Soluble Fish

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.

Listening to the many great speakers on the Seminars About Long Term Thinking podcast. Here is Brian Eno speaking with Sims creator Will Wright about asynchronous loops:

Cinema has its monuments. It is time to harness forces and make cinema gardens. For me anyway, this shift has been liberating. Less about the creator, more about the discovering. Ambient and serial music (esp. Cage, Eno, Reich, Glass), generative literature such as OuLiPo ( esp. Queneau and Perec) are the models. Of course, there is now a history of generative video practice which I am just discovering. Not as easy to find, because many pieces are not on the net, nor available on DVD.

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.

In bed with a bad back and consuming the archives of Mark Amerika aka Professor VJ. He is making cinema and modeling a spontaneous, intuitive way of working through his blog. Mysterious, body-centered, "not-me" explorations with actors, landscapes, camera and editing tools – nutritious fodder for ambitious art vloggers. And not to mention an important way to "market" a work-in-progress.  Drawing in like-minded practitioners with almost tribal pulses of thought. 

Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE is net cinema on the big screen and it doesn’t belong there. Twisting in my seat for three hours was torture. What I wanted to do was stop the film, go back a few scenes or frames. Go get a bite to eat, think about it, discuss with others and then return. I wanted to read it, not be immersed in it. I know this is heretical with Lynch (he doesn’t allow chapters in his DVD releases) but it is the way I wanted to grapple with it. And it is some kind of monster.

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Juan is a Venezuelan videoblogger. I’ve been a subscriber to his En Video for about a month (he started his vlog in December 2005). His videos capture intimate, fragile moments that we can all relate to, but the minimalist approach doesn’t hide the sense of turmoil just outside his door.

Juan was kind enough to answer a few questions.

1) Why did you start to video blog?

I kind of fell into it more than starting doing it. I started Blogging one year ago without knowing about the vlogging movement. One day I decided to make a short video that I could show on my blog in order to let it be seen. After that, I started looking for people that made what I had done and I discovered videoblogging.

2) How would you describe what you are doing? Are there other things you want to try in your videos?

What I do (or at least what I try to do) is to show short moments from my life in a particular way. I like to show more than the moment itself by going deeper into what I felt and the way I reacted. I will love to have the guts to film outdoors. I’m terribly shy when it comes to shooting in front of unknown people but I’m trying to get comfortable with it.

3) Where did you learn to make videos and put together a vlog?

I was introduced into the basics of video editing by an excellent Venezuelan filmmaker called Carlos Caridad (who also runs a blog about filmmaking called Blogacine [www.blogacine.com]). I attended to a class he gave at my university and there I learned a lot about the production of a video. I learned to vlog in an autodidactic way by getting on the web and reading about it.

4) How do you want your video blog to evolve?

I want to be able to make images talk by themselves instead of needing to be explained by any other medium. I also want to show the poetic and philosophical side I know video has and maybe get some people interested in it.

5) Are there other vloggers in Venezuela that you can point us to?

There is a Venezuelan vlog dedicated to interviewing people from the film industry (I don’t know the guy who runs it), it is called Maraca vlog (http://www.maraca.info/blog/).

Erik Nelson’s weekly Carp Caviar, like the bottom feeder eggs after which it is named, is the procreative result of collaborative scavenging. Episodes arrive at your doorstep in a nice tin, but the work is “a struggle with the materials and tools at hand, and your ability to manipulate these to conform to some vision you’ve conjured in your brain.”

This is what is unique and revolutionary about this moment in cinema – the single vlog post is just part of its value as art. It is the whole project that we are invited to follow- the sense of discovery and anticipation that is built over time. The moving image is way behind other 20th century art forms, because the costs of production make the end product central. Vlogging allows for more breathing room. Its not about a final cut or reaching perfection – it is about moving through ideas, listening and responding to others, questioning, “freeing the mind”, rock ‘n roll.

Erik hardly ever shows his face in his videos, but in the struggle to dissolve boundaries in media and in himself we have the portrait of a serious termite-artist. Now, how to package and sell the work of a termite-artist. Somebody?

“Most of the feckless, listless quality of today’s art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece….

…A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity…
…The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement. Laurel and Hardy, in fact, in some of thier most dyspeptic and funniest movies, like Hog Wild , contributed some fine parody of men who had read every “How to Succeed” book available; but, when it came to applying thier knowledge, reverted instinctively to termite behavior…
…The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsmen can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it….”
-Manny Farber

LINKS:
“White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” – Manny Farber (1962)
The Gleaners and I