‘Ah’ said the old lady, ‘painters always make ladies out prettier than they are, or they wouldn’t get any custom, child. The man that invented the machine for taking likenesses might have know that would never succeed; it’s a deal too honest, –a deal,’ said the old lady, laughing very heartily at her own acuteness. [1. p.90]

1. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. London, England: Penguin Books. (1837) 2009.

‘Become mediocre’ is the only morality that makes sense. [qtd. 1, p.22]

Now:
Become spectacular is the only morality that makes sense
Become consumed is the only morality that makes sense
Become pictured is the only morality that makes sense
Become green is the only morality that makes sense
Become transparent is the only morality that makes sense

How could then be described the morality of our days?
It is said that a healthy and progressive modern society is that one with a large middle class to produce consumption. The middle class is a vast collection of people whose social relations are mediated by consumption. These mediations are materialized in different kind of objects like images, products, and trends. Today we have a mediation of second order. The digital media have first co-opted all other channels to be informed of new trends; second they have challenged the products as mediators of social status; finally in the digital media are produced all the images of the spectacle we live in. The morality of today is shaped in the digital media. But still, how could it be described?

1. Berman, Marshall. All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. London, UK: Verso. 1983.

This particular kind of exposure of poverty usually combines famished, dirty, and slavish aesthetics. This cunning combination produces in the spectator a saturation similar to the experience of watching a pornographic film. S/he is delighted to be confronted with the uncivilized poor for s/he gets the impression of a critical and denouncing insight. Nothing farther from reality because the artist has used the poor merely as a commodity. The image of poverty in such expert hands produces a piece to be consumed, enjoyed, and disposed as soon as possible, not to be understood.

The voracious artist has hunted the poor, captured his image, ripped out his dignity, and served it us in a neat frame. The naked prey stands in front of us to be scrutinized, commented, and dismissed. The purpose of the spectacle is to spot the compromise of either artist and spectator with social issues. The poor clean us out.

The Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo), shot in 1978, in Cali and Bogotá, by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, is a false documentary that satirises this artistic practice.

Today the production and distribution tools for media have to be free and open. Free and open software have brought a new perception toward these tools. Steadily, we leave pyramidal and individual forms of ownership and production in media to openly share materials, ideas, and procedures in social surfaces without centres. To embrace collaborative forms of production is a breakthrough in media (art, design, and production). Free software allows to collective knowledge and aesthetic to surface. These expressions have been largely, neglected by close and feudal tools as poor quality. We were conveniently convinced that only industrial and formal knowledge in media production was proper. This pervaded the media arts and the designs mainly focused on spectacle and effects.

Knowledge has to run free across the very media. People has to remember how to collaborate if we are to change our world. But digital media are meant to fragment and be used by mere machine bureaucrats in a frenzy consumption state. Artists and designers! WE have the duty to denounce and expose this. WE need to defranchise the production of images, narratives, experiences, and objects. WE have to believe it is possible to overcome to supremacy of the bureaucrat system with single ideas and single tasks. WE ought to appropriate these tools before they appropriate us. WE need to fight the self-referential trend of the open media, if WE are to see the variety of the possible. WE need to open art and design and a first step to free art and design.

Popular is to be comfortable.

Popular is to be right in the middle.

Popular is to be standard.

Popular is to be in.

A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks.[1, p.36]

Every machine is part of system of machines and all of them integrate a constant current. This current has no starting point nor end, it is just a collection of connections that flows. Thus, a machine is perceived through the fractures it creates in a flow. The fractures frame discreet portions of the flow, therefore machines have inputs and outputs (other flows), and in the middle a particular flow is processed. If there is something to say about a machine is that it fractures a collection of flows. A machinic attitude in media must then make evident the fractures rather than to hide them.

1. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1983

The director of French intelligence had no scruples about their morality. It was rather that he inevitably found the exercise depressing. Nothing, he had discovered long ago, revealed quite as completely the emptiness, the banality, the squalor of most lives as did that harvest of the electronic scanning of an unguarded soul [1, p.270].

The recent explosion of people-led media contents in the Internet has led some to claim that the availability to freely exchange videos, photos, news, and comments in on-line platforms is making us to enjoy a state-of-grace not seen before, a media democracy. Now, we, ‘users’, are part of the media as we feed and actively participate in it. I share, partly, this enthusiasm. However, I distrust the so-called freedom and openness that are being actively promoted. I called this phenomenon the open media (OM). It is ‘open’ because everyone with access can introduce material and it is ‘media’ because we ought not forget that the logic of mass media still is hidden behind the spot.

Mass media are highly industrial and sophisticated means of technological communication that allow a central and hierarchical organization, like a state or a company, to widespread a package of contents. Ideologies and desires are the most common of these massively distributed contents. Traditionally, mass media have been closed and the audience do nothing else but to consume. The ethic and aesthetics of mass media respond to the popular taste.

The open media are empty vessels filled with the content of its consumers. These media are opened for they openly offer a general structure and each user produce its own version. However, the open media do not belong to the users, rather they are used by the owners of the media as part of it. The users are programmed to constantly feed the media with pictures, opinions, and videos. These myriad of materials are as empty as the media itself. In the OM we do care about ourselves and about our desire to be for short instants on the spot. In the OM we spend (waste) our time in front of a digitally enhanced looking-glass. There is anything else to be seen there but selfish banality.

1. Collins, Larry and Dominique Lapierre. The Fifth Horseman. New York, NY:Avon Book. 1980.

Hi, a new year has started and I want to welcome it with a short reflection about hybridity. This concept is perhaps the most common idea to describe digital media. Hybrids are often the result of either two machinic principles: the assemblage and the remix. A hybrid is an individual resulting from the combination of other individuals. One key characteristic of this process is that it keeps some features of the original beings into the offspring. They usually exhibit these features on its surface. However, once a hybrid is closely observed it also shows that the inner processes belonging to its parents have also been hybridized. In media it means the languages and the techniques of production, surface and subface.

The picture above exhibits for instance, a digital photo taken by me of a guadual mixed in GIMP (an image processor) with a pattern I did in Processing. The process is quite simple: four superimposed layers with different kinds of colour blending.

Music is plenty of examples of hybrids, on September 22th, I enjoyed in Bogotá a concert given by Headphone, a group of music students from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia that fuses music with visual arts and dance. During the concert I got particular interested by the work of Andrés Montero, whose piece ‘Colombia Electrónica II’ combines a Gaita (link in Spanish) with an electronic console. In this piece he made use of one single gaita which sound was been live recorded by the console. The electronic console fixed the sound and then released it while it was recording the following sound made by Montero. After three minutes or so the musician was accompanied by a chorus of Gaitas produced by his inputs on the electronic machine and the feedback of this. The traditional music of the Colombian Caribbean was suddenly mixed with the electronic folklore of loops and feedback. This type of assemblages are called Mixed Musics [1], and happen when different traditions to produce art pieces converge in the same machine to be hybridized.

1. Bejarano Calvo, Carlos Mauricio. A vuelo de murciélago el sonido, nueva materialidad. Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 2006.

Fans are all around the world and it is usual to find contests of fan media productions held by the mass media companies with participants from different countries. Lucas Films and Atoms Films support a yearly Star Wars fan video competition with different categories and prizes, it is called Star Wars Challenge. In the 2009 competition, for the first time a Latin American won in a category. The winner in the category of Best Animated Movie was Óscar Triana, a Colombian animator.

Star Wars in a Notebook has a hand-draw, and cut and paste style. And in spite of its neat animation it keeps the DIY visual style of fan video productions. It was reported by UN Periodico at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (in Spanish). And below you can enjoy this 3 minutes animation piece.

Here can also be watched the winners of each category as well as the firsts nominated for the 2010 competition.

Education for Death (1946) shows how USA media industry used the visual language of animation during WWII. They associated fairy tales, popular culture, their own style of cartooning, and a clear political message. Dark times were those of WWII, from a historical (and moral) point of view, those methods against the enemy were justifiable. Today, Are they still justifiable? What media languages are employed today to attack? Are the media weapons?

After watching this piece, I recommend to take a look at two previous posts, Duck and Cover and Social-Sex Attitude in Adolescence.

I have great news for today, Healing was selected for a special show about Colombian Video Art in Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The announcement can be read here and the exhibition will happen between October 16th and December 12th in the following address: Arenales 1540 – C1061AAR. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. REPÚBLICA ARGENTINA

Art is dead, long live to the machine art. Vladimir Tatlin.

‘Machine’ is one of the principal concepts of the modernity. Machine is accurately described, by Broeckmann, as a productive assemblage of forces towards a non-teleological end [1, p.195]. This concept has determined the fate of all sort of practices aimed at producing, organizing, planning, designing, and/or projecting all sort of objects, spaces, social structures, sonic rhythms, and visual sensations in the western societies along at least the last two centuries. In spite of the heterogeneity of forces that are assemblaged this concept is totalizing because first, it covers production, organization, and serialization; and second it encompasses all forms of creative work that are treated in similar manners and usually tends towards homogenisation into an uniform social structure at the the same tic-tac-rhythm.

The machinic is the principle that specifies these assemblages, it differs, for instance, from mechanical, electrical, and digital because it covers all of them as characteristics of different sorts of machines, to determine then that what matters is the kind of work the machine does.

Let’s take as example a combinatory machines such as a blender. In a blender different fruits are mixed to produce juice, thus a mix is a homogeneous surface resulting from the assemblage of dissimilar sources. Clearly, a blender could be described as a mechanical machine but mechanical is not enough when specifying the principle that rules a machine that mixes. Mixing is a type of machinic principle.

Remix is another step up in the spiral of rhythm machines that combine ready-made material into new instances. Today, remix can be found everywhere, it has become the form of production per excellence of our times. Lev Manovich has called attention to the remix in contemporary cinema, visual communication, and architecture in which the results are hybrid forms with an homogeneous and fluid surface, and an unreal aesthetic.

If remixing is considered a machinic process, then is a different type of machine art. These forms of machine art cannot be approached based on the type of machine, usually algorithmic, neither they can be characterised by their particular set of visual forms. Rather we have to make use of the principle of combination in which what is being combined is less important than the process itself: the (re)combination. The contemporary machine art differs from that of Tatlin because is one of conversions and not of subversions.

1. Broeckmann, Andreas. “Image, Process, Performance, Machine: Aspects of an Aesthetics of The Machinic”. MediaArtHistories. Ed. Oliver Grau. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 193-205
]]> http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/10/05/the-remix-is-a-machine-art/feed/ 0 http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/09/08/the-cyberpunk/ http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/09/08/the-cyberpunk/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 05:24:32 +0000 admin http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/?p=298 HI, it’s been a long time without writing here. Many things have happened during the last month, I’m back in Colombia and I’ll be here most likely for some months. Today, I want to get back to a topic I just mentioned before, the cyberpunk. This is a portmanteau that mixes a prefix with a word. The former means control and the latter refers to aggression. The cyberpunk has been the icon of freedom, anarchy and response that the computer culture has championed since the 1980s. However the cyberpunk term is quite contradictory, at first glance the cyberpunk seems to be in control due the access to certain technology but soon we discover that indeed is the punk who is being controlled by that technology, similarly as in a Greek tragedy.

The prefix cyber, is taken form an ancient Greek word meaning steersman. It connotes an individual with a clear destination in mind and a planned route to get there. Cyber refers to an individual that acts upon the world, rather than one being acted upon. An individual that exerts action on the world and therefore to control. From the 1970s on Punk is a term used to characterize young subcultures that are brutalized and marginalized by a dominant society. Punks usually externalize and re-present such abuse by disfiguring them selves or their look. A punk acts as an aggressive surface to the external social pressure by hitting back the dominant society.

The classical example of the cyberpunk is Johnny Mnemonic. In the eponymous novel, Johnny’s personality is been erased because of the overload data he carries on his brain. He is a cyborg, a being with artificial implants that enhance certain features of his body. Johnny’s tragedy is that ultimately he is not in control of his own brain because the data is taken over and his fight is to keep himself save by getting rid of the excess of data. Cyberpunks must behave according to their program, a cyberpunk has no choice but to follow her/his instructions. The control, though internal is away of the cyberpunk. When seen in that way a cyberpunk looks closer to a character of a Greek tragedy, like Ulysses, in which her/his fate was predetermined by the capricious of gods and deities, and not to the liberation promoted by the access to information and therefore knowledge as for instance in Frankenstein.

Are we after almost 30 years of cyber-culture, controlling our lives by accessing large data banks or rather have they taken over every aspect of ours lives, with no space and no time to ourselves than to fill them up? Is our program to fill up these large data banks?

]]> http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/09/08/the-cyberpunk/feed/ 0 http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/06/17/comparisons-two/ http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/06/17/comparisons-two/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:49:42 +0000 admin http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/?p=183 HI, it is often the case, that when discussing media theory, inquiries rise about the practical use of it. Which is the latests hype in media theory? and How can I use these ideas to produce something? How these body of concepts can help me in improving what I’m currently doing? Of course there is nothing wrong with such questions. However, I don’t feel absolutely comfortable with the idea of media theory as a provider of plans or manuals to reach a neat practical goal. Rather I think media theory is a critical field for discussion that sheds light over cultural, social, and technical issues with a perspective of inclusiveness and not of success.

Marshall McLuhan is one of the most quoted media theorist. His writings, though not easy to understand, are still influential in digital media schools. Culture Industries have made profit of his ideas and thereafter have thrown him away in their hysterical quest for the popular market. That accelerated dynamic has given zero time to critically take a grip on hyped terms such as non-linear, repetition, intuitive, and simultaneity. Most of them remain cryptic for most of us, at least to me they do.

Previously, I quoted a series of comparisons from the Introduction to the MIT Press edition of Understanding Media. In the following pairs, Lewis Lapham presents a series of words similar to that [1, p.xxii], identified by McLuhan, between the print to the electrical media. Now, what has impressed me about this list is the strange sense of tribalisation that can be felt in words like: power, wish, magic, legend, and prophesy. Is it a de-regularisation of modern thinking?, or Does this imply a more sophisticated regularisation?. I will call it a soft regularisation. One that instead of segmenting and normalising in order to compose, will mix and remix to do montage and pastiche.

Citizen	–	Nomad
build		wander
experience		innocence
authority		power
happiness		pleasure
literature		journalism
heterosexual		polymorphous
civilization		barbarism
will		wish
truth as passion		passion as truth
peace		war
achievement		celebrity
science		magic
doubt		certainty
drama		pornography
history		legend
argument		violence
wife		whore
art		dream
agriculture		banditry
politics		prophecy

Many of the right-column words also, oddly, remind me of ‘experiential design’ as a more ‘human’ stage in designing pleasurable objects, which usually means that the persuasion, design is intended to, is made more convincing and subtly to be noticed. Thus, we, the nomads, buy more happily whatever the  ‘evangelist’ wants us to consume. A barbaric hedonist horde.

---

1. Lapham, Lewis. “Introduction: The Eternal Now”. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. By Marshall McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994. ix-xxiii.
]]> http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/06/17/comparisons-two/feed/ 0 http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/05/18/star-wars-fan-videos/ http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/05/18/star-wars-fan-videos/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 18:38:12 +0000 admin http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/?p=139 HI,
one part of my recent thesis discusses fan and amateur video productions in the context of machinima and DIY media. Star Wars holds a large fan community all around the word, only comparable to trekkies, that has made it to achieve its status as cult film. These are very active communities whose members usually get involved in organising festivals and conventions, and in publishing fanzines and other forms of DIY media.

Fans, independent of the cult media, appropriate the original media content to extend its diegetic world. These activities can be read as either participatory or resistant towards the media. The story lines, characters, and aesthetics of the media cult are unfolded in order to fill gaps, or to accommodate them to personal, political, and social issues. In all cases, fan’s productions are deviations of the cult media (film, TV series, video game, and pop bands) that the producers do not support officially, but that in many cases they encourage as long as these productions increase the popularity of their cultural text.

The access to nearly inexpensive tools for media production has brought a proliferation of these fan’s (di,-sub-, and per-) versions with a decent and even high quality. Fanzines, fanart, music videos, mash-ups, disguises, parallel narrations, mods, machinimas, and online forums are part of a huge realm in media production that currently is garnering as much attention as the original productions in the Internet.

Recently, I found via Wired the following videos by Mike Horn, an enthusiast of Star Wars. His DIY productions combine the amateurish style of camcorder video with CG animations. He places the universe of Star Wars in contact with San Francisco and in one of the videos in narrative collision with Star Trek.

]]> http://drnn1076.pktweb.com/2009/05/18/star-wars-fan-videos/feed/ 0