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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Found Theory #1: this piece of paper was on the sidewalk...
What do you like better, narratology or ludology?
Excerpt from Espen Aarseth's "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation" in the 2004 MIT publication First Person edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan...
Underlying the drive to reform games as "interactive narratives," as they are sometimes called, lies a complex web of motives, from economic ("games need narratives to become better products"), elitist and eschatological ("games are a base, low-cultural form; let's try to escape the humble origins and achieve `literary' qualities"), to academic colonialism ("computer games are narratives, we only need to redefine narratives in such a way that these new narrative forms are included"). At a recent game conference, it was stated that the difference between films and games was simply the "interactivity" of the games.
This latter motive, the only one of the three mentioned before to concern us here, seems to me to spring out of a certain ideology, much practiced by humanists, and also well beyond our ivory towers; an ideology that we might call "narrativism." This is the notion that everything is a story, and that story-telling is our primary, perhaps only, mode of understanding, our cognitive perspective on the world. Life is a story, this discussion is a story, and the building that I work in is also a story, or better, an architectural narrative. Ironically, most proper narratologists, who actually have to think about and define narratives in a scholarly, responsible, and accurate way, are not guilty of this overgeneralization.
Yet among anthropologists, business people, technologists, visual artists, media theorists, and other laypersons, this ideology -- or what Alan Rauch once fittingly called story fetishism -- is strong and uncontested. And to us humanists, the (let's face it) lowest caste of the academic world, it is nice to feel important again, for once. Finally, our expertise matters! We don't know much about technology, or biology, but we do know stories and storytelling. So why be critical when we can be important instead?
A book vending machine in a Sao Paulo Subway .
(image courtesy of Fastwürms)
Heartwarming current events:
"The Newfoundland comedian [Mary Walsh] shocked the crowd last night when she called the federal Conservatives "the arse-lickers of Satan'' before introducing a performer.
TV cameras then cut to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, who bowed his head and smiled sheepishly from the front row. Earlier, while making a presentation, the Nova Scotia MP was booed when he mistakenly referred to Halifax as Toronto."
If you liked "Chariots of Fire" you'll love the horse rescue (thanks M. Jean).
Parasitic Venture Press has a launch tomorrow at Art Metropole (588 King St. West, 2-5 pm). I'm keen because artists' books are great, but publishing them is a hard gig. Michael Maranda loves the medium, and knows it well, and is moving this forward with lots of amibtion and enthusiasm. Also, I've sneak previewed some of the books launching and they're great, notably Sandra Rechico's whereabouts.
Instant Coffee's:
THERE IS NO ROMANCE IN TAKING A RISK
INSTANT COFFEE
LOVES EVERYONE
Art Metropole, February 10 - March 3, 2007
Ambivalence and contradictions embedded in artistic texts produce the art effect. Belief is suspended. Culture reflected.
Taken literally, you might interpret IC's "There is no..." as meaning that they feel they can't risk offending anyone so they love everyone. That would pretty well sum up a lot of the aesthetic in art these days. Terrified safe.
The message becomes much more interesting, in the sense of loaded up with meanings, if you sever the last two lines, which are about as meaningful as an email signature, from the first three, which might mean:
THERE IS NO ROMANCE IN TAKING A RISK (anymore) It's just sad if you are so naive as to date bad boys, drive drunk, not recycle. Naive risk-taking just gets you in trouble: e.g. heart break, accidents or global warming.
THERE IS NO ROMANCE IN TAKING A RISK (and never was) Risk is a necessary part of life and we shouldn't fear it: e.g. the Harper govn't needs to see green energy not as a romantic ideal, therefore risky, but as a necessary step based on scientific observation... in fact in politics there has never been romance in taking risks; every strategy involves risk, with high stakes.
Note to self: Don't even think about using romance and risk in a single sentence.
Links: http://www.artmetropole.com/popups/exhibits/exhibits_07/instant-coffee/ic.html
Rob Labossiere
An intriguing F.A.Q:
What happens if death should occur at a great distance, or if USA is unable to use the body?
Issue #16 is now posted. (thanks simpleposie #1599)
Kate Wilson
Cold Drive 2000 series of 248 paintings, oil and digital media
on vellum, 23 x 30 cm
Today I went to the ministry of health to update my OHIP card. The guy at the counter noted that our birthdays are very close together and that we both have a watershed birthday coming up this spring. "I don't care," he said, "you're only as old as you feel." Then, when he took my picture he said, "Is that one okay with you?" I shrugged "sure." It's not like I sit around staring at my OHIP card. Then he said, "even with the frizzy hair?" Then he said, "it's winter hair." Then he said, "I know that feeling." Then he said, "not that I have any hair." Then he said, "I'd rather have frizzy hair than no hair." I was pretty much done with saying things, myself, so I left. Which is all by way of introduction to my new favourite phrase:
"graceful degradation"Which has deposed my old favourite phrase:
"accelerated decrepitude"Here's what the current issue of Scientific American says about graceful degredation in their article on the broadcast transition to digital tv:
Even if your TV can receive over-the-air digital signals, that does not guarantee you can see the pictures. Analog offers what is called "graceful degradation": people in fringe reception areas can at least see something, even if the picture ghosts or fades in and out. DTV is not as forgiving. You either get it, or you do not.Being of a fairly murky mindset I find myself quite comfortable in the fringe reception areas. I grew up in the country without cable and spent a lot of time staring at something-less-than-completely-random TV snow that teased me with rare decipherable images hinting at the storyline of Battlestar Galactica. I'd rather have a fuzzy winter broadcast than no broadcast at all.
Sally has gone horseback riding. Discuss.
A friendly reminder (via Von Bark) for any of us who forget to read Bookninja: read Bookninja. This recent thread about Margaret Atwood's Globe & Mail essays on arts funding might be the most sophisticated arts funding debate I've ever seen. Even the internet-obligatory just-looking-out-for-me-and-mine dude has some thorough and complex insights. My favourite bits, however, are embedded in George Murray's response. Excerpt...
Artists have always been supported by the tribe/lord/town/government. Art is not a business. It can’t be run that way. It’s not a free market of supply and demand. And despite history’s filtering, it’s not Darwinian on the macro level of present day. If it was, it would all be cartoons, dogs playing poker, corporate sculptures, Brittany Spears and John Grisham novels. And we would all be working in art sweatshops for a few cents an hour and another part of you would be crying for our liberation from oppression.note: L.M. and I re-posted both of Atwood's essays in the comment thread here.
Perception of perception report by Joe McKay
According to Donald Hoffman, our vision does not accurately describe the world at all. In fact it constantly lies to us so we can eat and have sex before we die. Why should our vision be excluded from Darwinian evolution? Donald had a host of wacky optical illusions to show us, but also the science chops to back em up. Plus he used an overhead projector to show stuff not a data beamer so we would not think it was a trick.
Also awesome was Norman Klein, who showed us a fly through his new graphic novel "The Imaginary 20th Century" made from culling images from days of yore. I'm not sure the book will be better than his impromptu performance was, but then again who knows.
The second day of the event was held at the Velaslavasay Panorama where we got to have a preview of the upcoming exhibit. The panorama has that kind of effect on your body and mind that makes you say "duuuuude" as soon as you climb in to the room even if you've sworn off saying "duuuude" because you're well into your late 30's and enough's enough already. It really is sweet [d'oh!].
Lastly, here's an image meant to illustrate how change blindness works. I'm not sure how exactly, but I'm pretty confident that I see a bunny. How this makes me A. have more sex or B. live longer is none of your business.
Over the past few weeks, L.M. and I have been posting some lovely mature juicey finished artworks by artists we admire. I decided to break it up with some raw scratchy half-baked drawings from my own sketchbook...
space/time cat water balloons
right/left brain owl
spread inspired by Miyazaki movies and a novel by Iain M. Banks
| Who do you like better, Shakespeare (thanks Bill) or Doctor Seuss? | |
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O hell! what have we here? A carrion Death, within whose empty eye There is a written scroll! I'll read the writing. All that glitters is not gold; Often have you heard that told: Many a man his life hath sold But my outside to behold: Gilded tombs do worms enfold. Had you been as wise as bold, Young in limbs, in judgment old, Your answer had not been inscroll'd: Fare you well; your suit is cold. Cold, indeed; and labour lost: Then, farewell, heat, and welcome, frost! Portia, adieu. I have too grieved a heart To take a tedious leave: thus losers part. |
My hat is old. My teeth are gold. I have a bird I like to hold. My shoe is off. My foot is cold. My shoe is off. My foot is cold. I have a bird I liked to hold. My hat is old. My teeth are gold. And now my story is all told. |
The other day I made a post about tonight's launch of FUSE magazine, with the theme of precarity. I'm just finding out about this whole "precarity" thing myself. The term is useful because it allows for very different and disenfranchised groups of people to connect politically. The current issue of FUSE has an article by Alessandra Renzi and Stephen Turpin outlining the precarity movement.
Precarity describes the situation of temp or flex workers, ranging from workers in supermarkets and other big commercial chains to artists and employees of the service industry.Izida Zorde, editor of FUSE, says in her introduction:
[...]
By embracing a wide range of communication tools and practices, the precarity movement enables workers less familiar with their political conditions, yet all too familiar with the exploitation they engender, to contextualize their exploitation within the broader logic of capitalism, and connect to a wide range of struggles within a meaningful system of reference.
Citing the myth of the American Dream and its attendant fantasies of limitless opportunity and personal enrichment, [Renzi and Turpin] unpack how in foreclosing on the connections between economic oppression and organized political resistance, dominant North American culture reroutes political questions back onto the isolated individual.
Two articles I read recently seem possibly related under this precarity rubric. The first is a recent piece on the art market (thanks bill) by Jerry Saltz in Village Voice.
Painter Charline Von Heyl recently described Americans' disconnect between the personal and political this way: "While almost everything in the outer world feels messed-up, our inner lives aren't altogether messed-up." The current art world, awash in money and success, is shot through with a similar disconnect.The second article is a statement by Chris Gilbert, the curator from Berkley who resigned last year when he programmed a political show of art from Venezuela and the gallery wanted to change some of the accompanying text to mitigate expressions of "solidarity" and replace them with expressions of "concern."
[...]
The current market feeds the bullshit machine, provides cover for a lot of vacuous behavior, revs us up while wearing us down, breeds complacency, and is so invasive that it forces artists to regularly consider issues of celebrity, status, and money in their studios. Yet, it also allows more artists to make more money without having to work full-time soul-crushing jobs and provides most of us with what Mel Brooks called "our phony-baloney jobs." Last December, more than 400 New York art dealers representing more than 5,000 artists paid for booths in one art fair or another in Miami to participate in this market. Everyone is trying the best they can. For critics to demonize the entire art world, then, as somehow unethical and crass seems self-righteous, cynical, and hypocritical.
The class interests represented by the museum, which are above all the interests of the bourgeoisie that funds it, have two (related) things to fear from a project like mine: (1) of course, revolutionary Venezuela is a symbolic threat to the US government and the capitalist class that benefits from that government's policies, just as Cuba is a symbolic threat, just as Nicaragua was, and just as is any country that tries to set its house in order in a way that is different from the ideas of Washington and London -- which is primarily to say Washington and London's insistence that there is no alternative to capitalism. I must emphasize that the threat is only symbolic; in the eyes of the US government and the US bourgeoisie, it sets a "bad" and dangerous example of disobedience for other countries to follow, but of course the idea that such examples represent a military threat to the US (would that it were the case) is simply laughable; (2) the second threat, which is probably the more operational one in the museum context, is that much of the community is in favor of the "Now-Time" projects -- the response to the first exhibition is enormous and the interest in the second is also very high. That response and interest exposes the fact that the museum, the bourgeois values it promotes via the institution of contemporary art (contemporary art of the past 30 years is really in most respects simply the cultural arm of upper-class power) are not really those of any class but its own.Mute was following the Gilbert thing closely, and reposted an Artforum piece by Liam Gillick.
As the controversy unfolds, it highlights the void between rhetoric and practice within a developed and striated art discourse. During a period of social and political strife, within the context of a superheated art market, there is an increasing gulf between those artists and curators who have carved out a path of resistance via ongoing critique of social systems and those who function in a more complicit relationship to the contradictory impulses that affect art production and mediation. For some it is increasingly difficult to follow Deleuzian aims toward complex understandings, the subtle likes of which may be said to have oriented artistic and critical discourse for decades. To quote the philosopher in his Two Regimes of Madness (1977), "We've been trying to create concepts with fine articulations, extremely differentiated concepts, to escape gross dualisms." For Gilbert, it seems that such critical self-consciousness in relation to art production can no longer be productive within a society that, as he sees it, is inured to the delicate probings of the super-self-conscious artist, curator, or critic. It is a time of gross dualisms once more, and it is necessary to take a stand and make a careful choice about who will be there alongside you.
There is a nice article here by Steven Pinker summing up the current theories in the science of consciousness. (thanks Timmer!) Quote:
Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.Mark mentioned in some perception thread ages ago about the eye being an outgrowth of the brain. I went looking for some more info and found this cool sight, which describes "lateral inhibition" really well, complete with opticall illusion illustrations. Quote:
The organization of the brain is such as to create "abstractions", rather than to simply take input at face value. A checkerboard is a checkerboard is a checkerboard not because the input reaching our eyes is the same at all times but rather because the nervous system is organized to reject some information and replace it with other information. The "booming, buzzing confusion" of the external world is rendered stable and comprehensible by the organization of the nervous system. That organization represents information added by the nervous system to the information is receives, and constitutes a presumption that there exist stable, constant external forms with well-defined boundaries. The presumption is strong enough so the nervous system actually creates boundaries where none in fact exist...