on art, virus and antibodies

At the edge of art defends a view of society as a body and art as the immune system that protects it (according to the book, from “technology’s assault”; “society needs art to survive”.). The analogy between antibodies and art allows a description of operations performed for both within the context of the body. While lymphocites work by recognizing an alien body (=virus), capturing it, warning the entire immune system and reproducing another antibodies to finally eliminate the threat, artists can be seen as the “agents” that (while flowing in the “bloodstream” of society) first recognize ideas not yet assimilated but already circulating in the culture, give resonance to them, arrest the public’s attention, and creates a cultural memory. The comparison is intriguing, though: are artists “guardians” of society? Antibodies work to eliminate foreign agents that could compromise the body’s life. Maybe I do not understand the strong political premise of the work, that art is keeping society “alive” against “technology’s relentless proliferation”.

(Beatriz)

Filed under: tp0910

week 10

We Feel Fine (wefeelfine.org) by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, 2005 – onwards

[Update February 10th 2010]

I have now booked (ref 48481) a group visit to Decode, for wednesday the 17 th and this grants us free access to the exhibition.

You need to collect your tickets from me. So, let’s  meet at 3:30 by the Porter Gallery, situated next to the V& A’s grand Entrance (the front of the museum).

Directions to the museum here

Read about the exhibition here.

etivity for week 10

theme:

the theory and practice of networked art (continuation of week 2 topic and the readings of networked book about networked art)

“Decode looks at three current themes within digital design: Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.”

readings:

1-the website for the exhibition where you can learn about the 3 sections the material is organised into and browse each individual work:

code

interactivity

network

2- review your readings for week 2 of ‘networked book, a networked book about networked art.’

an easy way to browse all posts for that theme  is via the tag ‘networked art’

posting:

Following your reading of networked book’s essay, choose a networked art project at the V & A decode exhibition, to analyse in relation to the online essay.

Suggestions:

1-you may want to compare the three- dimensional form of the networked installation with the on-line aspect of the written text, commenting on the way the network  is translated into the context of a spatial gallery instalation.

2- you may focus on the  code/ interactive/ or networked aspects of the work to analyse its installation in the physical, technological , visual and/or social space of the gallery;

3- or if the work is also available online (some are; others don’t) you may want to analyse how this translates into the gallery space

Two paragraphs , to be posted after your visit to the gallery;

suggested deadline:

monday march 1st (tp week 11)

Filed under: networks , networked art, paula roush

The notion of art as virus in the context of a participatory culture – JS

This notion is a reversal of the thesis propagated by the book “At The Edge Of Art” where art and artists are seen to be the antibodies protecting our immune system/cultural sphere. As within the body, a virus (a harmful or corrupting agent) will often mutate within a cell (e.g. fan based media) when it has ceased to become effective, and in doing so becomes more resilient and stronger to forms of attack from antibodies. Digital media has allowed art to be a more fluent and impacting social agent. If art – in the widest possible definition of the term – is seen to be a corrupting agent to participatory culture, it is also because “media ethnography is criticised …for “going native” suggesting that academics cannot be considered fans” (Fans, Bloggers and gamers:Exploring participatory Culture:Henry Jenkins). If we consider “fans learn to use (digital) media resources to increase their visibility and to expand their influence over popular culture” this can be seen as the infection because the “Internet acts as a bloodstream for the social body”. The implication here is that “Fandom” needs to assert its authority within participatory culture so that the reverse is not true – that fans are viruses waiting to mutate and attack (when they are confronted by antibodies, i.e. critics, academics, social commentators) to infect our notion of art !!! – JS

Filed under: tp0910

Purposeful Aesthetic (Imoh)

As a medium of communication, art seems to be the best tool for communal unification and dialogue partly especially in the event of sectarian disputes, due to its eclectic nature.

Parts of social misunderstandings can be traced to different groups putting too much emphasizes on what makes them different, somehow it is harder to appreciate cultural similarities. However art seems to possess the aesthetic ingredients that appeal to people of diverse cultural influences.

From Mikhail Bakhtin’s argument which states that a work of art can be view as a form of conversation that can convey “meanings, interpretations and points of view”. It can be safe to put it in my own words by saying that because of its aesthetic, art appeals to the different ethnic or social groups. Making it a Purposeful aesthetic.

Filed under: tp0910

“Dialogical”—week 08(Nancy)

“Dialogical” is a process-based and performative approach which distinguished from traditional art form. “Dialogical” achieve artistic influence by its “context” instead of “content”. Take example of “Shelter for Drug-Addicted Women”, Wochenklausur provided a platform to let different classes of society (including: sex-workers, politicians, the mayor, city councilors, attorneys, journalists, police chiefs, and doctors) sit together, and communicated with each other outside the rhetorical demands of their official status. In my opinion, the participants could get final consensus on the drug-addicted issue was because this project gave them a chance to communicate and got to know each other as equitable human, in this “public sphere”, the participants did not represent any society level but themselves, thereby the participants could have this frank discussion on the issue and forged an empathic understanding of each other. The dialogical aesthetic is that making the speakers rely solely on the impact of superior argument potentially, and the self-awareness makes them to be critical of their opinions.

“Dialogical” should be appraised and encouraged because it put Humanistic concern into practice and achieved its socio-political effect. In fact, most social contradictions and issues are result from the unfamiliar of different classes, therefore they complain each other once the problems occurred and that cause the deeper hatred eventually. As artists, rather than simply express the situation of one certain group, it is more powerful to achieving a soul communication without the restrain of nationality, ethnicity, grades, and aptitude among the contradictory opposites.    

Filed under: tp0910 , week 08

Art as virus and participatory culture (Edit)

Just a few years ago knowledge and information was reserved in libraries. Development started to show an increasing pace and this stored information became out-of-date. Education tried to keep up, so they focused on lexical knowledge and they tried to make students memorisinig whole books of data. Also before the internet you could get up-to-date information only from experts personally, which gave plenty of opportunities for example to corruption to thrive.

Nowadays you can get information from multiple sources in multiple forms. Moreover, the content is authored by us. It is a dynamic, ever developing and changing, living mass of information.

I think that is why the ‘roles of fan and academic’ can merge, as Jenkins says (page 5, 2006)*.

Nowadays, you can be an expert of anything. There aren’t any topics for expertism embarrassing enough not to be useful for a company or an organisation in some way.

How virus spreads from cell to cell, information and the lust of making some kind of art is borrowing our mind to use it as a vehicle. ‘Art as virus‘ spreads and connects us in a rather benefitial way. New technology allows us to cooperate in many levels.

Susan Blackmore speaks on TED.COM about a very interesting concept of ‘memes and temes’, ‘ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus’.

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html

*:

Jenkins, H., 2006. Fans, bloggers, and gamers : exploring participatory culture, New York: New York University Press.

http://tinyurl.com/yjzcscq

Filed under: tp0910

Ghost Bike Video Essay

Filed under: tp0910 , awareness, cycling, ghost bike, helena doyle, london, safe travel, video essay

The collectivity in conversation (Lynn)

When people who become collaborative encounters in a conversation has different identity, there is collectivity of experiences and perspectives. In this term, the conversation would have surprising consequences and the speakers contribute more to each other.

Like British artist Peter Dunn said in “Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged”: they are “context providers” rather than “content providers”, the individual speakers with unique identities develop a cross-cultural dialogue. In this way, “generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities and official discourse. The dialogue and conversation between our classmates of art and media practice is a good example for this, we all have different identities and backgrounds, we talk as artists and collaborators across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or class.
“What unites this disparate network of artists and arts collectives are a series of provocative assumptions about the relationship between art and the broader social and political world, and about the kinds of knowledge that aesthetic experience is capable of producing.”
We collect knowledge from the comments on the same topic which made by people from various social and political world. That is a beneficial experience to get feedback which may beyond our imagination for art practice. Thus it is worth doing to develop our works based around communication and exchange.
“their legitimacy is not based on the universality of the knowledge produced through discursive interaction, but on the perceived universality of the process of discourse itself.”
The definition of “ collectivity in conversation” also means everyone is allowed to express his or her attitudes, desires and needs. “In this way we are led to see ourselves from the other’s point of view, and able to be more critical and self-aware about our own opinions. ” We are led to rethinking to see our views, and our identities, which may cause creative transformation.
Thus, the dialogical practices provide a sense of collectivity which means the participants can share insights and be open to the transformative effects of difference through dialogical exchange.

Filed under: tp0910

Dahn, I am a fangirl.

I have been a fangirl for as long as I can remember. When I was little I used to have my hairdresser braid my hair and wrap it into buns like Princess Leia, when I was a teenager I read and drew manga, and as I left high school I got into reading fanfiction. It is because of this that I proudly call myself a nerd and geek.

Jenkin’s book, “Fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture,” fascinated me from the moment I saw the Storm Trooper buying an Obi-One Kenobi action figure. As I read through the first chapter of the book, I could relate to the points that Jenkins was making. Fanfiction is often poorly written, but it is for entertainment purposes and despite some poor grammar and spelling (sometimes due to English not being the author’s first language), it is still entertaining. I feel that fanfiction is a great way for academics and non-academics to delve into a fictional person/character’s inner workings. Instead of analyzing an artist or writer’s lifestyle’s influence on his or her work, one is looking at the back-story and other intricacies that we have been given, and analyzing their actions from there. It is similar to when one analyzes Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship in Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice,” except going one step further and writing down his or her imaginative stance on certain situations, or on how their life played out after the novel. It is for this reason that Jenkins’ point that fans can in fact be both academic and still live in the fan world was so interesting to me. Many of the authors that I follow are in their 40s with families and have Master’s degrees; they are in fact academics who take part in the entertainment of fanfiction. It is those authors that actually tend to have a more in-depth perspective in their writing. They employ psychology to describe characters reactions and reactions, and make one look deeper into the character’s fictional past as we know it. I believe it is for this reason fans are the best, in my opinion at least, to discuss the “going digita”l topic Jenkins discusses. I feel just as with our research and critical theory essays, we have the best ability to write them because we are passionate about our subject, thus fans such as myself are the people who know the inner workings of the characters and series better than the average non-fan academic.

Thank you.

Jess

Filed under: tp0910 , bloggers, fanfiction, fangirl, fans, gamers, sci-fi

Harun Farocki – Some thoughts on Immersion

I was impressed by the diversity of the work by Harun Farocki in his exhibition Against What Against Whom? Which spans a number of years dealing with many mediums and genres. I was intrigued to see examples of moving images that we would rarely have an opportunity to see,

Eye/Machine III, 2003, Video, 2 screens, 25 minutes

‘…explores ‘operational images’ made only for technicians, or not for the human eye at all. Cruise missiles are programmed to find their way…’*

Farocki gave many examples of where moving image technology is being used in a wide variety of areas (construction, army training, rehabilitation, surveillance etc.) and is no longer just a form of entertainment.

It was interesting to see the depth of history in the pieces not just in the content but also in the formats/mediums as well. The Leaving the Factory was a good example as it documented the progression of the cinematic image. What I found interesting was that all the clips par one were in the aspect ratio 4.3, the one on the far right represented the latest depiction of workers leaving the factory and was 16.9. I felt it looked quite odd as it didn’t fit with the rest. For me it was clarification on how much the medium of the moving image has changed in just a few short years. Is it fashion that has changed our viewing format from a more traditional square shape to rectangle? Photographs have gone through the same formatting, is it a question of aesthetic? For me I really enjoyed viewing the pieces partly for the nostalgia of the older format.

I was especially interested in the piece: Immersion, (2009. Video, 2 screens, 20 minutes) described as a‘workshop for the US military which demonstrates how the virtual reality scenarios of computer games can be used to treat post-traumatic stress.’*

I think the title Immersion is very apt. In this piece the viewer is almost immersed in the situation. On the 2 screens we can see the soldier wearing the virtual reality device and describing a situation he has gone through while live programmers create the scene as he describes it. He becomes upset and wants to stop but is told to keep going. The audience becomes engaged by both the soldier’s story and the digital recreation of it and also his current situation. In her essay Translating the Essay into Film and Installation by Nora M. Alter, the author discusses Farocki’s work. She claims ‘Farocki’s use of the split screen produces what he refers to as a ‘soft montage’, which allows for an increased flexibility and openness of the text for the spectator – associations are suggested but not formally mandated.’ When comparing the video essay to the traditional written essay she also looks at Benjamin’s theory of translation,

‘Translation was above all a ‘mode’, meaning a variety of expression, a new arrangement or a new form. Only works that have a certain ‘translatability’ can be translated with any degree of fidelity to the original. ‘Translatability’, Benjamin observes, ‘is an essential quality of certain works’, by which he means that ‘a specific significance inherent in the original’ can be put into the words of a different language. This ‘specific significance’ is related to ‘pure language’, or to the theoretical or philosophical core of what is to be translated.’

I feel that when it comes to translating the subject of the piece Immersion, Farocki couldn’t have chosen a more apt format. To try and achieve the same response by writing a traditional essay on the topic would never compare to actually seeing the real and ‘unreal’ footage of the soldier.

I find it interesting that soldiers are being trained through virtual reality but also rehabilitated through it. The ability to be ‘immersed’ mentally in an unsafe place while being in a safe place is almost akin to dreaming. Another example this piece reminded me of is the Israeli animated feature film Waltz With Bashir. It describes director Ari Folman’s efforts to fill in the gaps in his memories of his military service during the First Lebanon War. In the film the director uses recurring images and voiceover to piece together experiences that he has blotted out. Although an animation it feels very much like someone’s memories and in that sense, quite real. Another example of virtual reality and war is the video game Darfur is Dying. The player is a refugee trying to collect water in a hostile environment. The game highlights awareness of the current situation through immersing the viewer.

I think with the array of technologies that we have available the most important thing is choosing the best format for your chosen topic.

Helena

Filed under: tp0910 , Harun Farocki, helena doyle, immersion, virtual reality, war

Experiments of multi-screen (Lynn)

Harun Farocki ‘Against What? Against Whom?‘
Raven Row, London. 27.01.2010

The exhibition contains two-screen and multi-screen works of revered German filmmaker Harun Farocki. It makes me think a lot about the relationship between installation and editing or montage as well as the narrative of film essay.

Multi-screen or two-screen works are totally different from the one of single screen. It does extend the imaginary or possibility of montage of film. Sometimes, it make the story go more smoothly, while sometime it seems to disturb the structure of the film and try to make some sense.

Take the Eye/Machine(video, 2 screens, 25minutes, 2003) as an example, the screens show the situation in different space at the same time in different perspectives. In this situation, if it is single screen, there would be more issues about montages. The images in different context would be edited together, and the editor needs to do it carefully to control the rhythm of the film. However, when it is played in two screens, there is nothing about editing between them. One can watch how things are going on about the “bleeding man” and the “guard” at the same time. The author create a feeling of contradiction which is more intensive when they both are going on without disturbing of editing. In another word, the multi-screen maximizes the information what the film can give at one time. This kind of function of the multi-screen of installation can also be reflected by the “comparison via a third”, which shows the industry of brick-making in different countries in different periods, and “workers leaving the factory in eleven decades” (12 monitors) which gives the history of 110 years in less then 110 minutes. Finally, I found that the multi-screen can save the time of the film which essay can not do.

Filed under: tp0910

Dahn Faroki Installation Comment

Faroki’s installation was the first video installation I have attended, so I was not quite sure what to expect. Having watched the majority of the pieces held within, there was only one that I continued to find myself wandering back to. I do not recall the name of the installation, but it was the one showing the different country’s and community’s methods of brick making and laying.

The cultural differences displayed in this installation are what enraptured me I believe. To see how developing countries have people sitting in mud pits making bricks by hand using only natural methods (mud, clay, the sun, etc.) with industrialized companies making bricks by automated machine was fascinating. Not only did it speak of the difference on a economic level, but also one of progression. At one point those countries using machines had to rely on doing things with their own two hands, or importing such things from countries that could.

The dual display I believe played an integral part in this installation. To just watch both screens at the same time, side by side, while two different worlds were portrayed concerning the same manner was fascinating. Had this been played on one screen I feel that the message would not have been as effective, if not lost all together. This installation made it quite clear the power an audio video essay has with its viewers when executed properly.

After having seen this installation I wish as a class we could redo our own audio video essay assignments and play them side by side such as this one and see the difference time and experience has made on us, just as time and experience made on those countries making bricks.

Thank you.
Jess

Filed under: tp0910 , audio video essay, bricks, Faroki

Etivity week 8- Conversation (Silja)

Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged Art

Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, edited by Zoya Kucor and Simon Leung (Blackwell, 2005)

This introduction compares the artist who is communicating an authority, be it God, Reason or Artist (for example, avant-garde artist whose objective is “shock us out of our perceptual complacency”), and dialogue-based public art. The latter is also about changing our attitudes but the artist in this case is not the authoritative force who changes the viewer but an initiator of a dialogue or conversation between different groups.

The idea of conversation is to overcome clichés and social stereotypes without forcing the participants to change their identify. It is not about finding out the truth but rather creating context where subjects are encouraged to be open to listening and understanding members of a different group. “We are led to see ourselves from the other’s point of view, and are thus, at least potentially, able to be more critical and self-aware about our own opinions. This self-critical awareness can lead, in turn, to a capacity to see our views, and our identities, as contingent, processual, and subject to creative transformation.” I think this also applies to the artist him/herself who does not start with an assumption of having a solution but creates in a more process-based way.

Art projects that are given as examples (Suzanne Lacy, “The Roof is on Fire” at the National Endowment for the Arts web site: http://204.178.35.192/artforms/Museums/Lacy.html; Austrian arts collective Wochenklausur; A Better Life for Rural Women by Nigerian artist Toro Adeniran-Kane (Mama Toro)) had positive practical solutions which seem simple but could not be thought of before those conversation actually took place.

This text did not really clarify how those social projects used aesthetic methods to facilitate the dialogues.

Filed under: tp0910 , conversation, dialogue

Notes for conversation-week 08 (Edit)

Reading for discussion:

From the Object to the Concrete Intervention from the website of the German art group, WochenKlausur.

http://www.wochenklausur.at/kunst.php?lang=en

Project:

Shelter for Drug-Addicted Women (Zurich (CH) * 1994 * Shedhalle * 8 weeks)

‘In Zurich a shelter for drug-addicted prostitutes was established. For six years, the facility provided a place to sleep for women who needed to get some rest during the day.’

WochenKlausur:

‘The artist group WochenKlausur has been conducting social interventions since 1993. The concept of intervention, whose usage in art has undergone an inflationary trend in recent years, is often used for any form of change. In contrast, WochenKlausur, at the invitation of art institutions, develops and realizes proposals – small-scale but very concrete – for improving sociopolitical deficits.’

http://www.wochenklausur.at/methode.php?lang=en

Bulletpoints for discussion:

• “socially engaged art” vs. art producing objects, ‘venerated in specially designated spaces’
• Function of art: ‘transformation of living conditions’; ‘questioning value standards and authority’; bringing about change of attitude’
• Artist as activist; the social responsibility of art
• ‘Methods of “constructing situations”‘

Important quotes:

‘Art should deal with reality, grapple with political circumstances, and work out proposals for improving human coexistence. Unconventional ideas, innovative spirit and energy, which for centuries were wrapped up in formal glass bead games, could thus contribute to the solution of real problems.‘

‘Art can perform many functions. For pages and pages, the various functions could be listed like a catalog of stylistic -isms: Art can represent its commissioners and producers; it can be a definer and caretaker of identity; it can affect snobby allures and satiate the bourgeois hunger for knowledge and possession. Art can fatten up the leisure time of the bored masses; it can serve as an object of financial speculation; it can transmit feelings and cause one’s heart to vibrate. Furthermore, the many functions are also enmeshed in one another. Abstract Expressionism served Cold War Americans as a political instrument of culturalization just as much as it served the spiritual need for expression of the young painters that created it.‘

‘One of the functions of art has always been the transformation of living conditions. Since the advent of Modernism, with its rejection of religiously founded authority, art has been an especially fertile domain for querying irrational taboos and inherited value standards and for correcting social imbalances. This function was first put into practice by the Russian Constructivists. Simultaneously with the 1917 change of regime in Russia, an art was introduced which for the first time sought to directly influence the people’s consciousness and living conditions through agitation and activism. Thus a new chapter was opened in the history of art.’

‘The avant-garde wanted to choose living localities for their creation, to stop working for eternity, and to address more than just the educated classes of the public.’

‘Action Art also made a significant contribution to the developments leading to Activism. Originally conceived as cathartic satisfaction of the individual’s unfulfilled drives and a liberation of the subject from the bonds of convention, Actionism soon changed its thinking and recognized the cause of many individual and psychological problems in social injustices.’

‘…visual art has developed in two directions: into an art that is defined by economic interests and bottom-line thinking, that lures the masses with spectacles and lots of horn-blowing. And conversely into an art that acts – independently of profit and populism – in possibilities, that seeks to examine and improve the conditions of coexistence.’

‘Art must devote itself to very concrete strategies of effecting change.’

‘This art’s big chance lies in its ability to offer the community something that also achieves an effect.’

Filed under: tp0910

AK on ‘The Author as Producer’, Walter Benjamin. Week 8.

Benjamin, Walter, (1936). The author as producer. New Left Review, 1/62 (1970).

The Author as Producer

References and quotes are made from and in relation to the text.

Points to converse about in the conversation.

Benjamin discusses the autonomy of the individual to write whatever they please, within the social and economic frameworks of a given era. Regardless of the era in which the author writes, Benjamin claims that the author may possess a ‘tendency’ to write material useful for the “proletariat in the class struggle”. This appears to be one of the principal underlying factors which I have understood from “The author as producer”.

When approaching any given subject, the author’s writing must not start with ‘isolated and lifeless objects’, but must instead be “situated in the living social context”. My understanding of this, is that the starting point for any discussion in a piece of work, should not start from the author situated outside and looking into the subject area, but rather, from within the area of discussion itself. As Benjamin states, instead of asking “what is the relationship of a work of art to the relationships of production of that time?”, he instead asks, “how does it stand in them?”. Clearly, then, any piece of work must have a relationship within, rather than to, the production of a given period.

On the advent of the newspaper, we can clearly see some examples of this at work when we discuss the area of authorship. As the readership of newspapers was transferred broadly between the bourgeois press to the Soviet Russian press (taking the Soviet Union as an example), the new proletariat reader “is indeed always ready to become a writer”; he is able to gain entrance to authorship. To quote the text, “Literary competence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, but on technical and commercial training in trade schools and this becomes common property.” This quote has made me think, if the rise of the power of authorship was so marked as the power of newspaper production was transferred to the proletariat, what would Benjamin make of the freedom of authorship that is now available via the internet? Any author is now able to produce, and freely distribute, their content.

Indeed, Benjamin does discuss whether the author as producer is transferrable to production processes other than writing; on discussing photography, he writes that “What we should demand from Photography is the capacity of giving a print a caption which would tear it away from fashionable cliches and give it a revolutionary usevalue. But we will pose this demand with the greatest insistence if we – writers – take up photography.” Here we see evidence that what Benjamin is actually writing about, could be applied not only to writing, but to any other medium; but the author as producer must engage with that medium, and thus means of production, in order to make this production ‘politically useful’.

Later in the article, Benjamin discusses what he calls the ‘concept of the specialist’, who has a mediated solidarity with the proletariat. As Benjamin is writing principally about the politics of author as producer, there is a constant reference to the proletariat and bourgeois which always has to be made. When discussing transforming the functions of the novel, drama, poetry etc – in aid of the ‘revolutionary struggle’, Benjamin seems to imply that it is the goal of the proletariat to bring on a revolution, and it is to this goal that the author as producer strives. Although the revolutionary intellectual, at first, may appear a traitor to his class, ultimately “the revolutionary struggle does not take place between capitalism and the intellect, but between capitalism and the proletariat”.

Filed under: tp0910 , author as producer, benjamin, conversation, ma art and media practice, Thinking Practices

Harun Farocki’s Exhibition in Raven Row (Edit)

Harun Farocki ‘Against What? Against Whom?‘

Raven Row, London.  19.11.09-07.02.10

Harun Farocki’s exhibition shows 9 works, both two-screen and multi-screen types.

As I was watching these works I was strucked by the diversity of feelings and thoughts they generated in me.

According to Farucki in the genre of film essay ‘one image can comment on another, lending montage – editing – an extra dimension: ‘There is both succession and simultaneity, the relationship of one image to the next as well as to the one alongside it.’*

So making a montage is basically editing and that is the ‘foundation of all film work’.*

The works and the exhibition itself, curated by Alex Sainsbury, are edited in multiple ways. Farucki says: ‘montage is always about similarity and differerence.’ Those works with emotional message stand closer to me, so my attention was drawn more to Feasting or Flying, 2008 and Immersion, 2009, than for example Eye/Machine III, 2003.

However, for me it was more important to look at the relationship between the works themselves. They form a special montage of Faroki’s works and showed in how many ways we now use moving images. They became an essential part of our lives; we use them for industrial, military, surveilance and entertainment purposes amongst others.

The similarities and differences, the ‘construction of arguments, which are formed through personal association rather than academic precision’ * provide a lot to think about.

I found it fascinating how the art of making a montage/ editing/ arranging images and moving images can trigger feelings and arguments. Looking back to the experience of visiting the exhibition, I can say that I understand a lot more about the legacy of film essays.

I am also content about the fact that this is again another genre which is slipping through the fingers of ‘academic precision’ while being ‘formed through personal association’. I believe that the amount of available information in today’s world makes it almost impossible to be perfectly precise academically. It also relates to the argument about institutionalised art education, which is based on a delicate and dynamic balance between external standardised and inward personal processes.

Farucki and the curator of the exhibition took me to a journey, from which I returned richer with a better understanding on film essays and a few more questions; and I am grateful for that.

Work 1

Eye/Machine III, 2003, Video, 2 screens, 25 minutes

‘…explores ‘operational images’ made only for technicians, or not for the human eye at all. Cruise missiles are programmed to find their way…’*

Work 6

Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki Feasting or Flying, 2008. Video, 6 screens, 24 minutes

‘…homage to the film actor, as well as a deconstruction of the tragic hero in cinema. Scenes on the subject of male suicide reveal the way cinema constructs narratives of failure.’*

Work 7

Immersion, 2009. Video, 2 screens, 20 minutes

‘…workshop for the US military…, which demonstrates how the virtual reality scenarios of computer games can be used to treat post-traumatic stress.’*

*(exhibition leaflet)

Filed under: tp0910

Harun Farocki – On Construction of Griffith’s Films 2006. Video, 2 monitors, 9 minutes.

Essays relate a narrative of ideas and evoke impressions of the sources which have influenced the writer. Architects in describing a building’s “circulation”, i.e. how people navigate from A to B, draw upon the natural “narrative” that the visitor will experience and therefore complete when they leave the building. In visiting a gallery with one artist’s works of art, this is an important consideration. In visiting an artist’s work who deals with his own audio visual language, this layout is vital.

The two monitor piece “On Construction of Griffith’s Films” is in the furthest room on the second floor of the exhibition. It should have been the first piece for a visitor to encounter upon entering the gallery because in this short visual essay, the basic syntax for Farocki’s visual language is demonstrated to us in precise, clearly stated and subtle terms. In aligning two monitors at head height with two chairs facing the screens, we are presented with a narrative in montage that results in a “general relatedness, rather than a strict opposition or equation” (Alter, Audio-Visual Essay Practice Today, 2007, pg. 53) as Farocki uses text to chart the invention of the shot and counter shot using the screens from left (shot) to right (counter-shot). In its simplest terms, when a man is seen to be looking at a woman, his eye line of looking from left to right in the left screen, we are naturally drawn as we would be in a theatre, to look to the right screen for her reaction, as she looks from right to left. This spatial reference to the question and answer format within a written essay for example, provides the juxtaposition of the three dimensional awareness that the two screens provide, as a method of “soft” montage does not “predetermine how the two images are to be connected” (Alter, pg. 53) and the viewer creates her own meaning from what she relates of the images and sound but also from what is not seen or heard.

This Visual Essay explains in text across  both screens how the early language of film editing was created from the meta language (logic) of painting’s composition, that in film is referred to as the mise-en-scene. With the advent of moving images and sound (where time was now a contributing factor) interpreting audio visual material necessitated a negotiation of our temporal experience. By using a two-channel installation to impart information, or to evoke an emotional response, Farocki has physically given us “open spaces for thought, interpretation and reflection, demanding new modes of perception”.

Perhaps this is the only way to begin an exhibition of a visual artist’s language and work. – JS

Filed under: e-tivity 08, tp0910, video, visual methodologies

Some thoughts about Harun Farocki’s installation (week 7)

Video not only can be record the changes of the world, but also the changes in itself, such as the changes of brick making and the development of film in Raven Row’s exhibition. Whose purpose is not only record and display, but also presents a history of social development and social psychological changes. The visual shock of the audience is the most direct, and did not require translation and text symbols. So that to a certain extent, the expression of ideas and the message it transferred are more direct and accurate. At the same time, the visual information conveyed between subjective and objective, and that means in an “objective view” expressed “true self”.

The part 5 of the exhibition left me a very deep impression. Through the footage of CCTV, it shows us a certain perspective and scope that our normal human eye could hardly reach and tell and makes a number of original intimate space opened to the public so that no secret at all. At the same time, through the past and the present situation in contrast to the prison, we can see that due to the use of high technology such as CCTV, making the prison management is also a marked change.

In the view of most people, media is merely a formality, as well as the carrier of information and knowledge content. The media itself is empty, static, passive, and its function is to complete the communication of media content. But in fact, there is a strong reaction on media by the information it conveyed. From the media’s own point of view, the form of media is one kind, and the content of information and knowledge precisely is another form of media. The media as a form is positive and dynamic, and given a significant impact on information and knowledge, and determines the clarity and structure of the mode of information.

(by christie)

Filed under: tp0910 , Harun Farocki’s installation, Visual essay, week07

Harun Farocki video installations (Silja)

Harun Farocki “Against What? Against Whom?”

Raven Row, London.  19.11.09-07.02.10

Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki Feasting or Flying, 2008. Video, 6 screens, 24 minutes

Visual essay is a multi-dimensional work, with image and audio tracks, voice over, intertitles, etc. As Alter says, these create “complex levels of meaning that the audience must co-produce”.  Harun Farocki adds another dimension by presenting his work on several screens which compete for our attention, with themes on them coinciding, contrasting and creating a whole in a way that successive images on one screen could not. The viewer must decide, which screens to look at, in which order and for how long. Farockis video installations are, in Alter’s words,“demanding new modes of perception”. No two viewers actually see the same thing.

Using 6 screens in Feasting or Flying allows simultaneity of images, so we can see parallel motifs from different films, like opening doors, walking down the road, seaside, a gun. This ties the clips together on one another level besides the suicide of the hero, and gives the work certain fluidity.

Feasting or Flying is not a commentary on real life suicides, as all the clips are from fiction films. So this work is about images in our culture, or even just in film. It left me with a question “So what?” Maybe it’s because film is not really my language. For most part, it seemed just a mechanical collection. We were to find our own individual meanings of the piece ourselves. There was no commentary, no justification. Besides the film clips, only few quotes from the films appeared on screens. Even those seem fragmentary; nothing relating them to one another.

The title of the piece “refers to film scholar Helmut Farber’s remark that ‘some dissect birds in order to eat it, others in order to discover how to fly’” (Exhibition leaflet). Farocki and Ehmann dissect film in order to help us to discover… what? Even the title of the exhibition is in a question form, although it suggests Farockis work is protest, defiance against something.

Margaret Gray writes in her review of the exhibition (http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=187 ) that its point is the detachment: “The modern world is overloaded with information, technology, and images. They have become our primary means of navigating and controlling the world, but our reliance on them simultaneously puts us at a remove from it.” So this work might be about suicide after all – showing us how detached these clips are from the reality, it makes us, in a reverse kind of way, think about reality and our relationship with it in a modern world.

One after another, screens turn black (or red), creating a pause before the videos loop, a silence, a finality – or maybe it’s a symbol of the limited possibilities of film format to depict the drama of suicide?

Filed under: tp0910 , antje ehmann, feasting or flying, Harun Farocki, video installation

Visual essay- week 7 post

Audio Visual Essay

The installation of scenes from throughout film’s history of workers leaving the factory is displayed on twelve monitors simultaneously. In Fritz Langs “Clash by Night” (1952), one sees Marilyn Monroe on the assembly line, coming out of the factory, and one hears her talking about it. But the existence of factories and movie stars are not compatible. A movie star working in a factory evokes associations of a fairy tale in which a princess must work before she attains her true calling. Factories – and the subject of labour – are at the fringes of film history. (Harun Farocki, 2006)

Over the century they was and will be workers in the factory.  Workers in factory because this is social condition or a fairy tale” before she attains her true calling” (Clash by Night). Factory and workers can be separate or not as a mean? I believe workers can be very independent word, but factory without workers it becomes as an empty space .This world is a factory and we are workers? That happen whit out us? Everyone find this favourite factory or maybe we still looking forward? Or maybe we must to accept the place?

As Nora M. Alter mention Farocki is a good example in this development by playing in exhibition place transforms us into “detached observer of mute images”. Methods of montage offer the freedom the find the meaning and association. The montage parallels “Adorno’s essayistic in some way”. “Discrete elements set off against one another are brought together in a form a readable context”. If Adorno “follow the linear logic of writing”, Farocki “specialized these concept trough the media of film”. “Farocki show working procedure in traditional newly industrialising and highly industrialized societies”. (Matthias Michalkc)

Lukacs reformulated Schlegel’s famous dictum “the theory of the essay should be and essay and the theory of film a film”. Farocki installation is a long way from the one-dimensional form of written text (Nora), he translate into the context of three-dimensional installation.

In conclusion audio visual essay give freedom and space to transfer certain information. In the time it can be encouragement to translate from another language or a different media and form.

Irina

Filed under: tp0910