Monthly Archives: July 2006

U B U W E B :: Nancy Perloff

Postmodernism

Perloff’s description of Cage’s work helps clearly define modernism and post-modernism:

U B U W E B :: Nancy Perloff “Postmodernism and the Music of John Cage”
In the early 1970s, as we see in the comments quoted above, Cage endorsed collaborative musical performances in which the audience worked together with performers, fusing art with its environment, and in which the composer’s will did not constrain participants’ activities. This de-centered, collaborative, and heterogeneous principle for musical performance seems very postmodern. Yet the decisive presence of Cage’s ego (“I like”, “I try to bring about”), as well as the value he attached to historical musical practice, steered a modernist course. He designed and determined the performance situation, no matter how many participants were involved, and relied on his invention of chosen traditions from the past.

U B U W E B :: Anthology of Conceptual Writing

conceptual writing, form

U B U W E B :: Anthology of Conceptual Writing
“Accordingly, the conceptual writing collected here is not so much writing in which the idea is more important than anything else as a writing in which the idea cannot be separated from the writing itself: in which the instance of writing is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Writing: the material practice of écriture.

“Conceptualizing writing in that way returns us, perhaps surprisingly, to a poetry of form. But not to a form – to the received forms of sonnets and quatrains and the like, with their familiar schemes of stress and rhyme. Instead, the new forms and structures of conceptual writing recall the sense of artifice, constraint, and perversity that the sonnet too must once have embodied. Conceptual writing is the writing of the new new formalism, and far from being a relic of the period Lucy Lippard documented in her invaluable Six Years (1966 to 1972), it has characterized some of the most rigorous and exciting work from twenty-first century writers such as Dan Farrell and Mónica de la Torre.”

John Dewey, Art As Experience:

“This is what it is to have form.  It marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.  Hence there can be no distinction drawn, save in reflection, between form and substance.  The work itself is matter formed into esthetic substance…the act itself is exactly what it is because of how it is done.  In the act there is no distinction, but perfect integration of manner and content, form and substance” (p. 109).

Giacometti Quote in SL

Old Media

“I used to see the world through the goggles of the existing arts.  I would go to the Louvre to see the paintings and scultpures of the past, and I found them more beautiful than reality.  Today, when I go to the Louvre, all these representations of the external world — and until fifty years ago, all painting, all sculpture were direct representations of the external world, weren’t they? — strike me as partial, precarious.  I ask myself why the devil they could have seen it like that.  And what astonishes me, what really gets me, isn’t the paintings and scultpures anymore, but the people who look at them.  Now I look only at the people who are looking.”

Alberto Giacometti, 1967

New Media Consortium Second Life Campus

New Media, Second Life

I happened upon Second Life this spring as part of some work on MUDs and MOOs.  I made an account, learned to navigate (and fly!), and spent very little time there.  It was cool to wander around, but I just didn’t really see the point.

But in this month’s Technology Review, they describe the campus created by the New Media Consortium on a private island in Second Life.  I was able to join and poked around the posters that will be part of a live poster session later today.  You can read more about the session and the NMC Campus at the blog.

Random Thoughts

Cultural Stereotypes, Paradigm Shifts

Using RL communities as metaphors for the web:

From Nicholas Mirzoeff: Contrasts web addresses with MIT representing the gated community: “By contrast, an address at America Online is the equivalent of living in a tract home in a subdivision.” (Introduction to Visual Culture, p. 105)

From Jonathan Zittrain on net neutrality and government controls and the appeal of computer security: “This [security software] risks turning PCs into gated communities that can too easily become prisons patrolled by a single warden.” (From Technology Review, March/April 2006, p. 32)

The “New Way” of Reading:

From Educational Leadership, May 2006, an article that contrasts the old and new way of reading. It seems that kids these days need visual engagement in order to encourage reading. The author, Valerie Ruth Kirschenbaum, cites lots of research and challenges educators to be part of the paradigm shift: “History warns us that the establishment rarely recognizes a paradigm shift in its earliest manifestations. Maybe this time history will be wrong. Maybe this time the education establishment will wake up for what are students are screaming for: visually stunning, multi-sensory ways of reading and writing” (p. 50). I should mention that the four-page article was in color (which made it difficult to read the name of the journal I might add) with lots of visual stimulation. The font was larger with important words underlined in red. It was visually engaging but I kept thinking it was an advertisement. It just didn’t look like a real article…showing my own bias, I guess.

Life…but not really:

Just finished reading Michael Frome’s history of the Great Smokies, Strangers in High Places. He describes a tourist attraction near the mountains called Ghost Town, which the Asheville Times says is an authentic recreation of a frontier settlement. Frome quotes the paper, “Gun-totin’ youngsters and nostalgtic adults visiting Ghost Town find themselves transported into their favorite television western. From the team of bearded cowboys who enact the shootout to the waitresses and dancers in the saloons, costumes and architecture reflect the pioneer western atmosphere” (p. 314). Hmm…they aren’t transported to the past, instead they only get as far as a television western, a larger than life portrayal of the past that ignores individual experiences for a generalized historical view. Here is a real-life portrayal of a fictional virtual past…

Cultural Elites

I feel like I was a little hard on the kid from San Jose…he meant well. But then I remembered something Mirzoeff said about technology being seen as the next phase of evolution: “Those most able to deal with computing environments have become the new technocratic elite on merit, while less able people have fallen behind” (p. 107). Is this an example of that idea? The oppressed just need to turn to the web for salvation.