On Media, New and "Old"

I made this as a part of a the "United By Edit" logo competition on Instagram.  No photos were used (or harmed) in the making of this image.

Ever feel like you are a social movement of one?  I know the feeling.  And of course, the irony of those two sentences is that they contradict: If there's two of us, we are no longer alone.

Click to enlarge to see a bit of my process in making this.

Now that we've limbered up with a little verbal calisthenics, let me get to my point.  I feel like I am waging a private war at times against the presuppositions of photography in  online image sharing.  The preponderence of sites (Twitpics, Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, etc.) default in their language to the idea of sharing photography, when a cursory glance through people's feeds suggests something more interesting is going on here. 

On Instagram, I participate in groups like #we_edit and #unitedbyedit, formed in part in response to photography groups who regularly criticize "too much honey" in a photo edit.  But even in these groups, photography is not always the base.  Plenty of folks are working with digital graphics apps and software that allow them to render from scratch or modify other captured content (preferrably open source or Creative Commons, but admittedly, not always). 

Actually began as a photo, but made to look painted.

Then too, many apps and software packages still predominantly identify their filters and effects by the ways they (roughly!) approximate darkroom procedures for retouching photographs.  "Burn," "dodge," "vignette," "HDR," "Orton," and so forth have become common parlance in digital photo editing -- although the results are often quite different from their print photography analogues.

Now don't get me wrong: I am not against digital photography or its imitations of its analogue ancestor.  And I see the value, on paper or on screens, of the minimally edited photograph.  But as we celebrate the ways tablet and smartphone technologoes are opening up people's creativity and generating "new" art movements (c.f. "iPhoneography"), I think it behooves us not to be too beholden to the familiar and to acknowledge the plethora of image creating possibilities these tools allow.

I think the real inovation of these tools is less the camera (although that is part of it, but certainly also available on lower IQ phones) than the screen.  The screen is increasingly how we frame our shots (as opposed to the analogue and early DSLR view finder).  It is also where we edit and view most images (since only very few of us print out our pics, and then only very few those, relatively speaking).  But it is also where we forgo the camera entirely to use stylus or finger to draw, paint, clip, and blend images.

So, there's a photo of a drawing in this one?

So what are the better terms?  What is a little less beholden to the way things were, a little more responsive to extant practice, and a little more visionary for the future.  Increasingly, I use "pic" (the online-savvy abreviation of "picture")  or "image" when talking about the images I create and share.  These may be photographs, may include photographic elements, or may never have involved a lens in the process at all.  I also object to "edit" as the default term for image manipulation since it implies some photographic original that I am revising and reworking, some qualitative distinction between making an image and revising it.  Instead of "edit," maybe we should call this work "pixel pushing."  Leaving aside vector graphics for the moment, "pushing" seems to capture both the sense of moving and also the sense of transforming through filters the basic structure of the digital image: the pixel.  "Pixel pushing" captures the idea of edit and of paint, and it frees us from the erroneous perception that we are engaged in anything really like darkroom editing.

Maybe this is all just a matter of semantics.  The "photo" in "Photoshop" hasn't stopped artists from using it even when they don't have a photograph to build on.  More people use Instagram than those using digital "Instamatics" or their imitators.  And every time someone complains about someone else's aesthetic or use of a tool, the offender tends to form communities as reaction formations to arbitrary rules.  Making art is frequently about breaking rules and using tools in ways other than they were intended.  No harm, no foul.

Click to enlarge some of the steps.

Even so, now might be a time to lift up our heads and take a good look at what is going on.  Something is changing in our capacity to make and circulate images.  The camera in your phone that is also a phone that is also a powerful computer....is also a powerful digital arts studio.  This combinatory morphing, this portability, and this digital ephemerality of the final work is creating truly new media, something that owes much to the predecessors we can name but something also significantly different.  With or without the social movement of one or many, our practices are leading the way into fascinating territory. 

Your Heart of Hearts.  Made with a digital brush made from a heart diagram.  
Happy Valentines Day!

On Stillness and Motion

Scurry from Jonny Gray on Vimeo.

[Elements of this video come from here and here.]

A tree has movement.  It grows.  But it does so slowly, in ways that are almost impossible to see with the naked eye.  Meanwhile, around the tree, things scurry and run, fly and fall.  The tree, itself, marks this continuum of motion with a grounded trunk and branches that must not be too rigid, that must wave in the wind: stillness at one end and movement at the other.  But even that rigid trunk has a little flex to it.  And in some cases, trees have been known to walk.  I am not talking about J.R.R. Tolkein's Ents (although they are very cool); I am talking about the walking palm trees of Costa Rica.  What a wonderful and strange world we live in!

So, if we view stillness from some frames of reference as a kind of motion, can we also see motion as a kind of stillness?  Perhaps when the motion is contained within a stable frame?  Is that stable frame the space around the motion?  Or is it the way we interpret the motion -- as cyclical or goalless or imperceptible if you observe it from far enough away?  Perhaps we most transform our sense of motion and stillness through interaction, through the work of working together even when we are alone.

This week I have been working with collaborative art on-line and the metaphor of a tree.  I've been thinking a lot about things that change states and our resistance (sometimes) to that movement, even when it is unavoidable.  I've been interested in the desire and dread to fix things (art, people, work, etc.) in place, to own them, to not let them go.  And I have been thinking about the remix, the ways in which things are constantly made into other things and how that is both a violent and a creative act.

The two pieces I borrowed in my video above resonate for me with this tension.  Craig's sound piece is generated from a program that translated the data of a still photograph (the "Anarchy Tree" of the original @Platea trunk post) into a MIDI sound file, which he then processed and mixed with other sounds (including the woodpecker soundfile from the trunk post).  In other words, the stillness of image literally becomes the temporal movement of music.  Similarly, Deborah's  "Green Man" video series plays with the idea of the fixed camera focused on the fixed tree in dynamic relation to the movement that goes on around the tree and a medium meant to capture images in motion.  I wanted to put these two pieces into dialogue, adding a bit of my own video work in keeping with the Tree-Blog aesthetic. 

Even documenting the Tree-Blog event has had its own dialogue of stillness and motion. The map is, in some ways, an attempt to fix the ephemeral, or at least provide a guide to its murky trajectories through a variety of internet terrains.  As I have made the map of the Tree-Blog project each day, I have constantly had to adjust it -- shifting branches to accommodate other branches, re-clustering nodes as they begin to interact, adding in posts I missed from the days before.  In other words, the growth of this tree (even as map) has not been a simple linear path, but a constant shifting and reworking.  Growth, like evolution, is not precisely linear.  Seemingly fixed positions have to shift.  "Permanence" is a fiction, a concept created by fantasizing humans that doesn't really have a corollary in nature.

@Platea is a collective of artists who explore what it means to make art on/with/through social networks of digital information exchange.  We tend to favor Twitter as the location of most interest (as revealed by the "@" and our catchy subtitle, "tales from the stweets").  But if Twitter is the medium of choice, then we truly do embrace the digital scurry -- the frenetic motion of short messages, streaming information, and posts with rapid expiration dates. 

Even so, we also concern ourselves with documentation of our projects.  We take care to make clear attributions for borrowed works and illustrations.  Some of us make clear statements that our contributions are copyright protected and are not available for others' use.  Others are interested in using social media to "crowdsource" work that will appear in gallery installations and/or be sold.  That is, there are elements to this work that don't want to be ephemeral or lost in some undifferentiated network of exchange.  

All of which is simply to say, we constantly negotiate this tension of permanence and flow, the lasting and the ephemeral, the individually owned and the collectively enmeshed.  I hope this Tree-Blog experiment will not disappear too quickly into the ether of the net; we have certainly tried to document it.  But all trees -- even the old giants -- one day fall.  And I have a suspicion that our Tree-Blog may prove to be more a mimosa than a sequoia.  But hey, out on the "Alkaloid of the Month" branch, Jason tells me dried mimosa root is a moderate hallucinogen -- so at least there's something in there to help keep the visions coming.

Thanks to all who have checked in at my blog this week and taken a chance to participate in @Platea's Tree-Blog project.  

Networked Performance

So, I am recently back from the Southern States Communication Association conference in Memphis where I presented a paper on my recent involvements with various art projects on social networking sites.  Principally, these include involvement with @Platea and Inter.Sect.  In the last year, I have participated in several "crowdsourced" happenings sponsored by these organizations.

My paper was on a panel about how folks are using iPhones and other smart phones in performance work.  My paper was mostly about my recent social networking performance work with a nod to how the iPhone makes that more possible, particularly because of its portability and the ways that it allows me to check in on and contribute to projects even when I am away from my desktop.

The presentation was generally well-received, although there was some skepticism from members of the audience less hospitable to virtual performance and social networking. In one case, an audience member had been pretty harsh about Twitter in a previous presentation, and I admit I took the opportunity to speak back to his suspicions.  I am hardly a Twitter-holic.  I think of myself as a "migratory Tweeter," flitting in and out of Twitter as projects, interests, or world events attract me to micro-blog.  But I don't think any of this work with new technology should be met only with disdain.  Moreovr, I grow weary of criticism made from the margins of experience; don't judge something if you haven't spent sufficient time trying and exploring it.

Mostly, the techno-suspicious asked two related questions:  (1) how do you find the time to do this work, and (2) isn't it somehow less authentic for not involving actual human contact?

In answer to the first, I responded that time is always a finite resource, and that all of our interests and activities take time.  We make choices about how to spend our time.  Work demands may limit our availability, but even work involves a certain amount of choice.  How we spend our time -- from reading to watching TV to making a family to participating in on-line communities -- is always a choice.  I find time to do this work (which is also play) because I choose to make time for it.  It engages me enough that I want to spend time at it.  I don't judge others for not making a similar choice; and I welcome those that do.

The second question is a little more difficult to respond to.  I am interested in the intersection of face-to-face encounters with computer mediated encounters.  I am interested in the sustainability issues addressed (and not addressed) by working in a digital, virtual medium rather than a material one.  So, for example, not having canvasses and photo prints cluttering up my studio has freed me to be more experimental in my art; much of my artwork now conveniently is made and stored in digital form. 

But given that we were presenting this work to Performance Studies scholars, this embodied authenticity question takes on additional heft.  Much of Performance Studies inquiry celebrates the body as an epistemological tool, performance as a mode of inquiry, etc.  How, some might ask, is all this social networking stuff an actual performance.  Sure, digital graphics and textual expression, but where is the body?

It's a good point, but I have never been comfortable making the body the ontological essence of performance.  Or, more accurately, making the body clearly on display the center of performance.  Is not this virtual performance an extension of puppetry or the clever mechanism, clear performance traditions predating the computer?  Does a performance stop if a performer works in a mediated environment and leaves the stage while some digital media "takes over"?  Moreover, just because you cannot see me working with these digital interfaces doesn't man that I am not here, making my gestures and leaving traces in a virtual world.  In some ways, doesn't the seemingly absent body of virtual performance more honestly point to the body as a social construct?  Perhaps the anxiety over presence in digital performance does more to reveal absence in so-called "real" physical performance.

By and large, though, my presentation (and others on the panel) were well received by most, in part because what we had to share made the case for us. That, in the end, is the best test for the value of something.  When you show folks what you are doing, do they at least find it interesting?  The work of performance is not a zero-sum game.  We need not force a choice between forms when a choice is not necessary.  There is room (some might even say need) for multiple forms of performance on multiple platforms of display.

For me, I think social networking and the Internet in general would be a dry and boring place if it didn't include and invite opportunities for performance.