CNM 201 will be held in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, a monthly lecture series that brings internationally known speakers to campus to present their work in new media.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Harrington
Similar to the ways your music has been received by the public, artists like bela fleck and the flecktones and victor wooten have also often been regarded as new media artists. I find this label to be somewhat confusing, since the medium, being the chosen instruments and performance practices, are actually not new at all. The Kronos quartet utilizes traditional string instruments and performs in typical concert venues, and Victor Wooten uses a standard electric bass guitar. However, both musicians incorporate innovative playing styles to these traditional instruments, and often engage in musical styles that aren't traditionally played through their instruments. For instance, the Kronos quartet often plays popular contemporary music through through the classical medium of their instruments, and Victor Wooten conversely has played classical compositions, considered "high-culture", mediated by his bass guitar and nuanced contemporary funk style of playing(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FvXUVHECwM), often considered "low-culture". Would you say then that what makes your music, and the music of similar artists like Wooten, "new media" is in the ways it challenges and removes traditional barriers of high-culture and low-culture in music?
The first violinist is responsible for leading the group. Without a so called “leader” of the Kronos, you rely equally on all members—How has the fluctuation of group members coming and going over the years influenced your music and group dynamics?
Sarah and others, including myself, question how to understand Kronos Quarter as “new media.” In considering Henry Jenkins definition of convergence culture and its role in new media production, might the combination of Kronos' music featured in media, “including film (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, 21 Grams, Heat, True Stories) and dance, with noted choreographers” present a way to think of their works as a new media art form? Or is this simply collaboration?
Is Krono's covering of other band's music, such as the Rolling Stones, similar to that of Mark Hosler's appropriation of U2's songs? Do issues of ownership exist? Moreover, how do you deal with copyright issues?
Also, I noticed that the various members of Kronos' quartet continuously fluctuates and changes. Has it been difficult to deal with the lack of stability of your group memebers?
Unfortunately I have no training or background in music. Here are my questions after doing the readings and watching a couple of their work.
1- Kronos Quartet has copyrighted every piece of their work. I noticed that many of the articles on their website are carrying copyright signs. I am just wondering whether or not a successful ensemble like Kronos Quartet has thought about using a creative commons license.
We started our class with Negativland's ideas on art collage but so far not many of the artist has used cc (I can hardly think of any, other than Negativland itself). In the software world many successful companies strongly support the essence of open source software (examples include IBM, Sun, Red Hat, even Microsoft has an open source/free software arm that promotes languages like IronPython and IronRuby).
I find it puzzling that companies are not afraid of releasing their products under open licenses but artists are hesitant to do that, shouldn't it be the other way around?
2- I am also wondering what are the new media elements in their work, I can find some new media elements in some of their works like the "sun rings" but new media is missing in many of their art pieces. My question is: Who are the new ensembles in the era of youtube, twitter and blogs? I am not thinking about how an ensemble can promote their work and I thinking more about how they can form and produce their artwork in this time.
PS. I noticed that Negativland's website was hacked on Dec 4th! The defaced page is still available on Google cache.
1. Although you are the first violinist of Kronos Quartet, you often say that you don't identify as the leader of the group, while musically and in interviews it often seems as if you are.Why don't you identify as such?
2. You have been quoted as saying "I've always wanted the string quartet to be vital, and energetic, and alive, and cool, and not afraid to kick ass and be absolutely beautiful and ugly if it has to be." When does your music need to be ugly? What strength does it bring to the piece?
I am wondering what role collaboration (with Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, beat poet Allan Ginsberg etc. ) has with innovation in music and various genres (performance, poetry etc.) ? Why might collaboration between, within, and other genres remain important for innovation, experimentation...? What does this process entail?
Additionally, how does the kronos quartet help characterize new media art, culture, and technology? How does music, sound, play a vital role in new media works? What interventions is kronos quartet making in performativity, genre, and music?
My first is in regards to the project, Visual Music. The description on the Kronos quartet website is a bit vague. Could you give more insight into how the the visual component corresponds to the music? Do the notes shown directly represent the notes played? And what is the intent of this?
I would consider Kronos Quartet a contemporary string quartet, which, as said below, has brought new life into string quartets. How important has it become over the past years as a contemporary string quartet to adapt to new media (including visuals, appropriated sounds, and mediums--facebook, twitter)?
Typically one thinks of New Media Art as incorporating the digital medium in some way, or re-mixing music, or re-assigning new meanings to original works. Much of the Kronos Quartet’s work, however, is original and involves only classical instruments. Do you classify the Quartet as being a part of the “New media art” genre? The Kronos Quartet is clearly a new kind of music, however, since it takes classical instruments and uses them to perform music of artists like David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Bjork, Nelly Furtado etc. How has this kind of appropriation of traditional instruments been received by older audiences? Younger audiences?
The music of Kronos Quartet is powerful and insights deep emotions from both the players and listeners. It has almost a synesthesiatic quality to it, forcing the listeners to imagine certain colors or images to accompany the pieces. When writing a piece, do you usually draw inspiration from certain imagery, or colors? Do you see your music as fitting best with a particular genre of film?
It's been written online that Harrington is responsible for saving "an entire musical universe" by pumping new life into classical music. My question on this claim is: can it really still be considered the same kind of classical music since it operates to play songs from the 20th century? Instead of viewing Kronos as "saving classical music" wouldnt it be more fitting if the claim was "brought new life to classical music"?
My second question revolves around the concept of my first. Because contemporary songs are being played through what can be easily considered "old" music styles, how EXACTLY is that fusion "new" media. I can see how the two styles converge, but am not sold. An explanation of this would clarify a lot for me.
1. John Rockwell wrote in his New York Times review "Unconventional is the word for this quartet." They play only new music, which is often times written specifically for them. They dress and look unlike classical string quartets. They employed sound engineers, roadies, etc. They played "avant-garde" pieces in traditionally classical venues. Does this unconventionality, however, constitute being new?
2. Since Kronos Quartet has been around for over 30 years, I am curious about how they continue to find ways to "break down genre barriers", especially while maintaining the traditional string quartet line-up. Is it enough to make the medium of a string quartet different? Has or will the Kronos Quartet reach a dead end for challenging the "mainstream", without venturing into different mediums of music playing?
Although the Kronos Quartet is known for its “long-running, in depth collaborations with many of the world’s foremost composers” (http://www.kronosquartet.org/info/bio.html), the quartet has also collaborated with other artists, with whom they have not only performed but also composed new pieces. One such piece was Nunavut, on which they collaborated with Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, whose voice Harrington compares to sounds produced from strings (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YTtUolJa9E).
Though the quartet is often seen as “new” because they perform (original and new) pieces that are outside of the traditional string-quartet repertoire, I discovered within Nunavut other ways in which the quartet can be seen as different and unique. Nunavut was intriguing because it broke away from the traditional structure of the string quartet and involved an unorthodox composition production process. In this piece, rather than having just four string instruments, they essentially had five since Tanya Tagaq’s voice mimicked the sounds produced by a bow and arrow. Moreover, the Kronos Quartet sought to imitate the sounds of the far north environment rather than embrace the string sounds of their instruments and mimic the Inuit singing tradition of singing closely while performing by having Tagaq sing directly at the instruments and having the instruments respond back to her. While the Kronos Quartet heard their ideas coming out through the new medium of a voice mimicking a string instrument, Tagaq heard her ideas coming through the new medium of string instruments mimicking her native environment and Inuit singing tradition. However, because the Kronos Quartet can only seemingly incorporate the Inuit tradition of singing closely in performance and not on non-visual recordings of this piece, is the piece the performance or the music? Would the piece lose meaning in its non-visual reproductions?
Nunavut was also interesting because of the composition process it involved. Although they only had three days to work on this piece, Tagaq and the quartet began the piece with no score and just the hope of staying abstract in the project. Harrington had the idea of using eight different colors to compose the piece, wanting to order the colors to create the composition and then figure out how each color sounded and how to link them. This process was interesting and unorthodox because colors could mean different things to different people, and they are something visual while the Kronos Quartet produces pieces that are aural. How did the Tagaq and the quartet agree on how the colors should be ordered? How did they then translate the colors into sound?
Finally, can the Kronos Quartet be considered a new media artist because it has a non-traditional structure that doesn’t necessitate having only four string instruments or because it experiments with new ways to compose pieces? Moreover, can the Kronos Quartet be seen as new and innovative simply because it engages in collaborations with other composers and artists or attempts to mimic sounds rather than produce traditional string sounds?
You have stated that the visual elements of a performance (e.g., Rothko paintings) influence Kronos' musical interpretation of a piece. How much are you involved with the visual aspects of a performance (even if it is a collaborative effort); from where does the visual inspiration come; and for the future, would you consider employing technologies that would allow for real-time interactions / feedback between any combination of Kronos, the music, the visual, and the audience?
In the articles we read, you comment on the political nature of Kronos' work -- that by featuring musical elements / collaborations from political hotspots, Kronos draws attention to the suffering (implied injustices) of people from these parts of the world. Do you provide additional information about the political injustices along with the music or is the music alone enough for awareness / protest? If the latter, please comment on how you incorporate specific musical elements to convey a political message.
Since we're thinking about Kronos as a new music ensemble in the context of a lecture series on art technology and culture, I'm really curious about how Kronos fits in.
One big difference between previous ATC speakers and David Harrington is Kronos' status as artist. Of course, Kronos is a group of artists. But, unlike video artists, or even popular (or less-popular) musicians like Mark Hosler, classical musicians are often divided into composers and performers. A traditional way of thinking about artistry for performers is the work of interpretation. However, I think what distinguishes Kronos from other string quartet groups is the crucial work of selection and image making, which, I think has had a big impact on younger new music ensembles. So, I'm curious about the selection processes that goes into commissioning new work, and choosing collaborators, which are key to Kronos' brand as a string quartet. Who makes the choices? All the members? An outside board? Harrington? And of recordings by Kronos, what portion are works that composers have approached the quartet about recording, and what portion is commissions by Kronos?
The other question is, regarding new media, I'm hard pressed to say that the bulk of Kronos' performances would fit in the category of what I think of as "new media." At most, it seems that the new media portions are work done by other collaborators (in the case of Sun Rings) or already part of the piece (Reich's Different Trains was composed "for Kronos quartet and tape"). But a different way to think more directly about Kronos and new media is the role that digital recording plays in production of recordings, or the way that social media is used in the promotion of musical activities and selection of collaborators. I noticed that Kronos has a twitter account. Has this, and other ways of networking changed the audience base at all?
If kronos quartet's place in new media art is a complex (and questionable) one, it seems like the cellphone orchestra has them beat in the new media race: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/technology/05orchestra.html?_r=1
Can you explain your relationship to minimalism? It seems that the trend was and is, whether with pop artists like Brian Eno, Phillip Glass or in some forms of world music, kind of a deconstructive approach to composition. What attracts KQ to it? Is there something unifying about minimalism across genres of music?
What do you think of collaborative music technologies like eJamming, that allow online jamming? You can go on YouTube and find many bands using iPods or PSPs to make music. How do you think these "virtual" forms of music making impacts performers who work with traditional instruments such as the Kronos Quartet? ~Reggie
Apologies for the delay, I thought the presenting group did not post questions! I put mine on the handout! However, will include now!
Questions
1. Mark Tribe's Port Huron project provokes questions for me around embodied performance/performativity, particularly around reenactment and mimicry. How can we tease out the dynamics of mimicry and reenactment as performance, and politics?
2. Personally, I read the Autobiography of Angela Davis earlier this year, which was written not too long after the Port Huron project, 1968 speech. It was great to hear the performance of the speech and feel its a powerful pedogogical tool, particularly when studying social movements, ethnic & african american studies, and 1960s history. in some ways, the reenactments links the past to the present through new media. How can new media art be utilized as pedagogy in various interdisciplinary ways? Was Port Huron utilized in classrooms and also, what does reenactment do for memory, and political counciousness? Additionally how does politics intersect with public art?
3. I am also interested in the role of the new media artist and creating spaces, archiving, anthologies etc. In addition to Rhizome, I was also excited to see Mark Tribe edited a collection from Tashcen one of my favorite book stores and publishing companies when I lived in Los Angeles. I have the Women Artists collection, which is a personal favorite. How was the experience editing a collection, advocating for new media art, and creating a new media artist community? Is this important to you, as an artist? activist?
4. Additionally, Tribe's work provokes questions around activism and new media. Why is activism, as well as participation, such an important characteristic and/or possibility of new media art?
One observation I wanted to share, regarding the issues tackled by this excellent presentation and discussion on the budget protests: Interesting that the administration and campus police did not try and create a black cloud around Dwinelle -- cutting off their Internet access or phone connectivity... was that an ode to free speech or an oversight on their part... I don't know. ~Reggie
Do you think that the commercialization of bandwidth and server space that allow people to use social networking and blogging sites for free could potentially serve as a threat to freedom of speech and social activism online?
what do you think has come at the expense of the technological shift in contemporary mass-mediated grass-roots movements? Do you think the concept of "ego-casting" could effectively serve as an impediment to the diffusion of new social ideas throughout society?
1. On your website, you do not state the inspiration for and intention of Revelation 1.0 and 2.0. I am curious, what inspired you to transform the web interface into a "parallel version,...stripped of text and graphics," and what is the intended meaning? And why was the text skewed and not the photographs? I acknowledge that the meaning lies within the observers reception of the piece, but I always find it interesting to hear the artist's perspective.
2. In regards to your Port Huron Project, you cite a review by Christopher Knight: “Activism seemed futile when, despite the hundreds of thousands of people flooding into city streets around the world in protest before the invasion of Iraq, the ill-fated war went on. Yet there’s a difference between old models based on mass culture, which had their zenith in the 1960s era of these original speeches, and the new ‘niche culture’ of our high-tech present. Mass culture is effectively over. The possibility for closing the contemporary gap between activism and the individual is underway in the netroots—activist blogs and other online communities, including artistic ones.” Knight argues that there has been a shift in from direct activism to virtual activism? In your videos of re-adapted activism, you make this clear, but what seems to go unsaid is whether this activism is as cogent as activism once was? Do you see this shift as positive, or something that just is?
You have made a name for yourself as an academic, accomplished author, and artist who has promulgated art in over-sized HD screens in Time Square, and museums in Karlsruhe and Moscow to name a few. What is your greatest personal accomplishment to date? What goals do you still have in the field of new media?
Did any new media artist in particular inspire your desire for an open-source culture?
The “Port Huron Project” draws upon historical demonstrations and protests, such as the reenactment of a speech by César Chávez encouraging social change. “Chinoise A” reenacts a scene from 1967 in which a radical student contemplates bombing a university. A lot of you work highlights historical moments in time, presented in a modern day mechanism through the advancement of technology. How, if any, does the interpretation of your work alter if focused on current events or current social change movements? I know part of your own passion and motivation stems from a desire for students to be more politically engaged and aware; how might motivation change on the part of your viewer by presenting former protests versus current protests? Historical moments versus modern day struggles?
1. Like my classmates (in some posts below), I am interested in your Port Huron Project. You state that the project was a response to the lack of political activity on the Brown University campus. Yet I wonder if you might be overlooking the political activity that students may be involved in within digital communities, through blogging, or other social media tools. Jenkins' draws attention to such a participatory culture taking place with these new technologies, suggesting that they allow for more participation than previous medias. Do you think that physical protesting is still an effective way of creating a political change? Or is your filming and online distribution of this project more effecting for encouraging discussion and debate? Or perhaps both?
2. Carpark was a "an endeavor whose conception function was, in fact, to undermine the ordering of social space in a small and unremarkable fragment of daily life." In the video, however, many of the participants in the project said that they thought it was "neat" or that it made their life easier since it took less time to find a parking spot. Yet in the end nobody could find their cars. What sort of awareness did the participant's eagerness to submit to authority and initial enthusiasm for the project lead to when at the end of the day nobody could find their cars? Was the project successful in bringing attention to the space beyond aesthetics?
1- I noticed that tribe has changed his website title from "women_in_combat" to "street_art_in_tehran" and the blog header is taken from the following photo from Tehran
why are you renaming your personal website every day? why Tehran? and why are the words separated by an underline?
2- I feel that the question of "is Rhizome an art?" is very similar to this question "is Pluto a planet?" it is a legitimate question and you can simply argue that Pluto is in fact a planet. but if we consider Pluto as a planet we need to consider hundreds of other celestial objects with the same size as planets as well. Rhizome is an interesting website but what makes it stand out from hundreds of other similar websites?
Having the discussion, about new media art and art in general, at the last lecture, and viewing all of Mark's work I would like to see what his opinion of art is. How would you describe art? Is there any definition of it? Or maybe how do you see art. I do think it is a very broad topic and in my opinion like I said in lecture I do not think that we can really define it. But you being an artist, what would be your prospective of art? Also Mark is involved with very complex idea of politics and art. can you please talk more about that. Because I am very interested in idea of media and how it reflects on politics. How media shapes politics or on the other side how politics shape media. Can you please be a little bit more precise about your prospective of politics and art.
In Tribes' Port Huron, the reenactment of historic speeches brings to light the similarities between relevant issues from decades ago and today. One in particular, was Paul Potter's 1965 speech from the March on Washington criticizing the government's role in Vietnam. If each word that was relevant to that war was replaced with those of the current war in Iraq, the speech itself would remain completely coherent. This shows just how similar of a political situation the United States is in now with one that troubled the nation decades ago. Tribe used these reenactments to highlight the futility of protests today. One thing he does makes sure to do is to not sensationalize the reenactments. Thus, mundane video of small crowds listening to average looking speakers is the result. This points out Tribes' belief that unlike in the 60's and 70's, when a television set was as important to an uprising movement as a gun, today's media coverage cannot be relied on for publicity. It is now up to different platforms, such as YouTube and other niche groups.
This leads me to my questions:
1. Tribe seems to have given up on the idea that another movement similar to The New Left Movement can occur. But is this really an accurate assessment considering the longstanding history of The United States and its ties to activism?
2. Has he failed to believe in the future and the new resources that can help such activism?
1.Many would argue that your piece Choise A is not art. Can you speak more to this piece and what makes it art to you? Furthermore, what was your inspiration in recreating this particular scene?
2.A lot of your work speaks to participatory media and the issue of reenactment. Is there a reason that you place such a strong emphasis in the 60s and Vietnam era in this emphasis?
3.Your recent piece the Port Huron Project was said to be an effort to connect the present situation with the War on Terror (especially at Brown University) with the New Left Movements of the past. As an advocate of the New Left, I was wondering what your thoughts were on the activism on the UC Berkeley campus this passed Friday and across the UC system in response to the cuts to higher education? Have you considered creating a piece centered around these actions?
In the Star Spangled Cover (feat Andre Lassalle and Greg Tate), Mark Tribe is showcasing a re-creating of Jimi Hendrix’s recreation of the original American Star Spangled banner. In Anotonia Caronia’s speech on “ark!” he says that contemporary art that is re-enactment is like re-discovering origin. He says that the only form of being is becoming, and it is impossible to step in to the same river twice. Although Mark Tribe may ascribe individual meanings to each work, why does he use re-enactments to create his art? Is this meant to be a comment on the post-modern condition in which things are copied over and over again? Las Vegas is a simulacrum, which seems to take the art of re-enactment and reduce it in to pure economy. In the words of Anotnia Caronia, how does Tribe avoid the reduction of his art in to pure economy? What kind of art would he describe as having already suffered this kind of reduction?
In a conversation on his Port Huron Project and the relationship between politics and art, Mark Tribe remarked that “Walter Benjamin wrote that in the age of mechanical reproduction, art ceases to be based on ritual and begins to be based on another practice – politics. Benjamin was right, I think, but art rarely has a direct impact on the realm of politics. It doesn’t get presidents impeached or raise the minimum wage. It would be a mistake to conclude that art is politics. Art is not politics; it is politics by other means” (http://www.joaap.org/5/articles/Tribe/ulketribe.htm).
What did Tribe mean when he said that art is not politics but politics by another means? Is he suggesting that art is a vehicle for politics, that politics emerges from a reaction to an art piece, but an art piece on its own is not political, cannot make an impact, and is therefore dependent on an audience? Is it because such art work is dependent on an audience that art has only been able to become a means for politics in an age of mechanical and mass reproduction, and is art work that has no audience therefore meaningless?
If this is the case, it explains why Tribe chose to videotape his Port Huron Project reenactments and circulate them in an open source manner. However, what kind of political reaction did Tribe want to spur with his Port Huron Project? Tribe created the Port Huron Project as a response to what he saw as a lack political activity at Brown University, a place that was a center of protest when he was student. Given that student activism in the past 20 years has, in his opinion, “done little to change the course of history” (http://www.joaap.org/5/articles/Tribe/ulketribe.htm), Tribe thinks that students do have a justified reason for their lack of political involvement. Hence, why does Tribe want students to engage in activism when it hasn’t been effective inbringing about change? What does Tribe want student to organize for when his project has no “ instrumental aims—it’s not, directly at least, about swinging the vote or bringing the troops home, but about creating an experience, however brief, of the unstable nature of history, reminding us that, as entrenched as the status quo may seem, history bears witness to the fact that the future is full of possibility” (http://www.joaap.org/5/articles/Tribe/ulketribe.htm)? Rather than directly create political action, Tribe is seemingly trying to first reverse students’ cynicism towards politics and the possibility of change through political actions.
Therefore, to highlight this possibility of change, did Tribe select to reenact only those speeches that highlight the changes that have occurred since those speeches were made, or, because he believes that students have had no motivators to engage in political action, did he choose speeches that were inspirational and had created political action in the past? If he chose speeches based on what they inspired and whether they were successful in motivating action, does his documentation of the reenactment affect how inspirational or effective these reenacted speeches are?
He doesn’t deny that “documenting the events infects the events themselves. The cameras are very present; they intrude into the event in a way that emphasizes the mediation that is already taking place in the very act of reenactment. They draw attention to the fact that the reenactment is itself a spectacle” (http://www.joaap.org/5/articles/Tribe/ulketribe.htm). Moreover, the documented reenactments “produce a secondary experience at another level of estrangement, one that is even more mediated than the first” (http://www.joaap.org/5/articles/Tribe/ulketribe.htm). Does this evident mediation induce students to be less receptive to the speeches’ messages or to Tribe’s project?
Finally, can we consider Tribe’s Port Huron Project a piece of new media art? Would it not be considered new media if it was not documented and circulated in an open source fashion online via YouTube, or could it be considered new media simply because it is media (in the form of an art performance) with the agenda of reaching out to people and, by getting people passing the reenactments to watch, making its audiences (willingly and unwillingly) a part of the art piece?
Due to unforeseen medical reasons, Mark Tribe will not be able to present at Berkeley tomorrow evening. We will still have class, but the lecture will not take place as planned. Sorry, everyone!
This is in response to the Jenkins' article. I am struck by Joe Trippi, the Internet activist for Howard Dean who made this statement:
"If information is power, then this new tech - which is the first to evenly distribute info- is really distributing power. The power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top down, hoarding information at the top, telling us how to run our lives --- this is the new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by all of us."
An optimistic perspective for sure, and I while the associations between art and power should be explored as well ..... I ask, if what Trippi describes this as the ethos of the Internet Age - why are artists slow to embrace this?
Is this because they see the value in craftsmanship -- the "real value" (their's), not just the perceived value (art public) -- that is: time, intellect and work are married to produce artistic visions --- New technology, the facility of it, gives the illusion that art is easily composed especially cut/paste/sampling art --
The goal of art, in some sense, is to create icons of meaning, icons that through their aesthetic presence, reveal or re-inscribe norms. That to expose the mystery of the craft is to pull away the emerald curtains...
But, are these artists wrong? Maybe that was old art -- and new art or at least new media art - is situationist to the extreme - contextual and temporal. Not to say that people should cease painting, but rather the aesthetics of new media art (like the work of Ben Rubin, for example) however critiqued, is to reveal the ghost in the shell and the brush strokes as well. ~Reggie
I am interested in some potential insight into the world of virtual reality. Apparitions employs this device in order to learn more about it, it integrates the experience of virtual reality into the very questions the installation poses to the viewer. That is, in order to know what questions are being asked, you must engage with the device itself.
I am curious if you have come across the more recent uses of this visual tool to aid in the replication of schizophrenic experiences (for therapeutic and communicative purposes), or in the creation of neurologically induced out of body experiences.
What is identity under these controlled circumstances?
Should new media take advantage of the potentially physical relationship between mind and image -- as to create more detrimental forms of image/sound reception -- to further expose the impact of advertisement pollution and "old" (passive) forms of media reception?
