#and so interesting socially/politically in its underpinnings

[goatsandgangsters]

the design movements with "art" in the name are all such winners

arts and crafts. art nouveau. art deco.

all bangers, all the time

[mamthew]

Some thoughts on Metaphor: ReFantazio. I avoid spoilers for the most part.

It’s maybe impossible to overstate how much I love Persona 5. It’s my favorite game of all time, and directly started me down the path to being a radical. It’s got some flaws – many of which were fixed in its rerelease, Persona 5: Royal – but it’s such a fantastic package in terms of story, gameplay, art design, music, and thematic resonance that it’s hard to fault it for them. I’ve played and enjoyed subsequent P5 material, but none of them are nearly as devoted to a political message as the original, meaning that even though they’re all good, they ultimately fall short of what I love about the initial game.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a 2024 RPG by a good number of the folks who made Persona 5, and you can immediately tell. It has a very similar art style, uses many of the same sound effects, has a similar battle system, and is built around the calendar/social links/social stats system that the Persona series is known for. It is essentially a Persona game, but set in a fantasy world rather than contemporary Japan, and without Persona’s emphasis on Jungian psychology and the tarot. It’s also thoughtfully political, but in a way that’s maybe less engrossing and blisteringly relevant than Persona 5. That said, what it does have to say is worth engaging with, as it uses its more traditional fantasy setting to comment on the ideological underpinnings of RPGs as a genre and games more broadly, as both an artistic medium and an industry.

In many ways, Metaphor is “Persona does Final Fantasy.” It’s clearly an homage to Final Fantasy at its core. It may have Persona 5’s battle system, but it’s got FFV’s job system, and it’s reworked the “one more” mechanic to feel more like the Brave/Default system from Bravely Default, or the Conditional Turn-Based system from Final Fantasy X. The job system is especially interesting. There are 14 basic jobs, with each job having 1-3 class change upgrades that unlock at specific Social Link levels with the job’s corresponding character. Every party member can use any job, but have very individualized stat spreads that make certain jobs more viable than others. For example, Strohl starts with the Warrior job, which hits hard and doesn’t do much else. He could use the Mage job, but his physical attack is like double his magic attack, so that would probably be a waste of his massive attack stat. That said, some players might opt to train him through Mage anyway, because at level 20, Mage gets a skill that increases MP by 15%, which they could equip to Warrior so he can use more of his big hits that spend MP. I, on the other hand, trained him in Pugilist, which has powerful physical moves that spend HP instead of MP. It’s a bit more risk/reward, but Strohl has considerably more HP to spend. And that’s one of the seven party members, each of which has their own unique stat spread.

That customizability is fun and rewarding, but limited by the use of a Persona calendar system. I’m less inclined to experiment and try training characters in weird directions when I only have ten in-game days to reach the end of the current dungeon and only have about an in-game year to reach the end of the game. Due to the FOMO brought on by the time constraints, I spent about eight hours just mindlessly bashing enemies in old dungeons in order to unlock all the jobs, which was pretty decidedly unfun, and I ultimately only got to play around with maybe half the fully upgraded jobs in the end. Persona’s time-management (which often translates to some occasionally brutal resource management in dungeons) has always ratcheted up the games’ tension and forced a level of deliberateness in decision-making. That works fine in Persona, but dampens the freedom of choice I associate with job systems. The calendar generally feels like a weird thing to keep. On one hand, the narrative and mechanics have been built around it, but on the other, part of what I enjoy about the calendar in Persona is the mundanity of it. The changing of the seasons, interspersed with real-world holidays, as experienced by a protagonist who is attending high school and therefore at the mercy of the calendar, all help to complement the familiar contemporary setting of a Persona game. In Metaphor, there are no seasons or holidays, the weeks have five days instead of seven, and the one-year cutoff for the action is arbitrarily enforced by a spell rather than by familiar societal norms, so the days tend to blend together. This calendar has all of the anxiety of Persona’s system with none of the novelty, and that’s not a great place to be in.

That said, what Metaphor loses in variety from the calendar it gains from its much larger world and its travel mechanics. Each chapter of Metaphor is set in a different city, and the characters must travel to each city using their gauntlet-runner, a land-based version of the classic Final Fantasy airship complete with a pilot who’s clearly Atlus’s take on a Cid. Each city has several dungeons, landmarks, and surrounding towns that the party can travel to and explore as side-jaunts to juggle as options within the time-management system. Some of these can take several in-game days to reach, but traveling has its own activities that raise social stats, craft items, or even develop social links with party members. In Persona 5, many of the side activities had their own unique content but wasted precious days to do, and travel-time feels like a way to alleviate some of that sense of waste, by limiting you to just “bedroom activities” like reading books, cooking, tending to plants, doing laundry, cleaning the floor, bathing, or inviting party members to hang out. You have to go to the extra dungeon either way, so you’re stuck on the gauntlet-runner either way, so you might as well raid the pantry, use the shower for a small Exp bonus, cook some fermented meat with Hulkenberg, do some laundry with Heismay, and then read a fantasy novel while you’re there. Much of the traveling system feels like an iteration on the central premise of Persona 5: Strikers, allowing the characters to go on a road trip and see a bunch of cities but without the dearth of things to do outside of dungeons from which Strikers suffered.

Metaphor is in most ways an improvement on Persona 5. It’s a much bigger game, with a more strategic battle system and prettier visuals. That said, its dungeons are generally a bit less interesting. They’re more straightforward, without the verticality that made especially Persona 5: Royal’s dungeons shine. They’re also less colorful, less surreal and – I guess a bit ironically – less metaphorical. That makes sense, since all the dungeons are actual locations within the game’s world and must therefore follow the world’s logic, but it’s weird infiltrating a giant fantasy airship and being struck by how much duller it is than Persona 5’s Diet building – a real-world place known for being boring. The music, too, is less interesting than Persona 5’s. It’s still technically solid, and there are certainly some bangers, but because the soundtrack is aping Final Fantasy in genre and instrument choices, it’s much less engaging than the acid-jazz of Persona 5. Metaphor also has less to do than Persona 5 or especially Royal. The game doesn't require that you grind up relationship points with social links, which cuts out a lot of the frustration of the social link system, but also means that there's no reason to take characters on dates or to the movies or to play darts. The world feels less varied because the activities are much more clearly laid out by which social stat they increase.

Both this game and P5 are punching way higher than their weight class in terms of budget and team size. They’re both essentially AA games that have been catapulted into the AAA space, and both are a generation or more behind in terms of actual graphical power. Both games made up for that discrepancy with stylish artistic flair, and while that papering over succeeds in both games, the stylizing of Metaphor feels less relevant to the game than with Persona 5. Persona 5’s intentional use of color and effects make it feel both pulpy and like agitprop material, which are two of its major artistic influences. Metaphor’s stylings, however, mostly make it feel like Persona 5, which clashes a bit with its more classical fantasy setting. I’ve seen a number of people complain about the game’s graphics being outdated, and I think the fact that it retreads so much stylistic ground is why the unimpressive graphics are more noticeable this time around, even though it’s much better graphically than any previous Atlus entry. The game’s reuse of many Persona sound effects aggravate this issue. Those sound effects feel punchy and contemporary, and work great in the context for which they were created: a game that turns rpg genre conventions on their heads by using a contemporary setting. Here, in a game that’s purposely leaning into more classic genre conventions, they instead feel lazy and out of place. The game clearly had great sound designers; there are plenty of new sound effects as well as the old. I wish they’d had those sound designers replace the reused sound effects as well. The game's localization, however, does set it apart from Persona 5. Metaphor is another JRPG to outsource its localization and English voice work to the UK, rather than the states. Most of the characters are voiced by UK voice actors, and they all do an outstanding job. Honestly, the weakest link voice-wise is the protagonist's voice, which was clearly directed to try to be fairly flat and unaffected. Still, I'm just so happy to have a voiced protagonist that I didn't mind all that much.

Metaphor opens by posing a question to the player: does a story have the power to change the world? I figured when I started the game that this question was referring to Persona 5, and the difficulties of creating a story with a specific, clear political message and having to deal with its audience agreeing with the message and longing for that change but not working to bring it about �� or even worse, a chunk of its audience refusing to acknowledge it as political at all. While Metaphor was clearly inspired by that initial tension, it addresses a much broader question than that: why do video games – works in a medium that tends toward fairly radical political theming – seem to attract audiences that refuse to engage with their theming? Much of the game’s use of Final Fantasy elements is in service to this question, since Final Fantasy is sorta the seminal RPG. The game’s antagonist, whose name is frustratingly spelled Louis and pronounced Luis, represents in some ways the ideological underpinnings of Final Fantasy and is even designed to look like the FF1 Warrior of light, with long flowing white hair and curved horns. The main plot of the game involves a powerful spell that forces the kingdom to hold a democratic election. When the king is assassinated, his voice thunders down from the sky that the crown will go to whomever the most citizens believe in their hearts should be the next king in about a year’s time. The protagonist enters the race because he opposes the two frontrunners – Louis and the head of the very racist Sanctist church.

The protagonist often reads from a utopian novel and communes with the novel’s imprisoned author, a man named More, probably because he represents the demand that society improve and offer us more. The novel discusses the workings of an idealized version of our contemporary liberal democratic system, and all the party members fight in some way to try to realize that system. The novel itself was banned and all its copies burned, while More was arrested and sentenced to exile for writing it. While both the protagonist and Louis love the book, they had vastly different takeaways from it. The protagonist and his party see the book as calling for a society built around caring for its citizens, protecting and providing for those without the means to protect or provide for themselves. Louis, on the other hand, sees the book as calling for a society built on “true equality,” where all are forced to fend for themselves and only the strong survive. In both cases, the circumstances of one’s birth theoretically don’t matter, and leadership isn’t decided by a bloodline, which makes both visions look preferable to the world of the game: a heavily racially stratified monarchic theocracy. With the crown up for grabs, both characters have the opportunity to try to realize their visions of this utopian system, if they can convince the populace to back them.

This conflict is, deliberately, the conflict at the center of liberal democracy: is our system meant to be more individualistic or more collectivistic? Does the “liberal” mean that individuals must fend for themselves without a societal support structure? Does the “democracy” mean that the strongest must sacrifice the fruits of their advantages to provide for those without the same advantages? That the game takes the side of the whole over the part is unsurprising, given that it was made by the folks who made Persona 5. And hey, that’s the side I agree with more, so no skin off my back. But, using liberal democracy as the basis for its core theming makes Metaphor feel considerably less radical than Persona 5 did. Most of the oppressor/oppressed relationships in Metaphor are ones for which we have answers, which stands in stark contrast to the real-world-inspired conflicts in Persona 5, and when the characters look to the utopia of the novel for a solution, they’re looking to the answers we already have. And as Persona 5 already told us, those answers are insufficient.

That said, what feels backwards about the game’s theming becomes more interesting when we consider it instead as a metacommentary on the politics of RPGs. Louis, the villain who looks like the Ur-FF Protagonist, is an individualist to the extreme. His vision for a perfect world is one where all compete to live and only the strongest survive. That’s barbaric to most folks whose brains haven’t been poisoned by weird sectarian internet communities, but it’s also pretty much how RPGs operate: you keep fighting guys who are weaker than you to make yourself stronger until you’re the strongest, and then your character uses that strength to change the world the way they want. This is – crucially – also how this RPG operates. The protagonist might oppose Louis’s vision, but he still has to do so on Louis’s terms. It turns out that the conflict at the heart of liberal democracy is also the conflict at the heart of many power fantasies: we imagine ourselves being strong enough to make the world fairer, but in doing so, we engage with an individualistic framing. When looking at the metaphor of Metaphor, we can think of the protagonist as the story of a game and Louis as the narrative told through its mechanics; ultimately, what a story says is still constrained by what the game does. So the question of whether a story has the power to change the world is complicated by the introduction of the constraints placed upon a story by its medium. Why didn’t Persona 5 change the world? Metaphor implies it’s because its audience is primed to see its brand of power fantasy as apolitical – not even about the world to begin with.

I think increasingly often about a time I got into an argument with the admin of a Persona 5 Facebook meme page. He’d posted a meme complaining about people’s need to inject politics into Persona 5, an otherwise apolitical game. I found this absurd. The game in which you infiltrate the Japanese Diet building to stop a fascist from stealing an election is apolitical? The game where the personification of humanity’s tendency toward rebellion leads the party into battle to destroy the god of wealth at the center of a panopticon? It was beyond comprehension. But an art form that constrains most of its narratives to center around accruing power through conflict in order to elevate oneself as an individual has maybe inevitably attracted an audience that’s allergic to the idea that fiction can and usually does say something about the real world. And when I say “allergic,” I don’t simply mean “unwilling.” We’ve crossed into a political moment where the arbitrarily-defined level of “woke” in a piece of media determines whether a chunk of people will deign to engage with it at all, but based on my googling, Persona 5 is hilariously considered “not woke” (though Royal is simultaneously both “woke” and “anti-woke,” the remake of Persona 3 is too “woke” to bear, and Metaphor ReFantazio is under scrutiny but they seem to be leaning toward “not woke”). So the line in the sand is whether or not a game comments on the real world, but that line is drawn by people with shockingly low media literacy.

One element of the story that confused me clicked into place once I considered this angle. The game’s world is plagued by huge and brutal monsters called “humans.” In the game's world, the word “human” refers only to these monsters, while the sentient denizens of the game’s world call themselves “people,” or refer to themselves by their fantasy races. It’s bizarre to hear characters talk about “humans” and mean big weird giants that massacre towns and aren’t recognizably human at all. But when we consider this through the lens of a metacommentary on games, this choice comes to make sense. In an RPG, the player is a human roaming through a world of non-humans. They’re infinitely stronger than everyone around them, and in the end, only the human’s decisions matter. Everything exists to placate the human, and if the human refuses to engage with a story on its terms, then that pretty much destroys everything the story is trying to do. Those characters who exist solely to make the human feel something become fodder, to be ground up and discarded by the human. If we look at the relationship between art and audience from the perspective of the art, the audience becomes something like a kaiju, applying its own warped reading to the text, forcing it to submit to that reading. A story only gets to change the world if it first wins that battle with the human, and humans are getting increasingly combative. Obviously, there’s story reasons for the word choice that I won’t spoil here, but they align pretty nicely with my reading.

I really enjoyed Metaphor. It took me 110 hours, and I managed to complete all the social links, beat the extra boss, and unlock every class with the protagonist. A run that doesn't do those things probably could finish it in like 85-90 hours. Either way, it's shorter than Persona 5. I still prefer Persona 5; its politics are much sharper, obviously, but it also has a much bolder and more unique style. But anyone who really enjoys Persona or old-school Final Fantasies should give Metaphor a shot, since it's a pretty fascinating merging of the two, and it uses those associations to comment on the video game medium, the purpose of art in fomenting societal reform, and the shortcomings of liberal democracy. And if you haven't played either, it's a long, complex, standalone RPG in a new ip, which makes for a pretty good jumping-on point to Persona, from which it takes many of its mechanics.

[t4t4t]

2014, 10 years ago:

Against the Gendered Nightmare

Baedan

In the past several years, the question of gender has been taken up again and again by the anarchist milieu. And still few attempts amount to much more than a rehashing of old ideas. Most positions on gender remain within the constraints of one or more of the ideologies that have failed us already, mainly Marxist feminism, a watered down eco-feminism, or some sort of liberal “queer anarchism.” Present in all of these are the same problems we’ve howled against already: identity politics, representation, gender essentialism, reformism, and reproductive futurism. While we have no interest in offering another ideology in this discourse, we imagine that an escape route could be charted by asking the question that few will ask; by setting a course straight to the secret center of gendered life which all the ideological answers take for granted. We are speaking, of course, about Civilization itself.

Such a path of inquiry is not one easily travelled. At every step of the way, stories are obscured and falsified by credentialed deceivers and revolutionary careerists. Those ideas presented as Science are separated from Myth only in that their authors claim to abolish mythology. Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, History, Economics—each faces us as another edifice built to hide a vital secret. At every step, we find more questions than answers. And yet this shadowy journey feels all the more necessary at the present moment. At the same time as technological Civilization is undergoing a renewed assault on the very experience of living beings, the horrors of gendered life continue to be inextricable from that assault. Rape, imprisonment, bashings, separations, dysmorphia, displacement, the labors of sexuality, and all the anxieties of techniques of the self—these daily miseries and plagues are only outpaced by the false solutions which strive to foreclose any possibility of escape; queer economies, cybernetic communities, legal reforms, prescription drugs, abstraction, academia, the utopias of activist soothsayers, and the diffusion of countless subcultures and niche identities—so many apparatuses of capture.

The first issue of Bædan features a rather involved exegesis of Lee Edelman’s book No Future. In it, we attempted to read Edelman against himself; to elaborate his critique of progress and futurity outside of its academic trappings and beyond the limitations of its form. To do so, we explored the traditions of queer revolt to which Edelman’s theory is indebted, particularly the thought of Guy Hocquenghem. Exploring Hocquenghem still proves particularly exciting, because his writing represents some of the earliest queer theory which explicitly rejects Civilization—as well as the families, economies, metaphysics, sexualities and genders which compose it—while also imagining a queer desire which is Civilization’s undoing. That exploration lead us to explore the bodily and spiritual underpinnings of Civilization: domestication, or “the process of the victory of our fathers over our lives; the way in which the social order laid down by the dead continues to haunt the living... the residue of accumulated memories, culture and relationships which have been transmitted to us through the linear progression of time and the fantasy of the Child... this investment of the horrors of the past into our present lives which ensures the perpetuation of civilization.”[1] Our present inquiry begins here.

To explore the conflict of the wildness of queer desire against domestication is to take aim at an enemy who confronts us from the beginning of Time itself. While our efforts in the first issue of this journal were a refusal of the teleology which situated an end to gender at the conclusion of a linear progression of time, we’ll now address the questions of origins which hint toward an outside at the other end of this line. As we’ve denied ourselves the future, we now turn against the past. In this, we abandon any pretensions of certainty or claims to truth. Instead we have only the experiences of those who revolt against the gendered existent, as well as the stories of those whose revolt we’ve inherited. In the spirit of this revolt, we offer these fragments against gender and domestication.

[metanarrates]

would you say shoujo boys are a Character Type in a distinct manner from the way shounen girls are?

oh, absolutely. while of course the overall character trends present in both genres can be very broad and leave room for a lot of variation, much like how the archetypal shonen girl is defined by her potential romantic relation to the protagonist, the archetypal shoujo boy is perhaps even more so. this is because while shonen absolutely includes romance as a component of its frequently-escapist storytelling, shoujo almost ALWAYS includes romance as a main focus.

(disclaimer that I'm talking very very broadly with trends I've seen in the genres, and not about specific individual works. there's a lot of shoujo with mainstream popularity that deals with telling different types of stories, and the same is true for shonen. it's just also true that it's been very rare for me to encounter a shoujo work that isn't romantically focused, and I spend a LOT of time scrolling manga sites to find shoujo when I want to read something chill.)

for the shoujo boy, the specific archetypes he's drawing off of tend to be what's currently in fashion at the moment, but the common denominators tend to be that he is older, usually more "worldly" than the protagonist, and possesses great social, political, or magical power. if he's in a fantasy story, he is either a duke or a prince. if he's in a more modern story, he is likely considered to be at the top of a social hierarchy. you'll notice that all these factors translate to him being more powerful than the protagonist. this is for a very specific reason! a critical component of shoujo romance stories is that the hero almost always needs to be capable of protecting the heroine in some way.

you could make an ENTIRE gender studies course on this, but I won't digress into that very interesting tangent. here, I'm just attempting to identify the common archetype and the fantasy underpinning that archetype. for now, it's enough to say that the fantasy of having a boyfriend who can protect you is nearly universally shown in shoujo romances. these tropes are usually true of both main male leads and any secondary love interest that the protagonist picks up, btw.

another critical component of the archetype is that the shoujo boy has a wound that only the female protagonist can heal. whether that's physical (guy undergoing a magical transformation into something, guy with rare magical disease, etc) or emotional (usually the guy's got some trauma,) there is almost always something uniquely healing about the protagonist that draws him to her. if he's a womanizer, she can make him faithful to only her. if he's brooding, she possesses the ability to make him smile. he is always thinking about her. it's difficult for him to take his eyes off her when they're in a room together. and if he isn't someone who is usually gentle to others, somehow he is capable of being gentle to the protagonist.

honestly, i would say his actual personality is way less important than his story utility. whether he's a sweet childhood friend, an overbearing romantic pursuer, a brooding loner, or anything else, it's almost always true that a major male character will present some traits of an idealized male love interest as mentioned above. his personality traits outside of that will just appeal to varying and more specific types of fantasy boyfriend.

the shonen girl, by contrast, often requires a very specific personality type to be the object of desire (and usually the object of plot) in her story. while there are exceptions, the most common shonen girl archetype that I've seen is just kind of generically feminine and sweet. if she fights, she often loses. if she tries to be active, her attempts at agency will end with her being damselled. think kairi from kingdom hearts or orihime from bleach.

on that note, that's also a major point of divergence between the two archetypes. while the shonen girl frequently exists as a plot macguffin and object of desire, the shoujo boy is very frequently a driver of plot. whether he's swooping in to save the protagonist from an evil dragon, fighting the protagonist in an academic rivalry, or the protagonist's arranged-marriage husband with a big secret, he usually moves the plot forward with his actions. though the honor of main plot driver either goes to the protagonist herself or to outside forces such as a villain, every major male lead in a shoujo story will contribute to the plot momentum in some way. again, you could write a gender studies thesis on this.

but that's my broad analysis of trends! I'll note that the bulk of both shoujo AND shonen I've read are almost always fantasy, so my perspective of big trends might be a little skewed to those genres. I'm not too sure what usually goes on in shoujo with contemporary settings, for example. feel free to add on with any thoughts of your own, especially if you think I'm off base about something!

[goodolreliablejake]

So, Baldur's Gate has me thinking about D&D again, and I've long had a take on it that I've been hesitant to share. Hesitant because, as a lover of fantasy and roleplaying games, it feels like not only biting the hand that feeds me, but perhaps biting my own hand.

For context, there's this Folding Ideas video about Minecraft that really informs my understanding of what we consider "fun." The crux of the video is how Minecraft and games like it are unconsciously informed by colonialist ideas of going to an "uninhabited" place (they are inhabited by "mobs" and "villagers" but never mind that), terraforming it into a shape of your choosing, and claiming its resources. And it's difficult to reconcile that with what seems on the surface to be such a simple, fun, unproblematic game. Dan isn't really saying you need to stop playing Minecraft, and he seems to enjoy games like that himself, but he's challenging us to consider what social programming has led us to consider those types of activities fun.

So, Dungeons and Dragons is a game that many people have played in many different ways, and that makes it hard to pin down. At times I've been frustrated by the game's design because of how it tries so hard to appeal to or contain so many different styles of gameplay. I'd argue that 4th edition failed because it was too explicit about focusing on its design goals, when players go to D&D looking for the ambiguity of a system that they believe they can shape into whatever they want (whether that's true or desirable or not). That said, I think the core thing that defines Dungeons and Dragons, that sets it apart from other role-playing games, and that is most central to its gameplay is Adventure.

And what is Adventure? Well, in this context, adventure means going to an exotic and far-off location (one that is exciting and dangerous, with interesting things to see), fighting (probably killing) whatever interesting and dangerous creatures live there, and then taking their stuff. Now, you can mess with these elements. You can complicate them. You can ignore them and do improv and political intrigue. But they are what the whole thing is built around. Even if you're avoiding the murder hobo style, you need a steady influx of treasure and monsters to advance and survive. These activities constitute the core game-play loop.

And so we come to my take. Basically, I think that the core of D&D is a colonialist fantasy. The propaganda of Imperialism is that by killing and plundering native cultures, the empire is somehow uplifting them, while implicitly enforcing their own superiority. Bringing Christianity, or "civilization," or more recently "democracy" to indigenous people. It is not merely that many of these inhuman cultures like goblins and orcs are depicted as orientalist caricatures, as Wizards has gotten in trouble for in recent years. It's the reenactment of systemic violence against indigenous peoples. The fantasy of colonialism is that not only is it okay to kill people and take their stuff, but that it is the morally correct action.

And I think that's kind of what D&D is. You aren't plunderers but heroes, and you enter ancient ruins in search of treasure because it's the right thing to do. Killing monsters is how you save the world, and that +2 sword is what lets you do it. Never mind the fact that you may literally be dressed like a Crusader.

So I don't necessarily think that D&D is inherently sinister. I'm still playing. But I think that if we peek behind the curtain, look at why we play it, what we are socialized the see as fun... The historical underpinnings are much more complex than they are first appear.

[ausetkmt]

The first time Karl Ricanek was stopped by police for “driving while Black” was in the summer of 1995. He was twenty-five and had just qualified as an engineer and started work at the US Department of Defense’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, a wealthy town known for its spectacular cliff walks and millionaires’ mansions. That summer, he had bought his first nice car—a two-year-old dark green Infiniti J30T that cost him roughly $30,000 (US).

One evening, on his way back to the place he rented in First Beach, a police car pulled him over. Karl was polite, distant, knowing not to seem combative or aggressive. He knew, too, to keep his hands in visible places and what could happen if he didn’t. It was something he’d been trained to do from a young age.

The cop asked Karl his name, which he told him, even though he didn’t have to. He was well aware that if he wanted to get out of this thing, he had to cooperate. He felt at that moment he had been stripped of any rights, but he knew this was what he—and thousands of others like him—had to live with. This is a nice car, the cop told Karl. How do you afford a fancy car like this?

What do you mean? Karl thought furiously. None of your business how I afford this car. Instead, he said, “Well, I’m an engineer. I work over at the research centre. I bought the car with my wages.”

That wasn’t the last time Karl was pulled over by a cop. In fact, it wasn’t even the last time in Newport. And when friends and colleagues shrugged, telling him that getting stopped and being asked some questions didn’t sound like a big deal, he let it lie. But they had never been stopped simply for “driving while white”; they hadn’t been subjected to the humiliation of being questioned as law-abiding adults, purely based on their visual identity; they didn’t have to justify their presence and their choices to strangers and be afraid for their lives if they resisted.

Karl had never broken the law. He’d worked as hard as anybody else, doing all the things that bright young people were supposed to do in America. So why, he thought, can’t I just be left alone?

Karl grew up with four older siblings in Deanwood, a primarily Black neighbourhood in the northeastern corner of Washington, DC, with a white German father and a Black mother. When he left Washington, DC, at eighteen for college, he had a scholarship to study at North Carolina A&T State University, which graduates the largest numbers of Black engineers in the US. It was where Karl learned to address problems with technical solutions, rather than social ones. He taught himself to emphasize his academic credentials and underplay his background so he would be taken more seriously amongst peers.

After working in Newport, Karl went into academia, at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. In particular, he was interested in teaching computers to identify faces even better than humans do. His goal seemed simple: first, unpick how humans see faces, and then teach computers how to do it more efficiently.

When he started out back in the ’80s and ’90s, Karl was developing AI technology to help the US Navy’s submarine fleet navigate autonomously. At the time, computer vision was a slow-moving field, in which machines were merely taught to recognize objects rather than people’s identities. The technology was nascent—and pretty terrible. The algorithms he designed were trying to get the machine to say: that’s a bottle, these are glasses, this is a table, these are humans. Each year, they made incremental, single-digit improvements in precision.

Then, a new type of AI known as deep learning emerged—the same discipline that allowed miscreants to generate sexually deviant deepfakes of Helen Mort and Noelle Martin, and the model that underpins ChatGPT. The cutting-edge technology was helped along by an embarrassment of data riches—in this case, millions of photos uploaded to the web that could be used to train new image recognition algorithms.

Deep learning catapulted the small gains Karl was seeing into real progress. All of a sudden, what used to be a 1 percent improvement was now 10 percent each year. It meant software could now be used not just to classify objects but to recognize unique faces.

When Karl first started working on the problem of facial recognition, it wasn’t supposed to be used live on protesters or pedestrians or ordinary people. It was supposed to be a photo analysis tool. From its inception in the ’90s, researchers knew there were biases and inaccuracies in how the algorithms worked. But they hadn’t quite figured out why.

The biometrics community viewed the problems as academic—an interesting computer-vision challenge affecting a prototype still in its infancy. They broadly agreed that the technology wasn’t ready for prime-time use, and they had no plans to profit from it.

As the technology steadily improved, Karl began to develop experimental AI analytics models to spot physical signs of illnesses like cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s from a person’s face. For instance, a common symptom of Parkinson’s is frozen or stiff facial expressions, brought on by changes in the face’s muscles. AI technology could be used to analyse these micro muscular changes and detect the onset of disease early. He told me he imagined inventing a mirror that you could look at each morning that would tell you (or notify a trusted person) if you were developing symptoms of degenerative neurological disease. He founded a for-profit company, Lapetus Solutions, which predicted life expectancy through facial analytics, for the insurance market.

His systems were used by law enforcement to identify trafficked children and notorious criminal gangsters such as Whitey Bulger. He even looked into identifying faces of those who had changed genders, by testing his systems on videos of transsexual people undergoing hormonal transitions, an extremely controversial use of the technology. He became fixated on the mysteries locked up in the human face, regardless of any harms or negative consequences.

In the US, it was 9/11 that, quite literally overnight, ramped up the administration’s urgent need for surveillance technologies like face recognition, supercharging investment in and development of these systems. The issue was no longer merely academic, and within a few years, the US government had built vast databases containing the faces and other biometric data of millions of Iraqis, Afghans, and US tourists from around the world. They invested heavily in commercializing biometric research like Karl’s; he received military funding to improve facial recognition algorithms, working on systems to recognize obscured and masked faces, young faces, and faces as they aged. American domestic law enforcement adapted counterterrorism technology, including facial recognition, to police street crime, gang violence, and even civil rights protests.

It became harder for Karl to ignore what AI facial analytics was now being developed for. Yet, during those years, he resisted critique of the social impacts of the powerful technology he was helping create. He rarely sat on ethics or standards boards at his university, because he thought they were bureaucratic and time consuming. He described critics of facial recognition as “social justice warriors” who didn’t have practical experience of building this technology themselves. As far as he was concerned, he was creating tools to help save children and find terrorists, and everything else was just noise.

But it wasn’t that straightforward. Technology companies, both large and small, had access to far more face data and had a commercial imperative to push forward facial recognition. Corporate giants such as Meta and Chinese-owned TikTok, and start-ups like New York–based Clearview AI and Russia’s NTech Labs, own even larger databases of faces than many governments do—and certainly more than researchers like Karl do. And they’re all driven by the same incentive: making money.

These private actors soon uprooted systems from academic institutions like Karl’s and started selling immature facial recognition solutions to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, governments, and private entities around the world. In January 2020, the New York Times published a story about how Clearview AI had taken billions of photos from the web, including sites like LinkedIn and Instagram, to build powerful facial recognition capabilities bought by several police forces around the world.

The technology was being unleashed from Argentina to Alabama with a life of its own, blowing wild like gleeful dandelion seeds taking root at will. In Uganda, Hong Kong, and India, it has been used to stifle political opposition and civil protest. In the US, it was used to track Black Lives Matter protests and Capitol rioters during the uprising in January 2021, and in London to monitor revellers at the annual Afro-Caribbean carnival in Notting Hill.

And it’s not just a law enforcement tool: facial recognition is being used to catch pickpockets and petty thieves. It is deployed at the famous Gordon’s Wine Bar in London, scanning for known troublemakers. It’s even been used to identify dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine. The question whether it was ready for prime-time use has taken on an urgency as it impacts the lives of billions around the world.

Karl knew the technology was not ready for widespread rollout in this way. Indeed, in 2018, Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Deborah Raji—three Black female researchers at Microsoft—had published a study, alongside collaborators, comparing the accuracy of face recognition systems built by IBM, Face++, and Microsoft. They found the error rates for light-skinned men hovered at less than 1 percent, while that figure touched 35 percent for darker-skinned women. Karl knew that New Jersey resident Nijer Parks spent ten days in jail in 2019 and paid several thousand dollars to defend himself against accusations of shoplifting and assault of a police officer in Woodbridge, New Jersey.

The thirty-three-year-old Black man had been misidentified by a facial recognition system used by the Woodbridge police. The case was dismissed a year later for lack of evidence, and Parks later sued the police for violation of his civil rights.

A year after that, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, a Detroit resident and father of two, was arrested for a shoplifting crime he did not commit, due to another faulty facial recognition match. The arrest took place in his front garden, in front of his family.

Facial recognition technology also led to the incorrect identification of American-born Amara Majeed as a terrorist involved in Sri Lanka’s Easter Day bombings in 2019. Majeed, a college student at the time, said the misidentification caused her and her family humiliation and pain after her relatives in Sri Lanka saw her face, unexpectedly, amongst a line-up of the accused terrorists on the evening news.

As his worlds started to collide, Karl was forced to reckon with the implications of AI-enabled surveillance—and to question his own role in it, acknowledging it could curtail the freedoms of individuals and communities going about their normal lives. “I think I used to believe that I create technology,” he told me, “and other smart people deal with policy issues. Now I have to ponder and think much deeper about what it is that I’m doing.”

And what he had thought of as technical glitches, such as algorithms working much better on Caucasian and male faces while struggling to correctly identify darker skin tones and female faces, he came to see as much more than that.

“It’s a complicated feeling. As an engineer, as a scientist, I want to build technology to do good,” he told me. “But as a human being and as a Black man, I know people are going to use technology inappropriately. I know my technology might be used against me in some manner or fashion.”

In my decade of covering the technology industry, Karl was one of the only computer scientists to ever express their moral doubts out loud to me. Through him, I glimpsed the fraught relationship that engineers can have with their own creations and the ethical ambiguities they grapple with when their personal and professional instincts collide.

He was also one of the few technologists who comprehended the implicit threats of facial recognition, particularly in policing, in a visceral way.

“The problem that we have is not the algorithms but the humans,” he insisted. When you hear about facial recognition in law enforcement going terribly wrong, it’s because of human errors, he said, referring to the over-policing of African American males and other minorities and the use of unprovoked violence by police officers against Black people like Philando Castile, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor.

He knew the technology was rife with false positives and that humans suffered from confirmation bias. So if a police officer believed someone to be guilty of a crime and the AI system confirmed it, they were likely to target innocents. “And if that person is Black, who cares?” he said.

He admitted to worrying that the inevitable false matches would result in unnecessary gun violence. He was afraid that these problems would compound the social malaise of racial or other types of profiling. Together, humans and AI could end up creating a policing system far more malignant than the one citizens have today.

“It’s the same problem that came out of the Jim Crow era of the ’60s; it was supposed to be separate but equal, which it never was; it was just separate . . . fundamentally, people don’t treat everybody the same. People make laws, and people use algorithms. At the end of the day, the computer doesn’t care.”

Excerpted from Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2024 by Madhumita Murgia. All rights reserved.

[stjohns63]

Since civilization began, we as a species have worked to evolve a framework of government but more importantly, law, that allows us to live together, underpinned by a foundation of shared concepts of morality, integrity and fairness. We have sought to justify this system to those that might not immediately recognize its value to their own self interest by linking it to the will of the an overarching motivating force of the universe (name your deity). But at the most fundamental level, this framework and its viability is YOUR protection against the unmitigated desires of those who think they have the power (any combination of physical, economic, and/or political) such that they can impose their self interest over you and yours, to your detriment, if not otherwise restrained by law.

Realize the truth of this, for at this moment, at the height of this evolution, we are backpedaling from a world where in many places we have achieved a an almost ideal version of the framework. Despite the fact the framework protects them as well, for power always shifts, special interests seek to break these system and replace them with something that unilaterally favours the assailant. Unbelievably short sighted, because in the end history is replete with the fall of the powerful, and song of madame guillotine echoes in history as the most graphic example of the all too common fate of those who seek to embody rather than serve law: violent end.

But they are attacking, and seem to be succeeding. The nations that have reached the pinnacle to date of these concepts are seeing their systems attacked and eroded by powerful interests and if those interests win, the framework will be lost. The result is a repeating cycle of autocracy and reactive anarchy. This is evident throughout history, and is readily visible in many situations around the world. For example, “falling out of a window” is a black humour euphemism for extrajudicial repercussions that are too common in one of the most visible examples of a place where impartial law and order is replaced by autocratic rule. The “pusher” will one day be “pushed”, and so it goes without a viable framework of justice, law and government that enshrines everybody’s rights equally, beyond and against any momentary power shifts that suddenly usurp any current advantage one might enjoy.

The key to this is to respect and support the process of law, impartiality, morality and integrity, even if your opinion of what is better differs from one you are opposed to. Let the framework be the arbiter, and support it, because the alternative is a regressive model that can ultimately implode into irretrievable chaos, on a planet of 8 Billion people. There is nowhere that a ship of pilgrims can escape to. Indeed nobody has ever escaped. You can only stand, defend and build for the future. Understand the stakes, and see clearly those who are trying to destroy our civilized framework for their benefit and your detriment. They can only do it if you don’t stand against it.

I use #Freemasonry to promote this post because one of the basic fundamentals of the masonic philosophy and “movement”, if not the primary purpose, is the promotion of an idealistic framework for civilized society.

We teach our philosophies by way of symbols, parables and moral legends that depict this struggle. The central story we found our philosophical framework is a violent attack on a figure of moral authority and wisdom, that results in social chaos, and is ultimately dealt with over time via a very long process of lawful response and centuries of social recovery

[hmskms]

Some really interesting background on how Republican views on race and national identity have shifted over time.

In one of his earliest political speeches, Ronald Reagan insisted that “America is less of a place than an idea.” The American idea, per Reagan, is that “deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people.” Reagan is expressing the traditional conservative movement view of American national identity: that it is defined by our shared commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This kind of nationalism, which scholars term “creedal” or “civic” nationalism,” gives rise to a deep belief that anyone can be an American provided they are properly socialized into American ideals. As president, Reagan offered amnesty to millions of undocumented migrants and explicitly welcomed people crossing the Southern border.

Compared to:

“America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance said during his speech at the Republican National Convention. While allowing that “it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers,” Vance argued that this tradition also requires strict criteria for the number and kind of newcomers who should be permitted. Immigrants may only be allowed “on our terms,” or else America will lose the sense of nationhood that he believes underpins the country’s greatness.

It's not a super long article - definitely worth reading the whole thing.

[fundgruber]

Unlike folksonomy projects in museums in which crowd-sourced categories float on top of museum catalogs yet rarely, if ever, enter a dialog with the formal key words of museum collection management systems, the Instagram tagging system both constitutes the archival qualities of the platform and demonstrates the ways in which classificatory systems are in fact not a priori, but created out of a networked infrastructure of images.

Haidy Geismar, Instant Archives?, in The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, hg. von Larissa Hjorth et al. Routledge, 2017: 331–43, 337

"Yet it is the very sociality of Instagram and the ways in which it forges networks of images that is also the most profound regulator of the production of normative images. The archival logic of Instagram revolves around an infrastructure of value forged by the formation of classi- ficatory systems based on user appreciations, underpinned by the epistemological logic of the hashtag. Not only does this have a practical application, in the exploitation of these circuits of appreciation in the form of commercial interest, it also in part might explain the emergence of particular genres within the platform." p. 338

"While liking and commenting form the basis of large numbers of community, even larger numbers of Instagram images are in fact not instantiations of self-making or identity in rela- tion to culture, practice, politics or sociality. Rather, they are vehicles expressly designed for the interconnection between aesthetic contemplation and taste making, uploaded specifically to engender social networks of appreciation." 339

"Historically there have been numerous failed attempts at total archiving projects from Warburg’s Mnemosyne project to the Mundaneum. These projects, like that of Google’s book project or even its search engine, might be understood as a kind of imperial hubris, like the mapping project described by Borges in his short story “On the Exactitude of Science.” However, platforms such as Instagram can be seen as new forms of archives of the everyday, constructing a predetermined and emergent infrastructure through which persons circulate in the digital world as assemblages of taste and, by extension, work collectively to construct new forms of value. It is the archival logic that produces the qualities of Instagram that are of such interest to analysts—the classificatory system of the hashtag, the normativity of genre production and the self-identification of users within this new normative and visible public sphere. Instagram opens up the possibility of registering or archiving a slice of reality that was absent in the traditional archive, and in so doing makes it possible to incorporate that into circuits of value and the production of meaning. Thinking of Instagram as an archive allows us to make sense of the ongoing tensions about the visual economy, the monetization of user data, the corporate structure of the interface, alongside the analysis and understanding of user-generated content." p.341f.

[alexilulu]

Books I Read in 2024, #12: Karl Marx (Isaiah Berlin, Times Inc. Books, 1963)

A short and to the point biography of Karl Marx, including a high-level examination of some of his work at the points in which they were published and the public reply.

I think I first read Marx in 2010, when I had long since been in leftist spaces online and marginally so IRL (I was at the time taking care of my mother and also having a lifelong battle with depression and my own brain, so not as much of the latter and much more of the former, for better or for worse) but didn't have the sort of theoretical underpinning to my beliefs that I found many people in the spaces I moved in did. So, I grabbed the Communist Manifesto and 3-4 other things (including, of course, Volume I of Kapital) on kindle and started reading.

The biography by Berlin is shockingly evenhanded, given how quickly the foreword was to point out the author's critiques of Marxian thought and Marxism as a trend politically (a Russian Jew by birth, Berlin was born and grew up during the 1917 revolution and left in 1920 due to Bolshevik prosecution of his family's class position; he went on to become a prominent social scholar at Oxford College), characterizing Marx primarily as a brilliant man who did not suffer fools or people whose views of political economy did not align with his own.

Overall, its is straightforward and short, primarily because it does not focus overlong on periods of Marx's life that do not hold much historical significance. This is most notable during the periods after 1948 and the foundation of the International, when he primarily published newspaper columns to get by (alongside Engels generous funding) and was focused on working on compiling Kapital into a publishable format.

The sense you get of Karl Marx from his biography here is a man of prodigious, overwhelming intellect and strength of character who was utterly committed to his ideas and the articulation of them, even in the face of defeat after defeat as his theory of political economy again and again failed to predict events in his time.

I think the most interesting parts are parts I knew only in passing; the stuff regarding Bakunin and the anarchist International Workingmen's Association, the surprising grudging respect Bakunin had for Marx that was only scarcely returned. Living in the world his ideology has so clearly predicted (even if he could not see it proven true in his lifetime), it was fun to learn a little bit more about a man I know more for his theory than the life he led.

[vincewillard-1971]

Masochistic Personality, Revised

Resource: psychologytoday.com

Key Points:

•Masochistic tendencies-excessive self-defeating behavior, a constant need to please others, and the reflexive denial of positive regard-are not formally recognized as a personality disorder.

•But some clinicians continue to diagnose what was once call "masochistic personality disorder," and such traits may benefit treatment even without a formal diagnosis.

•Therapist can help patients "unlearn" negative core beliefs about themselves by reinforcing the patient's worth as a person and showing genuine interest in them.

Unfortunately, we don't choose our personalities. Personality is a combination of inheritance/genetics and how early life experience/nuturance influences us. Inherited components are called traits, and, collectively, traits are termed temperament. Learned behaviors are called habits, and the collection of habits is termed character. Join temperament and character, and you have a personality-all the things that influence how a person views themselves and the world, and how they interact with it.

While we all have personality quirks, perhaps an anxious temperament, or being too trusting, these individual.quirks don't likely cause global ripples in our optimal functioning. Those with disordered personalities exhibit collections of maladaptive thoughts and behaviors, which can be downright problematic, like Antisocial and Narcissistic Personality Disorders.

Recently, I was reflecting on people with self-defeating, or masochistic, qualities to their personality is not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In the 1980s APA deemed there is too much overlap with Dependent Personality and the behaviors are better accounted for thus. Despite this, Jefferson (2986) noted, "The consistent and considerable literature which has evolved regarding the masochistic personality suggests that clinicians see this category as descriptively useful." It was also alleged masochistic personality is a sexist diagnosis and that political forces contributed to its ensure by the APA (Buffalo 2019).

Even so, not recognized it doesn't render it non-existent, masochistic personality, and by Million (1996,2021) as the aggrieved/masochistic personality. Despite APA not formally recognized it, clinicians may still diagnose it. We would use: Unspecified Personality Disorder, Masochistic/Self-Deafeating, and of course be detailed in the clinical formation.

Categorize aside, self-defeating characteristics are not uncommon, like people-pleasing at one's own expense or denying positive acknowledgement. At the extreme end of the self-defeating spectrum, there's a sad, painful existence. Unfortunately, anyone working with youth has likely witnessed the underpinning of masochistic personality. I can't help but recall some court-involved families I've evaluated that include a very parentified child headed down the self-defeating path.

The Roots of Masochistic Self-Sabotage

Surely, you've encountered children attending to responsibilities. I've met kids who tend to bill paying and groceries because their mother was too anxious to leave the house and her boyfriend believed these tasks were below him. Others were saddled with getting siblings off the bus, fixing dinner, and getting siblings to bed because parents were disabled, working, abusing substance, or absentee.

Imagine being a child of an anxious temperament and having such forced responsibilities. If you don't submit, you're told you're no good and selfish, or harshly punished. Being anxious, you're likely cave to the demands. You've been groomed, you lot is taking care of others needs before yours, if at all; clearly, your needs aren't important. Identity and self-worth become based on caretaker, even as a child. It's the only thing you're rewarded for. Sadly, personalities are solidifying between 7 and 13.

The maladaptive habits follow them into social, educational, and eventually careers. Y

The habit of pleasing others, for example, is globalized, and in school the kid doesn't simply help a classmate with a paper; they write it for them, even at the expense of their own grade. It's as if to say, "Use me. It gives me value. Besides, it's selfish to think of my needs.

As a teen, relationships are increasingly with "projects " needing care, or people inviting painful experiences, like in the family of origin? A substance-abusing parent, for example, is enabled because if they ceased, the self-defeatist couldn't sacrifice for them. Despite complaints of relational struggles, they never seem willing to let go.

Why Masochistic Personalities Are Often Martyrs

Our maturing masochistic personality eventually reaches a state where all satisfaction is derived from self-defeat. Being a martyr is admirable, it is not? The masochistic pats themselves on the back for sacrifice and asceticism, wearing is as a badge . "Look at everything I do for others!" they advertise. Though they may seek "selfish" satisfaction from personal interests or healthy relationships at times, they invariably self-sabotage, as such achievement is too anxiety-provoking given its correlation to guilt: "How dare you indulge yourself?!" emanates from unconscious crevices storing early life experiences.

Treatment Implications for Masochistic Personalities

While some say they are too similar to deserve independent recognition, it's important to differetiate dependent and masochistic personality conditions. While many conditions share symptoms, as discussed in Schizophrenia or Schizotypal, that doesn't mean they're similarly treated . In this case, while dependency and people-pleasing arise in both conditions, dependent personalities need to be taken care of; masochistic/self-defeating personalities seek someone to sacrifice for.

As noted earlier, personality consist of genetic and learning components. Some have more of one than the other. Self-defeating practices are learned. Therefore, if clinicians recognize self-defeating characteristics it is helpful to examine the person's core beliefs about themselves and construct a therapy towards more adaptive views.

Such patients will resist directive therapeutic intervention given, to them, they're being directed to erase that which they rely on: falling themselves. More subtle, interpersonal measures, such as a therapist modeling interest in the person's being and thus showing they have more to offer than sacrifice, can help to start altering faulty scheme.

Lastly, in terms of children, while alerting social services to families where this scenario occurs may drive a wedge into the dynamics, for the time being, it doesn't stop there. The therapist must now consider the child's belief about their role in life and examine and correct faulty core schema, so the child can grow up to feel important and value themselves and their own needs.

[qu-film-history-to-1968]

Political Tug-of-War, the “Spy” Film and Art born out of Hardship – Week 4

By Jack Muscatello

The structure and intention of the “spy” film follows surprisingly traditional beats for a genre built on subversions, double agents and twisty plots. For one, the prevalence of a “double agent” in most spy media, as an example, creates a pattern of expectation where the audience anticipates a double agent exists somewhere in the story, thus undermining the shock of the reveal itself.

In many ways, the spy film was born out of a time of deep unease and back-and-forth tension, whereas political stability was a distant memory. Case in point – for Fritz Lang and countless other German artists in the post-WWI era, the home country they knew was one that had been broken, beaten down and left to fend for itself while reconciling with a war that was thought to be an unrepeatable travesty. Naturally, people respond differently to such a situation, especially in politics, and the push and pull in Berlin did no favors for crafting a proper recovery strategy. The best that could emerge from this period in the 1920s was a succession of “middle” approaches, aiming to stay neutral while simultaneously halting any social or economic progress. For a country “racked by economic problems, shaken by internal crises… reviled by the far left and far right, successive centrist governments struggled ahead for another 10 years” (Britannica). As stated, Germany was in a relative state of disrepair, and hope was dim. For Lang and others, though, it was an opportunity to craft an artistic means with which to make sense of all the noise, giving rise to the endlessly entertaining Spy genre.

One of the most intriguing developments of this new storytelling genre was the trickiness of its central subject matter. Instead of confronting the political upheaval with traditional drama, Lang decided to handle it through the means of tricking his characters, and thus the audience. “The spy genre it virtually inaugurates has remained a primary vehicle for transmuting the most unsettling of emotions--dread of entrapment, suspicion of appearances, universal mistrust--into an orderly, not to say mechanical, exhilaration. Chaos is repackaged as quadrille” (O’Brien, 2). The inherent traits of the central spies in each story, and the characters surrounding them, create a sort of dance around the plot, filled with mystery and conspiracy that stays entertaining even in its darkest moments. Much like it must have been to watch your home country fall to pieces while trying desperately to build itself back to former glory. Definitively entertaining to behold, yet still frightening and dreadful to live through. Which is what allows the political edge of most spy thrillers to creep effortlessly into their narratives. The enjoyment is the politics, in many ways. The spies and characters surrounding them are not acting on pure free will but at the hands of the system behind it all, which drives their decisions in part because they have no other direction to go – “The spy film is ideally suited for politics, since it is one of the few popular formats in which an individual's life is legitimately seen by an audience as dependent upon international events and wills beyond that of the protagonist” (Rubenstein, 7). As stated above, the spy is directly linked, emotionally and situationally, to the political underpinnings of the narrative. This is the heart of why spy thrillers are so tense yet fantastical, so real yet so blindly fun.

This makes for an interesting connection between the works of Fritz Lang – mainly the pair of Dr. Mabuse classics and Spione – with those of modern spy franchises, such as Mission Impossible and James Bond. In the former, Lang and his crew developed a deeply visual approach to the spy’s story, allowing the conspiracy to creep in around the protagonist (Haghi, for instance), building in each scene slowly. All the while, emotional interest mounts between the protagonist and a new acquaintance or lover (again, Haghi) which complicates the now expanding political mystery around them. By this point, the conspiracy and emotional core of the story are one, which makes for a perfect third-act showdown. Every time. Compare this to the structure of Ethan Hunts latest adventures and the many more travels of James Bond, and the relationship becomes clear and striking. In both franchises, the central hero finds himself in the midst of political conspiracy beyond the scope of his personal life and team. He gets to work, building a crew and getting to the bottom of why everything is happening – while a certain love interest interjects, blindsiding the hero and distracting them from the now rapidly accelerating central plot. The conjoining forces build almost effortlessly to the final showdown, which invites any director to go crazy and experiment with new stunts, visual tricks and plot twists. It’s a storytelling structure that’s just about perfect for the theater experience, much like it was when Lang discovered the genre as a means of making sense of the political nightmare that preceded the rise of the Third Reich. And, conspiratorial drama and political meltdowns still happen today, allowing James Bond’s showdown with nuclear armed psychopaths to hit just as hard as Haghi’s mission to stop a massive spy ring almost one hundred years ago.

[designresearch604-ahnesshim]

Week 7: Lecture

General Feedback

Dive deeper - what are their influences, why are they doing that kind of work (social good etc.,)

Underlying message and how they put their messaging into their work – justification of their work

Being able to explain research methods – e.g. taking random images to create collages or thinking purposeful images for the collage and justifying why we work like that

The Creation: When discussing our work we like – why do we like that work: environmental, mental issue etc., dive deeper

Context: what are the field of work - pop art, what is the politics of it - relationship to time and place, investigate further about the artists context

A2 Poster

Diptych A2 Poster of 20 elements montaged as a designed artefact

paired with a contextual inventory of each element - explain significance of item to my work

must include name

draw on strengths – illustration, typography, grids, mixed media

Research

Modes of representation – artist Joseph Kousth, what are the contributing factors that we could bring to the A2 posters?

what is the system that we are going to be developing ?

describe, analyse and underpinning concepts of work

how we use an "inventory" has to conceptually link to our work – again looking back to my artists and seeing what system they used, could be experimental publication design, or something more handwritten conversational

SDL

Thinking about the significance of objects

Ways to Portray 20 Items

Emma Lewis

She is an illustrator based in London. Her illustration style follows a narrative approach to her work. She uses mixed media when creating her work. There's a clear mix of photographic, digital illustration and hand-drawn elements within her work, collaged together. Although these components are all very different, she manages to create and express her style and story cohesively.

Maria Fischer

Maria Fischer is a German Designer who explores hyperlinks that we encounter on the internet by showing that through the threads in this publication design. This captures the intangibility and mystery through hyperlinked threads wich tie in with the keywords that she highlights. I am personally interested in publication design and enjoy the process of binding, so I might take my direction towards publication design for my poster.

Threaded Magazine

Both spreads/pages are displayed in the Threaded Magazine. The first image above shows a collated collection of objects and items in its physical form with copywriting on the side of the page. The first image above of the spread feels more personal and intimate. The images below show a more editorial way of the items/objects with texts around and next to the items. The highlighting of keywords is also a great way to highlight its importance with arrows directing the text to the image to show its relation. As mentioned before, I am quite interested in publication design, arranging text and images ina grid system to show effectively communicate through design, so this might be a way to approach my A2 poster as well.

Collage

I grew up collaging a lot through my adolescence all the way through high school and I found myself really enjoying the process of cutting, and gluing pieces of found art together to create a body of work. I like how through collage, you can combine objects to show their relation but also differences to one other object.

[juliakwinto]

Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory

ALEIDA ASSMANN

Notes & Quotes:

"Consciousness generally develops in terms of what has passed, and this process fits in logically with the retrospective nature of memory, since the latter only begins when the experience to which it refers has run its complete course."

(01)

"Living memory thus gives way to a cultural memory that is underpinned by media-- by material carriers such as memorials, monuments, museums, and archives. While individual recollections spontaneously fade and die with their former owners, new forms of memory are reconstructed within a transgenerational framework, and on an institutional level, within a deliberate policy of remembering and forgetting. There is no self-organizational and self-regulation of cultural memory-- it always depends on personal decisions and selections, on institutions and media."

(06)

"No one today would deny that these memories, based on individual experiences and transformed into collective claims, have become a vital and controversial element of modern culture."

(07)

Memory as a phenomenon transcends many disciplines

There are many approaches to memory

Virginia Woolf: "Memory is inexplicable" (Orlando)

Marcel Proust compares the presence of the past in human consciousness to photographic negative (you can't tell if it will be developed or not)

Second World War and Holocaust as a great shock; traumatic heritage of the mid 20th century

Traditions: potential of memory (mnemotechnics) and forms of identity

Perspectives: individual, collective and cultural memory

Media: texts, images and places

Discourses: literature, history, art, psychology etc

Storing vs remembering

Memory as art

Memory as power

Importance of memory for the formation of identity

Selection aspect of memory and forgetting

Storage vs functional memory

"Individuals and cultures construct their memories interactively through communication by speech, images, and rituals. Without such representations, it is impossible to build a memory that can transcend generations and historical epochs, but this also means that with the changing nature and development of the various media, the constitution of the memory will also be continually changing."

(11)

Media: provides the material for cultural memory

Media: frames and interacts with individual human memories

Images register impressions and experiences and they are independent of language

"After the extended dominance of the print age, the governing principle in the era of electronic writing is now the permanent overwriting and reconstruction of memory. Through information technology and new research into the structure of the brain, we are now experiencing a change of paradigm, by which the concept of a lasting written record is being replaced by the principle of continuous rewritings."

(11)

Body: trauma happens when the violence of experience is so overwhelming that its memory is disconnected from consciousness and is stored within the body with no access to it

Places may confirm and preserve memories. Forgotten traditions may revive when a place is rediscovered

Bodies and places are linked to the sensual quality of understanding

Archive: exists independently, remains abstract and general

Archive: a place where the past is constructed and produced

Construction of past in the archive depends partly on social, political and cultural interests as well as it is determined by media and technologies

Digital age: new forms of processing, transferring and accessing information; large capacity of storage

"(...) The current crisis facing cultural memory is not confined to the problems caused by the new media. This is evident from the work of artists born after World War II who work in the aftermath of a shattered cultural memory. The self-reflective art of these artists highlights the processes of remembering and forgetting".

(13)

Artistic memory: not storage but index; it acts as a reference to human experience; it is a form of communication

"Today the arts have developed new and emphatic ways of focusing on the memory crisis as their theme, and they are finding new forms to express the dynamic movement of cultural remembering and forgetting."

Consider: Poland as a place of post-communist memory crisis

Archive: outside archive waste accumulates

Waste: leftovers and remains of a civilisation that was not collected

Waste: what is dormant in memory

Waste can be utilised and take new meanings at a later time

Waste lies between presence and absence

Waste is structurally important to the archive as forgetting is to memory

Art archives whatever the current culture has rejected

Art brings waste back to our awareness

Memory boxes: spatial concretization of memory

Memory boxes: Middle Ages use of chests to store parchments that were called 'treasure chests'

Memory boxes: the Latin word for a box is arca form which is derived ark as in Noah's Ark

IMAGE

Consider the Written world as the main medium in the past enlightened Renaissance humanists; now images are more prominent

"Under the banner of an integral history of culture, some critics began to distrust the written tradition and to discover new forms of access to the past through pictures and monuments."

(208)

Images show up in memory, especially in the areas that cannot be accessed by verbal processing (precognitive and traumatic events)

Images are both metaphors and mediums (just like writing)

Photo as a lasting impression of a moment gone forever

Photography transcends every proceeding medium for memory

Photography acts as proof of particular past that once existed

Image must impact imagination to be imprinted effectively

"The miracle of photographic emulsion consists in the fact that it gives material form to light radiated from an object."

Consider what about painting? lasting impressions of feelings/emotions gone forever?

"Pictures fit into the landscape of the unconscious in a way that is different from texts: as the boundary between the picture and dream is blurred, the picture is transformed into an internal 'vision' that takes on a life of its own. Once this border is crossed, the status of the picture is changed from being an object of observation to an agent of haunting"

(217)

Assmann, A. (2013) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

[grad604-macytaylor]

Week 1: The Creative

Who is doing the creative practice and underpinning research? Where? Like in general? Lots of people are creative! But I think a few key people do shape the way we see the world and what we see as effective. And to quote Hamilton... I want to be in the room where it happens

Who am I as a designer? I think this is a tough question as I am still being shaped and formed into solidifying my own style. Something I actually struggle with is keeping to a distinctive design style as I love to experiment and test my own ability. I would call myself a chameleon, as I am still influenced by the things I see and interested in trends and modern styles. However, I think it is too early to tell wether I like those styles because they resonate with me, or if I like them because that is what I see so much of. 

What are the influences on me as a designer and where do they come from?  Potential influences are my family, my high school art teacher, my cultural background, my friends, and modern local and international trends. I like clean designs with visual interest, something memorable sparks my eye. I think I tend to look at posters and media I design from a compositional point of view, and have many creative concepts for work I would like to develop. The internet

How can I unpack the personal design ideologies that cultural shifts, ethics, and responsibility that impact my decision-making? Still working on that. Uni helps- this course feels like it will!

How might I expand my visual vocabulary by understanding the environmental, social, cultural, political contexts of my design influences?  Maybe being aware of where my thoughts come from? However I think this is a struggle because I think its my way of seeing the world which sets me apart and not necessarily my lived experiences. It is cool to be able to see something and recognise it for what it is- good or bad, so that we are aware of our influences instead of blinded by them.

What do you value as a creative?  I think I value a lot of things that others value- like sustainability, ethics, and having a heart behind the design. I am blessed to be in an era where perhaps the market is oversaturated, but that's because people value well thought out design and well made things. People can sense the heart behind creative projects- movies, concerts, and design elements. As a creative, I value making that heart visible to others and bringing them into the story.

I attended a guest lecture where someone quoted something along the lines of "you have to love the work because the praise and accolades are too few and far between". I am discovering I really do love the process.

[grad604kaywee]

Week 1: Questions & Answers

The Creative

Who is doing the creative practice and underpinning research?

I am not sure who and what this question is asking, so if it is asking about my own designs, then of course I am doing it. If it is asking about the upcoming and current designers and works of the design world, then the answer would be the popular designers and teams or studios behind them. That would be most of the people that our classroom listed on the previous post.  If it is asking about the design trends and the mass works that you see on the street or in public, I would guess that not too much research goes into them design-wise, because a lot of them are not very thought provoking or have interesting references and inspirations. It is quite clear when something has been thoughtfully designed and created.

Who am I as a designer?

An empty book, slowly filling up with designs and inspiration. I do not have a specific style or goal for design. I want to make a living with it because I enjoy creating beautiful and functional things, but other than that I need to explore more to find out. I do not like being told exactly what I can and can’t do, or be put in a strict box. Designing and creating artworks allows me this freedom.

What are the influences on me as a designer and where do they come from?

They come from the everyday designs I see around me in living areas and in public spaces. They come from the artists and designers I see online, as well as the artworks and design works that I come across. Other influences are traditional artist values because of my previous knowledge and skillset before university. My mother and grandmother have heavily influenced me in my creative childhood with their paintings and sketches, which led me to choose design as my field of study.

How can I unpack the personal design ideologies that cultural shifts, ethics, and responsibility that impact my decision-making?

By researching my family history and what influenced them, and then diving into the things that I see everyday and researching the origins. I feel like I do not have a strong cultural heritage impacting me, so would like to research into that and see if I’m influenced by the majority of the world or if my ideas and designs actually do reflect my home-country.

How might I expand my visual vocabulary by understanding the environmental, social, cultural, political contexts of my design influences?

Research, experience, and knowledge. Feeding and filling up my creative bank/book with examples from different places and communities. By looking at other designers and works, I can explore the audience and society reactions and impacts that it caused.

Where do I stand in relation to my practice and what do I value

A learning and discovery phase. I currently do not know what I like doing the most, or what area I want to explore deeper. I lean towards branding because of its demand and because it would allow me to make a living doing design. But this is not something that I really enjoy doing, corporate logos and websites seem too rigid and a bit boring for me. I value the freedom that designing gives me.