Scott Zuke | ART214

Penny Emancipation Coalition

2006-12-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

Abolish Penny Circulation!

As of writing this, most of the layout is in place and polished, but only the index and "cost of production" pages have been uploaded. Besides filling in content for the rest of the pages, I also need to start working on the media to be incorporated. There's not much in the way of images, but I'm trying to avoid clutter.

Website: The First Page

2006-11-18T15:11:00.000-08:00

Can be seen here.

Blithe Riley

2006-11-13T15:46:00.000-08:00

Although I found Ms. Riley's work to be more clearly defined as performance or gallery art than Siobhan Rigg's, I'd have to say that my lack of comprehension of modern art continues to be a problem. Mostly I'm referring to her gallery piece, "Shaker, Crawler, Wall." Of the three pieces, the only one that I thought I understood was the Wall, which involved an element of creating a stimulating experience for the visitors. It also made an interesting observation about how eye-hand coordination can be tricked, which confuses a person's senses in an interesting way. The other two pieces, especially the Shaker, were a bit bizarre, and I really couldn't come up with an interpretation for what was going on.

The piece that was built onto an old water tower framework was the most interesting to me in terms of showing a creative use for video as an artistic medium.

I also liked that she was involved in the database project, collecting interviews with artists and making them available to the public. Although I don't have much personal use for that sort of thing, I'm sure archiving those sorts of interviews will have a lot of historical significance in the future.

Probably the most interesting thing that Ms. Riley shared was the Belief Objects project. This is another work that has the potential to carry some philosophical and psychological significance. I'm not entirely sure what how the project is supposed to culminate and present itself, but that may have been due to the unfortunate technological problems during the presentation which prevented us from viewing some of the interviews that had been conducted so far.

Like I said, even if I didn't understand all of the pieces that Ms. Riley presented, I can at least tell that she is not only an active artist, but someone who is active in the art world, providing valuable services like the video archive project.

Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping

2006-11-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

This was a highly entertaining and enjoyable performance. I was continually impressed by the Reverend's inexhaustible energy as well as his skill in structuring long polemic monologues right on the spot. The group's act was up to date, already making references to the outcome of the General Election earlier this week. They sang well, capturing perfectly the atmosphere of the Evangelical gospel choirs that their show imitates, and I especially liked the piano music running throughout the performance.

As performers, I really liked Reverend Billy and the four members of his choir; As activists, they make me nervous.

First of all, the choice of adopting the Reverend and gospel choir act is troubling. Yes, there is comedic value in creating a sort of parody of the kinds of people that these actors certainly oppose politically (that is, actual Baptists ans Evangelicals). The problem is when this act, this parody, loses its comedy and becomes the true persona of the actors. The power dynamic in the real Evangelical churches is that the Reverend serves as a leader to the congregation, but he is subservient to God, just like everyone else. Reverend Billy is adopting this act as a powerful leader, and the whole point of the act is to get his audiences to trust him as a figure of authority. He, however, is not answering to a higher power: He is trying to get people to simply listen to him, the individual. (That being said, this criticism could be applied to most Televangelists)

I also find their message to be intentionally vague: Reverend Billy repeatedly says that we need more radical activism as opposed to gradual activism. He says that it is not enough to have non-violent protests, as they have not worked in the past few years. First of all, if there's any time that we should be worried about radicalism, it's now, when terrorism, violence, and riots are sparking throughout the world, fueled by radical religious fundamentalists. Radicalism is tied to violence in the modern vocabulary, and even though Rev. Billy never explicitly recommends violence or any sort, he never says anything at all to discourage it. All he says when he's advocating radical activism is, "Be creative."

Is his message vague enough to be called irresponsible? Possibly, since he is obviously someone who is aware of his audience and his intended impact upon it. He is an inflammatory speaker, visiting a heavily liberal college, and being sponsored by some of the college's activist groups, and the message he's sending out is: Be radical, Be creative, non-violent protest is not enough. Explicitly, he even says to go out and confront people in public, bothering them while they are shopping: "You just might be...loving your neighbor."

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is undoubtedly an entertaining group, and I'm glad that they were brought to St. Mary's. They very much depend, however, on a sympathetic audience -- one that is pretty much already on board with their politics, and doesn't require a well-presented argument or rationalization for their prescribed radical action. For the most part, I am sympathetic to their aim -- after all, just a couple years back Wal-Mart tried to build a new store across the street from my house -- but I'm still not totally comfortable with the sorts of actions they seem to advocate.

Flash Animation

2006-11-07T11:27:00.000-08:00

Click here to view "TennisBallName.swf"

What the Cyborg Manifesto Means

2006-11-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html

This article in Wired Magazine managed to explain what Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" was all about in understandable terms. It also provided some background information on Haraway, which helped me to understand her personal philosophy.

From what I understand in the article, the Cyborg Manifesto is making the claim that people can be called cyborgs even if they don't go so far as having silicone chips implanted under their skin. The modern culture and way of life is so integrated with technology that it has become a part of us in its own way. Just as one computer, although physically retaining its original hardware, gains the capabilities of a supercomputer when it is connected to a network, such as the Internet, so are people empowered through a sort of cultural/technological network.

In my initial reaction to "A Cyborg Manifesto" I criticized Haraway's communication skills, as her impenetrable writing style failed to get across her intended message; Even now that I have read a couple of interpretations of the piece, I still think she unwisely set herself up to be needlessly cryptic. The word "cyborg" has a distinct definition as being a person with enhanced abilities due to technological modifications made directly to the body. Haraway is trying to redefine an already established term; This strategy has been attempted by arrogant young philosophers in the past, such as John Dewey, and they ended up spending the rest of their careers trying clarify what they really meant.

A Cyborg Manifesto

2006-10-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

I found this article to be extraordinarily difficult to understand. I submitted the url to a website that tests readability according to three different algorithms, and it literally scored off the scale for two of them in terms of difficulty. The third one yields a number on a scale of 100 -- the higher the number, the easier the page is to understand. Web content is encouraged to fall between 60 and 70; this article scored 31. I found most of the article to be grammatically correct, but so abstract and filled with purposefully obscure words as to make it nonsensical. I do not see this as a sign of superior intellect, but of poor communication skills, exhibited by someone trying very hard to sound intellectual. It didn't help that it was packed with countless typos and spelling errors. Literally, there was a point in this essay in which I asked myself if I might have missed a disclaimer stating that the article was a long and elaborate implementation of the cut-up method on a real essay.

Much was said throughout the essay about race, gender, politics, economics, and other things, but I truly cannot summarize what this article was about. Much of the article doesn't seem to be saying anything about cyborgs, and I can't even follow what the author's definition of a cyborg is. She starts with a thesis that seems simple enough:

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

But almost immediately she continues to discuss cyborgs in a way that is nearly impossible to understand:

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense — a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.

What on Earth does any of this mean? Even though I've had some basic introduction to Marxism, and I know what alienated labor means, I can't come close to comprehending how any of it fits into what she's saying.

As much as I wish I had something more insightful to say about this essay, the fact remains that I was unable to penetrate its spectacularly unclear writing style. I cannot comment on what it accomplished because I honestly couldn't follow what was being said. I almost recognized some feminism in it, and I certainly saw a lot of references to Marxism and socialism, but I cannot say what any of it amounted to.

Soviet WWII Photos

2006-10-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

The exhibit current at the Boyden Gallery, consisting of various WWII photos from Soviet photographers, has several powerful pieces. Two of my favorite pieces were actually ones that were presented in pairs.

The first pair showed a scene with about 10 soldiers working in shallow cover in what appears to be a large, open, farm landscape. The first frame just shows all of the soldiers -- two are working to carry a third, on a stretcher, either into or out from the foxhole. Others are perched around the pit's ledge, scanning the distance, and others are just sitting around. The second frame shows almost the identical scene--no one has moved--except a large shell has just impacted the ground fifteen or twenty feet in the background.

The other pair shows a group of five soldiers huddled around a piano in a bombed out home. It's a relaxing scene, as one of them plays a classical piece and the others relax to the music. The next shot shows the same setting, but three of the soldiers are not poised for battle, leaning out of the bombed out wall that had been in the background of the first frame. One of them is aiming a rifle, and another holds a Soviet stick grenade. Two of the other soldiers are not to be found -- they probably had to move around into other parts of the building to see what was going on.

I liked these photo pairs because they showed the volatility of the battlefield in times of war. In a fraction of a second people can go from temporary comfort back to a state of high alert. No medium captures this moment-to-moment contrast like photography. Video might come close, but its analog nature, which shows a more gradual change of state, is less effective and startling than the comparisons that can be made between two photographs taken moments apart.

I was also struck by the photo, titled "Grief," which showed a woman recognizing the face of her dead son on the battlefield. What was interesting was the two versions of the photo on display -- the original, which had regular dimensions and a washed out sky, and the final, which was more squared in proportion and had had a dark, forboding sky transposed for added dramatic effect. A friend of mine noted that he preferred the original, with its less dramatic composition. I think I can understand his preferrence: the altered version is so dramatized that it almost romanticizes the scene, making it too poetic and less realistic. The original print is so real that its impact on the senses is made all the stronger. Such scenes stand on their own.

Print Project

2006-10-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

My photoshop print project shows various landmarks transposed into the St. Mary's campus. One photo shows the Roman Colosseum in place of the Crescent townhouses; Another shows the U.S. Capitol in place of DPC at the end of the townhouse greens; and the last shows the statue, "The Awakening," in the St. Mary's river.

Colosseum on the Crescent

Capitol on the Greens

"The Awakening" in the River

Animation

2006-10-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

Click here to see it.

Siobhan Rigg

2006-10-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

After Ms. Rigg's presentation, someone in the audience asked about whether there was much planning that goes into her projects or if they are more improvised. I think a lot of the material she presented could be questioned and critiqued in this way.

Her first couple of slides - those dealing with "found video footage" - were recognizable as art pieces, even if their intention was a bit obscure. From the micro-army on, however, she transitioned more into what she called performances. Are they art? Are they activism? Are they anything at all besides tactical exercises of organizing people? I wasn't really sure, and I couldn't tell if she was either. They seemed more like what she decided would be fun, experimental activities, performed for her own amusement -- whether or not anyone else derived any message or aesthetic pleasure from them was either secondary or hardly considered.

Once again I am tempted to plead ignorance and say that I just don't understand modern art. I'm sure that, after so much experience and education, artists like Ms. Rigg must know what they're doing, but I still haven't been given a sufficient primer -- I fail to see the value in what they are doing.

Turing

2006-10-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

I came across information about Alan Turing last year while writing a philosophy paper about fate versus free will. I was researching the "Game of Life," a simple game that takes place on a grid. Following four simple rules, squares on the grid are born, continue living, or die each turn. A living block that has three or more adjacent living blocks may die from overcrowding, for example. When patterns of blocks are lit up from the start and then the game is turned on, the automated process begins, revealing that simple starting positions can result in remarkably complex reactions, such as a small pattern that quickly grows into a huge one, or a grouping of blocks that are arranged in such a way that they begin reacting with each other in an infinite loop. After the Game of Life was created, it was determined that it qualified as a "Turing Machine," meaning that it is capable of representing all of the major logical functions of a computer, such as "if, then" statements.

In the article, Turing makes several familiar references. The idea that if we know the precise starting positions of elements in a system, as well as the rules which will determing their behavior, we will also be able to know how they will be arranged indefinitely into the future was a common philosophical belief during the Enlightenment. During this time, scientists and philosophers believed that our understanding of physics could allow us to one day predict the future, or at least understand exactly what's going on in the present. They also believed that this disproved free will, in that it meant that everyone's actions and thoughts were basically predeterminned based on the starting arrangement of atoms at the Big Bang and the laws of physics which dictated them ever since they were set into motion. (This theory took a hit at the discovery of quantum physics, which seem to include an element of randomness, but it could be argued that it only appears random because we don't fully understand the laws at work.)

I'm not sure that it will be such a big deal when computers are able to "think." The boolean logical statements seem to do that much already, as long as the calculations are able to be complex enough. Human thought follows the same logical statments, but every decision that is made by a man goes through innumerable phases of calculation, taking into account a few variables that we are aware of, and who knows how many variables that we are unaware of, but lurk deep inside our heads. Turing is right when he says that thinking computers will require huge storage capacity -- just imagine how much sensory information must be stored by a human baby's brain before it is capable of the most infantile of independent thoughts.

I remember reading a commentary a couple months back pondering whether the Internet could possibly become self-aware, or even if it may have done so already. I'm not exactly sure what that'd mean philosophically, but I guess that would be a bit unsettling, especially based on the quality of the material stored online.

Print Project Sketches

2006-10-02T15:33:00.000-07:00

Hane's Point sculpture in the St. Mary's River.

The Colosseum in place of the Crescent.

The U.S. Capitol in place of Dougherty Palmer Commons.

Hannah Hoch

2006-09-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/classes/ah111/hhoch1.jpg
http://www.mclink.it/n/dwpress/donnarte/11_98/2.jpg

http://www.yellowbellywebdesign.com/hoch/gallery.html

Photoshop Non-entry

2006-09-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

I missed the entry deadline for the "in stitches" competition on Worth1000.com, but here's what I had done before I realized that submissions were no longer being taken.

The idea was to take a picture of a cartoon character and turn it into an iron-on patch design. This, of course, is Captain Planet. He's a hero. Gonna take pollution down to zero, etc.

I changed technique a couple of times throughout the long process of drawing stitches line-by-line, and I had to adjust again when I tried working from my own computer, which doesn't have Photoshop (I used Gimp, which has a lot of the same functionality, but not quite as much power, and it's not as intuitive as Photoshop).

One of the key filters that is needed to pull off the illusion of stitches (bevel) wasn't included on Gimp, so I had to play around with settings until I found a suitable alternative.

Photoshop Contest Entry

2006-09-26T12:27:00.000-07:00

This is my submission for the "Celebrity Tombstone" contest on Worth1000.com. Although he surely has a real one, I created an alternate tombstone for the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce. On the tombstone he is referred to as "Prof. Charles S. Pierce." Throughout his lifetime, Peirce was tormented by the fact that he was never granted a position as a professor and by the constant misspelling of his last name (pronounced like "purse"). Nevertheless, people continued greeting him as "Professor Pierce." Like all good philosophers, he was largely unknown during his time, and he eventually fell into poverty and alcoholism. A sad story, but a humorous tombstone.

I also added in the beer bottle and kept the engraving very light to emphasize how overlooked he is by the public.

See the entry page on Worth1000.com.

Fantic

2006-09-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

While reading the first few pages, regarding the "computer people" who are making it difficult for the general public to become acquainted with computers as a useful medium, I was reminded of an old Saturday Night Live skit about just such a computer geek. Nick Burns, "Your company's computer guy," is placed in charge of maintaining the computers for a business. He is not using computers to generate work, like the regular employees -- instead, his confidence is based on his computer expertise, and the fact that the workers have to look to him to solve their problems. It may not be possible to completely eliminate our need for computer experts, but Nelson would probably say that the world would be better if people like the workers in the skit knew enough about their computers so that they could focus on their work rather than having to worry about the media on which they compose it.

The problem is that computers have not been designed by the workers, but by people like Nick Burns. As a result, things like control schemes and default set-ups often get in the way of productivity. For all of the things a computer can do, many of its uses will go to waste if its interface is not intuitive. In a process of what Marx called "alienation," humans created computers, but made the mistake of becoming subject to their own creations. Computers are meant to be tools to simplify our lives, but instead they complicate most things. Now when someone is trying to create a piece of artwork on Photoshop, it could easily turn out that the person has to spend more time dealing with the software's interface, deep menus, unclear icons, and other organizational eccentricities than on the actual artwork.

To me, fantics sounds like the "art" of proper software development, and its something that could still use work, even though many improvements have been made since Nelson wrote the piece. It's not being ignored, though -- whenever I look at job listings for open-source software projects, "User Interface Specialists" are almost always in demand.

Angela Davis

2006-09-13T18:45:00.000-07:00

My final audio file for the Audacity project can be found here.

After reading about Angela Davis, I find myself more conflicted in my opinion of her than I had expected after only hearing the songs written about her. The songs, "Angela" by John Lennon and "Sweet Black Angel" by the Rolling Stones, only discuss her imprisonment. The songs lament how she was put in prison for a crime she didn't commit, saying that she's just a political prisoner and that racism was likely a factor.

The Wikipedia article written about her says that a gun found at the scene of the crime was registered in her name; She had a background in activism; She was a member of the Communist party and the Black Panthers; AND she evaded arrest. With that kind of a profile, her arrest doesn't seem particularly objectionable to me. I think if a similar situation were to occur today, people wouldn't question the decision to bring her into custody; They would see it as an acceptable means to ensure public safety in the face of violent protest.

On the other hand, I'm hesitant to say that John Lennon and The Rolling Stones were simply on the wrong side of this issue: I'm guessing there were other factors involved that stirred up so much public outrage. Also, after reading about Davis's education in philosophy, especially Sartre, one of my personal favorite philosophers, I can't help but feel some sympathy for her.

But then I read about how she cites Cuba as an idyllic government system, an opinion with which I strongly disagree on all sorts of ethical and philosophical grounds. Also, while I'm glad she opposes the death penalty, I was taken aback to see that she supports an anti-prison movement. As peaceful as she may be nowadays, in her old age, Davis strikes me as an extremist who easily could have had shady dealings in her youth. I am not sympathetic to her causes, and that makes it hard for me to think of her in the positive light that the project songs are trying to cast on her.

With this new take on Angela Davis, I think I will take an entirely different approach to the message I'll be attempting to communicate with the second part of the Audacity project; one that will diverge significantly from the message originally intended by the artists.

Response to "The Cut-Up Method"

2006-09-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

William S. Burroughs’s article, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” describes a process of breaking down articles of text into smaller pieces and recombining them in random order in an attempt to find new meaning or new ideas. What Burrough’s does not clearly define is the purpose of using this technique. When he says that, “The cut-up method brings to writer the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years,” it appears that he is suggesting that the work resulting from the method is itself a work of art, just as the collage is a form of art. I would disagree with this analogy.

In general, I would not consider any work that is created by chance to be art. For one thing, such creations are rarely intended to be art, and I, unlike Burroughs, believe that intent is an important factor for determining what constitutes art, and what is a mere accident.

Fine art should not be simply about aesthetic appeal; Art is a form of communication. Works that are created by chance, without a specific message or intent behind them, raise difficult questions when it comes to attributing them to an artist. Should the artist be credited for conveying a message simply by accident, or should credit go to chance? Is it enough that the accidental artist was able to recognize the artistic value in his work and then share it, or should he be concerned that his own purposeful efforts have failed at communicating a message as meaningful as something that appeared at random?

Artists who work with the collage are working with a specific message in mind, and they find clippings from other works that can be meaningfully combined in such a way as to convey that message. The cut-up method, on the other hand, is not performed with any intended message as a guide; It is a process used to discover, rather than to communicate meaning. Therefore, I do not think that a piece created through the method, left as it is, qualifies as a work of art. Instead, it is a tool for stimulating creative thought that could be channeled back into a real work of art.

The introduction mentions the book The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, which was supposedly created only by a computer. However, some who have studied the work believe that the computer was used to randomly generate drafts that were then edited into its final form by a human. In this case, a form of the cut-up method is being used to stimulate thought, which is then being used to create the real work of art. As the introduction says, “Those using the cut-up method should note that it is hardly incompatible with the process of revision.” Like revision, the cut-up method is a tool for writers; It can be used to look at the subject material from a new angle.

In the example of the cut-up method that is included at the end of Burroughs’s article, the reader sees that the final result of the method, if read literally, is unintelligible. Sentences are broken and change subjects mid-stream. The human brain, expecting only to be faced with clear, fully-developed thoughts, attempts to compensate for the confusion by filling in the gaps in the sentences, in a process of confabulation. This increased activity would likely be similar to an intense brainstorming session. The notes one scribbles down during a brainstorming session are not artwork, but they can certainly serve as the foundation of a work of art to be created later.

From another angle, I also find that I am uneasy with Burrough’s suggestion that, “Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups.” My concern is that the next step might be to apply the cut-up method to existing works of literary art. Could you apply cut-up to Moby Dick and find new meanings and evocative word combinations? Probably. But to do so would literally destroy the original message that Melville was conveying; This is an abuse against art, not a new expression of it.