web sounds

wind harps

wave organ

croatia organ

same croatia organ

cuckoo clock with music

croatia organ static

cuckoo start

cuckoos

crazy clocks

other sounds

détournement, briefly

In "Methods of Détournement", Debord says "not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another." Life can never be too disorienting: détournement on this level would really make it beautiful." It's a striking analogy, interesting to consider in terms of real-life applicability. Seems true that "not many people would remain unaffected", but how exactly would it affect us? Would it highlight a fundamental difference between communities? Would it highlight a fundamental sameness between communities? The idea reminds me of a sculpture called South Facing 4.3 (2006) by David Cotterrell. The piece is a city plan that consists of a thousand miniature white plaster models of residential high-rise towers that replicate Shanghai's officially sanctioned building designs, with each structure facing south at least fifteen degrees. If that characteristic of Shanghai, which is dictated by the Chinese government due to traditions that I know nothing about, was detourned into my city what would the détournement mean without the context of those traditions? I like that Debord doesn't isolate the practice to art making, and as a result I found his ideas most interesting in relation to language and social behavior. "Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite." I imagine every person speaking and acting in his/her own code, and wonder if it's true that life can never be too disorienting. This seems to largely be about disunity, about taking things apart for the sake of it, not to create new associations. There's something disappointingly hollow in that. In "Postproduction", Bourriaud describes it like this: "The Situationists extolled la derive (or drift), a technique of navigating through various urban settings as if they were film sets. These situations, which had to be constructed, were experienced, ephemeral, and immaterial works, an art of the passing of time resistant to any fixed limitations." Does that equal a worldview where any given environment you encounter is a facsimile of the idea of another environment, a somehow "realer" environment? In that case drift is both attractive and depressing in its apparent absence of attachment. But have you ever been on a film set?

finally net art project

here it is.

Rambling answer to this week's assignment

Open source / open content increases accessibility of material and information for creative work and research by decreasing restrictions and limitations, which seems to offer nothing but advantages for remixers of culture. The possibilities for derivatives would be like an infinitely nesting matryoshka doll (but the layers are nested in a progression of depth rather than size). And maybe you just keep adding doll layers to the outer most doll layer, instead of opening more and more doll layers. I guess it can work either way. Or picture endlessly peeling an onion, but in reverse, so the layers are peeled on rather than off. Imagine anything with many layers, I guess, is how I’m thinking of it. Sort of like what the discovery of a new easy-to-visit planet or additional dimension -- complete with orange sky and purple ocean and inverted mountains -- might to a landscape painter… overwhelming but exciting.

Also, open source’s increased (or at least, democratized) availability of basically everything would either feed the over-developed sense of entitlement of the average consumer, who seems to never stop wanting more acquisitions, or perhaps de-center the ownership aspect of that entitlement syndrome. Sharing is supposed to be good for people. Being a contributing member of an active community is also supposed to be healthy, but it’s probably going to be hard for most folks to give up on this ingrained notion of individual authorial superiority. Which is perhaps why even though the idea of copyright appears archaic (ESPECIALLY when applied to digital/networking culture) people continue to cling to its false (?) sense of security. Does it effectively guard against someone taking credit for something that you created? If that’s what most artists are afraid of, then it seems like the attribution option of Creative Commons licensing should provide adequate peace of mind. Alternative licensing procedures (like creative commons) appear to be trying to evolve along with creative output and technology, unlike the US copyright laws, which seem mostly irrelevant to the “protection” of creative expression. Copyright is useful to those who make money from distributing copies of things and want to prevent unsanctioned reproductions from reducing their ability to make money, right? From this view, it deals more with distribution than creation, and since I frankly don’t expect to ever make money off of copies of my art work, I’m not personally very concerned with copyrighting.


Regardless of source material being freely accessible or fiercely protected, I don’t believe in a purely personal production that is immune to contamination by or reflection of cultural production. Even if your work isn’t obviously derivative, it’s inescapably a product of culture, because you are too. Going back to Jonathan Letham’s article The Ecstasy of Influence, artistic voice “isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” I sure do agree, but I almost want to object to Letham’s use of the word “humbly”, which implies a lowering of pride, or an expected drop in esteem… as though “creating out of a void” is the preferred, more respectable practice rather than what it is: a harmful mythological view of creativity that continues to haunt and confuse the minds of artists.

Exciting Divorcée

One thing I've been working on recently, a video called Exciting Divorcée, involves a multi-screen projection of three Dirt Devil television commercials starring Fred Astaire. At the time they came out (90's) critics were indignant over these ads, which featured the digital insertion of vacuum cleaners into clips of well known Astaire dance solos. Sensitive fans of Fred Astaire (and classic Hollywood musical style) saw this as a distasteful insult to the man and to the genre, but their high-minded disapproval was heightened by the fact that Astaire's widow Robyn Smith Astaire had been burning many bridges in her litigation-happy obsession with protecting Astaire's image... her dogged efforts even led to the passing of California's "Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act". The controversy generated by her decision to permit use of (sell) Astaire's image to a tacky, blatantly commercial endeavor is punctuated by her simultaneous righteous (and loud) outrage over a condom manufacturer's attempt to put Fred's face on their packaging. The contradiction fascinated me and led to the form that is gradually taking shape for this piece, which includes the three Dirt Devil advertisements projected onto three screens made from oversized (4 inches in diameter) latex condoms. I'd like to add an element to the installation that directly addresses the implications of Robyn Smith Astaire's "ownership" of her head husband's image, but in its current form, the crux of the work is the dynamic between the material of the projection surfaces and the projected imagery.

I’m also concerned here with considering the function (and meaning) of objects. The condom’s identity as on object is based on its function, so that recognition of the object immediately evokes a meaning that must in some way be sex-related. I’m interested in whether or not the image of Fred Astaire, a symbol of maleness based on neutered sexuality and chivalry, projected on the condom screens will “neuter” the object, or whether the nature of the object can successfully sexualize Astaire. The piece is based on questioning the latter idea, insofar as it seems to be a firmly held conviction of Astaire’s widow, evidenced by her fierce protection of Astaire’s likeness against the condom manufacturer. But it’s my hope that the relationship between the material projected upon and the projected images can build some new meaning or associations beyond an either/or type of binary.

Here's some documentation of the in-progress installation... unfortunately there's no sound on the video. I'm workin' on it.

Almost Too Pleasing

Michael Robinson and Takeshi Murata are two artists who both reconfigure assorted source materials. Their work has certain common characteristics that I'm compulsively drawn to, such as a leaning toward psychedelia, a bulk of 1980's cultural reference points, a campy use of digital technology, and varied transformative approaches to their source imagery. Check out Takeshi Murata's work on Youtube or watch an excerpt here. And lots of Robinson's work is up on his Vimeo page, which, speaking of sharing, is really nice.

With this kind of work there seems to be very little risk or cost to the originator of the original since the original remains in tact and inexhaustible. For better or worse, Little House on the Prairie stubbornly keeps existing in its previous form regardless of Robinson's intervention. Letham's "Ecstasy of Influence" articulates it much better than I can:

..."a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of “intellectual property” leaves the original untouched. As Jefferson wrote, 'He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.'"

HOLD ME NOW from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

VICTORY OVER THE SUN from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

Borges and I remix

She’s the one who wants to be always going places. Not for the places so much as the in-between spaces. She has a delusional conviction about being able to truly exist only in the in-between. I’m sick of in-between, I want a solid here or there. Any restless discomfort I might experience is her doing. I know of her from scattered messages, disguised as small coincidences that grow accumulate until I agree to move somewhere new.

I feel equally displaced by small town familiarity and big city anonymity. She shares these anxieties, but in a manic way that turns them into symptoms of a disorder. Every new place makes a new past, and every particular past, dozens of them now, are my loss and her gain. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion. Or to her.