Does this mean that we make our own films as we live them? Traveling without moving. It's something even Aristotle's ‘Unmoved Mover’ wouldn't have thought possible.”

MPR feedback

Here are my colleagues feedback on my MPR.

I will be reflecting on the below information and post my comments soon.

Maya Chami: My research question ‚ 'foot kicking a ball: Narrative falling apart in the V.J.ing playground'‚ portrays the project I am developing: V.J.ing as an eye candy challenged into a narrative form.

I am interested in using the old habit of intermittent communication or my inability to tell a story in a shortcut way as a form in the narrative.

I am working now on narratives' 'leftovers' or the stories that come out and revolve around a theme, but not specifically portray it.

done

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): several comments here about how this is a similar project to Jean's, good idea to creae a dialogue between you 2

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): Jean asks, how is sound incorporated into this?

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): or is the plan to include sound at al

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): VJing is also repsonsive, reponding to the sound - like a DJ responds to the crowd....

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): so is VJing actually the right word to use at all

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): is there another term that can be used

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): can anyone explain VJing - sorry not familar with the term

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): what about looking at the history of hip hop to give a context

David Tatnell (davidtatnell): I like the autobiographical sense of a vj set - not entirely documentary but hinting more to memory flash backs

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): hip hop is also responsive, often to local issues, verbalizing what is going on

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): Jean - VJing is manipulating video in real time

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): but Jean also points out that VJing (VJ = video jockey) can be different in clubbing type setting rather than a cinema type setting

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): there is a feel of improvisation - influenced by what is going on around the VJ

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): the concept of 'input/output' is important to VJing, along with manipulation the footage you are working with

David Tatnell (davidtatnell): by taking it out of the clubs and into the gallery, how/will its context change?

Melanie Menard (m_menard): Do VJs normally work with D?J/musician (they agree beforehand on type of visual that match music) or usually completely separate ? If so, would you work with specific musician Maya ?

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): also Jean points out the differences between simply 'live editing' footage just creating a sequence, and manipulating for example by adding effects

Melanie Menard (m_menard): I thought Maya wanted to perform in clubs, but maybe I misunderstood

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): What will the content of the video be - what is it's focus?

Andrew Stiff (astiff): if thisnk this is an interesting dialogue that we are having here - the response mechanism within vjing - input and output and feedback

Andrew Stiff (astiff): how does this work within a narrative

Melanie Menard (m_menard): I think it's childhood memories but sort of abstracted + external images she relates to them for some reason ?

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): ok that sounds good

Melanie Menard (m_menard): (was answer to sat)

Satbinder Kooner (skooner): thanks Melanie

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): do you want this to be a performance in a club or a gallery or both - does this raise stylistic issues, what are people expecting in the different settings?

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): Chan, suggests the visuals in a club setting might not be the best setting if you wnat people to focus and give atention to your images

Jonathan Kearney (jkearney): but maybe it is possible to make a club setting the right space, by thinking differently about how a visual narrative is constructed

Andrew Stiff (astiff): ok time .....

Andrew Stiff (astiff): thanks Maya - again many more questions

Andrew Stiff (astiff): definitely strike up a conversation with Jean

Maya Chami: thank you, i will!

Melanie Menard (m_menard): personal experience only, why not experimental music concerts? there's nothing much going on on stage (guy fiddling with machines) so they always look for VJs. SO you keep the not-art-world/festive setting, but people usually pay attention to the visuals and appreciate more, and are not so, hum, drunk or other :)

on another note, Matt emailed me his feedback, here it is:

Hey Maya these were my thoughts on your project...

- What is it that makes this medium eyecandy? This seems to be an easy trap
to fall into - how can this be avoided?
- Can there be certain sections of the narrative that are ‘corner stones' or
repetitions through which the non-linear parts happen?

- Maybe look more into the idea of memories and how these can be visualized.
How memories distort/ mix/ fade/ abstract/ fragment over time.
- Maybe look more into the concept of time in relation to memory and also
film theory.
- Play with time and pace - Run shorter clips alongside/ over the top of
longer clips? Check out...
- Vertov – Man with a movie camera (sequences layered on top of each other)
Able Gance - Napoleon (running narratives Simultaneously alongside each
other/ triptic)

MPR Presentation

My research question ‘A foot kicking a ball: Narrative falling apart in the V.J.ing playground’ portrays the project I am developing: V.J.ing as an eye candy challenged into a narrative form.

Up to this point, I was concerned with realizing what made me decide using V.J.ing as the medium of my project. I was questioning V.J.ing as a form of digital moving image and the restrictions that are natural extensions of this technique, having the scenes extracted to one minute each so that the software does not fail on the performer during practice.

I found out that my past habit of intermittent communication or my inability to tell a story in a shortcut way, played a main role in the decision-making, leading to a higher interest and deeper research in narrative styles in digital moving image, and later on to an appreciation of the idea of narratives’ ‘leftovers’, or the stories that come out and revolve around a theme, but not specifically portray it, this point liberated the way I am looking at my project.

Across the many theoreticians/practitioners I have visited so far, I have came across 4 main influential and inspiring ones:

- Lev Manovich’s ‘Soft Cinema’ project > database as a main essence

- Lev Manovich’s ‘Deep Remixability’ theory > software like species within the common ecology, once released, the start interacting, mutating, and making hybrids

- DJ Spooky in his album ‘The Secret Song’ > sampling as a collage, an art practice based on centuries taking out text out of context...

- Mark Amerika in his ‘Cyberfictions’ > working on expanding the concept of writing to include multimedia formats; starting with a written then trying to locate different kinds of audiences whether through the Internet, in nightclubs, museums, galleries…

- Laura Marks in her ‘Haptic Visuality’ theory > intercultural films and video allow the viewer to experience cinema as a physical and multi-sensory embodiment of culture, not just a visual representation of experience.

At this point of the course I became convinced that theory leads practice, and that ideas come out of theory. With the technical background I have, any software would become accessible.

I wish to explore the concept of fragments further. Being able to construct scenarios from any picture or scene is giving your audience the liberty to imagine instead of spoon-feeding. I should be expanding further the research on performer / audience in relation to participation.

What I will be doing next:

- Continuing the research on the breakdown of narrative in digital moving image.

- Looking more at narrative techniques, and have written narrative sequences as a start that will be the support to build up from.

- Start filming, editing, animating and going back to archives of memorial places.

- Developing loops and get myself a training with a practicing VJ before the middle point of Unit 2.

Raising questions about how will the leftover idea be clarified, what kind of footage will I be taking into consideration, the length of the V.J.ing show, is it too obnoxious for a performer to project herself on the screen, why will I go into a domain that does not fit in the mainstream?

To check the beginnings of written narrative along with a mood board experiment please check the below presentation:

Soft Cinema: Navigating the database

Soft Cinema, the DVD by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky encloses 3 ‘films’: ‘Mission to Earth’, ‘Absences’, and ‘Texas’. The films are based on database of videos, visuals, soundscapes, music, narratives, voice overs…

Then a software in real time was created enabling two major factors to manipulate the database: human subjectivity and the variable choices made by this custom software. As a consequence, the films can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same sequences, layouts of the screen and narratives. The result is Soft Cinema, or a cinema that fits the information age. Twentieth century cinema was too reflective of the industrial age since in form it consists of an engine that drives movement and the electricity that powers it. The role of the database and the digital computer is not visible in twentieth century cinema, so this is where this project intervenes.

Lev Manovich, in the catalog accompanying the DVD, asks how can new media narrative take into account that its elements are organized in a database? How can new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve, lead to new kinds of narratives?

The Soft Cinema software is not to be praised as the main achievement of this project. The narrative in the films were inspiring, reflective of the current world of layering, traveling, instant messaging, the sentences are detail oriented, you would hear the voiceover saying ‘the woman kept eating, she did not take off her sunglasses, so the pieces of chicken looked purple, almost violet, but they tasted ok, after she poured some soya sauce on them’ and others like ‘the car wash was her favorite scene in the world, she did not remember when this passion started exactly, the brushes attacking the front window of the car like the legs of a giant octopus’.

To navigate the actual database, visit the website: http://softcinema.net/?reload

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.