Andrew's ITP blog

Recently I was brought on a by a musician to do various designs for her band Blue Kid.  Eventually the designs will include: Projections for live performances, their CD cover, linter notes, music videos, and eventually collaborating on interactive installations.

The singer/songwriter, Lydia, and I talked about making an animation to go along with their “Dismemberment Song.” Luckily this timed out with our animation assignment in Comm Lab;  I was eager to take  the opportunity to bring some outside work into ITP.

The song can most simply be defined as a “violent breakup song,” but the style is meant to make that more complex.  Talking with Lydia, it is actually about taking back control of your life.  We decided that it would be redundant, and actually reductive, to have the video just depict  the actions of the lyrics.  And even might be counter-productive to even include images of “the ex.”

Instead we decided to make the video a metaphysical journey of controlling your body and surroundings.  I wanted to include some of Lydia’s features in the protagonist, hence the red hair and tattoo.  However, we also felt it was import to obscure most of her features as to let viewers’ imaginations fill in some of the details.  That choice really helped me find the main visual style for the animation.

This week I worked with Matt Tennie and Will Jennings.  They added a lot of ideas for the sequences, and really helped string the narrative together.  In particular, Will  suggested a few sequences such as the cogs as the central mechanism.  Matt gave ideas for new sequences too. He also  really helped push the pleasure of what was already there.  They both really helped this go from a few ideas around a core, to a cohesive video that can really come together.

Below you’ll see our storyboards for the first verse and chorus, as well as an m4a of the song.

The Dismemberment Song, by Blue Kid

This is our group’s Comm Lab project, a two part letter called “Most Are Bad.”

This video was created along with Cyrus von Hochstette, Eszter Ozsvald, and Matthew Tennie,

This is a link to the pdf that is the first draft of storyboards for our Comm Lab film.  **note** the idea has evolved since this was created.

Story boards wk 1

The properties of a thing are effects on other ‘things’:  if one removes other ‘things,’

then a thing has no properties, i.e. there is no thing without other things, i.e. there is no thing in itself.

— Frederick Nietzsche Will to Power.

I, Mark C. Taylor, am not writing this book.  Yet the book is being written.  It is as if I were the screen through which the words of others flow and on which they are displayed.  Words, thoughts, ideas are never precisely my own; they are always borrowed rather than possessed. […] As boundaries become permeable, it is impossible to know when or where this book began or when and where it will end.

–Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity.

Mark Taylor is an old advisor of mine, and yet these words of his never rang so true to me as they do for this assignment.  I, Andrew Lazarow, am not writing my opinion of intellectual property.  This post will inevitably, like Lethem’s article, be others’ words and ideas flowing through me.   I have only had one real issue with copyright; not nearly enough to form an opinion beyond what I have read and heard from others.

The obvious argument to be made is we live in a network culture.   Things, as Nietzsche aptly observed, cannot exist in and of themselves.  Their properties are relational.  Take a glass vase, for example.  Let’s get beyond the obvious fact that the glass came from sand, which had to be converted into glass.  The key component of a vase is its ability to hold things such as water, or flowers.  Take those away, and all we have is a glass object with a void in the center.  But without anything to hold, does the empty glass object still matter as a vase?

Now let’s look at complexity and network theories about individuals.  After all, we are just as reliant on relationships to define who we are.  Our relationships and interactions through life constantly shape and redefine who we are.  Interactions are also, arguably, the drive that moves ideas down the path of progress.  This belief is the root of Hegel’s dialectic: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

(While I have many issues with Hegel’s system, his emphasis on the impact of exchanging ideas is something I can get behind.)

It is from this perspective that I have major issues with strict copyright legislation—especially when it comes to a strict interpretation of the fair use clause.  Examples abound, as Lethem points out, from Shakespeare to Nabokov of artists borrowing from previous works to create pieces that now define our cannon of “high art.”

My favorite contemporary example is actually the fashion industry.  Fashion does not fit under copyright protection.  (It does fit under trademark protection though.) And this has done some very positive things for the industry.  For one, as Stuart Weitzman admitted in an interview, it has pushed him to remain innovative and step up his game.   This is not a solitary case; it has pushed the whole industry to stay inventive and continue pushing forward.  And as Johanna Blakely points out, the fashion industry has other “Virtues of Copying:”

-       “Democratization of fashion.”

-       “Faster Establishment of Global Trends.”

-       “Induced obsolescence.”

Blakely even made a wonderful graph pointing out the difference in Gross Sales between Low Intellectual Property (IP) industries, and high IP industries:

All of these points seem to make the cases for reducing strict copyright protection.   Which, at this point in my career, I am generally in favor of.  Especially if what we are talking about is a relaxed interpretation of the fair use clause.

My biggest worry about a general relaxation of copyright is a worry that it will create lack of rigor in praxis as well as thought amongst artists and designers.   It is easy to root for Joy Garnett and against Susan Meiselas.  However, I have to side with Meiselas when she makes points like: “Technology allows us to do many things, but that does not mean we must do them. Indeed, it seems to me that if history is working against context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim that context.”

Thinking beyond Meiselas’s photograph, let us take the Grey Album as an example again.  DJ Dangermouse did not expect this to be a phenomenon. I, for one, believe that he did not simply chose those two albums just because of their chromatic titles.  For me, it is clear that he did take the context and history of the content into account when mixing the Beatles and Jay-Z together.   Moreover, he did not simply layer one vocal track on top of an instrumentals track.   His mix of “99 Problems” makes it almost difficult to tell that he is sampling “Helter Skelter.”  DangerMouse’s mix of “Encore” inspired George Martin to reproduce “Glass Onion” for the Love album and show in Las Vegas.  The Grey Album does walk a fine line.  But most importantly, it shows a rigor of praxis (and in my opinion of thought).

Place that next to the bulk of other mash-ups.  In my opinion there is not the same intellectual framework for doing an album of Jay-Z set to tracks by Radiohead.  Moreover, very little work is done to the instrumental or vocal tracks in most mash-ups, beyond layering them together.

Music and mash-ups is the common example.  But most artforms have seen a huge rise in appropriation recently.   My largest issue with that recent rise is what Meisalas points out in her half of the Harper’s article.  It seems to be an easy choice, and in many cases the least interesting choice.  Sure, I like it when artists quote or reference The Great Gatsby, or Lil’ Wayne, or Andy Warhol.   Sometimes its just cute and clever.  Sometimes I feel like it is an artist’s way of not confronting who she or he is, or what she or he believes.

There are instances of appropriation that and grab me emotionally and intellectual.  They range from the Wooster Group’s ’84 piece L.S.D. (..Just the High Points…), Kneehigh Theater’s current Brief Encounter, or DJ Green Lantern’s tracks that combine Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, 2Pac, and Joe Budden.

The examples that interest me, and have my full support, are the pieces where the new creators take the original context into account and highlight overlooked aspects, or thrust it into something new and unexpected.

Much of my academic work has been focused on semiotics: The functions of the sign.  Thus far, it has been placing a burden on analyzing content.  So it was refereshing to read McLuhan’s push to focus on the medium conveying a message.  I agree with his assection that often times “’content’ of any medium blinds us to the characteristics of the medium.”

After all, this lead to what I think is McLuhan’s most astute observation is based upon an unpacking of literacy to find that “’rational’, of course, has for the West long meant ‘uniform and continuous and sequential.  In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.”

This is similar to Sasseur’s work in linguistics, which proved that it is impossible for us to think outside of the limits of language.

But ignoring content leads to an oversimplification of the problem.  And I think that is something that—at least the early chapters of this study—lacks.  Rather I think that this study should be folded into studies of the sign, to understand how the medium colors content.

Let us look at Roland Barthe’s depiction of the sign:

So for Barthes there are two levels of signifaction: Denotation and connotation.  The deonation is the thing (a picture of a tree means tree.)  That signifier points to a signified.  However, each idea is influenced by our culture therefore they have connotations.  The sign (combination of signifier and signified) cis the connotator. And that points to a signified (tree, for example, makes me think of environmentalism) which completes my understanding of the sign as a whole.

What McLuhan inspires is an admission that there is yet another aspect of signification that comes before the denotation: This is the medium.  The medium used to convey an idea actually does define its denotation. (After all the word tree, is different from a photograph of a tree, which is different from a painting of a tree, which is different from 10 actors ‘embodying’ a tree.)   This will define how the rest of the function of signification works.  After all, as McLuhan points out, our minds to ‘read’ different mediums differently.  Therefore the medium is the “sign” that defines the denontator in Barthes’ diagram.

My interest is always in unpacking and expanding how signification works.  To help us think beyond McLuhan’s point of how the West defines ‘rational,’ and to show that other understandings are possible.

What I admire, and am thankful for, in McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message,” is that it allows me one more element to toy with in my work. And the medium I chose is a choice that I have control over.  Especially if I understand the effects of each medium I work with.

A useful map here is his guide to understanding hot and cool media.  I do take issue with his scale for this, though.  He seems to confuse himself in this text, by acting as if a medium’s “hotness” is defined on one scale.  What it seems to me that it is more like a graph:

One axis measuring a medium’s focus of heightening one sense versus appealing to all of them.

The other axis measuring a medium’s ability to interact with its user, or for the user to use her or his own imagination to fill in the details.

It is my experience that mediums which focus on one sense, force users to interact with their imaginations: Filling in what the other senses might sense.  If I play only with vision, they imagine what a scene sounds like. If I only offer sounds, they imagine what it might look like.  When looking at more recent interactive technologies: it seems as if mediums that focus on one sense are easier to make interactive.  That is something users are more prone to be willing to change or play with.  For example, there are a host of interactive drawing systems or sound systems.  Yet, when it comes to something as “cold” as film or television users seem resistant to instituting their own changes.

Therefore I think a more accurate measure would actually be placing a given medium on that graph.  And looking where it falls.  Perhaps creating four quadrants, rather than a strict binary.

This is a quick animation I made with Matt Tennie, playing with how to make a stop motion animation.

Here is the comic I made with Becky Kazansky.

Enjoy.

Becky and Andrew Comic2

Below you will see the video of me making my “Fantasy Machine” for Physical Computing.

(note: all set renderings are from the production of “Artifacts of Consequence,” which I directed. Music used by permission of the artists.)

I am really interested in what Benjamin points out about the schism thats created between the artwork and its place in time and space.  I really enjoy the demand on the artist to mind her or his surroundings fully. This is why I always prefer the designs for shows created for a specific venue, over traveling shows.

My academic background is in Performance Studies with a focus on ritual, religion, and performance.  One of my advisors, Mark C. Taylor used to define religion as “a series of myths, rituals, and beliefs that we use to figure and screen the chaos of the world.” I don’t want to go on for too long about my theories of religion, nor do I want the brevity of this post to oversimplify the complexity of the issue. But I do believe that American Culture is the dominant religion here, with several different sects.  Within that, most are grounded in capitalism and the “American Dream” – which is based on renewable goods and selling a life style rather than individual products. Credit Cards, for example have their etymology in the Latin “credere” “to have faith in.” (This is really interesting when we look deeper into the influence of Calvinism on Adam Smith, but that is a post for another day.) “American ideals” and the myths of our country do help us understand the world around us. This does come with it’s own set of rituals.

My point is that I think he’s misread how we value art even after it’s reproduction. I do not think we have lost the cult value, nor that it has been greatly diminished. I just think the beliefs behind the “cult value” have changed.

Films, in the movie theater, are not free floating in time and space. There is a specific set of rituals that go along with the movie. We behave a certain say. We buy specific foods. We can count on commercials followed by 14 minutes of previews. Purists and traditionalists object to the changes that have been made to that ritual.

I admit these rituals are firmly rooted in attempting to sell goods, but that is also such part of our “religion today.”

I think those roots are what Benjamin Ctualy objects too.

What I object to is the difficulty in subverting those rituals. Many venues -in film or Iive performance – do not want to put them aside either. And it is so ingrained in audiences that this point, that it is extremely difficult to successfully change or adapt.

Then there is the whole other question that he brings up, encapsulated in Baudrillards definition of the simulacrum: a copy with no original. You cant really argue that a smartphone app, by being downloaded on multiple phones, is losing it’s place in time and space. That IS it’s time and space. That’s what it is designed for.

The aspect here that fascinates me is how Benjamin talks about desire, and its effect on the users experience.  One thing I enjoy about working with live performance or installations is that when they’re over, the are over. Photos show that something happened. But really, after a show closes it lives on through (or dies with) the audiences memory. They chose to remember it, or forget. And what they remember is their experience! I think a major aspect of my work is aiming to create a cohesive experience. So i am attracted to the idea that at a certain point that is all that lives on . .  . I think how long somebody remembers that experience is an interesting test of how much a work succeeded-how much it did affect them.

That’s why I loved Benjamin’s line that art, “Sets up a desire to only be satisfied later.” I do worry about the effects of instant gratification, and how it really affects us when i consider that desire most desires desire. (One of my favorite concepts from Lacan is the objet-a, that we actually don’t want to fulfill out desires.). That is a cultural question I keep thinking about.

Back to art theory though, i think what Benjamin astutely points out is the problem of having a version of the artwork we can instantly revisit. It means that we treat that as the real, the true, the final. It takes away a viewers distance, and her or his ability to think about the artwork. What the felt, what the think – or the way those two things are folded up in just looking what she or he remembers.  This is not just a problem with film, where the frame changes before i can think about it and look back again (to use Benjamins example.) i enjoy that it changes and I have to think more about it. And i don’t worry as much about the mass not wanting to think as I do about the space we are taking away for blights to occur.

The challenge this poses to me is how to reach as many viewers and users as I can while still encouraging it to be an experience with room for thought, and individual memory.

While reading this story I kept thinking of two challenges that Red posed in our first Applications class. First, to think of technology as a verb, not a noun.  To treat it as something for users to (for lack of a better word) use.  And second, that it be used to enhance the human spirit.

The worry that a lot of people feel while we increase our reliance upon technology is that it fails that second challenge.  That it decreases the human spirit, and distances us from one another.  As the story suggests, we lose something as we shift from a world where people have things brought to them, rather than going to things.

That concept is something I have been thinking a lot about recently. A former colleague of mine is currently doing a project for QVC.  A friend was recently staying with me. As we ordered food on Seamlessweb he half jokingly remarked that its great because “you don’t have to deal with people. I hate dealing with people.” (I must admit, I love using seamlessweb too.)

Even as I read the story I felt a certain sense of that disengagement.

I was reading the story on my iPad. Even though I was sitting in a coffee shop, I had a completely private experience.  Nobody around me saw what I was reading, or had any clue what I was doing.   I had cut myself off.  Meanwhile next to me was a man reading “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”  Even though his book created a personal and private interaction with his artwork as well, it was still on display to the public.  He left open the option for me to lean over to him and say, “I love Oscar Wilde.  Isn’t it interesting how this book preceded so many things that happened to him during his Gross Indecency trials?” (Or whatever point someone wanted to discuss about Wilde or Dorian Gray.)  I had completely cut myself off to conversations like that with strangers.

I believe that exact thing is why I am still drawn to working with live performances.  I believe that when done right they are communal events, that you share with friends, loved ones, and strangers.

But the deeper reaction I felt was actually to the ways Forester kind of predates what would become central tenants of semiotics or discursive theory.  The ways that our patterns of thought are predetermined.  That we cannot think outside of the approved systems of truth and logic. Even in a more open societies, there is still a homogony of thought: a “dominant  discourse” that we cannot fully escape.

The moments that stuck out to me are Kuno said he found his own way to the surface, and Vishti was unable to respond.  As Forester says that “phrase ha no meaning to her.”  A similar moment was when Vishti tells her friend about Kuno’s warning that “the machine is stopping.” And her friend replied, “What does that mean? That phrase conveys nothing to me.”  Lastly, what really got my mind running was how the Committee of the Mending Paratus “allayed the panic with well chosen words.”

We act as of that can only happen in a totalitarian state.  And yet, it happens here. Now.  There are constraints to our thoughts, set up by the limits of language and the definitions of “truth” and “logic” today.  I don’t believe that that these limits are set up in any centralized manner.  And yet, they exist to benefit some and create barriers for radical change.

Something Foucault often wrote about was how “punishment” is always our response to those who threaten to unweave the mainstream modes of thought. Who risk undoing what we, as a culture, know to be true.  And yet, that is exactly what happens in this story.  Kuno is threatened with homelessness precisely because he poses that threat.

Recently I have been wondering about my own limitations when trying to think new thoughts, or trying to think differently.  Even trying to think outside of this system is, in and of itself, a system based within the mainstream.  Vishti does, after the conclusion, come to see what Kuno is saying.  But in all honesty, it is because she was learning his system of thought.  And we even see the roots of his thoughts within the teachings of “the machine.”

In an effort to grapple with these exact questions, I recently started helping a playwright develop a new script.  The core question is tied up within this main thrust of Forester’s story: Can we think outside of these defined systems of thought.?  Or even more specifically: can we think outside of the limits of our language?”

While thinking about this question, I have been thinking a lot about the effects of technology.  About whether it aids that ability or inhibits it.   Does it help us to define new paths of thoughts, and change the limits of our current vernacular.  Or does it just offer more options of ‘systems of thoughts,’ that we can just plug into and regurgitate?