User:Andre Castro/2/tutorials

Tutorial with David - spam as minor language & performance

Minor language discussion

Described Deleuze and Guattari's argument for considering Kafka's literature as minor

minor as a choice

• David was a bit skeptical to the idea of a conscious choice to become minor; to take/accept a minor position that opens up the possibility of no value to recognized in the work.
• David argue that Kafka's minor language came out from its personal position, he wasn't taking a political stand

political aspect

• Spam arises from big world events, that are used to justify the narratives. In that sense there is political aspect, in the appropriation of world event to

would be interesting to try to find spam that takes the Boston Marathon bombings into its narrative

• 9/11 example: we have a already an image of the event, brought to us by the media. A personal email referring to the event and the people involved; becomes a minor language within the language of media. it reports the same event but from an unofficial, and personal angle, that undermines the informative and impartial language of the media.
• the personal perspective on world events, over which we normally only have a birds eyes view, create a disjunction between the language through which they are portrayed. Because they are normally described through an often distant and secure position, when confronted with a vivid, personal description. The language used to describe the events, and our own view, crack open.

the language

It is not clear what major language is spam actually borrowing, building itself on to. It can be language of world news, of politics, of high-finance, and not necessarily only of advertisement. Yet advertisement seems to encompass, to borrow, from all these other languages.

made visible

• when the minor language is made visible, like in Linton Kwesi Johnson's poetry, it begins to make sense
• the minor language begins to make sense when it acquires the form of the major language, but it is not the major language
• like when the Jamaican-pidgin is introduce into the context of English poetry and pop music, of cinema ... [FOR THE ESSAY] like the examples cited above ... spam also needs a major to acquire the form of - the language of adv

Performance

• lecture form
• common familiarity of this type of language; and I am recontextualizing it.
• the recontextualization seems to David to add a rich layer to this language
• that becomes something else when it is recontextualized: I am being told a story, but I am also made aware of the repetitions present, and tautological nature of these, that seem to be compiled from one single source-code on different manifestations
• the story is par of a richer vocabulary

danger

• danger: it becomes 3 people reciting spam.
• it must me taken away from simply telling: "spam is like this and other times like that"
• it needs to move out of that territory and into an area that surprises, that the audience is not expecting.
• It can even be pushed into singing

scenario/imaginary

• David suggested the presence of stereotypical images of the scenario the emails describe
• I responded with the intention to introduce sounds, that provided a scenario of the email: war sounds for the soldier; jungle sounds + airplanes in Miss Kones.

I am asking the audiences to look at a language, that is not quite what it is supposed to be, it is a minor language. Because of that it has quite uncanny aspects to it, which derive from our own familiarity to it, but also its strange minor position. This position, both familiar and strange make it is interesting to observe.

exhibition

• An installation/documentation of the performance
• synced monitors on top of plinths
• each monitor has the image and sound of a single performer

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Tutorial - Michael 14/01/2013

Reoccurring characters in different emails, create connections between stories told over the different emails. These relationships and interconnected stories deserve to be explored, as out of the relationships a narrative begins to begins to be sketched.

Characters Model

adding a model for characters

CHARACTER
name
stories

THE LINK TABLE

• could have more information: like the role played by a character in the field; the misspelled names given to the same character ) - links that have properties
• many to many relationship
• server cross-referencing

stories = ManyToMany(Story, ..., through=Role) 

thoughts

• using the table as writing environment

from a mathematical model to literature

• repurposing the database, outside its infamous data tracking and surveillance aspects.

the relational model in a writing sense

necessity for a search function

• django haystack - for search functionality