Perri MacKenzie
Synopsis assignment
In “the work of art in the age of digital recombination’, Jos de Mul presents a re-thinking of our experience with (artistic and new) media via the computer interface, as a construct of aesthetic experience, through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” De Mul briefly outlines the scope of Benjamin’s essay, in particular defining key terms such as cult value, exhibition value, and aura. Throughout the essay he re-defines these key terms in digital terms. Through this lens, de Mul develops a “database ontology”, which reflects on how the combinatorics of the database – the commands Add, Browse, Change, and Destroy, allows for surpluses of meaning in media to be created through multi-dimensional flexibility. In this sense, databases can function as material or conceptual metaphors – the former in the material databases of biotechnology or industrial robotics, the latter as a structure which extends and re-combines our experience of ourselves and the world. He then introduces his main thesis: for Benjamin: in the age of mechanical reproduction, everything becomes and object for mechanical reproduction. However in the age of digital databases, everything in the material and conceptual world becomes an object for recombination and manipulation. As he number of recombinations available via database ontology is near-infinite, the work of art in the digital age has a renewed presence of aura, in the sense that the work of media art becomes “an interface between the sensible and the supersensible” – a membrane not between the work and its history, but in between the work and its virtuality.
In ‘Remixing and Remixability’, Lev Manovich reflects on flexibility and modularity as a marker of an media object’s worth, in a description of what he calls “remixability” – the potential of any kind of information to be copied, pasted, sampled, and “remixed” into any other kind of information, endlessly. He uses examples from electronic music, video editing (“mash-up”) and the world of fashion to illustrate this idea. In particular, he makes a distinction between collections of information where remixing is practiced “publicly” (such as computer programming) and those collections where remixing is practiced “privately” (such as the stock image library of a graphic design studio.) This distinction begs the question: will cultural works be blurred into this remixability milieu in the future? Will they be designed to be modular, to be broken into blocks which “know how to couple with other blocks.” ? Contemporary modularity, for Manovich, goes beyond the design restrictions of twentieth century design – in a contemporary modular system, every time the blocks are used again they can modify themselves automatically to produce “unlimited diversity”. This points towards a possible future of “complete remixability” or “universal modularity”. He describes a tendancy for information to actually want to be infinitely remixable – “in the era of Web 2.0 – ‘information wants to be ASCII’.” This tendancy means that the distinction between professional and amateur has blurred, as their media pools mix. It is at this point that his thesis becomes an exploration of the difference between modularity in contemporary culture versus industrial modularity, which is governed by a different logic. In this way we have been modular for a long time – but at the same time “we have never been modular.”
Synopsis Assignment
I have looked diligently at my own mind is an essay by Heraclitus of Epheses, (Greece , c. 500 BC). It is one of the many ancient thought-fragments anthologized in The Lost Origins of the Essay, (ed. John D’Agata, Graywolf Press 2009).
I have looked diligently… is a series of 38 short statements. Each statement is visually separated from the next with a graphic. This gives each thought space to be itself - a discrete statement; yet with the flow of the repeated graphics this discretion is given visual continuity.
This discrete continuity is subtle: each thought at first seems aphoristic, Zen-like, unified in itself. Yet, as you read the essay, the thought-fragments begin to correspond with each other. Thus the writer moves from
We share a world when we are awake
to
Awake, a dying world.
The essay begins with a reflection on knowing and intelligence:
Those who wish to know more about the world must learn about it in details
This then moves on to an extended meditation on the movements of the elements (fire, water, lightening) throughout the world, eventually returning to its details - the world’s debris of dirt and dust:
There are gods here, too.
Describe what you do assignment
What follows is a 150 word description of three projects.
Popsong
There are three elements to Popsong: two screen prints, a performance, and a PDF. The screen prints: two, A2 in size, two colours - dark royal blue and dark ochre. The prints were graphic, containing hand-written text (blue) and a drawing (ochre). The first text read “popsong”, the second “ritournelle”. Each drawing appeared to be scrawly renderings of a single foot. The performance was of me, talking and singing, descending a stair case - lasting approximately 15 minutes. I read from a script, which had painted elements on the backs of the pages, and deposited each page as I descended the stairs. I sang in French and spoke in English. I sang La Javanaise by Serge Gainsbourg, and spoke about zig zags, translation, hexagonal chessboards, and the letters A, V, and Z. The script from the performance was scanned in double-sided as a PDF, and it exists on my website.
(150 words)
Ivan: A meditation on three objects
I was asked by MAP magazine to convert research I had accumulated on a residency at the Centre of Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, into an online publication. It is soon to be published. The online publication is called Ivan: A meditation on three objects. Each section contemplates a “cultural object”, in order: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Mappa embroideries by Alighiero Boetti, and The Lecture on Ethics by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The text is set in Times New Roman, with occasional blue italics, and is accompanied by 13 watercolour illustrations in process-blue, process-pink, and process-orange. The illustrations range in style and content, from tonal washes to graphic fills. The publication is laid out in a series of landscape spreads, and is designed by me. The text is approx. 6,000 words long, split into three sections with a very short introduction and no conclusion.
(144 words)
The air was full of scent, imbued with life and with contradictions
This is a performance by me to take place on Saturday 13th October at Sunday Artfair. It is presented by Victor and Hester with Aye-Aye Books in the publication section of the art fair. The performance is part of a broader project with Victor & Hester and Allison Gibbs exploring the potentiality of archives. The performance will be approximately 20 minutes long, and will include the following: one A3 watercolour painting by me, pinned to wall (the painting is of hands holding a colourful rectangular object with a green leafy background), and myself reading aloud an abstract essay referring to my relationship with my particular copy of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. The essay also refers to the phenomenon of “structural colour” in objects such as opals, fish scales, and the blue sky. The essay centres around the arbitrary question: “what is this books relationship to its cover?”
(149 words)