The Whiskey Sea

Given our limited amount of time, for the second round I focused on working with a few items:

• having the words “work in progress” fall a bit more quickly and naturally with the puppet
• switching the spades background with the inscribed characters
• adding a spotlight above the inscribed characters so that it seems as if the puppet has turned on a light behind the wall hole
• make it look like the camera is zooming through the wall hole (did that via scale); parented the puppet and words to the wall
• fiddle with the spotlight so that as the stone inscriptions are moving down, the spotlight doesn’t disappear
• put a soft glow around the long-tail boats

I’ve also been working on the following which didn’t make this cut:

• making the cranes fly
• putting a mask and alpha-stencil on some characters
• puppeting the characters
• adding a “glow” and “light rays” effect to various objects
• photoshopping more assets

The inspiration for this piece came from one of the songs John Munson wrote for his thesis project, which he dedicated to his adopted daughter from China.  Inspired by the ShiJing, a collection of poetry about war, love, plowing the fields, etc., Munson sang and played all the instrumentals in song.

It was definitely too ambitious to animate for a first-time user of AfterEffects, especially given the limited time we had.  Candice and I couldn’t figure out how to use light sourcing, and the puppet tool was quite tedious; moreover, we spent a grotesque amount of time photoshopping various layers, most of which we didn’t get to use yet.  I’d definitely consider working further on this piece for my last project.

Here’s the video for the intro instrumentals and below are the lyrics:

On the yellow banks,
rompin’ mighty Shang…
burning ritual fires,
drinking, dancin’, desirin’….
Til Wu came along.
War like (rip-tease?) too strong…
Sayin’s time’s up, mother-fuckers,
now we’re going to cut off your years.

(Chorus) But your stories will remain
one that’s burned onto our brains
til we forget to go to the same fates as you.
Ya see the mandate’s passin on
now learn the victor’s conquerin song
I”m going to tell you again
bow down to good Kin Wen
and dance son.

Your temples once were great
Dark birds, falling eggs
Regulating the Way
the four quarters contained
at least a thousand li
from north to south, west to east,
but Wu must take what he can
and burn the rest of your land so good-bye

Chorus

Lyrics, from Jon Munson’s thesis project on the ShiJing, China’s first collection of poetry supposedly recorded by Confucius:

On the Yellow banks of the mighty Shang,

burning ritual fires, drinking, dancin’, desirin’….

then Wu came along, war like (?) too strong

and said, your time’s come mother-fuckers

now we’re gonna cut off your years.

But your story will remain,

one that’s burned on to our brain

til we forget to go to the same fate as you.

You see the mandate’s passin’ on

Now learn the victor’s conquerin’ song

I’m gonna tell you again

bow down to good King Wen

and dance, son….

Some collage material:

Some storyboard ideas for our video projects are posted here.

A few points I’m interested in exploring:

1) McLuhan states that body-sense experience is expanded with new media, but that this expansion comes at a cost.  So, for example, in the “mechanical age,” we expand the function, or abilities, of our foot when we step on a gas pedal, but in turn the gas pedal limits our range of foot movement.  The car, as an exoskeleton, extends our bodies, but also paralyzes our bodies even as we move faster than we possibly could without this exoskeleton.   If, then, the electric age and the internet has been an expansion of our nervous and cognitive systems, what have we limited or paralyzed as a result?  Yesterday for Red’s class, Linda Stone touched on this subject in her talk on the paralytic/parasitic affects that our technologies have had on us.  For instance, she mentioned how when we sit in front of the computer, we animate the computer but our bodies become de-animated: we slouch, hunch over the computer, our eyes become glazed, etc.  The electric/internet expansion of our nervous/cognitive systems via participatory “cool” media have, in many senses, dis-embodied us.  How, Stone asked, can we design interfaces that re-activate our bodies (and specifically, our parasympathetic nervous systems) in our transition from a culture of thinking+doing to one of sensing+feeling?  Then again, if we have technology that extend our sensing and feeling, what would be the cost, if any?

2)McLuhan states that we can’t respond to new media by focusing on content, and that the old “form” or medium becomes the “content” of the new form/medium.  My first thought was of the modernist poets’ obsession with form and content, and how Ezra Pound had declared Joyce’s Ulysses to be the “end of the novel” precisely because Ulysses digests the form of the novel and presents a self-referrentiality and self-consciousness that pushed it “beyond” the novel form (and the novel’s conscious scope) thereby creating a new form.  What I’m trying to describe so crudely is (I think) parallel to what happens with music sampling.  The re-creation of music through digestion of old clips and its reformation using various hardware and software programs not only creates a new sound/genre, but is appreciated even more through the understanding of where the samples came from—I guess I’m thinking the entire genre of drum&bass/jungle, which, from my minimal understanding, evolved from the sampling of the Winston’s amen break.  Is this an example of form being reconfigured to create new content (maybe one way to think about this is not the form-content duo, but rather a marriage of style and content?  ).  In any case, I tentatively suggest that sampling fulfills the proper use of recording, which turns the form of live sounds into the content of a new form.  All this also makes me wonder to what extent is McLuhan’s understanding of form and content a “western”, perhaps even a mechanical/typographical, one?  I haven’t even begun to think this through–or even defined what a mechanical or typographical understanding would be–but I like thinking about how our use of various technologies shapes the way we think and the paradigms we operate under.

3) There are certainly limitations to categorizing all media as either hot or cool, but McLuhan’s categories are compelling.  Unsurprisingly, it made me think of Chinese calligraphy and how a student copies the characters of a former master, but that this “copying” is essentially an act of role playing, or role embodiment.  If you just copy the form, my teacher used to say, then you’re just a copy machine.  Instead, one must re-create a charater by feeling the processing of writing itself and step into the mood/spirit of the original writer.  I think this would make calligraphy a cool medium.  The current keyboards we use and typefaced presentations on screens are based in the mechanical age of print—a hot medium, according to McLuhan.  Time to update!

4)In relation to the subject of hot-cool media, how are the different types manipulated for propoganda-like influences?  In the mechanical age, one could argue that hot media was more powerful (thinking of the third reich).  Today with American youth, on the other hand, we might be more susceptible to cool styles in advertizing, etc (thinking of cool hunting).

For our stop motion exercise, Chika and I cobbled together this short animation using iStopMotion and materials from Pcomp.  We experienced little difficulty until we started editing on Final Cut Pro which kept looping in extra clips and which cut off our ending.  We finally exported everything to iMovie to complete our editing.  We suspected that the reason FinalCut kept toying w/ us was because we were recording 12frames/sec in iStopMotion while FinalCut was set to 15frames/sec but that really doesn’t explain the additional looping (obviously, we could not find how to switch the frame rate in FinalCut Pro)…  Any suggestions?

My fantasy device for Physical Computing is called the Articulator.  This device allows one to manipulate other people’s facial and body movements remotely.  The device itself is disguised as jewelry–viz. rings, bracelets and watches.

I conducted the following interviews to see people’s different perspectives on what it means to articulate something.  A consolidated video coming shortly….*

1: Crystal

2: Nik & Allison

3: Noah & Jenny

4: Chris

5: Benji & Cat

6: Greg

7: Sonaar

8: Minette, Mark, Chika

9: Jeremiah & Zack

*Um, have no idea what just happened to the audio on these.  Perfectly fine when I uploaded them, played fine the first two time on blip….  eh? Articulate!!

I love trees. I was almost five years old when someone told me I couldn’t grow up to be a tree.  I still look at people to see what tree they are (they are sometimes disappointed when I tell them).  This is all to say, I was secretly super excited to go visit Katie Holten’s “Tree Museum” planted along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

According to the explanation on the museum’s website, at the Tree Museum, “100 trees give voice to 100 perspectives.”  In order to access these voices, one only had to call 718-408-2501 and reference the individual extension number assigned to each tree and displayed on a green, round plaque, cemented to the ground in front of the tree.

Unfortunately, I did not know all this before I went and spent 20+ min looking for the damn plaques which I thought would be prominently (i.e. vertically) displayed by each tree.  My own lack of preparation due to my desire to encounter the trees without conceptualizing it first via the website, made me feel somewhat foolish, but that aside, I found both the trees and the media format a bit underwhelming.  First off, the lack of vitality displayed by many of the trees were a bit depressing–and this from someone who finds stumps and plastically adorned trees poetic.  Secondly, having to call the same number at each tree was a pain in the ass (plus what about people who don’t have, or often forget, their cell phones?).  Thirdly, the audio quality was oftentimes awful and I couldn’t understand what people were saying.  Fourthly, the stories frequently had nothing to do with the trees (I understand that there is value in talking about the community in which a tree grows, but I really don’t care about people when I’m attending a tree museum).  Lastly, why is it called a museum?

Although E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” offers a prescient description of various technologies and its effects, I did not find his short story particularly compelling. To be sure, a basic reason for this is my own prejudice as a modern day reader whose experience of technology is significantly different from that of this turn-of-the-previous-century author.  A worthy machinic enemy, from my point of view, would not be based on a totalitarian or monolithic, -theistic model but rather on an organically evolving, decentralized, polyfluic non-entity whose systems of manipulation and paradigm-shifting mirrors and goes beyond that of humans.  In another sense, Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” extends to the death of a monotheistic power relation, which “the Machine stops” unsuccessfully evokes.

In fact, a key reason I found Forster’s portrayal of the Machine uncompelling is because it was forced to straddled the dual role of being, on the one hand, an extreme, monolithic, centralized, authoritarian figure with specific intentions of making humans act a certain way, and on the other hand, an environment or organizing system that was suppose to epitomize “Mechanical” qualities which, by Forster’s extreme definition of mechanical, should have precluded the possibility of the Machine having motive or intention, or any human quality.  The first role that the Machine must play neuters the power of the second role by preventing a direct exploration of the effects of being conditioned by the Machine, not because it somehow wants the humans to act in a certain way, but by virtue of its use for everything and having it become a seamless, inescapable environment.  Forcing the Machine into the monotheistic or authoritarian relationship with the humans is (to borrow from an old Chinese adage) like drawing some feet on a snake to give it power—the result is simply ridiculous.

At the same time, Forster’s human characters suffer from being so extremely two-dimensional that it is hard for me to consider them seriously.  I initially attributed the characters’ flatness to a purposeful illustration of how the Machine dehumanizes people.  The characteristics of this dehumanization include loss of body and spacial sense; a breakdown in familial bonds; an aversion to touch and direct contact with others; a lack of interest in conceptions of nature or man (or the reflection of one in the other); a disconnection from sexual and imaginative forces.  All this is very interesting.  Unfortunately, Forster also positions the humans as unthinking, subservient slaves who glorify the Machine as God or a benevolent authoritarian figure to whom they relinquish all control.  Why this dynamic is important and how this dynamic is related to the process of mechanical dehumanization is unclear.  Certainly, by itself the question of how and to what extent humans can be manipulated into voluntary subjugation is not unimportant.  On the contrary, given the historical juncture where fascist regimes were springing up on the heels of Christendom’s waning–not to mention continuing trends of mass reliquishment of civil liberties and civic responsibilities–the human ability to become subservient to a religious, political, corporate (or, fill-in-the-blank) structure, and the circumstances under which this can occur, deserves serious and thorough address. Forster, however, conflates the two issues–one of subservience and one of dehumanization–without fully addressing the mechanisms of how either comes to be in the Machine world, much less the relationship between the two dynamics.

Dostoevsy’s “Grand Inquisitor” chapter of the Brothers Karamazov, directly addresses the desire for subservience by articulating a clear, and somewhat devastating, argument about human nature, which can be summed up in the statement that more than freedom, humans want security.  According to the Grand Inquisitor, there are at least three conditions for creating this security: that physical needs be met, metaphysical uncertainties made certain, and social relationships stabilized via subscription to a homogenizing ideology (whether determined by nationalism, religion, etc., or catalyzed by fear of a common enemy, love of a charismatic father-figure, etc.–it really doesn’t matter).  In fact, these conditions, along with the thin illusion of freedom, are precisely the ones that the Machine meets in Forster’s short story.  But whereas the Grand Inquisitor makes a clear statement about human nature that makes its voluntary subjugation seem plausible, Forster’s metaphor of the Machine as an authoritarian figure and humans as mindless sheep is unsupported by Forster’s vague definitions of Machine and human nature. Again, if for Forster, the overarching characteristics of the Machine is limited to its Mechanical, non-human qualities, then this definition precludes any ability on the Machine’s part to want, or assert, itself as an authoritarian, religious figure out to dehumanize humans.  If, on the other hand, the Machine’s natural dehumanization process is what renders the humans subservient, then the role of the Machine as authoritarian figure and the humans as unthinking subjects is even more unnecessary.  In fact, this latter dynamic would not only be superfluous, but insofar as its plausibility rests on a specific view of human nature, it also detracts from what I think is one of Forster’s main message: that humans have the ability and duty to choose whether or not they will be dehumanized. According to the Grand Inquisitor, they would choose subjugation, even if it meant their own dehumanization.

At a meditation class last weekend, in answer to the question “why don’t we want to stay in our bodies?” one lady explained that so long as she’s thinking about herself, she knows she exists.  Similarly, so long as she maintains conceptions of reality, she knows that reality exists and that she is existing within or in relation to it.  However, in order to just be present to the moment and to be present in her body, she would have to drop these conceptions, which were mediating her experiences of her body as well as the world around her.  From her point of view, this lack of conceptual mediation would mean that she wouldn’t be able to know her existence.  “This not-knowing,” she said, “feels like dying.”  (If such an experience seems esoteric or incomprehensible, you could perhaps relate to what the French call “le petit mort,” or the “little death” that orgasm presents during which there is (we hope) complete presence, or attention, to what is occurring even as there is no conception of it.  Or, you could “lose yourself” in the complete attention to music.  Or, you might enjoy David Foster Wallace’s 2006 article on Roger Federer and athletic beauty.) In any case, I mention this story because it brought up two issues for me in thinking about Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and with relation to my own specific interest in the process of writing: a) how conceptualization affects a person’s feeling of existence, and b) the role of the body in the experience of experiencing something.

With regards to Orality and Literacy, what are the ways in which, and to what extent does, visualized language and literacy contribute to the Cartesian set-up of an objective time and space wherein conceptualization becomes essential to feeling oneself as living?  According to Mr. Ong, the shift from a primary oral culture to a literary one externalized and stabilized language so as to enable abstract, analytical thinking.  Moreover, language’s new-found materiality and visuality created a sense of permanence and distance (objective space) which among other effects helped promote individuality, isolation, and a sense of private ownership.  With regards to the act of writing, or for most of us, typing, I’m interested in how the physical experience of using a touch/motion/sound sensitive writing instrument can counteract or transform some of the aforementioned effects of literate language as well as the effects of current modes of written communication.  From my experience with Chinese calligraphy, the practice of writing can recalibrate the mind-body relationship, offering a fuller (if not orgasmic!) experience of the world, and enable the writer/reader a wider range of expression so that there is the possibility of immediate emotional power, mediated aesthetic appreciation, and the transcendence of reductive symbols (e.g. emoticons) or conscious markers of style-identity (e.g. wordpress themes).

To this end, here are a few of the topics I would like to continue to discuss and modify in this specific post:
-body sense in Chinese calligraphy and the nature of subjective/objective reality
-interiority/exteriority and the combination of image and sound in cinematography
-language as public and private property
-the combination of image, sound, and touch in current technologies (computers, cell phones, credit card signature pads, Wii, etc).
-memory and mimesis