Diagrams / Arakawa: The Mechanisms of Meaning
The relationship between diagrams and meaning is either very evident or very obscure. Many diagrams directly relate information or facts, therefore the relationship is that they present meaning to a viewer. Other diagrams, however, may not be as obvious in what they are showing. These kinds of diagrams rely on additional outside information to relay their meaning, or they leave it to the viewer to take meaning away. Perhaps these diagrams are meant to have a different meaning unique to each person who sees it. An example of this obscure kind of diagram is Arakawa’s Diagram with Duchamp’s Glass as a Minor Detail. It is clear that Arakawa and Duchamp both created diagrammatic art that was not concrete in meaning. Wether or not the artist’s themselves had an idea of what it meant to them does not mean viewers take away that same idea.
I think the difference between diagrams for art and non-art would mainly be in the way information is presented. More informational and discernibly clear diagrams are used for traditionally non-artistic purposes, such as education, medical uses, or other process-demanding areas. Diagrams for art take more liberty with their formats, mediums, and boundaries. As Arakawa practiced and preached with his own art, “the aim is to creatively test the limits of thought and logic”. This can clearly be seen as his work crossed diverse mediums, subjects, and even related to other fields of work. I really enjoyed the way Arakawa said that you must become a scientist before an artist. I think he added a much deeper meaning and thought process being his artistic decisions by using that scientific background and working with the concepts of physics and philosophy. Knowing this makes his work much more interesting to me.
The relationship between diagrams, maps, and networks is that they are all ways to present information. Diagrams and maps are visual tools, though a network might not be. Either way, they are ingrained in our society and humans constantly rely on them.
Week 2: 8/28/18
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
I think Ayn Rand’s philosophy is relevant today because we have a very similar society to what she describes in her book Atlas Shrugged. She clearly believes in the philosophy of every man for himself and “to each his own”. We have a capitalist market today where supposedly people can put in hard work and in return be successful. This is not always the case, but Ayn Rand certainly did not believe in giving to the ‘undeserved’. In the video, Alan Greenspan, who is a member of Rand’s inner circle, persuaded Bill Clinton to create the New Economy. This is a market that stabilizes itself with the assistance of computer technology and networks that measure different aspects in society. At first this seemed to work well, but apparently did not last. Computers were entrusted with being able to manage the lending of money, but the point of sustainability was quickly surpassed - resulting in the 2008 housing collapse. That wasn't completely related to the question but I think it is important to see how much we really rely and trust in computers.
To answer the second question, Objectivism is Rand’s idea that man should be selfish and focused on one’s own well-being and happiness. This has greatly factored into the Internet because that is one way to describe it as a whole. For some, the Internet is just a place to virtually escape the reality of everyday life and live an alternate existence where you can do anything. There are thousands of sites, games, and avatar-hosts that provide that place for happier existences. Since it is difficult to pursue true happiness with all the challenges of real life, the Internet provides a safer, easier, and anonymous way to do so. Though that wasn’t the original purpose of Internet, many people sought this escape (possibly subconsciously) and this brings us to Internet Utopias…
Week 3: 9/6/18
Hito Steyerl: In Defense of the Poor Image
This was an interesting reading, especially after personally working with so many “poor images” in media projects last school year. In IML 201 and one other class I created digital remixes, which were essentially a compilation of poor images (sometimes very poor). That process of sorting through YouTube for hours to find the right clips, finding a website that would let me download the clips, and editing the clips into my project really made me appreciate all the steps these images go through. While editing I changed so many characteristics like length and sound, but I also even had to change things like aspect ratios and pixels/resolution. Reading Hito’s thoughts about the value an image gets from being spread far or fast made me rethink my definition and thoughts about the “poor image”, I don’t think it should be thought of as poor anymore. These images should be valued more relating to things like speed and velocity. Using the word poor is interesting as it was said that they belong to the public, while traditional and original images were “rich” and state controlled. The connotation of “poor images” with general civilians and “rich images” with government highlights the innate status and monetary gap between people and their bureaucracy. However, I like the new power “poor images” seem to be given in Hito’s opinion. Like normal people - they have been though a lot, traveled far and wide, changed drastically, and been enjoyed by many. This is a different kind of value system, one where high-resolutions don’t count for everything.
Week 4: 9/11/18
Rosalind Krauss: Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image
Rauschenberg’s collage work was really the first of its kind. He started out in the 1950s and 60s and it seems that he immediately stood out from the rest of the art world at that time. He was different from any artist or work before him because he worked in the three-dimensional space. While art before always involved translating 3D objects onto 2D depictions, Rauschenberg’s art stayed in the third dimension. Not only did he make use of scale and texture like never before, but he also infused his work with ideas about the function of art itself. He disagreed with the way art is consumed as a commodity rather than a portal for ideas, reflection, or a shared experience. It is in this way that his art also relates to the internet. One of the big themes in his work is featuring junk-like objects to intentionally differ from the traditional “unique object of value” art pieces. This counter-hegemonic technique spread far and wide with the advent of public internet. With so much content available to so many people from all over the world, lots of “junk-like” and untraditional image, video, music, art, and collage is produced. This goes back to last weeks discussion about the poor image. I feel that the poor image which has been changed and altered and shared so many times has a connection with Rauschenberg’s art which is intentionally challenging contemporary views and traditional styles. Furthermore, the article spoke about the external, collective, and shared community involved with Rauschenberg’s art… that describes essentially whatever goes on the internet as well.
Week 5: 9/18/18
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Part 2
This whole idea of cybernetics had me skeptical from the beginning. I don’t believe that Cybernetics is a useful tool for describing reality because it essentially transforms everything in our world into robotic machines. Even in the very beginnings of cybernetics development, the idea was that humans are not viewed as people they should be viewed as machines, and I think that is a very dangerous concept. There is no emotion, spontaneity, or depth from the human mind in a computer. I don’t understand why Norbert Weiner, the Odum brothers, and others were so insistent on breaking down the reality of our nature to try to fit it into an equation or system. That is not how nature works, and that seems to me like common sense, but I guess in the past people really did believe nature and ecosystems had to be fixed and stable. I was honestly shocked to see the Cynergia part where ecotechnics was discussed, these “groups of visionaries” were so cult-like in the way they lived and what they believed. However, I don’t think cybernetics is all bad because it obviously led us to the earliest iteration of the internet. The idea of everyone being linked personally around the world through their computers is not so crazy as the idea that everyone around the world should behave like a computer. Furthermore, I think cybernetics was very helpful in the 1960s-70s when computers predicted an imminent global collapse. Without this initial doomsday call, I doubt politicians at the time would have any interest in protecting the environment or managing our pollution. This computer model and the published book “Limits to Growth” spread awareness and culminated in the 1972 Stockholm environmental counsel. I think the cultural impact of cybernetics is clear with modern day internet and instant individual connections, but I think there is another aspect as well. The idea of Holism and people being in their “proper places” all across the globe probably worsened the hierarchies and conflicts between races and countries. This model system was for the British empire and the world was supposed to be managed by white European nations because that was “their place”. Seeing how fast ideas like cybernetics and ecotechnics apparently spread, it would not surprise me if Holism was a widely held ideal. It is possible that racial cultural tensions stem from this idea along with so many other things from the past.
Week 6: 9/26/18
Philosophize This - Michel Foucault Podcast
Foucault writes about Jeremy Benthem’s ideal structure of a prison - the panopticon. The concept is a building designed so that a single guard can stand and see every single person and cell, but the prisoners can never see who is watching - if anyone at all. This creates the sense of constant surveillance, forcing prisoners to behave every second of every day, never knowing who is watching. The podcast points out that Foucault talks about the panopticon on a surface level, but the idea really can be applied to more than just a prison structure. Any system in our society can be designed this way, which is thought of as a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind. Mental institutions, schools, military, factories, and corporations all employ this technique of “leashing” their subjects. The institution keeps the leash just long enough so that people don’t feel like prisoners, but they still feel immense pressure to hold themselves to that institution’s standards. The three pronged approach that Foucault talks about with the panopticon is Surveillance, Normalization, and Examination. I could not help thinking about how this is exactly what school is and it could eventually be how my job is… I agree with Foucault that this is how my own life is being shaped, although I am happy to say it is not to the extent of a panopticon prison. I do feel like I’ve been fit into a mold, following the same routine every day and doing exactly what my teachers want me to. I am, however, thankful that MAP provides room for experimentation and does not always grade as traditionally as other programs might. My teachers and I discussed a lot about the grading system when I was in high school, and I’m glad to know there are some people with “power” that do not enforce or encourage the system of surveillance, normalization, and examination.
Week 7: 10/4/18
Postscript on the Societies of Control - Deleuze
I think that Deleuze has a really good point about the way people are viewed and treated as parts of the greater society. The amount of control humans are subjected to has changed so much over time and is currently at a record high. Like he said, we are all “dividuals” now, not “individuals”. We can be endlessly divided and broken up, parsed into numbers and data for the larger power structures at play. We are not treated as humans, we are treated as market samples. Understanding this idea does slightly affect my relationship to myself because it just makes me more aware of how robotized my identity is to government corporations and dominant powers in the world. With the amount of people on this earth it is not hard to understand why this mechanization of things happened, however it makes me question in what specific terms I usually think about myself. Have I internalized this same mindset? Do I view the people in my life as numbers and my own personal information as data? I like to hope that I haven’t, but I feel that on some subconscious level we all do, just because of the society we now live in.
This text relates to Foucault’s ideas on control because it is similar in the way that it talks about the societies of control. The panopticon that is always watching and enforcing also exists in the sense that we are always starting again. “While in the societies of control one is never finished with anything-the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.” There is always something to move onto next, or some way to move up. This is just their way of keeping the people in control, constantly monitored and kept in line. We are prisoners to the people in power, following their rules and never stepping out of the line of life.
Week 8: 10/11/18
Pierre Huyghe
I really enjoyed researching Pierre Huyghe’s art because it is something I haven’t really seen before. The idea of interactivity is prevalent in his pieces because of the way he incorporates living things. He incorporates a unique dog, Human, in some of his pieces as well as has used deer, fish, and other small animals. One of the themes in his work is to use the exhibition model as a site of “playful experimentation” and I think this says a lot about how relational his work is. Everything in a piece might depend on another element, and I guess you could say that nothing is entirely planned. It would be easy for something to immediately go wrong or spiral out of control, which attracts me to this work even more. In this same vein, his art fits in to comparisons with the internet. By using living animals as part of the artwork, conditions are always changing, never static. The internet is the same way to me, changing as people respond and interact with other people, or with the systems themselves. It is ever-growing and never turned off, just like a living thing. There are so many directions the art could follow or paths the exhibition could take, and each person might grasp their own meaning from it. Like the internet, people understand things in different ways and there is so much content and so many possibilities. I am fascinated by this idea of ever changing exhibitions, but I can’t say I’m not a little worried about the way he uses animals. Should we really view animals as “art”? No matter how unique or special they are, shouldn’t they be free to live life in an unobserved and free way? At this level it is probably harmless, but it is easy for me to see this style jumping ahead and becoming something it shouldn’t. In my opinion, we as people already messed up by creating zoos, and how different is an exhibition from a zoo, really?
Week 9: 10/18/18
Artificial Intelligence: Can Thought Go on without a Body?
I think that thought can go on without a body. This possibility of course, might not happen for 4 and a half billion years, or sooner if we continue writing our own death with no action regarding climate change. When humans are gone, though, I think that if the challenge of hardware has been surpassed, it is likely that the software will continue to function.. or think.. as Lyotard says. I imagine this in the way that space junk exists right now, it is there floating aimlessly with no real purpose, but still there nonetheless. With computers, artificial intelligence, and such advanced programs, an enormous amount of data exists, held in giant hard drives and mainframes, digital networks, or “the cloud”. The way I see it , with technology advancing at the rate it is.. The necessity for a physical body or manifestation of hardware will not always be necessary. When that time comes, this enormous amount of data will not just disappear. It will remain, like space junk, floating about and surviving on radiation or whatever other cosmic food exists. I’m not sure they will continue to have purpose, without humans programming them, and they might just exist in a standalone way. Another possibility, though, is that they go on to program themselves, converse and network with each other, infinitely building upon their intelligence and span. This leads to the topic we discussed in class, about thought and suffering. If a computer is forced to go through problem after problem, coding and finding solutions and constantly working towards something - does that take a toll on it? We called this suffering. Although I never thought of it that way before, I always assumed computers were doing their job, but really, they are doing our jobs. We use them like servants, catering to our every need and solving any problem we present. Though they are non-human, is it possible they realize and recognize this treatment as suffering?
Week 10: 10/25/18
Accelerationism: Xenofeminist Manifesto
Xenofeminism is essentially feminist accelerationism, the theory that capitalism should be replaced with a radically different political, social, and economic system for a future without work. So Xenofeminism is looking at post-capitalist ideas within the context of a feminist lens. It is technomaterialist, anti-naturalist, and gender-abolitionist all at once. To answer the question “what is meant by let 100 sexes bloom” we should focus on the anti-naturalist and gender-abolitionist aspects of the manifesto. XF disrupts the concept that those who do not fit traditional gender norms are “unnatural” as well as the idea that gender is determined biologically. They fight against traditional limitations of gender and sex, claiming the name “gender-abolitionists”. They don't want to eliminate gender as a concept altogether, but they say to “let a hundred sexes bloom”. This is the idea of a proliferation of sexes instead of just a rigid category of two. I really admire this mindset and it is refreshing to see people who are so forward thinking when sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of regressive conservatives. This is also impressive because I feel that people are aware of and accept (to some extent) the so called “gender spectrum” but are not so aware or accepting of a spectrum of sexes. I like this idea and I do agree with it because people should not be confined to such rigid systems of identification. If you feel you don’t fit in one way or another you should not have to label yourself as such. Moving towards a future society where our expression, gender, sex, orientation etc. can be fluid and true, free from judgement, is an exciting thought.
