memory of a ghost

Hi again



“The first image was a portrait. In classical mythology, a lovely youth named Narcissus lay beside a pool gazing in adoration at his own reflection. Ignoring the loving attention of the nymph Echo, he wasted away, died and was metamorphosed into a flower bearing his name.”
-Joanna Woodall in “Portraiture: Facing the Subject”

pieces from Salvador Dali’s “Flower Suite” collection

play this song:

Memory of a Ghost by Virtual Boy

with this video:

About the “Unnamed Soundsculpture”:

“The body – constant and indefinite at the same time – ‘bursts’ the space already with its mere physicality, creating a first distinction between the self and its environment. Only the body movements create a reference to the otherwise invisible space, much like the dots bounce on the ground to give it a physical dimension. Thus, the sound-dance constellation in the video does not only simulate a purely virtual space. The complex dynamics of the body movements is also strongly self-referential. With the complex quasi-static, inconsistent forms the body is ‘painting’, a new reality space emerges whose simulated aesthetics goes far beyond numerical codes.

Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the ‘alternative worlds’ we project (Vilém Flusser) and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22,000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again.”

that is all, good night

artists pam et jenny and salvador dali

Revolve

Turkish Voodoo by Free the Robots

I walk in the world I create

-Wallace Stevens

Just a little segment of an essay I wrote this week, describing, among other things, the ways in which art has the power to induce social change:

Relational artworks which promote spectator participation emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to late-capitalism’s increasingly regulated and conformist systems of living produced by the mass media. This institutionalization and commodification of experience caused social unrest as blacks, homosexuals, women and Latinos began to fight the politics mapped onto their bodies with social action and multiple civil rights movements.

Seeing themselves as inseparable from the social conditions of their context, artists like laborers began to “challenge the role of the institution and the autonomy of art in a time of social crisis” (Bryan-Wilson 26).

In order to do so, artists of the time rejected Clement Greenberg’s notion of modernist formalism expressed in his essay “American Type Painting” of 1955 which excluded bodily processes from the reception and creation of the work.

In turn, they re-activated subjectivity in the consideration of artwork, often in the form of uncommodifiable, one-time experiences such as “happenings” which spilled from galleries onto the streets. This sort of art had to be done rather than paid for.

By refusing museums and other institutions (such as the traditions of art history) which dictated the value of art, the artists gave power and agency back to the spectators. In “An Introduction to the Do-It-Yourself Artwork”, Anna Dezueze notes the “liberatory potential of participation” in accordance with Guy Debord’s “influential idea…that passive modes of engagement encouraged by late-capitalist, consumer-driven economies can be countered with action and lived experience” (16).

Among other avant-garde movements of the time, Debord’s Situationist International presented participatory works or “Situations” which provided “alternative models for social or political interaction” with the hopes that participation would “encourage individuals and groups to take control of their own social and political existence” (Dezueze 15). In this way, art history’s shift to the rise of the spectator during this period illustrates how relational art can break down the barriers between art and life, and therefore be an impetus for social change.

In other words, “Doing is knowing”: the awareness of one’s body, and its power to contribute to the meaning of the work of art through embodied participation, makes the spectator an agent of social change instead of a passive consumer of culture.

La Dérive

Tim Reynolds

Yosi Horikawa’s “Bubbles”. Listen to with headphones on and enjoy.

In my contemporary art course I recently learned about psychogeography, defined by Guy Debord (leader of 60s avant-garde movement Situationist International) as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
Psychogeography, in parallel with Freud’s study of the subconscious, intends to reveal the way one’s environment affects one’s behavior simply by the way one feels, consciously or subconsciously, while immersed in it. In order to explore the effects of a geographic location on emotion, desire, interactions, and identity, the Situationists exercised what they call the dérive:
“A dérive is an unplanned tour through an urban landscape directed entirely by the feelings evoked in the individual by their surroundings.”
Basically, the dérive permits urban wandering, a riddance of all normal motivations for movement (including work and leisure), with the intention of creating a brand new, authentic experience. The wanderer has no destination and chooses his or her own path based on desire, instinct and spontaneity.
This exploration of space can be looked at as an exploration of oneself, one’s own subconscious, as one explores what draws them to certain places when there is no design or plan. No rational reason to go this way or that.
“The dérive grants a rare instance of pure chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and authentic experience of the different atmospheres and feelings generated by the urban landscape.”
On a larger ideological and political level, the Situationists considered dérives an essential tool to escape the mundane, robotic path of late-capitalist society:
“The need for the dérive is necessitated, according to Situationist theory, by the increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life trudged through every day by workers in advanced capitalism.

The term is literally translated into English as drift.”
(quotes via Wikipedia)

Yago Hortal

Jeff Soto

"My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me"

-CG Jung

http://neave.com/digital-graffiti/
http://i.imgur.com/FICyI.png