transitional digital objects - white heels - 2011 from maya chami on Vimeo.
Dedicated originally to the MA in Digital Arts at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL (2009-2011). Starting October 2011, I will be using this same blog to continue posting about projects in progress.
Showing posts with label narrative styles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label narrative styles. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
H is for House by Peter Greenaway 1976
I was watching the shorts by Greenaway, his early works, and "H is for House" caught my attention, specifically how the narrator enumerates things that start with H: hesitation, hopelessness, hitchcock, hybrid, havana cigars, handle, hoover... Shot in the English countryside, thus the serene atmosphere.
I tried to research further what was the implications of the enumeration, as I am interested in what Greenaway will have to say about indoors and outdoors and houses in general... I learned the following from Greenaway's official website. (http://petergreenaway.org.uk/)
Greenaway on H is for House:
"I'd just married and had a small kid, and we used to spend our holidays in Wardour; we stayed in a magnificent early 19th century house belonging to a friend. It was the most extraordinary area of idealized, romanticized English landscape, very redolent of Roman Catholic history; all sorts of violent tragedies had happened there during the English Civil Wars. It was a rather shutaway countryside, so it had a sense of great drama and romance - in response to which, I made a series of films, of which this is the first. It was couched in the whole business of naming things - as in the late paintings of Magritte, the confusion between nomenclature, ascribing meanings and words... I made this enormous list of every single thing I could find in the domestic rural landscape that began the the letter H, which when juxtaposed gave you all sorts of interesting connotations. My daughter Hannah was learning the alphabet and her voice is on the soundtrack repeating and getting things wrong - the wisdom of the innocent. It was also very much to do with concepts of Heaven and Hell and how those are interchangeable."
I tried to research further what was the implications of the enumeration, as I am interested in what Greenaway will have to say about indoors and outdoors and houses in general... I learned the following from Greenaway's official website. (http://petergreenaway.org.uk/)
Greenaway on H is for House:
"I'd just married and had a small kid, and we used to spend our holidays in Wardour; we stayed in a magnificent early 19th century house belonging to a friend. It was the most extraordinary area of idealized, romanticized English landscape, very redolent of Roman Catholic history; all sorts of violent tragedies had happened there during the English Civil Wars. It was a rather shutaway countryside, so it had a sense of great drama and romance - in response to which, I made a series of films, of which this is the first. It was couched in the whole business of naming things - as in the late paintings of Magritte, the confusion between nomenclature, ascribing meanings and words... I made this enormous list of every single thing I could find in the domestic rural landscape that began the the letter H, which when juxtaposed gave you all sorts of interesting connotations. My daughter Hannah was learning the alphabet and her voice is on the soundtrack repeating and getting things wrong - the wisdom of the innocent. It was also very much to do with concepts of Heaven and Hell and how those are interchangeable."
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
storytelling: Matthew Herbert: How I made a concert out of the Guardian
"Something that appears quite temporary, quite disposable and turn it into a story."
"Matthew Herbert talks through the ideas behind One Day, a composition inspired by the content - and production - of the 25 September edition of the Guardian"
* The piece was performed by the London Sinfonietta on Saturday November 20 2010 at the Royal Festival Hall
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
classicists and modernists.
Earlier this week, I was watching a Guardian video ( along with its article, could be found on the following link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/27/week-in-architecture-art-banksy ), about Francis Terry, a classicist architect who had intervened over the work in "Banksy's Tunnel". He mainly restored/painted a facade over one of Banksy's guests artworks, one of the people who have been invited by Banksy, almost 3 years ago, to intervene (with their graffitis) on the walls under Waterloo Station.
What Francis Terry does could be found on the following link:
The classicist annoyed me, but I couldn't figure out why really, is it because I have just watched Banksy's film "Exit through the gift shop" and I sympathize with Banksy or whether Terry's artwork was too perfectionist and at the same time meaningless for my taste? Anyways...
So helvetica is the corporate thing, not that I hate the font, but the pride of modernists experiences today are breaking me: geeks preaching and making jokes about how geeky they are!
What Francis Terry does could be found on the following link:
The classicist annoyed me, but I couldn't figure out why really, is it because I have just watched Banksy's film "Exit through the gift shop" and I sympathize with Banksy or whether Terry's artwork was too perfectionist and at the same time meaningless for my taste? Anyways...
The article Jonathan Glancey wrote (link above) is very considerate and opens up to different dimensions, much more valuable than my simple annoyance.
So 2 days ago, again, I was watching the Helvetica documentary (about Helvetica the font), and the documentary is very good, and both visuals and research are very well done... it starts with "Designers have a huge responsibility, these are the people who put their wires into our heads" and things start deteriorating, the irritation problem again, specifically whenever I hear modernists Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones speak...
or when Bierut tears down old advertising to replace it with famous helvetica image:
I started wondering what is wrong with me and whether I am really in a compulsive hate mode? then again, in the middle of the documentary, things start to get better, when Paul Scher speaks, she says: "I was morally opposed to helvetica because I viewed the big corporations that were slathered in Helvetica as sponsors of the vietnam war, so therefore, if you used helvetica, it meant you were in favor of the vietnam war, so how could you use it?" and then Stefan Sagmeister who says: "I myself got fairly disappointed with modernism in general, it simply became boring. If I see a brochure now with lots of white space that has like six lines of helvetica up on the top and a little abstract logo on the bottom and a picture of a businessman walking somewhere, the overall communication that says to me is DO NOT READ ME, because I will bore the shit out of you, not just visually but also in content because the content will likely say the same as it says to me visually."
David Carson massacres the font "There's a fine line between simple and clean and powerful and simple and clean and boring!" and Michael C Place also intervenes in a very simple and nice way, even though he's not a Helvetica hater, he convinces you!So helvetica is the corporate thing, not that I hate the font, but the pride of modernists experiences today are breaking me: geeks preaching and making jokes about how geeky they are!
Saturday, 28 May 2011
George Orwell's 1984 - An Afterword by Erich Fromm about Utopias and Negative Utopias.
I read the afterword written by Erich Fromm about the famous "1984", this text is so rich. I am mainly interested in more opinions about compositing worlds, so here comes the notions of Utopias and Negative Utopias, in different authors' works, among them: George Orwell, Thomas More, Campanella (the first time I hear about him), Andreae's Christianopolis, Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley, Below is the text if someone is interested in reading it.
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George Orwell's 1984 is the expression of mood, and it is a warning. The mood it expresses is that of near dispair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it.
The mood of hopelessness about the future of man is in marked contrast to one of the most fundamental features of Western thought: the faith in human progress and in man's capacity to crete a world of justice and peace. This hope has its roots both in Greek and Roman thinking, as well as in the Messianic concept of the Old Testament prophets. The Old Testament philosophy of history assumes that man grows and unfolds in history and eventually becomes what he potential is. It assumes that he develops his powers of reason and love fully, and thus is enabled to grasp the world, being one with his fellow man and nature, at the same time preserving his individuality and his integrity. Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins, eventually this "end of days" will arrive, symbolized by the figure of the Messiah.
The prophetic concept was a historical one, a state of perfection to be realized by man within historical time. Christianity transformed this concept in to a transhistorical, purely spiritual one, yet did not give up the idea of the connection between moral norms and politics. The Christian thinkers of the late Middle Ages emphasized that although the "Kingdom of God" was not within historical time, the social order must correspond to and realize the spiritual principles of Christianity. THe Christian sect before and after Reformation emphasized these demands in more urgent, more active, more revolutionary ways. With the breakup of the medieval world, man's sense of strength, and his hope, not only for individual but for social perfection, assumed new strength and took new ways.
One of the most important ones is a new form of writing which developed since the Renaissance, the first expression of which Thomas More's Utopia (literally: "Nowhere"), a name which has then generically applied to other similar works. Thomas More's Utopia combined a most penetrating criticism of his own society, its irrationality and its injustice, with the picture of a society which, though perhaps not perfect, had solved most of the human problems which sounded insoluble to his own contemporaries. What characterizes Thomas More's Utopia, and all the others, is that they do not speak in general terms of principles, but give an imaginative picture of the concrete details of a society which corresponds to the deepest longings of man. In contrast to prophetic thought, these perfect societies are not at "the end of the days" but exist already - though in a geographic distance rather than in the distance of time.
Thomas More's Utopia was followed by two others, the Italian frier Campanella's City of the Sun, and the German humanist Andreae's Christianopolis, the latter being the most modern of the three. There are differences in viewpoint and in originality in this trilogy of utopias, yet the differences are monor in comparison with what they have in common. Utopias were written from then on for several hundred years, until the beginning of the twentieth century. The latest and most influential utopia was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888. Aside from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur, it was undoubtedly the most popular book at the turn of the century, printed in many millions of copies in the United States, translated into over twenty languages.1 Bellamy's utopia is part of the great American tradition as expressed in the thinking of Whitman, Thoreau, and Emmerson. It is the American version of the ideas which at that time found their most forceful expression in the socialist movement in Europe.
This hope for man's individual and social perfectibility, which in philosophical and anthropological terms was clearly expressed in the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century and of the socialist thinkers of the nineteenth, remained unchanged until after the First World War. This war, in which millions died for the territorial ambitions of the European powers, although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy, was the beginning of that development which tended in a relatively short time to destroy a two-thousand-year-old Western tradition of hope and transform it into a mood of despair. The moral callousness of the First World War was on the beginning. Other events followed: the betrayal of the socialist hopes by Stalin's reactionary state capitalism; the severe economic crisis at the end of the twenties; the victory of barbarism in one of the oldest centers of culture in the world - Germany, the insanity of Stalinist terror during the thirties; the Second World War, in which all the fighting nations lost some of the moral considerations which had still existed in the First World War; the unlimited destruction of civilian populations, started by Hitler and continued by the even more complete destruction of cities such as Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo, and eventually the use of atomic bombs against Japan. Since then the human race has been confronted with an even greater danger - that of the destruction of our civilization, if not all of mankind, by thermonuclear weapons as they exist today and as they are being developed in increasingly frightful proportions.
Most people, however, are not consciously aware of this threat and of their own hopelessness. Some believe that just because modern warfare is so destructive, war is impossible; others declare that even if sixty or seventy million Americans were killed in the first one or two days of a nuclear war, there is no reason to believe that life would not go on as before after the first shock has been overcome. It is precisely the significance of Orwell's book that it expresses the new mood of hopelessness which pervades our age before the mood has become manifest and taken hold of the consciousness of people.
Orwell is not alone in this endeavor. Two other writers, the Russian Zamyatin in his book We, and Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World, have expressed the mood of the present, and a warning for the future, in ways very similar to Orwell's. This new trilogy of what may be called the "negative utopias" of the middle of the twentieth century is the coutnerpoint to the trilogy of the positive utopias mentioned before, written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 The negative utopias express the mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man just as the early utopias expressed the mood of self-confidence and hope of post-medieval man. There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the beggining of the industrial age, when in reality he did not posses the means for a world in which the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war, and exploitation, in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new science and of its application to technique and to production - nevertheless man at the beginning of modern development was full of hope. Four hundred year later, when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was four hundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. It is the essential point of all the three negative utopias not only to describe the future toward which we are moving, but also to explain the historical paradox.
The three negative utopias differ from each other in detail and emphasis. Zamyatin's We, written in the twenties, has more features in common with 1984 than with Huxley's Brave New World. We and 1984 both depict the completely bureaucratized society, in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. This is brought about by a mixture of unlilmited terror (in Zamyatin's book a brain operation is added eventually which changes man even physically) combined with ideological and psychological manipulation. In Huxley's work the main tool for turning a man into an automaton is the application of hypnoid mass suggestion, which allows dispensing with terror. One can say that Zamyatin's and Orwell's examples resemble more the Stalinist and Nazi dictatorships, while Huxley's Brave New World is a picture of the development of the Western industrial world, provided it continues to follow the present trend without fundamental change.
In spite of this difference ther eis one basic question common to the three negative utopias. The question is a philosophical, anthropological and psychological one, and perhaps also a religious one. It is: can human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom for dignity, for integrity, for love - that is to say, can man forget that he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one? It must be noted that the three authors do not take the simple position of psychological relativism which is common to so many social scientists today; they do not start out with the assumption that there is no suxch thing as human nature; that there is no such thing as qualities essential to man; and that man is born as nothing but a blank sheet of paper on which any given society writes its text. They do assume that man has an intense striving for love, for justice, for truth, for solidarity, and in this respect they are quite different from the relativists. In fact, they affirm the strengthand intensity of these human strivings by the description of the very means they present as being necessary to destroy them. In Zamatin's We a brain operation similar to a lobotomy is necessary to get rid of the human demands of human nature. In Huxley's Brave New World artificial biological selection and drugs are necessary, and in Orwell's 1984 it is the completely unlimited use of torture and brainwashing. None of the three authors can be accused of the thought that the destruction of the humanity within man is easy. Yet all three arrive at the same conclusion: that it is possible, with means and techniques which are common knowledge today.
In spite of many similarities to Zamyatin's book, Orwell's 1984 makes its own original contribution to the question, How can human nature be changed? I want to speak now about some of the more specifically "Orwellian" concepts.
The contribution of Orwell whih is most immediately relevant for the year 1961 and for the next five to fifteen is the connection he makes between the dictorial society of 1984 and atomic war. Atomic wars had first appeared as early as the forties; a large-scale atomic war broke out about ten years later, as some hundreds of of bombs were dropped on industrial centers in Euorpean Russia, Western Europe, and North America. After this war, the governments of all countries became convinced that the continuation of war would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. For these reasons no more bombs were dropped, and the three existing big power blocs "merely continued to produce atomic bombs and stored them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later." it remains the aim of the ruling party to discover how "to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand." Orwell wrote 1984 before the discover of thermonuclear weapons, and it is on a historical footnote to say that in the fifties the very aim which was just mentioned had already been reached. The atomic bomb which was dropped on the Japanese cities seems small and ineffective when compared with the mass slaughter which can be achieved by thermonuclear weapons with the capacity to wipe out 90 per cent or 100 per cent of a country's population within minutes.
The importance of Orwell's concept of war lies in a number of very keen observations.
First of all, he shows the economic significance of continuous arms production, without which the economic system cannot function. Furthermore, he gives an impressive picture of how a society must develop which is constantly prepoaring for war, constantly afraid of being attacked, and preparing to find the means of complete annihilation of its opponents. Orwell's picture is so pertinent becuase it offeres a telling argument against the popular idea that we can save freedom and deomcracy by continuing the arms race and finding a "stable" deterrent. This soothing picture ignores the fact that with the increasing techncal "progress" (which creates entirely new weapons about every 5 years, and will soon permit the development of 100 or 1000 instead of 10 megaton bombs), the whole society will be forced to live underground, but that the destructive strength of thermonuclear bombs will always remain greater than the depth of the caves, that the military will become dominant (in fact, if not in law), that fright and hatred of a possible aggressor will destroy the basic attitudes of a democratic, humanistic society. In other words, the continued arms race, even if it would not lead to the outbreak of a thermonuclear war, would lead to the destruction of those qualities of our society which can be called "democratic," "free," or "in the American tradition." Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war, and he does so imaginatively and brilliantly.
Another important aspect is Orwell's desription of the nature of truth, wich on the surface is a picture of Stalin's treatment of truth, especially in the thirties. But anyone who sees in Orwell's description only another denunciation of Stalinism is missing an essential elemtn of Orwell's analysis. He is actually talking about a devlopment which is taking place in the Western industrial countries also, only at a slwer pace than it is taking place in Russia and China. The basic question whihc Orwell raises is whether there is any such thing as "truth." "reality," so the ruling party holds, "is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowehere else . . . whatever the Party holds to be truth is the truth." If this is so, then by controlling men's minds the Party controls truth. In a dramatic conversation between the protagonist of the Party and the beaten rebel, a conversation between the Inquisitor and Jesus, the basic principles of the Party are explained. In constrast to the Inquisitor, however, the leaders of the Party do not even pretend that their system is intended to make man happier, because men, being frail and cowardly creatures, want to escape from freedom and are unable to face the truth. The leaders are aware of the fact tha they themselves have only one aim, and that is power. To them "power is not a means; it is an end. And power means the capacity to inflict unlimited pain and suffering to another human being."3 Power, then, for them creates reality, it creates truth. The position which Orwell attributes here to the power elite can be said to be an extreme form of the philosophical ideallism, but it more to the point to recognize that the concept of truth and reality which exists in 1984 is an extreme form of pragmatism in whihc truth becomes subordinated to the Party. An American writer, Alan Harrington, who in Life in the Crystal Palace4 gives a subtle and penetrating picture of life in a big Anmerican corporation, has coined an excellent expression for the contemporary concept of truth: "mobile truth." If I work for a big corporation which claims that its product is better than that of all competitors, the question whether this claim is justified or not in terms of ascertainable reality becomes irrelevant. What matters is that as long as I servethis particular corporation, this claim becomes "my" truth, and I decline to examine whether it is an objectively valid truth. In fact, if I change my job and move over to the competitor, I shall accept the new truth, that its product is the best, and subjectively speaking, this new truth will be as true as the old one. It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own insterests and functions. Truth is proven by the consensus of millions; to the slogan "how can millions be wrong" is added "and how can a minority of one be right." Orwell shows quite clearly that in a system in which the concept of truth as an objective judgement concerning reality is abolished, anyone who is a minority of one must be convinced that he is insane.
In describing the kind of thinking which is dominant in 1984, Orwell has coined a word whcih has already become part of the modern vocabulary: "doublethink." "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory belief's in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. . . . This process has to be concious, or it would bot be carried out with sufficient precision. But it also has to be unconcious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt." It is precisely the unconcious aspect of double think which will seduce many a reader of 1984 ito believing that the method of doublethink is employeed by the Russian and the Chinese, while it is something quite foriegn to himself. This, however, is an illusion, as a few examples can demonstrate. We in the West speak of the "free world," in which we include not only systems like those of the United States and England, which are based on free elections and freedom of expression, but we include also South American dictatorships (at least we did as long as they existed); we also includ various forms of dictatorships like those of Franco and Salazar, and those in South Africa, Pakistan, adn Abyssinia. While we speak about the free world, we actually mean all those states which are against Russia and China and not at all, as the words would indicate, states which have political freedom. Another contemporary example of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting them can be found in our discussion about armament. We spend a considerable part of our income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and close our minds to the fact that they might kgo off and destroy one third or one half or most of our population (and that of our enemy). SOme go even further; thus Herman Kahn, one of the most influential writers on atmc strategy today, states, ". . . in other words war is horrible, there is no question about it, but so is peace, and it is proper with the kind of calculations we are making today to compare the horror of war and the horror of peace, and see how much worse it is."5 Kahn assumes that thermonuclear war might mean the destruction of sixty million Americans, and yet he finds that even in such a case "the country would recover rather rapidly and effectively,"6 and that "normal and happy lives for the majority of the survivors and their descendants"7 would not be precluded by the tragedy of thermonuclear war. This view holds: a) that we prepare for war in order to preserve peace, b) that even if war breaks out and the Russians kill one third of our population and we do the same to them (and if we can, of course, more) still, people will live happy lives afterwards, c) that not only war but also peace is horrible, and it is necessary to examine how much more horrible war is than peace. People who accept this kind of reasoning call it "sober"; those who doubt that if two million or sixty million died it would leave America essentially untouched are not "sober"; those who point to the political adn psychological and moral consequences of such destruction are called "unrealistic."
While this is not the pace for a lengthy discussion on the problem of disarmament, these examples must be given in order to make the point which is essential for the understanding of Orwell's book, namely that "doublethink" is already with us, and not merely something which will happen in the future, and in dictatorships.
Another important point in Orwell's discussion is closely related to "doublethink," namely that in a successful manipulation of the mind the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what is true. Thus, for instance, if he has surrendered his independence and his integrity completely, if he experieinces thimself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party or the corporation, then two plus two are five, or "Slavery is Freedom," and he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood. Specifically this applies to ideologies. Just as the Inquisitors who torturted their prisoners believed that they acted in the name of Christian love, the party "rejects and villifies every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to this in the name of socialism." Its content is reversed into its opposite, and yet people believe that the ideology means what it says. In this respect Orwell quite obviously refers to the falsification of socialism by Russian communism, but it must be added that the WEst is also guilty of a similar falsification. We present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial society, of an essentially bureacratic nature, and motivated by a materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns. Related to this is another example of "doublethink," namely that few writers, discussing atmoic strategy, stumble over the fact that killing, froma Christian standpoint, is a evil or more evil than being killed. The reader will find many other features of our present Western society in Orwell's description in 1984, provided he can overcome enough of his own "doublethink."
Certainly Orwell's picture is exceedingly depressing, especially if one recognizes that as Orwell himself points out, it is not only a picture of an enemy but of the whole human race at the end of the twentieth century. One can react to this picture in two ways: either by becoming more hopeless and resigned, or by feeling there is still time, and by responding with greater clarity and greater courage. All three negative utopias make it appear that it is posisble to dehumanize man competely, and yet for life to go on. One might doubt the correctness of this assumption, and think that while it might be possible to destroy the human core of man, one would also in doing this destroy the future of mankind. Such men would be so truly inhuman and lacking in vitality that they would destroy each other, or die out of sheer boredom and anxiety. If the world of 1984 is gong to be the dominant form of life on this globe, it will mean a world of madmen, adn hence not a viable world (Orwell indicates this very subtly by pointing to the mad gleam in the Party leader's eyes). I am sure that neither orwell nor Huxley nor Zamyatin wanted to insist that this world of insanity is bound to come. On the contrary, it was quite obviously their intention to sound a warning by showing where we are headed for unless we succeed in a renaissance of the spirit of humanism and dignity which is at the very root of Occidental culture. Orwell, as well as the two other authors, is simply implying that the new form of managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines which act like men and develops men who act like machines, is conducive to an era of dehumanization and comoplete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption.8 All three authors imply that this danger exists not only in communism of the Russian or Chinese version, but that it is a danger inherent in the modern mode of production and organization, and relatively independent of the various ideologies. Orwell, like the authors of the other negative utopias, is not a prophet of disaster. He wants to warn and to awaken us. He still hopes - but in contrast to the writers of the utopias in the earlier phase of Western society, his hope is a desperate one. The hope can be realized only by recognizing, so 1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who have lost every trace of the individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware of it because of "doublethink." Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings , and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and of he dopes not see that it means us, too.
Erich Fromm
NOTES:
1 The latest edition was published by the New American Library of World Literature, Inc., New York, 1960 (CD26).
2 It should be added that Jack London's The Iron Heel, the prediction of facism in America, is the earliest of the modern negative utopias.
3Cf. this definition of power in Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1941. Also Simone Weil's definition that power is the capacity to transform a living person into a corpse, that is to say, into a thing.
4 Alan Harringto, Life in the Crystal Palace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1959; London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1960.
5Cf. H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 47, n. 1.
6 Ibid., p. 74.
7 Ibid., p. 21.
8 This problem is analuzed in detail in Erich Fromm, The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1955.
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George Orwell's 1984 is the expression of mood, and it is a warning. The mood it expresses is that of near dispair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it.
The mood of hopelessness about the future of man is in marked contrast to one of the most fundamental features of Western thought: the faith in human progress and in man's capacity to crete a world of justice and peace. This hope has its roots both in Greek and Roman thinking, as well as in the Messianic concept of the Old Testament prophets. The Old Testament philosophy of history assumes that man grows and unfolds in history and eventually becomes what he potential is. It assumes that he develops his powers of reason and love fully, and thus is enabled to grasp the world, being one with his fellow man and nature, at the same time preserving his individuality and his integrity. Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins, eventually this "end of days" will arrive, symbolized by the figure of the Messiah.
The prophetic concept was a historical one, a state of perfection to be realized by man within historical time. Christianity transformed this concept in to a transhistorical, purely spiritual one, yet did not give up the idea of the connection between moral norms and politics. The Christian thinkers of the late Middle Ages emphasized that although the "Kingdom of God" was not within historical time, the social order must correspond to and realize the spiritual principles of Christianity. THe Christian sect before and after Reformation emphasized these demands in more urgent, more active, more revolutionary ways. With the breakup of the medieval world, man's sense of strength, and his hope, not only for individual but for social perfection, assumed new strength and took new ways.
One of the most important ones is a new form of writing which developed since the Renaissance, the first expression of which Thomas More's Utopia (literally: "Nowhere"), a name which has then generically applied to other similar works. Thomas More's Utopia combined a most penetrating criticism of his own society, its irrationality and its injustice, with the picture of a society which, though perhaps not perfect, had solved most of the human problems which sounded insoluble to his own contemporaries. What characterizes Thomas More's Utopia, and all the others, is that they do not speak in general terms of principles, but give an imaginative picture of the concrete details of a society which corresponds to the deepest longings of man. In contrast to prophetic thought, these perfect societies are not at "the end of the days" but exist already - though in a geographic distance rather than in the distance of time.
Thomas More's Utopia was followed by two others, the Italian frier Campanella's City of the Sun, and the German humanist Andreae's Christianopolis, the latter being the most modern of the three. There are differences in viewpoint and in originality in this trilogy of utopias, yet the differences are monor in comparison with what they have in common. Utopias were written from then on for several hundred years, until the beginning of the twentieth century. The latest and most influential utopia was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888. Aside from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur, it was undoubtedly the most popular book at the turn of the century, printed in many millions of copies in the United States, translated into over twenty languages.1 Bellamy's utopia is part of the great American tradition as expressed in the thinking of Whitman, Thoreau, and Emmerson. It is the American version of the ideas which at that time found their most forceful expression in the socialist movement in Europe.
This hope for man's individual and social perfectibility, which in philosophical and anthropological terms was clearly expressed in the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century and of the socialist thinkers of the nineteenth, remained unchanged until after the First World War. This war, in which millions died for the territorial ambitions of the European powers, although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy, was the beginning of that development which tended in a relatively short time to destroy a two-thousand-year-old Western tradition of hope and transform it into a mood of despair. The moral callousness of the First World War was on the beginning. Other events followed: the betrayal of the socialist hopes by Stalin's reactionary state capitalism; the severe economic crisis at the end of the twenties; the victory of barbarism in one of the oldest centers of culture in the world - Germany, the insanity of Stalinist terror during the thirties; the Second World War, in which all the fighting nations lost some of the moral considerations which had still existed in the First World War; the unlimited destruction of civilian populations, started by Hitler and continued by the even more complete destruction of cities such as Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo, and eventually the use of atomic bombs against Japan. Since then the human race has been confronted with an even greater danger - that of the destruction of our civilization, if not all of mankind, by thermonuclear weapons as they exist today and as they are being developed in increasingly frightful proportions.
Most people, however, are not consciously aware of this threat and of their own hopelessness. Some believe that just because modern warfare is so destructive, war is impossible; others declare that even if sixty or seventy million Americans were killed in the first one or two days of a nuclear war, there is no reason to believe that life would not go on as before after the first shock has been overcome. It is precisely the significance of Orwell's book that it expresses the new mood of hopelessness which pervades our age before the mood has become manifest and taken hold of the consciousness of people.
Orwell is not alone in this endeavor. Two other writers, the Russian Zamyatin in his book We, and Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World, have expressed the mood of the present, and a warning for the future, in ways very similar to Orwell's. This new trilogy of what may be called the "negative utopias" of the middle of the twentieth century is the coutnerpoint to the trilogy of the positive utopias mentioned before, written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 The negative utopias express the mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man just as the early utopias expressed the mood of self-confidence and hope of post-medieval man. There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the beggining of the industrial age, when in reality he did not posses the means for a world in which the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war, and exploitation, in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new science and of its application to technique and to production - nevertheless man at the beginning of modern development was full of hope. Four hundred year later, when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was four hundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. It is the essential point of all the three negative utopias not only to describe the future toward which we are moving, but also to explain the historical paradox.
The three negative utopias differ from each other in detail and emphasis. Zamyatin's We, written in the twenties, has more features in common with 1984 than with Huxley's Brave New World. We and 1984 both depict the completely bureaucratized society, in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. This is brought about by a mixture of unlilmited terror (in Zamyatin's book a brain operation is added eventually which changes man even physically) combined with ideological and psychological manipulation. In Huxley's work the main tool for turning a man into an automaton is the application of hypnoid mass suggestion, which allows dispensing with terror. One can say that Zamyatin's and Orwell's examples resemble more the Stalinist and Nazi dictatorships, while Huxley's Brave New World is a picture of the development of the Western industrial world, provided it continues to follow the present trend without fundamental change.
In spite of this difference ther eis one basic question common to the three negative utopias. The question is a philosophical, anthropological and psychological one, and perhaps also a religious one. It is: can human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom for dignity, for integrity, for love - that is to say, can man forget that he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one? It must be noted that the three authors do not take the simple position of psychological relativism which is common to so many social scientists today; they do not start out with the assumption that there is no suxch thing as human nature; that there is no such thing as qualities essential to man; and that man is born as nothing but a blank sheet of paper on which any given society writes its text. They do assume that man has an intense striving for love, for justice, for truth, for solidarity, and in this respect they are quite different from the relativists. In fact, they affirm the strengthand intensity of these human strivings by the description of the very means they present as being necessary to destroy them. In Zamatin's We a brain operation similar to a lobotomy is necessary to get rid of the human demands of human nature. In Huxley's Brave New World artificial biological selection and drugs are necessary, and in Orwell's 1984 it is the completely unlimited use of torture and brainwashing. None of the three authors can be accused of the thought that the destruction of the humanity within man is easy. Yet all three arrive at the same conclusion: that it is possible, with means and techniques which are common knowledge today.
In spite of many similarities to Zamyatin's book, Orwell's 1984 makes its own original contribution to the question, How can human nature be changed? I want to speak now about some of the more specifically "Orwellian" concepts.
The contribution of Orwell whih is most immediately relevant for the year 1961 and for the next five to fifteen is the connection he makes between the dictorial society of 1984 and atomic war. Atomic wars had first appeared as early as the forties; a large-scale atomic war broke out about ten years later, as some hundreds of of bombs were dropped on industrial centers in Euorpean Russia, Western Europe, and North America. After this war, the governments of all countries became convinced that the continuation of war would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power. For these reasons no more bombs were dropped, and the three existing big power blocs "merely continued to produce atomic bombs and stored them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later." it remains the aim of the ruling party to discover how "to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand." Orwell wrote 1984 before the discover of thermonuclear weapons, and it is on a historical footnote to say that in the fifties the very aim which was just mentioned had already been reached. The atomic bomb which was dropped on the Japanese cities seems small and ineffective when compared with the mass slaughter which can be achieved by thermonuclear weapons with the capacity to wipe out 90 per cent or 100 per cent of a country's population within minutes.
The importance of Orwell's concept of war lies in a number of very keen observations.
First of all, he shows the economic significance of continuous arms production, without which the economic system cannot function. Furthermore, he gives an impressive picture of how a society must develop which is constantly prepoaring for war, constantly afraid of being attacked, and preparing to find the means of complete annihilation of its opponents. Orwell's picture is so pertinent becuase it offeres a telling argument against the popular idea that we can save freedom and deomcracy by continuing the arms race and finding a "stable" deterrent. This soothing picture ignores the fact that with the increasing techncal "progress" (which creates entirely new weapons about every 5 years, and will soon permit the development of 100 or 1000 instead of 10 megaton bombs), the whole society will be forced to live underground, but that the destructive strength of thermonuclear bombs will always remain greater than the depth of the caves, that the military will become dominant (in fact, if not in law), that fright and hatred of a possible aggressor will destroy the basic attitudes of a democratic, humanistic society. In other words, the continued arms race, even if it would not lead to the outbreak of a thermonuclear war, would lead to the destruction of those qualities of our society which can be called "democratic," "free," or "in the American tradition." Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war, and he does so imaginatively and brilliantly.
Another important aspect is Orwell's desription of the nature of truth, wich on the surface is a picture of Stalin's treatment of truth, especially in the thirties. But anyone who sees in Orwell's description only another denunciation of Stalinism is missing an essential elemtn of Orwell's analysis. He is actually talking about a devlopment which is taking place in the Western industrial countries also, only at a slwer pace than it is taking place in Russia and China. The basic question whihc Orwell raises is whether there is any such thing as "truth." "reality," so the ruling party holds, "is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowehere else . . . whatever the Party holds to be truth is the truth." If this is so, then by controlling men's minds the Party controls truth. In a dramatic conversation between the protagonist of the Party and the beaten rebel, a conversation between the Inquisitor and Jesus, the basic principles of the Party are explained. In constrast to the Inquisitor, however, the leaders of the Party do not even pretend that their system is intended to make man happier, because men, being frail and cowardly creatures, want to escape from freedom and are unable to face the truth. The leaders are aware of the fact tha they themselves have only one aim, and that is power. To them "power is not a means; it is an end. And power means the capacity to inflict unlimited pain and suffering to another human being."3 Power, then, for them creates reality, it creates truth. The position which Orwell attributes here to the power elite can be said to be an extreme form of the philosophical ideallism, but it more to the point to recognize that the concept of truth and reality which exists in 1984 is an extreme form of pragmatism in whihc truth becomes subordinated to the Party. An American writer, Alan Harrington, who in Life in the Crystal Palace4 gives a subtle and penetrating picture of life in a big Anmerican corporation, has coined an excellent expression for the contemporary concept of truth: "mobile truth." If I work for a big corporation which claims that its product is better than that of all competitors, the question whether this claim is justified or not in terms of ascertainable reality becomes irrelevant. What matters is that as long as I servethis particular corporation, this claim becomes "my" truth, and I decline to examine whether it is an objectively valid truth. In fact, if I change my job and move over to the competitor, I shall accept the new truth, that its product is the best, and subjectively speaking, this new truth will be as true as the old one. It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own insterests and functions. Truth is proven by the consensus of millions; to the slogan "how can millions be wrong" is added "and how can a minority of one be right." Orwell shows quite clearly that in a system in which the concept of truth as an objective judgement concerning reality is abolished, anyone who is a minority of one must be convinced that he is insane.
In describing the kind of thinking which is dominant in 1984, Orwell has coined a word whcih has already become part of the modern vocabulary: "doublethink." "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory belief's in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. . . . This process has to be concious, or it would bot be carried out with sufficient precision. But it also has to be unconcious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt." It is precisely the unconcious aspect of double think which will seduce many a reader of 1984 ito believing that the method of doublethink is employeed by the Russian and the Chinese, while it is something quite foriegn to himself. This, however, is an illusion, as a few examples can demonstrate. We in the West speak of the "free world," in which we include not only systems like those of the United States and England, which are based on free elections and freedom of expression, but we include also South American dictatorships (at least we did as long as they existed); we also includ various forms of dictatorships like those of Franco and Salazar, and those in South Africa, Pakistan, adn Abyssinia. While we speak about the free world, we actually mean all those states which are against Russia and China and not at all, as the words would indicate, states which have political freedom. Another contemporary example of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting them can be found in our discussion about armament. We spend a considerable part of our income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and close our minds to the fact that they might kgo off and destroy one third or one half or most of our population (and that of our enemy). SOme go even further; thus Herman Kahn, one of the most influential writers on atmc strategy today, states, ". . . in other words war is horrible, there is no question about it, but so is peace, and it is proper with the kind of calculations we are making today to compare the horror of war and the horror of peace, and see how much worse it is."5 Kahn assumes that thermonuclear war might mean the destruction of sixty million Americans, and yet he finds that even in such a case "the country would recover rather rapidly and effectively,"6 and that "normal and happy lives for the majority of the survivors and their descendants"7 would not be precluded by the tragedy of thermonuclear war. This view holds: a) that we prepare for war in order to preserve peace, b) that even if war breaks out and the Russians kill one third of our population and we do the same to them (and if we can, of course, more) still, people will live happy lives afterwards, c) that not only war but also peace is horrible, and it is necessary to examine how much more horrible war is than peace. People who accept this kind of reasoning call it "sober"; those who doubt that if two million or sixty million died it would leave America essentially untouched are not "sober"; those who point to the political adn psychological and moral consequences of such destruction are called "unrealistic."
While this is not the pace for a lengthy discussion on the problem of disarmament, these examples must be given in order to make the point which is essential for the understanding of Orwell's book, namely that "doublethink" is already with us, and not merely something which will happen in the future, and in dictatorships.
Another important point in Orwell's discussion is closely related to "doublethink," namely that in a successful manipulation of the mind the person is no longer saying the opposite of what he thinks, but he thinks the opposite of what is true. Thus, for instance, if he has surrendered his independence and his integrity completely, if he experieinces thimself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party or the corporation, then two plus two are five, or "Slavery is Freedom," and he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood. Specifically this applies to ideologies. Just as the Inquisitors who torturted their prisoners believed that they acted in the name of Christian love, the party "rejects and villifies every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to this in the name of socialism." Its content is reversed into its opposite, and yet people believe that the ideology means what it says. In this respect Orwell quite obviously refers to the falsification of socialism by Russian communism, but it must be added that the WEst is also guilty of a similar falsification. We present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial society, of an essentially bureacratic nature, and motivated by a materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns. Related to this is another example of "doublethink," namely that few writers, discussing atmoic strategy, stumble over the fact that killing, froma Christian standpoint, is a evil or more evil than being killed. The reader will find many other features of our present Western society in Orwell's description in 1984, provided he can overcome enough of his own "doublethink."
Certainly Orwell's picture is exceedingly depressing, especially if one recognizes that as Orwell himself points out, it is not only a picture of an enemy but of the whole human race at the end of the twentieth century. One can react to this picture in two ways: either by becoming more hopeless and resigned, or by feeling there is still time, and by responding with greater clarity and greater courage. All three negative utopias make it appear that it is posisble to dehumanize man competely, and yet for life to go on. One might doubt the correctness of this assumption, and think that while it might be possible to destroy the human core of man, one would also in doing this destroy the future of mankind. Such men would be so truly inhuman and lacking in vitality that they would destroy each other, or die out of sheer boredom and anxiety. If the world of 1984 is gong to be the dominant form of life on this globe, it will mean a world of madmen, adn hence not a viable world (Orwell indicates this very subtly by pointing to the mad gleam in the Party leader's eyes). I am sure that neither orwell nor Huxley nor Zamyatin wanted to insist that this world of insanity is bound to come. On the contrary, it was quite obviously their intention to sound a warning by showing where we are headed for unless we succeed in a renaissance of the spirit of humanism and dignity which is at the very root of Occidental culture. Orwell, as well as the two other authors, is simply implying that the new form of managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines which act like men and develops men who act like machines, is conducive to an era of dehumanization and comoplete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption.8 All three authors imply that this danger exists not only in communism of the Russian or Chinese version, but that it is a danger inherent in the modern mode of production and organization, and relatively independent of the various ideologies. Orwell, like the authors of the other negative utopias, is not a prophet of disaster. He wants to warn and to awaken us. He still hopes - but in contrast to the writers of the utopias in the earlier phase of Western society, his hope is a desperate one. The hope can be realized only by recognizing, so 1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who have lost every trace of the individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware of it because of "doublethink." Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings , and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and of he dopes not see that it means us, too.
Erich Fromm
NOTES:
1 The latest edition was published by the New American Library of World Literature, Inc., New York, 1960 (CD26).
2 It should be added that Jack London's The Iron Heel, the prediction of facism in America, is the earliest of the modern negative utopias.
3Cf. this definition of power in Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1941. Also Simone Weil's definition that power is the capacity to transform a living person into a corpse, that is to say, into a thing.
4 Alan Harringto, Life in the Crystal Palace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1959; London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1960.
5Cf. H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 47, n. 1.
6 Ibid., p. 74.
7 Ibid., p. 21.
8 This problem is analuzed in detail in Erich Fromm, The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1955.
Monday, 16 May 2011
Alex Webb: More is more
Alex Webb's images have been called 'migraine photographs'. Geoff Dyer on the art of taking complicated pictures of complicated situations
Geoff Dyer
The Guardian, Saturday 14 May 2011
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USA. San Ysidro, California, 1979. Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to United States. Photograph: © Alex Webb/Magnum
Alex Webb is addicted to testing the limit of the load-bearing ability of his pictures: "It's not just that that and that exist. It's that that, that, that and that all exist in the same frame. I'm always looking for something more. You take in too much; perhaps it becomes total chaos. I'm always playing along that line: adding something more, yet keeping it short of chaos." This was in 2003; since then, Webb has found ways of piling on still more "thats", particularly in his images from Istanbul and Cuba.
Starting out, Webb's influences were Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Winogrand and Friedlander, and when he first worked on the Mexico-US border in 1975 he dutifully photographed in black and white – even as the terrain cried out to be shot in colour. But after a trip to post-revolution Haiti in 1986, he felt compelled to take on a massive additional complication. Politically and morally, an appropriate aesthetic response was demanded. "The world is a complex place and there are great dangers when you start looking at everything in terms purely of black and white."
So you start looking at it in colour.
The result: complicated pictures of complicated situations. When writing about difficult pictures or music or poetry, it's important not to forget, deny, or disguise one's initial (or enduring) confusion or perplexity. The purpose of criticism is not to explain away one's reactions, but to articulate and preserve them – in the hope that doing so expresses a truth inherent in the work. So it's reassuring that I am not alone in finding some of these pictures exhausting to look at. Dayanita Singh, the Indian photographer who took classes taught by Webb at the International Centre of Photography in New York, describes them as "migraine photographs".
Colour photography had gained institutional acceptance with William Eggleston's show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976. Webb was part of the second wave of American photographers working in colour. His essential contribution was to ask the simplest of questions: if you are interested in colour, doesn't it make sense to go where the colour is? In this regard, he was following the same logic as Van Gogh and Gauguin, in painting, when they decamped to the blazing yellows of Arles. Gauguin, of course, went further, to the tropics of Martinique and Polynesia. (I wonder, is Webb's photograph of pilgrims bathing in the waterfalls at Saut d'Eau in Haiti a kind of documentary composite of – and homage to – Gauguin's Tahitian masterpiece?)
Wherever he goes, Webb always ends up in a Bermuda triangle where the distinctions between photojournalism, documentary and art blur and disappear. Even in Haiti, when he is most obviously "a witness to history", he is forced to recognise "the pattern of my futile efforts at news photography… I had missed the February 'revolution' and the fall of Duvalier; now, in April, I arrived to calm…" The most newsworthy pictures are offset by others that suggest that what we are seeing is both old and news. Sometimes this temporal double standard exists within a single image. On one side of the picture is human time and violence; on the other, the animal time of the dog, sniffing around. His cities are palimpsests in which one world is constantly peeking into or giving way to another, through windows, doors, posters, fading layers of paint.
Webb has said of Mexico and Haiti that these are places "where colour is somehow deeply part of the culture, on an almost spiritual level". That's as may be, but his is a world where certain instruments and tools – a spirit level, for example – do not make sense (the Bermuda syndrome again). Within his pictures gravity is rarely more than optional. There are often people's feet dangling from the top of the frame, as if it's a branch they're perched on. Or else they're hanging midair, like cartoon characters in the blissfully oblivious seconds after they've walked off a cliff; or floating upside down and sideways, weightless as astronauts. One way or another, there's a lot of suspense in these pictures.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
Saturday, 26 March 2011
Tarkovsky's notes
My friend gave me Tarkovsky's "Sculpting in Time" as a birthday gift, I was going through the introduction to get back to the book at a later stage when I found myself reading more and more in it. I reached this part where he speaks about non-linearity, poetry in cinema and life portraying... the note on perceiving someone on the street and how this moment is remembered later on made me think about the blur in image making, contour-less objects or sceneries... I am too lazy to rewrite the whole section, I will just attach photos of the pages in here.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
D-Fuse Latitude_Redux
The details and the fragments.
"Latitude_Redux is a condensed extract from D-Fuse’s live sonic cinema performance Latitude. The screen is divided into two parts, which represent the multiple screens used during live shows. Latitude is inspired by the notion of drifting through the land and soundscapes of China and uses fragments of conversations, lights, and architectural forms to trace the multitudes of paths, identities and influences which make up the rapidly changing urban environments of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing."
"Latitude_Redux is a condensed extract from D-Fuse’s live sonic cinema performance Latitude. The screen is divided into two parts, which represent the multiple screens used during live shows. Latitude is inspired by the notion of drifting through the land and soundscapes of China and uses fragments of conversations, lights, and architectural forms to trace the multitudes of paths, identities and influences which make up the rapidly changing urban environments of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing."
Latitude_Redux from D-Fuse on Vimeo.
Thursday, 18 November 2010
feedback on research question and abstract version 4
Tuesday's session was a tutorial, I got feedback and approval on the last version of the research question and abstract.
So to recap, it sounds very good and Andy's advice is simple: keep the boundaries as defined in the abstract and just write
expand definitions etc. 'fluidity' should be defined early on for example.
me: I did include a little paragraph about objects and museum
"The ‘physical’ object in the creative industry was criticized in the museum environment. Museum and objects is a vast topic, the paper’s restriction will not allow giving it justice. However, within the context approached here, and to back up Mark Leckey’s vision of the physicality dissolving, Theodore W. Adorno in his ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ declares the death of the object in the museum when he brings in the German word ‘museal’ and connects it to the word ‘museum’."
so mainly just one example and am skipping the rest of the topic to stay focused
feedback: it sounds like I have worked hard over the past week to really get your idea defined and this is a huge transformation
me: I think i started the whole paper in reverse, that is I read a lot before coming up with the question, should have been the other way around, I would have saved a lot of time
feedback: there is no right way to be honest - sometimes you need to read alot to get inspiration / focus
it offers you poosibilities beyond the immediate imagination
me: is it normal to feel that it's actually combining material to fit the main question? i am barely writing, it's more collecting the notes in a logical way, like introducing what is going to be cited and then leading the way to the next point
feedback: thats the way to do it then you re-write ensuring there is a flow
just make sure your collection of data is following a pattern that will allow for the development fo the argument and discourse
me: I had hard time figuring who worked on the "wholistic" idea, then one day i was able to chase 3 good references that I have read earlier but didn't spot them since i was focusing on the bigger topic. I am happy with this finally
feedback: you sound in good spirits on this, my advice is keep writing while it lasts and enjoy the process, the other issue is really to suggets you just get this going, get it finished asap so you can focus on your practice
do you think this essay will inform your practice much?
me: sure it will, i even have 'notes to self' file on the side
every other note is generating visuals for the practice
like the idea of filming my grandmother's library, with books in the background and all the frames of the whole family (like 3 generations) in the foreground
and the idea of having the show (maybe, if it does fit within the budget), mapped on a building
like a live show on a building, but this requires huge budget for the projector and the structure
so am not thinking about these logistics, but it's definitely paper generated ideas
feedback: ok yes that could be complex and expensive - however a digital recreration of a space could be a very interesting development
it would allow you to be inventive with the recording and recreation of the space
me: but things are making sense out of this, autobiography was not coined earlier, and the idea of trying to get a whole narrative is now rejected in my head, but with a back up argument
So to recap, it sounds very good and Andy's advice is simple: keep the boundaries as defined in the abstract and just write
expand definitions etc. 'fluidity' should be defined early on for example.
me: I did include a little paragraph about objects and museum
"The ‘physical’ object in the creative industry was criticized in the museum environment. Museum and objects is a vast topic, the paper’s restriction will not allow giving it justice. However, within the context approached here, and to back up Mark Leckey’s vision of the physicality dissolving, Theodore W. Adorno in his ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ declares the death of the object in the museum when he brings in the German word ‘museal’ and connects it to the word ‘museum’."
so mainly just one example and am skipping the rest of the topic to stay focused
feedback: it sounds like I have worked hard over the past week to really get your idea defined and this is a huge transformation
me: I think i started the whole paper in reverse, that is I read a lot before coming up with the question, should have been the other way around, I would have saved a lot of time
feedback: there is no right way to be honest - sometimes you need to read alot to get inspiration / focus
it offers you poosibilities beyond the immediate imagination
me: is it normal to feel that it's actually combining material to fit the main question? i am barely writing, it's more collecting the notes in a logical way, like introducing what is going to be cited and then leading the way to the next point
feedback: thats the way to do it then you re-write ensuring there is a flow
just make sure your collection of data is following a pattern that will allow for the development fo the argument and discourse
me: I had hard time figuring who worked on the "wholistic" idea, then one day i was able to chase 3 good references that I have read earlier but didn't spot them since i was focusing on the bigger topic. I am happy with this finally
feedback: you sound in good spirits on this, my advice is keep writing while it lasts and enjoy the process, the other issue is really to suggets you just get this going, get it finished asap so you can focus on your practice
do you think this essay will inform your practice much?
me: sure it will, i even have 'notes to self' file on the side
every other note is generating visuals for the practice
like the idea of filming my grandmother's library, with books in the background and all the frames of the whole family (like 3 generations) in the foreground
and the idea of having the show (maybe, if it does fit within the budget), mapped on a building
like a live show on a building, but this requires huge budget for the projector and the structure
so am not thinking about these logistics, but it's definitely paper generated ideas
feedback: ok yes that could be complex and expensive - however a digital recreration of a space could be a very interesting development
it would allow you to be inventive with the recording and recreation of the space
me: but things are making sense out of this, autobiography was not coined earlier, and the idea of trying to get a whole narrative is now rejected in my head, but with a back up argument
Monday, 15 November 2010
Revisiting the research paper - Version 4
Transitional digital objects: Fluidity in compositing an autobiography or a failure to create a portrait of the whole?
Abstract:
The paper explores the transitional aspect of digital objects in relation to autobiography. D.W. Winnicott coined the term ‘transitional objects’; it travels around the theme object and fantasy. The paper assumes the fluid nature of digital objects, “a new media object” could be “variable, mutable, liquid” as per Manovich’s definition. Placing autobiography as the aim from transitional digital objects manipulation, the paper questions whether the fluidity will act as a facilitator to autobiographical visual writing or will it fail to create a portrait of the whole?
The first part is dedicated to look at the fluidity of digital objects through observing and relating theories and artworks of practitioners who have investigated the theme object (1970s onward); Hollis Frampton doubts the object’s third dimensionality on the screen, Sherry Tuckle emphasizes the emotional in objects, the Cult of Less upload their material lives on external hard drives and online services platforms, and Michael Craig-Martin challenges belief through a glass of water, a shelf and a printed text in his sculpture “An Oak Tree”.
The second part is focused on autobiography in the digital realm. Different autobiographical manifestations come together to reach the final conclusion later; Mark Amerika speaks of the “technomadic” and the “hyperimprovisational narrative artist” in Meta/Data, and Marcel Proust gives a lesson in generative autobiographical storytelling and involuntary memory in his book “In Search of Lost Time”, specifically the episode of the Madeleine.
The conclusion is preceded by notes on ‘recollection’ (Mark Freeman) and the ‘wholistic fictionalization of the past’ (Michel Foucault) as well as Nietsche’s statement of ‘the whole’ that ‘no longer lives at all: it is composed, calculated, artificial, a fictitious thing’.
The findings of the paper affirm the fluidity of autobiographical visual writing through transitional digital objects as well as the failure of creating the portrait of the whole but do not judge the latter conclusion as necessarily inconvenient.
Friday, 12 November 2010
Revisiting the research paper - Version 3
Revisiting the research paper:
The research question:
Transitional digital objects:
Fluidity in compositing an autobiography
or a failure to create a portrait of the whole?
Abstract:
The paper should explore the transitional aspect of digital objects in relation to autobiography. D.W. Winnicott coined the term ‘transitional objects’, it travels around the theme object and fantasy. The paper assumes the fluid nature of digital objects, “a new media object” could be “variable, mutable, liquid” as per Manovich’s definition. Placing autobiography as the aim from transitional digital objects manipulation, the paper will question whether the fluidity will act as a facilitator to autobiographical visual writing or will it fail to create a portrait of the whole?
The first part will be dedicated to look at the fluidity of the digital objects through the work of theoreticians and practitioners who have worked on the object theme; doubting the third dimensionality on screen by Hollis Frampton, “emotional objects” of Sherry Tuckle, the Cult of Less’s initiative to upload their lives on external hard drives and online services platforms, and challenging belief in Michael Craig-Martin’s “An Oak Tree”.
The second part will be focused on autobiography in the digital realm. Exploring the “technomadic” and the “hyperimprovisational narrative artist” of Mark Amerika, Nietsche’s concept of “the whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, calculated, artificial, a fictitious thing”, Marcel Proust’s autobiography triggered by the “Madeleine”…
Mark Freeman in “Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, and Narrative” suggests linking autobiography to recollection and development:
“'re' makes reference to the past, 'collection' makes reference to a present act, an act, as we put it earlier, of gathering together what might have been dispersed or lost. Framed another way, the word recollection holds within it reference to the two distinct ways we often speak about history: as the trail of past events or 'past presents' that have culminated in now and as the act of writing, the act of gathering them together, selectively and imaginatively, into a followable story…”
Whereas Foucault considers “a great deal more that is accidental in both history in general and in our own life histories in particular than we might wish to avow. Perhaps we have reverted too often to a kind of wholistic fictionalization of the past, imposing unity and continuity on that which doesn't deserve it.”
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