FA-weblog
7-11-13
Steve's objects
24 (Fox Network, 2002-2010)
Last week Steve showed a clip form the U.S. TV series 24. In this show the protagonists have access to, or are denied access to, a code. This code will allow our hero (Jack Bauer) to disarm an atomic bomb or neutralize a flesh-eating virus (or any number of 'clear and present dangers'). The plot always centers on Jack getting the code through some clever trick, and finally through torture. The body in 24 might be understood as an encumbrance to the free flow of information, an imperfect medium for information exchange. In the show the body is often disposed of once the information has been imparted. The body is reduced to an informatics.
See: The Internet Effect, A.R Galloway, Polity, 2012
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973
There are some significant differences and similarities to the way the body is treated in The Holy Mountain. Here the ‘thief’ undergoes a process of purification – an array of ‘technologies of self’ - before setting off to find the Holy Mountain. We are introduced to the nine ‘thieves’ who accompany him on his journey. These include an arms manufacturer who makes weapons for hippies and various types of religious armaments; a toy manufacturer who trains and conditions children to hate. Aversion and electro-shock therapy is used to fashion the development of the children’s psychological life. Jodorowsky presents us with a society in which production and consumption is regulated by a huge computer. The economy is ‘vertically integrated’ to produce and condition citizens to continue the cycle of production and destruction. The film was made in the year of the CIA instigated coup in Chile. Allende, the elected socialist president, was deposed. A ‘free market’ economic system was instituted. Resistance was violently repressed by the Pinochet regime.
At the time Stafford Beer (on the request of Allende) was developing a computer system (cybersyn) design to regulate the Chilean economy and facilitate economic and democratic transparency. Pinochet abruptly discontinued this program on gaining power, preferring a ‘free market’, Chicago School economic system, mixed with ‘psyops’ techniques of repression imported from the United States' secret service. For Steve, The Holy Mountain demonstrates the protean nature of cybernetic ideas (control and communication - feedback systems &c). These ideas were active across the divides of left and right – they were simultaneously called into the services of liberation and oppression. These ideas live on in shows such as 24 where the body is, in the final event, a carrier of code (knowledge, DNA &c). The subject is understood as an information machine, exchanging information with other information machines.
See: Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, E. Medina, MIT, 2011; The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, Penguin, 2007, N. Wiener, Cybernetics, or The Control and Communication in Animal and Machine, MIT, 1965; M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (see chapter, care of the self), Penguin, 197?;
Link. Artist Susanna Kriemann interviews Steve about cybernetic ideas in contemporary culture:
http://www.roddickinson.net/pages/pre_reviews/SignalNoise-Bulletin.pdf
X's objects
Alice Mendelowitz
Sister Carrie, 1900 by Theodore Dreiser
File:Sister carrie.jpg Which deals with a young american county girls realisation of the american dream in the big city, primarily through her use of sex or sexuality and being a bit of a sauce. Alice suggested that in it there is a general tendency towards things or ideas or stories being vague and open to our knowledge of their occupying a wider world and that this book exists as a template for novels of the american dream, bukowski, etc. As a novel which doesn't take a particular moral stance Alice is interested perhaps in its potential for telling and romanticising a story which not long prior would perhaps have been subject to stylisation as scandalous or a fall or a moral tale for social education. It also seems to its readership about themselves in a particularly live way, as turn of the (20th) century americans it inhabits the spaces that the nascent nation did.
Media
The American Friend - Wim Wenders - 1977 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06hIZ76Zlds
one of many adaptations of many Ripleys novels (Patricia Highsmith). The American friend, played by Dennis Hopper, is an auction house price gamer, he is involved in an artwork forgery ring and appears at auction houses in order to bid on forged paintings to push up the price. The key protagonist though is a hitman with an unspecified (probably) terminal illness who performs hits in order to accumulate money for his soon to be widow. He is commissioned by Hopper to murder first a rival art gangster and then a second man after Hopper character fakes his medical report to suggest his illness is more immediately terminal than it is.
Alice was particularly interested in Wenders particular stylisation of the novel and of Hamburg, the location. He shoots light in a particular (painterly?) way which fictionalises Hamburg as a beautiful location, which She (Alice) doesn't understand to be the case with actual Hamburg, as it exists.
Artwork
Drive in by Stuart Croft. 2007
Again this deals with spaces and modes for telling a story, in this case a story is essentially told in the form of a long looping joke, by an american woman to a silent man. The man drives a car at night and the woman is the passenger, there isn't any real indication of the nature of their relationship, but the weight of particular parts of the story and the glances he throws back perhaps suggest that it could stand as an allegory for them.
Within the story a man is caught in a storm at sea, he washes up on a beautiful desert island, alone and without provision. after a while of starving and getting hairy he discovers that a beautiful woman was also washed up, but she is AWESOME. she has a house which she possibly built, livestock, a shower, all sorts and she paints and carves amazing, weird sexy art.
they hook up, he writes a trashy novel, she doesn't like it, he has an affair, nothings the same, he leaves on his raft and hey presto, caught in a storm, washes up on an island, and repeats the story. We weren't 100%confident about it being a single unit loop or if the story is told twice as the loop repeats the double telling.
The camera work is very stylised, very slick, tight shots of the man and woman with rainy windows and out of focus lights from the street and city at night.
Alice feels that something about the piece is perfectly contemporary, or is the best example she has seen lately of how to tell a story as a short film in a contemporary way.
Throughout these there is a kernel which interests Alice about the stylisation of a saga, and about the slickness of an American approach and presentation, and possibly how that can co-opt or reorientate a story or location which is outside the mainstream american lineage. Though she doesn't feel like the saga (as distinct from the story somehow?) exists explicitly in her own practise, its something which bothers her in other work, and perhaps something which she is interested in bringing into her output, working out how to manipulate the particulars and stylisations of her aggregatory/collage based painting to incorporate the toning of a narrative.
Sol Archer (by Alice Mendelowitz)
Text = (http://www.vurdalak.com/tunguska/witness/witnesses.htm)
Sol was looking at eye witness Statements of the Tunaska Events in 1908, when it is thought that an airbust of small asteroid caused an explosion in Russia. These are primary sources, where the statements are very subjective and personal as opposed to being scientific.
Media = (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrU90Ub4Uw)
The media that Sol was interested was a conglomerate of footage of a meteor shower in present day Russia. Grainy film shot on a combination of car dashboard cameras, security cameras, and newsreel. Art piece = (http://theactofkilling.com/trailer/)
“The Act of Killing” is a stylized documentary about “gangsters” in North Sumatra, who in the wake of a failed coup in the 1960’s went from selling black market movie theater tickets to leading the most notorious death squad. These “gangsters” re-enact some of their killings for the film, doing so in the style of their favourite movie genres.
How does the medium the story is told with add to the tale ? Sol chose historical events in a combination of primary and secondary source material. Looking at the embodiement of stories, and how they can be told both objectively and subjectively.
Sriwanas objects
Last week Sriwana talked about the working process of the Rwssian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Najinksy. She read a part of his letter with the title “Letter to mankind”. Najinksy, was perhaps going through a schizophrenic state, that aloud him to use the language as a code of illustration.
He wrote some letters that are untranslatable in another written language; he was mainly interested in the sound of words or animals such as cat sounds or pigeon. Perhaps it could be translated to another language as dance; he used sound of animals and words in order to illustrate dance movements. Sriwana showed us a video Rite of Spring, 1913/you tube. With this choreography he reestablished the catholic concept on movement in classical ballet dancing by reversing the balletic tradition, turning the basic movement from outside to inside. She also talked about the idea of unlearning as a creative process. By undoing what you learned invent, create and in this case dance movements that would examine the limits of the movement of the body. The second art piece she was interested in the book of Djuna Barnes particularly a sentence … “time crawling” broke into uncontrollable laugther, and thought this occurrence troubled him the rest of his lif he was never able tp explain it to himself.”… as a respond to something that she didn’t know but she was drown to it.