conversations

the image

According to this account in Radical Philosophy in the Anglophone world the post aesthetic use of semiotics, psychoanalysis and cultural theory have dominated the discourse on contemporary art since the 1970s. In France it is the image that has remained the central articulating concept of aesthetics, art history and art criticism, and more particularly the classical problem of the relation between image and word.

Radiohead - Scotch Mist

A film with Radiohead in it made for New Year's Eve, 2007. They played every song on In Rainbows (2007) for a special New Years webcast.

The album is very song-oriented, with each track constantly moving forward and developing, yet there are abstract electronic layers and studio-as-instrument elements to prevent it from sounding like a regression. The film is minimal there's no stage or audience: it's just Radiohead and instruments.

Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet

Karl Stockhausen's intriguing Helicopter String Quartet is a complex piece of music. Here it is interpreted by the Digital Music Ensemble at the University of Michigan:

A bigger version for those with a faster broadband connection. The Digital Music Ensemble's interpretation of the piece uses model helicopters instead of full-scale ones, a quartet of electric guitarists in place of a string quartet, and a live video processing dimension.

Stockhausen's work explodes the concept of traditional music and this is first and last string quartet. Although it is performable as a self-sufficient piece, it also forms the third scene of the opera Mittwoch aus Licht ("Wednesday from Licht") which is part of the Licht opera project, which consists of 7 operas.

This real helicopter version of the Helicopter String Quartet is described thus:

A string quartet is presented to the audience, before leaving for the four helicopters waiting outside. The helicopter blades begin to turn, and take off; each containing a string player. A sophisticated system of video and sound equipment transmits the performance back to a mixing desk in the hall for the audience, via a multichannel sound system with the 4 performers made visible on video monitors, The quartet are seen to be playing completely synchronously as they make their ascent. The sounds of the helicopters are mixed with the string quartet for the listeners as the helicopters fly above the city. The three melodies of Licht are heard as sharply accented notes rotated from one player to the next, during the constant glissandi. The tremolando style of playing blends with the noise of the helicopter blades. Finally a slow descent brings the musicians back to earth, and they re-enter the concert-hall for the applause.

It's a fascinating idea. I doubt if it will ever be staged in its entirety in Australia.

Walter Benjamin:

Samuel Weber Benjamin's Abilities

user generated content + prosumer

Gary Hall in his Digitize this Book makes an interesting argument about user generated content. The shift from critique to creation, is commonly argued for many academics in media studies, and they understand this in terms of digital technology enabling people to shift from passivity to activity, to the point where producers and consumers are one and the same. This idea is fairly common in contemporary culture and is often expressed in idea of the “prosumer.”

It is a narrative that I accept. I see it as part of the tremendous cultural transformation that we are living through with the shift into the digital age.

Hall says that the story here is as follows:

Previously, society was structured in terms of two more or less separate and distinct groups. On the one hand there were the professional producers, who could create, copy, and distribute media and cultural objects such as books, films, and TV programs. On the other there were the domestic consumers who could not. They could only use the media and cultural objects created for them by the professional producers; and they could only do so relatively passively. They could not reproduce, copy, alter or circulate them, or change them into something new, at least on a large scale. At the most they could only do so with regard to their own individually purchased and owned copies.

The development of “prosumer” technologies changed all this. Originating in the video industries, these are technologies of a high enough technical standard to be able to produce work that can be recorded, broadcast, and distributed at a professional level, yet at the same time they are cheap enough to be affordable to most amateur consumers.

The result is that now the consumer no longer needs to occupy a predominantly passive relation to media and cultural objects. They, too, can not only consume such objects, but also actively create, reproduce, copy, change, and circulate them on something approaching a mass-produced, professional scale in the guise of the prosumer.

Hall says that the issue around ideas of this kind for me is not that digital technology does not enable a good many people, including academics, to become involved in creating media and cultural texts in this way. It does.

Okay. So where do the problems lie?

Hall argues that one problem with the concept of the prosumer lies in the way in which prosumer maintains and reinforces certain notions of production and consumption—even as it claims these distinctions are being “broken down”—that I would argue new media have helped to undo.

For far from blurring these categories, the whole idea of the prosumer depends for its very existence on quite fixed, and somewhat unsophisticated conceptions of “production” and “consumption,” as well as the relation between them. After all, production and consumption can be brought together like this in the guise of the prosumer only if they are positioned as having somehow been separate and distinct in the first place—which they generally are in narratives of this kind.

However, production and consumption are much more complicated and less stable concepts than a lot of erstwhile cultural analysis has seemed to allow. In a knowledge economy the production of particular mental predispositions has become a central focus for globalised productive processes in that production, consumption, and circulation become an inseparable whole, and “value creation” becomes an immediate, continuous process that unites the formerly separable spheres of production, consumption, and circulation.

Secondly, is the problem of what is called the digital dialectic. This means that writing on the new media, if it wants to be innovative, has to be enriched with a critical involvement in both technical, user-related matters and content matters.This writing needs to go beyond examining what is happening to our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms to grounding the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. Hall's is with the emphasis on practice and the way that it positions theory as a a potential threat to, or distraction from, the real job of “net criticism.”

The real job .. tends to be very much “grounded in the constraints of practice” and presents itself as “practice driven.” As a result, the concept of practice continues to function as something of a fetish, similar to the way politics, activism, and “the street” do in other media and cultural studies–related discourses ... where it is important to talk about being practical, about engaging with those who make policy decisions, about getting involved with political activists, relating to the kids on the street, and so on, because all this is held as having to do with actual, concrete, political materiality. So talking about practice feels, you know . . . well, really real.

So, despite the talk about dialectics the impression is that to be involved with the actual specifics of creating with computer media—with software production, programming, coding, and so on—is somehow more material, more political, more real than writing theory. Theory has been placed in a supplementary relation to practice.

Halls argument is that media theory is a productive discourse: creates and defines (rather than simply
reflects) the practical, and simultaneously renders it available as an article or aim for practice.

white nationalism

Australian nationalism's conservative form has been called a paranoid nationalism. It's conception of national sovereignty is premised on the populism of the white Anglo-Celtic Aussie battler that refuses to acknowledge and confront the violence of the colonial past and its hatred of the Other. The politics of sovereignty is articulated through a white Australian nationalism.

White Australia is currently experiencing an acute obsession with border control and with paranoid fantasies about the ability of internal and external 'Others' to seize control of the country; an obsession immersed in fear that resurfaced in the wake of multiculturalism, reconciliation, republican debates and the rise of Asian immigration in the 1980s and 1990s.

Increasing fear of an outside world meant that the welcome mat was pulled up and the doors firmly closed. The asylum seekers would never knock on the door of the newly renovated national home as they wouldn’t even make it through the front gate.

The other aspect to the populist hostility to the non-white other is the ongoing internal project of enacting or reasserting colonial sovereignty over Indigenous bodies and lands. The various protectionist discourses effectively meant entrapment for Indigenous communities in a form of apartheid that is experienced as a feeling ‘of being hunted in a confined space’ and a ‘loss of voice’.

As Irene Watson says in her Aboriginality and the Violence of Colonialism in a recent issue of Borderlands:

the demonization of Aboriginal culture allows an opening for the state to appear as a crusader and rescuer of Aboriginal women and children ..... The state becomes the knower of what is Aboriginal culture while Aboriginal peoples and communities are positioned as mere actors, acting out a deemed and ‘known’ cultural practice. The state as knower of ‘objectionable practices’ has power to construct what Aboriginal culture is and to analyse, vilify, and ultimately undermine the right of peoples to self-determination.

The recent state sponsored public outcries, which are white men rescuing black women from black men, lead to the conflict between the Northern Territory Emergency Response (initiatives under this legislation such as compulsory income management apply only to Aboriginal people) and the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 ( with its equality under the law). So the latter was, and is still suspended, in a state of emergency.

Jay Rosen on social media

Jay Rosen talk at the Science Writers in New York, which was part of Panel for Social Media. The memes are that the means of media production is now in the hands of the audience; the falling costs of find, connect, and share with one another; and his use of Twitter.

His blog now becomes a place for more finished pieces of work that are build up from his daily conversations on Twitter about how people are interpreting his work.

Merleau Ponty: bodily nature of perception

Back to a.aaaarg.org This time it is the Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty where it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the bodily nature of perception, of the perceptual bedrock of human existence, remains his most profound and original contribution to philosophy.

The picture that held us captive was an epistemology whose understanding of the place of mind in a world such that our only knowledge of reality comes through the representations we have formed of it within ourselves. We know the outer world through the inner representations. Knowledge of things outside the mind/agent/ organism only comes about through certain surface conditions, mental images, or conceptual schemes within the mind/agent/organism.

The input is combined, computed over, or structured by the mind to construct a view of what lies outside. To buy into the picture is to hold that our knowledge is grounded exclusively in representations and that our reasoning involves manipulating representations.

The Introduction says:

Merleau-Ponty thus sought to rescue our understanding of perception from the conceptual oblivion to which traditional psychology and epistemology had consigned it. Perception... is neither brute sensation nor rational thought, but an aspect of the body’s intentional rip on its physical and social environment. Most philosophers today readily dismiss the empiricist notion of brute “sense data” as symptomatic of a more general failure to appreciate the intentionality of perception.

For Merleau Ponty no corner of human life is unmarked by the fact of our situated bodily perspective on the world. His later work marks a break with the residual subjectivism in the Phenomenology of Perception and makes a turn to an ontology of the flesh.