Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian professor of English, philosopher of communication theory and a public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.[1][2] He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the rest of his life.
McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.[3] Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.[4] In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.[5] With the arrival of the internet, however, interest in his work and perspective has renewed.
(wikipedia) Kugelmugel is a former micronation located in Vienna, Austria.
Located in ViennaPrater, the Republic of Kugelmugel declared independence in 1984, after disputes between artistEdwin Lipburger and Austrian authorities over building permits for the ball-shaped house which he built in the countryside in Lower Austria
and which was moved into the park by the authorities. The house is
enclosed by a barbed-wire fence and is the only address within the
proclaimed Republic. Its address is "2, Antifaschismusplatz 1" (2nd district (Leopoldstadt),
"Anti-Fascism Square" No. 1), and the founder is the head of state of
hundreds of non-resident citizens. Lipburger refused to pay taxes to the
Austrian government and began to print his own stamps, for which he received a prison sentence in court. Only a pardon by the Austrian President saved him from going to jail.
Austrian state officials relocated the structure to the Prater park and surrounded it with barbed wire fencing.
Kugelmugel has since become a tourist attraction in Vienna due to its
unique history and architecture. The word "Kugel" means "sphere" in German; the word "Mugel" is an Austrian German expression for "bump" or "mogul".[1]
"One of my discoveries was that in order to create the first imprint of a word -- when you learn a word, whatever it is, "coffee," "love," "mother," there is always a first time. There's a first time to learn everything. The first time you understand, you imprint the meaning of this word; you create a mental connection that you're going to keep using the rest of your life. And to create this mental connection, you need some emotions. Without emotion, there is no production of neurotransmitters in the brain, and you don't create the connection. So actually every word has a mental highway. I call that a code, an unconscious code in the brain."
Clotaire Rapaille is a world renowned market research specialist that works with companies to uncover a culture specific "code" that is used to exploit the "reptilian" drives of consumers.
I've been trudging through his bestseller The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as they Do (2006). In itRapaille explains his process of market research which is a little more thorough than normal market research sessions. Rapaille arranges a three hour long group interview that allows for people to relax and gradually reveal what emotions they have associated with certain products. The session is three hours long and is elaborated on in the video posted below. In the third hour people are guided into a relaxed state that Rapaille believes is similar to the state one is in when they first wake up. He believes that this state is beyond emotions and logic and is the reptilian understanding of people have to a product. This is where the code come from.
The recently revealed plans for the new campuses of Google, in Mountain View, Calif., designed by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, and Apple, in Cupertino, from Sir Norman Foster, are so striking: They, like the companies they will house, point to the future — the future, that is, as it looked in the 1960s. Images of the projected Apple campus — a four-tiered ringlike structure nestled in a thickly wooded landscape — evoke the landing of an alien spaceship. The central structure in Ingels’s and Heatherwick’s design is canopied by a sinuous glass membrane, a protective bubble or amniotic sac, shielding an entire section of the campus — not just buildings but bike paths and desks — while letting the abundant Northern California light stream in. In aerial renderings it looks like larvae, incubating a new and possibly terrifying future.
The new unearthly Silicon Valley campuses represent the triumph of privatized commons, of a verdant natural world sheltered for the few. Neither the Google nor Apple campus is open to the public, nor are their designs replicable on the scale that the ’60s utopians imagined for their designs. Well after the orchards of Northern California were overwhelmed by glass boxes and suburban tracts, the tech companies find themselves looking longingly at an Edenic, prelapsarian moment, when it seemed that — to adapt a more recent slogan — another world was possible. But what was originally borne from improvisation and a desire to live simply is now borne from unimaginable mountains of cash. The new Apple office will cost an estimated $5 billion, making it possibly the most expensive office building in history. We are dealing with a bubble of a different kind.
The following images are from structures still existing in Kassel Germany adjacent to the (former) School Architecture. Neglected but solidly standing.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
A (lot) Few (hopefully not too meandering) Clear Thoughts with a Title:
The Pratfalls of Resurrection
Since 2015, my ongoing
research and projects have centered on re-performance and resurrection. Not
resurrection in the ecclesiastical sense, but in a more George A. Romero way:
the walking dead, and all the connotations that go with that. Zombies, on account
of their cerebral dissonance, get a fairly bad rap: to be called a “zombie” is
to essentially say, “you’re brainless.” Yet, the walking dead surround us, and
they appear to be perfectly functional, some downright brilliant, or at least
called so on paper. Let’s consider Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces a performance series in which the artist covered
the canon: Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974); Vito Acconci’s Seed Bed (1972); Valie Export’s Action
Pants: Genital Panic (1969); Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (1973); Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) (the other two
pieces, were, in a fit of assumed modesty among this group, Abamovic’s own).
Abramovic’s rationale for doing this series: "There's nobody to keep the history
straight…I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do
it."[i]
When the history seems
to be out of control the compulsion is to get out the broom and dustpan and
tidy it all up. Of course, this is to assume that there is a mess that needs
cleaning to begin with. In the case of Abramovic, it’s unclear what, other than
an (admittedly pretty boring) post-structural stroll in the park was being
achieved – who wasn’t safely keeping the legacy of these performers straight (with
the exception of Export, who, like most female artists, gets historically
overlapped by their male counterparts)? That Abramovic had to go through estate
approval to perform these pieces is a testament to just how preserved these works are and how their gestures have changed
over the course of art history (read: institutionalized). Yet, all the problems
with Abramovic’s motives doesn’t make her gesture worth inquiry. That she feels
the need to pluck into history and try to sort it out is a maneuver that
increasingly finds artistic practices sharing space with art history.
Hal Foster, who wrote
the influential “Archival Impulse” in the late 1990s writes of archival artists
as an avant garde today today:
Not heroic, this avant garde will not
pretend that it can break absolutely with the old order or found a new one;
rather it will seek to trace fractures that already exist with the given order,
to pressure them further to activate them somehow. Neither avant nor rear, this
grade will assume a position of immanent critique, and often it will adopt a
posture of mimetic exacerbation in doing so…Perhaps, the paranoid dimension of
archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition - its desire to turn
belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature,
philosophy, and life into possible scenarios for alternative kinds of social
relations, to transform the no place of an archive into the new place of a
utopia.
To sum up: the
archive lives and breathes for revision and revisiting. Which is why we see
things like Kanye West tinker with his new album – if it can be called such a
thing given its elasticity – for the foreseeable future, or the headlines of
articles change throughout the day, or why composer Glenn Gould, who
re-performed classical music from the comfort of his home, disavowing live
performance for the recording, have his works programmed into a player piano,
where a sold out audience watched a ghost play music by very dead composers.
All
of this amounts for what I would consider as a condition – not in a negative
sense, but one that is popularized through our archival daily (social media,
camera phones, etc.). What I’m looking at when I think about re-performances or
revisiting old styles or works of art, while I, as some sort of art historian,
walk what feels like Philippe Petit on his tightrope between the two towers of
the World Trade Center (itself now ghosts that walk among the United States as
harbingers of fin-de-sicle 21st century hubris/the end of late
capital/infinite partisanal squawking that bankrupts American propensity for
ingenuity), the game of peddling preservation acts vs. responsible caring for
the canon, deciding the worth of what art gets talked about and what doesn’t,
enlightenment idea(lism) vs. the struggle of the real, etc.
Hippie Modernism had the brilliant subtitle: “the
struggle for Utopia.” Perhaps on account of the failures of the utopic
movements and moments of the 1960s and 1970s – bringing us the focus group,
individualism that somehow still doesn’t account for black lives but wraths
enough anti-authoritarian to posit Donald Trump as a viable presidential
candidate, not to mention co-opting such maneuvers into new types of freedom as
the basis for selling us shit, or making fast food choices easier, etc. – we don’t
believe in utopia anymore, or sincerity, or that there can actually be anything
mined out of the 1960s that doesn’t just jettison us into a cynicism. But this
is, of course, a generalizing at worst, a standard argument from the Left at
best. Re-peformance or revisiting or archival impulses or dipping into the
canon or social practice art or net art or resurrection, zombie or no, shouldn’t
be discounted strictly as an ouroboric postmodernism. Doing these things act as
a break of sorts, even if they are failed from the get-go or derivative. What I
mean is, as Foster aptly points out, there’s potential in recouping the losses
of the past, even if it ultimately leads to a wall – like Abramovic’s Beuys or
Gould’s reanimation. The struggle for utopia is not just limited to hippie
modernism, or a psychedelic aesthetic, but it’s likely the call for our today.
I don’t know how to break the cycle of jadedness that comes with 40 plus years
of postmodernism, or why, when we see someone cry over a tree being chopped
down, it’s pretty damn funny. The hope is that, through constant
reconsideration, the art historian’s task, but increasingly, more and more
present in art making (whether the artist may know it or not), we inevitably
stumble over something new, our consider a utopia plausible again.
With this in mind, I’ll
accidentally advertise while simultaneously invite:
Tentatively, May 11th,
will be the final installation (at least for this current term) of my organized
series Expanded Art History for Plants, a lecture series generously given
hosting allowance by Aaron & Grace (Uptool) at the UIC Greenhouse. The
night’s iteration will be titled “The Sounds of Utopia” and amongst other
speakers, I’d like to open with a non-cynical performance of Bob Dylan’s “The
Times They Are-A Changin.’” It would be my privilege to ask anyone in this
class, or reading this, or who knows a guy who knows a guy, to perform it with
me, be it in voice, banjo, harmonium, some kinda old Renaissance era harp, an
old jug, whatever. The reason for this song is its prescience as well as the
reminder of the time of which it originated, as well as its pertinence for my
own personal research projects: can we summon the ghosts of the past, no matter
how jaded we might be with their message, and make them feel sincere, or that
they still matter? We clearly want to, so why not?
If the 11th
doesn’t work we’ll try try try try again for a different date.
[i]New York
Times in
an interview published in early November 2005.
This weekend marks the first anniversary of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, an event that sparked anger, unrest and lots of questions about policing in communities of color. Those same issues were at play 50 years ago this month in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The story is familiar: a young black man pulled over by police for suspected drunk driving, an argument, a shoving match and within hours a full-blown riot. A few years later, a group of young black filmmakers from UCLA would use Watts as the backdrop and inspiration for a short-lived but influential film movement that came to be known as the "L.A. Rebellion." Its story is chronicled in a forthcoming book and expansive DVD collection.
More about the L.A. Rebellion: It functioned
as a cross-disciplinary group, filled with undergraduates and graduates from
all departments who wanted to learn filmmaking. They were a collaborative group, crewing on each other’s
films, offering critiques on rough cuts, and organized film exhibitions,
lectures, and conferences. Composed of
Africans and African Americans, they worked to create a film language to
respectfully express cultural particularity and Black thought. The L.A.
Rebellion sought to compel the audience to intervene in the social reality
rather than passively accept it. Bush Mama (1976) and Killer
of Sheep (1977) took place in the Watts neighborhood, where people who
actually lived there acted in the films.
In this way, L.A. Rebellion’s work created images that were very
particular. Their
community-oriented film praxis serves to refute Hollywood convention, and therefore
whiteness’ cultural power from being the unseen universal.
Be Kind, Rewind, dir. Michel Gondry, 2008. Two bumbling store clerks inadvertently erase the footage from all of the tapes in their video rental store. In order to keep the business running, they re-shoot every film in the store with their own camera, with a budget of zero dollars.
You'll Like This Film Because You're In It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol, 2008.
Michel Gondry has a utopian vision, and you're a part of it. In short, he sees a future in which communities will come together to create cinema. But here's the thing: it doesn't matter if the finished product is good or bad; it just matters you make it. This is Gondry's manifesto: it lays down the rules so that you and your neighbors can try it for yourself. Don't have a DV camera? Not to worry: you can write to Gondry via his website, and, if he thinks you're serious about following the protocol, he just might lend you one to carry it out.
In a way, he's advocating for the 21st century version of community theater: the process is to be as much fun as the performance, and the performance is to have a finite reach. It is for your friends and neighbors, not for some stranger mindlessly searching for Katy Perry videos on YouTube. To ensure that the protocol is not used as a gateway to Hollywood, Gondry has imposed a time limit on the inception and production of the video. The participants are to execute a series of tasks, each more difficult than the last, which will result in the completion of a short film. To discourage preciousness, Gondry repeatedly insists that "imperfection is your ally"; again, the purpose of the protocol is that you finish it.
Biblioburro: The Donkey Library, dir. Carlos Rendon Zipagauta, PBS, 2011. Biblioburro is the story of a librarian and a library. A decade ago, Colombian grade-school teacher Luis Soriano was inspired to spend his weekends bringing a modest collection of precious books, via two hard-working donkeys, to the children of Magdalena Province's poor and violence-ridden interior. As Soriano braves armed bands, drug traffickers, snakes and heat, his library on hooves carries an inspirational message about education and a better future for Colombia.
History Moves (est. 2015 by Jenny Brier, Director of UIC Gender and Women's Studies) is a public history project that presents under-explored aspects of Chicago’s history. We make public history accessible and meaningful to all Chicagoans by collaborating and curating with local organizations and residents to recount how they have changed the city and the course of its history. The mobile museum will move this history around the city, serving as a site for community engagement with ideas about the past and present. History Moves also engages in cultural partnerships through history making. Our toolkits will impart the skills required to produce and curate public history, with a focus on archival research, oral history, material culture and clear and concise writing. We will also work with area historical institutions such as libraries and archives to expand access to under-displayed historical sources.
