Saturday, June 05, 2010
Monday, April 05, 2010
Come See my Band This Sat!
My band Danger Pin is playing an amazing show this Saturday night 4/10 @ 17 Murray St. You should come by, It's full of media!
Three Bands.
Three laptops pumping electronic beats.
Three sexy chick singers from South Florida.
Three amazing sounds that put the eclectic in electric .
Come see us throw down this Saturday with brand spanking new tunes to shake your bootie too.
9:30pm- The Goodnight Darlings
10:30pm- Revival Revival
11:30- Danger Pin
DJ Babsy spins the beats after the show till who knows.
$10
CinemArt Space
17 Murray St. (btwn Church St. & Broadway)
Ny, Ny
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Net Neutrality
The ideas of Net Neutrality or Utopian Plagiarism are just that, Utopian. Like Marxism, it counts on artists all contributing their abilities and using what others give in a respectful way. However, as history has proven, not everyone can be trusted to contribute or use property fairly. Our Internet space, like our physical one, needs some structure that allows for a meeting of a wide array of people. In such a structure, like government or Internet protocol, the needs of some people's interest are left out in order to include others since in any majority or democratic form, the extremes are left out of decision making process by design and necessity. Although there may be some way to truly factor in the needs of all participants in a large society, it has not yet been discovered by humans.
Remix culture also runs into a Utopian conundrum. Although artistic process and sharing are great goals, greed and ego are considerable variables when you take on the risk of open collaboration. As an artists trying to make a living doing art, I feel that we have to think of a way to make sure artists are credited and somehow paid for their work. Although there are immense problems and exclusion in the traditional gallery/studio/record label model, the new model of remix and open source have their own drawbacks. The new generation of musicians and artists have almost come to accept the fact that they will always have a day job, there is no way to live sufficiently on the income generated by their works alone. While being locked into exploitative contracts is not ideal, at least those musicians, filmmakers, and writers could focus their time on their chosen craft. While we may have traded some of the systemic constraint in the name of artistic freedom, we also sacrificed our livelihoods. Neither system truly serves and appreciated the value of the artists and creators, I believe a model that provides for the greatest possibility for an artist to profit from their own work is vital. If there are no artists that can truly devote their time to creating without having to have another job, it says that our society finds art, music and movies are worthless. If that isn't true, it means that someone is profiting on the works that other people created, and that doesn't bode well for the artist. Instead of encouraging more artists to work and make things we love, we've built up powerful salesmen.
Remix culture also runs into a Utopian conundrum. Although artistic process and sharing are great goals, greed and ego are considerable variables when you take on the risk of open collaboration. As an artists trying to make a living doing art, I feel that we have to think of a way to make sure artists are credited and somehow paid for their work. Although there are immense problems and exclusion in the traditional gallery/studio/record label model, the new model of remix and open source have their own drawbacks. The new generation of musicians and artists have almost come to accept the fact that they will always have a day job, there is no way to live sufficiently on the income generated by their works alone. While being locked into exploitative contracts is not ideal, at least those musicians, filmmakers, and writers could focus their time on their chosen craft. While we may have traded some of the systemic constraint in the name of artistic freedom, we also sacrificed our livelihoods. Neither system truly serves and appreciated the value of the artists and creators, I believe a model that provides for the greatest possibility for an artist to profit from their own work is vital. If there are no artists that can truly devote their time to creating without having to have another job, it says that our society finds art, music and movies are worthless. If that isn't true, it means that someone is profiting on the works that other people created, and that doesn't bode well for the artist. Instead of encouraging more artists to work and make things we love, we've built up powerful salesmen.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
The Database Narrative
Information has historically been passed on in stories. Oral histories and then written were folded into narratives that made the facts function in an engaging way. Perhaps this function is because it is easier, or simply more fun and engaging for the human brain to remember stories than it is to recall facts. As much as we love random facts, stories are what move us; it's the story of the people living with the effects of global warming rather than the pure logistical facts of it that make up engaged. Perhaps it's simply because we are people, who think in narrative forms about themselves (IE the phrase "that's the story of my life") which makes narrative forms more relatable to us.
The pure amount of information generated today requires a database structure, a paring down of the story to it's meat if you will. The database is a convenient place to store information, but the information only truly comes alive to us after it is used in some narrative form. Language itself is a database of words, letters and meanings that only makes sense to us when we organize it into a structure, of sentences and stories. Like language, the possible narratives that can come from a database are infinite. Just as 100 hundred people will write slightly different stories about the same event using the same 'facts' of what happened on their facebook or twitter accounts, the narrative aspect of information is subjective and ever changing.
Humans have been finding narratives in the database of nature and experience since the advent of language. It is perhaps what makes us human. Animals live lives full of adventures and experience that could easily easily be thrilling narratives (as Disney knows very well) but lack the ability or interest to string them into stories, so since Aesop we've been doing it for them.
The pure amount of information generated today requires a database structure, a paring down of the story to it's meat if you will. The database is a convenient place to store information, but the information only truly comes alive to us after it is used in some narrative form. Language itself is a database of words, letters and meanings that only makes sense to us when we organize it into a structure, of sentences and stories. Like language, the possible narratives that can come from a database are infinite. Just as 100 hundred people will write slightly different stories about the same event using the same 'facts' of what happened on their facebook or twitter accounts, the narrative aspect of information is subjective and ever changing.
Humans have been finding narratives in the database of nature and experience since the advent of language. It is perhaps what makes us human. Animals live lives full of adventures and experience that could easily easily be thrilling narratives (as Disney knows very well) but lack the ability or interest to string them into stories, so since Aesop we've been doing it for them.
Monday, February 22, 2010
The Culture Industry
response to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Essay:
One thing that I always find amazing in people who write about things such as 'the culture industry' and comment on culture and society is their lack of realization that they are part of this culture that they discuss in such a seemingly 'objective' way. The author's own absorption of the prevalent cultural zeitgeist and it's effects on their point of view becomes more apparent only with time and distance.
It seems to me that the ideas that Horkheimer and Adorno focus on in their deconstruction of the 'culture' and media industry are almost cliched among the cultural landscape that we know was 1944. Fascism, The use of propaganda, the image of a few powerful men handing down fodder for the ignorant masses, and anti semitisim (Culture monopolies as producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easy-going liberalism and Jewish intellectuals). These ideas are very relevant in a dissection of the media industry of the 1940's. Hitler had just shown the world the immense power of propaganda machines. There was anti-semitism left in the air, as the Nazi's had not yet been totally extinguished. The media industry was still more Jew run, as immigrants built the industry from scratch, and the studio system was much more restrictive in it's production of specific formulaic movies and stars.
However, this dissection of the media industry is about as relevant to our current cultural landscape as Jazz (which Horkheimer and Adorno refer to greatly). Music, movies and technology in general have moved so beyond what Horkheimer and Adorno could have even imagined (as they say the rate of our technology growth id growing exponentially). The thought of personal computers was beyond their imagination, let alone the ability for the average person to produce their own films, records or newspapers (ie- blogs.) This 2-way culture movement makes it more clear just how gray the line is between culture, media, and observer. Consumers are also creators, making the argument for the ignorant masses hard to swallow. Aggregation of content online makes it easy for the public to have access to information (via google, nytimes online, etc.) that would have been hard to come by in the 1940's, when one's major (or only) source of up to date international news was the local paper and the radio.
The major machines of the culture industry still exist and turn out pc socially justified materials, Hollywood and Network TV, major record labels and etc. However, the fact that they serve a public more than the public serves them has become abundantly clear in their fight to remain relevant. Hollywood tried to cater to the public's needs in formulaic blockbusters and indie style films alike, in hopes to keep their audience form defecting to completely indie sources on online. The record industry's struggle to remain relevant in an age where music is available everywhere from itunes to myspace is well known. And the fashion industry's new frenzy to woo bloggers by giving them front row seats to high end fashion shows is a tangible example of the major 'culture industry's' awareness that now that the public can be heard, you better not try to ignore them.
One thing that I always find amazing in people who write about things such as 'the culture industry' and comment on culture and society is their lack of realization that they are part of this culture that they discuss in such a seemingly 'objective' way. The author's own absorption of the prevalent cultural zeitgeist and it's effects on their point of view becomes more apparent only with time and distance.
It seems to me that the ideas that Horkheimer and Adorno focus on in their deconstruction of the 'culture' and media industry are almost cliched among the cultural landscape that we know was 1944. Fascism, The use of propaganda, the image of a few powerful men handing down fodder for the ignorant masses, and anti semitisim (Culture monopolies as producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easy-going liberalism and Jewish intellectuals). These ideas are very relevant in a dissection of the media industry of the 1940's. Hitler had just shown the world the immense power of propaganda machines. There was anti-semitism left in the air, as the Nazi's had not yet been totally extinguished. The media industry was still more Jew run, as immigrants built the industry from scratch, and the studio system was much more restrictive in it's production of specific formulaic movies and stars.
However, this dissection of the media industry is about as relevant to our current cultural landscape as Jazz (which Horkheimer and Adorno refer to greatly). Music, movies and technology in general have moved so beyond what Horkheimer and Adorno could have even imagined (as they say the rate of our technology growth id growing exponentially). The thought of personal computers was beyond their imagination, let alone the ability for the average person to produce their own films, records or newspapers (ie- blogs.) This 2-way culture movement makes it more clear just how gray the line is between culture, media, and observer. Consumers are also creators, making the argument for the ignorant masses hard to swallow. Aggregation of content online makes it easy for the public to have access to information (via google, nytimes online, etc.) that would have been hard to come by in the 1940's, when one's major (or only) source of up to date international news was the local paper and the radio.
The major machines of the culture industry still exist and turn out pc socially justified materials, Hollywood and Network TV, major record labels and etc. However, the fact that they serve a public more than the public serves them has become abundantly clear in their fight to remain relevant. Hollywood tried to cater to the public's needs in formulaic blockbusters and indie style films alike, in hopes to keep their audience form defecting to completely indie sources on online. The record industry's struggle to remain relevant in an age where music is available everywhere from itunes to myspace is well known. And the fashion industry's new frenzy to woo bloggers by giving them front row seats to high end fashion shows is a tangible example of the major 'culture industry's' awareness that now that the public can be heard, you better not try to ignore them.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Response to Walter Benjamin: Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Benjamin talks of the "liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage." Which is relevant in a land of movie remakes of novels, and other movies, a constant supply of cover songs and reproductions. But the fact is that this old cultural heritage, that is supposedly 'authentic' within it's historical context, is also a liquidation of the images of it's time. Medieval art liquidated the images of Mary and Jesus and told and retold the religious tales and myths of it's time. Greek art reproduced the same images of gods and the mythology of it's time. Art has always been drawing on itself and the art that came before it, it's just had more secrecy in the past to hide it's plagiarism. And authenticity in the concept of a true 'author' with noble intentions is a historical myth. There have been numerous questions as to whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote his own works. And famous artists of the past, just like those of the present, such as Michelangelo, were not only bound by the demands of their 'consumers' (the church or royalty) but also used numerous other artists to help them produce work that would only be credited to one person, much like a movie studio.
As new as our state of mass culture art, film and media is, it is essentially the same story with new special effects. We have a tendency to see a picture for it's differences in detail instead of structural similarities. The dialogue we're having now about the dangers of reproduction on art are the same one had centuries ago about the printing press. Humans tend to work cyclically and I think this is a part of art's endless cycle of validity, manipulation, outdatedness and re consumption. In the end, any work of art's meaning and depth are held entirely within the mind of the viewer. You decide whether you think a Picasso painting is more artful than a postcard. Whether a caveman made his art for you to see is irrelevant, it is only your mind that decides whether it is worth looking at now that you've found it.
Benjamin describes how a statue of Greek goddess held different meaning to the Greeks that made it than to those of the Middle Ages, and this idea, that meaning is in the idea of the beholder and not in the piece of art itself, is the same idea that I think makes the question of authenticity pointless.
Art certainly has an aura, such as Vermeer's milkmaid, that is different in person that in replication. But just because the two pictures, the replica and the original, are different doesn't invalidate one or the other, it simply makes two pieces of art based on the same painting. All art is inspired, however distant or closely, by other art.
The ability of reproduction may only help culture and art overall. In the past, supply and demand played an even heavier price on art; if you were not sanctioned by royalty or church, you couldn't produce art. Through a long loosening of those regulations, we've reached a place where almost anyone can produce what he or she feels is art. While this in some way may lead to watering down or confusing of what is and isn't art, that's a completely silly argument. Because if art is whatever we choose to see as art, prom a painting to a toilet to TV show, there is no way to water it down, since it contains no pure form outside of our minds. I Hope that the ability of mass production will only lead to an environment of tremendous choice, where there is something for everyone to find their own beauty in.
As new as our state of mass culture art, film and media is, it is essentially the same story with new special effects. We have a tendency to see a picture for it's differences in detail instead of structural similarities. The dialogue we're having now about the dangers of reproduction on art are the same one had centuries ago about the printing press. Humans tend to work cyclically and I think this is a part of art's endless cycle of validity, manipulation, outdatedness and re consumption. In the end, any work of art's meaning and depth are held entirely within the mind of the viewer. You decide whether you think a Picasso painting is more artful than a postcard. Whether a caveman made his art for you to see is irrelevant, it is only your mind that decides whether it is worth looking at now that you've found it.
Benjamin describes how a statue of Greek goddess held different meaning to the Greeks that made it than to those of the Middle Ages, and this idea, that meaning is in the idea of the beholder and not in the piece of art itself, is the same idea that I think makes the question of authenticity pointless.
Art certainly has an aura, such as Vermeer's milkmaid, that is different in person that in replication. But just because the two pictures, the replica and the original, are different doesn't invalidate one or the other, it simply makes two pieces of art based on the same painting. All art is inspired, however distant or closely, by other art.
The ability of reproduction may only help culture and art overall. In the past, supply and demand played an even heavier price on art; if you were not sanctioned by royalty or church, you couldn't produce art. Through a long loosening of those regulations, we've reached a place where almost anyone can produce what he or she feels is art. While this in some way may lead to watering down or confusing of what is and isn't art, that's a completely silly argument. Because if art is whatever we choose to see as art, prom a painting to a toilet to TV show, there is no way to water it down, since it contains no pure form outside of our minds. I Hope that the ability of mass production will only lead to an environment of tremendous choice, where there is something for everyone to find their own beauty in.
Monday, February 01, 2010
New Media
I will be understanding some new media this semester. Hopefully.
Blogg Blog Blog. (smarter posts to come.)
Blogg Blog Blog. (smarter posts to come.)
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