Brightest Shades of Grey

Daniel Anderson’s piece on the rhetoric of layers in the use of digital image and video composition seemed as though he were rehashing material that  stated a profound wisdom found in the varied writings of King Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Examining the digital aspects of layering a composition in the terms of deliberate process may be fruitful for the study of graphic design. But as a “novel idea,” it’s hard for me to grasp. Layering goes back through time back to some point where after the dawn of civilization, some guy with a flute, some guy with a drum, and some chick with a decent mezzo-soprano voice decided that they would find a way to make sounds that blended well together.

And the video with stylus text? All I can think of is the scene from the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari where Cesare the Somnambulist wanders through the woods in the silent film era and the name “Caligari” is repeatedly scrawled across the screen through a process of chemical etching in order to convey Cesare’s desperate search for the man. The processes Anderson cites as being used are nothing new, though they certainly add much to the discussion of rhetoric.

The coherent and cogent point concerning digital spaces that Anderson makes, at least in my opinion, as Trauman suggests: “that the shift to binary modes creates a layer of abstraction in digital texts. Digital spaces are more fluid and open to invention in large part because of their many material and representational layers.” More layers does mean more possibilities, even if most of the possibilities in which these layers are used do not stray far from traditional effects that have been used in the capture of video, audio and still imagery in most cases.

It is my perception that the fact that Manovich states that these layers are a key part of software is as simple as stating, “these are the tools that developed because media has always been layered, but we now have the technology to infinitely layer media elements.”

It’s only natural that they would have developed that way. Silent era films had a sound track or band, all sorts of physical processes for film editing and altering exist and have existed since its early inception, even if they were as unrefined as the Techicolor process, multiple cameras and angles have been used to create reels of film that then had to be spliced together, the first title generators and mixboard editors for live television developed in the 70’s were created to apply layer to layer upon layer.

So perhaps there is a rhetorical change that has taken place because there are more layers, but like much of digital media, it would be best to study the changes in comparison to those that came about with other technologies introduced in film and writing, and with the psychology that came along with them.

Finally got a handle on what I meant to have uploaded for my digital identity site after much soul searching. Personally, I view myself as a camera, in a body of many collective cameras. Together we hold the institutions of the world accountable by reporting, mobilizing and existing.

Here’s a snapshot of my purpose, my function as a member of interconnected global activism community whose perception of the world has changed through my interaction with technology over the course of time. I am not a handle, or an avatar, or even merely an uploader. I record, I produce and I distribute.

I admit that I don’t do enough capturing and affixing (in the collective gallery of sorts) of the injustices that go on around me, but instead latch on to those that others capture as a rule these days (and ever since the days I dropped out of being a journalist to attend grad school) but my recent examination of purpose makes me want to change these things over the long term to further my own effect as a camera and documentor of what is going on in society around me.

In PlainText Performance, Bjorn Magnhildoen presents a garbled wall of text borrowed from various poems, real time data feeds and and ASCII images animated by an algorithm intended to create a sense of random yet calculated movement. Magnhildoen cites this work as part of his series of protocol performances based on lower-level communication rules related to thought objects, which allow a “reader” (and I use it in quotes because reading is a liberal term in this case) to identify data streams as they would another stream of consciousness work.

As I experienced this piece, I was largely affected by the shape, its movement and the few intelligible excerpts that caught my eye, which were a singular quote on Kristevan theory and an ASCII arrangement that spelled out “XANAX,” which I perceived as a fleeting moment of sentience as other ASCII characters swirled around dancing in and out of text passages while creating blocks of open and closed discursive space that affected me emotionally in the same way any other visual art performance would,. It likewise reminded me of my first reading of works like “The Wasteland” without footnotes, or a Caroline Bergvall chain-of-word/text art poem, in that the sense of nothingness in the passages I didn’t understand only amplified my enjoyment and perception of the bits I could, drawing me in to analyze and make sense of as much of the work as I could, while endeavoring not to get bogged down by information overload.

What fascinates me about this piece though, is the problematic that an accurate author centric analysis or interpretation of a text art or even a piece purely based on “psychological noemata” creates, it difficult because meaning, in and of itself, is truly is in the eye of the reader in the case of psychological phenomenon (even if it can be somewhat predicted and shaped by authorial intent).

The stark contrast of black and white text Magnhildoen presents on the stodgily scrolling, yet hiccupping page gave me deeper insight in to the flow of information systems and their relation to the humans who code them– there is a semiotic understanding to be had in the seeming nothingness if only the link between signified and signifier is found in somewhere within the realm of an observer’s experience.

After watching The Century of Self , I was decidedly moved.  As for where to begin on my commentary of the piece, I can’t say I’m sure. I’m afraid, for me at least, that it was all far too personal to be able say anything  objective.

The psychological constructs that make up marketing have affected my life (just as they have affected the life of many others) for sure, but many of the other elements portrayed in the development of a “culture of self actualizers”  and the politicization of  general public relations of the 1980’s did as well.

I suppose the short version, at least as my life is concerned, starts in the year 1983–the year I came into the world. The year before my union-president grandfather couldn’t make enough labor concessions to save even a small number of jobs for men employed at U.S. Steel’s South Chicago Works in the face of massive layoffs. He ran for the position because two years before, he lost his beloved second wife and thought it would do him some good to make a change in the world. And then, in the spring of 1983,  after having lost the rail mill and soon before I would enter the world, he lost his youngest son. A journalist working for the New York Times once called him “soft-spoken.” Anyone who actually knows the man laughs at the idea, he’s normally boisterous and gregarious. But I suppose, that if enough goes wrong in any man’s life it is easy for him enough to become broken.

I was born just three months later and have been told that my coming, at least for my family, was one bright spot in the midst of a time of great sorrow.

Don “Blisters” considered himself a moderate, knew that industry must prosper, but he also knew that men and women who labor must have benefits and protection. But no decision he could make could please both factions. Reganomics declared that steel production was moving to Houston, inflation would be checked, and the rights of the worker would be second in demand to the demand for more cheap consumer goods, in the name of saving the economy–in the name of exploiting a new set of workers in order to preserve the status quo. These financial policies also consumed my nuclear family–my mother never felt that my father had purchasing power enough. She left him when I was 5 to pursue a nursing degree. 23 years later, she admitted how much she deeply regretted her decision to do so and what her motives really were.

But I suppose the real question is how any of this had a profound effect on my own life. I’d say that my family history more than anything shows me that the backs of  disenfranchised people cannot continue to uphold the unchecked demands of a protected consumer/producer class in the name of a peaceful society that cannot be sustained.

And as I made my journey into adulthood, I too experienced what it was to be broken in the name of preserving the status quo. At age 16, I was told by more than one person to give up on the dream of a college education since there was no paying entity to help me achieve it.  At age 20, I moved 900 miles away from my home (as the crow flies) to pursue any other opportunity but dead end retail job after dead end retail job. I then spent 16 hour days in a cubicle working to keep Medicare recipients enrolled on an HMO plan that did not always suit their best interests in the name of putting more capitation money in the hands of a fairly-well known not-for-profit. By age 23, I carried $16,000 in consumer debt I had no hope in paying off thanks to a layoff, and by age 25 I felt I had no other choice but to enlist in the Army in order to get ahead.

But I was still fairly intact emotionally, and would have never questioned my place in things until my family was torn apart, again.  At the age of 27 I found myself out of the Army and married to a brilliant man who mentally collapsed after experiencing far too much in Iraq. He was withdrawn, distant and on one occasion violent. Six marriage therapists seen over the course of four years could not save our union despite both our best efforts. And I suppose the war in Iraq was not one “about oil,” though even if put most simply, it could be considered one waged because we put a dictator in power in the name of preserving “freedom” in the Cold War era.  What is preservation of an ideology that allows the rich men at the helms of multinational corporations to prosper at the expense of the multitudes worth? What are a few broken eggs, or a whole dozen or a whole crate in the name of western ideals? Was my family acceptably consumable in the name of prosperity for others? Should anyone’s be?

It is my opinion that consumer culture consumes people and psyches as wantonly as it consumes resources and goods. As we attempt to express our “individuality” through pre-set options, as we become a set of niche markets ripe for the taking we oppress those who provide us with the means to do so through their labor and never really get to know ourselves. And as our libidinal forces run around unchecked and unsupervised, we dig ourselves deeper and deeper into darkness, further into the cave. We know less of the life we were born to live and believe more and more in the engineered consent shackles that oppress us. The only answer, the only candle in a world of darkness is reason. The only answer out of this mess is to think critically, and to teach anyone willing to think to do so.  But I suppose that Plato knew that all too well in his own time that the takers on such a proposition are woefully few.

I couldn’t help but muse about the the workings of mimetic through the medium of  ”advice animal” as I was reading Poster’s section on Locke, and namely pondered how identity can change as a social construction without a person’s consent. Just ask anyone who is suddenly thrust into the spotlight due to some set of unfortunate events and becomes an involuntary public figure–your life is suddenly not your own thanks to crowds of paparazzi; your identity becomes whatever the 24-hour hour ratings-driven newscycle wants it to be, even if identity is in and of itself an attribute of consciousness that is not altered by secondary changes.

The issue with the Internet age, however, comes in drawing the connection between self and property.  If the writing on the wall shows us that intellectual property is no longer as firm a concept as corporations hope it to be, it may be likewise fair to argue that personal identity is no longer as firm a concept as individual persons care for it to be. If property, as Locke says, is self-ownership, “Every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself.” But for me it begs a question: what is to be said when a member of Reddit decides a picture on your abandoned MySpace page from high school is ripe for plucking and modifying?

If it is as Poster posits, that identity theft undermines the capitalist basis for property and presents the paradoxical state of a body with no ability to accumulate wealth, then it is fair to say identity is now as fluid a concept as authorship. It’s game for the collective.

The “What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” meme has been slow to slide off collective brain pan for the past few weeks. There are many variations, some of which are more hilarious than others. And thinking about the meme made me think harder about global communication as a whole, and use of the meme as a whole–as it is often used to make social and societal commentary in a simple and effective way.

Poster’s assertion that the net requires a new cultural practice of signification in Information Please, rings true to me as I examine my own propensity for cross-global and cross-territorial communications in my time spent on the web, namely the meme in and of itself.  Because of the meme, communication with my multi-lingual and multi-national peers tends to boil itself down to one root idea conveyed visually with a bit of text for clarification, if that bit of text is even at all necessary.

The organization of meme is pretty simple. Same format, often times using the same exact images as the last–the framework is already laid out  for the taking of the new interlocutor in most cases–and small tweaks on the existing framework usually make all the difference.  The linga franca of the Internet is not necessarily English, but rather, at least in my opinion, the mimetic. And one must speak the language of the new domain by rethinking what signified and signifier actually are.

But I suppose these many of these visual implications could have a further reach than merely communicating with my peers as far as my netzien status is concerned. Why do I know what  I’m dealing with the moment I see a Guy Fawkes mask? Because the idea of what Anonymous does is intrinsically tied with that image for me–since it’s often used in communications made by hacktivists.  It’s like their branding, and it’s fairly effective.

And to end on one last scary thought: Cats have managed to proclaim dominance over pretty much any other animal on earth in this new electronic medium, which makes these new findings on toxoplasmosis even more intriguing/frightening–at least to me.

"Lunch in a Cup as depicted in the 2008 Pixar film, Wall-e"

As I read the first two chapters of Peter Lunenfeld’s The Secret War Between Uploading and Dowloading, I was immediately impressed with his reference to the ‘patio potato’ mentioned as en example of TV-delivered-via-the-web advertising. Though I had to resort to a Google search to familiarize myself with the AOL advertisment he referenced, the description Lunenfeld provided immediately reminded me of a fairly recent film in which the major plot point was fairly straightforward: humans (or at least what population was left of them) had to fight their own tools in order to reclaim the active sense of their humanity.

This theme is not new (in fact, it’s probably been rehashed a number of times since the pivotal Kubrick/Clark project that has defined the Space epic for the last 40-odd years) but it is apropos to describe the situation presented by the persistent efforts of the RIAA, MPAA and multinational news and other corporate conglomerates that want to make the distribution of ideas a one-way street on which all traffic is controlled by a central corporate authority. PIPA and SOPA are dormant for now, but these laws are just one attempt to take a bite out of the new Gemeinschaft the masses have managed to cobble together though their new electronic limbs, networks and identities while the corporations behind these organizations have endeavored–but failed–to preserve the old networks of distribution they controlled at all costs.

A demand for a sense of community is arguably the definitive attribute of children from the tail-end of Generation X and the Millennial generation. We grew up in subdivisions as bleak and binding as depicted in the 1980’s Rush song of that very name. Many of us barely knew our parents because they were far too busy finding purpose in providing us with walls to shelter us from the world-at-large. It would be fair to argue that untold percentages of latch-key kids raised on one-way entertainment have grown tired of its taste. We want something new, and we insist on making it. It’s why we create, and it’s why we’ll continue to create even as the opportunities to do so on the web close. It’s why numbers of us sit on Wall Street and in Oakland, and it’s why we’ll continue the fight.