10 O'Clock Dot

A Walk through the Tate #32 All 7 images from Roy...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:00:54 -0400

A Walk through the Tate #32

All 7 images from Roy Lichtenstein’s Haystacks series, lithographs and screenprints on paper, 34 x 60 cm, 1969.

In 1968–9 Lichtenstein made a series of paintings paraphrasing Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ and ‘Rouen Cathedral’ paintings (1891 and 94). He made prints on this theme at Gemini in 1969: the series of seven ‘Haystacks’ runs from morning (yellow) to midnight (black, with embossing) in a mechanical version of Monet’s changing light effects.

Source here.

P.S.: The difference between Monet and Lichtenstein is the difference between the modern and the postmodern. Together they also illustrate the orders of the simulacrum pretty well.

You’re welcome. I never intended my response to be so...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:50:29 -0400

You’re welcome. I never intended my response to be so long, since, as you rightly point out, only point 9 really addressed what you were talking about; but for some reason I just couldn’t leave my other points of intersection and disagreement with Rodowick well enough alone. As to Doane, is Rodowick more right to distinguish between registration medium and playback medium the way he does? Mainly I ask because how do we account for, say, a von Trier film where he converted it from film to tape and back to film, or a documentary which collages old movies, TV, and youtube footage? Or Natural Born Killers? Is it an unspeakable hybrid? I guess my point is that art tends to demolish categories. What do we do?

P.S.: It was 10 days.

Peace.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:01:13 -0400

Peace.

Ten days ago, likeregularchickens said: “I’d like for you to...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Ten days ago, likeregularchickens said: “I’d like for you to elaborate on the bytes having a physical existence part a bit. Rodowick spends half of The Virtual Life of Film severing the connection between film and digital pieces and I’m wondering how your view more specifically differs.” I could be flippant and just restate the fact that bytes, in fact, do have a physical existence (otherwise the NSA wouldn’t be building such a huge complex in Bluffdale; they’d just store our data on the ethereal plane or rainbows or something). But that would avoid the complexity of the question. So here goes. Apologies in advance for the length.

1. In The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick begins at the site of a perennial crisis. He writes, “Periods of intense technological change are always extremely interesting for film theory because the films themselves tend to stage its primary question: What is cinema? The emergent digital era poses this question in a new and interesting way because for the first time in the history of film theory the photographic process is challenged as the basis of cinematographic representation” (Rodowick 9). The cinema, now understood retrospectively as a creator of worlds rather than just a recorder of worlds, takes its place as both the last of the visual arts (in the Bazinian sense of cinema as the apotheosis of the realist drive) and the first of the virtual arts (recall the film few points of this post). I hasten to add, however, that we should not be surprised or sentimental at the replacement of the profilmic event by digitally animated virtuality. In point of fact, it’s nothing new. Confidence in the veracity of the putatively indexical event has been challenged from the beginning of photography (in subtle and not-so-subtle ways) as well as from the beginning of cinema.

2a. Where does this leave us? Was it ever possible to declare an ontology of cinema without refusing to acknowledge image manipulation and animation (which predates cinema, not only in Reynaud’s proto-films, but also in motion toys)? When one asks questions about the nature, state, or identity of a medium, one by necessity must return to specificity arguments, which is to say, ontology. That, of course, means we must go back to Bazin. Again. (Well, not necessarily; Rodowick dutifully mentions Epstein, Balazs, Benjamin, and Kracauer, too; but Bazin’s ontological argument is a familiar one, and it neatly illustrates some of the pitfalls of ontology.) Bazin’s ontology of film derived from a Platonic model of thought (as ontologies tend to do), which is to say that he believed that the machines which made shooting and projecting possible possessed a collective essence simply because their operation fulfilled a teleological purpose, or an end. This end had little to nothing to do with the material substrates of the machines, and it had even less to do with how these machines came to be used. To Bazin, cinema had nothing to do with Hollywood, with nickelodeons, or with flexible roll film. Rather, cinema was cinema because it “satisfied, once and for all,” some supposed transhistorical psychological “obsession with likeness” in Western culture.

2b. The deceptive thing about reading Bazin is how much historiography he attempts in his essays. He discusses everything from Egyptian burial practices to Renaissance-era linear perspective, but despite this outward application of history, Bazin was anything but a materialist. As such, he did not define cinema technologically or, in point of fact, historically. Rather, he developed an ahistorical notion of cinematic essence, called that cinema, and applied this definition extrinsically (perhaps even eisegetically) to the existing cinema culture around him. For Bazin, cinema was not a set of machines with technological possibilities, not a set of spheres of reception and audience habits, and not a constellation of industrial practices tied to aesthetic models; rather, it was an ideal form of reality-registration to which certain filmmakers aspired and from which many others deviated. These essentialist filters come to the fore even more prominently in “The Myth of Total Cinema.” In this essay, he supposed that the ability to completely replicate reality had been a human dream since time immemorial, and though the birth of movies (and the subsequent arrival of color and sound) marked crucial waypoints on the trek toward that goal, “cinema has not yet been invented.” Here Rodowick steps in and tells us where Bazin went wrong: “All media evolve in time… but not toward a predetermined essence” (37). Bazin wasn’t looking at cinema as it was. Bazin interpreted cinema through a lens of how he imagined it should be. To an ontologist, a phenomenon’s essence is never tied to its material reality; its essence is something conceptually grafted onto that material, determining for us how we should think about it.

3. So despite my affinity for it, I suppose we need to get away from ontology. A genealogical method sets us right: Cinema hasn’t always existed, nor, despite what Bazin claims, has any predetermining “Myth” guided its creation, nor have the conditions and form of existence been constant through history (remember Charlie Chaplin’s impassioned pleas for the silence of cinema, which he saw as crucial to preserve what he saw as cinema’s crucial pantomimic communication?). This last point is the most important. At times in cinema’s history, it has taken a variety of incommensurable forms. Until about 1907, it was a fixture of fairgrounds, shown in cafe-concerts, in whatever room was available, or as one of the acts in a Vaudeville variety show. During the beginning of this era, the cinema was not yet a stable mode of expression, but instead a multiplicity of devices competing for the public’s attention. At other points in time, going to the movies involved seeing newsreels and shorts in addition to the feature; audiences often showed up when it was convenient, watched the film to its end, and then continued watching as the feature played again, up to the point where they came in. Whereas once each theater had only one screen, now the screens - and their virtual counterparts - are uncountable. When a film is released in theaters, on demand, and through pirate channels simultaneously, despite the differences in the experience of reception, audiences nevertheless claim that they’ve all seen the same film. How can zoning out to a camrip of Man of Steel on stagevu possibly compare to recoiling in surprise in 1895 as the train at La Ciotat seemed to speed by on a two-meter screen in the basement of 14 Boulevard des Capucines?

4. So there have been vast changes. However, at each moment cinema has had some sort of vaguely describable identity. At the very least, one can certainly account for the conditions of its transformation as a medium at any given moment. One can describe what Rodowick calls its “variable specificity.” If we want to talk about cinema, we need a word which acknowledges the ways in which the film industry, the audience, market forces, genres, individual creativity, and the mechanical limits of existing cameras and post-production equipment lay out a locus of possibilities into which and through which cinema might become. Working with Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed (a book I actually quite enjoy reading, even if his methodology falls outside the realm of any kind of traditional film studies), Rodowick reintroduces the notion of “automatisms” to fill this need. He explains that any medium of any art form combines multiple elements, all constantly undergoing some kind of change. Rather than attempt to stop this change with some sort of medium-specificity argument, and rather than retreat to the territory which changes the slowest and define a medium’s essence in terms of that, Cavell encourages us to look at media in terms of what defines the way it changes. He calls these attributes “automatisms.” First, automatisms define a safe playing field, giving copyists plenty to copy and ways to be recognized for doing it well. This is to say, automatisms encompass narrative genres and market forces governing everything from running time to the star system. These things are always subject to change, but at any moment, as with a language, there are reigning conventions. Automatisms also define the boundaries of a field, thus implicitly inviting “geniuses” to cross them and change the shape of the field for those to come. These boundaries might be of the formal, aesthetic, and industrial kind which I just mentioned, but they can also be technological. It would be impossible to name the sheer number of new devices which changed the parameters of cinema; everything from sync-sound to digital intermediates, from cinemascope to non-linear editing, or from two-strip Technicolor to performance capture. Sometimes tinkerers developed technologies in a process of nonteleological experimentation and refinement, but other times creators staring down their limitations developed new technologies as a way to break out of their constraints (or attract bigger box-office receipts). All media are in the process of constant transformation of many kinds, and for Cavell, to define a medium is to define the parameters of its transformation, which he calls automatisms. Rodowick summarizes: “A medium, then, is nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold,” and “a medium is less a substance or material than a horizon or territory populated by automatisms” (85).

5. It’s been a challenging task for me recently to attempt to move away from essentialist modes of thought like teleology and ontology (my resolutely Christian upbringing made them seem like a priori facts of existence) and to embrace a Foucauldian approach to history. As I’ve written earlier on this blog, that means seeing history in all its messiness — history as a space in which accidents were just as formative as purposive activity. I believe that the notion of automatisms leaves room for aesthetic accidents and their subsequent redemption. Rodowick, however, disagrees, writing, “In this definition of creative media, concepts precede materials, but only in the sense that concepts are inspired by potentialities that these materials are capable of expressing” (85). Here I believe that Rodowick gives too much credit to intentionality. In my dissertation, I’m currently attempting to account for the accidental birth of reverse motion in cinema. At first I wanted to claim that reverse motion was a medium-specific property of cinema. While this is not strictly false, had the machines of cinema been built differently, reverse motion may never have emerged as a possibility. The electric motor which drove the kinetoscope only turned in one direction, so reverse motion never emerged there. Only because its accident was incorporated into later cinematic practices did reverse motion come to be institutionalized as a property of cinema. If we also think of reverse motion as a Foucauldian episteme, we might even argue that its particular shock to thought was so radical that it could not have emerged except as an accident. But it’s impossible to say for sure. What is certain is that just as the boundaries of a medium might be shifted through diligent effort, they can also shift as the result of the redemption of an accident.

6a. By denying the formative power of accidents, Rodowick denies one of the links between analogical motion pictures and digital ones, namely the complementary processes of encoding and decoding. Encoding and decoding are, in principle, algorithmic processes by which one form or set (of data, however stored or expressed) is mapped or translated into/onto another form or set. For instance, literate people are able to mentally “run” certain algorithms which allow them to freely turn written words into spoken speech, and spoken speech into written words. Though the written and the spoken are not ontologically equivalent, one can be transmuted into the other. We understand this process (and its hazards) fairly well. Consider how we might apply encoding and decoding to the features of cinema’s apparatus. In The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz interrogates the role of the screenplay. He asks, does the film exist to signify the script, or does the script exist to signify the film? How do we assign or assess semic primacy or privilege? We might ask the same question of the relationship between the reels of celluloid and the film. The reels are, phenomenologically, NOT the film. Only during playback does a film “become” a film. It must be activated by the machine of projection. The seamless images of motion and sections duration reflected by the screen, then perceived, internalized, experienced, and interpreted by the audience— those are the film. The notion of the “apparatus” entails this entire process, which is why films still exist in the post-celluloid era. The celluloid was never the film, it was only a material substrate which helped to make projection possible within a certain era of technology. Rodowick seems to agree with this argument, writing, “a medium should be distinguished from its physical support and channel of transmission, even if they share the same substance or material. Videotape (analog or digital), MPEG-2 encoding, broadcast television, and the Internet may all function as distribution channels in which essentially the same artifact (say, Fritz Lang’s M) can be viewed” (32). It is no contradiction to argue that even though each individual film’s existence is ultimately tied to a certain material, cinema itself is not. Its various automatisms have caused it to pass through various materials, but no single material (not even celluloid) can be deemed to have primacy once we consider cinema in terms of its automatisms.

6b. Three years before the unveiling of the cinematographe, Emile Reynaud’s projecting praxinoscope was capable of creating magic lantern shows with hundreds of glass slides linked to each other in sequence by metal fasteners. It lacked the flexible roll-ability of celluloid, and it could not create the seamless illusion of motion (Reynaud’s shows were proto-animation), but it was the first device able to project anywhere near such a large quantity of sequential images. The Emil and Max Skladanowsky’s Bioskop, which premiered in Berlin on November 1, 1895, featured two projectors placed side-by-side, one to project the odd-numbered frames of the film, and the other to project the even-numbered frames. As it perhaps sounds, this device was impractical and soon abandoned. The Mutoscope, a flip-card peep-show device, appeared on American boardwalks in the late 1890s. Like Edison’s kinetoscope, only one person at a time could view the “film,” which was printed frame-by-frame on cards mounted like a flip-book on a drum. And though its gestation period was much longer, the first steps toward inventing television appeared in the 1870s and 1880s with early devices for line-by-line scanning of images and electronic transmission of such data. The point of this long aside is that there have always been other means besides flexible roll film of getting serialized images to the eyes of the spectator. Or, more to the argument I’m setting up, there have always been multiple ways to store (or encode) and to play back (or decode) moving images. Celluloid and film are not equivalent. Screen practice and motion pictures live on without celluloid.

7a. In traditional (celluloid and silver-halide based) cinematography, light reflecting off the objects of the profilmic world passes through the lens and imprints itself on a photosensitive material, one frame at a time. Let us consider a single-shot film of the Lumiere ilk. When the lens has aimed at the object of its gaze and the crank has turned the fifty-odd seconds’ worth of raw stock through the gate, is this exposed celluloid the film? Well, no. Not quite yet, at least. The exposed material must undergo an algorithmic process by which it is transformed and translated from exposed stock into projectable film; it must first be developed, which is to say subjected to a multi-step chemical process which renders it insensitive to any further exposure to light, and then it must be printed, producing a projectable positive print from the master negative.

7b. The “algorithms” I have just described are more often thought of as physical and chemical processes, and in truth they are. Rodowick warns against the “conceptual abuse” of applying computational jargon to analog systems, but I’m going to go for it anyway. My reasoning is that computers have no less a physical existence than the chemicals in celluloid. Even if the Babbage and Lovelace’s Analytical Engines (the forerunners of modern computers) have been astonishingly miniaturized and their complexity overwhelmingly increased in the modern computer, by Turing’s definitions they are not fundamentally processing any differently, just at altered speed and volume. It’s also worth noting that Turing’s 1936 hypothetical design of his famous Turing Machine closely resembles a traditional celluloid film projector. The Turing Machine consisted of two parts: a long tape of serialized squares each with a meaningful symbol written on them, and a mechanical reader through which they passed one by one. The mechanical reader, upon encountering each symbol, generated output according to a table of rules. In a similar (though hardly identical) fashion, each frame of a celluloid film passes through a gate wherein the projector beam “reads” it by throwing it up on the screen. As I said, there are crucial differences, but the projector consists of two parts - a set of symbols to be read (or translated, or decoded) and reader to do that. In celluloid film, the reader is a simple one indeed, no more than a beam of light, an intermittent mechanism, a shutter, a screen, and the associated devices for spooling the film. But just because the encoding and decoding devices are much more complex in digital cinema doesn’t mean that they are in principle any different.

8. Rodowick even notices his mistake but chugs right on ahead without correcting himself. Pay attention to the damning content within the parentheses: “Because its basis and processes are computational, the very nature of digital information processing is to be without substance in the ordinary sense of the term. (Of course, extraordinarily, anyone who has experienced a hard-disk crash is brought to a sudden comprehension of the computer’s material and technological realities.)” (100-101). What does he mean by “the ordinary sense of the term”? An ossified and convenient pattern of thought which may not align to reality? Does he mean that the digital seems to have no substance because it is very small? Or because manipulating that information (like here on tumblr) involves interacting with it through a light-on-a-screen interface? Gee, that actually sounds familiar. Isn’t cinema made of tiny images constantly absenting themselves upon a screen? Snarkiness aside, there is a difference between analog and digital representation, but the difference isn’t as extreme as Rodowick wants it to be. If the destruction of a hard drive destroys the information contained on it, then that information was incontrovertibly physical. Rodowick also attempts to argue that silver halide crystals do not sample light in the way that digitization does (118-119). True, the method is different, but it would be specious to argue that silver halide registration isn’t a kind of sampling. Anyone knows that resolution is lost when a photograph is blown up too large. Even converting 16mm to 35mm results in a noticeable loss in resolution, similar to the way that fullscreening a 240p video on youtube emphasizes the low quality of its encoding.

9. Rodowick writes, “The separation of inputs and outputs—analogical-to-digital translation and back again—is like communication across parallel universes” (115). I understand his misgiving here. Light from the real world streams into a camera and lands on a sensor. There it is translated into code. The code looks nothing like an image. In this sense, celluloid and DVD have little in common. But why does this need to matter? Consider the analogy of sound recording, which he mentions only two pages earlier. Even if the grooves on a photograph record are analogical and shaped directly by the sound input, they don’t look like sound (for how can something look like sound?), and they don’t produce a sound either, even a small one, until the stylus reads them on playback. Thus, recording process converts the sounds into something which cannot be read by a human in its encoded form, and which we are powerless to make any sense of without the machine. How is this in principle different from an image “represented” as binary bits? Why does a complicated system of encoding in and of itself rob something of its capacity to carry an indexical message? (Capacity to and tendency to are different things, and Rodowick seems to hang more of his misgivings on tendency, which makes sense historically.) Photography couldn’t have existed if silver halide (or another photosensitive chemical) didn’t respond to light with such immediacy and subtle correspondence. Surely digital sensors were built to be similarly responsive. Digital photography is indexical and realistic to the extent that it registers the fine details of the shape of light streaming through the lens. The process may be different, but the purpose forms a continuity. Yes, the difference necessarily implies certain discontinuities. But whereas Rodowick clearly believes that the discontinuities will end up mattering more, I believe that the continuities matter more.

10. Consider yesterday’s glitch post and the notion of the accident which I mentioned earlier. Rodowick speaks of entropy, describing the ways that celluloid may be wounded and corrode over time, displaying a slightly different pattern of scratching and fading on each screening. He’s right to identify this as an important property of the medium. Those scratches are on the film; they accumulate. But when binary bits run into an error and glitch on playback, they produce an image which was NEVER recorded, which is not “on the film,” which was not produced until the moment the file was misread, the keyframe skipped, the image garbled. The glitch images arise in a form which is unlikely (perhaps impossible) to ever be seen again. But celluloid has just as much capacity to produce non-encoded accidental images. Consider the familiar trope of the film getting stuck in the gate and burning through. The image of this burning, which shows up plainly on screen, is not on the film at all; rather, the image arises as a result of the film’s destruction. Only later have artists decided to aesthetically redeem this quintessentially cinematic proto-glitch by including a staged version of it in their films. Witness the burn-through in high art and low art, from the midpoint of the Swedish film Persona to the Swedish Chef’s projection error at the midpoint of The Muppet Movie. My point is that accidents and glitches reveal the structure of a medium’s automatisms like no other aspect of it. And if analog and digital encoding are so utterly different, their accidents ought to have nothing to do with one another. And yet, as I see it, the accidents reveal crucial points of continuity. Rodowick almost agrees when he writes, “To recognize a computer as a medium is to begin to define conceptually the automatisms it makes possible, how they are alike or different from previous automatisms, or how they transform existing automatisms” (128). Undeniable differences, yes, but in both cases also the refreshing fallibility of materiality.

tl;dr: “A computer is a medium, then. (How could it not be?)” - D. N. Rodowick, p. 129

P.S.: Also, reread what Doane has to say about this here.

We’re now living in a Glitch Culture. “The social...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:00:46 -0400

Saturday Night Live glitching

Red Beard glitching

Bob's Burgers glitching

The Office glitching

The Colbert Report glitching

We’re now living in a Glitch Culture.

“The social machine’s limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential element of its very ability to function… And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.” — Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1984, p. 151, here.

“Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted.” — Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” 1947, p. 95, here.

More glitching here. See also these glitch blankets.

10 more TEDTalks in 6 words

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:00:48 -0400

Electrified brain: curing many (enslaving all?)

Bricoleurs arise! Play-doh Mario & Eggplant drum-machines.

Texting isn’t writing; it’s speech transcription.

When laminar becomes turbulent, attempt failure.

In knowledge economies, Marx is right.

Applying business agility techniques to families

Threatened not with death, but immortality.

“The present moment is so underrated.”

Beauty and design effect social change.

“Only a truly insane global consciousness…”

More to come.

Arbitrary Film Festival #19

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:00:47 -0400

Arbitrary Film Festival #19

tsurubride: Started working on my next piece featuring...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 03:28:54 -0400

tsurubride:

Started working on my next piece featuring @jacsfishburne

I started following slowheart—longlife some time ago because she is a poet of rare insight and maintains a youtube presence of sincere generosity.

When she reblogged this image from tsurubride, something felt strangely familiar about that name. It turns out that tsurubride is the spouse of the guy who runs tsurufoto, a notable photographer and publisher of a nudiezine. I never would have known his name except that an IRL friend of mine once dated someone who modeled for him.

That chain contains quite a few links, but I left out some others that make it even stranger. There are others I know that I’m not aware of. By a certain age, it might be fair to conjecture that every significant life event has a causal series behind it so convoluted that nearly anything that happens is statistically unbelievable.

Add to that my surprise at the internet’s ability to forge peculiar connections across any boundary or distance, and I can say that tonight my own capacity for wonder and strangeness has been outpaced by the universe’s most banal concatenations of happenstance.

Peace.

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:01:06 -0400

Peace.

Notable appearances of the flag in art, 10 images. See also.

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851

Rob Servo, Old Glory, 2011, American flag constructed from simulated bags of cocaine

Yukinori Yanagi, World Flag Ant Farm - Pacific, 1996

Judith Bernstein, Union Jack-Off Flag, 1967, charcoal and pastel on paper, 30x40in

Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky, 1861

Stanley Forman, The Soiling of Old Glory, 1976

David Hammons, African-American Flag, 1990

Danh Võ, flag installation at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2012, gold leaf on cardboard

Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988; Silver gelatin print, US flag, book, pen, shelf, audience; 80 x 28 x 60 inches

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954

Notable appearances of the flag in art, 10 images.

museumuesum: Luke...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:01:13 -0400

museumuesum:

Luke Stettner

c,c,e,e,e,e,e,e,e,f,h,h,h,i,i,l,l,m,n,o,o,s,t,v,w, 2007

Watercolor on paper, 47 3/4 x 80 1/2 inches

Each letter was attached to six helium balloons with self-addressed stamped envelopes and released from the roof of the artist’s studio. The empty frames represent the letters that were not found and returned.

I enjoy artworks which offer themselves as puzzles, but if the title of this piece is to be taken as the bank of available letters, there’s one too many. I checked around the internet and found that the presence of this extra letter is consistent: http://katewerblegallery.com/index.php?/artist-images/luke-stettner/, http://artforum.com/print.php?id=12741&pn=picks&action=print, etc.

Nevertheless, I decided that I would try to solve this crowdsourced hangman, so I began with the second word. The first word, after all, is probably “the.” (It could also be TEN or TWO, but since the next word isn’t plural, I’ll disqualify those. It could be names like TED, TIM, or TOM, but let’s not consider those either. That leaves TEE, TIE, TIL, TIN, TIS, TIT, TOE, TON, TOO, and TOW. Compare these to the possibilities of the second word, and I think you’ll agree that none of them seem to fit either.)

Using a onelook search, I found a surprisingly short list of words which the second word could be (after discounting words which are too obscure and limiting words to the available letters): CLOSEST, CONSIST, HOTSHOT, LOOSEST, MISSENT, ONESHOT, TENSEST, and TWOSHOT.

From here I used intuition, trial and error, and Internet Anagram Server, and here’s what I came up with:

(Omitting an I): THE CLOSEST I HAVE COME TO FREEWHEELIN.

This message refers not only to Stettner’s release of control over the final form of the work, but it also contains a punning reference to the game show Wheel of Fortune, which his puzzle resembles. Maybe he also likes Bob Dylan, but who knows?

At this point, I got tired of searching. If you can find another possible answer, I’d love to know it.

tastefullyoffensive: [via] “The End” in hybrid...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:00:47 -0400

tastefullyoffensive:

[via]

“The End” in hybrid German-Swedish?

Also, if you play “Dilutes” with the S under “Bow,” you’ll get the seven-letter bonus and triple word score.

10 New Assertions. 1. The kind of ‘stupid’ videos...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:00:39 -0400

10 New Assertions.

1. The kind of ‘stupid’ videos which become incredibly popular on youtube indicate two things: that humans desire to view records of novel contingency more than we ever realized, and that the proliferation of cameras has proven that contingency was more a part of cinema’s essence/ontology than we ever realized.

2. Never evaluate the conclusions before you evaluate the argument.

3. A scholar is always up against the defensive ignorance of mankind. If you press pretty much anyone on earth, they’ll be able to eventually admit that there are things that they don’t know. However, it’s much harder to get people to admit that there are things that they don’t know that they NEED to know, unless it’s in a subject that they’ve already been devoted to for a while. More often than not, when people are faced with the boundaries of their ignorance, they assume that everything beyond that barrier is a vast blank area with nothing in it, rather than an undiscovered country overflowing with absolutely essential information.

4. Whatever you leave unexamined has the most power over you.

5. There are two wishes upon which The Container Store capitalizes. 1) On the most surface level, the promise of an organized life; of everything put in its proper place, of your life (relationships, career, emotions, dreams, etc.) coming into order through the symbolic ordering of tangible objects. 2) More importantly, for few who shop at The Container Store notice this, the wish – the fantasy – to be able to imagine all the wonderful objects which you will obtain to put inside them. The containers don’t signify themselves; the containers signify the objects which the store doesn’t sell, which are not present, which you must imagine, and with which you intend to fill them. The Container Store is a perfect wish factory, for every one implies another thing. The buying of the container will bring you a step closer to that perfect object which you intend to place in the container, which you will never find. They’re selling you emptiness with the promise of impossible fulfillment. I imagine that builders in hardware stores and artists in art supply stores and fashion designers in fabric store are similarly able to imagine endless potential in the objects which they behold. But with a key difference. The Container Store doesn’t ask you to build anything. Rather, it advertises the accumulation of other things, other things which you will put into their accumulators. Thus, the Container Store sells consumption. The Container Store is thus a consumerist fantasyland, because every object in it sells the promise of more consumption, consumed more perfectly.

6. Artists are only free when the arts are seen as irrelevant.

7. When you eat in front of the TV, you tend to overeat. Consumption is consumption; so image-consumption encourages food-consumption. Commodity-consumption in general comes more easily to those trained to consume images.

8. Do not trust me, because I will co-opt your struggle in order to support my status quo.

9. If a gun in a crime film functions simply as an expression of phallic power, and a suitcase of money (or any macguffin, though cash, the deified reifier, seems ideal) represents the object of phallic desire, are all crime movies therefore also rape fantasies?

10. In this age of reflexivity, ironic distantiation, and the multiplication and alienation of the self through virtual online avatars, the hashtag is a way for us to hiply acknowledge and spoof our detachment by momentarily separating ourselves from our own statements and pretending to situate their meaning from a position external to ourselves, like Jim Gaffigan’s high-pitched “audience voice,” or an ancient Greek playwright’s use of the chorus. The hashtag functions as subtext, metadata, and a way to forestall the criticism of others by embedding deconstruction within the text of our post; because if we comment first, no one else can beat us to it. The Facebook use of the ironic hashtag reveals more about us sociopsychologically and lexically than does its “proper” use in Twitter or Tumblr; because only on Facebook, where its meaning is not diluted by its purported functionality, can it truly mean and function.
#ifyoumadeitallthewaydownheregradschoolisforyou #NERD!

A Walk through the Tate #31 Sculptures and installations by...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:00:52 -0400

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1971, oil on canvas, 220 x 317 cm.

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1960-98, steel panel, enamel on paper on 2 canvases, fabric, coal, 3 metal hooks and metal rod

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1993, steel bedsprings, metal hook and paint on wall

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2005, mixed media, 100x71x16cm

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled (Knife and Train), 2002, 5 knives, 2 trains, metal and glass box, 53x40x10cm

Jannis Kounellis, Bells, 1993, bronze bells, wooden beams and rope

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled (Scissors), 2004, mixed media, 65x45x14cm

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled (Hanging Knife), 1991, mixed media, 65x45cm

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled (Hair), 2004, mixed media, 65x45x14cm

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1969, locally-sourced stone set into a wall, dimensions variable.

A Walk through the Tate #31

Sculptures and installations by Jannis Kounellis, titles in the captions above.

In the late 1960s Kounellis played a key role in the foundation of Arte Povera. Literally meaning ‘Poor Art’, this was an anti-elitist movement that promoted a new openness to artistic production characterised by the use of non-art materials. Here, steel panels and canvases create a framework from which a sack of coal is suspended. The tension between the supporting structure and weight of the hanging materials draws our attention towards the centre of the composition and the special properties of the coal. Conjuring up a sense of its mass, texture and distinctive aroma, Kounellis’s integration of this ordinary substance reflected Arte Povera’s ambitions to unite art with everyday, lived experience.

Source here.

Additional caption for the first work shown above (Untitled, 1971):

At the beginning of the twentieth century, cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, introduced musical notes and motifs into their still-lives. In this canvas of 1971, Kounellis drew upon this avant-garde tradition, reproducing a score from Bach’s oratorio St John Passion. The work can be ‘activated’ with a cellist playing alongside it. The painting exists both as a work in its own right, and as a trace of the performative action. Kounellis was interested in creating a harmony between history and contemporary experience, and used the theme of music to reconcile memory with the immediacy of the present moment.

Source here.

Peace.

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:00:49 -0400

Peace.

I got my first taste of the time-image in cinema at a very early...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:00:41 -0400

I got my first taste of the time-image in cinema at a very early age, but not in Deleuze’s sense of it as an aesthetic/ideological aspect of postwar art film, but rather as an interactive aspect of film reception in the age of the VCR.

For hours and hours on many days over the course of several years, I watched a Bowdlerized copy of The Blues Brothers fanatically, playing the car wrecks and other kinetic mayhem in slow motion, often advancing the film frame-by-frame with my thumb, always rapt in the ritual of it. As I watched mangled shards of metal pirouette through the air, twitching across one equitemporal interval at a time, I came to an intuitive understanding of the technological base of film by dissecting it, parsing it, and iterating it at a cellular level. Few things gave me more pleasure than exploring entropy on the smallest register of time then available to me - units of 1/24th of a second. In truth, slow motion is still one of my favorite time-images (along with reverse motion), because there is still so much to be found when the viewer elects to intervene on a film’s playback, still it, and tiptoe through a moment one indexical photogramme at a time.

Above, enjoy the spectacle of Valery Gergiev conducting the last note of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture played back at a tenth of its original speed. Regular-speed video here.

See also: Tag Gallagher’s analysis of John Ford’s oft-dismissed film Mogambo, in which he uses slow motion to revel in the depth and complexity of Grace Kelly’s performance. Jump to 10:40.

While many scholars have pondered the death of film and the post-medium condition of motion pictures (an absurd notion, since bytes still have a physical existence, that is, a medium), and plenty have also devoted page space to considering the phenomenology of VCR and YouTube as spheres of reception, I don’t know of anyone who has yet commented on the disciplines of filmmaking used in video essays on films. Are the techniques of “normal” filmmaking substantively different from the techniques of the video essay on film?

It seems that they must be, since after all the point of a video essay is to reveal aesthetic and thematic patterns which may have otherwise drowned in the undertow of narrative or spectacle. The editing in a video essay must of force draw attention to itself, so as to draw attention to the formal patterns which the film hid in plain sight. The maker of the video essay on film must know how to deploy slow motion - a technique of temporality - to reveal the structure and content of time. The maker of the video essay on film must know how to deploy split screens to put images in concurrent dialogue, how to deploy silence and desynchronization to expose an image denuded of its sonic sheen, and how to deploy montage to bring the latent ideas of images into manifest collisions. Come to think of it, the video essayist must adopt and adapt the formal operations of avant-garde cinema.

In short, the maker of a video essay analyzing a film must first achieve reflexive knowledge of the nature of film itself if he or she ever desires to put filmmaking techniques in the service of an understanding of film. A tall order!

Of course, this is exactly what Dziga Vertov did in the greatest film essay of them all, Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a metacinematic fractal in which the object of analysis is itself. Here, in the service of documentary, he finds it necessary to lie and manipulate in order to be truthful as to how cinematic techniques are able to lie and manipulate. Consider the magical moment in which the film slams to halt, and what is revealed as we gaze into that transfixed horse - the photogrammatic limit, the art of editing, and the act of seeing. For we see ourselves seeing, and we see how we see how we see. The moment that time stops is the moment which most changes us; for by freezing time Vertov reveals what can never be, and our minds tilt into motion. Documentary for Vertov was not a matter of rendering reality as it was, but instead an imperative to use the camera to promote reality’s transformation. And, more importantly, the audience’s transformation as well.

Free the eye from the tyranny of 16 frames per second! See without boundaries or distances! Revolution through a transformation of ways of seeing! Revolution through the action of the camera, which changes the world even as it reveals it! Revolution as the duty of documentary, which must put into proper motion that which can never be stilled.

Max Tohline, Periodic Dice, 2012 In another interdisciplinary...

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:00:49 -0400

Max Tohline, Periodic Dice, 2012

In another interdisciplinary art(ish) exercise (this time at the intersection of chemistry, classification, topological mapping, and geometry), I decided to cut up an old Periodic Table of the Elements into sections of six contiguous squares which could be folded into cubes. In a way, this art-as-brain-teaser exercise derives from classical Euclidean packing problems, but with the twist that the unfolded cubes come in eleven distinct shapes. (For a visually dazzling article on unfolded cubes and tesseracts, click here.) Since I’m only doing this recreationally, I’m uncertain that my cut pattern maximally packs unfolded cubes onto the Periodic Table, but I will say that if someone finds a way to extract a seventeenth cube, I’ll be very impressed.

Identify the shared nickname!

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:01:03 -0400

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6

Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 and Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 2

Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 and Schubert’s Symphony No. 4

Britten’s Symphony op. 4, and Nielsen’s Symphony No. 6

Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, op. 62 no. 6 and Schumann’s Symphony No. 1

Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 and Hanson’s Symphony No. 2

Mozart’s Mass in C Minor and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major

Haydn’s String Quartet op. 76, no. 3 and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6

Dvorak’s String Quartet No. 12 and Glenn Holland’s Symphony No. 1

Arbitrary Film Festival #18 Honorable mention goes to the Bill...

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:01:04 -0400

Arbitrary Film Festival #18

Honorable mention goes to the Bill Douglas Trilogy, with its trifecta of “My” titles.

You’ll Wonder Why You Used to Think Old Things Were...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:00:45 -0400

You’ll Wonder Why You Used to Think Old Things Were New

Max Tohline, 2012

First blogged a year ago, and then a month after that.

When I returned in December to the site where this was first installed, it had washed away.

This work examines how virtuality and mediated experience cause the boundaries between once-distinct registers of time to become permeable. This work is meant to be viewed on the internet and not in the location of its original (secret) installation. Just as viewing and re-viewing Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) fragments filmic narration and viewer perception into multiple remembered and misremembered past tenses as well as multiple imagined and remembered future tenses, so also in this work verb tenses, subjects, and objects unstably bridge several disparate futures and pasts. The first word, “You’ll,” refers to multiple futures. The first points to only a second later when the sentence is read for the first time and the viewer begins to consider its meaning; the second refers to any future moment when the past is remembered and thought anachronous; and the third includes the death of the artwork itself - a future time when this artwork is seen again, not as as something new, but as something old, known, even predictable — and at that future moment, as the spectator reactualizes the work by re-viewing it, the text’s old prediction comes true, the work seems old rather than new, predictable rather than innovative, and the work is reborn or transformed from simple prophecy to evidence of its own fulfillment at the very moment that it appears most irrelevant and dies. The viewer remarks, “he’s right, the work does seem old and irrelevant,” and this feeling trumps any wonder that the prophecy came true.