·~{dRNn}~·

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

In 1994 Lapham derived the following pairs from McLuhan’s Understanding Media (Link broken, new link: here – update: 03.07.2009)

As all comparisons do, they seek out to separate and differentiate aiming at better comprehension—especially when put on a table; its logic is more similar to a well rooted tree-like structure rather than to an interconnected mesh of elements in perpetual change.

HI,
recently for n-time I watched again (yeah I know) Blade Runner. I cannot stop finding meanings and inspirations, being awed and getting scared by this film. A couple of sequences made me think again about the nature of the images and its artificiality. Images, in Blade Runner attested both authenticity and proof. In this fictional world there is concern about what is authentic and the humanity of artificial beings is under question. The replicants are perfect simulations of living creatures, they simulate everything at the more finest details, but as simulations they are meant to be something they are not, to possesses something they were denied to have. However, paradoxically they want desperately to be.

The Voight-kampf test.

[...]you are talking about memories

Images, memories, self-imposed references of a source. The production, circulation and consumption of images is a kind of paranoia. Just by looking at my hard drive I came to discover the amazing amount of pictures, images, memories I’ve stored. Some of them are so far away in the time and the space they simulate, that they have become something totally different from my memories, they have life by themselves. Even though I know I’m doomed to continue producing and consuming images. I have to recognised that after a while they are any longer about me and my selfish attempts to save imperceptible moments to live my past again. They replicate themselves and threat me.

A world constructed of images is the final triumph of a chain of simulations to separate ourselves of the alien nature surrounding us. The more clean, immaculate, pure the images the better, this is very well known by Roy Batty, his (its) entire world is an outside-imposed image. Why do we identify much more easier logos, trademarks, people’s images than trees, flowers or mountains? Why do we want to frame everything? Why do we continue believing about the actuality, reality, and neutrality of images? Images are any longer about reality, the world is not the images. Why do we, with anxiety, follow the beauty impose by the generators of images? The meaning-machines are doing a great job, ruling the meanings. We are not away from the images, we are trapped in the images, they one of the new gods. Even worst, as in a Huxleyan nightmare we are happily filling in our world with millions of images every millisecond, all the same, all with an endless replicated selfish meaning(less). The person of the year is you! screamed a big machine, but the picture was empty, nothing in there just a mirror and we looking narcissistically at ourselves, this is our brave world, just a mirror we are too afraid to look beyond it. All these framed moments, are dying like flickrs under a rain of images…

[...] it’s time to die.

[...]you won live, but than again, who does?

While researching for concepts about animation for my thesis work I found this a great old animation referred in The technique of film animation by John Halas and Roger Manvell. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

More Info about Tuslava here, and a short review here:

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. The images react, interpenetrates, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved. Written by Stewart Naunton {snaunton@online.ru}

Hi, we tend to think that mixing media is a new trend but looking back in history sometimes it surprises us with examples that show the opposite. A question I got recently is if mixing, remixing and hybrid media already exist before algorithmic revolution then What is so special about current digital mixing?

Again in the Internet archive, I found this old animation-video which is a mix of text, animation and real footage in a unique package, everything . In “Now you’re talking” (1927) a poor and mistreated telephone has to visit a doctor, a dream its owner would not forget. Check it out!

HI,
drifting around in the internet archive I found the following piece. it is a behavioural manual for teenagers and parents towards a standardisation or normalisation of life. Take a look
Source: the Prelinger archive.

HI, here a funny but scary movie founded by Antonio in the Internet Archive.

Duck and Cover (1951) is a (scary) film about how to mislead population by mass media hysteria. This movie seems to be an educational one targeted to kids and young population but what it does create, is a perpetual state of fear and paranoia typical during the cold war.

After 9:15 you should know what to do in case a nuclear bomb explodes nearby. Just remember the catchphrase “Duck and Cover“, I mean pure and simple terror propaganda.

Definitely a worth watching video.