Reynolds 10-26-10

Initially I was drawn to the actual design of the book, Rhythm Science, because it is a unique work of art on it’s own; a hole for a spindle piercing the CD shaped pages, alternating paper textures, text, quotes, designs and a music CD enclosed. Then I read Paul Miller’s heady and very perceptive text. He is obviously very bright and his educational background in Philosophy and French Literature is evident in his intellectual ruminating in this book; many varied recognizable and some unfamiliar people from history and the present, are quoted, and their thoughts and/or music explored (remixed). He is an artist, writer, producer, and a DJ. As a DJ he goes by Spooky that Subliminal Kid, a name that refers to the combination of “eerie sounds of hip-hop, technology, ambient and other music,” that he recontextualizes. He not only DJs but he uses the concept of DJing in Rhythm Science as a vehicle to present his cultural ideas and issues regarding art in the digital age.

Miller talks about how the artist uses technology to rearrange many of the ideas, art, music, and beliefs to create and convey infinite new and expressive art. Software becomes the tool and the almost limitless information on the web can be altered or added too at the artist discretion. He said that thanks to technology the entire history of music can be remixed, his CD is a true form of sampling and multiplicity. This is accurate for all art as well.

Some of the themes that he purposely expressed disjointedly are: “Who speaks through you?” Miller’s African American heritage sometimes speaks through him. I feel he was connected to his deceased father and DeBois both activists in their own right. “Who owns memory?” Memory is in our cells and genetic makeup. Memory is in the ethers, open for anyone to assimilate. We all own our own memory but maybe we are multiplex selves. “How does property intervene in the flow of information between the material and the ethereal?” Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. “In an information economy it’s all about how information creates identity as a scarce resource.” “The method becomes actionary rather than reactionary.” I don’t think he believes there is much originality but that all ideas are recombined and re-”paired”. To me the remixing or recontextualizing of material is really a composite of ownership that loops around back to a point where you don’t really know who owns it, but does that really make a difference anyway?

Who is the controller of your universe?

The question really is “who speaks through you”

Influencing every moment of your existence

I am impacted with every cell of my body by my mother

Her voice resonates with every passing thought

She gave me life and imbedded the seeds of who I am

Speaking

Captivating

Ever guiding me through my journey in this lifetime

My intuition and experiences are the hand that guides me

I own my memory

My looking glass changes with every breath

My memory changes

Drifts

Morphs

And sometimes dissipates with the tick of a clock

Paces into the deeps recesses of my mind

Or it is hiding waiting to be evoked from within

But there are memories that will stand the test of time

Playing and Replying

Forever

Reynolds -Jody Zellen

The artist that I chose to discuss is Jody Zellen and her work Ghost City on the website net_condition. She is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has a BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. In this net art project, she explores the urban environment through different types of media such as photography, poetry, music, newspapers, public art, and books. “The images are from print media sources, texts from books on urban theory or other written words, generally poetic.”

In my blog I’ve linked four websites that reference her work:

http://www.ghostcity.com/

http://aminima.net/wp/?p=492&language=en

http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/zellen.html

http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/zellen/index.html#

The site Ghost City started in 1997 and completed in 2005. It started as a hyperlink and continued as a work in progress, as technology evolved so did her web site. In Zellen’s own words, “Ghost City serves as an archive for all my web based work as well as a place for experimentation.”

Jody Zellen designed ‘Ghost City’ which is a website that presents a maze of multiple changing scenes of an imaginary city. “...A city of fragments, a memory, a ghost of reality, a ghost city.” She calls this net art “an interactive urban environment” and she thinks of her web space as a sculptural space. Viewers participate by interacting with the animated graphics allowing them to “sculpt” different views of city life. Each animated image is a link to a different part of the city. The opening web picture is a square divided into twenty-five individual squares against a black border. The nine center squares each contain a letter against a solid colored background that spells out Ghost City, and the center square has one letter that continually alternates, and also spells Ghost City, one letter at a time. The sixteen colorful border squares each flash and shift pictures of city scenes. To enter the city, you can click on any square and suddenly you are in a complex network of visual, textual, and sometimes auditory stimulus, a city environment. “The viewer is a wanderer through the city either moving forward or backward, discovering new spaces in the city.”

Zellen’s theme is a narrative about being immersed in a city environment; the memories, feelings, smells, sights, tastes, sounds, both past and present. When entering her imaginary city one is immediately sensory bombarded and in constant movement. These are some of the stylistic and consistent feelings Ghost City evoked in me while navigating: congestion, colorful, intriguing, creative, noisy, claustrophobic, frustration, alienated by the energy, frenetic, overwhelming, smelly, smoky, bus fumes, conversation, honking, bodies, pushing, opportunities, laughter, crying, joy, sadness, ringing cell phones, and blinking lights. This is a very in depth net art piece, it envelopes you as you click deeper, you dig deeper into the heart and fragmented history of Ghost City; windows of images of old buildings, signage, cars, and clothes pop up and disappear. Simultaneously, pictures and text of the present contrast pictures and text of the past.

It really stimulates your memory of what one feels like in the midst of a city. I like Ghost City a lot, but I don’t like big cities in general so I have somewhat of a negative reaction to this digital immersion. On the other hand, there are many people who can’t live without the chaos and tempo of an urban environment and they would be right at home in Ghost City. It’s also stylistically consistent because you are always in the confines of an urban environment. Cities are all about growth and expansion and Ghost city as a good example of this process.

Zellen’s work is valuable because it is an example of the changeability and evolution seen in a specific art piece over an extended period of time, which is a distinctive element of digital art. Ghost City is technologically innovative, as digital art advanced, so did her work. In a contemporary arts context, it is important that this work appear on the internet because it’s a very creative forum that one can utilize to interact with “a city” via the web. The digital medium is actually unique and a very artistic way to experience and explore an art piece. Obviously, you can’t interact with a painting or sculpture of a city in the same way you can on- line.

Reynolds 10-5-10

The Yes Men are said to have a “hactivist approach to art.” I looked up the definitions of hacker + activist. Activists: “the actions of those who try and bring about political or social change. Hackers: those who gain unauthorized access to computer data or some system, and/or innovative users of digital media.” When you combine the definitions they describe some of the methods used by performance artist’s in the film The Yes Men. According to Wikipedia ‘The Yes Men’ do culture jamming which “is a tactic used by many consumer social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions.” http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=cultural+jamming

The way their website was formatted mirrored that of the WTO, “an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade.” The website was extremely believable, people would contact ‘The Yes Men’ group thinking that they actually were the WTO. Then the Yes Men would set up interviews or meetings with media sources with these organizations.

As hacktivists, they assumed aliases and impersonated representatives of the WTO at several conferences and media interviews. During interviews and presentations they appeared to be believable representatives, but they made radical, and avant-garde statements said in a subversive and satirical way. People often don’t question authority figures or those who are supposedly highly respected in their field. Their message not only made fun of the WTO, but through parody they delivered ridiculous strategies on how to fix the global economy.

I looked up the definition of “tactical media art” in Wikipedia and found the following website that uses activism through humor and politics in an attempt to create public awareness about specific issues. It’s not exactly like The Yes Men group and there are similarities, but they are social activists.

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/mission.html

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/lb.html

The conventional thought of a studio artist is someone who creates art in a studio like painting, sculpture, photography, etc. within a studio. The Yes Men used their website, and also their satirical fake personas as performance artists as their medium to express themselves artistically. I think art mixed with constantly changing technology has changed the “artist as genius” model. Borat is a performance artist who is somewhat of a hactivist who also uses exaggeration and imitation in films.

The Yes men are performance artists and hactivists who use parody to make social commentaries. The other two artists used websites and parody also to make social commentaries.

Example: net art’s “manifesto” and etched tablets, and Fluidity.... used a lot of humor about the future of net art.

I have ambivalent feelings in regards to whether or not The Yes Men’ are ‘artists.’ This hesitance to call their work ‘art’ or the group ‘artists’ has to do with my own internal struggle as to what defines ‘art’ and who is an ‘artist.’ On one hand, I feel that their work is mainly hactivism and not art because their main goal is essentially political. On the other hand, I think they have a very unique style and approach which I can see as performance art. After trying to decipher my own interpretations of the Yes Men and film, I came to the conclusion that I really do consider them ‘artists,’ because the ability to take on pseudonymous personas and act or perform the part is a form of art.