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MA ADA 2007 > articles > Penelope Dunbar
the art of Blogging and the art of conversation.
9 May 07 · Penelope Dunbar
Ippolito’s (2002) essay Ten Myths of Internet Art does a disservice to the simple immediacy of imagic material which the internet can convey.Many public collections and Art Museums now display a wide range of Art on their web pages including net.art (see“tate online”:http://www.tate.org.uk/ )This has created a vast visual resource where one can gain access to knowledge of contemporary art alongside traditional and historical art .I find much new media art counter intuitive unaesthetic and consequently impotent and unaffective. At best it is a curiousity at worst it feels like a Glitch or gimick.
However my experience of using the internet to source visual material has made me realise what a powerful and effective medium it can be for showing conventional art and new media art forms. The internet as a resource furnishes the fine art researcher
with avast amount of visual knowledge “Amazing rare things“ one of many e-collections. – extraordinary. And extremely convenient. I can scrutinize each image without having to bother with Gallery Etiquette. The quality of the image is really pretty good and you can zoom in close.To me this feels like really democratic art , accessible and of a good enough quality to really feel one is engaging with the image . The collection of fans
is an example of how the virtual experience can offer a degree of scrutiny never afforded the individual museum visitor.This is an important aspect of art on the internet. The internet becomes a medium, for translating visual knowledge.
Mark Catesby, Nightjar and Mole Cricket (1722-6)
There are now a vast range of online galleries whose remit is not to sell art but to disseminate the artifact.
Benjamin Potter
Afterlife 1997.
( bird wing suspended in honey)
8 × 8 cm
Other websites dedicate space to interactivite
art. Donna Leishman. has extensively researched contemporary interactive narrative structures. She identifies new media art as being a critical commentry on the fileds of communication and as a reaction against the commercialisation of HCI Computer Interaction)
Her comprehensive website 6amhoover is an informative relevant research document. I have particularly enjoyed reading her PhD thesis in such a fluid and lucid format.
I have used the blog to embedd my selection of images including my collage work in a space where I can critically reflect from a distance.
Pum 2007
kit for it, the life of things
Object arrangement
But also to enjoy the immense visual opportunities to instantly place work from different eras alongside one another, to create visual dialogues.
Graham Fagen,
my mouth shall speak of wisdom 2006
CMYK print
Hanna Hoch
Made for a Party 1936
Photomontage
Institut Fur Auslandsbeziehungen Collection, Stuttgart
Main Gallery, Ground Level
!
Hannah Hoch
And shade
(1934)
New media ,its practices and multi-valiant metaphors
can be employed as useful tools processes to analyse my work and to critically reflect on my learning experience .
I have used the internet as a virtual location to send examples of my own visual practice and collage work.
Blogging
becomes a method , for externalization and public objectification as one enters a dialogue with unknown heterogeneous entities. Many artists make use of the potential the internet provides for feedback from such a diverse and populous audience .Professor VJ
sees blogging as performance and he may have a piont .
Pum 2007
Grinning performer
Collage .9 × 6cm
Comment [2]
mind-amplifying technology
9 May 07 · Penelope Dunbar
The idea that people use computers as a tool to amplify thought communication, social and intellectual activity has its foundation in another individuals imaginative and original vision . Doug Engelbart
was inspired by the possible accomplishments afforded to the computer amplified mind. Engelbart had identified the task involved in problem solving had reached a new level of complexity, due to the sheer amount of information and knowledge that had been generated. The key to successful problem solving was no longer in devising ways to expand our accumulation of knowledge but in developing tools to manage and integrate the by-product of problem solving. Computer technology could enable one to find and access the solutions to complicated problems that were already stored somewhere ,allowing one to be able to quickly gain the relevant comprehension to derive solutions to problems.He imagined a way of life in an “integrated domain where human hunches, cut-and-try , intangibles and the human “feel for a situation” usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technology and notation sophisticated methods and high-powered electronic aids”(Engelbart 1962)
Cyborg and Goddess, humans have always been compelled to imagine mythical hybrids and animated machines.They serve to illustrate and reflect our human processes and the boundaries between self and the world . The machine is an aspect of our human embodiement . Harraway(1991)
It was the coexistence of human intellect and machine technology which Engelbart hypothesized would be the next step in the evolution of human capabilities .
The internet today provides us with a tool which can augment our innate capacity to learn new things. The current technology harnesses our brain’s natural hardware and gives it new thinking tools. It is enhancing and developing the way we think. The hyperlink is being adapted to allow ever increasing interaction with the information being surveyed. Engelbart’s integrated domain has become a reality. Hyperwords a project run by UCL Interaction Centre. Frode Hegland has written a manefesto Liquid Liquid Information takes us a step closer to be able to actively select and interact with information. Hegland’s experimental system is geared toward allowing users, not just writers and editors ,to make connections. Instead of just viewing websites, readers can change the way information is presented, or relate it to other information elsewhere on the web.
Below is the lastest in wide field of view stereoscopic display – the next generation of new virtual and interactive media
Researchers at the the Interactive Media Division The University of Southern California are currently exploring ever more sophisticated ways of interacting with technology. One project Hypermedia Reveries
uses an immersive installation to simulate a multisensory experience through a hybrid mix of realistic and fictional collages
samples
References
Engelbart, D (1962) Augmenting Human Intellect: A conceptual framework. [online] Available from:
Haraway,D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, Women:The reinvention of Nature. London:Routledge.
hypertext as collage -seeing the invisible beyond the visible.
9 May 07 · Penelope Dunbar
Hypertext when considered not in terms of the totality but in terms of the individual works, allows one apply the analogy with collage.
Spell your name with these objects George Brecht / Ben / Emmett Williams / La Monte Young / George Maciunas / Takako Saito / Geoffrey Hendricks / Joe Jones / Larry Miller / Bob Watts / Jock Reynolds / Albert Fine, Spell your name with these objects, 1976, plastic box containing diverse materials, printed card, 2.9 × 9.4 × 7.5 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.
Many contemporary artists are exploiting the rich variety of visual material available in flux on the internet. New media , digital collage This analogy can help me interpret my interaction with the webspace in terms of a fragments of different pieces of information being selected and negotiated from a vast collection of material . These fragments are then assimilated into ones experience. Subject has the task of creating order and meaning out of the chaos in a similar manner to the collage artist finding a synthesis between different composite elements of the image and inturn forming new interpreations of the relationships between the parts and the whole .Its a kind of hermenuetic cycle
Bernie Stephanus (2000)
La Couleuvre ( the Snake)
Collage
Juxtaposition and interruption are also the traits that Walter Benjamin welcomed in montage, seeing them as undermining the illusionism of realism and the camera and thus as tools of a critique of culture. he was trying to develop a mode of critical discourse that reduced theorizing and authorial interpretation to a minimum in favour of series of “images” (both verbal descriptions and graphic images including photographs) plus some commentary that would evoke the very dense world of nineteenth-century Paris and in particular the transformations in material and social relations brought on by “high capitalism.” This project was unfinished at the time of Benjamin’s death in 1940; the notes for it and some sketches and proposals have been published and translated into English as The Arcades Project attempt to present “dialectical images” one after the other without the connective and integrative speaking of an author. Professor VJ suggests Benjamin was essentially a blogger . Bruno Latour’s Invisible city Latour’s text illuminates the countless invisibles encompassed within the visibible. By hi-lighting the hidden relationships embedded within the city and its phenomenon, he presents a creative document , a verbal montage of facts and city fictions. The details, the fragments and the ideas which this visual and textural essay communicates , allow one to access a sense of being embroiled within the convolutions, the overlapping and imbrications of subject and object , human and thing , a material existence. Collage in all its forms seems to allow us to express the hybridity and interrelations we form with the world .
Image Marijana Zebeljan.2005
References
Benjamin, W (1999) The Arcades Project (translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin) Cambridge, Mass; London : Belknap Press.
Latour,B and Weibel, P(2002) Iconoclash translated by Charlotte Bigg et al.Karlsruhe [Germany] : ZKM, Centre for Art and Media ; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press Latour,B.&Hermant, E (2004) Paris the Invisible City (translated by Liz Libbrecht)[online]
.Communication , imagination , the web as anastomosis
8 May 07 · Penelope Dunbar
Michel Serres has some interesting ideas about communication and our relationship with our world . In his book the Natural Contract he asserts the need to readdress our human relationship with our environment. He puts the ecolological foundations of our human existence firmly and poetically back in perspective . It makes me acutely aware of our present day societies displacement from the world and environment . Latour(1993) accurately encapsulates the problematic relationship between human societies and the natural/material world of things.What is needed is a way to disclose the interactions between the object (the world of things) and the subject ( the human and societal ).(Latour1993)
Pum (2007) Happy Haptic Ritual
Collage
10cm x 7cm
‘ We possess hundreds of myths describing the way subjects (or the collective , or intersubjectivity, or epistemes) construct the object- Kant’s Copernican Revolution is only one in a long line of examples . Yet we have nothing that recounts the other aspect of the story:how objects construct the subject.’ (Latour 1993:82)
Latour (1993) provides a comprehensive explanation for why this division between man and nature has arisen . We have never been modern sets out to show how we must now admitt the hybridity of the subject object relationship, accentuate the role of the mediator and reject the divison or separation of Nature , object and human subject. In an interview Serres discusses why he thinks a metaphysics of the contemporary world still has considerable relevence .He is essentially exploring the dimensions of knowledge in terms of the relationship between the material body and knowledge . developing knowledge through the body’s experience of the world – but not soley in terms of the 5 senses. We can more acurately describe the body as being a fusion of 7 senses – by considering the role of Proprioception ( the perception we have of our own body by means of the billions of captors disseminated throughout all the bodily tissues .) and the vestibular sense of gravitation and spatial orientation. located in the inner ear
The seven senses are interconnected to create a single sense -the sense of movement.(Berthoz 1997) Perception and motricity in a convultion. The body becomes a place where oral and experiential narratives are knitted together – to create knowledge. The artist Marcus Coats who attempts to connect with the animal world by using his body to subsume his subjectivity into animal behaviours – his dawn chorus is a triumph in evoking an extraordinary relationship between human and bird song. communication is perhaps something we need to approach in less conventional and more imaginative ways.
References
Berthoz,A. et al Ed (1993) Multisensory control of movement Oxford; New York:Oxford University Press
Csordas, T. ed. (1994) Embodiment and Experience: the existential ground of culture and Self . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
Latour, B.& Porter,C (trans) (1993) We have never been modern. Cambridge MA:Harvard University Press.
Serres,M & MacArthur&Paulson(trans)(1995)_ The natural contract_ . USA:University of Michigan Press .
Serres, M & Cowper, P(trans) (1993) Angels: A modern myth. Paris: Flammarion.
community and interaction
8 May 07 · Penelope Dunbar
Latour(1993) argues that the polarity between subject and object is a modern construct , one which impedes our attempts to access to the imbrications and networked relations of subject and object . Latour thinks we must restore the role of the mediator , as an ‘ original event [which] creates what it translates, as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role ‘(Latour 1993:78) Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory(2005) is founded on the interaction between humans and things.’ stretch any
inter-action and, sure enough , it becomes an actor-network’(2005:202) There are some interesting dimensions to this interaction which I can directly vouch for in my growing interactions with the internet .Latour(2005) describes interactions as overflowing in all directions , encompassing a ‘Bewildering array of participants…...simulataneously at work in them and which are dislocating their neat boundaries’ The internet is reflection of our human interactivity with the world of things. Its technology creates everyone of Latour’s conditions for interaction between inumerable actants.The internet is saturated with hetrogenous entities that are not synoptic (simultaneously visible) Interactions involving millions of different actors and actants from diverse and distant places.
The internet is altering how we behave on a societal level. The private and the public conflate on a daily basis.Scores of people regularly are rendered completely absorbered ,privately interacting in a public space with vast amounts of public information.*
Berners-Lee translated the dream of a machine which could be interacted with into the beginnings of a reality. Central to his idea was the aspiration to use technology to facilitate a two-way process involving interaction with the information space , a creative exchange, that would provide people with the opportunity to engage in sharing. People to be reading , accessing ,creating links and connections between web pages.
Serres (1993) would suggest we should think of communication as the sending and recieving of messages via different messangers and be vigilent of the role the Internet has as a mediator and ‘actor endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it redeploy it and betray it’. (Latour 1993:81) silentmiaow the internet to communicate her unique perspective of the world . This video is especially powerful because of its transparancy and immediacy. Hearing and seeing directly through the medium of the internet , this subjects private world rendered in a public dimension presented a paradox. Silentmiaow opens up the possiblity for new definitions of communication,People with autism are often identified by non-autistic people as having a communication disorder.By posting this clip on youtube she is inadvertently engaging with multiple and mobile relationships that involve complex and fluid hybridising of public-and-prvate life(Sheller & Urry 2003) This could be misconstrued as publicity ,a media infiltration of the private realm. thus collapsing her mode of communication into a spectacle for world-wide consumption.I felt concerned that this material becomes vulnerable to misinterpretation by being posted on youtube which has a diverse and vast audience.The internet and its populations of networks , can distort and corrupt the integrity of a message.References
Berners-Lee, T & Fischetti,M. _Weaving the Web : the past, present and future of the World Wide Web._London : Orion Business, 1999.Csordas, T. ed. (1994) Embodiment and Experience: the existential ground of culture and Self . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
Latour, B.& Porter,C (trans) (1993) We have never been modern. Cambridge MA:Harvard University Press.
Latour, B.(2005) _Reassembling the social:An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory_Oxford:Oxford University Press
Serres,M & MacArthur&Paulson(trans)(1995)_ The natural contract_ . USA:University of Michigan Press .
Serres, M & Cowper, P(trans) (1993) Angels: A modern myth. Paris: Flammarion.
Sheller, M & Urr, J.(2003) ‘Mobile transformations of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life.’ Theory ,Culture& Society. vol 20 no3 pp.107-126
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