in the digital lab classroom recently:

visiting philosopher/writer- ken (mackenzie) wark, writer of the hacker manifesto. oh, and you can read a version of it here. wow, so much to take in. still am. . . reading this was great because as juvenile as it is. . . i definitely had a more preconceived notion/definition of the word "hacker". so the exploration and additional contextualization continues in all things. . . yes.




and then derek holzer and sara kolster. (they should merge their names into one. kholszter?) out of all the things they showed, i was most pleased with the documentation of their resonanCITY, the other video of theirs they showed, and the vasulka pieces. oh, and the nicolas provost piece too. i very much wish i had gotten to see their live performance and also their workshops on PureData. ahh well. provost piece yes was a one trick pony but it was still lovely and intricate and i was especially attracted to the sound. but then i was also affected by how much i did not enjoy certain videos they showed- especially the Servaas video with the Michael Mcclure poems (which i actually remembering reading some of before). i did not enjoy the fact that the sound and visualization of the objects moving on the screen moved with every accented syllable in the reading. it just made me think of my least favorite drummer that i ever played with- he just played on the beat and it made the music worse somehow. i think mark described it as representational? yes, i would agree with that assertion.

i have said before that i am trying to walk as many fine lines as i can between things in art, and art and everything else and so on. but i am also at places right now where i keep teetering into one extreme and then the other in short and long term areas of existence and i am realizing just how fine those lines are. they're so hard to see right now. i can't see much of anything these days.

to continue on with paul pfeiffer- there seems to be a bit of debate about him. i seem to have a different opinion than everyone else, but i suppose its because i was familiar with his work and talked with him quite a bit when he was here. his lecture was not amazing, but i thought it was fine. i also thought he was very sincere and quite thoughtful in giving it and thinking about everything that was going on. while he may not have always had answers for questions, should he know it all? i think he could have answered them easily if he wanted to, but was answering them in the moment of reconsidering the ideas. i get more turned off by artists who have a spiel, know exactly what to say and just keep repeating themselves over and over. he was thinking about the questions, thats for sure. no he wasn't there to sell his work, but why should he? does he need to? is that the point? and in class i was thrown off by the fact that everyone took his not wanting to put his stuff on the internet and not do projects with corporations to be anti-marketing anti-commercial etc. but really, i think he's just not interested.

i just read casey's blog so alot of my comments are responding to hers. . .and also because we've been around each other alot lately and have been talking to each other about things. . .

so i'm going to continue with that in talking about the paul miller aka dj spooky book rhythm science. yes, casey and i were talking about social sculpture in correlation with miller's book and it made me think about bueys and the definition of social sculpture and rick lowe. ( i will argue till the day i day that sound is sculpture. sound is a material, it has shape and takes up space). . shaping life is sculpture, and isn't that what social sculpture is about?

wait so where am i going here? i did the exact same thing casey did, found the same bueys passage- Social Sculpture refers to a conception of art, framed in the 1970s by Beuys, as an interdisciplinary and participatory process in which thought, speech and discussion are core ‘materials’. With this perception, all human beings are seen as ‘artists’ responsible for the shaping of a democratic, sustainable social order. Social Sculpture lifts the aesthetic from its confines within a specific sphere or media, relocating it within a collective, imaginative work-space in which we can see, re-think and reshape our lives in tune with our creative potential.

i think maybe miller's thinking of his work as social sculpture is related to ideas of mixing of classes and races . . . one of the things that is so amazing about sound in the first place is that it travels and it keeps going. . .it reaches so many people in so many ways, its hard to stop. i think he means the social sculpture in his work in the re-contextualizing of these works he is remixing and the environment he is setting them into. there's a large audience for music, lots more than for visual art. you can release music and sounds into the world and people that want to hear them will either listen carefully to hear the literary gertrude stein or jazz innovators matthew shipp and guillermo brown or dub of king tubby or wu tang or thurston moore, or be entranced by his beats or the sound or the feeling itself. people listen to music for a variety or reasons, and his music pulls from different forces to create a blend of the intellectual, interesting yet pleasing sound . he can play all over the world to different audiences and they come together in that way. as simple and cheesy as the idea sounds, a common interest that brings people together of all different races and classes of people is a beautiful thing. so also, people that get into his music for one reason, might go on to investigate another aspect of something else he as sampled or collaborated with. so. . . i think that what miller is talking about in terms of social sculpture.

while his work does not as immediately shape society like rick lowe's project row houses, i think that the way miller could possibly shape society with sound is beyond anything that can be described. i'm not saying i think this is all true, but that i can see the possibility for it.

i didn't even get to everything i wanted to touch on. more later.

reflecting here at the end of the most of the week that was paul pfeiffer mania for me. . . first off, paul is a great guy and great artist, very conscientious about everything that is going on around him in close and far spaces, very purposeful and careful with his words and thoughts. i enjoyed my critique with him immensely. i feel like we related in ways of thinking about video in correlation with objects as well as talking about that desire to walk fine lines between pop culture and art. one of the things he talked about was the fact that he is not so interested in commodifying his work or trying consciously to make it into something that is outside of the art world. he is also not interested in trying to make it into net art as there is already so much online. i found this interesting, because even though i hadn't thought about it, i feel sort of the same way. but it is the same way that i have issues about making objects- they are getting larger and i have issues about making more stuff to add to the world. but at the same time i have a physical need to experience a variety of objects and the spaces around them. images, words, and sounds from monitors, screens, and projections feed a lot of senses and emotions but not all of them.

at lunch the other day a conversation began that continued into the interview today about a show he is co-curating. while i won't speak of the details of it i will just say that it made me think about my identity as an artist. . . as a physical person. . . i think in the past i have been more intrigued by certain works that really feel like the persons, and very unique persons at that. okay, yes i still am to some extents, but it makes me think of my identity, and how much differently i move and try to do things since coming to grad school, since being single for the longest period in my life in the last 10 years, which if anything, really has been a time for me to grow and learn and all of that. . . but i think that greater change has been more so in my "personal life", but that greater change i think is not as prevalent in my artwork as i would like it to be. the other day i had a converstion with one of my professors about how she thinks i'm a little bored and the fact that some of my not as recent work had more of a sense of improvisation to it. of course this makes me think of music and so it also works in that mark just posted about hyperimprovisation. its funny because my life outside of school has become more improvisational than its ever been, but i've lost it in my artwork. then i started thinking tonight about this drum kit that christian, our visiting artist/adjunct in ceramics this semester, told me about at the salvation army. (funny now just thinking about how much christian's work is pretty much all about this idea of improv, sort of a constant performance). so i want to do all of the things i said i was going to do in grad school- one of which was that i was going to buy a drum kit and start playing it.

i've made this huge loop around but it all makes sense to me. i love the way that you can put all the little bits of things and thoughts together so it makes sense. . . i guess that's my favorite thing also about making art.

oh wait, so back to thinking about identity. i think that possibly i am a little bit stuck in a art identity crisis, and i need to do some improv in that area. maybe playing the drums, or maybe playing more music again in general will somehow help even if its not part of it. also, i used to do a lot of improv with my sewing, especially of sewing of my own clothes. especially because there are so many particular ways to do this, most of which i know anything about. i have always used the sewing machine as a tool in my own way. . . i have no idea what to do with a pattern or how it works. when i make clothes its all about making it up for myself and seeing what works and what doesn't. in video i find more improv, its the objects i'm struggling with right now. do i know too much about them? i think maybe i like to know less about things so i can invent a way to work with it. how do i continue to invent ways to work with things after i get to know them? i mean, you can with everything if you learn more things, make it more complex. . . but that was another thing paul and i related on. . . is the idea of using simple technology, simple materials to do things without overproducing. well, there's too many things in the world to learn, so that sort of works out for me right? just learn bits and pieces of as many things as i can and use them and learn them in the ways that i need them to work. and that's improv for me too.

the immediate future. . . .

things i would like to learn:
aftereffects
dreamweaver and other website stuff
percussion/drums
kinetics/robotics
some aspect of winter sports/activities

would like to improv more on:
fabric, stuff i collect
all my noises in general
boulder
my aesthetic

need to learn more about:
sound recording

thinking about this all, there seems to be a direct correlation between my lack of playing music, lack of performing live and this lost sense of spontanaeity in my work.

will admitting this realization here make me do it faster? i hope so. but i am slow. don't harass me. there's nothing worse than harassment from someone else about something that you are already painfully aware of. reminders are okay though.

how come i only now just found out about the craft technology group on campus here?

how come i had to read this to find out about it?

huh? huh?