Cut-Ups Are For Everyone

William S. Burroughs, American novelist and poet (1914-1997)

When William S. Burroughs instructed "...the cut-up method could add a new dimension to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut streets of the world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films" in his essay "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" from 1961, he seemed to have had an inkling of the volume of visual material to come and also how technologies and media would become increasingly accessible ultimately helping artist to "coax something up from the unconsciousness." There has been a long history of artists rearranging material found close at hand. From Marcel Duchamp defacing a mass produced picture postcard of the Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q., 1919) by drawing a mustache on the iconic painting to Paul Pfeiffer erasing video footage frame-by-frame to create his eerie loop "Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon)" from 1999, artists have taken on the role of editors sorting through the torrent of visual images to point out "the hidden ghosts of the individual and his society" (thanks to Italo Calvino in "Cybernetics and Ghosts").

After two years of scouring a film archive of decaying Fox Movietone reels in Columbia, S.C., filmmaker and director Bill Morrison created a monumental experimental film. The goo of dissolving nitrate stock added poetics to long forgotten documentary footage of "exotic" people and places. Decasia" The State of Decay, the resulting film completed in 2002, begins with a Sufi Whirling Dervish foreshadowing the cycles and endlessness of movie film spinning on reels or fibers being spun on wheels into fabric and yarn which are motifs repeated throughout. A graduate of Reed College in Portland and Cooper Union School of Art in New York, Morrison made a film that was recently described as "the calligraphy of decay growing increasingly hallucinated and catastrophic" by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice (May 2010). The film prompts us to ponder the delicacy of both what is lost and what is saved while considering the endless human struggle and attempts at transcendence. Morrison cared enough to transform the deteriorating found analog material and collaborate with composer Michael Gordon to create a wall-of-sound-track to create an unnerving viewing experience. Through juxtaposition and aesthetics, not just patina, Morrison's fascination with the interaction of decay and film imagery created new meaning. As the digital age progresses and the inevitable loss of digital data becomes more fully realized, the relevance of Morrison's analog project changed as reflected in a Q&A conducted in March 2010 at Stanford. 

Whrling Dervish still from Bill Morrison's Decasia

Morrison's project is a meaningful addition to the 21st century dialog on the Remix. In "7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College" in the October 2010 Wired, senior editor Jason Tanz gives an "extra credit assignment" in his "Remix Culture" hypothetical course: create a unique work using the Prelinger Archive. Helpful suggestion and great that Harvard professor and chairman of the artist-based Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, continues arguing for copyright reform to protect fair use and creative freedom for artists using Remix strategies in their practice. He speaks of eliminating the "fear of legal liability" with the aim of encouraging the next generation of artists to succeed rather than to fail as he believes the current copyright system tends to do. 

Artists and the Social Media Explosion

Rachel Crowl's Facebook Portrait, 2010
Photographer: Unattributed
Lawrence's New Media & Website Coordinator

When we met Rachel Crowl, Lawrence University's New Media and Website Coordinator, last year and found out she'd learned html in 1993 and PhotoShop soon thereafter, we had to invite her to talk with our Digital Processes students about the wild world of the Web as she saw it evolve. When she gave her talk on Wednesday (10.6.2010), she covered digital progress from Desktop Publishing to RSS to Creative Commons. Referencing John Knoll, co-developer of Adobe Photoshop and Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook profile proclaims the innocent mantra "I'm trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share," we realized once again that the the digital inventors that are re-wiring the way we think are far from household names like say Edison or Bell. With the release of the movie The Social Network last week,  the FB founder and CEO may become a somewhat more familiar name after getting the Hollywood treatment. Same with Hedy Lamarr, actress/inventor, who may get her due in a rumored Hollywood biopic reminding us of Lamarr's invention of spread-spectrum encryption which lead to the wireless technology we know and use today.

by Ted Nelson
Self-published using
Lulu.com

Books like Ted Nelson's Geeks Bearing Gifts review this history too reminding us of the impact of late 20th century inventors on our daily life. Rachel took us through this evolution and ended with Web 2.0, the ultimate 21st century tool. At LU, she uses Web 2.0 platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and WordPress to get the word out through photos, videos and newsfeeds about what goes on at the college on a more human level than prior static websites and slick brochures perhaps resulting in the college's largest ever Freshman class.

Lev Manovich,
Software Studies Initiative
California Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology

That Web 2.0 quickly became a marketing tool enabling anybody to blog about anything or toot their own horn becomes clearer with each passing day. But, what can artists do with the deluge? In the exhibition catalog The Art of Participation, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008, Lev Manovich posed the question, in a now historic essay: "Art after Web 2.0": "Modern artists have thus far succeeded in meeting the challenges of each generation of media technology, but can professional art survive the extreme democratization of media production and access? His answer: "In my view a significant percentage of the work found on these websites represents the most innovative cultural production today...Ultimately, social media's true challenge to art may not be the excellent cultural production of studenets and non professionals that is now readily available online. It may lie in the very dynamics of Web 2.0 culture: its incessant innovation, energy, and unpredictability." Certainly a safe, open-ended answer that points to that next overly obvious but completely new thing that will continue to change everyday life. In his essay, Manovich references the video "Web 2.0...the Machine is Us/ing Us" posted by Michael Wesch a cultural anthropologist who explore the "effects of new media on society and culture." We are left to contemplate the strategies and tactics artists are using to be productive digital citizens helping to form what we now know as Web 2.0. The blog Art Fag City recently ranted about the simultaneous importance/lack of importance of authorship and the rise of collaboration as a start.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: All-Knowing

Dan Leers ('02) talks with LU students about the HCB exhibition @ AIC 10.2.10

Dan Leers (LU '02) spent the last couple years examining the journals and papers of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), archived by the Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson in Paris. As Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, Dan tracked on HCB's movement through the space-time continuum as a way to shed light on the photographer's prescient dedication to global travel and to help viewers put HCB's photographs into context. Dan's research became an integral part of the Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century exhibition and catalog. The show organized by MoMa travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago (closed 10.3.2010) then will go on to San Francisco and Atlanta. Giant maps and color lines at the entrance of the exhibition denote Cartier-Bresson's photographic journey over the course of 50 years, a data visualization helping viewers to contemplate HCB's photographic trajectory.  

Henri Cartier-Bresson Photo-Essay

on Bankers Trust, New York, 1960

HCB managed to be in the right place at the right time with his basic 35mm camera and black-and-white film.  Always watching and seeing the minutia that reveals the complexity of a specific moment. From the assassination of Ghandi in India to the early information age in America, his wife, Martine Franck, pointed out in an NPR interview in 2003 that "...Henri had an innate intuition of what was going on in the world and what was important."  Long before jet travel, HCB travelled by boat, train and motorcycle. HCB's mythology  looms large in the photography canon from the branding of the "Decisive Moment" to the legendary formation of Magnum, The exhibition partly knocks HCB off his pedestal, according to Leers, by giving viewers a new perspective on the photographer's body of work. We see HCB's obsession with living and looking. We see that long before art museums showed photographs and photography galleries were as commonplace as the Internet, picture magazines where the best way to circulate pictures and that's exactly what HCB did. Through Magnum, he contributed both color and black-and-white photographs to a range of magazines from Sports Illustrated to Life to Paris Match. The exhibition provides a hint of the sheer volume of his output as professional photo-journalist and artist. Eventually giving up photography for drawing, HCB practiced the "journey-form" tas defined by Nicolas Bourriaud in his Alternmodern Manifesto. He did so long before it was as easy as jumping on a jet plane to your latest artist residency. Writes Bourriaud in 2009: "The form of the work expresses a course, a wander, rather than a fixed space-time...Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in space and time." HCB criss-crossed continents to see a changing modern world throughout the 20th century while pining for the traditional old world past and living long enough to catch a vision of the last of the pre-FaceBook 21st century. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson, McCann-Erickson Agency,
Madison Avenue, New York, 1959

The Panopticon vs. Capture

The revelation in a recent New York Times story that a trusted civil rights insider and photographer, Ernest Withers, had been an FBI informant stings while reminding us how much we want to trust perceived insiders. Like Sabrina Harman and the other soldiers at Abu Graib who snapped digital photos and videos to "show what's going on" with the prison conditions that initially shocked them in late 2003, they trusted their friends and they trusted photography. They ended up with prison sentences and dishonorable discharges and left a case study of how photographs could incriminate the watcher rather than the watched. Errol Morris's film, Standard Operating Procedure (2008), puts forth his Interrotron interviews with Harman and others to examine the complexity of perceptions and digital photography and the electronic distribution of digital photography. These examples play into the surveillance model, the deeply engrained notion that some entity is watching everything we do be it parents, teachers, peers or the boss.

Leave Me Alone

P. Agre

For a more subtle aspect of watching, we contemplate the case of former UCLA associate professor Philip Agre's and his ideas about "capture". We consider the many ways our daily activities are "tracked" on from online purchasing to facebook updates to buying gasoline with a credit card. We leave an audit trail. A pile of receipts. As if to put all his theories about "grammars of action" to the ultimate test, he disappeared, walked away from his professor gig  and his apartment a year ago. His disappearance reported by the media and then resolved by the University of California Police leaves the public to ponder how easy it may or may not be for a professor or anyone to disappear. Online discussions bring up his bipolar disorder aor projections that he simply got off the grid. Whatever the case, he has left us with a real life case study of what happens when an expert defies all the capture models he'd studied and referenced in his books and publications particularly "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy".

Progress: Dystopia or Utopia?

The popular conception of computers reflected in the 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone "The Brain center at Whipples" shows us "the machine" as a source of problems thus expressing the anxiety over the prospect of computers displacing workers. It was in this cultural context that Doug Engelbart demonstrated the functions he envisioned a computer might perform. Known as the Mother of All Demos, his Stanford Research Institute's visionary December 9, 1968 presentation of networked computers aimed to improve "the effectiveness of intellectual workers" by helping them "share knowledge." Engelbart shows the public for the first time the functions we take we now take for granted: the mouse, video-conferencing, hyperlinks, digital text editing and online collaboration. Engelbart envisioned a utopian use of technology "toward making the most difference in improving the lot of the human race."

Ted Nelson, best known for coining the term hypertext and conceptualizing what we now know as a link on the Internet, thought computers should go beyond number crunching of IBM. He believed they should be used by all people for all things. In his book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, he advocates for a deep understanding of computers. They should be fun and not dystopian.