birds vs. squirrels

You Forget Her

CHECK OUT THE ZINE!

Where do I begin? Where do I end?

I started to think about this project early in the semester when we discussed how writers and readers merge in a hypertext/hypermedia environment, where one becomes a “(w)reader” of texts. This interrogation of authorship as well as the navigation of the binary of writer/reader mirrors feminist/queer theory. What solidified my idea to do a “poem” of individual lexias within an aural space was re-reading Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” in the context of our Katherine Hayles discussion. Haraway’s discusses biology being technological; our biology is a communications system: “There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic,” (532-33). Judith Butler extends this idea: “...we would be foolish to think that life is fully possible without a dependence on technology, which suggests that the human, in its animality, is dependent on technology, to live. In this sense, we are thinking within the frame of the cyborg as we call into question the status of the human and that of the livable life,” (13). Butler, in this discussion, probes many of the same themes that Haraway does; what it means to be “human”, what it means to have these distinctions, boundaries, and norms, and how such boundaries and norms affects those who embody difference, who, by the systematic functionality of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are dehumanized. This dehumanization (or even outright denial of human, as Butler defines it) due to privilege or a place of political/social power, even comes from (as bell hooks reminds us) “female” persons/bodies. This was the ideological thrust behind the verbal part of my project (which I loosely call a poem). I wanted the speaker (who is gender ambiguous) to speak “back” to a privileged woman, to claim humanity and livability, while interrogating the systematic oppressive ideologies that haunt us all.

Another ideological aspect of my project came from a deep meditation about the body itself, which relates to the question of “human” as discussed above, in addition to how the body interacts with technology. Hayles not only works within feminist practice of deconstructing the mind/body split, but does so in the context of information technology. Hayles writes, “In these views the impact of information technologies on the mindbody is always understood as a two-way relation, a feedback loop between biologically evolved capabilities and a richly engineered technological environment. Such feedback loops may be reaching new levels of intensity as our environments become smarter and more information-rich, but the basic dynamic is as old as humans” (301). To construct this project that is about bodies, in that it probes how bodies interact with their environments, how bodies are gendered, racialized, and categorized, in addition to probing the impact of privilege on the definition of “human,” was a difficult task to say the least, but one that I felt worthy of exploration through a multimedia project. The multiple ways the verbal, aural, and visual texts are presented interrogates both form and theory on these levels.

Judith Butler discusses the body in a way that I wanted to be reflected in my project:
The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh
expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence. The body
can be the agency and instrument of all these as well, or the site where
“doing” and “being done to” become equivocal. Although we struggle for
rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not
quite ever our own. The body has its invariably public dimension;
constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and
is not mine, (21).
Not only do our bodies intersect with technology, as Haraway, Hayles, and Butler point out, but they also intersect with one another. For instance, if I stand close enough to you, I breathe your skin cells, as your skin itself is porous, it comes in contact with the moisture from my mouth. I became more and more interested in how I might work with this idea in my own writing after doing the in-depth study of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl for one of my seminar papers. With my own project, I wanted the speaker and the woman spoken to/about to reflect this; I wanted them to be connected, not only through a potential gendering of their bodies, but also through their shared experience of the body (and what comes with it: desire, shame, expectation, gendered “norms,” etc.).

Authority/Authorship: Whose piece is it?

One of the aspects of creating a multimedia text and then “sharing” it in multimodal ways is that authorship is interrogated and explored. In making the video, I created my own “texts” (audio and the screen capture of the construction of the poem) but also borrowed visual texts from open source and activist media sources on the web. Who is the “author” then, but a “node in an information network”? (Landow, 127, interpreting Lyotard). I know that this idea of authorship itself as nodal may be disconcerting to some, because it decentralizes authority and destabilizes normative identity categories. As Landow says, “radical changes in textuality produce radical changes in the author figure derived from that textuality,” (128). Though the video is not technically hypertext, the intertextuality of the verbal piece, the audio/aural piece, and the photos nonetheless destabilize the notion of a “unitary self” (Landow 131). This destabilization or decentralization of authority is desirable for me, as it creates a space for inspiration, exploration, and collaboration that I didn’t necessarily achieve when creating text(s) on paper.

However, Landow goes a bit too far in his discussion of the limits of a paper text in terms of its linearity. Our Wardrup-Fruin text is a partial rebuttal to his point that “the linear habit of thought associated with print technology often influence us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization, and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment,” (132). Espen Aarseth makes a more clear distinction in “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory”: “It must immediately be pointed out that this concept [nonlinearity] refers only to the physicological form (or arrangement, appearance) of the texts, and not to any fictional meaning or external reference they might have. Thus it is not the plot, or the narrative, or any other well-known unit...but the shape and structure of the text itself,” (Aarseth, 762). My history of creating art with paper and print technology would only partially agree with Landow; there is a limit to what one can do with a typewriter and a photocopier, a Sharpie and a borrowed/pirated text, yet, (as hopefully my zine will demonstrate), decentralizing the author/reader/text can also be achieved through print technology (as Aarseth states). One can open the zine from any point and begin reading. The pages can be read in any order and meaning(s) can be made from whatever order the reader chooses. The one limitation to the zine is that it is not seemingly infinite in its possible combinations, as some more robust hypertexts are. I will also admit that I had not thought of creating a deliberately non-linear text before I was exposed to post-structuralist and feminist/queer theory, radical politics, and/or hypermedia theory.
How these modes of thinking influenced my creation of the parts of this project have been manifold. Decentralizing the author, borrowing and remixing texts, and collaborating with another artist on the audio piece were all practices that were heavily influenced by our class discussions and readings.

Visual Poetics: What does the video want?

When I originally conceived of my project, I first only wanted to create an aural text with a verbal component (the voice in the audio and the zine). I then began to consider what it might look like if I documented the process of creating the verbal text somehow. I also wanted to stretch my technical skills a bit; I have never worked with digital video. I was also struck by many of Mitchell’s points in What Do Pictures Want?, especially when he discusses reciprocity of the “looking at others and being looked at” and how this reciprocity constitutes social realities. He goes further to rebut the notion of discussing the visual in the same way we discuss language: “Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the ‘sign,’ or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language,” (47). At first, I wanted the video to turn the image into language, to “play” with Mitchell’s assertion a bit. I used Camtasia to document my writing process (over 26 hours) and then sped it up and cut and mixed the video, putting the writing process out of chronological order. What I found, however, is that the “language” (the words on the digital “page”) were images, and vice versa (especially with the process “sped up,” the “language” becomes more pictorial).

In his chapter “Addressing Media,” Mitchell writes, “If we are to ‘address media’ as such, we must recognize that images, not language, are their main currency. Speech and writing are of course crucial to articulating and deciphering the messages conveyed by media, but the medium itself is the embodied messenger, not the message....Speech and writing, moreover, are themselves simply two kinds of media...” (215-216). By speeding up the video of the writing process and attempting to render it as more of an image, I attempted to investigate the notion of images as “main currency.” By interspersing montages of (what I feel to be) evocative pictures with the video of “language,” I wanted to further examine this notion.

Old Media: The Photocopier

Mitchell writes, “There has always been a shock of the new with media; they have always been associated with divine intervention, with double-edged gifts from the gods, and with legendary creators and messengers...That doesn’t mean that these innovations are not really new, or make no difference; only that the difference they make cannot be settled by labeling them ‘new’ and treating all of the past as ‘old.’” (213). As I stated earlier, part of my motivation for producing a zine was to create lexias that decentralized a traditional notion of authorship. Another larger part of my motivation for producing a zine was to attempt to reconcile this old/new binary that we’ve been navigating all semester. I wanted to experiment with the “old” in a way that was new to me (i.e. attempting to create a non-linear print text that “mashed up” images and text in a way that attends to Mitchell’s notion of language and image).

I started making zines in my late teens because I was exposed to them as a (thankful) alternative to the glossy magazines in the drug stores that many of my friends read. I also was becoming more involved in activism as well as more involved in literary study. I was (and still am) interested in the construction of “literary” when it comes to texts, as well as interested in navigating the question of access when it comes to print media (which is confounded when access to digital media is discussed). I am drawn to zines still because of the ability to create multiple texts on the cheap, as well as the ability to leave them on a park bench or in a coffee shop, knowing that someone will come along and pick one up. In addition, our discussion of copyright, remixing, and mash-ups when it comes to digital texts have root in zine culture. Nicky Marsh writes, “The DIY culture’s palpable disregard for the niceties of completion, copyright, consistency or visual harmony poses a clear affront to the category of the literary itself: how one can read these texts is the most obvious and pressing question that they pose. Consistently foregrounded in such apparently unhoned literary productions is the possession of illegitimate and unsanctioned means of production and the need for similar models of consumption,” (par. 5). In terms of access, I wonder if more people will see the zine (left and picked up in local spaces) than the video, posted among the multitude of videos on YouTube, or if the zine and the video will attract different audiences. Further, in a nod to our first class discussion about Barthes and text, I “wove” the URLs to both this essay and the video into the zine by printing them on strips of paper and literally weaving them into the front and back covers of the zine.

Stuck in the Aural Stage: Late Nights in the Home Studio

Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of this project was creating the audio/aural “text” for this project. My interest in how digital recording software has made the production of aural texts more accessible to artists working from the home is magnified in my growing fascination with noise. This semester, I focused on noise during our discussion of aural poetics, as I noise as something which “jams the code” and disrupts linear meaning-making (Reynolds, 55). This is especially interesting when contrasted with a traditional melody. With this aural text, I wanted to combine and contrast “organic” and electronically manufactured sounds to produce a multivocal text that challenges the melody of the piano piece.

I used a digital mini-disc recorder to capture sounds from the yard and the “natural” environment (though the sounds of traffic and passing trains are evident). I used the same technology to record the piano piece, which I composed as a variation/distortion on/of the music on which I learned the instrument (i.e. Schubert, Pachelbel). The distortion comes from the piano itself being slightly (and delightfully) out of tune, from the composition itself (navigating tonal/atonal notes), and from the environment in which it was recorded (in the front room of the house, subject to “domestic” background noise of the dishwasher and a toilet flushing). My partner, Jimmy Anthony, and I then “dumped” those sounds into a studio-recording/production program (Logic) and recorded additional tracks (3 vocal tracks: the reading of the verbal text, and 4 additional tracks of electronically created sounds/noise). I wanted to loop the vocal tracks to destabilize the linearity of the reading, and to attempt to produce a multivocal effect, where the lexias overlap and collapse upon one another. I also wanted the manufactured sounds to be at once in opposition to/interrupting the melodic drone of the piano and creating an ambience for the entire piece. My goal was to show noise as both ambient and disruptive, to call attention to how noise occupies our aural space in everyday life. The recording levels were adjusted to highlight these aspects of the composition: the “organic,” the verbal, the distorted, the melodic, the disruptive, the dramatic, the mundane.

Where do I end? Evaluation.

The most rewarding aspect of this project was how the creation of this project was steeped in a theoretical and ideological approach. It was also very difficult to navigate. Usually I just do it, and then figure out the why later. Thinking about theory and practice in tandem made for a true growth experience for me as both a person who makes things and as a person who analyzes things.

The most labor-intensive aspect of the project was creating and editing the video (especially once the audio was introduced). Because I had very little experience (actually zero experience) with digital video editing software, it was a long and frustrating road to get the video to a point where I felt confident enough to share it. If I had more time, I would certainly work on that aspect of the project. I would have also liked to include additional original video (I must acquire a digital video camera somehow). I feel like I spent more time on the technical aspect of the video than the artistic, though it does, in its present state, provide a satisfactory element to my project. It took me three nights of intense work to merely synch up the audio and video in a way that was pleasing to me. What I learned from this is that the technology (and how proficient I am with using it) influenced how I created the video, which, when I think about it, isn’t much different than when I made the transition from writing on a typewriter to using a computer. One of the limitations about my working with video is I could see how I wanted it to look in my head, but I couldn’t work with the technology in a way to come as close to my vision as I would have liked. This was not the case with the audio/aural text or the zine; both of those aspects of the project were very rewarding and instructive for me, most likely because I was more fluent with the technologies that produced them, which brings up issues of techno-literacy that I’d like to explore in future projects.

As far as my theoretical approach goes, I discovered Baudrillard late in the semester (when everything indeed seemed hyperreal), and given more time, I would have read more of his work, because I feel that it could have informed and influenced my project. I am also interested in getting deeper into the suggested texts on our extended bibliography, as I feel that what I’ve learned through this study has influenced me a great deal, in both how I approach theory and how I approach creating art (if I can even separate the two at this point).

Resources:

Aarseth, Espen J. “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory.” The New Media Reader.
Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. pp. 761-780.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge Press, 2004.

Harraway, Donna. “Cyborg Manifesto.” The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. 515-551.

Hayles, Katherine. “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments.” Configurations. Volume 10, Number 2, Spring 2002. pp. 297-320.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and the New Media in an Era
of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Marsh, Nicky. “Go Grrl: The Zine and the PostLiterary.” How2. Volume 2, Issue
2. Spring 2004(http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_2_2004/current/in_conference/marsh.htm).

Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Reynolds, Simon. “Noise.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Eds. Christopher Cox, and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum Press, 2004.