24 04/10
02:28

The hollowness of Open Media

Tags: | Categories: digital media

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.

06 01/10
22:13

Mixed Musics

Tags: , , | Categories: art, digital media

mixed-music

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.

28 11/09
18:27

Star Wars in a notebook

Tags: , , , | Categories: digital media, DIY

Hi,
fan productions can appeared in different ways, sometimes these productions are completely independent and others are encouraged by the owners of a particular media commodity, nevertheless, often, fan productions kindly expand the fictional world of a media product by appropriation of its narrative.

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.

11 11/09
22:55

I’m using Linux

Hi,
since two months I’m using a linux distribution in my hp pavillion ze5300, it is OpenSUSE 11.1.

drnn_rebellion
I tried several years ago with Lycoris, but it didn’t work out. Now I have a dual system computer with OpenSUSE in one partition as default OS and Microsoft Windows in another partition while I do a complete transition. The installation took 30 minutes and it was easier and simpler as I initially thought.

Right now, I’m using most of the times Linux. My activities include, surf in and communicate via internet (firefox, skype); process documents, spreadsheets, and presentations (openoffice); work with pictures, photos, and images (gimp); download photos from my digital camera; write sketches in processing; listen to music and watch movies (vlc); and finally to keep update my blog (wordpress), and my gallery of pictures. It might be most of my time in front of my computer.

I work as designer and I’ve to acknowledge that some applications are behind the mainstream and standards imposed by firms as for instance Adobe, nevertheless with a little bit of time, patience and creativity to teak; I’ve discover that I can produce pieces of a good quality in software like: InkScape or Scribus.

So far I’ve had some annoyances with my wireless card and some video projectors, but my machine is quite old and I guess the newer the distro the easier to find adequate drivers and firmware for Linux distributions.

The curve of learning for somebody with no experience in configuring an OS is low (two weeks to one month) as many things work automatically, for instance on-line updates through YaST or software installation. If this is not enough, I’ve found in forums a large community of people always ready to help :). The system is very very stable and reliable. Before I had very few problems, including some annoying viruses, with Windows XP.

I went into Linux because of my conviction about the freedom we have to have in choosing, changing and distributing digital objects under the GNU/GPL and Creative Commons licences, we cannot continue being segmented and restricted by software companies without having access to the source codes of what actually builds our digital environment and without the freedom to share these digital objects. OpenSUSE is distributed under the GNU licence.

16 10/09
00:21

Healing is shown in Buenos Aires

HI,
healing-video

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

05 10/09
23:42

The remix is a machine art!

| Categories: art, digital media, machine

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

 
Basic combination of fotos 

‘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 assembled, 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

08 09/09
06:24

The cyberpunk

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?

17 06/09
13:49

Comparisons: two

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.

20 11/08
23:39

Images after the reality after the images.

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?



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