HW #1: #24hEcho
In May of 2010, Bushwick artist Man Bartlett performed his work “#24hEcho” at the PPOW gallery in NYC for the titular 24 hours in which he repeated into any tweet sent to him with the hashtag “24hEcho” to a live feed; Seated in front of a computer, Bartlett was able to both verbally echo and digitally repost the tweets back to the initially producer. Bartlett wrote about the piece, “"I will be present in repeating your words. I will be your puppet, your sounding board, your refuge. Otherwise, I will be silent."
In May of 2010, Bushwick artist Man Bartlett performed his work “#24hEcho” at the PPOW gallery in NYC for the titular 24 hours in which he repeated into any tweet sent to him with the hashtag “24hEcho” to a live feed; Seated in front of a computer, Bartlett was able to both verbally echo and digitally repost the tweets back to the initially producer. Bartlett wrote about the piece, “"I will be present in repeating your words. I will be your puppet, your sounding board, your refuge. Otherwise, I will be silent."
What is so engaging about the piece is the compelling
mixture of physical and digital space.
Gallerists could come to the gallery to see the artist perform this
action live, or alternately, follow the action digitally via Twitter. The gallery is one space, the artist's twitter
feed another, and the hashtag, yet another space that archives the matter, the
digital material, of the creative work.
Further, the work itself is assembled by the public, by
the public followers, and filtered through the artists (the parrot) returning to
the public in an interconnected echo or loop.
Bartlett transforms the unidirectional aspect of Twitter, in which one’s
words are send out to the world, into a bi- or multi-directional work. Yet the return is merely reflective, rather
than critical, as the artist asks each tweeter to consider or reconsider their words. In this way, the artist acts as a
mirror, repeating the statement, or, perhaps, even as a therapist, as the repetition
has the form of questioning.
HW 2) Immersive Surfaces
The link to a full video of the experience is below.
Sadly, the DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL has been discontinued, a victim of its own success, since while the festival grew, so too did the expense of producing it. In 2015, without the needed corporate and private support, the festival ended its exhibitions. Still, the festival, for its 18 years, was noted for bringing new and exciting work, such as this mixture of digital, cinematic, and architectural spaces into the public view.
Immersive Surfaces
HW#3) Etiquette
Certainly relevant to the internet as it is the space of the classroom. I don't think I have ever posted complaint posts, but I have spoken about the crunch of the semester or workload in the last weeks. But I have nothing to complain about. When I was teaching, I would sometimes prep until 4 in the morning, wake up at 7 and teach at 8. That was hard, but I did enjoy it. (I realize I am complaining.) Complaints may help those psychologically, but I am inclined to think that they exaggerate the emotional state.
l try never to correct spelling or pronunciation on line or in class. But I do ask students to write out their e-mails fully to me, rather than use abbreviations.
A great reminder. Our words are like stray or dead branches. If we prune the dead ones, other greater ideas will likely sprout in their place. Also, one just looks better, on the whole, with a good haircut.
HW #4) SWIPE LEFT!
"Swipe Left!" is a digital triptych which references the "Swipe Right" function of the Tinder app. The dating app Tinder, offers the viewer photos of prospective mates, which the view may either swipe left to discard or right to accept.
This "digital" action of the finger suggest that to swipe right indicates that one is "turned on" by the material in front of them.
I am reference this erotic impulse to the action of reading; in this case, the novel Pride and Prejudice whose first line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man with a good fortune must be in want of a wife," reminds us both of the erotics of courtship and reading about courtship.
I ask my viewer to swipe left, or turn the page; this action initially opens the book and continues to unfold the consumption/consumation of the story to each reader, who is of course, turned on from their off position. Dear reader, bless you.
HW #5) Swipe Left!
Swipe Left!
HW #6) Readings and Takeaways
Written one decade after the introduction of the Apple personal computer, Sven Birkert’s The Guttenberg Elegies identifies a point of “critical mass” (Bickerts, p.3) in the history of readership and literacy: Birkerts suggests that the act of reading becomes modified and the slow, deliberate actions that allow for inward, vertical ascent, resonance and reflection, have been supplanted by the speed and lateral tug of hypertextuality. Bikerts claims that technology will be forge an “inevitable” change “to our basic nature” (Bicketrs, p.15) and bemoans that the authors he has taught, difficult authors, such as Henry James, are falling out of fashion since his students will find such prose “too slow, to hard, [and] irrelevant to the excitements of the present” (Bickerts, p. 20). Are the minds of Generation Ne(x)t that different from generations past?
Similar warnings come from Carr who notes the significant ways in which our habits of mind have shifted since our use of the personal computer and the web. For example, the heavy use of a search engine such as Google taxes the brain with a quick series of judgments, thus activating the left frontal part of the brain, or the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Scanning webpages to determine their value is a very different activity for the brain than reading. Carr cites the work of Merzench, who states the each time we practice a new activity, “our brain is modified” (as cited in Carr, p. 119), stressing later that heavy use has neurological consequences. It is as if we are training a different set of intellectual muscles, and while those muscles develop, others may atrophy.
Reading: Scanning Across Horizontal FieldsThis atrophy is of concern to Carr, who writes that extensive searching and scanning so overtaxes our brain in areas of judgment that deep reading and deep thinking become disengaged. While some may argue (Carr cites Johnson) that the intense stimulation the Internet provides greater benefit than the comparative understimulation the brain receives when one reads, Carr warns that faster is not better. For the deep thinking that reading elicits is not necessarily the same mental process as the fast quick judgments of the Internet. Kahneman recognizes the value in each mode of brain operation and makes them the dual protagonists of his work, Thinking Fast and Slow. He refers to the two modes most psychologists agree factor into judgment and choice, and names them system 1 and system 2. System 1, fast and agile, is associative, but only with elements easily available to the mind; System 1 is first-out-of-the-gate, often understood as intuition; by contrast, System 2 is activated when more taxing problems occur, such as pulling from memory, or complex computation, or logical problems or flaws. Deep thinking would naturally fall into system 2. Kahneman acknowledges that his two characters work in tandem, as system 2 may provide data for system 1 to use to make fast judgments in the future. In light of Carr’s warnings, will the overstimulation of the brain’s cortex leave behind the important work of reflective, judgment system 2 is responsible for? Will the net overdevelop the fast-twitch impulse of Generation Ne(x)t?Like Carr, Birkerts too recognizes that the move away from deep reading of printed books and other experiences of aesthetic immersion may well leave a vacancy of the spirit. He cites Darton’s history of reading, mentioning that from the print book to 1750 or so, men read intensively – that is, a few books consumed repeatedly. From then on, by 1800, reading shifted to extensive reading. With the loss of the print book, Bickerts now sees reading as horizontal, lacking depth, with more and more people skimming without reflection or consideration. What saves us from the shallow pond of cursory thought is spirit, psychology, and art. Church provides a context for self-reflection, as does the therapist’s couch. With art and the aesthetic experience, we move from the horizontal plane of experience to vertical immersion, as with a painting, play, or dance performance (Bickerts, p. 76). He writes: “In the case of the present age, in which the preponderance of technology obviously signifies a predominance of clear intelligent consciousness, as a cause as well as an effect, I have emphasized that spirituality and contemplation, stunned by the clamors splendor of the scientific technological age, have to suffer for it by a faint sense of tension and vague longing” (Bickerts, p.484).
Memory: Outsourced and AtrophiedAnother concern of the Internet involves our lack of dependence on working memory. Since the Internet, one need not rely on our memories for data retrieval. Carr writes that we have in effect outsourced memory to the computer. He makes the argument that memory, or cultural memory of facts, feelings, and data, build not only identity but also a complex sense of self. To outsource memory is to empty each person’s corporal shell of culture. Further, he writes that to remain “vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers” (Carr, p.196). Carr may be right to be wary of Generation Ne(x)t’s deficiency not only of memory but also of cultural, historical, and scientific artifacts themselves. Bickerts views that memory is lost, since we now know “bits” of information, be it profound or trivial. Memory, with disuse, has “atrophied” (Bickerts, p. 72). Bauerlein extends earlier arguments of amusements, viewing the Internet as a source that crowds out real data to situate consumerism, entertainment and hypersociability: “The internet doesn’t impart adult information; it crowds it out. Video games, cell phones, and blogs don’t foster rightful citizenship. They hamper it.” (Bauerlein, p.36)
Selfhood: Identities Masked, Divided, and AnonymousThe use of on-line personas is also of concern for some who think about the development of identity. Gaming, MUDing, catfishing (a recent phenomena), and, to some extent, the personae of Facebook project alternative or aspirational identities. Some scholars view the internet as a psychological enchantment, an other space in which participants can express forbidden emotion and feelings. Murray cites many games, such as MUDs (Multidimensional User Dungeons), in which each player inhabits a global stage of participatory theater, suggesting participants experience what actors achieve through performance. She envisions the narrative worlds in gaming as allowing for multiple perspectives writing that games are “the most capacious medium ever invented” (Murray, p. 283). With all its possibilities, Murray optimistically awaits the next cyberbard.
While Murray and other applaud the play of identity on the internet, there are many instances in which the mask of anonymity or guise of an avatar confuse the blur the lines of ethics. Catfishing is common on the Internet, as is cyberbullying; the former using some false identity, the later, anonymous posts. In recent years, on-line activity has become so pervasive and the results so pointedly tragic for the victim that the term bullycide was coined, a term that suggests a causal link between the bully’s words and the subsequent suicide of the tormented. One well cited example of the complexity of identity and ethics on the Internet is the on-line rape of lebga and Starsinger by Mr. Bungle on the LambdaMOO, a popular MUD. Yageleski views this as yet another example of the computer’s capacity to split the mind from the body. To Yageleski’s notion, I would add that the virtual gaming world creates a conundrum akin to that of Gyges’s ring. Plato’s thought experiment in which an invisible ring would prevent the bearer of such a ring of any punishment for actions taken. The question becomes, if you are invisible, would you do anything? So technology has allowed for guises that allow the mind to become habitualized to permissive, even immoral, acts without risk of punishment. While theft, homicide, and even rape are common in many video games, the interaction is often against the machine; in games such as MUD, the players, flattened to avatars and virtual beings, enact violence to each other. The virtual identity effaces moral identity.
Taken together, these key examples illustrate the dual nature of technology and its effect on the mind: one the one hand, we can immerse ourselves in imaginative play and social intercourse; yet alongside such promise rest the dangers of displacement, division, disjunction and moral untethering.
References
Bauerline, Mark. (2009). The dumbest generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeoporadizes Our Future. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
Bickerts, Sven. (2006). The Guttenberg Elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age. New York: Faber & Faber.
Carr, N. (2010). What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton.
Kahneman, Daniel. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
McLuhan, Marshall & Quentin Friore. (1967). The Medium is the massage: an inventory of effects. Corte Maera: Ginko Press Inc.
Murray, Janet H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck. The future of narrative in cyberspace. New York: The Free Press.
Turkle, Sherry. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.
Yageleski, R. Computers, literacy and being: teaching with technology for a sustainable future. Retrieved December 19, 2015, from the State University of New York at Albany Web site: http://www.albany.edu/faculty/rpy95/webtext/cyber.htm.
Project Proposal:
Duo Selfie Reflection
Help us with our homework! Myself and my fellow graduate student, Catherine Lan, have been asked to design and orchestrate a social media art project involving 25 people. We have chosen to invite people to make "Duo Selfie Reflection, or duo portraits in which each person mirror the expression of the other. Here is how you can help us:
1) select a willing partner or pal
2) stand face to face
3) use the duo portrait function on your phone (this function is on Samsung phones); or for apple users please simply take a selfie and use the FREE APP Splitpic.
4) pose with a funny or peculiar face; encourage your partner to reflect that face!
5) snap the photo
6) upload to Facebook
7) tag Christian Gregory and Catherine Lan
8) Invite 5 others to do the same by cutting and pasting these instructions in your post
2) stand face to face
3) use the duo portrait function on your phone (this function is on Samsung phones); or for apple users please simply take a selfie and use the FREE APP Splitpic.
4) pose with a funny or peculiar face; encourage your partner to reflect that face!
5) snap the photo
6) upload to Facebook
7) tag Christian Gregory and Catherine Lan
8) Invite 5 others to do the same by cutting and pasting these instructions in your post
Thank you! You have been officially selfie-reflective!
Christian Gregory and Catherine!
Project Update: Thus far in the project, Catherine and I have received close to 50 "Duo Self-Portraits"; each pair tells its own story: parent-child, siblings, friends, colleagues, lovers, even a set of twins! Many to date have used the exhibition album itself as inspiration; some aping existing ideas, others trying to push for something not done. The portrait album, which expands each day is posted on both my and Catherine's Facebook page.
HW #8) Digital Stewardship
Audacity and Free Indirect Discourse in the English Classroom
My presentation focuses on the use of creating audio files of works of literature that utilize the narrative technique of free indirect discourse. This technique became popular in the modern era, and is known as a mediated third person narration in which the narrator seems in moments to be infected by the thoughts and language and thoughts of a group or individual of the story. The program audacity allows students to record and edit audio files. By using one, several or multiple voices over certain lines of a text from say James Joyce, one is able to convey an interpretation of the use of Free Indirect Discourse in the novel or short story.
Sample Audio File.
We will learn in class a popular way of uploading audio files, which is "Sound Cloud", it will allow users to record and embed audio files in social media sites (e.g. blogs). - BTW That's amazing to see that your impact 25 is already an impact 50.
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