corporate
Link Round-Up:
Articles on Avatar
This clip of protesters in Bil'in, Palestine dressed as Na'vi from James Cameron's Avatar circulated widely across the internet this week, and that, paired with the recent announcement that Avatar is nominated for 9 Oscars, made me feel that it was about time to present a round-up of the more thoughtful articles I've collected on Avatar. Feel free to post links in the comments section - I'm hoping this post can become a resource for those who might be interested in additional reading concerning the film.
► "Avatar and Invisible Republic" by Rob Horning [From PopMatters]
Excerpt:
By coincidence, I began reading Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic, which in part is about the demise of the 1960s folk movement and Bob Dylan’s role in destroying it after having come to exemplify it. The folkies, in Marcus’s depiction, had the same patronizing attitude toward Appalachian poverty and civil-rights injustices (the Other America, as Michael Harrington dubbed it) that the makers of Avatar seem to evince about colonization. Capitalism sullied and exploited the pure rural people, as clear-headed bourgeois liberals can best recognize. To adherents, folk music (and Avatar) offers us glimpses of pre-capitalist America, a “democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed” in which art seems “the product of no ego but of the inherent genius of a people.” The Avatar planet is such a product, for the race occupying it and the film-industry execs who made it.
The substance of this fantasy about indigenous people at harmony with their appropriate environment is the denial of individual subjectivity (the overriding value of the folk revival, according to Marcus), which is rendered unnecessary and impossible. Everyone is at one and merged with one another. Just look at the blue people in the movie sway to the unsounded rhythm as they worship their special tree. Marcus: “As they live in an organic community ... any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular.” This is an attractive fantasy to have about other people, as it leaves oneself as the last unique individual standing—like the hero of Avatar. Folk music tends to make a virtue out of a subject people’s lack of autonomy because its adherents can’t see a way to ameliorate those people’s powerlessness without surrendering some of their own comfort. Avatar offers a fantasy solution, in which one vicariously becomes one of the subject people without losing one’s distinctive identity, and then helps that group achieve autonomy. The story conveniently ends there, before the logic of communal unity eradicates the hero’s sense of self.
► "Aya Avatar: Drink the Jungle Juice" by Erik Davis [From techgnosis]
Excerpt:
With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries. That said, Avatar represents some important twists in that basic tale. The most important of these is that the Na’vi’s nearly telepathic understanding of their environment is grounded not only in ritual, plant-lore, and that earnest seriousness that now afflicts PC Hollywood Indians, but in an organic communications network: the fibrous, animated, and vaguely repulsive pony-tail tentacles that not only allow the Na’vi to form direct control links with animals but also, through the optical filaments of the “Tree of Souls,” to commune with both ancestors and the Eywa, the biological spirit of the planet whose name resonates with Erda, our own Earth.
Call it ayahuasca lite. For while Avatar features nothing like the South American shaman lore and stupendous aya visuals that litter the otherwise very bad 2004 Western released here as Renegade, the film does suggest that the bitter jungle brew, and ideas of ecological wisdom now attached to it, is having a trickle-down effect. The banisteriopsis caapi vine that gives ayahuasca its name (though not its most hallucinogenic alkaloids) is also known as the “Vine of Souls,” which echoes the Na’vi’s Tree of Souls. And when Sigourney Weaver attempts to establish the efficacy of the Trees through a neurological discourse of electrical connection, the corporate tool Parker asks what she’s been smoking—a backhanded way of acknowledging how much Avatar’s visionary take on ecological consciousness is grounded in psychoactive consciousness.
You Are What You Buy (2007) - Michele Pred
I chose to create an embroidered version of a barcode to represent how technology has become interwoven, fused with our lives and our identity- to represent how we have become one and the same with technology.
Through new technology cell phones are now capable of scanning and decoding barcodes. However, these barcodes are a little different than the ones you see scanned at the grocery store: they are called 2D barcodes and are composed of black and white squares that encode the URLs to any website of creator's choice. In other words, these Data Matrix format barcodes are a physical hyperlink. Through my research I have learned how to create and program 2D barcodes with embedded text messages. I have also discovered that these barcodes can be reproduced in a variety of materials and are still capable of being scanned/read with a mobile phone.
National Dinner Tour (2004) - Marc Horowitz
I was working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel. While on set one day, I wrote “dinner w/ marc 510-872-7326,” my name and cell phone, on a dry erase board featured in a desk product shot. A few months later, the catalog, containing my dinner invitation, was printed and sent to millions of people. I eventually received over 30,000 calls from people wanting to dine with me. As a result, I traveled the USA in a tiny RV for a year dining with strangers.
Andy Warhol - Braniff Air - TV Commercial
From Braniff Airlines 1968 "When You Got It, Flaunt It" ad campaign. Salvador Dali was another celebrity featured in the campaign, to view that video, go here.
Required Reading:
"A Decade in Retrospect" and "The Decade Ahead" by Kazys Varnelis
Never mind that the decade really ends in a little over a year, it's time to take stock of it. Today's post looks back at the decade just past while tomorrow's will look at the decade to come.
As I observed before, this decade is marked by atemporality. The greatest symptom of this is our inability to name the decade and, although commentators have tried to dub it the naughties, the aughts, and the 00s (is that pronounced the ooze?), the decade remains, as Paul Krugman suggests, a Big Zero, and we are unable to periodize it. This is not just a matter of linguistic discomfort, its a reflection of the atemporality of network culture. Jean Baudrillard is proved right. History, it seems, came to an end with the millennium, which was a countdown not only to the end of a millennium but also to the end of meaning itself. Perhaps, the Daily Miltonian suggested, we didn't have a name for the decade because it was so bad.
-- EXCERPT FROM "A DECADE IN RETROSPECT" BY KAZYS VARNELIS
It's time for my promised set of predictions for the coming decade. It has been a transgression of disciplinary norms for historians to predict the future, but its also quite common among bloggers. So let's treat this as a blogosphere game, nothing more. It'll be interesting to see just how wildly wrong I am a decade from now.
In many respects, the next decade is likely to seem like a hangover after the party of the 2000s (yes, I said party). The good times of the boom were little more than a lie perpetrated by finance, utterly ungrounded in any economy reality, and were not based on any sustainable economic thought. Honestly, it's unclear to me how much players like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Larry Summers were duplicitous and how much they were just duped. Perhaps they thought they would get out in time or drop dead before the bubbly stopped flowing. Or maybe they were just stupid. Either way, we start a decade with national and global economies in ruins. A generation that grew up believing that the world was their oyster is now faced with the same reality that my generation knew growing up: that we would likely be worse off than our parents. I see little to correct this condition and much to be worried about.
-- EXCERPT FROM "THE DECADE AHEAD" BY KAZYS VARNELIS
Circular File Channel
Circular File Channel is the TV Network as TV Show. The project combines content produced by Circular File (principal members - Josh Kline, Anicka Yi, Jon Santos, Thomas Torres Cordova, Tatiana Hamilton) with contributions from invited artists (including Uri Aran, Alisa Baremboym, Luke Calzonetti, Anne Eastman, Greg Edwards, Debo Eilers, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, Patrick Price, Fatima Al Qadiri, Ken Okiishi, Georgia Sagri, Trevor Shimizu, Brina Thurston, Allyson Vieira, Xeno & Oaklander, and others). The content was edited together into three 28 minute long episodes broadcast in November 2009 on Manhattan Cable Access, and streamed on Vimeo, YouTube, and PerformaTV. Content was produced around the following themes: computer-aided new century modernist art and architecture, the creative industries, The Bush Economic Bubble (ie 2005, 2006, 2007), human capital/exploitation, posthumanism, comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy.
Required Reading:
"In Defense of the Poor Image" by Hito Steyerl
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.....
......The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema—to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.
-- EXCERPTS FROM "IN DEFENSE OF THE POOR IMAGE" BY HITO STEYERL IN E-FLUX JOURNAL #10, NOVEMBER 2009
Required Reading:
"Mad World" by Christopher Bedford and Jennifer Wulffson
Gears of War depends on a conventional anti-hero/redemption narrative set in another world where it is up to a motley band of once-disgraced brigands to save what remains of humanity from a subterranean enemy known as the Locust Horde. Its formidable commercial success aside, the game is simply a well-executed shoot-’em-up that offers no significant expansion on that well-worn genre. Its television advertisement is of far greater interest: the emphasis on the melancholy, pathos and self-reproach communicated by ‘Mad World’ connects Gears of War to a contemporary understanding of war produced in large part as a response to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The conundrum for the producers of war-based video games is a delicate one: how to craft and market a war game in an era when public opinion has turned against war as a paradigm? How, for instance, is heroism rendered in a fictional narrative when the most obvious contemporary social referents – the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan – do not, as social histories in the making, embody the kind of unambiguous moral bases easily identified, for example, in World Wars I and II? How can our period eye, in all its ambivalence, be satisfied while still offering a compelling narrative of heroism?
Those responsible for the advertisement of the juggernaut franchise that is Gears of War obviously concluded that to acknowledge the public’s ambivalence was key to eradicating it as an obstacle to the game’s commercial success. While the game’s story is not a romanticized one, the commercial relies on age-old Romantic notions of self. This is, of course, a rather insidious strategy.
Constellations Corpo Real (2008) - Gerald Edwards III
Flying down the back roads and divided four lane highways that cross the southern part of the United States has given me pause over the years to think about the rapidly shifting landscape. Granted being born in the mid 1980’s was like being dropped into the rushing river to maddeningly fast growth and development. When the first Best Buy came to my town it was like dreamland opened its gates right up, with the Sunday circular fueling my insatiable desire to get that fresh video game, or the hot discounted DVD player. As the time passed though, and I began to take these road trips with friends across the south, I realized what was eating me. The disappearing sense of regional diversity, passing through Dothan, Troy, Ozark, Alabama each town had become defined by its strip, the reconfiguring of Main Street, into a bypass road lined with the shiny, glowing colors of economic growth and progress.
Each constellation is a set of points on a laser etched map that correspond to photographed franchises of the projected logo. The first in the group is of Eighteen McDonald’s that spread across the beautiful city of Memphis, Tennessee.
American Landscapes (2009) - Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
American Landscapes takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally "made." In these occasionally abstract photographs, the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Broomberg & Chanarin refer to these spaces as 'scenography for a free market economy' or simply 'Landscapes'. For just as the American West came to represent unbound possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.
Corporate Culture:
An Introduction to Art Business Consulting
"Contact," the most recent exhibition by the group Art Business Consulting, featured a rocket ship built from computer hardware, with a trio of yuppies floating weightlessly on a video screen inside. The trappings and denizens of the office have figured in ABC's work since Mikhail Kosoplapov, Maxim Ilyukhin, and Natalia Struchkova formed the group in 2001, and as in "Contact," they have always been subject to some sort of disfigurement. Early on, ABC established a pseudo-corporate identity by showing up at art openings in expensive cars and nice suits, performing the role of Russia's nascent upper-middle class while their colleagues in the Moscow boheme were riding public transport in sweaters and jeans. To solidify that image, ABC made good on their name's promise of "business"--in 2004, they became dealers, selling the work of artists they liked at ABC Gallery. Change happens quickly in Moscow; now that the market has dwarfed institutional influence in Russia's art world, linking the words "art" and "business" doesn't feel as novel as it did in 2001, and Western-style corporate culture has lost the cachet of an exotic interloper. ABC's symbolic launch of the office into space in "Contact" came on the heels of the loss of their own office space; at the end of May, the arts complex where ABC Gallery was located shut down to make room for a new development. While Ilyukhin, Kosolapov, and Struchkova continue to work as artists, businesspeople, and consultants, the events of last summer seem to mark a turning point, a time for reflecting on the future of a project initiated to document social change now that those changes are entrenched.
"The idea for ABC began with horror at the notion that I would have to work at an office," Ilyukhin, the group's de facto spokesperson, said in a conversation in Moscow last month. And though he did end up working in an office--for the Moscow branch of Halliburton, no less--the work of ABC always balanced horror with sympathy. Their use of the office's visual vocabulary was never dark or grotesque enough to be read as a critique of corporatism. The Yes Men impersonate companies to infiltrate media platforms, like news shows and conferences, where they use exaggeration and parody as tools to highlight corporations' socially ruinous practices. Goldin+Senneby engage actual companies as well as artists and thinkers in their mimicry of corporate language and behavior, all to create structures that demonstrate how theories of the virtual are embodied in the everyday operations of business. ABC's approach is looser, more ambiguous and playful. Their first intervention at a real company had nothing to do with criticality; a maker of installation equipment for business expos commissioned them to do a show in its office. It brought a lot of media attention to both the company and the artists, and as ABC told the Russian magazine Artchronika in a recent interview, they subsequently fended off a flood of requests for similar shows by making outrageous proposals to their corporate suitors (for example, they told one would-be client to build a living billboard, with employees working in a transparent enclosure above a highway). ABC flirts with the appearance of both branding agencies and activist projects; their art isolates the values and quirks of corporations by transposing them to incongruous settings.
Notes on Going Under:
A DEVO Primer
But the whole discourse of noise-as-threat is bankrupt, positively inimical to the remnants of power that still cling to noise. Forget subversion. The point is self-subversion, overthrowing the power structure in your own head. The enemy is the mind's tendency to systematize, sew up experience, place a distance between itself and immediacy... The goal is OBLIVION.1 - Simon Reynolds, "Noise"
Replace the word OBLIVION with DE-EVOLUTION and you have encapsulated the essence of the strangest art-music project that ever emerged from Akron, Ohio. While a quintet of jerky ectomorphs in hazmat suits (seemingly) singing about sadomasochism breaching the Billboard Top 20 in 1980 seemed unlikely, the legacy of DEVO is fraught with such contradiction. Formed in 1973, DEVO began as a polemical performance project, became a major buzz band and then crumbled under the weight of the attention they had cultivated. Outside of influencing a generation of musicians and artists, a surface reading would suggest the band only registered a few blips on the broader pop culture radar—"Whip It", their pioneering music video work and a legendary Saturday Night Live performance—but tracing the dramatic arc of DEVO reveals a fascinating back story. While the group might be most easily read in relation to their 1970s Ohio peers Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys or Chi-Pig, more enduring points of reference may be found in the deadpan, dour and decidedly humorless synthpop of Telex, Gary Numan and Kraftwerk. Comparisons notwithstanding, DEVO defied categorization and their creative exploration of emerging technology, hermetic logic and contentious relationship with the mass market make them quite relevant to new media artists—they're just the band you want!
So, in celebration of homebrew science fiction, multimedia r&d and a profound cynicism regarding human nature, the following series of vignettes have been drafted to chart the circuitous mythology of DEVO. A critical listener might dismiss the band as a kitschy counterpoint to Reaganism, or worse yet, a 1980s footnote. However, careful consideration of DEVO's legacy reveals a morbid obsession with the decay of technology and an uncanny aptitude for the graphic dissection of pop culture. In the DEVO universe, there is no distinction between the prison colony and the shopping mall, suburbia is a blighted landscape of genetic defects and "space junk" rains down from the heavens. There is an order to this metamorphosis in the Midwest, attentive listening will reveal the pulse of a prescient rhythm section and a melodic snarl that is simply too odd to neatly file away in the standard punk, post-punk or new wave historical dustbins.
Required Reading:
IMG MGMT: Zappos Selbstdarstellung by Joel Holmberg
Art Fag City started their artist essay series, IMG MGMT, again this week with "Zappos Selbstdarstellung" by Joel Holmberg. In this essay, Holmberg considers the corporate culture of the online shoe company Zappos, which encourages the individual expression of its employees through social media outlets, content it then uses to build their overall brand. Holmberg makes the observation that this communal bonding through self-expression is similar to the Selbstdarstellung performances acted out by members of Otto Muehl’s Action Analysis Commune. Here, members were to "reveal one's freest self" through "spontaneous acts of self-representation." What results is "joy-bordering-on-desperation," as members were pushed to test their own boundaries by the larger group. The Zappos example illustrates the contemporary corporate adaptation of psychological practices used in various social experiments from the 1960s and 1970s, a subject elaborated in greater detail by filmmaker Adam Curtis in The Century of the Self.
The Question of Freedom at the Open Video Conference
Does free video uploading and downloading equal democracy? I asked myself this question during the recent Open Video Conference, organized by the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School and the Open Video Alliance, an umbrella coalition for the development of an “open video ecosystem”: a “movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video.” Conference sponsors include Mozilla, Redhat, Intelligent Television, and Livestream. The conference was held at New York University’s Vanderbilt Hall, home of the NYU Law School from June 19-21, 2009. I attended several of the panels at the conference, although it was primarily Yochai Benkler’s opening keynote that was of concern.
The mission statement for the conference reads, “Open Video is a movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video." The conference and its affiliates aimed to respond to outdated copyright law in an attempt to open the limits on the circulation and distribution of copyrighted material. Gabriella Coleman of New York University in her talk, “The Politics and Poetics of DeCSS,” demonstrated the historical connection between code and free speech. Coleman traced the relationship back to John Stuart Mill, who first equated Romantic notions with utilitarian ones in order to justify free speech. In the 20th century, figures such as Richard Stallman, Peter Salins, and Daniel Bernstein, all further solidified the connection between legal rights and code. This history, Coleman points out, thus explains the popularity of today’s research into the triumvirate of copyright, law, and culture. Ideally, the open video culture sought after would be one that would allow for the distribution and use of copyrighted video content without the fear of lawsuits or legal action.
Yochai Benkler, author of the celebrated book, The Wealth of Networks (2006) took the stage in the morning on Friday June 19. His conflation of the freedom to access content, as noted above, with freedom in general, was suspect. Benkler argued that Open Video was indicative of an “open democracy for everyone, everywhere, all the time.” Open Video Culture, he said, would usher in the possibility for “anyone to express oneself, be creative and innovative.” Benkler also claimed that because “millions of people are now looking at [social and political] problems” we will thus find millions of, “distributed solutions.” In this “free” culture, he continued, “human creativity would move to the core.” Aside from the seemingly naïve conflation of terms, exactly which society, which “everyone,” and which economic system did Benkler have in mind?
After Microsoft (2007) - Goldin+Senneby
The most distributed image ever is being phased out. What remains is a hill in Sonoma Valley, California. In the context of this project we have re-visited the hill. “After Microsoft” tells the story of a January day in the late 90’s when the hill came to coincide with a global branding strategy.
After Microsoft has been exhibited as an installation piece, including a projection of the re-photographed view together with a voice-over.