conversations

from cinema to moving image

In the editorial of the first issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image it is stated that the journal's aim is to provide a platform where cinema, taken in its broadest sense, as image in motion and image that moves, can be a topic of serious scholarly work.

The editors observe that particularly since the digital shift:

the uses and definitions of “cinema” have become permeable. We are not going, however, to tackle the thorny issue of definitions here: the question “what is cinema?” or “what is the philosophy of cinema?” will be left to our contributors in this and future issues. Nevertheless, unquestionably, today, cinema means not just film, but other forms of the moving image. Traditional filmmakers are increasingly using digital and animation techniques and the usual understanding of cinema as film is being challenged with the digital shift. The same is true of television. Furthermore, ever since the 1960s, artists have increasingly incorporated video into installations in exhibitions and, more recently, new creative outputs include the use of new media.

They add that the shift, therefore, from film theory and the philosophy of film into studies of the moving image and its related philosophy, is not only a theoretical option, but it corresponds to, and reflects an actual change, one which extends across contemporary visual culture as a whole.

Britpop: Blur

Brit-pop, which is a part of the larger British cultural movement called Cool Britannia, was a reaction to the Americanization of British culture. Blur, was a key band in this cultural resistance, and their third album Parklife made them the most popular band in the UK in 1990's.

The track below, "This Is a Low ", is from Parklife:

Blur can be seen as continuing the English guitar pop tradition of the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Who, the Jam, Madness, and the Smiths.

Xmas

Merry Xmas everyone.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Christmas Lily, 2010

Hope you all have a good break. Cheers

Captain Beefheart: RIP

I read that Captain Beefheart ----Don Van Vliet--has died. If there was ever an avant garde in rock music then Beefheart was a central figure along with the Velvet Underground.

This Ice Cream for Crow track is from the album of the same name. Made in 1982 Ice Cream for Crow it was the last studio album made by Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band.

Whilst Ice Cream for Crow was rooted in past musical ideas, it points toward a new musical direction for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Trout Mask Replica from 1969 is recognized as his best album. It straddles the border between blues, jazz, rock and classical music, is a post-Cage-an study on tonality.

In his History of Rock Musi Piero Scaruffi says that:

Trout Mask Replica is above all a collage of abstract paintings, each different from the other in color, intensity and contrast, yet they're all homogeneous in their "abstraction". Most of the songs are miniatures of dense, dark and crackling sounds that present themselves as a white man's rhythm and blues, but are in effect delirious episodes of psychosis.

He adds that the work was The work is so innovative and complex as to be nearly indecipherable. The rhythm section sounds so polyrhythmic that all rhythm is lost. The singing, vaguely interested in music, travels within alien universes. The guitar acts as atonal contracanto. The counterpoint of the ensemble is something halfway between the orchestral chaos of Charles Ives and the audacity of John Cage.

Susan Sontag: photography+ interpretation

Susan Sontag understands interpretation itself to be quintessentially narrative in nature, and since without accompanying captions and analyses, photographs cannot tell a story, or even generate a complete understanding of the situation they are expressing, they are neither narratives, nor therefore, interpretations. In fact, left to themselves, photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale.

In short, they are not 'writing' and thus relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness. Without the narrative coherence of prose, photographs do not qualify as interpretations at all; whilst photography is faulted for not being writing. What we have is a defence of the position of the value of the written word over photographic images; and or even the value of narrative coherence and understanding over all other forms of
understanding.

Judith Butler in her "Photography, War, Outrage,"published in the house journal of the Modern Language Association: PMLA 120(3):822-27, 2005, disputes Susan Sontag’s claim that pictures cannot create and sustain a distinctive interpretation of an event because they are too selective:

For our purposes, it makes sense to consider that the mandated visual image produced by embedded reporting, the one that complies with state and defense department requirements, builds an interpretation. ... We do not have to have a caption or a narrative at work to understand that a political background is being explicitly formulated and renewed through the frame. In this sense, the frame takes part in the interpretation of the war compelled by the state; it is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself interpreting, actively, even forcibly." (p. 823)

Butler's view is that the phenomenon of embedded reporting is a way of /interpreting/ in advance what will and will not be included in a field of perception, and thus even before the viewer is confronted with the image, interpretation is always already in play. The photographic frame in embedded reporting and advertising in our visual culture is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself interpreting, actively, even forcibly.

litspam

An important article on spam in Radical Philosophy by Finn Brunton. This introduces the concept of litspam, which is what my weblogs are subject to these days. The days of spammers circumventing spam filters by purposely misspelling key words, for example replacing "I" with "1" in the word "click have gone.

Spam Lit exists to circumvent the powerful spam filters developed by major email providers such as Google, Yahoo, AOL. These spam filters recognize the characteristics of typical spam messages and automatically delete them. Brunton says:

the spammers faced a truly strange problem of language: to produce text on a mass scale that would convince the filtering algorithm of its legitimacy while bearing the spam’s payload to the human on the far side of the filter. They had to create bifacial text, a kind of anadrome which reads with two distinct meanings when read forward and backward. This was a twist on Turing’s test: not only to convince a human but to convince a machine as well. Their solution to this problem created the first mechanized avant-garde, the advent of spam’s modernism: litspam.

The problem with trying to beat the Bayesian filter by adding random words to a spam message -- a ‘dictionary attack’ -- was that most words are little-used and new to the filter, so it would weigh them evenly without influencing the result. You need vital language and full sentences, with slight variations to keep the filter from learning your tricks.

The vast corpus of public domain literature happened to be ideal for this purpose, fed into the algorithmic maw of a program to be chopped up and reassembled, enlisting the Professor Challenger stories of Conan Doyle and the minor novels of Sinclair Lewis in the task of getting an online casino ad in front of a pair of human eyes. The result is immediately recognizable, a stochastic knockoff of Tzara or Burroughs, rife with bizarre synonyms that only we particularly anatomically-minded humans would understand, and a stop/start rhythm, flashes of lucidity in the midst of a fugue state, akin to rapidly changing television channels. (‘I began to learn, gentlemen,’ as the ape says in Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy,’ another awkward speaker learning language as a means of escape: ‘Oh yes, one learns when one has to; one learns if one wants a way out; one learns relentlessly.’) These litspam systems.... don’t need to work perfectly, just well enough. If you send enough messages, you’ll get someone who will overlook the lexical potsherds and click.

Very little litspam comes into my mailbox. Most of the lit spam that attacks the weblog comments to goes into the junk folder of the weblogs, where I eliminate it after 24 hours. It's a pain, but it is manageable.

critical commentary on WikiLeaks

Geert Lovink + Patrice Riemens in Twelve theses on WikiLeaks at Eurozine argue that WikiLeaks is an indication of a new culture of exposure beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency. In Thesis 5 they say:

The steady decline of investigative journalism caused by diminishing funding is an undeniable fact. Journalism these days amounts to little more than outsourced PR remixing. The continuous acceleration and over-crowding of the so-called attention economy ensures there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are increasingly disinclined to see the workings and the politics of the global neoliberal economy discussed at length. The shift from information to infotainment has been embraced by journalists themselves, making it difficult to publish complex stories.

This is the media landscape WikiLeaks has entered. it is an an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture, combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism that emerged in the 1990s. Lovink + Riemens say:

Traditional investigative journalism used to consist of three phases: unearthing facts, crosschecking these and backgrounding them into an understandable discourse. WikiLeaks does the first, claims to do the second, but omits the third completely. This is symptomatic of a particular brand of open access ideology, where content production itself is externalized to unknown entities "out there".... it is simply presumed that analysis and interpretation will be taken up by the traditional news media. But this is not happening automatically. The saga of the Afghan War Logs and Cablegate demonstrate that WikiLeaks has to approach and negotiate with well-established traditional media to secure sufficient credibility.

At the same time, these media outlets prove unable to fully process the material, inevitably filtering the documents according to their own editorial policies.

The sublime today

In his “Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull and the Capitalist Sublime,” in The Sublime Now, eds. Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), Luke White refers to Fredric Jameson theory of a “postmodern sublime":

as forming an unthinkable and unpresentable totality within which the subject of global capital must attempt—however vainly—to map him- or herself....Where I depart from Jameson’s analysis, however, is with regard to his understanding of this sublime of global capitalism as an entirely new thing. Jameson discusses the sublime of Burke and Kant as posited in relation not to the totalising “second nature” of capitalist modernity, but to nature itself. However, it is my contention that capital—with its formlessness, its constant passing beyond its own finitude, its implacable force—has always been at the heart of the notion of the sublime, a notion which, after all, arose to prominence in Western criticism and aesthetics alongside the massive transformations of the institutions and practices of modern capital which P. G. M. Dickson has termed a “financial revolution,” and alongside the rise of the discourse of economics itself.

White adds that if he is right in this contention then the natural sublime of Romanticism and its successors is itself a displaced and reassuring projection of a relation of the modern subject to capital, and the Jamesonian sublime is at the heart of a modern as well as a postmodern sensibility.

I would argue that the sublime begins as an attribute or effect of first nature—raw nature beyond the human, nature as the non-human that sometimes threatens humanity but nevertheless is a material condition for its existence. But in the twentieth century these complex feelings become associated more with the self-made disasters of society, or second nature. Society hardens into a second nature because the fact that social relations are historically constituted—and thus transformable—is concealed from everyday experience: social relations become reified or naturalized. This shift in the object of the sublime— from first to second nature—is a long time taking hold in critical discourses but is consolidated in the decades following 1945.

The place-name are Auschwitz and Hiroshima. These are shorthand for qualitatively new powers of violence gained by the nation-state and the way that these powers were historically realized should terrify us far more than the random natural disasters of old. The meliorism and Enlightenment notion of progress that inform Kant’s sublime----the encounter with the power or size of first nature is ultimately the occasion for reaffirming human freedom and dignity----becomes naïve.

These sublime new powers of the state are products of capitalist modernity itself: ie., the techno-productive power and instrumental reason have developed within the frame of the modern nation-state and capitalist economy and under the globally dominant logic of capitalist social relations. Second nature is capitalist: it is the society and world system that capitalist modernity produced.

Prospect Journal + photographer's intellectual property

I came across Prospect Journal an online journal that is produced by University of California, San Diego. It even has an informative blog. This is work solidly within the public domain and an "innovation commons." It is an example of how the Internet is built on an 'innovation commons.'

The Journal's blurb states that the journal showcases:

works created by students who wish to broaden their understanding of issues of contemporary and global relevance. Placing ourselves at the intersection of policy and the arts, we believe that together we can better understand current affairs from a variety of vantage points.Our essays analyze issues and prescribe solutions to problems around the world in a thought provoking manner. Visually-arresting art pieces convey a multitude of perspectives by representing themes that make policies memorable. Travelogues and photo essays allow first-hand exposure to locales that may seem distant, but have a lasting influence on domestic policies.

So the journal is not part of the counterrevolution by those who prospered under the old regime, are threatened by the Internet and who aim to enclose the commons in the name of private property.

The stories were interesting and each article had an interesting photo. Then I noticed the top three stories on the webpage did not credit the photographer, despite having a extensive bibliography. The only credit on two of them is 'Image courtesy of Flickr.' Everyone knows that Flickr is not the creator of the photo. It is an archive of the work of photographers. So the photos were not being credited and Smit's creative expression not recognized.

Then I came across this image posted by Jonathan van Smit (Kiwi) in my contacts on Flickr. Underneath the image Kiwi stated, I'm getting tired of people using my photos without permission or attribution....eg., University of California, San Diego. So the photos in Prospect Journal were being ripped off, even though it is not that difficult to ask for permission or to grant attribution for a photo for non-commercial use.

Why aren't they collaborating with photographers on their stories? Isn't that how the open digital culture based on the doctrine of fair use works? The editorial team took the story down and stated in comments on the photo:

We assure you that our staff had no intention to steal or reproduce Mr. Van Smit's work without obtaining permission and using proper citation.

However, the top three stories on the webpage do not credit the photographer, despite having a extensive bibliography. The only credit on two of them is 'Image courtesy of Flickr.' They have chosen good photos that given an added dimension to the text ---but stolen the intellectual property rights in the process. This appears to be the standard practice of the Prospect Journal's staff.

Historically, copyright law has struck a balance between giving creators enough incentive to create -- and enough money to live on+- and freeing up their works for future generations. Recently, however, the debate over intellectual property rights is framed by the culture industry in an either or: no protection (i.e. anybody can take anything over the Internet and do what they want with it) versus complete protection (the copyright holder is allowed to decide any and all use of the protected material), which the complete control copyright-holders (or at least the big corporate players) are now claiming (and are close to getting).

The permission and attribution required by fair use of the image is the middle ground between the corporations "companies vs. pirates" view. Kiwi displayed the license information and he displayed the licensing information in an understandable way. Permission would have been easy to obtain case and attribution is standard practice in academia for non-commercial use. The Prospect Journal's staff failed to do either.

Tom Waits meets Captain Beefheart

The track 'Underground' is from Tom Waits' 1983 album Swordfishtrombones

I find it hard to see why this album was seen as weird or as notoriously difficult. It is a break from the the piano-driven barroom ballads of his past and connects him to Howlin' Wolf, Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera) and Captain Beefheart.

Rethinking the Contemporary art School

The latest issue of Broadsheet, a publication from the The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) there is a review by Sean Lowry of Rethinking the Contemporary art School: The artist, the PhD and the academy (edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos).

Traditionally the artist is granted the privilege of creative prerogatives over and above the norms of the state with the entire academy can be understood as living in a state of exception. However, the academy, including the art school, lives with increasing market pressures and the university administration increasingly demanding that departments, disciplines, and faculties respond to the market. However, that ‘market’ should not be confined to the economic balance sheet between cost and production value but understood as the larger public that consumes the products of academic research, whatever the discipline.

Another tradition is the dichotomy between theory and practice has troubled thinking on art. The teaching of art exclusively in terms of ‘skills training’ devalues the educational value of critical debate, discussion and difference. For some art students, a correlation between a lack of interest in theory and conceptions of art as a sensory expression of their individuality remains deeply embedded in the understanding of their own practice.

Lowry highlights the role of research given that the challenge for contemporary art education is to somehow provide a structure for experimentation. He says:

Do artists need PhDs? If so what is the best model? what is an appropriate relationship between a studio practice and a written thesis? How might the relationship between theory and practice at an undergraduate level best prepare students for postgraduate study? How can the boundaries between disciplines be made more permeable? will creative endeavours be forever marginalised within the research culture of the university?

The consensus in Rethinking the Contemporary art School is that:

education in general has shifted from teacher-centred instruction and a linear one-size fits all format toward student-centred facilitation and interaction. In accordance with navigational approaches emphasised by digital communication, students are often better served by being able to browse and then take their own course pathways through a curriculum....The net result is less broadcasting and more collaborative or participatory modes of production and distribution. we are now all both uploading and downloading culture. It is clear that any pedagogy that does not acknowledge and integrate this reality is unsustainable.