how power is organised – ‘antisocial notworking’

Geoff Cox is an artist, teacher and organiser of events connected with digital experimentation in the United Kingdom. Within his curatorial route for Arnolfini, an organisation dealing with contemporary art, he developed an interesting project whose topic is the intersections between critical theory of social networks and critical practice of the world of art.

Geoff’s developed an interesting project called Antisocial notworking. These are the notes about the project and an interview with Geoff talking about social networks. Fascinating stuff – just make sure you’ve got a clear head when attempting the Notes…there’s a lot to take in, but it’s worth the effort.

Also see Art & Social Technologies , which is a research group in the UK that examines creative practice at the intersection of art, technology and society.

Digerati – the information elite and lovink it!

I’m part of the creative industries and fairly immersed in network culture. I know this, but it does not sit well. Funny that!

For my latest quest, I’m on the look-out for information about the impact of digital technologies on media practice. As I delve further and further into this web of…the Web, actually, I’m struggling to come up with ‘the goods’! On the plus side however, I’ve re-discovered the thoughts and theories of Geert Lovink – first encountered in my undergrad ‘Digital Media’ class in 2002. The ‘future’ we discussed then, is now. Geert’s articles in my course reader helped my understanding of all things ‘new media’ immensely back then. Yesterday, as I again seek knowledge of the future in the now (Web 3.0 anyone?), his name popped up – again. I found Geert’s archive of ‘thoughts’ on the web and promptly wrote a post about it. Today, I’ve come full circle and wandered into his current home at the Institute of Network Cultures. Serendipity!

Hello Professor Lovink. You’ve appeared at just the right moment and sets me ‘on course’ again. The past and future collide. There ain’t nuthin’ new in that!

Snack culture

While working on one research project looking into digital technologies affect on media production, I stumbled upon this gem from the Video Vortex conference held earlier this year in Amsterdam. It’s a quote from the (always interesting) Geert Lovink. It was written for an upcoming book:

We no longer watch films or TV; we watch databases. Instead of well-defined programmes, we search one list after another. We are no longer at the mercy of cranky reviewers and monocultural multiplexes. what we run up against is the limitations of our own mental capacity. Which search terms will yield the best fragments? What was that title again? Does anyone know that director’s name? What was that band called? What category was it under? Does he know someone else with interesting tastes? Was that reference blogged anywhere? Does she know the URL? Was it under pets or entertainment? Welcome to snack culture: watch a clip and move on.

My ‘home movies’ project is still ‘the road I’m travelling’ for my Honours, but it’s important (to me) that it is somehow related to contemporary culture. I’m also looking into emotional mapping, visualisation, identity,archiving, databases and the ‘cultural DNA of content’ (yet another ‘Lovink term’ that’s bang on the mark for what I want to explore). Things shift and swirl…

Internal Montage

Although I’m primarily investigating ‘film‘, I read an article today by Scott McQuire called Videor-Video Theory. Although this 1999 article has a focus on video, it was interesting to ‘re-think’ the impact of image de-composition and the function of the frame afforded by video.

McQuire writes about the problematic relationship between video and theory, suggesting that ‘[o]ne of the problems, even for those theorising video as a ‘specific signifying practice’ was that, while it was clearly different to photography and cinema, it was not entirely new. Moreover, I would argue that the arrival of video around the 1970s didn’t make nearly as radical a break or cultural rupture as photography had in the 1840s or cinema in the 1890s. Nevertheless, it did stretch existing paradigms in a number of ways’. He traces this impact under three headings:

1) instantaneity
2) architectonics
3) plasticity

Plasticity was what I found of most interest.

What I wanted to talk about briefly is a shift in the aesthetics of the image: its increasing density and malleability. I wanted to approach this by considering the changing function of the frame from painting to photography to cinema to video. The frame becomes crucial in painting around the same time that painting begins to detach itself from architecture; it corresponds to the moment in the Renaissance when painting is being reconceptualised by those such as Alberti as a ‘window to the world’. The function of the frame is firstly to demarcate the inside of the image from its exterior; but the stability of the frame also serves as guardian of the stable and centred position of the spectator.

This system continues in photography, with its inheritance of painting’s visual language and its aspirations to be considered an art. But it does so with difficulty. The crux of the matter is that, with the number of ‘views’ which begin to be made, the authority of the one ‘ideal’ view which painting represented becomes increasingly tenuous. The shift towards an active frame, and by implication a mobile, decentred spectator, becomes more explicit with the arrival of cinema, and more, particularly, with the development of a cinematic language based around camera movement and montage. From this moment on, the frame delineates a point of view which is inherently unstable, shifting and highly mobile. The philosophic, political and social ramifications of such a shift are still being felt.

What happens with video belong less to this external axis of framing than to its internal dimensions. As the interior of the image becomes increasingly fluid, there are new possibilities for what might be called ‘internal montage’. One aspect of this is the proliferation of internal ‘windows’ — frames within frames — which can be seen in the work of a film maker such as Peter Greenaway.

This idea of internal montage set my heart aflutter! McQuire concedes that although the plastic possibilities are not unique to video; you could do similar things with film but it was a more laborious and expensive process. He argues that, ‘it is interesting to speculate on video’s role as screen technologies moves away from purely visual concerns to become a combination of image and text — a data screen for the information society.

Aesthetic shifts, fluid frames, overloaded images, montage. It sort’ve fits in with my hazy ideas of re-interpreting home movies/found footage and discovering what’s NOT shown in them and I constantly keep thinking of the wash of amateur film, photos, words on the Web today…am looking for connections…what is this identity thing all about?

‘Video theory’ Globe (1999)
Scott McQuire
www.artdes.monash.edu.au/non-cms/globe/issue9/smtxt.html
Accessed 20 August 2008