Soluble Fish

Practices of Construction

May 26th, 2010 § 0

This year I have been doing a lot of listening to the now all-inclusive field of “digital media art.” I regularly read the blog HTMLGIANT for insight into how fiction and poetry writers are adapting to the changes digital culture brings to literary form. In a recent conversation between Blake Butler and Matthew Simmons about David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Blake had this to say:

“… while I enjoyed Shields’s book, and could see it bringing benefits to those who haven’t thought so much about escaping the undoubtedly dead scene of traditional narrative lit, I’d much rather have seen the book act less as a manual or a ‘manifesto’ and more as the kind of amorphous, transfixing objects that he calls for. This is more a syllabus, less an art….All that said, a syllabus can be a great thing. I wish there’d been more feelers that escaped the book, transcended it, rather than a kind of diatribe. ” -Blake Butler

I was also (sadly) underwhelmed by Reality Manifesto. It traces only part of the history of constructing art from contingent reality. Shields hardly mentions the de-mythologizing influences of cinema and networked culture on narrative form. Hasn’t blogging and video blogging done it’s share of breaking down our sense of reality into bite-sized, multimodal fragments? What really surprised me was Shields’ dismissal of fiction-making as a still vital and powerful art. Just ask BP about the power of fiction. It is not the fabrications of fiction vs. contingent reality that is the issue. It is how artists arrive at the structures of their creations that is changing.

In his Poetics of Cinema 2, in a chapter called Structure and Construction, Raul Ruiz writes:

“Structure relates to the creation of the work, taken as a singular entity; while construction concerns the film in relation to the many circumstances that interact with it, throughout its making; during the many processes that will allow it to surface. That is, its relation with that which is near and far.” -Raul Ruiz

It is this “near and far”, the othernesss that intrudes on “the plan,” that is so hard to pin down in an artist’s statement or teach in the classroom, much less welcome inside the creative process. So much of our training in making things is industrial: pre-production, production, post-production; outline, draft, final draft. And yet, our lives have become more and more influenced by Black Swans.

I get great pleasure in contemplating the structures of art – videos, paintings, novels, poems, movies. So when I embark on my own art project, if structure isn’t clear, I start doubting my choices and the project stumbles. But then sometimes, something happens. I let go of my own plans and start listening for the works’s own desired shape. I start constructing. Good structure is grown inside the contingent circumstances of the work’s construction. It is a dynamic of mind, body and materials.

If we give up worrying about structure and all that that it implies – mediums, genres, markets, audiences – and instead look to practices of construction, we might find that digital art wants to be something very different than most models of (popular and high) art in the industrial age.

For example, we know digital art wants speed. It wants to be free or cheap. It wants to be social so that it gets attention. It wants novelty so that it acts like an eddy in the rush of information. It may even want to alter our senses with “mutant percepts and affects” (Guattari), or at least do something that a steady diet of information bits cannot do.

If we abandon knowable forms in favor of hybrid monsters, where do we look for models? Avant-garde and modernist practices, barthesian fragmentation and delluezian rhizomes – where to start? The history is there and will be (re)taught in schools and universities as economies (once again) shed 19th century models of mind and reality. But let’s not mistake storytelling for structure as we create new digital forms.

I’ll leave you with the constructions of Michael Robinson. He has taken remix art to a different level by building improbable and beautiful enigmas of sound, text and image. His cinema is made of the shells of past structures and re-purposed into hybrid monsters. But instead of being diatribes against the mythic past, they weave stories from an inhuman future. Dark and good. Enjoy.

VICTORY OVER THE SUN from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

forms of attention

February 11th, 2010 § 0

It’s a black and white, high contrast afternoon. I have a half hour at a local cafe before I go pick up the kids from school. I want to write something and dignify the place of the writing with images. I am capturing photos with my iphone. With the same phone, same finger, I compose a blog post as an email that will be sent to me for later revision.

The cafe I am sitting in, The Palio, is in the Ladd’s Addition. The Ladd’s Addition is one of the oldest residential districts in Portland. It is built in the shape of a wagon-wheel with wide, diagonal, elm-lined streets that converge on a central traffic circle. Where I am now.

The circle is quiet with more bikes and pedestrians than cars. Massive rose bushes in the park have little nooks for lovers to sit and talk. The only shops on the circle are a cafe, a bike repair shop and a salon. All of this makes for a certain kind of quiet, steady attention.

I remember boredom. The feeling that there was no place to put your attention. But then albums and movies and books and TV started filling that empty space. Now the internet. The irony is that the commercial success of these arts grew out of a need to fill chunks of dead time – “leisure time” – and cure its inevitable boredom with novel forms of attention. Conversation pieces.

Now “art” sits next to other information categories in an rss reader. Personal databases of curated forms of attention are carried around next to our bodies. We are walking museums.

I’m not sure artists and writers are facing a publishing crisis. Publishers have a publishing crisis. Artists have a deeper more complex problem. How to create the kind of attention that is not the same kind of attention that we see all around us at the workplace, the gym, the cafe, the home?

There is always live performance or the unique object in space that can break up our plugged-in-screen habits. The live venue, like the ecology of this residential circle, will always capture attention.

But what to make of the virtual forms of attention – the books, the movies, the music, the interactive games? How do these fit into our lives when we are already filled with more forms of attention than our lives have time for?

Here is a book that has consumed a good portion of my attention:

Paris Stories by Laird Hunt. I found it at Powells last year for a bargain $7 (it was listed on Amazon for $50-100) and it has been close-by ever since. I cannot tell you what it is about, except that it is the observations of an American writer in Paris. I can only say that its syntax and the way prose flows vertically on the page awakens a certain partially dormant part of my brain. It makes me pay attention in ways that are both familiar – I have also been alone in a foreign, barely decipherable, city – and completely novel. It is of the Gertrude Stein family of literary arts, but still something entirely its own.

I just finished this trimmed down novella and plan to read it again very soon.

It was quite an easy read. It flowed sentence to sentence, chapter to chapter, effortlessly. A love story with a tragic ending. In fact, the novel begins like this:

Then it takes off on its story of the lovers. Other characters emerge and disappear. The reader isn’t sure of some things, like why certain details and not others? It is elliptical but has a graspable shape. The plot is neatly pruned. That is the problem. The reader must look to the pruning, the negative space, for the story to resonate on deeper levels. That is why I need to read it again.

Both of these works have an emptiness at their center. They ask you to sit down at some quiet center of your being and observe with rapt attention.

But now I have to place my attention on the time and my kids.

Posted via email from shasei

Sebald on the iPad

February 3rd, 2010 § 0

Many of us know what to do with a web page filled with different media. There is no longer a “web of attractions” where text next to image next to video carries an inherent fascination. What is left of the web’s mystery is just a weary awe at an expanding network of data.

So much time is spent in front screens, it sometimes seems artists might be better off very far away from not-so-new media.

After a week of iPad-frenzy and a bout of shameful techno-lust, I spent Saturday morning easing into the dreamscape of W. G. Sebald. I find his writing difficult. His imagery puzzling. The texture of thought so finely woven, that it demands a very high level of caffeine and concentration. His art is beautiful, mysterious, convulsive. His books are things to pick up, examine and admire. They are stories as well.

Shasei, my iphone blog, is partly inspired by a Sebaldian aesthetic. The weaving of text and photo, the movement through space, the details of everyday life, an amateur’s carefree approach. All very common themes for blogging. Traditional even.

I feel free to think with the iphone. I play with camera apps, shoot spontaneously, type words with a finger and publish instantly. So far I haven’t included much writing or video. Visual fragments seemed more evocative, even friendlier, on their own.

Lately, I am feeling the need to write.

The 19th century haiku poet Masaoka Shiki worked in a practice he called “shasei,” meaning “sketch from life.” Shasei is what I have named this blog for obvious reasons. Haiku as snapshot. Things as they are, objective reality with only an implied observer.

What happens to ideas of “thingness” when thought itself – abstraction, imagination, memory – are increasingly part of things. Like paintings, books, computers, game players, phones, furniture and walls?

How has multimedia screen space already restructured our relationship to things? How has it shaped the sensation, perception, conception and cognition that make up “thingness”?

The iPad is not a new kind of computer. And it is not the device that will “save media.” Far from it. The iPad is a screen made for deep, immersive and interactive experiences. It is the missing technology that, i think, will give birth to a thriving commercial and communal art scene. And like all successful art scenes, it will impact how we “do” everything else: education, journalism, business, government.

My friend Motoya Nakamura is an excellent photo-journalist, who is struggling to keep a career in newspapers.

Saturday night I went to an opening of Motoya’s portraits of Japanese-American WWII veterans. Beautiful large-format photos of the veterans surrounded by their families and the objects of their domestic lives.

These photos were hung in a museum space depicting the internment conditions of the Japanese rounded up by order of President Roosevelt.

After the show, many friends and their kids gathered for pizza and snacks. I spent a lot of time trying to convince Motoya that the new iPad will be good for photojournalists and all photographers. He said his large photos wouldn’t work on a 10′ screen. It’s just not the same. I said that a book of Italian frescoes are the next best thing to visiting Italy for an art tour. An app of the Japanese Veterans would interest a lot of people who couldn’t afford a print.

As beautiful and valuable as the photos are in their “thingness,” they also embody the flow of visual information through a community.

And so on.

The work of web and net artists has so far remained marginal – compared to the established arts – because of commerce, power, access, the materialization of value vs. dematerialization of expression, etc.. The iPad may change that power structure.

There are issues of censorship, percentages of sales, tools, marketing, visibility. But the profit is not in dominating the new medium with professionalism. The profit is in opening the field to mass creativity and in making work that is worthy of attention.

I would never read Sebald on a computer. He provides enough multitasking, thank you very much. Sebald on an iPad, however, would be great. Opening a photo full screen, for example, would encourage a kind oscillation between image and text that the author intended.

The merging of text, image, moving image and interactivity onto the portable screen has been part of an active collective consciousness for about ten years. It’s been part of a dormant unconscious since the beginning of human thought.

217 Views of the Tokaido Line

January 21st, 2010 § 0

In the spirit of the great Japanese travel artists – Hiroshige, Basho and Hosai – I captured 217 video and text fragments from a trip to Japan with my 9-year-old daughter.

Rather than sharing my personal anecdotes, I wanted to evoke the impersonal experience of contemporary travel with its ephemeral jolts and folding repetitions. Maybe the reason why we travel is not to expand our own on-going story, but to find new inputs that shuffle our personal and expanding databases.

Have a look.

You may have to be patient with the quicktime download.

Signs of Light

May 21st, 2009 § 3

click to play

iPhone

Images from a walk home after a Bruce Connor screening. The twilight blue played with the electric hum of street lights. The magic hour.

A cinema art market?

April 23rd, 2009 § 2

Digital filmmaker Alejandro Adams, of the original and newer braintrustdv.com, has organized and posted a self-distribution roundtable.

Here is my entry:

What if cinema art’s economic model shifted from its traditional show business roots to something resembling the art market and in the process helped reconstruct the economics of art–making in the digital age. That’s right, moving an art form that has always been democratic toward something elitist. Let’s face it, the great film artists—Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni, Cassavettes, etc., were stubborn and elitist directors who at one time were the talk of the town not because they were speaking to everyone, but precisely because they were uncompromising and difficult. Show business cinema will continue to give us those big collective experiences that we all love, but without the more exploratory/experimental cinema arts, the language will become stale. Late Hitchcock needs the French New Wave.

What would a cinema art market look like? I guess Matthew Barney is one model, but an unfortunate one. Making the Cremaster cycle limited edition DVDs does not put those images into collective circulation (I’ve been able to see only 2). It would be like owners putting Picasso’s first cubist paintings into a vault. Patrons and collectors should want their artists popular, exposed and of collective value.

Another model is Mark Amerika’s recent cell phone project, Immobilite: a limited edition feature film shown at museums, a website with remixed video segments, an iphone app, a pdf publication, a blog, probably some wall art and performances thrown in. I haven’t seen the 70 min. projected “film”, but what I love about the project is that it is trying to create a model for a new type of art cinema (and a new type of writing) by offering the process of its making and distribution as part of the work. The project is kind of manifesto. You can’t get more democratic than a cell phone. But again, it would be a shame if the limited edition feature were not available for viewing outside major cities.

How to sell a cinema project to collectors and still make it available to everyone? We have to get away from thinking of a cinema work as a 70-100 minute feature. More than anything the work should open up possibilities of seeing in a multi-dimensional way. This could mean something transmedia—a DVD, a book, a database, an installation, a website, wall art, social networking. This does not mean cinema artists should (necessarily) renounce narrative. It does mean looking at narrative as an element in the web of culture and not the dominating force for making meaning. Eija-Liisa Ahtila (with the help of Finland state funding) makes affecting stories for multi-screen installations and linear versions of the same stories for the festival circuit.

What about funding cinema art? What does it cost a painter to get a studio, paints, canvas, model? These costs are figured into the price of the final work. What does it cost a small theater company to put on a show? Public funding and patronage could help digital artists, but costs for shooting are near zero. Actors must be paid however, and though much depends on the nature of the project, their fees should also be included into the price of the final work. How much would a collector pay up front for a limited edition David Lynch project? How much would a collector pay up front for a limited edition newcomer’s project? I don’t know. But wouldn’t it be a bonus for “culture” if the artists were simply paid for the work and then let it go? No need for talk show circuits, promotional events, marketing campaigns. Just the art itself circulating the networks.

By embracing an art market (not the current one necessarily), there might be innovative ways to support novel cinema forms. Galleries and museums could be extraordinary houses for the moving image. Public funding could help everyone make, teach and share cinema art. Authors and musicians could partner with cinema artists to make hybrid works not just adaptations of novels or music video commercials. By owning limited editions of the work, collectors (the 1000 fans?) could choose screenings online and off to publicize their collections. And most importantly artists could make a viable living by making work, sharing their ideas with the public and doing it in a context that celebrates experimental forms. We need novel art to get us through these enormous cultural changes, and I would argue we need novel cinema art most of all.