Meaning vs. aesthetics

I do believe that a work of art can be created without meaning. My last project is evidence of this. I did not choose the elements of the song based on some deep artistic significance; they just happened to work together. My only goal was for it to sound good. I would compare it to watching a sporting event on TV. The camera angles are not chosen to impart some hidden meaning, but merely to give the best view of the action. If I were to assign some meaning to this, I suppose it would be that a work of art can be created for purely aesthetic reasons. However, this reason would be given after the fact, because if I had created it reject meaning in artwork, that would have been the deeper meaning I was trying to avoid. But just because no meaning is intended, that won’t stop viewers from coming to their own conclusions. This works in the reverse as well. I enjoy abstract art just because I like the way it looks. The artist probably had some pretentious logic behind the creation, but I feel comfortable rejecting that. When I watch my video, I don’t see anything but entertainment, but someone else might feel differently. I would be curious to hear what other members of the class thought I “meant” when they first saw the video.

Mash Up

For my mash up I used the vocal track from “The Stopper” by Cutty Ranks, percussion tracks from “Impeach the President” by The Honeydrippers and “Synthetic Substitution” by Melvin Bliss, and a whole bunch of sound effects. Then I synced it up to the original video as best I could. There are a couple of rough parts, but I think its pretty good for a first try.

Soundscape

http://www.imeem.com/people/ejjpVCx/music/ip6rtyxf/me-project/

Here’s what I cooked up.  I wanted to construct a basic track featuring one sample, just effected to make it sound like other things.  I started by loading a clip of car door slamming into Audacity and cut it down to what I needed.  Then I loaded the sample into FL Studio and messed with it there until I had a few decent loops.  Then I dumped all the loops into a folder and arranged them in Acid Music.  My goal was to see how I could blur the line between diagetic and nondiagetic sound.  I think this is the bridge between the people who alter a sound until it is unrecognizable, and those who use everyday sounds to construct full songs out of.  The final track is pretty minimal and sounds a bit rough, but it does what I set out to do.

Psychogeography

This is my attempt at creating a psychogeography of Manhattan.  Nearly all of the pictures were taken in Midtown and the Financial District.  I wanted to portray the experience of being in a place where everything is on such a huge scale.  A lot of psychogeographies focus on small-scale street life, but I tried to capture the experience of looking up.  To that end, I tried to get shots where the buildings seem to cluster together, and high enough so that there is no reference point as to where one stops and another starts.

This Week’s Stuff

MEMES

One meme that has survived thousands of years is graffiti.  Archaeologists and historians have identified graffiti on walls dating as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.  Graffiti was done then for much of the same reason as now.  It was primarily a way to express some feeling in a public place by someone who had no voice otherwise.  These inscriptions ranged from funny drawings to political messages.  This meme reappeared in the early 20th century when hobos would leave messages for each other about houses or towns.  Later, US soldiers in Europe would draw the iconic “Kilroy was here” graffiti on buildings.  Graffiti continued into the end of the 20th century in cities such as New York, where street artists would spray paint their names and designs on buildings and trains.  Today, graffiti is used as a large-scale art project or to project political messages, much as it was done back in ancient Rome.

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

For my psychogeography project, I did the school building that we have class in.  I mainly wanted to portray the feeling of the sterile white walls and quiet corridors.  I did this by starting the video with shots of the street outside to contrast with the interior pictures.  I oversaturated the colors on the street pictures, and made the cuts between them quicker to make it feel more vibrant and alive.  When I moved to the interior, I used filters to make the pictures high contrast black and white.  I also put each picture up longer and used dissolves rather than cuts.  I also tried to capture the straight angles inside the building.

Week 3

1. Culture Jam Project – I used the Illinois Family Institute’s website (http://www.illinoisfamily.org/).  Since it is largely an anti-gay Christian group, I thought a good idea would be to swap out their pictures and links for pictures of shirtless men.  Take that, Illinois.

2. Group Dossier – I looked up information on the magazine Adbusters.  Some interesting things I found:

• Founded in 1989 in Canada
• Primarily anti-consumerist with environmentalist and anti-war elements as well
• Features art, editorials and news
• Places an emphasis on turning readers from passive consumers to activists
• Works with Powershift, an alternative advertising agency

3.  Online Culture Jam – http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=20&products_id=73

This is a website selling a product called “TV-B-Gone.”  It seems to be a homemade remote control that will turn off any TVs you encounter.  Supposing it works, it would be a perfect way to jam culture.  It’s DIY assembly and appearance will certainly appeal to the type of person that would want a product like this.  On the downside, its pretty arrogant to go around turning people’s TVs off just because you want to.  I doubt that matters much to all the totally edgy culture jammers, though.  But I bet they wouldn’t like it if I came into ther loft and snatched their soy latte.

4. Blog Post

It is possible to culture jam without spreading the original meme.  The remote mentioned above is a good example of that.  Turning off TVs doesn’t promote more TV use.  Likewise, covering up a billboard or tearing a poster down will not help spread the lost product.  If it is a parody or bootleg of something, then that may backfire and give the product more attention.  An effective culture jam needs to do two things.  First, it has to remove or silence whatever it is working against.  This is culture jamming at its most basic.  To remove something that you don’t like from the public space.  The problem with leaving off here is that people are so desensitised to advertising and mass media that the absence of any stimuli isn’t going to make anyone notice it’s gone.  For a culture jam to be truly effective, there needs to be something in its place.  A slogan or a logo or something.  As long as it catches someone’s eye and makes them realize what used to be there is gone; mission accomplished.  I believe there is a choice in media consumption today.  Mass media is controlled by several major corporations, but there is absolutely choice.  The choice is mainly whether or not to participate in the mass media world, or to opt out and only subscribe to “alternative” media.  In the past, people looking for niche viewpoints had to subscribe to newsletters or magazines, but the rise of the internet has brought every crackpot out of the woodwork and given them a soapbox in the public sphere.  No matter what kind of wacky beliefs you have, there is someone out there who agrees with you.  And if you can’t find them, then you have the ability to put your message out there yourself.

McLuhan

My favorite quote from this chapter is, “The electric light is pure information.”  I think this is representative of much of McLuhan’s work in that it presents an idea in an obtuse way without explaining it.  When you do finally unravel it, it clearly explains what he is getting at in this chapter.  All that light does is present things more clearly, therefore it is inherently all medium with no message.

I found the section criticizing David Sarnoff to be the least persuasive.  Comparing 20^th Century technological advances to apple pie and smallpox is like comparing apples and oranges.  It doesn’t work.  Apple pie has no capacity for evil and smallpox has no capacity for good.  Technology, on the other hand, can go either way depending on how it is used.  His comparison to guns is more apt, but I disagree with his conclusion there.

He uses the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument as an example of why he is right.  I think that it disproves him.  McLuhan writes, “If the slugs reach the right people firearms are good,” like it is some sort of ridiculous statement.  I think that statement is pretty accurate.  There is a big difference between gun violence when an innocent person is killed, and when justice is being served.

Futurism

This is my non-objective representation of the medium of television.  The rectangles represent all of the noise out there; whether it be infomercials, 24 hour news or reality shows.  Even though they are all different shapes and sizes, they are all still rectangles with shades of the same color.  This mass of blue nearly blots out the background, but a few slivers of yellow are still visible through all of the mess.

guy debord is wack

Guy Debord thinks that everything we do and experience is not real.  It is the result of generations of conditioning by the media to think and act a certain way.  He suggests that the problem this creates is that nothing is original and everything is endlessly repeated.  This is Debord’s answer to the age-old question, “Where does culture come from?”  His answer seems to be that culture comes from other culture, an endless, self-propagating machine.

I just have to ask, “So what?”

Of course nothing is original.  Civilization has been going for upwards of 5,000 years.  Everything has to come from somewhere.  Artists don’t just pluck their masterpieces out of thin air, they are all influenced by those who came before.  We didn’t raise ourselves to adulthood in a vacuum of existence.  We learned how to act from our society and culture.  And its always been like this.  There’s still good art and scientific discovery and interesting people out there.  The world isn’t a lost cause.  And if everything is just a retread of something that came before, then what is Debord doing?  I assume that he’s the only one smart enough to see through the static and view the world the way it really is.  From the needlessly obtuse vocabulary and organization to the, “Everyone is wrong but me,” message; this smacks of vanity.  It sounds like something written by a fifteen year old who’s decided to become a Libertarian based on what he’s heard on South Park.  He presents “alienation” as some sort of escape from the cycle of spectacle for individuals who don’t fit in.  But as we have seen time and time again, all of these supposed “individuals” will group together and fall into the same trap of conformity.  I guess Debord proved himself right by becoming one more in a long line of writers to put themselves on a pedestal and glorify their own supposed uniqueness.

Intro

Hello, class.  I am Paul.  I’m 5’10″, 180 lbs. and an Aries.  I hail from the suburbs of Chicago, IL.  I am a junior at Eugene Lang and a Culture/Media major.  I’m okay with a bunch of different audio/visual programs, but not great with any.  I’m here to learn more about media and put some of the things I’ve learned in school to use.  I realize that most media is stupid and ridiculous, but instead of getting angry or upset, I just laugh.  I think its pointless to get worked up in the face of government or business.  There is nothing you can do, and if you think otherwise you need to grow up.  I do hate lots of different things, though.  Mostly narcissism-related.

This is a picture of me.