Oral Presentation - Paradigm-a-Dozen

Art in a Digital World

     English philosopher George Edward Moore once remarked that “a great artist is always before his [or her] time or behind it,” and with the advent of this new “digital age,” his quote could not be more prescient nearly seventy years later. Over the past fifteen years or so, the Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, interact, and spend our free time. We are riding the crest of this constantly evolving technology, where the next “cutting edge,” the next billion-dollar idea lurks just around the corner. At the same time, the Internet creates an unprecedented archive, cataloging the world's information as a unified collective, accessible to anyone with a connection. At once, the Internet exists ahead and behind its time, described by Moore, preserving the past while marching onwards towards an unknown, ever-changing future. Thus, the Internet exists as a breeding ground for new artforms and artists, giving virtually everyone a chance to speak their mind and achieve universal recognition, something unheard of a mere twenty years ago. Memes like LOLcats and other phenomena are direct products of the Internet, combining words and images into “remixed,” chuckle-inducing visual jokes that become ingrained in our popular culture. “Remix” or “mashup” art has exploded onto the mainstream in the past few years as people twist or change culture as they see fit, creating a new generation of subversive, culture-jamming art that can be viewed anytime. One such group at the forefront of this new movement is Everything is Terrible!, a collective that scours video stores, thrift markets, and garage sales for hilariously bizarre VHS tapes from yesteryear. The group then digitally edits and remixes these long-forgotten, now-obsolete videos into whacked-out, ridiculously entertaining shorts. Although these clips are meant to be funny, they subtly make a profound statement on the state of our pop culture. These videos, once fleeting, ephemeral VHS fodder, now have a second life on the Internet. Part found footage, part digital trickery, part fever dream, these videos reflect a postmodern aesthetic, both critiquing and nostalgically looking back upon a dying form of entertainment. 
     Currently one of my favorite websites, Everything is Terrible! gleefully blurs the line between art, mashup, and hallucination. Take a peek at one of their most infamous videos,entitled "Stranger Danger:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxAndD9lVqM.a seemingly innocuous video about child safety drenched in early 1990s cheese. Bizarrely, the video stars what appears to be an alien creature, narrowly evading pedophiles to a ridiculously corny theme song. Everything is Terrible! knows that this video is hilariously godawful, enjoyable strictly in an ironic sense, and edits it accordingly to highlight the most puzzling aspects of the video. This "self-conscious, reflexive" (Bass 8) condition is wholly indicative of a post-modern text: a work that cannibalizes material from the past into a meditative pastiche. Looking at this woefully misguided video today, one can't help but laugh at all the elements working against it: using an alien as a poster child for kid safety, having a underlying sense of inappropriate, cartoonish humor, and the sheer idea that kids would learn anything from it. Thanks to the Internet and the warped minds at Everything is Terrible!, they have saved this gem from video obscurity, preserving it as almost a time capsule of halcyon days of the early-1990s. We look back at this video with a tinge of nostalgia, but also with a sobering foresight. Kids actually had to watch this stuff in classrooms back when the O.J. Simpson scandal was just hitting the newsstands. Personally, I never had to watch videos on this level of cheesiness, but it was damn near close. Watching these videos now, I can't help but wonder if, in an infinitesimal way, they played a part in my development as a child, and fragments of it are still ingrained in my psyche like VHS shrapnel. Everything is Terrible! simultaneously subverts and critiques this notion by highlighting the most head-scratching aspects of a video into a two-minute post-modern masterpiece - existing in both the past and the future.

Homework for 10/15/10

Back again! Here are some interesting articles I found regarding the Internet:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/09/internet_pioneers_protest_sena.html
The Senate is attempting to pass legislation that would give the Justice Department "greater power to block websites, even before a court determines if they are illegally infringing copyright." However, several Internet companies are protesting this new bill, citing vague phrasing that could potentially act as a sort of Patriot Act against the Internet. So...you might want to hold off on illegally downloading those MP3s...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370704,00.asp
According to a survey by Pew Research, internet video calls like Skype are slowly on the rise. Nineteen percent of American adults have made a video call or engaged in video chat on their computer or their cell phones. Could regular telephone calls be on the way out? Do we have to see our friends online when we "chat" with them?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1
Perhaps the most interesting article of the three, Wired magazine asserts that Web usage is dying as apps on gadgets like iPhones do "all of the getting" for the user. People are now opting for the ease of apps instead of searching the Web the ol' fashioned way ten years ago. They claim that "we'll always have web pages, like postcards and telegrams," but we are slowly moving away from an HTML-based environment.

On Avatars and Online Identity

          Since the advent of the digital revolution, the concept of identity has been increasingly difficult to pin down. Only a decade or so ago, back when terms like "search engine" or "social networking" were not the cultural juggernauts they soon would become, identity was defined only in terms of the individual. Now, due to the limitless bounds of the Internet, a user's "identity" can change on a whim, adapting and evolving to the newfound freedoms online. More and more people are beginning to "negotiate their fantasies and fears in different coordinates of space and time" (Kunkle 1), blurring the lines between traditional, face-to-face interactions. For instance, my student job entails that I email guest lists to concert venues. I have never once interacted with my contacts face-to-face, or even on the phone. The only sense of personality I have of them is derived from impersonal, to-the-point emails. We are at the forefront of this new technological revolution, and social critics and scientists alike are scrambling to answer emerging, relevant questions. Is a person's Facebook profile a true indicator of who they are? Can a simple, prefabricated avatar be a viable substitution for someone's "real" appearance? After making my own avatar for this website and viewing the work of others, I can answer these questions with a hearty, "No!" While the usage of a cute, pre-packaged avatar may seem like a fun way to represent a blog online, they merely further the gap between online and "real life" identity.
          For our assignment, we were told (digitally, no less) to create an avatar that represents the blogger within us. This raises a slew of exisential questions: how can I fit my entire personality into a 250x250 pixellated box? Would even an image of myself truly represent how I feel? As Timothy Binkley states in "Digital Dilemmas," even the pictures we use to define who we are "just bits and bytes like figures on a spreadsheet" and there is "nothing intrinsically visible of image-like about them" (Binkley 3). Embracing this concept, I decided to visit http://www.planetcreation.co.uk/createpic/, a site that can generate a cartoon-like avatar of one's choosing based on a pre-set number of hairstyles, faces, and expressions. I clicked the images, picked out a face that sort of looked like me, changed the hairstyle to a pleasing unnatural brown , and presto! There "I" was, staring blankly back at me, ready to take credit for the work I will soon write - a soul enriched with ones and zeros. As Lacan stated, "Where in the signifier is the person?" (Apter 371). My avatar, something used to represent me on the World Wide Web, is completely the opposite of who I actually am. This thing has no emotions, no feelings, no sense of the past, and no thoughts about the future. It simply exists in a man-made haven, a byte in a machine.
          As I cruised through some music blogs, I encountered one avatar that was particularly perplexing. One blogger's avatar was a picture of a turntable playing a record, something I thought was painfully ironic. Here was a blogger, sharing his thoughts in ones and zeros, offering a download of an MP3, music in ones and zeros, and received feedback from others in ones and zeros. The entire thing was so far removed from vinyl records and turntables, the only music format that's actually physical. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not some snooty, golden-eared audiophile who scoffs at any music that's not on wax (I'm the proud owner of an iPod). The mere fact that this blogger was using a picture that was so far removed from what was actually presented perfectly encapsulates my dislike of avatars. Avatars perpetuate the Derridean concept of différance, endlessly distancing the user from others (Norris 408).
          With the omnipresence of Facebook and other social networking sites, it seems as though everyone has an "alter-ego" on the Web (myself included). Despite the immediate benefits of having one (Facebook Chat is pretty handy sometimes), these pages don't even come close in representing our true selves. An inhuman avatar, whether it be a profile picture or a generated smiley face, can simply not stand in for what is supposed to represent: humanity.

Blogs Away!

August 23, 2010

Hey, everyone! This is my blog for ENGL 3116-002: Topic in Advanced Theory. I'm excited for this upcoming school year and eager to share my thoughts with you on the World Wide Web.