Soluble Fish

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.

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.

via Ubu

Mayhen 1987, by Abigail Child
Part 6 of Is This What You Were Born For? Film (16 mm, b/w, sound, 20 min.).

This whole series will require some deep attention if I can find it.

My apologies to Belinda for not linking to this interview earlier. It is an interview with me about my video work – an exercise and an unexpected pleasure to articulate what I’m trying to do, my inspirations etc. Check out the other interviews on her site. Inspiring work.

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.

-Susan Sontag,  Against Interpretation.

The 3-minute pop song has it’s roots in the ballad – a collage of words and sound given form with repetition and melody. We listen to most music (pick your favorite genre) over and over again not because we know what is going to happen next, but because our minds are turned on by the complexity of multiple inputs and the oceanic state beyond linear thought and meaning.

I am reading the new bio of Donald Barthelme, and getting reintroduced to his fragmented stories. For a while in the 60’s and 70’s, he was celebrated for a cinematic montage style where meaning was found (or discovered) in the juxtaposition of images, voices and genres. Everybody was doing it – The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Fellini, Godard.  And then came a backlash, the collage style went out of fashion. Story and collage went their separate ways.

As I toil away at another draft of a screenplay, I get the heavy feeling (again) that the feature drama, like the novel, has lost much of its alchemical magic as an art form.  I don’t think it’s a question of storytelling vs. a collage aesthetic. The traditional ballad and many pop songs, are fragmented stories. Some of the great storytellers of cinema (Welles, Hitchcock, Renoir) had a complex and somewhat fragmented style. Mainstream movies and novels have lost their power to connect to experience, which is more and more a collage-like messiness. As commercial art forms, they need to justify themselves to agents, publishers, producers and distributors. Every moment needs to be about something.

That’s why I love the fragmented messiness of net video. It is hard to find the magic and poetry, given the relentless and tiresome 20-something relationship dramas,  but it is there. Here is a taste:

• Whisper To Me Gently | Robert Croma
• spacetwo : patalab: On chamber(work) and oblique conversations
• Renard Lumière | Pierre Wayser.

The artwork as a field of potential meaning. Frustrating for some, exhilarating for others. An interview with Diane Williams in elimae.

elimae: …. Is it your aim, as much as you may be able to describe your aim, to allow the language of your fictions to achieve some semblance beyond which you intended, to become, in the manner of smoke and clouds, substances amplified beyond and abstracted from the particles of which they are composed?

Diane Williams: Yes, yes, yes, yes, this is my aim! If you have guessed this is my aim, then your question has brought me the sort of happiness I have not had in the longest time!

Categories:
Poetics
Termite

Six months away from the vlog. There is a lot going on behind the scenes – personal/professional/national/global – but really I have been thinking, reading and absorbing. Where to go with one’s extra energy? Being a contemporary “media worker” is all about stops, starts and about-faces.

Mark Deuze’s Media Work lays out the opportunities and insecurities of media production in today’s “informational hypercapitalism.” The conclusions are neither optimistic nor pessimistic. They are, to me, simply hopeful. Disruptive technologies are exactly that – disruptive. Obama is a case in point.

Deuze reminds us that it is the novel and authentic that will always attract attention, and therefore have value. The difference now is that what is novel and authentic depends on networked communities made up of individual creators and consumers. It can no longer be controlled by top-down corporations,governments or boards. At the same time, commerce and power need attention flows and must be engaged with or following culture production. What does this look like in practice?  Nobody knows the answer, which is why it is such an exciting and precarious time to be a media creator.

I recently finished a draft of a feature script that is one part novelty, three parts formula.  It seems to me that Capital will only feed cultural production in healthy ways once it follows (rather than lead)s the directions of individual and niche creators. So instead of the 100 million dollar mega-hit, why not seed  communities by funding 1000 artists with 100,000 dollars? Or 10,000 artists with 10,000 dollars? The artists have to keep working no matter what, continue creating novel and authentic forms without the attachment to money. If the artist helps to cultivate a niche community, then their work has value and money, in theory, should follow.

Much of my reading lately has been around the cultural implications of recent brain research. It could be said that the experience of novelty is the firing of new neuronal pathways in the brain. The brain feeds on new experiences.

• Neuroplasticity – experience changes the brain’s organization.
• Mirror neurons – the same neurons are fired by an animal performing an action as an animal observing that action.

Voice, style, technical innovation, the weird, the hybrid, the disruptive are what some of us hunt for – the fuel for these unstable times. But novelty in media is also the recording of the novel or contingent in daily life. A reminder of the strangeness of what is always nearby. Novelty is everywhere. It is our brains that become lazy and dull. One of the roles of art, and one that is essential for health, is the exercising of new (and refreshing of old) pathways in thought. The art vlog is the brain’s gym.

But the trick with novelty is that there needs to be a dose of the familiar, a cultural context, or else the brain has no way of dealing with it. It ignores novelty, rejects it or labels it silly or pretentious. The familiar is essential for novelty to actually register as novel. David Lynch is able to create such deeply strange experiences because he uses so much that is familiar – the well-lit suburban house, the diner, the cup of joe. The familiar is the invitation into the brain, where the art work can then start firing neurons in unexpected ways.

Authenticity is even trickier. Questions of authenticity were hotly debated when vloggers first shook hands with advertisers. An artist can be stuck repeating a certain kind of effect because it is easy or profitable to do so. Here is where networks and the feedback of consumer/creators help in authentic cultural production. We want to sing the praises of novelty and authenticity when we see it. The comment and the link are just as much acts of cultural production as the post.

These thoughts are not new. Just reminders to myself of why to keep making things.

In his poetically inspiring Keynote at the recent ELO Conference (entitled Visionary Landscapes), Mark Amerika reminds us that the work is never just about ourselves:

Perhaps playing to play
while staying ahead of ones time
requires a recalibration of ones inner time
catching the flow of their unconscious poetic rhythm
so that their intersubjective jam sessions
with the fluid personas within and without
take place in what I call asynchronous realtime.

By asynchronous realtime I am referring to
what at times feels like a timeless time,

a simultaneous and continuous fusion of horizons
that embeds itself in an ongoing formal investigation of
complex event processing where the visionary artist,
always gyrating at pivotal locations throughout the narrative,
becomes a multitude of flux identities
nomadically circulating within the networked space of flows.

Derik A. Badman’s great blog about comics, multipaneled storytelling and generative literaure…etc. He is here quoting Alison Bechdel on “incidental life.”

A recent podcast interview with Adrian, gets me thinking about what he calls “minor video” or “minor cinema.” The value of the miniature in a networked world. The battle for attention, screen space, hits, ratings as modeled on youtube will, Adrian predicts, subside within six years. We are experiencing the growing pains of a new medium. The long tail hurts.

After the novelty of videoblogging, now what? What is networked video anyway? I had argued in the once active vlogtheory listserv that rss video was a good step in that it made watching, creating and conversing a somewhat unified process. But even the impressive Miro is still just a form of TV , because it separates the vlog text from the video and makes commenting on individual posts very difficult (especially when the video is served from a host like blip.tv). All we need is a permalink to the post on the creator’s website. This is the whole point, isn’t it?

I don’t look to net video to be informed, to be entertained, or to pass time. I don’t read blogs or books for entertainment either. Loaded in my rss reader are streams of thought-reports and thought-experiments that I find important to my daily life. The books stacked near my bed are half fiction, half non-fiction. I pick up what I need at the moment. What feeds my thoughts, what gets the blood flowing again. Movies (especiallly with my kids) still fall under entertainment. A kind of shutting down of thought. An immersion in cgi. But art films, like Lynch’s Inland Empire are increasingly like books for me. I dip into them, daydream inside them. I think this is what a minor cinema or literature seeks to do – to lead you to a place you have never been before. A clearing. A place to breath a different kind of air.

Take Sam Renseiw’s spacetwo : patalab. As video alone, there seems to be nothing special. But read what is attached to each post and look at the context of the project and you find a unique, electrifying “voice.” And there are many such voices (look under “Watching” to the right).

What distinguishes video in the deluge of images, is the contextual voice. Yes, the writer’s voice. Sometimes that voice can be brought into the video itself- I’m think of Liss’s pouringdown – and Jay’s Momentshowing where spoken or written text is a layer of the video post. I personally like to keep text and video separate but together: html and quicktime. Might the simplicity and elegance of dynamic html with linked video bring about a rebirth of hypertext fiction? A video blog that takes the writing as seriously as the video is well on the way.

Videoblogging is still show and tell, but it seems like the showing is increasingly being broken from its telling. The showing is what marks the individual moments of our own lives. But it is the telling that connects those moments to the larger ongoing Tale of us all. The Long Tale.

Looking at contemporary online examples of haibun and haiga- forms that still inspire me as approaches to videoblogging and net cinema – I end up on this great exchange about our storytelling future:

The 21st-century novel. – By Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart – Slate Magazine

How to give shape and scale to our ephemeral adventures on and off the network?

Isn’t there something just a little disingenuous about this latest multiplex spectacle. Isn’t this more in the spirit of a digital Thoreau?