Doug Aitken Videos

Ok, this isn't an ideal situation, but i have found some trailers for and amateur video of Aitken's most recent video project "Sleepwalkers." You can get an idea of the project by watching the trailers made my MoMA and Aitken along with the video taken from the street. Please check them out before our class on April 9.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loeBSaqwP8M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS9A4d020m4

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2038071166696084965&q=doug+aitken

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw3MMr_UdxA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FWWictq8p0

Coleman @ SF MOMA

I found out that in 1992 SF MOMA purchased Coleman's 1989 piece "Charon (The MIT Project)"
from the Marian Goodman Gallery.

The work (projected images with synchronized audio narration; 21 minutes) is in SF MOMA's permanent collection, and as far as I was told, there are no plans to show it in the near future.

Some info about the piece:

Charon was created in 1989 during a visit to the List Visual Arts Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. The projected pictures join together to form 14 episodes separated from one another by short breaks. They are accompanied by the disinterested voice of a narrator and do not seem to have any recognisable plot. What they all share is their thematic background: namely, photography. They feature the most varied forms of photography and what roles these can play in our modern society: as a rather untrustworthy form of evidence, as fictitious make-believe for advertising, or as a safeguard against forgetfulness and a way of preserving and moulding our view of history. The borders between these sometimes highly contradictory standpoints become more and more blurred in the course of a sequence. This is due not least to the unchanging voice of the narrator who - in spite of the subtle humour with which viewing habits and conventions are undermined - continues on imperturbably with his commentary.

-- steven l.

Questions for Kaja Silverman

I'm interested in the notion of "building in decay," as you trace in Coleman's take on "Last Supper." Can you talk about the infusing "decay" in terms of sustainability or unsustainability of the cycle of decay and renewal?

Is this "decay" really something emergent, or has it been tacitly there for much longer?

Can you tell us more about what makes work "ontologically unstable"?

Question for Kaja Silverman

Analog photographs arguably carry the same ability as digital photographs to transfer information to a viewer, though the former more readily transmits "camera-ness" and the latter "edited-ness". One can envision a future in which people grow up unexposed (forgive the pun) to traditional analog photography--what would happen to the perception of the moving image as an informational messenger? That is, for one to whom the still or moving image never represented the direct indexicality that an old photograph carries, what is the basis for one's trust in recordable representation?

Questions for Kaja Silverman

How does your distinction between the analog and digital photograph parallel that of analog and digital sound? Might sound differ from the photographic image in its affective communication? Can digitized sound libidinally "stand-in" for analogue sound?

Since the identity of Coleman's "girl" in "Photograph" is many-fold, identity is able to shift in meaning, enabling "dispersed subjectivity." How does subjectivity influence this formation of identity? You have also written that "to identify with ideality is to refuse lack, and with it desire; consequently, it is to turn away from life itself." Can the unidentified object, such as the "girl", ever be identitied with ideality?

Question For Kaja Silverman

James Coleman's work is difficult to reproduce, and many of his installations are only shown once. You (KS) have been able to experience more of his work than most other people, and have written at length to describe and contextualize his work.
In "Live Vocals" you describe one of his works along the axis of digital to analogue. Analogue being a more direct representation of the indexical reality behind the photograph, and digital as a thing that can be changed to show more than what is real or possible.
Where would you put your representation of James Coleman on this axis?

Question for Silverman

Why chose the photos look like the ordinary life photos which actually were sophisticatedly set to represent the idea of "live"? Is it a narrative or metaphor? Is it a representation or live?

Qing

Questions for Kaja Silverman

1. In your essay “Live Vocals,” you cite Coleman’s use of digtized images in Lapsus Exposure as a mechanism for “bridging the affective distance between us and the analog images” such that we may “recover what would otherwise be lost: the world as it shone in the sun of another person’s eyes.” What are some other examples of this use of digitization in art and culture? Does it emerge predominantly in photography or in cinema?

2. Given your careful definition of “liveness” in your essay “Live Vocals,” how would you interpret musical performances in which the artists lip-sync to pre-recorded tracks of themselves? How do these (presumably unintentional) acts of performing “a/live” align with or depart from your broader arguments about “liveness” posited in “Live Vocals”?

Q for Silverman

Relative to the work of Coleman:
How does the layer of digitalization serve as a "raprochement" to the notion "alive"?
Does Coleman uses a kind of faux documentation, or false narrative, to make the notion of reality more explicit?

question re: Lapsus Exposure

This is a minor point that's specific to Lapsus Exposure, but Silverman refers to the contemporary musicians in that work as both "punk" musicians and "post-punkers" (p. 143). This lack of descriptive clarity is intriguing, given that punk is a genre and movement grounded originally in the 1970s. The 50s musicians may be a "retro group from the present moment, but either way they singify the 'past.'" Given this, the punk/post-punk musicians are seemingly intended to signify the present (the early 90s), so we can infer that the punk musicians are most likely retro aesthetically, i.e. they are trying to reimagine or reinvent a genre from two decades prior. What does having a revitalized/reworked genre as representative of the "present" say about contemporary music/culture circa the early 90s? How does this enhance a reading or discussion of Silverman's notion of playback? And how would using "hip-hop" musicians have changed the piece? -- steven l.

Question for Kaja Silverman

The explosion of user-generated media and systems which support it is a phenomenon that has taken place mostly after _Live Vocals_ was published. Is its immediacy in both in relevance (near-synchronous reactions to current issues and events -- temporally "live") and interaction (near-synchronous community reactions to the media itself -- interpersonally "a/live") worth yet another resemanticization of "liveness"?

questions for Silverman

It seems Silverman mixes many different technique and elements for his works, vocal and video are the reproduction on top of other form of media too. There are as many layers in the output in terms of representation as that in the input of composing and producing. Is this an advantage of new media or disadvantage, that there are unlimited choices for you to put into an art piece?
When he works on different ideas, he always deconstructs what he reconstructs on top of reality. For example, he play with vocal, and he apply the vocal a new meaning to indicate past and present, somehow he use different way either language or songs to blur the contrast that he builds. However, there are still layers after this if people keep interpreting his work. I wonder how far does he mean to reach his audience in terms of communicating layers of meanings?
He emphasizes the idea of “live” and “originality” a lot, and playback is not allowed for performance. How much does the “live” and spontaneous reaction affect his work? If we take Matmos’ work as example that he reworks on different existing sounds, how would he label it? Is it more to the end of copy or origin?

Tell me about your mother...

I ask the class: Freudian concepts such as the Oedipus complex and his stages of sexual development in children are of increasingly debatable validity given modern research into the human psyche. Are those concepts, though of dubious factual basis, still useful as conceptual signifiers? If so, what do they uniquely represent about human consciousness which has allowed them to "write over" similar concepts in our cultural linguistic palimpsest?

Can I Shake My Booty while Knowing that My Booty May not Be Mine?

Once again I reached a point in an academic paper when slander is disguised as a lazy “in-joke.” In discussing Coleman’s figuration of the digital, Silverman compares his transformative use of technology, to straddle the lines between the live and the “alive,” to Hollywood's banal attempts to imitate Reality. If Coleman is the magician who gives the “pre-recorded voice” its power to bewitch the present, then the folks at ILM (Industry, Light and Magic) are merely technical re-animators, churning out plastic images and selling the past to the ever ravenous consumer. By namedropping two significant directors, Lucas and Spielberg, we are supposed to recognize their works (and their representative industry) as formulaic and homogenous, but such a critical reading is blind by its own biases, we choose one aporia over another. In her interview with Pachmanova, Silverman states her interest in “experimental art” without giving much attention to the radical shifts within popular culture itself. What distinguishes Lapsus Exposure from the self-reflexivity employed in current MTV music videos? Must we ignore the latter because it has been subsumed by normalizing apparatuses? To conceive of digitalization requires both formalistic and historical frameworks (such as Manovich and Rosen), which too invite us to think in “new ways about aesthetic realism,” collapsing the precarious relations between indexicality and mimesis, author and audience, avant-garde and mainstream. How can we expand our inquisitive faculties beyond the art world, and incorporate the practices of affective transference already at play every time we access our personal computer, visit our local cinema, or simply “Be” in a mediated society?

Kaja Silverman Question

Silverman, towards the end of her article, draws a distinction between the digital and the analog image based on both epistimelogical and ontological grounds. Although both the digital and the analog image serve similar "libidinal" roles (epistimelogical), the foregrounding the materiality of each alerts the observer to the difference (ontological), in turn causing an epistimelogical divide. For Silverman, it is this divide which we come to appreciate at the end of the presentation, helping us to appreciate photography "as a medium and as a form of memorialization." For me, Silverman's conclusion raises some interesting questions about the communicative properties between digital and analog. Namely, is there a necessary "duality" of which we are aware when looking at a digital image, or need it be the case the we observe the duality through its foregrounding (as is the case with Coleman's art presentation)? Also, is the referential dependence of analog photograph to its subject really the same as the dependence between a digital image and its analog simulacrum (is this difference significant enough for Silverman to cite it in her argument)?

Questions for Kaja Silverman

You once wrote that "The eye can confer the active gift of love upon bodies which have long been accustomed to neglect and disdain." Is your definition of 'eye' in this context becoming less and less literal with technological advance, or do you hold this constant?

Does technology extend our ability to be "living in different presents"?

What makes something a "technology of radiance"? Does the increasing ease of layering heighten the radiance of photography and film?

Silverman Question

Coleman's Lapus Exposure doesn't follow the standardized rules of media, meaning it creates new rules of interaction and engagement, and force the viewer to explore a medium. Silverman is obviously engaged with the question of how media function to represent a world/narrative/moment. Representation is technical, asking questions about form, color and movement, but does pushing against the rules of media and representation make one a "punk" like Silverman suggests? Are all artists "punks"? Or is this term inflated and slightly misunderstood, like the similar term "hacker"?

Silverman Barthe

From where does this crisis in photo actually stem? The implication is that it’s the computer’s ability to remove the photo’s authority, but is this because it is easier to manipulate the image or because it put the tools of manipulation in the hands of the many? Anyone who’s printed photos knows what a lie the photograph told, long before the digital divide.
We faced the same crisis in the 90’s with painting and the post modernism logic vice that rendered it obsolete. Despite everything people still buy and make paintings. We will still look at photographs, and they will still carry authority.

We are eager in technology to assume that the new will erase the old. We were supposed to have stopped going to the movies years ago with the advent of tv and then again with video tape and now with video games. Yet somehow the movies have survived, and serve the same cultural purpose. The same will be true with photo. The image will never lose it’s validity entirely, just as it never had it’s validity entirely in the first place.

I think Silverman’s reading of Barth is pretty contentious. Or rather (for those of you who know), maybe I should phrase that as a question. As I remember Barth the photo has a punctum that is not different for every viewer. You don’t bring your own punctum to a photo, that’s what’s so head-scratchy about his text. In spite of a reading that would seem to imply the opposite Barthe is still imposing a modernist reading to the image. Or is he imposing a modernist reading through a post-modern lens? In any case it looks to me that Silverman’s use of Barthe is a bit of a leap.

Silverman - Questions for Class

Silverman depicts a dialogue between digital and analogue images in Coleman’s “Lapsus Explosure” in which the photographic tools seem is as important as the content they represent. Are there similar parallels to draw between the relationship between the digital and analogue in images and music?

She also describes Colemen’s transmission of affect to the viewer as allowing what the viewer sees to become realized. She suggests that the camera is becoming less able to communicate affect in this way. Have other tools for representation lost this power of “libidinal transfer”?

-Daniela

I posted my Matmos questions as comments earlier, but here they are again.

-Daniela

For Class:

Daniel Hander (Interviewer for the Believer) characterized the “organic” nature of Matmos’ work as what differentiates it from electronic music. Instead of focusing on the music as a product or on the visceral properties of the piece, it seems more useful to explore their process of creation. How did the methodology used to create each piece influence their choice of sampled material? How did sampling in impact the concept developed for the piece that followed? I’m interested in the interplay between variable and predetermined concepts and how methods are to realize those concepts.

For Matmos:

As musicians, you are naturally playing with time. Do you see yourselves as also manipulating the listener’s understanding the piece and its constituents over time? Similarly, how do you choose when and where to begin a piece? The most obvious and perhaps only constraints on your musical production are those imposed by time: the song must start; the song must end. When do you determine where a piece should end? Does this editing go on during the process of creation or is there editing at the end?

Question for the class (Kaja Silverman/James Coleman)

In class, especially where Matmos was concerned, we have been discussing how prior knowledge of context affects (or, in the opinion of a few of us, detracts from) appreciation of the artwork itself. Coleman seems to use this to his advantage in Projected Images (I am especially thinking of "Slide-Piece"), injecting the importance of point of view and interpretation into this context. Given that, is it possible to re-evaluate our assessment of Matmos' tendency for "overexplanation"?

The Description is the Painting is the...

Not much to "get" here, but I found this amusing...


















(via Ironic Sans)


-- steven l.