Kennedy Elliott takes up a useful rant in her weblog on the trajectory of our seminar discusssions. Because we are such a diverse group, with such varied backgrounds and interests, the odds of an intellectual consensus are slim to none. Yet we do share this semester's inquiry in common, and because we are at liberty to explore at will, each of us bears a certain responsibility to come to seminar with a set of talking points. I don't believe in forcing such preparation, as I feel that one learns more by doing for one's self than by doing for someone else. In a sense, though, by preparing for ourselves we are preparing for each other.
Regarding our seminar discussions, my goal is to serve as moderator rather than as leader. I am opinionated, and I will fit my two cents worth into the mix, but I'd prefer for the discussion to take shape in a way that reflects our collective interests, rather than via the imposition of my own agenda. This is easier said than done. As I read for my graduate seminars, I find myself slipping back into the comfort zone of the passive learner— I read what I'm assigned, no more and no less. With MDST 322, it's easy to do less, but it's also easier to do more. It will take a certain amount of self-discipline to make the most of the pedagogical model we're working with— not everyone will be at full strength every week, but as we progress, I'm hoping that a different set of especially active learners will emerge from discussion to discussion. A sort of collage in itself, if you will (or not, if you won't), as Jake Hostetter suggests in his response to the views of Kennedy et al.
On the topic of digital collage, Ben Walter raises an interesting point in his weblog about its exclusivity: whereas paper collage proved a more accessible, more DIY approach (from a knowledge-base and a materials standpoint) than the traditional media of charcoal, Carrarramarble and oil paint, digital collage is actually less accessible and less DIY. In the realm of new media, a more experimental, fragmentary aesthetic demands a much more complicated knowledge base, along with a much more expensive suite of new media applications. In other words, Elmer's products are cheaper and easier than Adobe's. Does this make glue more democratic, providing more authority and autonomy for the millions of would-be-artists in our midst? Or is the CPU in fact more democratic, since it allows the community-at-large a fighting chance to approach the level of technological sophistication employed by the mass media, which is increasingly subject to corporate consolidation and domination?
Here's to Majkin Klare for posting a link to the treasure trove that is Ryan Hildebrand's "Creative Misuse and Abuse of Musical Tools," a study of what he terms "Glitch Electronica." To accompany his myriad of sound files, Hidlebrand has a fine example of a hypertext essay, which though it clocks in at 2000 words and lacks sufficient hyperlinks, may be a useful model for those of you looking for an example of how a hypertext response might distinguish itself formally from an extended blog entry.
This project was completed for Howard Besser's Spring 2001 course at UCLA on the Social and Cultural Impact of New Information. In fact, Besser has been teaching this course since 1993, and has an impressive site with a splendid archive of materials for those interested in the subject. At the very least, its a fascinating document regarding the evolution of new media aesthetics in the 1990s.
And what have I been up to?
Playing ZORK after a couple of decades, I stopped to wonder... what is the difference between a literary work and a game? Is it perhaps the case that new media are collapsing distinctions between genres?
Now, I'm all for border crossing, but I do know which domains I like. Being the poetry enthusiast that I am, I ended up at poems that GO, and encountered Thomas Swiss's poem "Genius," which led me to wonder... what is the difference between poetry and entertainment?
Why such anxious questioning here? Isn't literature merely (or at least mostly) diversion? Why should I hesitate to endorse text adventures like ZORK and Flash poems like "Genius" without apology? Shouldn't all available technologies be employed where the work of literature is concerned? Of course, having said that, I wonder why so few of the poets at poems that GO actually read their poems. Once again, shouldn't technology be employed to present poetry to its best advantage? And isn't poetry at its best when read aloud?
When poetry remains to be seen, but not heard, even while embedded within an application like Flash, the barrage of moving images tends to trump the words themselves. One's attention can only do so much, and all that animation ends up distracting from the language, which gets left behind (especially when that language takes on the character of animation and gets all flash-ified). This leads me to wonder: are these moving images themselves aspects of what Ezra Pound called phanopoeia, or do they merely compromise the phanopoeia that rests within the language of the poem? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I'd tend to argue the latter.
Then again, while I might balk here at the idea of an old form like poetry in a new medium like Flash, I remain perfectly willing to look at older forms through the purview of newer aesthetic categories. For instance, at the Electronic Labyrinth, I examined a hypertext timeline which led me to understand
The Bible as a form of collage writing, and a codex that's quite amenable to the advantages offered via hypertext.
Bartelby.com's version of the King James Bible is only the beginning in this respect. Does any one know of a more fully hyperlinked edition?
Finally, I tuned in to hear some of Christian Marclay's set on WTJU yesterday. My favorite moment came when the sound of a bouncing ping-pong ball unexpectedly worked its way in to the mix, careening back and forth until it b-b-bb-bbb-bbbbounced to a rolling stop as the music came to a close.
As to that ball b-b-bb-bbb-bbbbouncing, I think it's bouncing on me. Must run. Will save my thoughts on Coover and others for tonight's discussion, and will be back soon with an entry on scattered ephemera.
I was really looking forward to David Golumbia's talk on "The Nonstandard Web." The topic is highly relevant to this week's discussion on Internet as Collage, but it will remain relevant to the seminar more generally, and looks to be a good thing coming to those, including me, who can't wait.
Meanwhile, there are some interesting things happening at the seminar portal. But what exactly is the seminar portal, and where is it going? What, exactly, is the point?
There is plenty of substance on the seminar portal, though at the same time it seems difficult to avoid the tendency by which, once taken from the page to the web, humanities scholarship tends to be regarded, even by some new media advocates themselves, as a form of "education entertainment design." Is this a problem? As long as there's a proper mixture of education, entertainment, and design going on at the seminar portal, then the learning environment has been effectively enriched.
What is the proper mixture? In his "How to Be an Internet Artist," Mark Amerika quotes Greg Ulmer to the effect that "electracy does not replace literacy, but supplements it." True, in theory, but in practice does supplement also supplant? The site is a great thing when we engage it, but is it somehow easier to trivialize, evade, or even forget than the good old-fashioned book?
As far as I can tell, the members of this seminar were all schooled on a steady diet of book larnin'. For better or for worse. At the same time, we all learn media on our own time, and we are all in the process of becoming hypertext learners. What does that difference involve, and how does it effect the way that we approach organized and disorganized information (as in, say, a Media Studies seminar)? What is hypertextual consciousness, and how does it relate to what I've been referring to as open source pedagogy? Are these inherently radical approaches? They do, at the very least, seem to accord with two fundamental principles advocated by Karl Marx: the co-ownership of the means of production, and the allowance of a system in which each performs to his/her own abilities, and explores according to her/his own needs.
How do the co-owners feel?
Nate Petty decides that the weblog is "like a verbal contract against your freewill that reinforces the adrenaline of creative spirit." Judging from Nate's weblog, his is not only a verbal contract, but a visual one as well, given the fantastic design he has going.
As for me, and my silence of late:
Verbal contract says: I will maintain a weblog relating to MDST 322.
Freewill says: I would like to sleep. Or read up for the latest book review that I'm working on. Or talk on the telephone. Or what have you.
Adrenaline of creative spirit says: Time to write another entry. Which doesn't just mean that I sit down at my roll-top desk with my corn cob pipe and my button nose and two eyes made out of coal. It means I'm going down to the global village with a broomstick in my hand, running here and there all around the sqaure saying catch me if you can. Not simply writing in isolation, by way of explanation, but exploring. THINK - READ - WRITE - SPIN CYCLE - RESTART.
Speaking of exploring, I just got through reading Ben Walter's thought-provoking essay on "The Website as a Work of Art in an Age of Infinite Reproduction." Very interested in Ben's sense of the internet as a space that allows for infinite reproduction without a corresponding degradation of aura. True as this seems of the internet of general, the principle may apply more fully to a webpage than to a painting. To see why, check out Morgan Whitaker's weblog entry for January 30.
As for a webpage, to the extent that a given webpage possesses an aura at all, its aura is not contrary to, but rather dependent upon its reproducibility. As Ben shrewdly notes of a screenshot of a webpage (whether viewed in digital or print form), to the extent that it is no longer functional it is no longer itself. In this sense, the internet seems to approach what Jean Baudrillard describes as the simulacrum: the copy for which no original exists. To reify a webpage by photographing it, framing it, and displaying it in a museum as a static artifact is to betray its very essence, which is, paradoxically, a non-essence.
I do have one critique of Ben's essay— namely, his distinction between the functional and the artistic, to the effect that Google functions outside the domain of art, as a web design "not intended to evoke any emotion or feeling."
Of any given webpage, then, we may say: it's art, but is it collage? Can we consider a work composed using charcoal, paint and photography analogous to a website composed using Dreamweaver, Flash, and Photoshop? Perhaps we sense that the former is more truly a collage because traditional media like charcoal, paint, and even photography retain distinct textures on paper, whereas new media applications, insofar as they retain a common digital character, tend to cluster together more seamlessly. Does this mean that a webpage is less properly considered a collage than those collages in the ? The question recurs: what's depth got to do with it?
Finally, Ben's essay elucidates an important link between collage and new media, for both phenomena destabilize the concept of authorship.
If it is true that at any moment each reader is waiting to turn into a writer, then there are innumerable potential co-authors of MDST 322— not only the two dozen of us, when we meet every Tuesday for a discussion, but each one of us at any other point we re-visit the seminar portal, as well as the many more that somehow happen upon the seminar portal from some other point in cyberspace.
Ah, but cyberspace is not all, and space beckons. Must run. But next time the adrenaline of the creative spirit strikes, I'm hoping to respond the notions of the Creative Commons and the Wikipedia, and, of course, to keep reading what you write, a la the eminently inimitable— or would that be the eminently imitable— Jake Hostetter.
Tuesday's class ended with an energetic discussion of what the terms collage and new media actually meant. Although we didn't come to any collective conclusion, I found the disagreements to be productive, and the differences of opinion have definitely pushed me to re-evaluate my own individual sense of these terms. A couple of ideas for helping to improve our collective sense of these terms, and of other terms: a) recourse to the Wikipedia's definitions of Collage and New Media, which we are free to modify as we see fit; and b) recourse to our commonplace "book", which everyone can take an active role in co-authoring, and where I recently added some relevant quotations from Harold Rosenberg's article "Collage: Philosophy of Put Togethers."
Etymology and original connotations aside, the term collage now seems to signify, in any medium (literary or visual; paper or digital; musical; photographic, filmic or video; conceptual, installation, or sculptural) an emphasis on the fragmentation and juxtaposition of various parts in order to form a new whole... or, at the very least, a new fragment— can something ever be truly 'whole' where the collage aesthetic is concerned?
In the physical realm, an artist is inevitably limited in terms of what s/he can access for the purposes of fragmentation and juxtaposition. But in the digital realm, many of these limits begin to recede. What, then, to make of those who make use of the work of others (whether you want to call it appropriating, borrowing, modifying, re-inventing, stealing, usurping)— is it somehow more legitimate in the digital realm, and if so, does this make it more legitimate in general?
Let's turn to some concrete examples. There is, for instance, my initial design for the collective MDST 322 portal. Jake Hostetter elected to incorporate some of these design principles into his individual MDST 322 portal: check out this January snapshot of his initial design. Now, while Jake clearly established an individual stamp with this work, his work and my work are clearly related aesthetically. Does it make sense to claim that one's work is original and the other's work is a copy, or that, even if such a claim could be established, the copyist has somehow behaved less ethically or less originally than the originator? I could, after all, go back and appropriate some of Jake's design principles (in fact, by sticking a snapshot of his work in my domain, perhaps I already have, for web purists might object that an intenal hyperlink to a snapshot from an external domain is in fact an unethical practice... but that's a different kettle of fish).
Is the solution simply to credit one's sources when possible? I'm certainly not asking Jake to credit me as a design influence— I'm not sure I even believe in such a practice. But what if an artist wants to be credited? Let's take another example. Roody Roodhouse came up with a fantastic initial design for her individual MDST 322 portal: check out the January snapshot here. This design was so fantastic that it was appropriated by two other members of the seminar: Carrie Dann and Kennedy Elliott. Here is Carrie's snapshot, and here is Kennedy's snapshot. Now, was Kennedy's work really "totally stolen from Roodie"? Does that mean that Carrie's was too? Should Roody feel ripped off, or should she feel pleased that her work is influencing other members of the seminar?
Turning back to my own work... or should I say "my own" work... for after all, the "initial design" for the collective MDST 322 portal is heavily dependent on a collage of images from Shirin Kouladjie's Days of My Life project. These images, while credited within the weekly pages, bear no credits within the portal itself. But to whom would they best be credited? Even if I were to place Shirin's name by every image, this would only be part of the story, for many of "her" images were created not only by her, but also by the many artists known and unknown that Shirin herself appropriated from— without always crediting them.
An interesting spin-off on this question has lately emerged, with the addition to the collective MDST 322 portal of a Days of My Life style image called
"Video Games" created by Bobby Bokista. Or does it just seem like it's influenced by Shirin because it's incorporated into a design framework that I created to showcase Shirin's work? Would that mean that Bobby has borrowed more from me than from Shirin? Or has Bobby produced a work that is purely original (apart from the fact that it too is a collage composed of fragments and juxtapositions)?
These are tough questions to answer. Nevertheless, it's easy to see how much excellent work has already been posted by a number of the members of this seminar. All you have to do is a little exploring. For example, check out Morgan Whitaker's superb "really really bad collage" .
New Zealander Peter Lewis was back in touch recently from with further thoughts on the question of paper collage v. digital collage. He writes that while "I've always considered my work to be purely paper," nevertheless "I often digitally paint out little blemishes such as small tears in the paper and dust from the scanner screen too," and in this sense "I may be crossing over into the digital realm."
Lewis further explains that "to me, digital collage has always meant manipulation of individual images, such as reversing or scaling them to fit better or altering the texture to blend older images with newer ones. Whereas with paper collage nothing can be reversed or scaled so you either spend hours searching for an image the right size and from the right perspective, or you make the incongruity work for you and incorporate it into your style."
Niels Köhler, a collage artist from Prague, also wrote in to question his classification as a digital collage artist, declaring that "all of my collages are paper collages made using classic collage techniques (cut out reproductions from magazines with knife and scissors, stuck together with glue)." Indeed, in his artist's statement "Addressing the Problems of the Terms Photomontage and Collage," Köhler seems to suggest that the very term 'digital collage' may be an oxymoron. If collage, to Köhler, is "an unique original with not only a visual structure but also a surface structure as the result of the physical treatment of the images," then, as he reasons, "the most commonly used technique in the modern mass media, computer aided digital combination and manipulation of photographs, is a form of photomontage and not of collage."
And yet, the trope of collage remains, for much as we may recognize the flatness and the replicability of the digital, the illusion of depth remains, as does the possibility of uniqueness. In light of these ambiguities, once-sacred concepts such as 'originality' demand re-evaluation. And even now, as we struggle to come to terms with our terms, we may have entered in an age in which words like 'cut' and 'paste' are used as often in the metaphorical, digital sense as in the classic scissors-and-glue sense. Does such a linguistic shift, beacuse metaphorical, serve to invalidate the notion of 'digital collage,' or does it in fact reinforce and reinscribe the trope of collage within the digital realm?
MDST 322, "Collage and New Media," which has been six months and more in the making, has already generated plenty of interest, both here at the University of Virginia and (dare I say it) around the world. I've received unsolicited e-mails from people unknown to me in Hungary, Japan and New Zealand that have helped to improve my sense of what the course should be and where it should be headed. One of my most interesting exchanges so far came with New Zealand artist Peter Lewis. He wrote me to explain that he had been mislabelled as a digital collage artist when "one directory listed me incorrectly... [and] their content was copied to many othes before I could have it corrected." Let the surfer beware.
But was it a mislabelling after all? Lewis himself explained that "all my collages are created on paper. The only digital aspect is when I scan them and 'beef up' the colour a bit, there is no digital manipulation." For my part, I acknowledged that while Lewis would not be alone in considering himself a paper collage artist, "others might argue that some sort of image manipulation would imply a shift from paper collage to digital collage... [though] others might say that the manipulation would have to be intentional for that shift to apply. Further on, some might go so far as to claim that any scanned paper collage automatically becomes a digital collage."
Would I go that far? I'm not quite sure. But I am sure that next week's talk will help to clarify my thoughts on the matter.
