donderdag 31 maart 2011

Understanding media

Yesterday I read the first chapter Medium is the Message and selected some things I found interesting.
Understanding Media

The "medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

The "content" of any medium blinds us to the charachter of the medium.
Electrical light is a medium without "content". p9 UM The extensions of man, McLuhan

Cubism announced that the medium is the message. p13

Oral and intuitive oriental culture <-> Rational (uniform, continuous, segmential), visual European patterns of experience. p16

As we become more aware of the effects of technology on psychic formation and manifestation, we are losing all confidence in our right to assign guilt. p17

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. The "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. ... The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception. p19

We become what we behold. p20

Cotton and oil, like radio and tv, become "fixed charges" on the entire psychic life of the community. p22

"No one can shield himself from such an influence". CG Jung on Romans and slaves. Contributions to analytical psychology, London, 1928

________

The term media event is an indication that in a postmodern world we can no longer rely on a stable relationship or clear distinction between a "real" event and its mediated representation. John Fiske, Media Matters

dinsdag 29 maart 2011

Tree of knowledge v2

Today I blew off the speck of dust from my good old 3ds max 5.1, dug up my 3d skills and put it to good work.

So I already had this idea of a transparent glass mold of a tree as a reaction on the metaphor of the tree of knowledge, that follows a hierarchical structure. Instead of the rhizome I thought of a mold, without the actual tree. A hollow split tree, because the source of knowledge is lacking in Postmodern life. It is fragmented as well, as it is possible to see multiple trees at once from every point of view. With two of them it makes it easy to imagine that you can to put the mold together to form your own knowledge, your own view on the world, your own perspective, your own solid tree.

It would be nice if I could realize a small scale version, but for now I have to do it with these:



maandag 28 maart 2011

The blind men and the elephant



American poet John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) based this poem on a fable that was told in India many years ago. It is a good warning about how our sensory perceptions can lead to some serious misinterpretations; especially, when the investigations of the component parts of a whole, and their relations in making up the whole, are inadequate and lack co-ordination. The underlying principle is that reality is based on one’s perspective.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approach'd the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, -"Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he,
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Then, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

MORAL.

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

woensdag 23 maart 2011

Question

What kinds of narrative techniques exist in conveying the idea that the individual's interpretation of reality becomes fragmented due to the increasing presence of technologically mediated representations of reality and the increasing role it plays in their lives?

Does the individual's interpretation of reality become fragmented due to the increasing presence of technologically mediated representations of reality?

Operationalization
Interpretation of reality = measured in cognitive maps or mental models: a representation of external reality or explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world.

My vision of reality
Reality is dependent on interpretation. It is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. Reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. What appears to us is a multitude of overlapping and conflicting perspectives. There is not one true reality. We can only experience reality fragmentary. The increasing presence and the increasing role technologically mediated representations of reality play in our lives increases the fragmentary experience of reality.

Fragmentation = the end of (hi)story, no single metanarrative can explain social reality as a whole. Rhizome, the opposite of the metaphor 'the tree of knowledge' indicating that knowledge has been organized by systematic and hierarchical principles, is a model of non-hierarchical lines that connect with others in random, unregulated relationships.

Narrative techniques

themes:
pastiche
surface appearance
decentring of the subject
metafiction or hypermediacy (self referentiality/reflexivity)

techniques:
collage
stream of consciousness
cut-up

Technologically mediated representations:
simulations (causing hyperreality)
overwhelming flux of images, codes and models
undermining the reference of the image to reality

dinsdag 22 maart 2011

Pastiche

"Although we create the technologies, they also create us." McLuhan, Understanding Media.

The contemporary individual becomes a 'made' entity, a postmodern pastiche of different styles.

Pastiche is a 'blank parody' or 'speech in a dead language... but without any of the pafody's ulterior motives, instead amputated of the satiric impulse. F. Jameson

Kroker & Kroker on 'disappearing bodies' The body dissolves into a stream of floating parts, a 'body-without-organs'(Deleuze), which reveals that it has been processed by the media, and that we experience our bodies only as 'fantastic simulacra of body rhetorics.'
The posthuman body enters the world: a techno-body, a screen, a hybridised version of pluralities: a cyborg, a hybrid, a body-without-organs, a virtual body, a body in-process. p251 Beginning Postmodernism
Relevant artists: Stelarc and Orlan.

According to Nicholas Abercrombie on postmodernism in television p228
- we no longer live in reality, but in images or representations of reality. A collapse of image and reality
- contemporary societies are about creating an image, refining a look, presenting a style, a 'surface appearance'
- no respect for authenticity anymore. Pastiche, amalgations of different styles genres and elements make their way.
- self referentiality
- not following conventions of realism and narrative
- postmodern culture is fragmented, bits do not add up to a whole

Jameson proposes 'an aesthetic of cognitive mapping' as a remedy. It is a reorientation of our experience of time and space in an era where the opportunity to place ourselves into a definable time-space location has become systematically challenged.

Kaplan has a more optimistic view. She says that the elision of "boundaries toward a heteroglossia('different-speech-ness') that calls into question moribund pieties of a now archaic humanism." Rocking around the clock p 148

maandag 21 maart 2011

Simulations replacing reality



Author DeLillo takes a quintessentially postmodern idea, that simulacra (or simulations) have replaced reality, and applies it throughout White Noise. The most obvious example is with the simulated evacuation, SIMUVAC; although the first run-through is for an actual emergency, SIMUVAC views it as practice for an actual simulation. In other words, its status as a simulation takes precedence over its use for a real emergency. On its second, simulated use, the people behind SIMUVAC continue to worry over its use in simulation, not in reality. The other major scene involving the dominance of simulacra is when Jack and Murray visit what signs call "the most photographed barn" in America. As Murray notes, people pay more attention to the signs than to the actual barn; they are wrapped in the simulated idea more than in the real barn. Another instance of simulation versus reality is when the family sees Babette on TV. At first they are frightened, but soon realize what is happening; only Wilder, not yet schooled in the way of simulacra, continues to believe it is really Babette and cries by the TV.

donderdag 17 maart 2011

Interpretation is everything

Postmodernism: a general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Glossary index
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html

Concept reminder

What is the work is about
Why should it be made
What is the goal
What is the method

Plan

Phases
Recourses
Planning

maandag 14 maart 2011

Map–territory relation

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999 .

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

"Perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves" Magritte

The infernal desire machines of Dr Hoffman

Postmodern novels all share one major preoccupation namely ontology: the nature of being. 'What is a world? What kind of worlds are there? What happens when different kind of worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between world are violated.' Brian McHale, Postmodern fiction p10



The infernal desire machines of Dr Hoffman by Angela Carter is such a novel.

Doctor Hoffman is an evil, sadistic scientist akin to Doctor Faustus. The doctor is the antagonist and diabolical adversary of the novel. He masters physics and surpasses his teacher, the proprietor; he later uses this ability to create a new form of reality where nothing is bound by time or the normal rules of physics. With help from his colleague Mendoza, he discovers that “eroto-energy” can power his desire machines with omnipotent and everlasting energy. He uses his desire machines to fuel energy into his new reality. - Wiki

Dr Hoffman might be an allegory to Marcuse, the 1960's philosopher or the surrealists. We may see in Dr Hoffman the nightmarish synthesis of repressive desublination and the society of the spectacle.
Susan Rubin Suleiman - Risking who one is: Encounters with Art & Literature p133

Doctor Hoffman’s illusion inducing machines create the same effect as today’s newspapers, magazines, websites, and television broadcasts. The mass media constantly effects peoples thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. Throughout the novel, Carter asks the reader to define what is real versus what is an illusion. Hoffman’s machines keep “projecting representations on the world.” In the modern world, “technology makes the reign of the images possible” (Suleiman 111) and Carter is wary of images for they can be mere illusions. - Wiki

Questions about technology can not be divorced from questions about ideology and values. - Carter p135

Fate of surrealist imagination


"The laws of our desire are dice without leisure." Robert Desnos

Surrealism advocates this idea of ceaseless motion. The nomad & vegabond is the hero, the fixed subject its worst dream.

What is the fate of Surrealist imagination in the sociey of the spectacle?
At best "la révolution Surréaliste" becomes a private passion, not a means to change the world.
Protagonist Desiderio, the public smiling man with a hero's statue in the town square, dreams every night of his lost Albertina, and writes his delirious memoirs in dedication to her. Meanwhile, life goes on as usual, dominated by the Minister's (Desiderio's boss) computers and clocks that all run on time. p136

Commodity -> Spectacle -> Simulacrum

Commodity

In a capitalist society commodity production is the purpose of society and maximization of profit is the purpose of commodity production. - Marx

Spectacle

The spectacle is a tool of pacifization and depolitization. Comparable to a "permanent opium war". The spectacle spreads itself through leisure and consumption, services and entertainment. It distracts the subject from the most urgent task of real life: recovering the concrete totality of human activity through social transformation. - Debord

"The commodity has attained the total occupation of social life."
p47 Baudrillard, a critical reader

Where the image determines and overtakes reality, life is no longer lived directly and actively. The spectacle escalates abstraction to the point where we no longer live in the world per se - "inhaling and exhaling all the powers of nature" (Marx) - but in an abstract image of the world. "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" (Debord), one which secures the false consciousness of enriched alienation. p47

Simulacrum

Political economy is no longer the foundation. Instead we live in a "hyperreality" of simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play of signs replace the logic of production and class conflict as key constituents of contemporary societies. p7

The proliferation of images, information, signs, overshadows production. -Baudrillard

Modern vs Postmodern

- Modern societies are organized around production and the consumption of commodities.
- Postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs.

- Modernity operates with logic of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth, concepts that are key postulates of modern theory.
- Postmodern society explodes this epistemology by creating a situation in which subjects lose contact with the real and themselves and fragment and dissolve.

Consequences

Individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought or behavior. p8

Debord emphasizes the super reification of image objects as a massive unreality, an inversion of reality and illusion.

The fundamental goal of the Situationist praxis was to reconstruct society and everyday life to overcome division and fragmentation in the spectacle. p60

donderdag 3 maart 2011

Mediated unreality

We create our cultural and private worlds meaning through communicated presentations of realities "out there". By presenting endless portrayals of realities in its content, mass communications provide experiences from which we collectively shape our meanings. p31 Communicating unreality

Morgan & Shanahan (cultivation theory)
"If media content shapes our attitudes and cultivates our images of the world, it seems plausible that different media would shape different attitudes."

Loss of both 'reality and 'ideology' as grounding bases for images is another facet of the loss of the 'grand narrative'. A key consequence of this loss is the fragmentation of experience and its images. Postmodern culture is a fragmented culture, the fragments come together for the occasion and are not organized into stable coherent groupings by an external principle. p58 Communicating unreality

"There is no difference between image and reality"
John Fiske - Postmodernism and television

There is no unmediated acces to the real, and that it is the only through representations that we know the world. p170 Beginning Postmodernism

Most of the images are reconstructed realities. They often distort the "true" reality, poorly represent it, focus only on certain dimensions of the "real" situation or redefine it for their audiences. The meanings that are communicated depend on an interaction between the text and the reader. These meanings are dynamic, context-dependent and dependent on interpretation.

The audiences rely on mediated unreality and often accept it as "the world out there". p359 Communicating unreality

This is illustrated in the "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato:

Essence of the project

Met alsmaar opkomende informatiesystemen en visuele lagen over de 'echte' tastbare wereld, wordt het lastiger om de laag erachter nog waar te nemen. Mensen komen terecht en gaan leven in een hyperreality (Baudrillard): de beelden die ze te zien krijgen vormen de originele betekenis en beleving om naar een andere realiteit. Informatie verpakt in digitale media wordt steeds toegankelijker en dominanter, zowel binnenshuis als in publieke ruimtes, waardoor er steeds meer versplinteringen in de realiteit ontstaan. De veelvoud van digitale media zorgt voor onsamenhangende reeksen van informatie welke er weer voor zorgen dat mensen worstelen met concepten, en relaties tussen, verschillende realiteiten. Deze informatiestromen hebben invloed op en worden onderdeel van mensen zelf. Er ontstaan "schizofrene" ervaringen: het verlies van contact met de echte omgeving en desintegratie van de authentieke persoonlijkheid, het verlies van identiteit.

Frederic Jameson in Post Modernism & Consumer Society: "Schizophrenic experience (following Jacques Lacan): An experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence." p4 Collage critical views.

As Jameson explains, the schizophrenic suffers from a "breakdown of the signifying chain" in his/her use of language until "the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time."


Collage helpt ons weer te re-integreren met onze wereld. Het dient ervoor om het missende terug te brengen en de orde te herstellen in een gefragmenteerde realiteit. Het houdt zich bezig met de vraag wat de aard van de realiteit nou werkelijk is. In de meerlagige wereld en de wereld die zo bewust is van meerdere perspectieven, ideologieën en van de betekenis van signalen en beelden, is het collage dat het ons mogelijk maakt te reflecteren op de complexiteit van het leven en te genieten van zijn mysterie.

Random quote "Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery."
Federico García Lorca