Our final class meeting will be 12/16 at 7 p.m. (until we're done, likely b/w 9-10ish.) I'm going to see if we can meet at IML's conference room, as it's a bit more festive than our classroom but has access to tech/a kitchen, etc.
I'll bring some kind of light meal and some wine. Feel free to supplement w/ wine/sweets if you like.
Cheers,
Tara
Monday, November 30, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Visualizing Dinner
The New York Times has posted a great visualization of the prevalence of various Thanksgiving dinner-related search terms (recipes, ingredients, etc), revealing state-by-state preferences for things like sweet potato casserole and pecan pie.
Happy holidays!
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Databases and Distributed Narratives: Resources and Examples
The following links provide a broad range of examples for those interested in both a general history of databases and information networks, and the role such technologies can play in the creation of fiction and other kinds of narratives.
Keep in mind that there's a fair amount of stuff in here that's only tangentially related to databases or distributed narratives per se -- but we feel that in the context of our readings, this extra material provides important context and flavour. Mmmm. And yes, that's flavour with a 'u'.
The list follows a general trajectory of antecedents --> early examples --> contemporary examples --> future directions.
Keep in mind that there's a fair amount of stuff in here that's only tangentially related to databases or distributed narratives per se -- but we feel that in the context of our readings, this extra material provides important context and flavour. Mmmm. And yes, that's flavour with a 'u'.
The list follows a general trajectory of antecedents --> early examples --> contemporary examples --> future directions.
- Clay Shirky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Relational database - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- ODP - Open Directory Project
- dmoz.org - Site Info from Alexa
- wikipedia.org - Site Info from Alexa
- delicious/tags/plautus
- Google Image Labeler
- cyoa · animations
- ryanTree.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x435 pixels)
- Electronic Literature Organization
- YouTube - iPhone App: Bloom by Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers
- jeff watson » Blog Archive » Tenori-on
- Quasimondo : Incubator - Experiments, Sketches and Computational Craft by Mario Klingemann
- Lev Manovich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The Work of Jonathan Harris
- The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris
- Twistori
- ATLAS experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Many Eyes
- Watch MGMT "Electric Feel"
- Queneau sonnets
- Grafik Dynamo!
- Year Zero Case Study
- I Love Bees - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- MIT Press Journals - The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Abstract
The Lost Archive- Holding narratives
In our readings on archive and narrative for this week, I am intrigued by a number of possibilities and questions surrounding a sense of reader/viewer and the ability to spatially and temporally construct narratives. Jill Walker poses this possibility- this position concerning technology as fragmented, but in a way that opens up a construction of the personal/professional within the context of a daily life. Walker claims, “Yet perhaps they also point to a new kind of unity: a
unity where the time and space of the narrative are in sync with the time and
space of the reader.” In Steve Anderson’s discussion on Soft Cinema, this combination of database and narrative pose a similar construction of multiple “selves.” Rather than a centered or linear account, the network computer reveals (as well as obscures) this account of modern identity.
In constructing multiple identities and possibilities for understanding narratives, Marsha Kinder’s Labyrinth Project also reveals this possibility in selection and categorization as crucial elements to language, allowing for further interrogation of master narratives. I can’t help but reflect upon Tom Gunning’s talk at USC last week, and his discussion and research on moving images. He talked about much of his recent research in LA, showing a couple of example clips of thumb or flip books, playing with this idea of still images and the physicality involved in moving the image. One of the most striking elements to the clips involved the very straightforward close-up of a flipbook, from cover to cover. I am reminded of the materiality in covers. Perhaps this line of thought is getting away from this week’s readings, but I am very much wrapped up in the idea of covers as beginning and ending points. It is this attempt in capturing narratives (master narratives), and the physicality of holding a journal or book and flipping pages that makes me reflect upon discourses of unity and the user/reader’s/consumer’s investment.
I can’t help but think of Jem Cohen’s film Lost Book Found, which documents the filmmaker’s obsession with finding a journal on the streets of New York with lists upon lists of numbers, dates, names and places. The film essentially mediates on this question of lostness within an urban space, as well as the impossibility in reconstructing someone else’s obsessions and mental categorizations. In the filmmaker’s attempt to reconstruct a stranger’s place in New York City, the film also shows a layering and mapping, both in the understanding of New York as a Place, and the patterns in the filmmaker’s mind in unraveling this code, his own understanding of his role as an observer and dweller through a set of visual objects.
unity where the time and space of the narrative are in sync with the time and
space of the reader.” In Steve Anderson’s discussion on Soft Cinema, this combination of database and narrative pose a similar construction of multiple “selves.” Rather than a centered or linear account, the network computer reveals (as well as obscures) this account of modern identity.
In constructing multiple identities and possibilities for understanding narratives, Marsha Kinder’s Labyrinth Project also reveals this possibility in selection and categorization as crucial elements to language, allowing for further interrogation of master narratives. I can’t help but reflect upon Tom Gunning’s talk at USC last week, and his discussion and research on moving images. He talked about much of his recent research in LA, showing a couple of example clips of thumb or flip books, playing with this idea of still images and the physicality involved in moving the image. One of the most striking elements to the clips involved the very straightforward close-up of a flipbook, from cover to cover. I am reminded of the materiality in covers. Perhaps this line of thought is getting away from this week’s readings, but I am very much wrapped up in the idea of covers as beginning and ending points. It is this attempt in capturing narratives (master narratives), and the physicality of holding a journal or book and flipping pages that makes me reflect upon discourses of unity and the user/reader’s/consumer’s investment.
I can’t help but think of Jem Cohen’s film Lost Book Found, which documents the filmmaker’s obsession with finding a journal on the streets of New York with lists upon lists of numbers, dates, names and places. The film essentially mediates on this question of lostness within an urban space, as well as the impossibility in reconstructing someone else’s obsessions and mental categorizations. In the filmmaker’s attempt to reconstruct a stranger’s place in New York City, the film also shows a layering and mapping, both in the understanding of New York as a Place, and the patterns in the filmmaker’s mind in unraveling this code, his own understanding of his role as an observer and dweller through a set of visual objects.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Database Readings
Here are the web-accessible readings for this week.
Steve Anderson: Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database
Serial Consign: Interview with Kate Armstrong
Marsha Kinder et al, About the Labyrinth Project
Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media pp 194-207 (account req'd)
Jill Walker Rettberg: Distributed Narratives
Clay Shirky: ""Ontology is Overrated"
Steve Anderson: Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database
Serial Consign: Interview with Kate Armstrong
Marsha Kinder et al, About the Labyrinth Project
Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media pp 194-207 (account req'd)
Jill Walker Rettberg: Distributed Narratives
Clay Shirky: ""Ontology is Overrated"
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Rick Prelinger
Rick's website and Vectors' project
Excerpts:
MANIFESTO
1. Why add to the population of orphaned artworks?
2. Don't presume that new work improves on old
3. Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4. The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5. Dregs are the sweetest drink
6. And leftovers were spared for a reason
7. Actors don't get a fair shake the first time around, let's give them another
8. The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9. We reach the future only by roundabout means
10. As we wish to address the future, so the past desires to address us
11. Access to what's already happened is cheaper than access to what's happening now
12. Archives are justified by use
13. Make a quilt not an advertisement
FOUR STAGES OF AN ARCHIVISTS' CAREER
1. Each film is precious and unconditionally loved. Its discovery is a thrill; its existence a blessing.
2. Style surfaces. I hear the tone of a stentorian narrator, revel in saturated Kodachrome and the roundness of old cars, float on waves of elevator music. Looking across time I focus on appearance, enunciation, style and the illusion of simplicity.
3. Move beyond style to historicity. Films become pointers to historical contradictions, provocations and insights. Who made them? Who paid for them? For what purpose, and in what context? The documents speak to the events and practices that surrounded them and become aliases to a meta-archive.
4. Revert to essentials. An egg is just an egg. "When you said gum, I knew it was gum." Sandblast the bricks, grind off the accreted patina. Reuse historical images for their analogical content. Pretend this isn't the Spam factory in 1965; these men are just processing meat from pigs and people will eat it. Let the superstructure slough off, at least long enough to make a movie.
Excerpts:
MANIFESTO
1. Why add to the population of orphaned artworks?
2. Don't presume that new work improves on old
3. Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4. The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5. Dregs are the sweetest drink
6. And leftovers were spared for a reason
7. Actors don't get a fair shake the first time around, let's give them another
8. The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9. We reach the future only by roundabout means
10. As we wish to address the future, so the past desires to address us
11. Access to what's already happened is cheaper than access to what's happening now
12. Archives are justified by use
13. Make a quilt not an advertisement
FOUR STAGES OF AN ARCHIVISTS' CAREER
1. Each film is precious and unconditionally loved. Its discovery is a thrill; its existence a blessing.
2. Style surfaces. I hear the tone of a stentorian narrator, revel in saturated Kodachrome and the roundness of old cars, float on waves of elevator music. Looking across time I focus on appearance, enunciation, style and the illusion of simplicity.
3. Move beyond style to historicity. Films become pointers to historical contradictions, provocations and insights. Who made them? Who paid for them? For what purpose, and in what context? The documents speak to the events and practices that surrounded them and become aliases to a meta-archive.
4. Revert to essentials. An egg is just an egg. "When you said gum, I knew it was gum." Sandblast the bricks, grind off the accreted patina. Reuse historical images for their analogical content. Pretend this isn't the Spam factory in 1965; these men are just processing meat from pigs and people will eat it. Let the superstructure slough off, at least long enough to make a movie.
Amelie Hastie and collections
Here's Amelie's book:
Cupboards of Curiosity
She also edited a special issue of Journal of Visual Culture on "The Object of Media Studies" that includes some of her thoughts on the ticket stub. [Journal of Visual Culture 2007; 6; 171]
Also, see Amelie's Vectors' project, "Objects of Media Studies" -- this is itself a collection but Amelie's thread of the piece is about ticket stubs
Prezi language
Sorry for the delay in my lab post from last Friday. I came in a bit late, missing part of the initial talk/presentation by a guest speaker with the Engineering department at USC. Basically, he discussed the role of presentations in academia, specifically outlining the use of Power Point in Science related fields. The Q&A after the presentation posed some thoughtful responses and observations in looking at the role of performativity in presentations (especially Power Point work), and the comparisons in performance styles at the recent UCLA conference.
Steve’s portion of the workshop focused more so on alternative presenting programs, including Diigo, Vouvox, Slidesahre, Wordle and Prezi. The actual “hands-on” portion of the workshop involved a tutorial of Prezi and it’s basic format as a collection of research materials/ideas. Prezi has a free trial service, which I’ve been toying with over the past couple of days. There are also varying membership prices and options (which look kinda expensive). However, I can’t say that I completely understand the rhetoric involved in making a presentation with Prezi (lots of functions, different types of mapping). The tutorial allows you to play with text, moving your work along a grip (which can become a miniscule dot if you scroll out far enough- you also can “lose” it in this case). Perhaps in reflecting on this week’s readings and topic surrounding the archive and research, the use of a tool like Prezi opens up a rich visual discussion in both the active role of memory, and movement of objects in the audiences’ ability to receive and retain information. I’m curious as to what a “finished” presentation product would look like- perhaps I will have something to show soon enough.
Steve’s portion of the workshop focused more so on alternative presenting programs, including Diigo, Vouvox, Slidesahre, Wordle and Prezi. The actual “hands-on” portion of the workshop involved a tutorial of Prezi and it’s basic format as a collection of research materials/ideas. Prezi has a free trial service, which I’ve been toying with over the past couple of days. There are also varying membership prices and options (which look kinda expensive). However, I can’t say that I completely understand the rhetoric involved in making a presentation with Prezi (lots of functions, different types of mapping). The tutorial allows you to play with text, moving your work along a grip (which can become a miniscule dot if you scroll out far enough- you also can “lose” it in this case). Perhaps in reflecting on this week’s readings and topic surrounding the archive and research, the use of a tool like Prezi opens up a rich visual discussion in both the active role of memory, and movement of objects in the audiences’ ability to receive and retain information. I’m curious as to what a “finished” presentation product would look like- perhaps I will have something to show soon enough.
the tools of collecting
I’m going to shift my response to the tools of collection, largely because when I examined my own processes, I found that there was little that I made the effort to collect in any exhaustive or detail-oriented way. There have been periods where I kept an eye out for matchbooks, novelty magnets, floaty pens, and books of poetry, but by and large those interests have passed, or the collecting urgency, the archival desire, has mellowed out considerably. There is plenty that I sort through however, and even more that I neglect; I moved a few months ago and still have unpacked boxes piled up in my closet, and my email inbox, at this point in the semester, has gotten particularly bad, despite my best efforts to create ever more descriptive and narrow folders and subcategorizations.
But I’m interested in the area of tools of collection, what one needs in order to survey or maintain or even “use” a collection, be it some kind of music player, an eBay account, or a refined skill in a specialized area. I am a compulsive notetaker and carry with me a notebook everywhere I go –it’s necessarily blank, without lines, and small. And while it’s fairly heterogeneous as far as the kinds of things that go in there – lecture notes, shopping lists, messy film notes written in the dark, odd words or phrases I hear, particularly medical ones, messages written in big letters to be shown to my roommate while she’s talking on the phone—it’s not personal in the way that my actual journaling or writing is, which takes place only on my computer, nested away in a labyrinthine system of deliberately misnamed folders. But I like to think of my notebook as an alternate journal, something more “public,” though not with the intention of being seen; a kind of net that’s cast to collect all the words and ideas that I come across in the everyday. A bit more formally, i.e. on my laptop, I keep a list of all films that I ever watch, organized by year, and listing information such as who I saw the film with, and what venue I saw it in (this would suggest I am a huge cinephagus; I am not. I just have a poor memory). But these lists and little books, ordered chronologically, accessible only by me (as entry is limited by my handwriting legibility, even for me), become their own kind of archive, some physical substrate of ephemeral experience, a material memory. I rarely go back to my notes, but there’s something comforting in having them there, even if I can’t find what it is I’m looking for, or if my graphological inscrutability –my personal “code”– has locked me out entirely.
For me, one of the paradigmatic collector figures is, of course, Harry Smith, who was known for his wildly diverse inhabitations of different fields and material things, from string figures, recordings of Kiowa ceremonies, paper airplanes, and Ukrainian Easter eggs, to his own paintings, films, esoteric mysticism and his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, which formed an archival backbone for the folk revival movement on its own terms. But one of the most interesting things about Smith, in my mind, was the depth at which he’d dive into an area, and then once he felt complete, the speed at which he’d abandon everything. There’s a new book out from the Getty that attempts to bring together Smith’s various collecting and collection-making impulses, but I wonder, if in the context of collecting tools, Smith’s own disposition, his own two hands and his inimitable mind, were the only throughline that could connect such an eccentric assortment. Certainly the collector is always present behind a collection (or maybe not always, but there is an implied direction that guides its changing parameters), but I know of no more extreme case than Smith, who used a variety of tools, and amassed many, very rich archives, but himself was the only connecting point that could link them.
Library of Comics
Like my interest in soccer, cartoons and sketch comedy television programs, I inherited comic book collecting from my father. The issue to the right is the first comic that I had ever purchased, in November of 1990. As a ten year old with surplus income from a paper route, my father insisted that I find a wholesome hobby such as my brother's baseball card collecting, which I found inane. I continuously collected X-Men devoutly, along with other X-titles as well as Spider-Man, Batman, Punisher, Daredevil, and various others (only Marvel or DC-I suspected the other independent publishers were lame knock-offs, like shopping at JC Penny's or Payless Shoes), until around 1995, when I needed money for other things, and felt that comics were for kids. Later, in college, I would sporadically go to a comic book store and splurge on both current issues, as well as as many back-issues as I could afford, to fill in the last five years of story. Finally, in 2006, I decided that having a wholesome hobby was a good idea, and began subscribing to the x-titles again, and I currently receive 6 titles in the mail each month. My collection is currently contained within 3 large comic book boxes, 2 of which are in New York, thus splitting the location of my archive into 2 physical sites. Although I had previously rabidly collected back-issues, internet fan sites such as uncannyxmen.net have allowed me to catch up on the story without having to pay anything, although depriving me of possessing the physical object, as well as the visual pleasure of most of the art-work contained within the pages, as these sites tend to summarize the story into paragraphs, depriving the reader of the full experience and sensation of different artist's styles, colors and dialogue. I do not really hope to collect X-Men in its entirety, as I enjoy the feeling of being lost in the story line, and having to google names and places to figure out what is significant that I have missed. So as far as I see it, there are no real limits to my collection, but objectively I could collect every Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force and New Mutants comic ever published-the story was always more important to me than the physical objects. While there is a market for comics, and I'm sure a few of mine may be worth a bit of money, I have no real interest in exchanging them. Strangely, I at once could never throw them away, but also take very little care of preserving their integrity as art-objects or possible commodities to be traded in for money. As far as use value, I like to think that one day I will write a compelling paper about the Mojoverse, comics as political and social critique, or the rise and fall of Chris Claremont, but when it comes down to it, the narrative universe of X-Men has occupied my absent mind for so long that sometimes I just like to look at old comics again, allowing me to enter parallel universes and alternate time-lines, re-visiting sheets of the past which allow me to recollect my actual thoughts/sensations while I read the comics the first time. My archive of serialized comics allows me a path at once into my past and into the narrative universe of a group of people who are at once branded "gifted" and "cursed"-an allegory for both intellectuals and queers.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
An Arab's Head
Sekula's "The Body and the Archive" reminded me of my run-in with the French system of criminals' photographs a few summers ago. I had met a guy at a club whose name was Karim and who was from Algeria. It's been my experience that the easier he is to fetishize, the riskier it is to get involved. In this case I was proved right. He was completely drunk and so I drove his car to my place but never jotted down the license plate number. He might have put something on my drink or maybe I'm just trying to remember it that way so that I am not completely to blame for what happened.
Karim, who showed surprise at my showing surprise over the fact that he wasn't French, said "Look at my Arab head." Which reminded me of the biologization of prejudice against people from Northeastern Brazil. One wouldn't say "so and so looks like this" or "like that" or so so "is" this or that. One would, like Karim, refer to one's "head" as the evidence for one's inferior social status ("flat heads from the Northeast"). By the end of the night we had set a date for the following night and I fell asleep. When I woke up, several of my belongings were gone. And so was Karim and his head (no sexual pun intended). So I walked to the police station to report the crime. "Was he Arab?" was the first question the policeman asked me. Then he said he was going to have to do something very pointless, but that was the law, so he had to do it. This pointless thing was to show me photographs of previously booked criminals on a computer. He didn't even pay attention to my looking at the images, 99-percent of which were "Arab heads". "Can I get these guys' phone numbers? They are hot", I told the policeman. And he laughed, and said he had been at the club where I met Karim (but not because of him, "because of a friend who wanted to go.")
Why did the policeman ask me if the thief was Arab if almost all criminals in the archive was Arab? The "average-ness" conceals the crime, so what was he trying to confirm?
This inheritance of the criminal photographic archive struck me because the policeman announced it as fruitless even before I had a chance to access it and because, all photographs did look alike. I can see, then, the allure (Galton's Bertillon's...) of trying to discover the physical link among these Arab criminal bodies. And the probing and measuring, perhaps akin to the queer assessment of "str8 acting" evidence in online photographs (checking for a lack, a lack of signs of femininity, or "gayness"). And the alikeness -- in the French criminal photographs and in this queer search for seamless hetero-mimicry -- isn't borne out of anything inside the photograph, but out of the looker's own investment.
Punctum metro passes
The timing for this particular assignment comes at a rather uncanny point in my own Ph.D. application process. I can’t help but think of this notion of “collection” and “materiality” in my own relationship to presenting a sort of archive of my academic and personal life. I went to a book talk the other day with Kaja Silverman on her new book Flesh of my Flesh. I’ve only had a chance to glance through the introduction, but some of the more memorable moments of her talk centered on this notion of self and her own relationship as a theorist and spectator/participant to her work. In her own search through the Berkeley Art History archives, Silverman also opened up a very “real” approach in having a personal stake in the materials and artists she has come in contact with. It’s a seemingly simple concept. However, I am constantly reminded of my “place” within a theoretical investigation, and this element of the personal in creating a space for my academic development.
So, I know the personal is deeply “looked down” upon in the world of academia or near past of academia, and I try not to be too much of an offender, but I felt the homework assignment allows for this space- this collection or rather embodiment of the personal (that’s why we blog, right?). So, here I am theorizing the personal.
I lived in Prague for a year after finishing up my undergrad work. I took very few pictures during my time there. More so, my actual “documentation” consisted of a journal, postcards, and receipts of my public transportation travels throughout city. Evoking the language of photography from Roland Barthes, perhaps the resistance of my own personal picture taking lay in this impossibility in understanding this notion of “punctum.” Barthes is able to “prick” or rather, feel this prick of the picture from his viewing position in relation to the image as an object. In many ways, the image transforms the notion of inanimate objects, to something felt alive and “experienced” in the flesh of the viewer/participant. Kaja Silverman goes into more detail about this position and specificity of photography within her book. Barthes poses to himself and addresses his mother through an essential question: “Did I recognize her?” In essence, Barthes asks this question in relation to his own being or pre-history on earth (his ability/inability in recognizing his mother before his own existence). It’s a strange thing being in the present position of the picture taker and consumer/observer. I realize Barthes notion of the “punctum” is always after-the-fact in a sense of both capturing a moment, and giving (or feeling) the details of the image as a product. In personalizing this question, did I or could I in fact, recognize myself as the documenter- a spectre of myself? Did I even “want” to recognize myself in this act of documentation? As an expat and English teacher? In a strange sense, holding those travel receipts, marked in one-day and week-long passes continues to evoke this stranger, and a stronger sense of self in my experience of moving through the passages of a city- my body riding the escalator, rubbing shoulders with “strangers”, the act of traveling between teaching venues/schools, and the constant unraveling my own forgetting. It’s not even the dates on the passes that remind of particular moments (which I could never figure out where the Metro Police looked in determining if the pass had in fact “expired”). It’s a similar sense of remembering in looking through my various English-language lessons, notes, student’s written work and drawings. I feel a strong sense of my once present state in laboring over lesson plans- at one time a currency in my own employability as an English instructor.
I am curious about this need, or rather, obsession with documentation. In our readings for the week, this notion of the archive and its linguistic roots in “secrecy” and privacy as described by Rolena Adorno. Adorno is more interested in a scholarly relationship between the University and the royal archive, including a layering and collection of knowledge. As with Lucas Hilderbrand’s text surrounding Youtube and cultural memory, there is also an underlying theme in renegotiating the bounds of an accessible internet site, and looking more closely as how privacy is accessed through a public domain.
The element of language becomes even more important in borrowing from Derrida this “quasi-illiteracy” of images with a textual analysis. This “in-between” space emerges (as discussed throughout this semester) in categorizing within the archive (and being able to effectively “search” through it). So, coming back to my own ideas around the archive and my time spent in Prague, I could never fully “collect” myself while living there (not to overly romanticize). I remember my cousin came to visit me while I was there and ended up making a “photo album” on facebook of the experience. I never managed to download one of my own, though. At the time, I didn’t think about it. It’s funny looking at the pictures now- I recognize landmarks (the Prague castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town area, the streets surrounding my neighborhood in Andel). I see my cousin and I, posed like many similar tourist pictures, occupying a sense of Prague.
There are visual markers, cues that cause me to reflect upon my time there, in that moment. It is also this inability in recognizing myself positioned within Prague. In many ways, I think back on my “unofficial” status as an undocumented worker. My language school paid me in cash once a month. No receipts. No documentation of my 60 plus hour workweeks. In many ways, like I’ve attempted to address earlier in this ramble of a post, my presence never could be fully recognized by the Czech government, including my own positioning in the sub-culture of English teachers in Prague. I never “belonged” and not that I desired or refused this sense of connection, but perhaps I could sense this transitory existence, my own replacement in an endless crop of expat English teachers.
So, hear I am left with dozens of metro receipts, all in various increments of Czech crowns. I can’t seem to throw them out. It’s my collection. Maybe the closest thing to remembering myself three years ago.
So, I know the personal is deeply “looked down” upon in the world of academia or near past of academia, and I try not to be too much of an offender, but I felt the homework assignment allows for this space- this collection or rather embodiment of the personal (that’s why we blog, right?). So, here I am theorizing the personal.
I lived in Prague for a year after finishing up my undergrad work. I took very few pictures during my time there. More so, my actual “documentation” consisted of a journal, postcards, and receipts of my public transportation travels throughout city. Evoking the language of photography from Roland Barthes, perhaps the resistance of my own personal picture taking lay in this impossibility in understanding this notion of “punctum.” Barthes is able to “prick” or rather, feel this prick of the picture from his viewing position in relation to the image as an object. In many ways, the image transforms the notion of inanimate objects, to something felt alive and “experienced” in the flesh of the viewer/participant. Kaja Silverman goes into more detail about this position and specificity of photography within her book. Barthes poses to himself and addresses his mother through an essential question: “Did I recognize her?” In essence, Barthes asks this question in relation to his own being or pre-history on earth (his ability/inability in recognizing his mother before his own existence). It’s a strange thing being in the present position of the picture taker and consumer/observer. I realize Barthes notion of the “punctum” is always after-the-fact in a sense of both capturing a moment, and giving (or feeling) the details of the image as a product. In personalizing this question, did I or could I in fact, recognize myself as the documenter- a spectre of myself? Did I even “want” to recognize myself in this act of documentation? As an expat and English teacher? In a strange sense, holding those travel receipts, marked in one-day and week-long passes continues to evoke this stranger, and a stronger sense of self in my experience of moving through the passages of a city- my body riding the escalator, rubbing shoulders with “strangers”, the act of traveling between teaching venues/schools, and the constant unraveling my own forgetting. It’s not even the dates on the passes that remind of particular moments (which I could never figure out where the Metro Police looked in determining if the pass had in fact “expired”). It’s a similar sense of remembering in looking through my various English-language lessons, notes, student’s written work and drawings. I feel a strong sense of my once present state in laboring over lesson plans- at one time a currency in my own employability as an English instructor.
I am curious about this need, or rather, obsession with documentation. In our readings for the week, this notion of the archive and its linguistic roots in “secrecy” and privacy as described by Rolena Adorno. Adorno is more interested in a scholarly relationship between the University and the royal archive, including a layering and collection of knowledge. As with Lucas Hilderbrand’s text surrounding Youtube and cultural memory, there is also an underlying theme in renegotiating the bounds of an accessible internet site, and looking more closely as how privacy is accessed through a public domain.
The element of language becomes even more important in borrowing from Derrida this “quasi-illiteracy” of images with a textual analysis. This “in-between” space emerges (as discussed throughout this semester) in categorizing within the archive (and being able to effectively “search” through it). So, coming back to my own ideas around the archive and my time spent in Prague, I could never fully “collect” myself while living there (not to overly romanticize). I remember my cousin came to visit me while I was there and ended up making a “photo album” on facebook of the experience. I never managed to download one of my own, though. At the time, I didn’t think about it. It’s funny looking at the pictures now- I recognize landmarks (the Prague castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town area, the streets surrounding my neighborhood in Andel). I see my cousin and I, posed like many similar tourist pictures, occupying a sense of Prague.
There are visual markers, cues that cause me to reflect upon my time there, in that moment. It is also this inability in recognizing myself positioned within Prague. In many ways, I think back on my “unofficial” status as an undocumented worker. My language school paid me in cash once a month. No receipts. No documentation of my 60 plus hour workweeks. In many ways, like I’ve attempted to address earlier in this ramble of a post, my presence never could be fully recognized by the Czech government, including my own positioning in the sub-culture of English teachers in Prague. I never “belonged” and not that I desired or refused this sense of connection, but perhaps I could sense this transitory existence, my own replacement in an endless crop of expat English teachers.
So, hear I am left with dozens of metro receipts, all in various increments of Czech crowns. I can’t seem to throw them out. It’s my collection. Maybe the closest thing to remembering myself three years ago.
More fun at Machine Project
Mignonette Game Kit: Soldering Workshop
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
12pm – 3pm
In this workshop, each participant will assemble their own Mignonette Game kit, and learn to solder in the process. The Mignonette kit is a perfect introduction to soldering and electronics, with challenges for intermediate skill levels too.Taught by Rolf van Widenfelt, SF Bay Area engineer and co-designer of the Mignonette Game.
The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference
Ways to follow an interesting conference kicking off in NYC:
The tweet tag is #IPF09. Play the conference Twitter game, designed by Local No. 12 (http://twitology.org/).
Program: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22379814/Program-IPF09
The tweet tag is #IPF09. Play the conference Twitter game, designed by Local No. 12 (http://twitology.org/).
Program: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22379814/Program-IPF09
We will live stream one track of the conference. Tune in 11/13 and 11/14 10am to 5pm (EST). WNYC will record parts of the event and feature it on their website. (http://streamingculture.parsons.edu/)
A video welcome letter is on Seesmic.tv to which you can respond
(http://seesmic.tv/threads/dzijUisaPo). We are filming short video statements, "Voices from #IPF09"
(http://vimeo.com/user2103510/videos/sort:plays). Major credit for that goes to Assal Ghawami!!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Bringing Sexy Bareback
It strikes me that the reading this week, from McGlotten’s queerspace to Dean’s emphasis on the distinctly modern stranger in cruising, are oriented specifically toward gay male culture, and as Tewksbury notes, one that is predominantly white. I can’t help but wonder what kind of space is opened up for female sexuality and in particular, gay women, particularly as the couple of Craigslist ads I placed were for women seeking women. The theories certainly apply to or suggest ways in which female sexuality might adhere to or differ from the web-mediated encounters that are described, though the focus on male homosexual practices like cruising or barebacking, or in the case of Bersani, the sociality of gay male community, is, for me, dangerously close to assuming that these types of encounters are common to all gay people, female and male. Tewksbury is the most explicit in delimiting his gendered scope, though as a sociologist (I am presuming), this seems to be intrinsic to his methodology; theorists like Kaye, McGlotten, Bersani and Dean, to differing degrees, posit modes of self-representation, desire, and community formation that are implicitly male.
i just saw your craigslist ad you posted earlier today looking for some nsa fun. i really want to take you up on it...like right now :) problem is, i responded to a similiar ad last month and was supposed to meet up with a guy but later found out after that it was just some 12 year old kid who was playing a prank on craigslist. That was my first time trying to hookup with someone from craigslist and since then i have been really skepitcal about going through with this again. but after just seeing your ad, i want to try this with you (if your ad was legit) i am for real, so i hope you are as well. i just moved here a couple months ago from vermont....wow....what a difference.
I certainly did not want to be “known,” not on the level that I normally present myself in any case. (Perhaps the certainty of that statement needs to be interrogated more thoroughly; or is it enough to say I just wasn't in the mood?) Though I posted pictures, they were movie stills that seemed ambiguous enough to be taken as candid photographs of “me.” This too spoke to the authority of the photographic image that Kaye describes, how, taking after Barthes, “a person’s photograph, much more than actually able to represent reality, makes the viewer believe in its reality.” (168) The awkwardness I felt may have stemmed from the knowledge that the photographs I used, however “fake” or “inauthentic” (i.e. misrepresentative), still evoke a certain reality, or reality-effect. It is not the indexicality of Bazin, but a signifier for authenticity nonetheless, an implied statement of disclosure, which I was, in actuality, falsifying. Kaye remarks that virtual cross-dressing only works “to the extent that they are fooling, or making themselves invisible to that hegemony,” and yet my experience with it was a heightened sense of myself, that I was not who I said I was. That, to me, felt ethically dubious. (166) Part of this problem, additionally, stemmed from the frustration over Craigslist’s lack of options for what I might have been looking for: strict divisions between gender, not being able to find more bisexual ambiguity, or having to rely on conventions of casual sex when it came to “casual encounter.” Why is there not a space for something between “strictly platonic” and something more pointedly sexual? Something like a queerspace in McGlotten's formulation: “a space of threshold, as a betweenness that opens up?" (65) A way of figuring out those dynamics in the process of their unfolding, rather than ordering off a menu of options?
my favorite reply so far
in response to an ad with the subject line "these boobs aren't real" (with a picture that certainly confirmed it), i received this reply (among many less imaginative ones):
"I disagree!!! If you can touch em...they're real!!!! =)"
Took me right back to Laura Marks and Touch.....
"I disagree!!! If you can touch em...they're real!!!! =)"
Took me right back to Laura Marks and Touch.....
Computing HIV
I thought this was interesting in light of how most of the readings describe how the computer facilitates that spread of HIV-in this case a supercomputer is being used to map HIV DNA in an attempt to understand how the virus mutates genetically. I wonder if similar technology could be used to track who infected whom, although I believe the virus begins to mutate even within one host. It poses questions of the ambivalent relationship between technology and public health, as in one instance computers can help spread the virus, and in another may work towards finding a vaccine, or additional forms of treatment.
Call and Response
Here are some of the most interesting responses I got from the ads I posted. I posed as different genders, looking for different "things." I'm not posting their photos or email addresses, but if you are interested in any, contact me.
1. "hey im not the slightest bit gay and have never done this b4 but im as horny as horny can be! i live in encinitas if you are up for coming over here and must be discreet..."
2. "i am real, d/d free, respectful, educated, BAchelors degree in film production and a minor in business and psychology .
what would you like to know about me? my sexual interests are easy. i love sex. i am clean, i always use protection, unless requested not to. i can meet days only, but please dont hold that against me."
3. "my dick when from hard to soft at the thought that u might by a man."
4. "I DO LIKE MY ASS EATEN BALLS SUCKED DOUBLE B.J AND YES I GO 9 INCHES
DEEP IN ASSES, I DO FUCK SUB BOYS BUT ONLY WHEN A WOMAN IS INVOLVED ASWELL "
5. "Some of us are always available. ;-) I'm off today and tomorrow, some of my guys work from home, so they're available too. I'm bi-curious, but not with my guys. Let's say if we meet you two and me I'm open to almost anything, but with my group I can do just a little bit. ;-)"
6. "im into getting you just have to be gentle. im a str8 dude, but i love the way cock feels"
7. "Would lov to hear You moan.....like masc guys out in public and sub bttm boy in the bedroom. That u?"
8. "I am honestly str8 but just curious and just want to get the curiosity out of the way...
No insertion into my mouth or ass... like i said, this is my first, and if i like, then maybe we'll break it in..."9. "I am 6'4", 200 lbs, an aggressive top who appreciates the curves of a woman and the yearnings of a boy"
10. "really want to find a girl that i 'come home to' and find her blowing my friend. I get pissed and rape you both. nothing too rough. I fuck him in the ass hard and then rape your ass and slap you around for being such a slut. I have the friend, he's a tight indian kid about 5'7 155 lbs. "
11. "perfer rubber but raw only with cleaning tools, like disinfecting liquid and need to shower good.."
12." i never met a ts in real but saw many on the web and i am curious to see how meetingn one and talking to one in person "
13. "im str8 and top women normally but with a girl like u i prefer u too fuck me good nd be a top..although i can verse. raw or rubbers really depends on the vibe."
14. "so i am a str8 guy, who recently discovered he'd really like to suck some good cock... and what's better then a cock attached to a beautiful girl, right? nothing, i say, nothing is better."
15. "straight, slim latino guy here. I just want to suck a cock very badly but i don't like guys. "
16. "Im the type that if a woman gets involved in a mans conversation, she just needs to stay out of it because it aint her place to be involved in a mans circle or conversation. Im from Turkey and have my temper at times and not afraid to show it. Here is my picture and hope to hear from you."
17. "I'm not a fag and will only fuck something very passiable with tits and fat ass. "
18. "My gf is half black and seriously hot with insame sex appeal so you know that i have to represent.. hahaha shes no joke! So tell me all you want.."
19. "ill let a guy suck me, if u can prove d/d free raw not big on ass eating"
20. "I need a girl or $"
21. "I am clean and I top raw and bottom with condoms."
22. "I will eat a girls ass but not a guys...I will get fucked like I said,if the guys cool..but girls have to be present..."
23. "I want you to be my aunt that wants to fuck with me but i never knew...."
Cruising Bresani
The film Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980) opens up an interesting dialogue with our readings this week, as well as the required sex ads on Craiglist, “looking for things,” as Diego put it. In the film, Frank Burns (Al Pacino) goes undercover in the New York S&M scene of late 70’s (pre AIDS) to catch a serial killer who has been preying on gay men. The victims, explains the police captain while detailing the operation to Burns, “were not in the mainstream of gay life. They were into heavy leather, S&M, a world unto itself.” Burns is sent out into the hedonistic scene as bait, to “cruise” the killer, as he matches the physical descriptions of the victims. Perhaps problematically, the film equates the act of cruising, or searching for an anonymous, casual sexual partner, with a radical underworld of leather, whips, public sex, and secret bars. The whole movie is available here, on Youtube, if you want to check it out (scroll through this guy's uploads, the film is there, broken into 14 segments). I highly recommend renting it though; it is one of my favorite films, despite stirring tons of controversy during its production and release for portraying gay men as wild, uninhibited, and dangerous.
Although more of the differences and comparisons between the film and our readings/homework can be drawn out at another time (perhaps in class if anyone else has seen the film), I thought Burns’ descent/ascent into this world was particularly relevant to the new ethics Bresani assigns to cruising. Quoting Foucault, Bresani discusses an asceticism of a homosexuality to come, “in other words, not in the sense of a morality of renunciation but as an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, an to attain a certain mode of being” (20). This mode of ethics, as Bresani notes, contrasts to the typical queer response to the hetero-moral condemnation of cruising, S&M, and public sex, which has historically been to suggest that these practices are novel and/or claim that they are perfectly within the realms of decency. Yet asserting the civility of these acts for Bresani means implicitly accepting “homophobic morality” values and striking the potentiality of cruising as new dynamic of sociability. Bresani believes that cruising can become a dismissal of moral worthiness itself, creating a new group of people who evade archaic moral categories all together. In short, cruising demands a new set of ethics, an asceticism of the self where the self is left behind to a radical otherness, a mutual surrendering to otherness, a “moment we relate to that which transcends all relations” (22). Combining this “jouissance of otherness” with an ascetic, rather than masochistic (S&M) erasure of inter-subjectivity, leads to a new mutuality in sex and society, where the desire for the other’s desire is feasibly eradicated. This fascinating reading of an ethics to come definitely mirrors Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism which also attempted to free thought and humans from the constraints of transcendence and its results: judgment, clichés, common opinion, failures of thinking, etc.
It’s a stretch, but perhaps we can see Bresani in Burns from Cruising. I won’t spoil the film entirely, but as Burns gets deeper into his new mode of life, his identity begins to unravel, or perhaps Burns begin to view his life, his identity, as already unraveled, fractured, and unexplainable. His experiences expose a new ethics, a new group of people, gathering in the park at night, shirking all of the homophobic morality weighing down the rest of the city (notably, all of the characters in the film that are “proper” heterosexuals, Burn’s lieutenant, the other cops, etc., are enslaved to the red tape of their jobs and wear it on their leaden faces). The killer is re-inscribing this morality on the “cruisers,” a morality that Burns himself must uphold if he is to catch the killer, one that he has known all his life and will not know “appropriately” again.
Urban Loving Strangers
I am interested in Tim Dean’s notion of cruising within a context of urban planning and the construction of a city/social way of life. Using Jane Jacob’s text, Dean constructs a re-negotiated site of urban modernity (relying also on Baudelaire and Whitman). In his examination of promiscuity, Dean begins his discussion surrounding the phrase “Why should strangers not be lovers?” This question resurfaces throughout his essay, opening up a terrain for further negotiating the possibility of the “Stranger” or “other” within the context of cruising as part of the fabric in urban safety and life.
Strangers make up cities (perhaps part of a modern/postmodern definition of a city?). Dean furthers this point by considering “erotic encounters” as a point or more specifically a “metaphor” in defining this notion of “otherness” (pg. 181). Thus, the pleasure of urban life or city life comes down to the principle of not only living next to and within a set of strangers, but also this possibility in contact (pleasure in contact). At this point in Dean’s argument, he goes on to reconstruct a personal example from his own life, meeting a homeless man on his way to the gym. He provides an interesting recollection of the encounter, noting the physical details of mapping and remapping a walk to a destination through a “short-cut” and social exchange between someone of an “other-ed” position. In a certain sense, it seems a bit indulgent to me (I don’t know if this is the right word here), but this example seems to fit so readily into Dean’s example of defining the “urban” poor as part of this invisibility in defining the stranger in urban life…I know this is digressing from this week’s topic, but Dean’s example made me think about the homeless man’s mapping of the city (after their departure from Gold’s Gym). Where did he go after this point? In a sense, the homeless man almost becomes this object of “otherness” that Dean is attempting to depart from…or perhaps, that is part of his point- this man becomes wrapped up into Dean’s understanding of the pleasures of contact.
This notion of urban mapping also connects very much to Leo Bersani’s “Sociability and Cruising” text. Bersani’s first line opens up with the idea of social composed of desire (pg. 9). I hope to discuss this text further in class (at least for my own personal understanding). One of the more striking lines comes near the conclusion of Bersani’s text, in his discussion of otherness. Bersani states, “The jouissance of otherness has as its pre-condition the stripping away of the self, a loss of all that gives us pleasure and pain in our negotiable exchanges with the world.” It is here where I think the center of both Dean and Bersani’s writings connect, opening up further discussion in regards to an urban-mapping of the other and carving out a human subject that can negotiate this inner/outer dynamic with the understanding of home and embodiment that re-configures the social stranger.
Strangers make up cities (perhaps part of a modern/postmodern definition of a city?). Dean furthers this point by considering “erotic encounters” as a point or more specifically a “metaphor” in defining this notion of “otherness” (pg. 181). Thus, the pleasure of urban life or city life comes down to the principle of not only living next to and within a set of strangers, but also this possibility in contact (pleasure in contact). At this point in Dean’s argument, he goes on to reconstruct a personal example from his own life, meeting a homeless man on his way to the gym. He provides an interesting recollection of the encounter, noting the physical details of mapping and remapping a walk to a destination through a “short-cut” and social exchange between someone of an “other-ed” position. In a certain sense, it seems a bit indulgent to me (I don’t know if this is the right word here), but this example seems to fit so readily into Dean’s example of defining the “urban” poor as part of this invisibility in defining the stranger in urban life…I know this is digressing from this week’s topic, but Dean’s example made me think about the homeless man’s mapping of the city (after their departure from Gold’s Gym). Where did he go after this point? In a sense, the homeless man almost becomes this object of “otherness” that Dean is attempting to depart from…or perhaps, that is part of his point- this man becomes wrapped up into Dean’s understanding of the pleasures of contact.
This notion of urban mapping also connects very much to Leo Bersani’s “Sociability and Cruising” text. Bersani’s first line opens up with the idea of social composed of desire (pg. 9). I hope to discuss this text further in class (at least for my own personal understanding). One of the more striking lines comes near the conclusion of Bersani’s text, in his discussion of otherness. Bersani states, “The jouissance of otherness has as its pre-condition the stripping away of the self, a loss of all that gives us pleasure and pain in our negotiable exchanges with the world.” It is here where I think the center of both Dean and Bersani’s writings connect, opening up further discussion in regards to an urban-mapping of the other and carving out a human subject that can negotiate this inner/outer dynamic with the understanding of home and embodiment that re-configures the social stranger.
Constraint City- the Pain of Everyday life
I recently came across this art/social project regarding a physical/emotional mapping of a city space (“literally”) onto the body. The participants in this project wore a corset, which allows for psycho-geographical writing and rewriting of the city. This project reminded me of the readings for this week, especially Tim Dean’s writing on “Cruising as a way of Life.” This notion of the pleasure-pain principle is quite apparent in the Constraint City project (even though the project doesn’t focus on a “sexualized” or queer space). I am curious as to how the programmers/artists for this project would conceptualize queer space in relation to public/private space, and the coding and negotiation of these spaces when approaching wireless networks/areas. How do we understand this “invisible architecture” that is supposedly transposed onto the body? Especially considering this notion of the stranger or “other” bodies? How is queer space re-negotiated in this context?
Cancelling cruising.
While posting the post below my mailbox found 6 more emails from craigslist readers/practitioners. I think I'll erase the ad in an h or so.
Fast it is.
Wow.
Posting as Asian Femme Fatale, it took not even 5min to get a response from http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html aka "kneel".
Pervasive, Perverse, Perennial
I've actually seen the inside of a sex-based text-based MOO. I've a friend, who shall remain nameless, who invited me to take a look, and I was certainly curious. The experience was broadening to say the least. I learned, amongst other things, that 'water sports' does not mean having sex while water skiing.
Water sports were, in fact, on a huge list of pre-determined 'kinks' that you could toggle on your character, that could be accessed by anyone on the game who typed +kinks. It was considering good form to be comprehensive here, and while there was a large and comprehensive list of kinks, ranging from 'size queen' to 'big bodied' to 'knife play' to plain old 'vanilla', there was also the option of writing up your own custom kinks. Very liberating, one might assume.
But I found, from my fascinated investigations, that rather than there being a destruction of hierarchies and discrimination, what ended up happening is that the representations people used in this cyberpornographic space tended to emphasize classically racist/sexist/domination based relations. Black characters always had huge penises, improbably so. Women were generally 'sluts' or 'bimbos' or tight laced librarian types who could be forced into adopting one of the previous two roles. There was a hardwired system of power relations, with masters and slaves, and one's personal position a required characteristic or 'tag' that needed to be chosen and could not be altered without consent from the authorities running the game. In short, freeing up identities and symbols caused these identities and symbols to develop a sort of giganticism, become almost hyper-racist and hyper-sexist.
As such, I think that the optimism of cybersex is questioned rightly by the authors we've read for next class. Certainly these forms of sex are physically 'safe', and it is much better that these fantasies be played out in a consequence-free environment, there is something concerning, in my eyes, about the way that unmoored and unmediated symbols, left to play, in fact tend towards greater expressions of domination. It could be argued, and cogently so, that the fact that one can play, with two different characters, both a master and a slave, but the need to separate to two demands that they be considered mutually exclusive. Separations are maintained and even emphasized, and cyberspace becomes, rather than a frontier of freedom, a reinstantiation of those fantasmatic desires that structure relations of domination.
Water sports were, in fact, on a huge list of pre-determined 'kinks' that you could toggle on your character, that could be accessed by anyone on the game who typed +kinks
But I found, from my fascinated investigations, that rather than there being a destruction of hierarchies and discrimination, what ended up happening is that the representations people used in this cyberpornographic space tended to emphasize classically racist/sexist/domination based relations. Black characters always had huge penises, improbably so. Women were generally 'sluts' or 'bimbos' or tight laced librarian types who could be forced into adopting one of the previous two roles. There was a hardwired system of power relations, with masters and slaves, and one's personal position a required characteristic or 'tag' that needed to be chosen and could not be altered without consent from the authorities running the game. In short, freeing up identities and symbols caused these identities and symbols to develop a sort of giganticism, become almost hyper-racist and hyper-sexist.
As such, I think that the optimism of cybersex is questioned rightly by the authors we've read for next class. Certainly these forms of sex are physically 'safe', and it is much better that these fantasies be played out in a consequence-free environment, there is something concerning, in my eyes, about the way that unmoored and unmediated symbols, left to play, in fact tend towards greater expressions of domination. It could be argued, and cogently so, that the fact that one can play, with two different characters, both a master and a slave, but the need to separate to two demands that they be considered mutually exclusive. Separations are maintained and even emphasized, and cyberspace becomes, rather than a frontier of freedom, a reinstantiation of those fantasmatic desires that structure relations of domination.
The Ballad of Gay Tony
The latest of the Grand Theft Auto IV spin-off episodes:
Sadly, it doesn't appear that Tony's the protagonist, so there probably aren't any barebacking missions...
Sadly, it doesn't appear that Tony's the protagonist, so there probably aren't any barebacking missions...
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Tinker.Solder.Tap
http://www.sarai.net/publications/occasional/tinker-solder-tap (Free Download) We live in a tumultuous media environment. There is widespread confusion, uncertainty and awe at the inventiveness of the thousands of people in media networks who innovate, copy, tinker, recycle, produce, remix and relay. The protagonists of Tinker.Solder.Tap bring alive the ways in which the relationship between life and the media has been re-scripted in the various neighbourhoods of our cities. The story begins in the mid-80s, when a man returns home with an object called a VCR. The chain of effects that follows transforms irreversibly the social life of the neighbourhood and its reverberations can be felt all over the world. Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab Text: Bhagwati Prasad Graphics: Amitabh Kumar Translation and Editing: Shveta Sarda Additional Research: Rakesh Kumar Singh, Lokesh Pencilling sequential comic pages: Raja Pocket Books (Raj Comics) Design and Cover: Amitabh Kumar Published by The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054, India Tel: (+91) 11 2394 2199 Fax: (+91) 11 2394 3450 Email: dak@sarai.net www.sarai.net Delhi 2009 Any part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the publishers for educational and non-commercial use. The authors and publishers would, however, like to be informed. This work is part of the project, ?Social and Material Life of Media Piracy? of Sarai-CSDS and Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore) supported by International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada . ISBN 9788190585316 Published by the Director, CSDS. Printed by Impress, New Delhi
Monday, October 26, 2009
Gonzalo Frasca @ IMD
Please join us for a talk by Gonzalo Frasca, who is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Powerful Robot Games. His talk will describe a framework for understanding how play and games convey ideas through the use of rhetoric rather than rules.
Gonzalo Frasca is a game developer, researcher and entrepreneur, who lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. He co-founded the studio, Powerful Robot Games, in 2002 to build both commercial and experimental games. Their game for Cartoon Network reached over 13 million player accounts. They described it as "our biggest gaming success in our history".
One of their most popular indie projects is Newsgaming.com, a project mixing journalism with videogames. It received the Knight Foundation News Games Lifetime Achievement Award at the Games for Change 2009 conference.
Time: Wednesday, October 28, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
(USC IMD)
Friday, October 23, 2009
Madden Journals
http://football-freaks.com/forums/index.php?showforum=43
For those who are interested.
Oh, and for an examination in fan culture, check fm-britain.co.uk for the best forums on Football Manager.
EA Sports Hockey Final
Check out the EA Sports Hockey League cup final -- real people playing simulated hockey in real space after playing a simulated season via telepresence... With interviews between the periods that sound just like real hockey player interviews!
http://www.easports.com/media/play/feature-video/NHL09_EASHL_Finals#
http://www.easports.com/media/play/feature-video/NHL09_EASHL_Finals#
Civilization: Quality of Life
Speaking of procedural rhetoric, check out IMD grad student Ethan Kennerly's project, "Civilization IV: Quality of Life," a mod for the popular world-simming game:
"My Civ4 mod (a directed research with Peter Brinson) appeared at a conference "Games for Change" and a workshop "Logic and the Simulation of Interaction and Reasoning." Thank you, Tracy, for inviting me to demo at Games for Change. It's refreshing to meet fellow humanitarian developers!
About the mod: The original Civilization IV rewards imperialism through scoring the glory of the empire. I reprogrammed the game to score the health and happiness of the citizens. By adapting John Broome's extended quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and responding to Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusions, I designed an ethical calculus that rewards restraint, diplomacy and art in Civilization IV. See the presentation and play the mod." (USC IMD)
Videogame- movie tie- ins...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvuB9CJr-HI
I was recently alerted to this videogame involving an Irishman living (and killing Nazis, of course) in Paris...It amazes me looking at this preview in connection with Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards...I don't think they're connected, but it's quite striking (timing wise) to see the obvious influence of film in presenting an image and narrative surrounding WWII France.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Baudrillard, Solomon, Empire
Reading Baudrillard this time, it was striking to me how Baudrillard begins “Simulacra and Simulations” with a description of Borges’ cartography, wherein the detail of the map is thorough enough to cover the space of the territory. The metaphor is prescient for the application of Baudrillard’s theory to expansive gamespaces that would be developed later. Here the simulation is by nature totalizing, and not partial; to see its edges would be to locate the limits of its reproduction of the real. Simulation exceeds and envelopes representation (indeed Baudrillard frequently describes it in terms of circular, recursive imagery: “an uninterrupted circuit,” “exchanging in itself,” a “Moebius strip,” “two ends of a curved mirror”), which maintains an ontological distinction between the sign and the real, however much they are equivalent. Simulation, however, refuses to acknowledge their differences; it denies both. This is the totalizing logic of the simulation.
It is not until later in the essay that Baudrillard approaches to an “outside” to simulation, which is expressed most pointedly through its mourned absence, its historical departure. This, to me, is an interesting break in the Baudrillard’s somewhat exhausting rhetoric. He suggests: “The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.” In other words, Baudrillard reasserts the concrete materiality of real bodies and objects, and this is reaffirmed in the essays he wrote just a few years later, collected in the volume The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. There he critiqued the mediated nature of the Gulf War conflict, precisely the disembodied nature of the conflict, at least the way in which it was represented to the public at large.
Elsewhere he refers to a lost reality that, through its felt lack, is overcompensated through the production of industrial materials and “overdose[d]” political ideologies like fascism that assuage people of their “[m]elancholy for societies without power.” Thus the real exists, but only in phantom form. It is remembered as it perhaps never was (nostalgia), and we are numb to or unaware of its continued presence in physical form. It would counter the logic of a totality, of course, if one could truly see outside the simulacra; at the same time, however, the pressure of reality’s absence is still felt on an indeterminate outside, which might account for the increased militancy that is expressed at those margins: political scandal, pathology, nation (Disney), territory, war. These extremities are precisely where the simulation comes under the most pressure, because that is where it threatens to come undone: in these categories which are already unstable, constructed, and yet taken as real or natural.
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As I mentioned above, the cartographic quality of simulacra lends itself readily to videogames, and I wanted to briefly discuss a piece by experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon, who has recently been creating machinima films within the gamespace of the Grand Theft Auto series (I’m writing about these films for another class). This installation, Empire, recreates Warhol’s iconic film within the world of GTA IV’s Liberty City. I believe that when it was on view at the Wexner Center last year, the piece ran uninterrupted for a week (Warhol’s film runs eight and a half hours). To achieve Warhol’s same perspective, Solomon, through his avatar, had to steal a helicopter and then crash into the side of a building. Tellingly, his south-facing skyline is one that does not include the World Trade Center; neither does Warhol’s, since his film was completed in 1964, before the towers’ construction. Throughout the week-long projection, the physics generator within the game begin to loop, indicating a temporal limit to the game’s total (totalizing?) space. And like Baudrillard’s simulacra, the vision of New York presented in Empire is not real, though it still feels like it, particularly for the uncanny sense that “[s]omething has disappeared.” The trace of a real is affecting not despite its departure but precisely because it is phantasmatic.
Phil Solomon, Empire (2008)
Andy Warhol, Empire (1964)
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