conversations

the circulation of images

In Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture, which is part of the Words Without Pictures series, Marisa Olson explores the pro surfer work in relationship to photographic media. She beings with the concept of circulation–the ways in which the images are produced and exchanged, and their currency or value.

The images that get appropriated on these sites are at times “cameraless” (i.e. created by software or other lensless tools that nonetheless aspire to optical perspective, typically follow normative compositional rules, and tend to index realism), while others are created with some other being behind the aperture, only to be found and appropriated by a surfer. In their re-presentation in a different context—arguably a different economy--the images are taken out of circulation, often without attribution or a hint of origin, unless that is part of the story being told by the artist. Two Nasty Nets members even programmed a web-based tool called Pic-See that makes it easier for internet users to plunder images archived in open directories. When the images are reused, they are positioned as quotations yet inscribed with authorial status by the artist who posts them.

These pictures often employ found material—whether it is extant photography or images that were always/ already “fake,” i.e. cameraless digital images created to index reality without ever having an analogous relationship to it. These include video game graphics, low-pixel sprites, bitmap illustrations, and other digital renderings.

e-books

In his The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age at ars technica John Siracusa states people don't get e-books --especially the bibliophiles who mount lots of arguments against e-books.

Siracusa adds that part of the problem is in the name: e-book:

In the print world, the word "book" is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, "e-book" refers to the content only—or rather, that's the intention. Unfortunately, the conflation of these two concepts in the nomenclature of print naturally carries over to the digital terminology, much to the confusion of all.

We often think of e-books in physical terms—books with batteries and a screen—rather than in terms of their content. We need to make the separation between medium and content explicit. The book is the content and the medium is just the vessel and the medium changes--from print to digital.

The next section on the enthusiastic opponents of technological progress is exquisite:

Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word "horse" for "book" and the word "car" for "e-book." Here are a few examples to whet your appetite for the (really) inevitable debate in the discussion section at the end of this article.

"Books will never go away." True! Horses have not gone away either.

"Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome." True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don't go everywhere, nor should they.

"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died.

The real blockage comes from the publishers/publishing houses as their well-established business model is faced with new digital technology that threatens to change the landscape of the book market. They are fearful and in panic mode, and their strategy is to ensure that e-book sales do not eat into hardcover sales and so the sabotaged the e-book market from day one. The techniques used are DRM, the pricing and the general treatment as second-class citizens.

The e-book is the text/image not the device. Currently, the device is the Kindle or the iPad.

virtual worlds

Virtual reality usually refers to a system of computer simulations of three dimensional space within cyberspace or the space of software. Virtual realities are computer generated worlds that simulate key elements the dominate representation of real space such as dimensionality and relations of resemblance.

It is often argued that the ‘fabricated visual “spaces” of computer imagery are radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography and television’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are, it is argued, ‘in the midst of a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from the Renaissance perspective’.

This emergence of a computer-mediated virtual world displaces the realist/Enlightenment quest to represent reality accurately. It is the ability of digital virtual reality to recreate the appearance and sensations of first order reality that engineers its break from Enlightenment traditions of representation. It refers to a wide variety of applications commonly associated with immersive, highly visual, 3D environments: the development of CAD software, graphics hardware acceleration, head mounted displays, database gloves and miniaturization have helped popularize the notion.

In Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Real and Virtual Space, Liz Grosz argues that virtual reality ... is a constant phenomenon in art history when she writes that

The virtual reality of the computer is fundamentally no different from the virtual reality of writing, reading, drawing or even thinking: the virtual is the space of emergence of the new, the unthought, the unrealized, which at every moment loads the presence of the present with supplementarity, redoubling a world through parallel universes.

(p.78)
This denies the sense if rupture that we experience a computer-mediated virtual world; a rupture with the past--the realist tradition of pictorial representation that started with the central perspective of the Renaissance.

Recent developments in communication technologies have thoroughly disturbed our assumptions about what is real and what is artificial, our understandings of the body and identity, of experience and presence, of space and time. Under the aegis of cyberspace and virtual reality, the age-old quest to distinguish between reality and its image, between the real and its representation, in fact seems curiously outmoded. What haunts contemporary concerns instead is the troubling question regarding the extent to which reality itself has become a technological simulation, a spectacle solely fabricated to entertain our senses and particularly our eyes.

"portfolio careers"

In his Cultural Policy Blog Ben Eltham refers to recent paper by Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew, entitled Creative Industries after the First Decade of Debate. Eltham's interest is in the debate about the relationship between neo-liberalism and creative industries.

Mine is with their emphasis on the way that cultural policy since the 1970s had been moving from a supply-side, artist-centered approach to one that gave stronger consideration to consumer demand
and cultural markets and to the small to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in the creative industries.Cunningham and Terry Flew say:

the creative industries have come to evolve what has been termed an “hourglass” structure, with a small number of major players in each sector sitting alongside a myriad of individual enterprises, small companies, and networks of creative talent ... As these individuals and small groups are relatively new and not highly concentrated, and as “portfolio careers” characterized by multiple jobs across different sectors are often the norm for these segments of the creative workforce, they lack the political power and lobbying clout of big corporations, established trade unions, and traditional arts organizations. Yet there is growing evidence that such loosely configured creative networks are a core source of innovation in the arts, media, and culture..

This was meant to be a point against those who argue for a neo-liberal governance of the creative industries. I cannot see it myself, but I do think that it is an accurate account of the emergence creative industries in the new digital economy. This emergence is associated with the gentrification of the inner city that runs counter to the anti-urban discourse of suburbia. The latter was based on a flight from the crime, violence, squalor and disease of the inner city that started in the 1950s.

The inner city is seen as a “cesspool” of “social parasites, druggies, skinheads, homeless and lefties”—a conglomeration of human misfits. Once largely abandoned to the workingclass amid postwar suburban expansion, relinquished to the poor and unemployed asreservations for racial and ethnic minorities, the terrain of the inner city is suddenly valuable again, perversely profitable.

This process of gentrification and the creative industries has shifted from the comparatively marginal preoccupation in a certain niche of the realestate industry in the 1970s and 1980s to the cutting edge of urban change. It is is simultaneously a response and contributor to a series of widerglobal transformations: global economic expansion in the 1980s; the restructuring of national and urban economies in advanced capitalist countries toward services, recreation and consumption; and the emergence of a global hierarchy of
world, national and regional cities.

Grateful Dead: Dark Star

This meditative improvisational version of Dark Star is on the So Many Roads box set--or so I am led to believe. It is short like a Japanese haiku.

This is a five-disc set that purports to be the first "in-depth musical retrospective of the Grateful Dead." I don't own the box set so I cannot judge how good it is.

A dark star is a star that is normally obscured or too faint for direct visual observation. This song is the fulcrum of the Grateful Dead's live musical playing. They were a traveling band, and this jam is a good indication of how accomplished the band was in extending themselves through jamming and exploration. On the other hand, they could also fall pretty flat. Their musical brilliance could be as fleeting as a sunshine daydream.

Update
The blurb under the video says that this version of the Grateful Dead's Dark Star is from the Capitol Theatre Port Chester New York 02 -18-1971 show. Only a small section (4.41minutes) is on the So Many Roads box set--- but I am not sure which section.

Wharf Rat, which is in the middle of the DS>Wharf Rat>DS jam, has been excluded from this video. From I can gather this was Mickey Hart's last show before the drummer left the band---that was from February 1971 until October 1974.

This is the Grateful Dead in transition to their 1970s Americana sound that was showcased on Europe 72. Many of the new material at the Port Chester 1971 show is quite basic or raw.

trash

Trash-- an issue of Alphabet City. The latter is a series that challenges us to rethink ideas central to our lives in urban modernity. One of these ideas is the "throwaway" or waste in our consumer society. We barely notice the rubbish these days, even though we see the gleaners going about their routines of gathering up what other people throw away.

Tina Kendall in Utopian Gleaners links the figure of the gleaner back to Walter Benjamin's ragpickers:

In formulating his theory, Benjamin draws on the writings of Charles Baudelaire, for whom the chiffonnier was one of the heroes of modernity. Ragpickers were marginalized figures of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, classed amongst Paris’s growing population of homeless and poor, who earned their living by scavenging the streets and collecting the refuse produced by the emergent processes of industrial capitalism. Although largely disdained as a dirty tramp by the popular imagination of the time, the ragpicker was reclaimed by Baudelaire as a key figure for understanding and defining the experience of urban modernity.

Baudelaire in "On Wine and Hashish says:

The ragpicker is responsible for gathering up the daily debris of the capital. All that the city has rejected, all it has lost, shunned, disdained, broken, this man catalogs and stores. He sifts through the archives of debauch, the junkyards of scrap. He creates order, makes an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he gathers the refuse that has been spit out by the god of Industry, to make of it objects of delight or utility.

The trash collector effectively “dreams” his way into a better world by reorganizing the material and the social. This is precisely the task of cultural critique as Benjamin conceived of it. The critic sifts and searches through the pile of debris that the “storm of progress” trails in its wake, thereby redeeming objects and people cast aside as worthless by dominant modes of organizing and fixing value.

Fredric Jameson: late capitalism + postmodernism

Benjamin Kunkel in his Into the Big Tent at the London Review of Books refers to Frederic Jameson’s description of the mood and texture of postmodern life:

the erosion of the distinction between high and pop culture; the reign of stylistic pastiche and miscellany; the dominance of the visual image and corresponding eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness – ‘surrealism without the unconscious’ – in the dream-like jumble of images; and the strange alliance of a pervasive cultural nostalgia (as in the costume drama or historical novel) with a cultural amnesia serving to fragment ‘time into a series of perpetual presents’. If all that now sounds familiar, this owes something to the durability of Jameson’s account of postmodernism

Kunkel says that this account was premised on the book by Ernest Mandel, the Belgian Trotskyist, which provided the base, as it were, to his own cultural superstructure. Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972) had offered a magnificently confident and pugnacious argument about the nature of postwar capitalism, but he regretted ‘not being able to propose a better term for this historical era than “late capitalism”’. In Mandel’s usage, ‘late’ simply meant ‘recent’, but the term naturally also suggests obsolescence.--hat capitalism was on its last legs.

Kunkel adds that Jameson Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism did not imply that capitalism was on its last legs:

His actual claim was more like the opposite: with the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe, with the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and their noble patrons) and the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history. Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism. It constituted a ‘process in which the last surviving internal and external zones of precapitalism … are now ultimately penetrated and colonised in their turn’. This thesis can only have been reinforced by the advent of China as the workshop of the world and the channelling of so much of intimate life by the internet. My shoes are sewn under the supervision of the CCP, and Gmail fills the margins of my private correspondence with ads.

Jameson produced an imposing account of the culture we all still inhabit---the recruitment of the entire world into the same big story, namely the development of global capitalism.

writing, blogging, photography

In his review of Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing No. 1, edited by Karen Andrews, (Miscellaneous Press ) Geordie Williamson, the literary critic of The Australian asks some good questions. He says:

While our conversations have largely concentrated on how blogs affect politics, business and the media -- how they dehumanise us, invade our privacy or offer our best chance for true mass democracy -- what has been missed is a discussion of their style. Has the internet changed the way we write? If so, then how? And if these changes can be isolated, have they been for the best?

The anthology of Australian blog writing refers to blog writing by those in the literary institution and Williamson links back to Robert Darntons' pre-blogging pamphleters of the Old Regime and in the politics of the French revolution in the New York Review of Books blog. He answers his questions thus:

Whether our political, business and entertainment elites have the same thing to fear from bloggers remains to be seen; but it is obvious that this particular style, entertaining to the point of scurrilousness, has become the default mode for internet writing. Taken with the failure of poetry and fiction to create a vigorous online presence, it suggests the web is reshaping the way we write.

He comes to this judgement by comparing blogs to print and vice-versa. Andrews says on the Splog, the blog of SPUNC, the home of Australia's small press and independent publishing, that her anthology addresses the common complaint that there is nothing worthwhile to read online and that the selected voices and stories contained within it were worthy of reaching a potentially different audience than what they might receive online.

But it is not just writing since Andrews links to the blogs of Heather Armstrong, Ree Drummond and Scott Schuman to highlight the difficulties in crossing the line from amateur to professional and making a little side money from writing.

What stood out for me was not the style of online writing by the author bloggers. It was that all the above make extensive use of photography.Andrew's own blog--Miscellaneous Mum makes extensive use of photography. Even Sophie Cunningham, who addresses the writing in her Blogging – Where Are We Now? post at Spike--- Meanjin's blog makes extensive use of photographs on her own blog.

Photography is not writing, nor is it simply an illustration of writing. It is a part of our visual culture not our literary culture. Yet no mention is made of the mix of medium's or how photography relates to writing by Andrews or Cunningham. The use of photography in their writing is marked by silence. Isn't the extensive use of photography one way that blog writing is different from the printed literary form?

waste

Gay Hawkins in Shit in Public in the Australian Humanities Review (Issue 31-32, April 2004) says that it's difficult to imagine a world without a distinction between public and private though there are times when you get an insight into what it might be like.

Seeing half the contents of your garbage bin spread over the street after collection night is one of those times. After irritation, this experience can trigger strong feelings of disgust and exposure. All this evidence of your intimate life revealed as waste. In the rush to pick it up your body shudders with the horror of contamination.Consider a different example. When it rains heavily in Sydney the stormwater system, designed to manage runoff from streets, is regularly polluted with raw sewage that leaks into it from broken pipes and ageing infrastructure. This makes the beaches dangerously toxic and it can produce a strange miasma. When the rain clears and everything is meant to smell fresh and cleansed you can often get a strong stench emanating from gutters and street grilles. Shit is in the air. This is unpleasant but we generally don't feel personally exposed, let alone implicated. We don't feel that our privacy has been challenged. It's an environmental problem, a failure of infrastructure. It can upset our sense of civic order and public health but our response is most often limited to 'what are "they" going to do about it', if we even care at all.

In these two urban encounters waste mediates the public private distinction in quite different ways.

In the first, it is resolutely connected to practices of the personal, to rituals of everyday life and routines of self-maintenance. Waste functions as a marker of the structural differentiation between the realm of intimacy and public life; managing it is something you do in private, something that is naturalised as part of a pre-public individuality.

In the second, the public waste evident in deteriorating stormwater systems and contaminated rivers and beaches is most often represented as an environmental issue; regularly generating special investigative reports in the press and even the occasional beachside mass demonstration. Accounts of this waste problem constitute it as a failure of the state.

postmodernism: modernism's waste product?

In Theories of the Postmodern Fredric Jameson refers to those whose aim is to discredit the shoddiness and irresponsibility of the postmodern in general by way of a reaffirmation of the authentic impulse of a high-modernist tradition still considered to be alive and vital. One such person is Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion whom Jameson says contrasts the moral responsibility of the “masterpieces” and monuments of classical modernism with the fundamental irresponsibility and superficiality of a postmodernism associated with camp and the “facetiousness”. He adds:

It is, however, easier to understand Kramer’s move here when the political project of The New Criterion is clarified: for the mission of the journal is clearly to eradicate the sixties itself and what remains of its legacy, to consign that whole period to the kind of oblivion which the fifties was able to devise for the thirties, or the twenties for the rich political culture of the pre-World War I era. The New Criterion therefore inscribes itself in the effort, ongoing and at work everywhere today to construct some new conservative cultural counterrevolution, whose terms range from the aesthetic to the ultimate defense of the family and religion. It is therefore paradoxical that this essentially political project should explicitly deplore the omnipresence of politics in contemporary culture-----an infection largely spread during the sixties but which Kramer holds responsible for the moral imbecility of the postmodernism of our own period.

Postmodernism follows high modernism proper, as the latter’s waste product.

Brian Wilson + Van Dyke Parks - Orange Crate Art

Van Dyke Parks collaborated with Brian Wilson on the latter's SMiLE, the follow-up to the Beach Boys' groundbreaking album Pet Sounds. Parks and Wilson didn't work again until 1995, nearly 30 years after the SMiLE sessions. However, the resulting album, Orange Crate Art isn't quite a collaboration -- it's a collection of Parks songs as sung by Wilson.

The album is an aural landscape that evokes the California of bygone era woven around pop, calypso, samba and other non-rock melanges from Van Dyke Parks' compositions.

Visual technologies

In The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture Graham MacPhee says that the penetration of visual culture by technology — from the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century, through film and video to the
new digital information technologies — has come to be understood as one of the central features of Western modernity.

Visual technologies permeate the main forms of mass-mediated popular culture, and have played a crucial role in the development of modern mass societies and the subsequent emergence of what might be described — however problematically — as a new global cultural space. Equally, their proliferation has also had a powerful influence on modes of representation and meaning that do not appear to be directly dependent on technology, as is perhaps most evident in the case of modernism and postmodernism in literature and the visual arts. The complex changes associated with these developments have demanded new paradigms of cultural, social and political explanation, and as such they have increasingly come to be seen as undermining the most basic assumptions of modern philosophy and critical thought.The far-reaching nature of this impact, and the perception of its cumulative power over an extended period, has contributed powerfully to the sense of a radical historical discontinuity between our own social, cultural and political situation and those which preceded it.

MacPhee adds that for a number of theorists — perhaps most prominently Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Frederic Jameson — the technological organization of vision and the visible defines the fundamental character of our contemporary condition.

What unites the different positions developed by these writers is the view that the perceptual parameters of the modern subject become redundant within the technological image-space of post-war, Western culture, which is therefore understood as marking the collapse of the broader conceptual frameworks developed by modern thought. Rather than confirming the unity and spontaneity of the modern subject, the new condition of technological appearance is seen either to mark the failure of such a subject to assimilate this new sensory world, or as final proof of this subject's propensity to violence and domination.

From this perspective, what defines our contemporary condition is precisely the inapplicability of modern paradigms of representation, meaning, action and politics, paradigms that are understood as irretrievably bound up with the model of an isolated and self-sufficient perceiving consciousness.

philosophy + art

In "Philosophy, culture, image: Rancière’s ‘constructivism’ " in Philosophy of Photography (Issue 1 no1) John Roberts observes highlights the tradition of the critique of the state-sponsored and market-organized technologically produced image; its certain logic of conformity, instrumentality and systematic coercion; and on the ‘dead’ life of technologically produced and distributed images that make one culturally stupid or morally culpable. He comments:

Most philosophical writing on art is either after-the-fact in its judgements, or, through the speculative elision of concept and work, engaged in producing judgements that are wildly capricious or irrelevant. This is largely a result of the fact that the movement of philosophical thought from concept to artwork, and from artwork to concept, is rarely internal to the conflicted labour immanent to the work of art and its relations to the conflicted labour of other artworks. Artworks are invariably fitted up for scrutiny on the basis of their susceptibility to philosophical abstraction, and not on the basis of the historicity of their technicity and form. (Ironically this is precisely Derrida’s point in his critique of Heidegger’s reading of Van Gogh’s ‘peasant shoes’ (Derrida 1987).) Philosophy arrives at the doorstep of the artwork offering sustenance to what it sees as art’s conceptually bedraggled and parched identity, whereas, on the contrary, it should be attending to the thing that provides modern art with its identity – the internal violence of the art- work’s historicity. This is why modernist criticism has always been sniffy and derogatory about philosophers on art: philosophers lose sight of the contingency of the object’s making and therefore lose sight of the significance of the artwork’s claims on the particular as against its exemplary status. But, more pertinently, in the drive of philosophy to defend the extension or expansion of the art-work through philosophical reflection, the artwork’s self-disablement or self-violation is rendered amenable, and even opaque, to conceptualization.

Philosophy needs to provide an account of the artwork’s particularity and internal relationality as the basis for a discussion of the problem of art’s social form and visibility.

Fair enough. But there is still our increasing seduction and narcotization by the images that support a market economy the same process of reenchantment that the Situationists referred to in their society of the spectacle.

Stefan Canham: Bauwagen

Stefan Canham's photographic work focuses on the usage of urban space, in particular on marginalized communities and forms of self-housing. He says about his Bauwagen: Mobile Squatters project:

In the 1980s people began to use “Bauwagen” (trailers originally produced to accommodate workers on building sites), circus wagons, lorries and busses to occupy quite often potentially valuable but disused plots of inner city land. Today there are around one hundred “Bauwagen”-sites in German towns and cities, from Flensburg up on the Danish border down to Tuebingen and Munich. There may be as many as ten thousand people living in “Bauwagen”...Bauwagen” are alien elements wedged into the city’s structure, improvised out of rundown vehicles, wooden beams and beautiful window-frames scavenged from demolished buildings, metal sheeting, styrofoam, tar, and just plain debris. Since they lack cellar and attic, the outside is used as storage space.

Canham’s photographs of interiors are clearly meant to show how homely these trailers can be.

Stefan Canham, Berlin, 2004, from Bauwagen series

dream worlds + post modernity

In her essay "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe" in October, Vol. 73 (Summer, 1995), Susan Buck-Morss says that an industrial dreamworld dominated the political imagination in both East and West for most of the century. In the East the dream-form was a utopia of production, whereas in the West it was a utopia of consumption. But both shared intimately the optimistic vision of a mass society beyond material scarcity, and the collective, social goal, through massive industrial construction, of transforming the natural world. She says that though cities worldwide have continued to attract immigrants to them in ever greater numbers, drawn by the promise of work and by dreams of consumption, a countertrend is increasingly apparent:

dreams are divorcing themselves from the space of the city. Recent urban planning has been more concerned with security against crime than with staging phantasmagorias for the crowd's delight.
Shopping malls as shrines to consumption have detached themselves from the urban landscape and are capable of relocation anywhere. While the automobile as dream-image is now tarnished by the sobering awareness of ecological realities, the accommodation of this individualist mode of mass transportation was disastrously destructive of urban space.

She adds that Postmodern architecture initially was committed to improving cities as a social space. But the economic and political climate was not favorable for urban reform. Rather, a postmodern virtue was made of the accidental way that cities evolve, justifying the lack of any urban policy whatsoever. Style has become eclectic, a melange of neo-, post-, and retroforms that deny responsibility for present history.

They reproduce the dream-image, but reject the dream. In this cynical time of the "end of history," adults know better than to believe in social utopias of any kind-those of production or consumption. Utopian fantasy is quarantined, contained within the boundaries of theme parks and tourist preserves, like some ecologically threatened but nonetheless dangerous zoo animal. When it is allowed
expression at all, it takes on the look of children's toys-even in the case of sophisticated objects-as if to prove that utopias of social space can no longer be taken seriously; they are commercial ventures, nothing more.