Loose Ends

So, my semester is ending and this will be my last full-length blog post. I've decided to amalgamate some ideas I kicked around but never developed into essays. The post will be correspondingly rough. Hope it's not too bad.

Music Videos

Music videos are the most obvious pieces of Intermedia to me. They combine visuals, lyric poetry, and music. Sometimes the video matches the music and echoes the lyrical theme, (I think The Avalanches' videos reflect the musical muse clearly.) and sometimes the video is an extension of the music, an outgrowth of the music. (Spike Jonze videos are like this.)

That's all fine and good. And mundane. Google is helping directors create interactive videos with HTML 5, and the results are mind-expanding. The Wilderness Downtown video takes place in the viewers neighborhood by importing street view images from Google Earth. The Ro.me video lets the viewer guide the gaze, and sometimes the path, of the protagonist. Videos like this add an element of interactivity that elevates the medium to New Media.

Scalar

I always meant to make some sort of interactive diagram or infographic about the history of Intermedia, but I never found tools that would let me do it easily. If scalar had come out of beta, you can bet I'd have been all over that. (Also, Google Charts)

Intermedia?

Bennett, why does your blog claim to focus on Intermedia when it seems to be more about digital humanities?

Great question inner-interlocuter! When I was signing up for classes last semester I was slated to take AP Comparative Government. But I didn't want to take AP Comparative Government. I wanted free time to work on the fiction I was writing.

So, I signed up for an independent study with Mrs. Burwell, who said I would need a course syllabus. I spent some time googling and found a New School syllabus for Intermedia. Since I draft in Adobe Illustrator and heavily design my texts, Intermedia seemed a supple term I could bend to my benefit. I submitted the New School syllabus when I officially signed up for the class and enjoyed my break.

I began researching the avant-garde art movements associated with Intermedia, starting with Symbolism and going through Mail Art. I read all the manifestos and image searched relevant works. But I began to realize the Intermedia avant-garde continued online. So my studies shifted.



I created a syllabus for myself after the official proposal was accepted. It's a collage of real college syllabi. This is a scan of the original, but I made a few photocopies to get better acquainted with the techniques of Mail Art.


I became Facebook friends with Brad Troemel and added Aaron Koblin to my Google+ circles. But as historical surveys got harder to come by, I realized I was historically caught up. So I began to write expository blog posts about the modern possibilities for Intermedia, and then internet philosophy. You can roughly follow my learning by reading the posts chronologically. The first is a Futurist analysis of a Sufjan Stevens album (which I wish I could have made longer, but my word minimum is 500 and the essay was pushing 1000 when I decided the ROI was waning - that was before I realized bloggers broke big posts into parts) and the last one applies social contract theory to the internet.

I was following Intermedia into the present with a special focus on my interest in the design of literature.

Self-Evaluation?

Nothing says I have to evaluate myself, but it's involuntary. Overall, I'd say the writing probably goes from bad to worse with time, but the ideas improve. I'm decently proud of the Internet Social Contract post. A preliminary Google search returned no ideas exactly like it, so maybe it's original. That'd be a good sign I suppose.

The Reasons I Picked a Blog Over Paper Essays:

1. Hypertextuality lets me allude to things without confusing the reader. It also lets me insert a special type of pun.
2. The blog is public. It feels good to publish something to the world, even if the world is uninterested and the post is written badly.
3. Comments make blog posts living documents. If something I propose becomes irrelevant (or relevant), the silent listener may comment and correct things.

Of course, all the above presupposes readership, of which there is virtually (no pun) none. Google tells me the blog has had thirty unique visitors in the last four months. I imagine most of those are the immediate friends and family who think hits will encourage me. The average time per visit is less than five minutes, and I drive that up by reading a whole post to spell-check it. The point of this pity party is that you, the reader, should comment on something. It would make my day - probably my week. Maybe my month.

So do it. Comment. Please.

Link Whoring

http://rhizome.org/ - This seems to be the center of all online art nowadays. The site was too big for me to digest, but I often used it as a reference for net.art.

http://www.ubu.com/ - Another site with everything. Eclectic collections of sound recordings and writings and film involving everyone from Joyce to Higgins.

0100101110101101.org - Decently famous art duo. Never got a chance to mention them I don't think, but they're worth knowing.

Ergon Logos - Kinetic text project from Molleindustria.

Designing Literature - This is probably what I should have signed up for (not that the syllabus would've gotten my proposal accepted). From what I can tell, Jentery Sayers is my intellectual soul-mate.

Pseudonyms

I've always meant to write a post about pseudonyms in art, but never got the chance. Duchamp's implementation of pseudonyms could easily be extended to the internet. The Social Contract post tell you how to create a false identity.

Memes

Brad Troemel wrote somewhere that memes will replace language at some point. I think that's a decent idea. Sort of full circle on the hieroglyphics concept. The images themselves communicate more than the raw text; they communicate a context and tone with the image, which is recognized instantly by an experienced user, just as words are recognized by experienced readers.

Closing - Thanks for reading

It means more than anything to me that you've read this, especially if you're neither friend nor family. I'll end this post by inviting any comments about the blog itself (formal hypocrisy, critique of post length, etc) or any general good/bad feelings to be posted below.

Internet Social Contract (Part Two)

(Continued from Part One)

5. The Future of Revolution

Just as corporate power has been transferred to the internet, so too has the internet become a part of political change. China has been handling this friction for years, and the Arab Spring was only the first foam of this new wave of revolution. The protesters used the internet mainly as a tool for organization and press, agreeing to the terms of Twitter and Facebook in an effort to void their violated contract with the real-world state. But as power moves to the net, so will revolution.

It's only fair to address anarchists and crazies at this point because there hasn't been a full-blown political revolution on the internet yet, but even with a smaller audience, there's still much to say.

Users can opt not to sign any contracts, browse with Tor, and hack til curiosity's contented. This stateless contingent is not dead. Wikileaks sparked the closest thing to a net war when it leaked diplomatic cables, challenging the real world status quo, and endured the ensuing backlash, which disrupted the net's status quo. The post-leak politics proved hackers are at least as powerful as moneyed sites.

And hackers, who largely inhabit the aforementioned world of .onion addresses and BlackNets, simultaneously maintain a secure presence in web forums and the mainstream media by relying on pseudonymity, the employment of multiple fake identities, switched on and off at will to mask real-world identity. The cypher-punks used remailers to achieve pseudonymity, and everybody is free to create a second Google account when they logout of their first.

After watching only two YouTube videos and searching two other terms, this fake identity has personal search results that differ from the ones below, where I've selected to hide personal results (The selected globe in the top right, if you can see).

Integration has made this easier. I can create an account for Dan Cooper, fill out his profile, watch a few YouTube videos, search a few terms, and things will begin to move automatically. New videos and searches will be suggested; friends from his hometown will be suggested. The account will be bombarded with relevant adsense.

Cloned accounts can be created at other sites and soon a new person will begin to form, purely digital.

Creating a fake identity on Facebook explicitly violates their Terms of Service, confirming the exchange of anonymity for services proposed in Part One.

6. Life in Public

The anime Serial Experiments Lain explores the possibility of a digital life that creates a real-life analog (the inverse of current human behavior). Halfway through the series, the protagonist, Lain, learns she was originally digital and her physical existence is an extension of her digital locus. She then assumes the abilities a digital life would have: harnessing digital devices' hardware, saving herself to bot-net computers, and erasing the internet data so many people believe immortal.

But, most people aren't contented by speculation on the creation of a digital life not tethered to a body. Most people want to immortalize themselves, as they physically exist, online. So, they dump the data that defines them into blanks on social-networking sites in hopes of escaping a real emptiness, or even real mortality.

These users don't realize the digital world is not without death. As mentioned before, data can be erased; but online death is not inevitable. It's either murder or suicide.

Domain names can be cancelled and web time-machine can be duped. Brad Troemel's Tumblr, Jogging, was destroyed by suicide when the project Assembly violated Tumblr's terms of service by threatening web violence (DDoS) against other sites. (An example of justice on a contractual internet)

But stories of users like Breit Bart, whose web brand continues despite his death, still encourage people to escape the inevitable by putting themselves on the internet.

Hedonistic escapism is nothing new in cultural criticism. Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace have already addressed the special escape television offers.

In a way though, computers are worse because they trick users into thinking something has been achieved, when in reality nothing has changed.