"Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you." -Rumi
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Krystal and Lisa Maria save the world!
We sit in trees and keep fools from messin’ up the earth!
We do not condone domestic violence!!
Just because YOU can’t handle something don’t mean it’s everyone else problem! Women have the right to breast feed in public!
Say NO to to homophobia and intolerance!
While Lisa Maria and I stumbled our way through Photoshop, I’m glad we created something fun and raw. In the words of our friend Tamar Ziv, “You only get to not know Photoshop once.”
We live in a world where works of art can be infinitely reproduced, a world where we have even surpassed the idea that at the push of a button the presses can fly full force, printing steaming hot dailies into thousands of people’s doorsteps. We are now in an era where at the click of a mouse an amateur photographer can publish her photos to millions of people worldwide.
Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” discusses how the technological advances that allow society to reproduce artwork will affect how we consume, understand, and interact with art. Benjamin claims that this change in the means of production, and therefore the method of consumption of art is one that removes the “aura” from a work. “Aura” meaning an artwork’s authenticity, the essential history and context that comes from interacting with the original.
Benjamin claims that this elimination of the “aura,” the “essence of all that is transmissible from the beginning… its testimony to the history which it has experienced” is the “liquidation of the traditional value of cultural heritage” (13). Benjamin claims that the integration of context in art comes with ritual, and “mechanical reproduction emancipates art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (4). When art is no longer ritual based, it becomes politically based.
Benjamin brings up positive effects of mechanical reproduction – the ability to democratize art, release it from the exclusivity of the “cult” and allow it to be exhibited to the public, and the movement from ritual tradition to politics.
At the same time, Benjamin also argues that art in the age of mechanical reproduction can lead to fascism because it works within the current value system without changing it – that art allows for political expression, while preserving the value norms of capitalist society. He illustrates the mode of film, that while film was revolutionary and introduced society to the tiny details of life and “unconscious optics,” film also creates art into a commodity.
“Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach…. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (7).
Is Benjamin saying that though the ability to reproduce artwork makes it political, accessible to different audiences, and allows for universal access, if society is not careful, the excesses of technology and the distraction of the masses by the passive consumption of art will lead us into war and self destruction? This rings of E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” as well as violent, apocalyptic movies envisioning a self-absorbed, passive humanity.
Also, Benjamin’s essay makes me think about theatre – the magic of live performance, the authenticity and reflexivity that the medium brings, its roots in ritual, as well as politics. Due to the medium being entrenched in what Benjamin deems this “aura” of art, the theatre world is not changing in speed with the times and the technology.
Other than a few groups, such as the Wooster Group, who are playing and stretching the limits of live performance, theatre is still figuring out how this live and essentially ephemeral art form can connect and be complemented by emerging technologies. However, I believe these technologies will not be used for reproduction, as that is the antithesis of theatre – but used for new ways of communication, interaction, and consumption.
I put together my DC power jack and I hooked up the jack and what I think is a voltage regulator to to my breadboard.
I plugged the DC jack in to the 12volt power supply. Then I started to smell burning.
I thought, “OMG. What have I done?”
As I was looking around my circuitry, I felt heat coming from the voltage regulator, and when I touched it, it was very hot. I immediately unplugged the power supply, undid my wiring, and discovered that I melted my breadboard.
Questions:
*Why did this happen?
*How did I do this?
Also, during this exercise, before I realized what I was happening, I was using the multimeter to try and check an LED on the board, and no reading was coming through. Why?
Still figuring it out.
“Cannot you see… it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but…. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it…. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”
- E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops
Let me begin by saying my first loves were written words (Sorry, Ong!). I lived among books as a child, adored creating stories and playing with humor and rhyme. I told my fourth grade teacher that I wanted to be a poet. She replied, “Poets don’t make any money.”
Around that same age, one of the things that politicized that love (aside from my family) was science fiction. My young thoughts were always fascinated by images of the future, and I spent a lot of time reading and imaging what the future would look like. I remember a Disney book projecting into the year 2000, where every family would have a robot in their home, we all had flying cars, and our wardrobe was primarily silver. As a little girl my vision of times to come looked like spaceship races and inter-galactical communication. As I grew older, my vision of the future matured into imagining futures without rape, war, or hunger, a future of inter/trans-cultural communication.
From childhood until now, I’ve come a long way from being any sort of scientist or engineer – the journey that brought me to ITP was a road paved with art and politics. Because of that context, reading stories like E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” was not only a delight (after struggling with PComp), but is also an awesome reminder, in a world that struggles with critical thinking and connecting seemingly disparate disciplines, that the future of technology, art, and society are inextricably intertwined.
“The Machine Stops” was first published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909. Forster has incredible foresight in predicting the rise of certain technologies – television and videoconferencing, the incredible interconnectivity of the internet, the shifting values of space and time due to the rapid pace of information and communication. (wikipedia.org)
Forster even describes this disintegration of space and time:
“You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ’space is annihilated’, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far’. ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far’, though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong” (Forster, 11).
Forster writes about a time in the future where humanity has been disabled by their dependence and loyalty to technology. Society lives underground because the Earth is no longer habitable, and those who break the rules of The Machine, get banished to the surface to be “homeless” and die. In this world, there is no physical contact, there are no emotions, just “ideas,” and even then the ideas are removed, “beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality, [who see past events] not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine” – a generation without context and without hindsight. Forster tells the story of the collapse of this “civilization,” strangled by its own weight.
In the end, we learn that there are the people, the “homeless” who live outside of The Machine, and that they will inherit the future, and learn from this tragic past:
“‘I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless–tomorrow –’
‘Oh, tomorrow–some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow.’
“‘Never,’ said Kuno, “Never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.’” (Forster, 16).
I have a weakness for apocalyptic narratives. In one of my favorite plays, José Rivera’s Marisol, the homeless (disenfranchised, marginalized, poor) inherit the future again, by rebelling against a senile god that is dying and wants to take humanity down with him.
“(Lights upstage reveal a single homeless person angrily throwing rocks at the sky….)
MARISOL: …Then, as if with one body, one mind, the innocent of the earth take to the streets with anything they can find – rocks, sticks, screams – and aim their displeasure at the senile sky…. Billions of poor, of homeless, of peaceful, of silent, of angry, fighting… as no species has ever fought before.
… It’s the first day of the new history.
Oh God. What light. What possibilities. What hope.” (Rivera, 68).
Blind worship and the loss of agency for humanity are central themes when we think about the directions that technology could go. In these stories the answer for those instant-gratification, materialistic addictions comes from the poor, the “homeless.” Those marginalized who have gone without and must make their way through the world separate from material things and removed from the privileges and the disabilities that come with “civilization” and modernity.
I think about Maya Lin, and how she asked us to imagine a future where humanity and the environment can coexist. She had said that it is always easier, and certainly more alarmist and romantic to be fatalistic about the future. That it is infinitely more difficult to imagine actual solutions and positive change.
I believe that is true, and societal change does not always have to come through fear. I am moved and inspired by thinking that a positive future can be imagined and created. Opposite from Forster’s tragic view of humanity with its demise due to unrelenting technological advances, I believe that with the right balance, and with responsible hindsight and foresight, technology is a tool that can be used not to separate people, but to connect people, not to destroy our spaces, but to understand our spaces better. I certainly hope to do that with my work as a poet/artist and my evolving understanding of technology.
It was a warm, gorgeous fall day when I went to the Tree Museum in the Bronx. The Tree Museum is a public art project by Katie Holten, that “gives voice” to 100 trees along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The installation celebrates the centennial of the wide thoroughfare that is a six mile stretch from Norwood and 206th street down to East 138th street in Mott Haven. 
Needless to say, I did NOT walk all six miles. I picked a heavily wooded spot between Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Museum. I got off at 161st street, walked up the Grand Concourse, listened to the trees in Joyce Kilmer Park, browsed the Bronx Museum of the Arts, took the bus down a few blocks to Franz Seigel Park, interacted (or rather as Chris Crawford in his book “The Art of Interactive Design” would say, REacted) with some more foliage on my walk from East 159th street down to East 149th street.
Using the map, I looked for the round green plaques that were to mark the trees with stories (not to say that the unmarked tree holds no stories), but the trees that were chosen to be a representative of the Bronx and its community. While I understand that Holten probably did not want to create some overwhelming structure that was too blatant an eyesore, or immodest to the park and its surroundings, I have to say that the tiny – *tiny* – green circles that marked the trees made the Tree Museum feel a little bit like a scavenger hunt.
At each plaque, there is a number that the participant can call, with an extension specific for every tree. When a person calls in, there is a brief narrative told by different members of the Bronx community. There were professors, artists, scientists, historians, community members, school children – you name it. It was fascinating to hear the different narratives – sometimes they were connected to the park and the trees, other times they told a little fact or anecdote about the ‘hood. There were times where the audio was unclear (Red would have *not* been okay with some of Holten’s audio!) Also, I would have liked to hear more variety in the stories that were being told. Granted, I only listened to maybe 10-15 trees, but I thought that maybe some trees could only play music or soundscapes. I might have missed it in the 70 or so trees I wasn’t able to listen to, but I would have loved to hear poetry and spoken word written by Bronx poets on my lovely fall walk.
As I was walking through the park holding up my fancy Xacti with my cell phone to my ear, strolling past students, families, homeless men, and the lounging elderly, I thought about the type of installation this was and the community that it has come to and is attempting to represent. If you didn’t have a cell phone, it would not be accessible – and while it is difficult to think of folks *not* having a cell phone, who would “waste minutes” listening to trees talk? (In light of the recent mugging, and being students holding HD cameras and using our iphones to call into the Tree Museum, I don’t know if free night and weekend minutes would work in certain neighborhoods along the Grand Concourse.)
Maybe I missed it, but I would like to see/read/hear about the development of the project, as well as the aftermath. Katie Holten is a 2004 Fulbright Scholar from Ireland. I understand how sensitive it can be to be an artist scholar from another country doing site-specific artwork in a community and culture that is not your own. What does the community who has this installation in their neighborhood think about it? Do they use it/interact/react to it? Doing a little bit of surface Google research on Holten and the Tree Museum doesn’t return much background on Holten, or her interaction with the neighborhood while she developed this project.
From Katie Holten’s Wikipedia page: “As a society that excludes nature from everyday life, how can today’s art engage with the natural landscape? Katie Holten…is looking for an answer to this question. –Artforum
Holten’s concept for the Tree Museum and its attempt to link art with the natural landscape is fascinating and well-intentioned. While art and nature are linked, I found it oddly removed from the community itself. I’m not sure why – the trees are speaking for the community, *literally.* Maybe it is just a matter of better documentation of Holten’s communication with the people in the living in the Bronx. Maybe this viewer needs to see how Holten’s art is affecting the men and women who spend their days sitting on benches along the Grand Concourse watching the BX1 and BX2 buses zoom by, or if she had young artists from Hostos Community College participate in the creation of the art that was going to be a part of their neighborhood campus. Maybe this viewer missed the point completely and is asking for something the artist has already provided, or might be asking for too much from Holten and her design team.
I understand that Holten is an artist, and not a community organizer. However, the more I think about it, her work of public art doesn’t seem so apparently public to me.
My fantasy device is a Universal Translator. It would be like a cell phone, with a screen, a keyboard, and an internal microphone.
The computer would hold all the languages in the world in its reference. If a person is going traveling, or speaking with someone who speaks a different language, the person would put on headphones and the Universal Translator would “listen” to the person, translate their words, and through headphones you could hear machine translate the conversation for you.
If the person with the Universal Translator is trying to respond in the foreign language, they would type their word or sentence into the translator, and on the screen the translation would appear. It would be like a quick and handy pocket google translation (but better).
