a vision of doing business on the world wide web.
No doubt the Internet is a wonder; but to my mind it often resembles, more than a global village, a vast business office, where the whole world, isolated in its cubicles and literally sitting on its ass, is communicating with itself through inter-office memos, bulletin boards, and ring-binders.
-Robert Cantwell, “The Magic 8 Ball: From Analog to Digital,” in If Beale Street Could Talk: Music, Community, Culture
sam amidon’s digital folklorica.
The opening chord sequence of “Sugar Baby,” the first song on Sam Amidon’s album of traditional American folk songs, All Is Well, announces that this record is up to something other than merely replicating Appalachian tunes. No Songcatcher here. Instead, the chord’s suspended bass notes and more darkly-hued, cosmopolitan, almost bossa nova-ish harmonies place the listener one step removed from the original setting, as if we were listening to coal-streaked, boney fingers frailing silver-banjo strings while sitting in a space-age bachelor pad (or better said a Dwell magazine loft studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) instead of on a mountain cabin porch.
That is to say, the music acknowledges, even celebrates its inauthenticity. But it does so by sonically signaling a relocation and displacement of one era’s folk music to another context. The old folk lyrics are so capacious, of course, that they make this transit well. Their allegorical dimensions only widen and encompass more in the new setting. No sepia tones in this digital photo album: place names and old, weird Americana jump into the present, pertinent and resonant.
On All Is Well all is not. Horns, strings, and other orchestral textures coat the raw songs in a kind of eerie, haunted soundscape. Reverb and multilayered vocals add to the feeling of hearing music once removed. Moreover, Amidon sings the songs in a kind of flat, affectless, hypnotized daze—it’s a voice that ventriloquizes old mountain singing, but with a hint of self-consciousness about the imitating. Amidon doesn’t want to become a mountain singer himself, but rather, in his timbre and tone, he seems to connect his own deep listening to mountain music to the production of meaning and feeling in the contemporary, sleek, synthesized city. He’s a new kind of New Lost City Rambler.
In one sense, the formula is simpler than all this: Amidon’s album merely sounds like traditional American folk music covered by Sufjan Stevens. But as the music washes over you, there is the feeling that there is more here than meets the ear. Amidon does not tap into the wellspring of American folk music itself, but rather, more intriguingly, spins his listener around on the whirlpool of figuring out exactly what makes folk music folk.
We can always rely on Louis Armstrong’s famous bit of philosophizing on this topic: “All music is folk music—I never heard no horse sing a song.” True enough. But then maybe all music needs to be heard by someone else besides the singer in order to count as music. Which is to say that Amidon’s album connects to a long-running debate about folk music.
The question goes as follows: are vernacular sounds always-already folk music or do they only acquire folkiness after being assigned the category by some outside force, usually a representative of some higher, more supposedly modernized socio-economic class?
The first position imagines that music counts as folk for insiders who may not have even heard of that label. From this perspective, if folk music is made in the forest, and no one is there to hear it except for a small, remote, closed-circle of forest dwellers, then it’s still folk music for this special group of people known as the folk, no matter how they themselves might understand the music.
The second position, by contrast, locates the authenticity of folk music in the ear of the beholder, in this case the outsider, the culture broker, the recorder and adjudicator from on high, who doles out the label of folk where he or she sees fit. From this perspective, folk music and musicians are only created from without. Reception is all. Listening is what imbues music with its folkiness. If it’s played in the forest, and no one from outside overhears it, then it can’t become folk. Musical sound must become reified—heard and situated (and in the process inevitably recast) by an external force—in order to become suffused with the magic of folk’s spell of authenticity.
What is intriguing about Amidon’s album is that it seems to defy these two positions, or rather, it combines them. There are times when the music gets a bit boring and rote—it’s almost too mellow and reserved—but on songs such as “Sugar Daddy,” “Saro,” “Little Satchel,” and “O Death,” the new sonic setting makes the music at once heard at a distance and heard with an immersive, almost overwhelming immediacy. Your perspective, far away, close up, see saws.
For a moment you can’t tell the folk forest from the digital trees, and you get lost where once you were found, and found where once you were lost.
Listen to Sam Amidon’s All Is Well.
pseudo-reality television and the news on timescast.
The newly-launched TimesCast daily web video by the New York Times takes us into the newsroom to get a quick, digitized sense of what stories the crack staff of the Old Gray Lady are following and writing. Watching the webcast, a strange new kind of pseudo-reality itself becomes newsworthy.
The webcast wants to bring the viewer into the Times as if we were watching a really good PBS documentary—”The Making of The Day’s News” or some such show. Or perhaps a great documentary film, such as War Room. Or maybe we are watching a reinterpretation of the final season of The Wire if David Simon had actually thought modern journalism was a success and not a total failure.
But that’s not the real story. I’ve buried the lead. What is most peculiar about the webcast is that it comes to feel like episodes of a reality series, or better said a pseudo-reality series, such as The Office. On TimesCast, the newsroom drama starts to overshadow the drama of the news.
We see recurring characters who seem like they are “acting” at being journalists. They are “making a newspaper” even as they are, in reality, making a newspaper. We start to follow them as recurring character-types even though we are supposed to imagine them as mere vessels for the stories they are following, investigating, and writing (oh, there’s the well-chiseled but pompous senior editor; there’s the aspiring reporter; hey, what is he wearing today? WHAT is he wearing today? And so on).
We not only become voyeurs for the famous Page One meeting, but are taken into conversations between editors and writers that come across as mock-spontaneous dialogues—conversations about real issues that start to feel staged by the presence of the camera. One is left thinking: do these conversations actually occur in the newsroom, or are they entirely fabricated for the cameras, or some in-between combination of the two?
I think what’s most fascinating about TimesCast is precisely this in-between quality. The show wants to rewrite The Wire, but in the ambiguous space between cinéma vérité and staged performance, TimesCast more weirdly starts to seem like a sequel to The Office than a rebuke to David Simon.
For here is the presentation of “reality” (real people making the news) done in a way that keeps shading into the feel of a pseudo-reality show (inevitably calling to mind the camera work and acting styles of The Office). And the pseudo-reality show mode of The Office, we should recall, was brilliant exactly because it imitated the reality show style that first gained popularity in the 1990s. Which, we should recall, itself was a fictionalized version of “reality.” Big Brother is watching, but it is we, the viewers, who are watching Big Brother. Real World is realer than real precisely because it is hyper-mediated, dramatized, and, ultimately, unreal.
The Office is a show about many things, but it is primarily about the effort to find something real when you have the nagging feeling that, in the modern work wasteland of postindustrial corporate capitalism, nothing is. The show’s creators make a new and painful type of comedy out of the absurd pointlessness of clerical and managerial labor. After all, does anyone really care, either on the show or in the viewing audience, that The Office sells paper?
And will anyone care anymore, watching Timescast, that the Times sells newspapers? What is on sale here, exactly, as we gaze at this strange new genre of reality television as it uneasily dances between the real and the staged?
Those questions remain to be answered, but what better mode to think about how the news gets made (or should that be how “the news” gets made?) than through this unstable and uncertain movement between the actual and the constructed, the fictionalized and the truthful, the mock-up and the paper of record.
Between just the facts, ma’am and all that’s fit to print is where TimesCast seems to cast its spell—and break its story.
cultural criticism in the age of social networking: from content and form to contexts and formats?
Rob Horning’s always fascinating columns explore the politics of consumerism. Horning charts a path between the usual camps of “consumption bad!”—”no, consumption good!” Recently, he has focused on the impact of Web 2.0 technologies, particularly social networking, on public life.
In “Reviews for consumption convenience,” Horning turns his attention to a recent blog post by Jason Kottke about developments in Amazon.com reviews, which increasingly focus on the formats of cultural products and the contexts in which they might be consumed rather than their actual content or form.
For Horning, the shift away from critical spaces for discussing content and form are troubling, but he uses the occasion not merely to issue a screed, but rather to ponder the place of cultural criticism in contemporary public discourse. Horning writes:
Criticism will recede into recondite elaborations of personal experiences with the goods, as the idea of trying to capture a consensus view will have disappeared completely from public discourse. Public discourse itself seems sort of threatened anyway, subject to replacement by social networks. Lost will be that middle ground of critical reviews, which help establish a context of reception that makes our engagement with something far richer and more meaningful.
It’s a nice description of what is so appealing, yet troubling about social networking: it is radically democratic, but does it fragment cultural criticism’s ability to achieve any sort of collective framework for shared understanding of cultural goods and experiences? There’s still “engagement,” as Horning points out, but no more “middle ground” of “consensus” and a “context of reception.”
Of course, consensus had its own historical shortcomings. Usually a small group’s opinions were mapped onto collective opinion. But, is it worth reconceptualizing what kind of “consensus” might be possible in the radically fragmented and decentered channels of Web 2.0? We’re probably not going back, so where does cultural criticism go now?
We still don’t know yet what the public looks like in this new zone of social interaction, and if at times it looks like a pseudo-public in which supposed consumer empowerment masks the profound inequalities and anti-democratic dimensions of corporate capitalism, at other moments, social networking seems to offer new avenues for cultural criticism as a more democratic encounter with “engagement” and all that it might entail.
david thomson on the age of “home theater.”
Andrew Garfield and Sean Bean in Red Riding: 1974.
In “Murder in the North,” David Thomson not only reviews the captivating new television trilogy, Red Riding, but also analyzes the current state of television watching.
He emphasizes not only the content of recent shows we watch on the tube, from The Sopranos to re-released films on DVD, but also the experience of watching television in the age of what Thomson calls “home theater” (think 500 channels on, satellite networks, Tivo, DVR, and “the new screens that we are buying, as big as CinemaScope windows”).
…a change is in the making—call it home theater, if you like, if you still feel confident about that word ‘home.’ It’s the grim huddle of people who’ve given up going to the movies for their fancy new screens—plasma, digital, or HD, but the feeling is that at last television looks like something. It’s not exactly photographic; rather, it involves a digital or electronic sheen that seems to thrill young people.
The essay is a kind of meditation on the phenomenology of television viewing. We watch the shows, but in the age of the digital, the shows are also watching us, which is a way of saying that the intriguing new forms of shows such as Red Riding are, for Thomson, linked to the lives we are leading as we watch them.
…there are series that are works of visual conjuring just as some old movies now enter a Borgesian library of variants. Their pursuit tends to be meditative, solitary, and unnerving. It resembles reading.
We burrow into our dens, domesticated, feeding on addictive flashes of possible insight. But, as with the characters on Red Riding, we are also terrified. We can’t make sense of the whole. We are lost—or is it Lost?
Whatever it is, it’s captivating—and it illuminates the ways in which television is returning to older modes of artistic captivity.
So Red Riding is a secretive modern novel meant to be exhumed on your own; when you go to let the dog out afterward you hear the wind moaning and you feel nervous of the dark in your own yard. You don’t follow or master this film, yet it’s alluring enough to keep you at attention.
With shows such as Red Riding, Thomson claims, each of us navigates “a culture of TV series and elaborate DVDs.” New details and clues get “unpeeled before our eyes.” Events such as the final scene of The Sopranos need to “be seen over and over again.” But nothing quite adds up.
This is the new world, segmented into chapters, streamed to bits, parceled out into niche experiences in darkened corners. It’s not a comforting space, but it is one that opens up new avenues to collective revelation through, paradoxically, grave isolation. Watching in our own homes, we glimpse the channels that keep us connected, unable to break free. We are alone here, caught in the blue ray beams.
You can’t like it, because the life it shows is forsaken and mean-spirited. But the looking is overwhelming. The abiding feeling as it unwinds, as you strain forward to discern details, is ‘I have to see this.’ …In its edgy beauty and grisly hesitation, Red Riding is a new kind of television—it is like somber music played at home and alone.
Though we are confused here, home alone, we are also fused, linked into the fiber optics and the optic fibers that increasingly define our togetherness. The new “home theater” is a space up for grabs, a compacted zone of private and public, a consciousness-making chamber, a mood machine, a stage set that might, via remote control, actually dramatize our very enchanted difficulties and our very difficult enchantments.
data mining for saddam.
Yikes! The Internet returns to its military origins, or, watch out who you befriend on Facebook: a new, five-part series at Slate, Chris Wilson’s “Searching for Saddam”, on “how the U.S. military used social networking to capture the Iraqi dictator.”
thinking through the digital & the body.
Digital Incarnate: The Body, Identity, and Interactive Media, an exhibition at Columbia College, features multiple paths to the place where the corporeal and virtual meet. This is a place with a long history: humans have been pondering the body and the mind, the physical and the mental, for millennia. But it’s also a new place: a site in which the technologies of the digital both echo older histories and point-click toward unknown destinations.
Digital Incarnate @ The Arcade Gallery, Columbia College Chicago, February 8 – April 2, 2010.
Two of the displays—Luftwerk‘s Doppelgänger and Troika Ranch‘s Liquid Mirror—are playful and fun. They pull the viewer’s body into the digital through shadow play, silhouettes, and light shows. Actual limbs and their visual extensions blur on a dark screen in Luftwerk’s piece and flickers of light in Troika Ranch’s vertical screens.
One thinks Marshall McLuhan here, but also, glimpsing darker shadows in the shadow and light, x-ray scanners at the airport and other modes of surveillance. The body seemed to evaporate into the digital in these pieces in ways that were at first frolicsome, but increasingly ominous: the body etherealized, but also filled with foreboding.
OpenEnded Group‘s Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar lean toward the traditions of animation in their collaborations with Bill T. Jones and Merce Cunningham. The OpenEnded pieces—Ghostcatching and Hand-drawn Spaces—are striking for how much they reproduce the signature styles of these two famous choreographers in digital form.
As Kaiser explained in his talk, the transformation of Jones’ body to the digital realm revealed his muscular, flowing, vibrant dance style (the markers to record Jones’s dancing body would literally rip off as he moved). When OpenEnded Group combined the motion of a male and female dancer in a Cunningham piece, the angular, skeletal aspects of Cunningham’s choreography remained. They were even accentuated by the merging of two actual bodies into one digital body. Cunningham’s already-abstract emptying out of subjectivity and control from his dancers’ bodies were even more ghostly and phantom-like as they flashed across three screens.
A final computer station features a collaboration between the choreographer William Forsythe and researchers at Ohio State University. Synchronous Objects, a complex digitalization of Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced, feels like a lab report, but one that is endlessly entertaining. One Flat Thing becomes quite multidimensional, almost overwhelmingly so—it is indeed reproduced. The user can instruct the computer to map out different aspects of the dance: traces of the dancers’ limbs, the negative space between the dancers, particular relationships between different dancers, and more.
I’m not sure if it’s art or science, or both, but it is something. One plugs into the matrix, in control of data that may lead to new programs of the very self. As fingers manipulate a dance of virtual space, bodies may simply become like so many other buttons, knobs, dials, and touch screens that we use to move between the flesh itself and our machines. Or, perhaps, at the module, our bodies tap into a grid we never knew we already occupied. We begin to glimpse a secret map of the place where inside and outside might merge in what essayist Sondra Fraleigh calls “the elusive soma,” the “body mysterium.”
Choreography has become cartography. We reach the edge of skin at the synapses of the circuit board, and feel, for a moment, sitting in front of a boring screen, waiting for a video to upload, the electrifying shock of watching the material leap into the virtual—what is becoming what might be.
digesting bookforum’s omnivore blog.
I remain amazed at the continual flow of articles and links at Bookforum’s Omnivore blog. Its authors remain in the shadows—in fact, they might best be called blog editors instead of authors—but their assemblages are magnificent examples of materials organized in playfully thematic ways.
koosil-ja/dancekumiko’s algorhythms.
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. – Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Blocks of Continuality/Body, Image, and Algorithm, Koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO‘s multimedia dance performance, explores “the coexistence of the digital and flesh worlds” to dramatize “the potential of a dynamically networked body situated in digital environment.”
At first you are drawn to the screens onstage, trying to grasp how the dancers are “playing” them, but soon this grows frustrating, and you realize that it makes much more sense to watch the dancers themselves, and the ways they are registering the onslaught of images and sounds. But even that starts to lose its centrality. One is ultimately left in a Benjaminian “state of distraction,” lost in the dizzying architecture of the digital network, bodies dancing through in fragmented bits and bytes.
In the opening series of pieces, images of traditional dancers, advertisements, famous paintings and sculptures, and other material flash up on the screens and the dancers cut and paste movements together from these digital sources. A girl kicks her foot against a wall, repeatedly. And the dancers follow suit. An African tribal ceremony shifts to a Picasso nude to an advertisement for cigarettes. The dancers seek to lose themselves—and the audience—in the gestural mix. It is not altogether unlike Merce Cunningham’s Cage-ian efforts to choreograph dance by improvisatory chance rather than controlled design. One is not surprised to learn that Hwang studied with Cunningham.
The final piece of the performance grows more intriguing when the dancers attach digital sensors to their bodies, and musician Geoff Gersh plays a large thumping pneumatic bar with his brain waves (also by digital sensor). Here the give and take between digital and flesh promises to be most “dynamically networked.” However, the results are a bit disappointing. The screens feature rather stereotypical “virtual world” imagery and the relationship between dancer movements and digital screens is predictable. The cyborg at this dance turns out to be a wallflower.
What is oddly the most compelling moment is when the dancers, musician, and technicians alike incorporate the wiring up of technology into the performance itself. The choice to lay bare the process of getting into digital gear, calibrating the equipment’s remote control capacities, and verbally announcing when the dance is about to begin (“Ready, ready, ready, go,” the call goes round) made visible the complex coordinations required in all networks. The digital, this Brechtian moment suggested, is above all else social.
It is indeed the sociality of the digital network that Koosil-ja and danceKUMIKO start to summon into heightened form. This sociality is where the flesh and the digital meet. The social body is between the buttons, on the beams, and in a digital ether whose long tail turns out to be embodied itself: it’s the foot of a young woman kicking against a wall.
on making more efficient the inefficient pursuit of ideas.
All men are intellectuals, . . . but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.” – Antonio Gramsci
The publicity around Louis Menand’s new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University*, is generating lots of contemplation of public intellectualism.
Horace blogs about re-imagining the teacher as public intellectual. Ferule & Fescue add that part of this intellectual activity involves offering students “ways to be in the world”:
But more generally, and maybe more importantly, by being public intellectuals in the classroom, we’re modeling for our students what it means to be engaged by literature or history or art, and why those subjects might continue to matter and have relevance for them even once they’re out of school. I think often about a comment a reader left on my blog, a couple of years ago, after I’d written about three former students who had collectively asked me out to lunch. I was trying to figure out whether they were looking for me to be a friend, or were thinking about grad school, or what–and my reader remarked that many smart young people are just looking for ways to be in the world, and that we often model that for them in ways we’re not aware of.
I have Menand’s book on my list to read, as I imagine many others do too, but in the meantime, since all of this conversation is occurring on blogs and websites, I return to questions that have arisen on HASTAC before: what role digital technologies in public intellectual life if we broaden it to include more than just a “marketplace of ideas”? Why does Menand equate public culture with the marketplace — and how are we both replicating these assumptions, and also offering alternatives to them, in the digital humanities?
The question of the marketplace leads to the vexing issue of “efficiency,” an ideal that Menand embraces, but which I argue we should probe more carefully. In excerpts published in Harvard Magazine, Menand borrows from William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine’s study, In Pursuit of the Ph.D., to explain why graduate students in the humanities take so much longer than other graduate or professional students to complete their degrees (often up to 10 years), Menand writes that Bowen and Rudenstine:
suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.
Menand righteously criticizes the trick played on graduate students in higher education: the labor systems of universities exploit the old ideals of specialization to earn a Ph.D. in order to maintain a cheap labor pool of instructors; and even those who finish the degree then find themselves in an extremely difficult job market. Perhaps, he asks, if we abandon the dissertation for one peer-reviewed article and shorten the time to degree, this could improve the situation by making graduate school more efficient.
All well and good. But why does Menand obsessively focus on efficiency? Why a “marketplace of ideas” instead of some other form of public culture? Why are ideas — and the social institutions in which they are created — necessarily best operated on a market model?
I agree with Menand that, “there should be a lot more Ph.D.s.” I would also be willing to entertain the notion that Ph.D.s “should be much easier to get.” But I disagree about the rationale for this reform. Menand argues that it would lead to greater “efficiency” (this is a book titled The Marketplace of Ideas, after all). But this does not really address the deeper longings that drive people to seek graduate education.
Perhaps efficiency is the whole problem here. Menand bemoans that, “People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute.” But maybe that’s exactly what those students are looking for when they emulate their professors. To return to Ferule & Fescue’s post, they are doing more than “just looking for ways to be in the world.” For, perhaps what professors as public intellectuals (at least in the humanities) “model” for students is not so much “ways to be in the world” as ways to not be so certain how to be in the world? And maybe the world could use more of that uncertainty.
If we started to imagine models of public culture and public intellectualism (and teaching and graduate education and economic dynamics) that were not equated with a mere marketplace of ideas, could this lostness regain its value, its purpose? Shouldn’t markets serve public culture (and private longings) rather than vice-versa?
*I hope the (unintended) irony of linking to the Amazon.com page for Menand’s book has become apparent by the end of this post. It makes me think about the potential non-consumer dimensions of Amazon’s vast storehouse of book titles and reviews — non-consumer value from which Amazon, of course, seeks to profit (just turn on 1-click order!).