009_ Final Project

Here is a link to my final project:

Choices

008_ Reaction to Raymond Williams' " The Technology and the Society" and Carlotta Schoolman & Richard Serra's "Television Delivers the People"

On "Television Delivers the People":

Carlotta Schoolman and Richard Serra produced a work of scrolling text, attacking the notion of the master/slave relationship of viewer and television. Aesthetically, they use background music of happy-slappy, perfect jazz allowing the viewer to "relax" as this work scrolls down the television screen. Contextually, I believe Schoolman and Serra are telling the audience that "You are the Product of television" and that you, the viewer, become the commodity that is being bought and sold, not the products displayed through advertisement. Furthermore, "corporations are not responsible" for your actions after watching the propaganda they produce and feed to you via television, but rather your actions of consumption and new-found obligation to a constructed reality, is what is responsible. The corporations are simply giving a vast audience something in common, something to relate to each other through commodities. "Corporation control advocates materialistic propaganda." Therefore, Serra and Schoolman conclude that the people, not materials, are consumed and television propagates this relationship.


On Raymond Williams' " The Technology and the Society":

Williams' essay describes the state of television and sound radio in relation to the society of the time (1972). He begins by asking the question of cause and effect between a "technology and a society, a technology and a culture, and a technology and a psychology." Although these questions seem difficult, the answer to them all is rather irrelevant. In a linear historical context, one may have come before the next but above all, these technologies were developed as systems, as transmissions and for reception/production of communication. The cultural and social significance of them were not used an aggressive tool, but rather in response to "an increased awareness of mobility and change, not just as abstractions but as lived experiences." Therefore, the concept of broadcasting data to individuals grew from a need to spread free information, for good or bad. Thus, when television and radio became an infrastructure of control, be it by corporations or government, there "was this deep contradiction, of centralized transmission and privatized reception." The goal of broadcast was for the spread of free, public information through technology, and once this became abused and labeled "mass communication" the historical order of cause and effect became unimportant. Therefore, television and radio's "use" changed, the output "changed" and the order of operations of social/tech, intent/content, and transmission/reception produced "in fact, a new social complex of a new and central kind."

007_ Podcast

Here is our class podcast:

Audio For Spaces

Audio works made to experience in specific spaces and places by the Spring 2008 Time Arts class at UIUC.

006_ Reaction to Martha Rosler's "In, Around and Afterthoughts"

Rosler begins by describing documentary work as a form of moralism, in that, the rhetoric and presentation, be it video or photograph, describes not only a situation but a social, political or personal structure taken place within a given space. I enjoyed when Rosler describes documentary as something with a higher purpose and usually involves many dualities (ie oppressor/victum, equality/disaster) to pose a possible solution to an ambiguous problem. Therefore, "documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery" (179). This relationship between the viewer and the actuality is obscured through a series of transitional techniques by the producer and what information is actually hidden within this content. Furthermore, the "social institutions serve one class by legitimating and enforcing its domination while hiding behind the false mantle of even-handed universality necessitates an attack on the monolithic cultural myth of objectivity (transparency, unmediatedness)" (188). Although a bit wordy, Rosler describes the power structures within "what you see and what you get" out of documentary work, in that the it speaks and claims ownership of all truth within a given story. Therefore, perhaps we need to be more critical of how a cut is supposed to make us feel as an audience and the decisions of the "making of" documentary work.

005_Reaction to Kenneth Goldsmith's "Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art"

In the article, Goldsmith discusses some of the major contributions to Sound Art in the past century. He jumps around fast from Dada sound poems to Sonic Youth to Christina Marclay, trying to diversify his favorite artists and their use of sound as an artistic medium. I want to focus on my two artists he mentioned: Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" and Lauren Lesko's "Thirst".

Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" recognizes that interior architectural space forms and shapes the perception and reception of sound. In the piece, Lucier "utters a series of sentences describing exactly hat he is doing into a tape recorder in an empty room." After this, the sound is played back into the room and re-recorded over and over, until his language is abstracted past the point of recognizable English. This work is a good example of how 'sound art quietly absorbs technological breakthroughs into its practice, but rarely makes them their content." Often, in many "tech" art projects, a point of access into the work is code, instruments of tech, but here the tech is used as a tool, rather than a medium.

Lauren Lesko's "Thurst" is, what Goldsmith describes as, "edgy.. and an unusually beautiful soundscape." For this piece, Lesko uses her body as a machine to produce sound. She uses a contact microphone, inserts it into her vagina and walks around for 30 minutes. After listening to the work, it has a very physical and bodily feel, and I often felt physical reactions when listening with headphones. Body-driven sounds transfer physical responses and how the body becomes a personal instrument.

004_Sound Art

If anyone reads this blog except for Ryan, here are some links to sound artists I am into.

http://del.icio.us/jeffreykolar/soundart

http://del.icio.us/jeffreykolar/Sound

003_ Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Observations on the Long Take"

Pasolini begins his argument around the Kennedy assassination claiming that "the spectator-cameraman did not choose his camera angle; rather he simply filmed from where he happened to be, framing what he, not the lens, saw." He argues that this long take is an example of using film as a representation of the present is abstract and leads only to a subjectivity for the viewer. The idealized long take becomes more so an alternate or fantasy vision of the event as taking place in "past". In that, to even attempt a truism of the President's death on film refrains to subjective notions of "a multiplication of 'presents'" or simply put relative to the frame of the viewing/recording device. He pushes this metaphor further when relating this use of film as present-past-future knowledge to the death of an individual: "as long as he has a future, that is, something known, a man does not express himself." Pasolini's interpretation of death as an action of allowing others to "know" the person, works similar to the vision of the video camera capturing small moments (or long shots) trying to depict moments of present, past etc. Therefore, when one dies, the possibility of a future rests with the body. Film is similar, in that, once the moment is captured and becomes in a sense "dead", others can subjectively interpret it's meaning as a static object. This is not to say the long clip will allow of an objective truth, nor the body of a human. But in the least allows for a critical analysis of the film (or body) as a discontinuous object. I think his comparison does lack in technical means, although in a conceptual sense does help describe the possible uses of the camera as a capturing device or method to reveal a moment in time, regardless of it's place within a time line of past, present or future.