Lynchian

adj. Of or pertaining to David Keith Lynch (born 1946), American filmmaker and director whose surrealist films are characterized by dream imagery and meticulous sound design.

-from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Benjamin first (and later McLuhan) understood technique not as a “productive force” (wherein Marxist analysis is locked) but as medium, as form and principle of a whole new generation of sense.  -Simulations pg 99
 
 “I like to think of the electric guitar as a powerful engine,” Lynch said. “At least eight cylinders, but running rough, with a bad muffler.” -BAM April 29, 2014

Image by Dean Hurley

Cheryl Donegan

"You are constantly facing a quotidian gauntlet of your corporeal experience and your virtual experience. They are pressed so close together. From moment to moment, you are trying to navigate both. Duchamp got there first with the infra-thin. It is like when you get a layer of sunscreen or moisturizer on the surface of your iPhone, or that moment when you sit down after someone has left a seat and you feel the warmth. It is an erotic feeling that is extended to your greasy phone!

There is, however, still the traditional idea of the isolated, genius artist who comes with no attachments and whose sui generis comes only from the self. That is its own self-referentiality. Non-attachment is a driving myth that produces artists who feel that their only allegiance is to their own creative imagination, which excludes other contributors. This produces an anxiety of influence. What if we insisted on the intimately connected, in being completely embedded? You have to take yourself a little bit less seriously."

Interviewed Jan. 28, 2016

by William J. Simmons

Museumised: Rose-Coloured Resurrection

The Loud Family for the PBS documentary An American Family,
which "devastated" them when media called them "affluent zombies"
while accusing gay son Lance Loud (upper left) of
"camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester".

"We all become living specimens under the spectral light of ethnology, or of anti-ethnology which is only the pure form of triumphal ethnology, under the sign of dead differences, and of the resurrection of differences."

-- Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (p. 16)

With the mission of chronicling the "daily life of the Louds - an upper-middle class family from May 30 to December 31, 1971, PBS museumized the family as it fetishized their interactions and relationships in the series An American Family aired in 1973. They became specimens before the camera, which precipitated the parental divorce and the punk antics of Lance Loud, who had famously corresponded with artist Andy Warhol as a teen. Sited as the first "reality TV" show, An American Family changed the lives of the Louds, and it "changed my life," stated Craig Gilbert, the creator of the series stated in 2011 in a New Yorker interview. In a subsequent HBO drama titled Cinema Verite about the making of An American Family aired in 2011, the producers tried to "convey the surreal enormity of An American Family to viewers who are more accustomed to the idea of living in public, whether in front of cameras or through social media" and understanding the innocence of the early 1970s. Writes Baudrillard, "More interesting is the phantasm of filming the Louds as if TV weren't there. The producer's trump card was to say: "They lived as if we weren't there." An "absurd paradoxical formula--neither true, nor false: but utopian"(50) wrote Baudrillard while concluding that the family were victims of a sacrificial spectacle offered to 20 million Americans (51-52). Such museumification of human subjects continues more broadly today in everyday life everywhere as every minute seemingly is captured and uploaded for all to see. An American Life is a harbinger of the Internet exploitation of the individual and all of the social media disasters to come.

We Buy It Because It's There (and cute)

Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real. The other production that of goods and commodities that of la belle epoque of political economy no longer makes any sense of its own and has not for some time. What society seeks through production and overproduction is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features the whole discourse of traditional production but it is nothing more than its scaled down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm all the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself.                     
-Simulations   Jean Boudrillard   pg 44-45

The original Mini underwent numerous changes of name and engine, and detail upgrades were made to its exterior design. Different body styles were created too, but its fundamental character and layout were unchanged and it was the “standard” two-door model that had the most timeless appeal: the final model that rolled off the production line in 2000 didn’t look that different to the original 1959 car.
Today's Mini simulates the original...

Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger, the American underground experimental filmmaker: 'Lucifer is not the devil. He's the god of light and colour.' Photograph: Pål Hansen for the Observer

"I was entranced by Scorpio Rising when I saw it for the first time, and it’s had a powerful effect on me and my own films over the years. The way Anger used music in that film, in such perfectly magical harmony with the images, opened my thinking about the role music could play in movies. It could become as important to the characters and the world of the film as it was to all of us at the time." -Martin Scorsese

The Divine Irreference of Images

Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse at Disneyland,
Anaheim, California, Christmas 2007 by Mouse Planet
"This deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and
realized by a man who is himself now cryogenised, Walt Disney,
who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade."
© 1983 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (p. 24)

ALLATONCENESS NEW MEDIA WORK

Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - 3:00-5:30 PM

Warch Campus Center Cinema

New media projects by 11 ART 240 Digital Processes students responding to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas of the global village from his seminal book The Medium is the Massage. Writes McLuhan, “Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “Space” has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening…we have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction.” 

Chloe Stella   Dentro Di Me (Within Me)

A short stop-motion video exploring the anxiety that stems from feeling constricted by one’s physical existence. 

Molly Froman   Blind 
This video explores the relationship of the still and moving image. By layering still images I have created not only a video but also a new still image which only gradually changes over time. It aims push the limits of subtle change and what it might mean to the viewer.

Patrick O’Mahoney   A Day in the Frame

My final project will be a series of photographs set to music. I will encapsulate the daily activities of a Lawrentian using still images in attempt to tell a moving narrative.

Malcolm Lunn-Craft   STILL RUNWAY SHOW
In this project, i will be using photography to help exemplify beauty in the form of a modeling photo shoot. The models will come dressed in what they idea of beautiful is, and strike poses that make them feel beautiful. This project is meant to show beauty and diversity and how we all are unique in the same community. 

Sara Morrison   Selfie-Portrait
A photography book which presents selfies as legitimate works of self-portraiture in order to explore the link between the two and why we consider one to be art and the other to be frivolous and self-absorbed.

Alison Smith    Appear Offline
A series of photographs exploring the interpersonal interactions between players in gaming.

Colt Duncan    Censored 

A series of photos mocking censorship and all the people that try to hinder anyone’s voice or artistic vision by using censorship. “Art is anything you can get away with” – Marshall Mcluhan, and although I agree, I think you should be able to get away with all art. 

Alicia Lex   Life Bling
A magazine containing 'life bling' found in Appleton, WI. But, do these blings solely belong to Appleton? To imagine what the artist captures as bling, an abstract video will show you through the eyes of the artist.

Mark Lofgren   Amateurism in Modern Film

I believe that in modern Hollywood we have lost this aesthetic of amateurism that early 20^th century film once possessed. I seek to return modern films to the amateur.

Luis Gonzalez  Hitana    
A music video that follows a couple walking around at night and has clips of The Goat Wizard playing live hoping to capture the vibe of the song that is in very odd meter.

Pat Commins   "The Pat Show"
In hosting my own talk show with a simultaneous video and performance interaction, I examine the roles that space, identity, and the audience play into creating a piece, and the impact of amateur versus the professional aesthetic.

Anna Kosmach   In the Eye of the Beholder

This video project explores the ways in which culture influences how women perceive who and what is beautiful, and what types of women qualify. I asked women I knew to describe who they thought was an icon for beauty that they look up to, and talk about why that woman is beautiful in their eyes.

Liam Guinan   The Village of Appleton
A video exploring Appleton's "village centers" such as stores, bars, hotels etc. and the cultural rituals performed there. It's purpose is to present Appleton as a "modern village" as McLuhan described in The Message is the Massage.

Molly Hopkins   je ne sais quoi.
This video attempts to show that human beauty comes from the little things that we all do.