Week 2 Sound and Vision - Responses

Friday, 28 September 2012

As Radical as Reality ItselfPart 2: Responses


New Formsipod, Wi fi, wii, internet, web 2.0, virtual reality, bit torrents, Limewire, Spotify, simulations, gaming, mobile technology, Skype, online cloud storage, flickr, the external hard drive, digital tvs (big and small), cgi, final cut,logic,photoshop ipod, iphone, pdf’s, Second life.......


The smog of data

The number of images uploaded to Flickr every week is likely to be larger than all objects contained in all art museums in the world. Today more video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all three U.S. television networks created in 60 years. Flickr July 2007: 600 million images.

Flickr February 2008: 1.2 billion images (100 million / month). Facebook: (June 2010): 500 million users 14,000,000 photo uploads daily (2009). October 2009: 2 billion media items uploaded monthly; 1 billion messages exchanged daily; 20 billion photos on the site. May

2010: users share 25 billion pieces of information per month; 48 billion photos on site. MySpace: 300 million users (2009).


“If you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have

spent playing World of Warcraft since the multiplayer online role

playing game first launched in 2004, you get a grand total of just over 50 billion collective

hours or 5.93 million years - to put that in perspective 5.93

million years is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first

stood upright”

Reality is Broken -why games make us better and how they can change the world, Janet

McGonigal


an image of the earth wrapped in a dense,enveloping web of interweaving, interconnecting,

crisscrossing, seemingly infinite lines of communication and exchange.


• “Chaos (i.e. a degree of complexity which is beyond the ability of human understanding) now rules the world. Chaos means a reality which is too complex to be reduced to our current paradigms of understanding.

• Franco Beradi, Pg. 212•


“There is chaos when the world starts spinning too fast for our mind to appreciate its forms and meaning. There is chaos once the flows are too intense for our capacity to elaborate emotionally. Overwhelmed by this velocity, the mind drifts towards panic, the uncontrolled subversion of psychic energies premise to a depressive deactivation”

Franco Bifo Beradi, The Soul at Work , pg. 125


The Filters can’t filter


Visualisation


Consumerist entertainment network

Network Society

Information society

Media ecology

Knowledge economy

Globalisation

Neo liberalism aka Capitalist Realism aka casino capitalism aka crack capitalism

The Beast has many names


AffectsCompression of time and space

A culture with a need for speed

Flux, impermanence -upgrade culture

Blurring of real and virtual (the virtual is real?)

New social networks

information overload (filtering becomes our chief activity) the smog of data....


Pathologies and Symptoms?

Hedonia (inability to be bored)

Hysteria

Denial

Chronic instability

Inertia

A.D.D.

Homogenisation

A Culture of Narcissism

Option Paralysis


Possibilities

Democratisation of culture at level production and distribution (long tail)

Reinvigorated public sphere via online communities (see arab spring etc. ) - space for countercultures to grow(?)

The replacement of passive, centralised, one way transmission media to decentralised, active, interactive media forms.


the paradoxes of change....


Cognitive Mapping, the

absence of stable

meaning and the collapse of

critical distance


‘achieve a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [..], in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion. (Jameson, 1991)


“McCarthy eliminates the possibility of

psychological distancing oneself from what is taking place; the viewer

laughs and recoils at the same time”

Dan Cameron


“The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. Ideological judgement onpostmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, a judgement on ourselves as well as on the artefacts in question.”

Fredric jameson‘The Politics of theory:Ideological Positions In the Postmodernism Debate’, New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984), p. 63


I find art's ability to guide, direct, and manipulate to be exciting. The only direction I see for art is as a tool for manipulating it public on every level - a political tool. I don't know if this places art above, below or parallel with advertising. [...] The techniques are the same. The audience is the same. I can never tell the difference between them and us. We are them. I am mass as much as I am I.

Jeff Koons


The absence of stable meaning


‘Over the top’.....delirious aestheticism......

accelerationism............


How to respond“I am interested in the ways that

recent film and video works are expressive: that is to say, in the ways that they give voice (or

better sound and images ) to a kind of free floating sensibility that permeates our society

today...[..]By the term expressiveI mean both symptomatic and productive. These works are symptomatic , in that they

provide indices of complex social processes, which they transduce, condense and rearticulate in the form of what can be called [..]

blocs of affect”Steven Shaviro,pg2.


“For as Jameson insists, the ‘global world system is strictly speaking “unrepresentable”, since its flows and metamorphoses continually elude our existential grasp...because of this it is necessary to proceed by abstraction :to “diagram” the space of globalised capital, by entering into it, and forging a path through, its complex web of exchanges, displacements and transfers”

Steven Shaviro, pg.36


a "strange hybrid of the sensibilities of Andy Warhol

and Philip K. Dick"

“Southland Tales, like most science fiction, is

not about predicting the future. Rather it is about capturing and depicting the latent futurity that already haunts us in the

present”Steven Shaviro, pg. 66

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales


An heroic failure?


Key features• A hyperbolic, accelerated, exaggerated

‘map’ of (a) ‘now’.

• A channel surfing aesthetic to mimic information overload. There’s a flatness to the constant stream of images, an equivalence between them. Distinct from traditional montage. In Southland Tales images are assembled together in a single smooth space.

• Sound, specifically the voice over is key in Southland Tales (the film is weighted more to the ‘sonic than to the optical’ Shavirio)


“Digital compositing implies a continuity and equality among its elements. The assembled images and sounds all belong to a single smooth space as opposed to the hierarchically organised striated space of montage. However, this does not mean that the result of compositing is always seamless’. (Shavirio, 2010, pg.77)


• Michel Chion in his numerous books on how sound works in cinema talks of sound providing added value to the image.

• In contrast Shaviro argues that now sound is far more overtly used (it is ‘foregrounded’). Sound, narration for example begins to tie together disparate seemingly unconnected images in films.


‘in the film just as in television news, speech guides us though an otherwise incomprehensible labyrinth of proliferating images…[…]Justin Timberlake’s neutral all encompassing voice accounts for and thereby makes possible, the apparent visual clash of different spaces’ Steven Shavirio


Being in touch with the world as it is……

Critique of decadence and denial of art house protocols (its aloofness or separation from the world as it is or as it seems or ‘feels’)


‘Assayas’ difficult task, therefore, is to translate the impalpable flows and forces of finance into images and sounds that we can apprehend on screen.’ Shavirio, S, Post Cinematic Effect, Zero Books, pg. 37


A fractured, disconnected, violent, lurid plot of murder, sex, transnational flows of people , money and drugs. Demonlover and Boarding Gate feature female protagonists, who are caught within a bewildering electronic landscape of surveillance, omnipresent screens and beeps, where the clear line between the virtual and real is dissolved. They can only make sense of their environment piece by piece , bit by bit, as they move from one disconnected space to another (every space seems to contain another space within it)

Gamers Logic. Levels and objectives.


Rhizome

Deleuze and Guattari introduce A Thousand Plateaus by outlining the concept of the rhizome Connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other.

Ruptures: a rhizome may be broken, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines

A rhizome is not reducible to any structure; it is a "map and not a tracing"


On a formal level Assayas attempts to capture the typography of this electronic landscape, our media ecology by dispensing with classical cinematic perspective and depth. The camera is frequently close up, constantly moving around or closely focused on the main characters; the background spaces are ‘poorly rendered’ flat, homogenous.


‘The market forces traversing our world are so intense and so disruptive that one’s very identity is continually under threat. In a world of affective labour and real subsumption , one is always being called upon to reconfigure one’s being into new forms –from one identity to another.’

Shavirio, S


The waning of effect


Week 2 Sound and Vision - Responses

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