·~{dRNn}~·

‘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.

My most recent work, Topografías, has been selected for presentation in the Media Art show at the coming X Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales, Colombia.

Topografías is a collection of 6 videos, of approx. 2 minutes length each, in DVD-video. This work explores the hybrid territories in the moving image through the manipulation and mix of live-footage with graphics of topographic representations and digital video defects (artifacts and glitches). The hybrid character in the outcome eliminates the spatio-temporal and narrative references of the source material to centre the attention upon its unreal and artificial aspect. For each sound, a machine composed of modulators and oscilloscopes was made. All sounds were recorded in real-time and improvisatory sessions.

This series of videos and the final piece in DVD-video was developed using exclusively free software, under GNU/GPL licenses. Codecs and containers for audio and video are free, too. The platform for production was openSUSE; video editing, mix, and composting was made in Kdenlive and Avidemux, and oscilloscope machines were built on Pure Data. All source files are available for downloading at Topografías.

ap-pro-pri-ate, adj., v.

1.  -adj. particularly suitable; fitting; compatible: remarks appropriate to the occasion.
2.  -v.t. to set apart for a specific purpose or use: to appropriate funds for an environmental study.
3. to take to or for oneself; take possession of.
4. to take without permission; expropriate.

[1515-25; < LL approopriātus, ptp of appropriāre to make one’s own = L ap– ap-‘ + –propriāre, v. der. of  propious one’s own].

ap-pro-pri-a-tion, n.

1. the act of appropriating.
2. anything appropriated for a special purpose, esp. money authorized to be paid from the public treasury.

[1325-75; ME (< MF) >LL]

Abbreviation key LL: late Latin; ME: middle English; MF middle French.
Source: Random House Webster’s College Dictionary. McGRAW-HILL Edition, 1991.

Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. 4 movements of 12 colours in procession. 2010. Processing

Source codes: first movement, third movement, four movement, second movement

Today the production and distribution tools for media have to be free and open. Free and open software have brought a new perception towards 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 collective knowledge and aesthetic to surface. These expressions have been largely, neglected by close and feudal tools because they are thought as poor quality. We’ve been conveniently convinced that only the industrial and formal knowledge in media production is proper. This idea has pervaded the media arts and the designs as they remain mainly focused on spectacle and effects.

Knowledge has to run free across the very media. People have to remember how to collaborate if we are to change our world. But digital media are meant to fragment and to be used by mere machine bureaucrats in a state of frenzy consumption. 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 consumed.

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.

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.