#ill have to make a proper post some time with actual better explanations and art references

[bogusbyron]

You BETTER make a fucking LM fashion post. I need that.

note: im not a professional in the slightest . mens historical fashion is a major special interest of mine and all my info comes from my own research which might not be correct so feel free to add corrections but be nice about it or ill cry

ill do a more in-depth post about it at some point when i get the chance and i've actually thought about it in more detail but for now the most fun details ive been working on in my own design is specifically Madeleine .

while probably not brick-accurate (as ive not had the chance to read it and most of my information comes from posts i read and what my friends tell me) i just think its a fun little take on his character using fashion of the time which im autistic as hel about.

one thing about 1820s fashion that usually sticks out to me is the height of all of their collars. One key feature of collars in the early 1800s was that they were quite tall (though by the 1850s they were tall on opposite sides to how they were in the 1800s-1820s. they kind of changed from being high at the back of the neck to high at the front, pointed towards the cheeks.)

This works wonders for my Valjean as he has quite a distinguishing scar down the side of his face near his right eye that would be very easy to identify, as a result, he grew his hair out longer to allow his hair to drape rather lazily down the side of his face. while this was entirely unfashionable, it was better than being clocked as immediately suspicious by Javert.

where fashion comes into play is that all these high collars were also perfect for a character design detail of him looking a bit more mysterious. i'm yet to draw something to properly convey this (i'll probably do it in another post if i ever get round to it, if more people want to hear about my fashion choices for my designs?) i think this is the best i got .

this was drawn quickly and without reference so you'll have to excuse the inaccuracies but it gets the gist across, the high collar and cravat working to conceal a part of his face (and you can also see the draped hair in play). while not totally effective in concealing his identity, that's not wholly the point of course . but i think it still gives him both a cozy kind of look like hes trying to stay warm in his coats but also i hope it also gets across that he's hiding.. Something. he's a little suspicious. but hes nice about it

[kaleidosouls]

SU reclaimed pearl rambles

im gonna use some annoying comments i got on my reclaimed pearl as a springboard for what i think could be interesting discussion because i think its good to engage with criticism/different opinions. but also if you talk to me like an asshole i want you to fuck off and i promised i wouldnt engage in that kind of stuff bc its not good for me and it doesnt Look good for me either.

so i can talk about my thoughts but not engage directly, win win. its been months but im still really fond of the pearl i made specially this art. like it coudl be better but i like it well enough. just a little header so this isnt a boring post with only text

i think like, its good to establish ground rules that like, i think most of the poor reactions ive seen towards my art were missing, mostly in bad faith probably but in case theres ppl who earnestly want to understand. actually maybe i can format it like a little FAQ even though theyre not frequent or asked lskdjg just for outlining my points. ill put it behind a cut but ill frontline w this: if youre a fan of pearl in the show, this content is not for you. youre allowed to like whatever you want and so am i. if you like her, we probably wont get along and you probably will feel very personally irritated by how i FEEL about her, so just walk away now. im not gonna engage with petty shit taht juts boils down to 'im mad you dont like what i like'

onwards to more rambling / sorta responding to some criticism

i scrolled back and i guess i sorta never have actually done a proper full explanation post about this AU have i? or maybe i have and deleted it, i forgor

why did you change pearl?

because i hate her, simple as. i went from a huge SU fan to hating watching it (i did finish) and pearl is probably The biggest reason why, as like issues with her character seep into other aspects of the show that i also hate. like i mean i Realyl hate her. she makes the experience of watching the show really irritating and miserable for me. if you dont feel taht way about her thats totally normal and whatever but no one is gonna change my experience and feelings that i had watching SU since the 1st season was coming out.; anyway answering. there is a Lot i love about SU and want to engage with, so i had the idea of like,maybe ill just change pearl, cause i wanted to delete her, really, but she is one of the main characters and she hasa function as a character that you cant just do away with. essentially im just like, some guy, who draws, coping and trying to reclaim his teenage investimetn in this show. literally its just for ME. but if anyone else feels like i do, then they can enjoy it too. if somoene doesnt feel like i do, go watch like pearl fancams or smth. like ill never be able to literlaly change the show as it is, like its happened, and its a tragedy im trying to move on from (begrudgingly)

why do you hate pearl?

the long laundry list of reasons are probably apparent in the ways i remade her lol (theyre not i can tell ppl are gonna project whatever worst bad faith reason for any change i make) but tbh the core of it is this, which is like, beyond whatever traits she has and whatever: she reminds me of my abusers. always had, from season 1, but like it became worse as the series went on. its like really infurating and upsetting to watch SU bc of her. had my abusers been a different kind of person, maybe i wouldnt hate her so much (kinda doubt tbh). like her personality and behavior are like hough disgosting!!

why did you change (some physical trait about her design)?

i dont really necessarily have a PROBLEM with canon pearls design. over the years ive come to like SU's style less and less but like, gestures, whatever. like i didnt like it or anything but its not like a bit deal compared to the actual offender that is her personality and behavior. the reason i redesigned her at all is bc like, if i hadnt, i would still be thinking about the way she is in canon all the time. like ive visually associated her like, appearance with all the shit about her thta makes me upset so i had to so she didnt look like the same person anymore, and i can try to let go of some of the hatred in my heart. like i want to think about the thigns about SU that i loved and also the potential i always saw in it and canon pearl is like, an active obstacle to that, to the point taht i cant even see her without getting like irked. i tried to keep enough similar traits so from a glance youd be like, who the fuck- is that pearl? rather than like. completely change her entirely to whatever i wanted. i do want to like, its a creative exercise. i want to try and change the things that would make me happy to see gone but try to work within the constraints of the SU we Did get as much as i can tolerate. bc like.... if the sky was the limit then at this poin wed just have to throw the whole thing away and start from scratch. like its kinda not really very salvageable, like im not rewirting SU to be like a Good show or fix Everything, its kinda too broken. im just chnaging enough so i can look at the actual show, screenshots, songs etc, and not feel overcome wtih like the grief and irriatation of how much it sucked ass. its just so i can enjoy more of it again

i dont like your redesign for (insert reason)

cool. thanks for your input. youre welcome! eat my asshole. seriously though, like, shrugs. i didnt make it for anyone other than myself. tbh im not fully satisfied with it either bc i think the SU style is kinda ugly, so im at a crossroads. should i mostly abandon the SU style? ive like, tested out tweaking things, it mightve been noticeable in screenshot redraws. drawing within the SU style is to create that coping 'oh it was totally like this haha' vibe but maybe im old enough to not need that anymore lol. like ive heard ppl say shit like shes ugly, or like sneakily trying to imply im like, got some agenda over beauty or racism etc. like whatever, think whatever you want, its not for you. go back to sucking up to rebecca or smth like i cant take the og pearl away from you still i am open for like that kind of criticism like, do i have personal biases affecting my design decisions? probably. i do try to keep aware of why im choosing certain things, but really in this case i cant emphasize enough how like, irritating it is that i have to change her design at all. like its hard to come up w smth else when the rest of the cast ahs already been design to balance off the og pearl. i probably wouldnt change almost anything if the sight of her didnt piss me the fuck off! most of all i kinda wouldve preferred to keep her hair short bc it messes up the sillouete but it makes me think too much of canon pearl so i made it long :/ i was like let me tell you my design thought process: -im gonna try to keep as many recognizable traits about her design while taking away bit by bit until she doesnt look like the og pearl to me anymore and i dont feel angry seeing her. pearl is lanky, tall, spindly, with a gem on the forehead, blue white pink yellow pastel colors, large pointed nose. i kinda tried to keep these traits while slightly tweaking their design until she looked different enough. is it a good design? eh idk. like the purpose is to make me not hate her and it does that job

now this hate comment im gonna grace with keeping it intact except removing the person bc its not about them. its like, a very stupid ass headed comment but im actually kind of interested in like,jumping off of it to ponder some things

im not heterosexual or cis enough to know what exactly wife bate means in this context so im gonna like guess, that maybe i could extract this q from that reply (also not looking like shes from steven universe is a compliment thanks)

you took away her personality and made her boring

the only thing i can assume is that like, some people must interpret the absence of an assholey personality or like abusive behavior is 'boring'. i know thats a really bad faith assumption but like, if ive written down a bunch of personality traits and you still come out saying thats 'no personality' what am i to make of that lol. based on my experience like Existing online, people tend to often call nice characters 'boring', like dude ive done it before, but i think im kinda over that edgy phase. also again, its for me and not for you so if you think shes boring, thanks for your input i dont care. but thinkign about it earnestly, i dfeintely dont want to make a character thats just no flaw and not interesting ofc, i havent done that with reclaimed pearl. that being said i havent like, probably written a lot demonstrating what i want her to be like instead of the canon pearl so, maybe ppl just are feeling lost with the lack of information.

personally, if i hear someone thinks a character is boring bc theyre not abusive anymore like, nothing of value has been lost. but characters do need flaws in order to create conflict and cause things to happen, like in a way canon pearl is like All flaw, which wouldnt be a problem except she gets away wtih all the horrible shit she did. heres some traits i want to explore with reclaimed pearl, some are similar to canon i just wanna go about it a different way: being overprotective/possessive to steven in a smothering way, projecting abandonment issues, not reaching out/communicating her emotions properly, lacking indepedence/self worth, depending on others to avoid confronting her own issues, being very passive and insecure and lacking initiative (this being the totally opposite trait that canon pearl has), stunting stevens development due to her not being ready for him to grow up and not need her anymore. and more, this is just from the top of my head. maybe thats still too 'boring' for ppl because shes not being selfish and inconsiderate enough to others so you can relate to her but i dont care :p

gosh how do i go about like, presenting the content i ahve in my head for this AU).. i cantjust remake the whole damn show. i would if i could, tbh

i have concerns about racist implications wrt (insert thing here about my redesign)

imma be frank. i dont know how to compltely 'clean up' any possible bad associations wrt pearl as a character given how like, rebecca has literally like, made her to be a slave in love with her slave owner and made it to be like, an uwu ideal lesbiab thing for most of the show until they tried to pretend no we understood the flaws in this dynamic all along and its bad actually , uhh, anyway shows over haha

ill say the main reason i changed her skintone is, bc that would be the like most instant way to make her look differnt from canon (which is vital for me for the reasons said above), and i did consider like, does this make the whole thing worse, or, ?? like, as they made it in the show, techincally All the gems are slaves to the diamonds, arent they? including all the very totally progressive poc based gems including and specially the ones who are made to be understood as black women. bruh like idk what to tell you this show is just fuckig bad sdlgkj like its just way too like, pervasive in my teen years forme to throw the baby w the bathwater entirely. and ill just straight up say it, like, im not a specialist on these topics nor do i hav ea position of authority to speak on about it. like the pearls read more clearly as slaves (very intentionally by the showrunners) bc they are meant to be subservient to gems Other than diamonds. and also bc they like fit in the stereotype of housemaid servant. like the rubies being made to just be forced to go and fight like they are slaves too, they have no rights and no like, authority to disobey or autonomy. but fsr like, slavery as in physical labor just doesnt immeidately set off ppls alarms as much as housework slavery does fsr.

i can only rly like change the canon so much and try to like, tweak things so it doesn feel as gross but i think for it to be cmpletely not insneistive at all youd have to throw away the whole show. and like i said, this isnt like me saying like im making the show good or as it shouldve been, im making it so I (and ppl who share my feelings about the show) can feel less shitty just thinking back to it. its just an exercise. im not like mass media im just one independent artist and shit will come out insensitve sometimes and im sorry but im also like, my art isnt meant to be representative and like, responsiuble for fixing all of society and racism like i actually cant do that. ill just do the best i can as an asian dude but like, if my work makes you upset, im sorry, but also just block me. like i cant please everyone. or like, even better, make YOUR take on pearl taht you feel would be better, like make the art you feel should exist.

this post is too damn long and id be surprised if anyone reads all of it but if you do, tahnk you! i felt kinda like ready to fight tonight so im triyng to redirect it from aggression to like, thinking. i cant guarantee im making new content for su reclaimed anytime soon but i would really like to, tbh

[deleteddewewted]

Incel!Shinsou x F!Reader fanfic idea (Part 2)

So here we are, Incel!Shinsou is back and this time with a bit of growth that he needs to make independently (While thinking about the reader of course. Thank you so much to @blossominglark for sending in such a lovely message! Also here you can find a small explanation as to why i even started the Incel!Shinsou series.)

"I think I want you. I think you're bad. I think you're good, it's like the love I never had. I think I need you. Oh God, it's true. I think I'm falling and there's nothing I can do" - Beetlejuice Chill by Life After Youth

Part 1: Incel! Shinsou x F!Reader

Part 3: Incel!Shinsou x F!Reader (1/2)

How difficult could it be? To forget that you ever existed... thats what's haunting Shinsou ever since the conversation you two had a few days ago. He cant seem to focus anymore, everything just reeks of you. (His own bedroom where you two would sit on the floor and work on your project together. You would laugh at something that came on the television, every time resulting in his face heating up and heart beating harder at the sound, the beautiful sound, of your laughter. It doesn't feel the same anymore. He cant sit or sleep there anymore.) Shinsou starts speaking with Aizawa more, to be honest its not like Aizawa gave him that much of a choice. He needed to understand what was happening with his son and you in order to help or bring some constructive input.

Shinsou goes on and on about how he mocked you to his "friends". When questioned on his "friends" he said that they were all telling him that you needed to be taught how to be a "proper woman" the "perfect girl for them".

("Hitoshi what-...why would you...?"

"I don't know! It made sense when i was young and- i... i dont understand how or why and...please just- help me i dont understand!"

"It's ok, it's ok, come here." Aizawa hugs Shinsou tightly. He starts running his hand over Shinsou's hair comforting him.

"What did you show them? What did you tell them about...her, exactly?") A mess of tears and regrets, thats what Shinsou is. A puddle which he somehow drowned you in out of a bitter rage that had nothing to do with you.

Aizawa finally holding a grasp as to how Shinsou's mind worked, he couldn't help but feel defeated. He neglected his son so much he became bitter and resentful towards the wrong people, the wrong person. (Aizawa only ever told Shinsou that his mother moved away from them because it was "too much for her". Young Shinsou couldn't grasp why his mom would leave him, but again he never really asked questions since he saw how upset it made his dad. "Dont worry Hitoshi, ill be here for you no matter what. Got it, problem child?") An intervention needs to be made now. To prevent even more damage, to keep his son safe and his sons ex-friend safe.

"Hitoshi? The posts and things you put online, you need to delete everything now." Urgency was a must, damage control needed to happen now. Who knows if Shinsou wrote about where he lived, where you lived and studied at, if he showed those "friends" of his your face. Who knows how much information he put out there to a bunch of strangers about you. "Ok, ok. Let me delete everything...yeah...thats-yeah...makes sense." He's slipping, Shinsou is slipping into a pit of shock and disgust, he needs to fix things and that only starts by wiping away years of miss informed opinions disguised as truths.

Everything is gone. No more accounts. No more pictures. No more you. He didn't make any announcements or even address why he was wiping everything. He didn't answer the piles of questions flooding his inbox about why he was doing all of this, he just didn't care anymore. He couldn't find you either. No account on any platform with any signs of you. (He should have asked for your socials, but knowing where you two started off at he thinks its better that you two didn't. It saved you from his incessant torment he saw himself being capable of.)

Week one came and went. You didn't show up for classes and people started to take notice.

"Does anyone know why y/n isn't at school anymore? Is she sick?" Midoriya asked one day. Everyone kind of just looked at each other hoping that someone might have an answer. Be it that no one other then Shinsou was in the same class as you, everyone in his friend group knew about you since you where always nice despite the way you presented clothing wise. (The clothing didn't matter nor did the labels, you were still so welcoming to everyone. Hell, you even welcomed Monoma and that guy is considered psycho by everyone.) Shinsou couldn't do anything but listen to his friends (Midoriya, Shoto, Denki, Mina, Iida, and Ururaka) go on about how nice you were. How they miss you. He misses you . He ruined this, he ruined your school experience and pushed you to lose the friends you had because of his own ignorance. He forced you to choice between showing up to school and dealing with him or not coming in at all and losing the friends you had because of him.

The Sports Festival was coming up soon, here all the students would compete against each other to show off their skills. The Festival acts more as an opportunity for the different Courses to fight each other since its focus centers on the physical strength and wellbeing of the students instead of their study of focus. It also helps with publicity by letting UA show off their students to the general public. (Shinsou didn't understand why the school would have a Sports Festival. UA was better known for being STEM and Art focused which meant that many of the students only had to take 1 year of P.E. instead of the 3 years other schools required.

"So again, what's the purpose of this?"

"Its just a chance for the different Courses to bully each other, and for the General Course to get mocked." responded Togeike. Be it that she never spent time with Shinsou, they both had a mutual attitude and just stayed away from each other out of disinterest. It wasn't after Shinsou's personality changed did she feel more comfortable being around him and started speaking to him casually throughout the day.

"So what does the Business Course do during-"

"Hey, didn't you and y/n work on that project together?" This caught Shinsou of guard. For the past week its all been about you and how you hadn't been coming to class. (You haunt him even outside of school, the guilts too much for him at times.)

"Yeah...what about it." he snarls. Just because he's changed in appearance and largely in attitude, that doesn't mean he's over the way he treats people. Cant she get to the point already-

"Geez man, i just wanted to ask if you needed her number." That...was off. Why would she assume that he needed your number?

"Why would you give me her number? Don't you think that as former project partners i would already have her-"

"You're clearly upset about her not being here, so shut up. Either take it or leave it, jackass." she bit back. How did she know? Shinsou has always had a resting bitch face which made it hard to read his emotions. How did she manage to figure it out? (God he was an asshole!)

"Yeah, please....i'm sorry. I could-"

"Please shut the fuck up, i don't want an apology from you. Take it and fix this shit. I hate seeing people mope and you're pretty much dying in a pit here." Togeike really gives no fucks and she was tired of the purple haired boy looking like a kicked puppy. She assumed it had something to do with you. When you started skipping class, Shinsou also started to look upset and wouldn't speak that often. It wasn't like Shinsou was shy, he just didn't see the need to speak all the time. So to see him become even more silent was concerning.)

He left school that day with a skip to his step. He has your number! He has a way of contacting you! Yet, he still knew that having your number wouldn't fix anything. You left him alone and it wouldn't be fair for him to barge back into your life without proving he's improving, that he's actually deserving of you're friendship at least....

The Sports Festival.....

He can prove himself to you there....

Everyone will see it, every student at UA has to be there for credit....you'll have to be there. You'll also have to participate for the start of it, so you'll have to interact with someone.

(This was it)

This was so much fun to write! Lets give this a slow build up to give him proper character development and redemption. The next part will be the Sports Festival and what he plans on doing to get you back. Let's set up that his intention is too for one, make an impression on the school for when he decides to transfer to the Art Course but also to make an impression on you and get you to notice him in a positive light. Our poor incel is trying his best ok....

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON NIGHTMARE’S LEAD VOCAL BAE REMI...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: n/a CURRENT AGE: 24 DEBUT AGE: 23 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 20 COMPANY: Koala.T SECONDARY SKILL: n/a

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): 알모미 - an abbreviation of even if you know her, you don’t (and the final syllable of her name), due to the fact that she has an enigmatic personality that is more quiet than the traditional “4-D image” but still maintains that off the wall unpredictability. One moment cutesy and cringey, the next moment cuttingly observant and savage, then the epitome of “노잼” or no fun at all. 미미 - “mimi” is a simple play on the final syllable of her name, mi, though sweeter fans state it’s due to the hanja reading being ���beautiful” both in her name and ostensibly the nickname, thus meaning she is “double beautiful.” she figures this to be an elaborate explanation for a simple nickname. 노잼미 - due to the frequent criticism of her mood-killing moments (usually ill timed puns, impersonations, bizarre factoids, or references to video games / anime the others aren’t familiar with and so on) being that she is “no fun”  (노잼) and the fact that her nickname mimi plays into the korean pronunciation for something not being fun, they’ve been mashed together into a nickname that essentially states she is the weirdo mood killer extraordinaire…but in a fond way? INSPIRATION:  Remi’s performative inspiration, as given to the mcs who ask for such information, is that she was just the biggest fan of Diamant and Royal-T and Clover and as a result had been inspired to audition for KJH after only a few months of dance training, hoping charisma could carry her through. The reality? Remi wants to be famous. It’s a cushy life if you can pull it off, albeit at the expense of personal dignity and privacy. She wants to be rich and she wants to get there as quickly as possible - the struggle is not her favorite. Ironically she has incidentally discovered a love of music and even of performance in the process. SPECIAL TALENTS:

multi-instrumental- she can play and compose on both the guitar and piano, as well as production abilities on various synthesizers. she has a talent for quickly transposing music across keys, which is almost never useful in her daily idol life, unless they have her trot out a guitar for an acoustic snippet on a variety. she is most proficient with the piano, more specifically these days in terms of the keyboard and style-adjacent synthesizers.

jingle creation- she can make a quick and catchy jingle for almost anything, and often spends her time narrating her life via song unintentionally and inadvertently, much to the chagrin of those around her.  she will occasionally produce these into snippets uploaded on soundcloud. her most “successful” of these was an 8bit midi-filled jingle about the blessing that is milk tea.

fortnite dances - she is exceptionally skilled at performing dances from the popular game fortnite, for better or for worse, and is more than happy to break this talent out on camera. whether her group-mates want for her to do this or not.

NOTABLE FACTS:

remi is skilled in musical composition and arrangements and has dabbled in a various instruments. She is more proficient with the piano than the guitar, these days, as she’s largely relied on the latter as she moves into beat-making and production.

remi is a social media guru, with an established presence on YouTube, Soundcloud, and an active twitter/instagram outreach. She is active as well on Vlive on a regular basis. She does reviews of producing equipment, reviews of instruments, covers, “let’s play” style videos, and various vlogs/live broadcasts. This began during the ending days of Vixen and continued through her hiatus (intermittently) and has ramped up since the debut of Nightmare.

remi debuted at 16 under KJH’s girl group Vixen, as the lead dancer and lead vocalist. She faced a rather significant scandal which was (mercifully enough) quickly eclipsed by the huge scandal that plagued the main rapper of the group, eventually leading to the disbanding of the group entirely. She was a fresh 19 at the time. She was immediately signed under KTM and began training.

was tested and proven to have a relatively high iq, but dropped out of high school to pursue music fulltime after the debut of her group, vixen. she later obtained the korean equivalent of her ged and has referenced studying for entrance exams and taking them late, indicating some potential for her to pursue higher education, albeit belatedly. 

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

in the short term, remi is working to establish herself in the industry once more. after four years of down time without a proper group, reduced to training once more, she’s found herself overwhelmed with vigor and intensity. this is her second chance and she’s not willing to waste it. as a result she’s casting the net quite wide in order to find what best suits her and what will expunge her past from the eyes of the public with the greatest speed. at the moment, she’s going for a saturation technique - hosting for mbc allows her constant pleasant smile-y screen time and exposure to a new generation of idol fans, and her slow creep into radio hosting and cfs has provided further blandly positive feedback relative to higher amounts of exposure.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

in the long term, remi is very much intent on creating an empire. she has no interest in remaining in a group forever and, frankly, is quite positive nightmare won’t be lasting too long statistically speaking. with that in mind she’s intent on creating a brand around herself, putting down roots in the industry particularly in easy, high profile, and lucrative engagements like hosting or commercial work, alongside hopes of debuting her actual musical interests as a solo artist, almost in the realm of a passion project given her niche style is not likely to be highly marketable to the public. the plan is that if she has an established presence via other means, her musical output can have greater freedom as it doesn’t bear the weight of paying the bills.

IDOL IMAGE

like the morning glory,  like the evening primrose, bae remi is the flower that blooms in the night, in the dark. she is the ethereal creature of the liminal spaces between day and night - the dusk and the dawn. she is not the waned moon, the blackened sky, but the earth bathed in the light of a full moon - mystical and perhaps deceptively alluring. this is her image.

they’re at the point in their career, at this point, where nightmare’s image is the priority. the importance of cultivating an image within the group is at its apex. nightmare is so heavily conceptual to begin with that there is an importance in being able to sell that image both onstage and off, to curate an instagram profile that toes the line of soft and macabre.

remi is being marketed perhaps nebulously, a softer edge, the ethereally strange sort of witch rather than one with a mouthful of blood and necromancy at her beck and call. the ensnared innocent, the tainted soul, the lost alice stumbling through wonderland, dorothy trying to return home, both enticed and appalled by strange magics - these are the formative elements of her persona as it relates to the videography of nightmare. in other groups, perhaps, the image set forth in one’s music video might be far more straightforward or, even, entirely less important. with nightmare, as is often the case, things are quite differents

off stage remi isn’t much different; the epitome of thinking before she speaks, she is owlish wide eyes and surprise remarks that cut observant to the core. humor from left field, jokes that don’t quite land. she’s not loud enough, not over the top enough for the 4-d moniker but she’s definitely odd, definitely weird. she is a study in over-explained jokes that don’t land right, and aren’t any funnier after a lengthy explanation. she’s equal parts taciturn and humorous, unsettling and endearing. she is an enigma, but at least she’s beautiful- something that has been said, to her face, on more than one occasion. the first time it happens she’s on a variety show with vixen. she’s young, and she makes a poor joke, and the silence that falls in the white room continues until she smiles and the host nods, says, ‘well, you can make a joke like that, since you’re beautiful. we’ll just laugh anyway.” it doesn’t get edited out, it becomes a funny moment, but remi can’t help but find it patronizing.

she began, after that, to use it as something of a shield. kjh had been strict about the management of her image- be young, be bright, be beautiful. don’t be threatening, or morbid, or weird. don’t be off-center, or odd, or strange. with ktm she is given the opportunity to leave those constraints behind. she wears her affections on her sleeve, publicizes her quirks. bae remi streams majora’s mask for 9 hours when she loses a bet, the pann post reads. bae remi uploads a youtube video reviewing the native instruments maschine MKII, makes a beat on the spot. bae remi begins uploading lengthily titled largely voiceless beats to soundcloud- shouldn’t she do the bgm for a video game? did you know that the pixel and anime art on the thumbnails are hers too? snapshots of her side of the dorm treat fans to her myriad keyboards and synthesizers, video game figurines and a formidable collection of sneakers. she tweets oblique references to dlist hollywood horror and snooty arthouse indie films in turn, with an eclectic range of music posts that illuminate the fact that it is not easy to pin her down. to narrow her image is to find it elusive, escaping grasp.

but it’s okay, because she’s beautiful. this is the secret, of course, that with a conventionally beautiful face one can easily get away with things. one can bury scandals beneath the faults of comrades and competitors. mcs and hosts and suitors alike are compelled to overlook poorly timed puns, jokes that make no sense, an obsessive interest in promoting herself through unconventional and largely useless means. when you’re beautiful , you aren’t bizarre and morbid - you’re delightfully macabre. when you’re beautiful you aren’t weird and obsessive- you’re charming and offbeat.

so remi becomes alice in wonderland. remi becomes the bait in the trap of nightmare, the delightfully unexpected representation of the unexpected and endearing, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

IDOL HISTORY

the stars do not fortel her coming in the literal sense, but her mother has a pregnancy dream, the kind old grandmothers will say is prophetic, a dream of the milky way in the sky overhead, a dream of laying on her back on the hillside of her hometown out in the countryside, long since left behind. a dream of the inky blackness over head and a sense of something both ominous and promising. to remi this sounds more like a stress dream than anything else, but she also enjoys the idea that her mother knew, even as she was unborn, that remi herself would be some eldritch horror, some mystical being.

she isn’t, of course. remi is a normal baby, albeit on the cuter side. she grows into a relatively normal toddler as well, precocious and strange as most toddlers are, with an apparent lack of fear that alarmed her more timid mother. nothing phased remi, not the dark, not needles, not snakes nor spiders. at the influence of her older brothers, she spent as much time tramping around in the muddy fields around their house as she did inside, and when inside her mind roamed the hills and mountains in flights of fancy.

she was a whimsical child, bound up in impossibilities, in hopes, in daydreams and mysticism. easily influenced by whatever media she consumed, the girl voraciously wrapped herself into fantasy worlds, books and television and movies the most common culprits. but with the dawn of the video game era, the bae household was filled with the enthusiastic shrieks of overexcited children, crowded around a controller- lost in hyrule or the johto region or any number of other pixellated universes filled with magic, mystery, and lore.

the games quickly revealed many things about remi: she was fanciful and flighty, she was obsessive, she was sneaky and scheming, she was a perfectionist. and above all else, she was yearning, a desperation to reach out to something other than the world around her. she wanted the promise of more that came from such worlds, from fantasies and dreams. she wanted to be the chosen one, wielding a special blade or never-before-seen magical powers. head firmly lodged in the clouds, she was able to ignore, for quite some time, the unravelling of their lives.

you see the bae family had hit dire financial straits, and slowly the wear and tear of it began to show in the falling apart bandaid fixes on the plumbing, the windows, the wallpapering of their home. her father became a ghost, drifting in and out of the house too early, too late, barely heard from nor seen.

eventually relocation was in order, and they were forced to leave their little world behind. moving from the countryside of gyeonggi to the heart of seoul was tumultuous to say the least, and relocating from a more spacious (albeit falling apart old) home to a cramped villa apartment was almost impossible. for a girl born to run and explore the energy she was left with in this pent up, new lifestyle had her acting out in more ways than one. her performance at school suffered as she moved into middle school and she had a number of behavioral problems. in the hope of mitigating this and expending some of her energy (and getting her out of the house) her parents scraped up the money to put her in dance classes, which she had expressed some interest in prior.

by the time she was thirteen, she was auditioning for her first entertainment companies.

kjh was the first to offer her a contract, and while she initially thought to hold out to audition with the bigger names first, she found promise in how readily they accepted her in with open arms, talking of a new sort of image, a powerful and hard hitting concept that would make even jinx look weak. she liked the sound of that - she wanted that kind of power, wanted to immerse herself in the fantasy of the rich and famous, and so she begged her parents to okay the trainee contract.

debuting only three years later was, at the time, a blessing. vixen wasn’t the most popular right out of the gate, but remi knew they had promise. potential. as their main rapper greedily grabbed up attention for herself, remi knew in her heart she herself would win the world over if she were just given a chance, and set out to make that a possibility - at any cost, by any means.

overtime it worked, gradually picking up attention, mostly for her maturing visuals and for her natural charisma, more so than anything else, but she wasn’t picky. landing a role on the breakout show heroes certainly came to her aid, and she was experiencing a modest upswing in her popularity, slowly growing her career.

and then the video leaked.

she knew she was ruined.  

she had to be.

a video like that, pictures like that, suggestive to the extreme. did it matter if it was her or not? the public was certain, and her name was finally rocketing up the search engines. barely past her nineteenth birthday everything was falling apart.

and then, it all got worse.

when the scandal of their main rapper broke, her first reaction was “at least i didn’t try to blackmail anyone” - there was a sort of comfort in the mutual destruction of it. at least they were both fucking up. at least her scandal was being overshadowed. as more and more details came out, as it went to a trial, as the company brought them in to disband them, she watched her carefully crafted fantasy fall apart around her.

she fragmented. left to live with her parents, in that just-barely-better apartment she’d managed to buy for them with the next-to-nothing she’d earned (ti was easy to upgrade them from almost nothing to barely something, even on the shoestring budget of a rookie idol).  she was twenty years old and knew herself to be an abject failure, truly and completely.

it wasn’t until they begged her into at least getting back into dance that she slowly woke back up, became herself again. she had little interest in dancing, these days, but being surrounded by music at least helped. and when a scout from KTM reached out to her, she even considered it.

eventually, she accepted the offer. she had to put the past behind her. she had to try again. training all over again was an exercise in humiliation, and she knew all too well what was said about her in whispers, behind her back. and strangely, it helped, inured her to the criticisms, created in her a brazen and bullheaded spirit of competition and obsessive drive that earned her a spot in the debuting group.

but the concept, god.

she’s a fan of the music. the concept is interesting. but remi isn’t here to be interesting. remi wants that life that she’s been promised by every article about celebrities buying buildings, high rise apartments in solid cash, driving fancy cars and living a life that remi has only ever been able to dream about. she’s intent to make herself a brand, a money machine, wants to live comfortably and carefree and ultimately, with all the reckless abandon she desires.

the years of her hiatus afforded her the opportunity to hone her interests, to find herself in music in a way she’d never expected. for a girl with little passion for the idol life, she found an escape int he story telling of composition, picked up and relentlessly studied those instruments that her mother had once forced her to sit through lessons in. there was a new appreciation for the piano when she was working with a synthesizer and a sound board instead of the same tried and true, pretty but ultimately uninteresting pieces her stodgy classical piano instructor had her playing. when scales were abandoned for midi sound sampling and she was sampling bird song and rain to layer behind the whimsical lilt of distorted, video game esque piano, to tell a story of witches or aliens or the misleading promise of a fairy queen, it was all much more appealing.

remi built herself into a brand the best she could, created a platform for outreach that stretched over instagram, twitter, youtube, afreeka, soundcloud. whatever platform gained traction she was there, with content of any style she could manage, from game play throughs to musical equipment reviews, from dance covers to song covers to re-arrangements of hits, from vlogs and insta-lives to a soundcloud full of strange electropop lo-fi mellow beats accented by anime-styled art that toed the line between whimsy, wonder, and the macabre with disturbing charm, all self produced and created and ultimately not profitable in the mainstream.

she hopes, or had hoped, nightmare would be the mainstream appeal she needed to make her own brand viable, but with the group proving itself to be as niche as her own musical interests she fears this won’t be the case. she’s thus worked on moving into a diversified realm of promotion that will both dilute her former iljin and scandalous image with positive content and will rebrand her as someone marketable outside of her bizarrely morbid group. she’s taking on various radio and music program hosting jobs to saturate the public with her presence in mild and approachable soundbites and can only hope that the upcoming units will give her a better chance still to attain the marketability she needs to rebrand herself, to reach the heights of success she salivates after.

[tumblunni]

Man, god, im just suddenly thinking about "ak/ur/oku" and like.. How the fuck did that even become such a huge thing in early 2000s fandom? Dear god so much early gay shipping in fandom was super unhealthy "sinful" bullshit made by straight people for fetishy purposes rather than genuine representation. But a/kurok/u was such a weird one because it was like.. Just globally accepted and never aknowledged to be problematic?? Man i still remember how lil 13 year old me didnt know there was anything wrong with it, like seriously when stuff like this becomes popularized it ends up sending bad messages to actual queer youth. Learning about your sexuality via the internet cos there's no sex ed irl for you, abd you end up stumbling into toxic fandoms before you have the critical thinking skills necessary to know that this stuff is bad and shouldnt be imitated. Like seriously one of the things i worry about EVERY NIGHT AT 2AM THAT KEEPS ME FROM SLEEPING is that stupid lil 15 year old me made a post on deviantart going like "are pedophiles really all bad? I mean it sounds like an illness. I mean maybe theyre just scared and they want help." Like im terrified constantly that someone will find that old thing and judge me as if i still believe that apologist crap, or as if it was actually an opinion i formed from a fully developed mind, rather than from a kid who (as far as i knew) had never met a pedophile, thinking about pedophiles in the abstract, while being influenced by fuckin pedophile-dominated fandoms and having NO IDEA. and of cooooourse i wanted to believe that i was mature for my age, i thought that was a compliment.. Uuuuugh...

Sorry, going a little offtopic there.

But anyway isnt it kinda weird how akur/oku was just.. Not even regarded as pedophilia? And when i was a kid it wasnt just me not understanding the gross parts of the fandom, i legit never thought axel was that much older than roxas. And it was one of the more popular gay ships cos at that point as far as we knew it was the only person axel had any sort of backstory with, and he cared so much about this guy that he was willing to sacrifice his life to help sora even when he knew roxas would never come back. At the time without further context it seemed like a reasonable assumption to make? And it wasnt until Days that i realized axel was intended to be an adult rather than a teenager, and even worse A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO MADE THAT SHIPPING ART KNEW THAT. Uuugh it was so gross in retrospect to go back and see all the clues i missed that these people were fetishizing roxas's inexperience and veey much writing him as underage. AAAAAAA!

Anyway im glad that shit is now recognized as shit and now we have canon evidence of this dude being old as balls. And honestly i love the relationship of him as a big brother/dad to roxas and xion a lot more, even though as a kid i was desperate for any kind of queer representation in kh. Like.. I never really actually liked the ship that much or felt any chemistry? I just latched onto a few bad writing flubs that could potentially be interpreted as Gay Evidence because i was SO damn desperate! Like i felt like i had to support all these gross abusive ships in fandom cos if i wasnt then i was being 'homophobic', i mean they were THE ONLY AVAILABLE OPTIONS, right? :( Its only now ive grown up i can see how wrong that was, and how people just used it as an excuse to make gross shit and get away with it. Like how in Black Butler all these 'yaoi fangirls' kept erasing the rarest of rare things, a canon trans woman, because 'its sexier if its gay'. Ughhhh. And seriously that discourse still exists for poor Grell, and there's still a lot of these shitty bigoted people pretending to be allies, but like seriously this was EVERYWHERE in 2005! And lgbt rights and even lgbt communities at all were way smaller and less available to the poor teenagers who really needed that positive influence while they were figuring out who they are. So man the abusive side of yaoi fandom was WAY more powerful, and wya more.mainstream, with barely any criticism. And the whole content of this fandom was creepy fuckin adults making pedo porn, and kids who just discovered they were queer and tried to headcanon their favourote characters as being like them. Fucking predator heaven! So yeh that ruined KH for me and definately made me scared of returning to Black Butler for almost a decade. And then i found out that the manga itself has none of that pedo shit and that one of the fandom's biggest abusive gay man archetypes was actually a trans woman this entire time, and just gahhhhh....

Also like seriously this is a tad offtopic but can we kill the anime trope of either everyone looking young or everyone looking old? Or creepy things where just one character looks the wrong age in order to fetishize pedophilia? I dont think kingdom hearts was one of those intentional ones, like i mean there's super bad shit where its like 'this 5 year old looking person is really 9000 years old/actually 18 and just hasnt had their growth spurt yet' (somehow its even more insulting when theres not even a magical excuse) Or the other way around and we have a character thats canonically underage but drawn looking sexually mature with big ol knockers so its somehow okay. The existence of those horrible things is why i end up feeling uncomfortable even seeing ambiguous ages as just a trope in completely innocent anime, yknow? Like in pokemon and digimon all the 10 year old protagonists are exactly the same height as all the adults, and all the female love interests for ash have to be early bloomers in terms of chest and hips, while notably Iris is the only one who actually looks her age and also the first non love interest. Its another reason why i prefer the new art style for the latest season, they make everyone look like kids and Lillie continues to look like a kid even though she's the main girl and has all the cute scenes with Ash. The girls even got very normal looking kiddy swimsuits in the beach episode! Why is that so uncommon, to find the bare minimum thing of underage kids not being sexualized at the beach??

Soooooo yeah, thats at least part of why kid me thought axel and roxas were within a similar age range. Like i thought roxas was maybe 16 and axel was 18?? Somehow?? I dont even know, kingdom hearts isnt even SUPER bad with the 'kids look like older teens,all adults look like age 20 at the most' anime syndrome. Its probably more because id been raised on games and anime that followed that trope, before i played kh. And as a kid you just dont really know the exact differences between 'old', like i mean i knew teenagers were tall and boys get a growth spurt, so somehow it made sense to me that axel could be the same age as roxas?? And man even if i knew he wasnt, i was barely educated at all about pedophilia and i didnt know the nuances of it. I just knew 'its bad for adults to marry kids' like man i was really behind the curve in general learning due to my undiagnosed autism and abusive parenting so like HERE'S 12 YEAR OLD ME NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT THE SEX ASPECT. And i didnt know that adults in relationships with teenagers was bad too, or like 16/17 year old teens dating kids... I was so fuckin dumb... I really cant believe that not only did i believe stupid adults saying 'pedophilia isnt bad if you're non offending, its okay to make cartoon child porn as long as you dont physically abuse real kids' but also i somehow just DID NOT EVER REALIZE that axel was an adult and roxas wasnt even a goddamn older teen...

So yeh im making a lot of excuses for why my stupid younger self was blindly parroting bullshit, but im not trying to excuse how goddamn wrong and bad it was. I still wake up ashamed in the middle of the night for crapoy decisions i made as a dumb kid, and in terrified that some shreds of it might still exist out there on the internet and maybe someone else could read it?! Gahhhh! Seriously could i have accidentally helped spread that bullshit brainwashing to other kids? And seriously when people say this shit is harmless they just need to look at this, look at how being into problematic yaoi is such a common 'phase' for ACTUAL CHILDREN. Like its not fuckin NATURAL for kids to fall into this stuff, they do it because they dont know any better but the people making the goddamn founding blocks of the fandom are fuckin grown women fetishizing gay men or grown men fetishing lesbians. There's people who do know better who actually conciously decide that a/kurok/u is a good ship while knowing all the goddamn details of what it actually is and exactly what theyre supporting by shipping it. Ughhhhh!

So yeh fuckin Please Stay Safe In Fandom, Kids

And pedophiles have absolutely none of my sympathy, please ignore that goddamn shit i wrote as a little kid being fuckin groomed by a fandom without even knowing it.

This also applies a lot to the rest of LGBT+ aside from just gay shipping, like seriously it took me til age 18 to find any positive representation of trans people or even a proper explanation of what being trans is, yet before i was even 8 years old i'd seen a million 'lol gross man in a dress who gets sexual gratification from wearing women's underwear' jokes in kids shows. And when i was 12 i'd already been exposed to the fuckin hell of m/pre/g thanks to its prevelance of untagged n/sf/w shit in the kh fandom. And by age 15 i'd been exposed to pedophile apologists arguing whether child porn was okay if they only got off to that and didnt personally abuse that kid with their own hands. All of that shit but actually learning about homosexuality and gender in sex ed would have been 'too much' for someone my age...

God what a fuckin mess. Fuck im really really fuckin worried that any of my ignorant comments at those ages could have been read by other ignorant kids and contributed to that disgusting fandom atmosphere. Fuck i think about this so damn often im so damn ashamed of how ignorant i used to be yet i know the adult fuckfaces making pedo shit never reel one lick of shame any damn day of their life. I used to excuse their shit as an actual kid cos i just ASSUMED they would be ashamed and want to seek help! Gahhhh..

[bambamramfan]

“Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.

And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”

This is great, and it’s important to fight the temptation to think of foreign cultures as completely ridiculous idiots who do stuff for no reason. But it all works out so neatly – and so much better than when anyone else treats the same topics – that I’m always nervous if I’m not familiar enough with the culture involved to know whether they’re being shoehorned into a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing than other anthropologists (or they themselves) would recognize.”

This question of the rationality of extremely different cultures has a long pedigree in anthropology. One of the classic early attempts to grapple with this problem is Edward Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande based on fieldwork he conducted in Sudan in the 1920s and 1930s. The Azade believe that almost every ill-fortune that befalls them is the result of witchcraft and have to constantly consult oracles when something goes wrong – they fail to catch a wild boar while hunting, or one of their wives gets sick. Evans-Pritchard was trying to show that by the internal logic of their own thinking, everything they did was perfectly rational. If you accepted their fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality then they were acting completely logically. One popular thought experiment given to first year anthropology students is to get them to imagine an Azande anthropologist coming to Europe. At first they would think, “these people are mad, they don’t accept the obvious existence of witches and attribute everything that goes wrong to ill-fortune.” Then, they might do something like the move David Friedman makes and think, “Actually, perhaps not believing in witches provides a sort of social cohesion necessary to the proper functioning of European society. If they accepted the reality of witches they would have to deal with the fact that people are constantly casting malevolent spells on them and the resulting disputes could be a threat to the stability to the social order.”

The Azande example is obviously dealing with whether other cultures’ actions are rational by their own logic, but there have been plenty of attempts to argue that they’re also rational by our standards. Economic anthropology as a sub-discipline was largely created in the 40s/50s by a debate between two groups known as the formalists and the substantivists. The formalists argued that the economic behaviour of “natives” could be understood by applying theories of rational, self-interested maximisation drawn from mainstream economics whereas the substantivists held that they had to be understood as working on different logics to our economic system. This debate never really got resolved and economic anthropology moved onto other questions, largely because the idea that homo economicus explained behaviour in pre-capitalist societies seemed fairly clearly untrue to the majority of anthropologists who’d spent a long time conducting research in such societies, but the substantivists never really came up with a good explanation of motivation, no reason why people did the things they did beyond “because it’s their culture”.

The problem never really went away though. One of the most famous relatively more recent examples was a debate between Gananath Obeysekere and Marshall Shalins about the death of Captain Cook at the hands of Hawaiian natives. Sahlins had argued that the Hawaiian’s killing of Cook made sense in the context of their mythical worldview, particularly in relation to their belief that he was a kind of deity. Obeysekere attacked him, claiming that there is a universal ‘practical rationality’ which was confirmed by contemporary knowledge of neurophysiology and cognitive thought processes. The Hawaiians, in his view, had known perfectly well that Cook was a man just like them, not a god, and they killed him for reasons that look perfectly rational to a Western understanding of the world.

Interestingly, Obeysekere is the postmodernist in this debate. During the back and forth between them he argues that Sahlins is engaging in a kind of orientalism in ascribing a fundamentally different way of comprehending the world to the Hawaiian’s, criticises Sahlins’ reading of Western sources as not being critical enough and believing they roughly correspond to objective reality when they’re obviously engaged in just the same orientalism he accuses Sahlins of. He even argues that as a native Sri Lankan he is better able to understand the non-Western view of Hawaiians than the white, Western Sahlins.

This should not actually be especially surprising. The idea of people being rational, and particularly the idea of calculatedly pursuing their own self interest pervades a lot of post-structuralism (a relative of postmodernism, although most people here seem to lump them in together.) This passage from Pierre Bourdieu (although in Bourdieu’s case the conflation of postmodernism and post-structuralism doesn’t quite work as much of his sociology was based on doing statistical analyses of large sets of data) on gift exchange among the Kabyle is a fairly clear example:

“A rational contract would telescope into an instant a transaction which gift exchange disguises, by stretching it out in time; and because of this, gift exchange is, if not the only mode of commodity circulation practiced, at least the only mode to be fully recognized, in societies which, because they deny ‘the true soil of their own life,’ as Lukacs puts it, have an economy in itself and not for itself. Everything takes place as if the essence of the “archaic” economy lay in the fact that economic activity cannot explicitly acknowledge the economic ends in relation to which it is objectively oriented: the “idolatry of nature” which makes it impossible to think of nature as a raw material or, consequently, to see human activity as labour, i.e., as man’s struggle against nature, tends, together with the systematic emphasis on the symbolic aspect of the activities and relations of production, to prevent the economy from being grasped as an economy, i.e., as a system governed by the laws of interested calculation, competition, or exploitation.”

This might be a good point to return to David Friedman’s book and Scott’s question of ‘whether [the cultures discussed are] being shoehorned into a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing than other anthropologists (or they themselves) would recognize.’ I think the answer here is that, yes, they are, but this isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself. Any theory for understanding societies or human action is going to be incomplete and at best capture a small slice of the infinitely more complex reality of the objective processes that took place or are taking place right now. When you try to reduce a society or even multiple societies to words on a page you’re undoubtedly going to lose the vast majority of what’s actually going on but hopefully your theoretical simplifications can still contain some accuracy and have some use in making sense of the world. Scott points to one of the benefits of this book: that it translates seemingly bizarre customs into terms that are familiar to contemporary Westerners with some understanding of economics and through this, powerfully conveys the truth that these people aren’t just crazy idiots engaging in behaviour that’s at best pointless and at worse self-destructive. It’s also probably useful for the development of economics itself: applying familiar concepts to unfamiliar contexts can help refine your understanding and use of these concepts and on returning to more familiar modern, capitalist economies you might well use these concepts in a sharper and more illuminating way. It probably won’t be as rich or as nuanced as some of the accounts of historians and anthropologists and probably in some respects less accurate but it might well be perfectly suited to Friendman���s purposes and could capture some aspects that these other accounts miss.

Having said this, you don’t want to do too much shoe-horning, and although I haven’t read Friedman’s book so I can’t say whether he does this or not, economic accounts often tend to do this. This comes out in Bourdieu’s analysis quoted above – in his view, the level on which they are acting in economic self-interest is the objective level of reality. They may think they’re being generous but a scientific analysis is one which shows how really there’s calculation at work behind this subjective mask of munificence. There’s a tendency that when we see, ‘The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes,’ we don’t interpret it as a particular way of describing reality that reveals some features while occluding others to be judged on what it reveals and how well it corresponds to actual practice, we interpret it as an objective description of what is happening.

There’s often a strange correspondence between ‘a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing’ and seeing things as being “objective” or “scientific”, like in Bourdieu’s account where the objective level is the one where we can say that people are being selfish. This is then often extended metaphorically across levels so that we can find an economic incentive for punishing crimes but also, ‘natural-human-desire-for-vengeance is probably just evolution’s solution to this same problem.’ We extend optimisation through the pursuit of self-interest down the scale towards biology and up the scale towards societies. Genes should be understood as if they were rationally pursuing their own self interest and this is an explanation for progress. Ideas should be understood through an analogy with genes as memes, which also act as if they were pursuing a self-interested desire to replicate. Institutions and even societies can be understood as if they were self-interested, competing individuals, and this again drives progress. I think it ends up with a sort of evolutionism that much more closely resembles the Spencerian version than what you’d find in On the Origin of Species. Less “variation under natural selection” and more “survival of the fittest” as a cosmic principle driving an optimising teleological process. It ends up with optimisation caused by competing individuals, not being one theory of society or one aspect of the economy, but a natural law of progress. Margaret Thatcher was famously nick-named TINA because of her fondness for proclaiming “there is no alternative”. The only arena where competition cannot be allowed is in the marketplace of ideas. Interestingly, she got this line from Spencer who was just as keen on claiming there is no alternative to competition because it is a natural law of progressive evolution.

tl;dr Anthropologists have debated the question of how rational seemingly exotic cultures are and in what sense they are rational. Shoe-horning other cultures into the terms of economic theory is not a problem as long as it’s for a purpose and we keep in mind that it’s just one way of describing/modelling objective reality and we take care not to confuse it for objective reality itself.

[mudkippz]

Going on very long possibly permanent hiatus, please read!

Hey everyone, most of you have probably noticed i’ve slowly become less and less active, i’m not doing bad or anything i’m actually doing really great despite the fall out of my parents finding out about the nonbinary thing. But there’s a lot in my life i need to focus on right now and tumblr is way too negative and just way Too Much in like, every way. 

i spend so much time on here i regret and i’m surrounded by very negative and taxing things on a daily basis, no matter who i unfollow or blacklist. its gotten to the point i get irritated every time i see a post about any fandom of mine in a positive light or not, i don’t enjoy myself on here anymore or how everything is treated but i’m not gonna get into that. 

I’m cutting out negative sources and overly time consuming things i dont enjoy as much anymore out of my life and tumblr is so high up on the list, the problem is i’ve spent the last 4 years of my life on here and its one of the only places i feel free to be myself, but now i’ve reached a point where i dont need that anymore and ive grown comfortable with myself irl as well and although tumblr really did help my social and confidence skills for a long time, its stopped being something that helps me and ive realized that. I dont need it anymore and i enjoy myself much more in just the company of myself or my friends when it comes to content, and i dont have the energy to keep up this blog anymore.

That being said i wont be deactivating! im going to keep this blog up for whenever im on my laptop (i deleted all social media outside of instagram off my phone) ill check my messages for the few people i still talk to on here, and continue to talk! basically just check in to keep contact with my friends, and maybe an occasional thing about my art but im basically moving everything to instagram im much happier there and im very active, its mostly my art but kind of a day to day thing as well if you guys still wanna see me around! im reyven_claw if you guys would like to follow me and better communicate :) if you have an instagram please feel free to follow and tell me who you were on tumblr id love that! its a much better environment for my art and im a lot better at keeping up with people and having a good laugh there :p

This was a very hard decision for me to make since ive spent so much time on here and some of you ive followed for years, but its the best decision for me and im going to be much happier away from it all. Please feel free to unfollow you probably wont be seeing fandom content from me anymore, my mindset as of now is permanent but maybe someday ill decide to pop in again but thats unlikely. Thank you all so much for accepting me and sticking around through all my crazy multifandom mess! this place and the people i met here helped me more than i can ever say. :’) 

I just really need to focus on my life and what makes me happy and moving forward and this is just a step in doing that, i’m gonna learn how to drive soon im getting work experience volunteering at my library and teaching myself skills for the future and im reaching my inner happiness everyday, things have never been better for me and im going to keep making decisions to further that, good luck in life to everyone! i believe in you all :) i probs dont need to be so dramatic lol but ive known you guys so long figure this deserves proper explanation to my leaving. I’ll be self reblogging this continually for probably about a week or more!

[kxlebcross]

for the quarantine asks, multiples of 2, please :)

are you fucking serious???? i’m gonna get back at you for this, i’m smol and ready to fight!!!! (under the cut >:3)

2. Grilled cheese or PB&J? grilled cheese, always... idk, maybe i’m too european for that but pb&j just seems gross to me (noah fence to anyone who likes it tho)

4.  Your go-to bar order, if you drink? usually it’s a mojito, a gintonic or a vodka-tonic, depending on the place and its’ prices... and if i’m not that low on money sometimes an absinthe slips in, but that’s really rare, i’m not that young anymore and my body just can’t keep up with the alcohol anymore dfsdfd

6. Top three cuisines? uhhhh..... italian, hungarian and..... i don’t actually have a third hdgfhsd can i just generally say that ‘asian’? tbh i tried like 3-4 dishes from various asian countries which imo is way less than enough to choose a fave, and there’s also a lot more i’d like to try sometime... but my city doesn’t have many places to go to, and the only “chinese” restaurant we have is a cheap ripoff which never served a proper chinese dish in their life.... ordered from there twice, beforehand researching each dish i ordered and let me tell u.... they weren’t even close to what they were supposed to be......

8.  What’s a job that you’ve had that people might be surprised to find out you’ve had?  i once worked at a strip club..... no, not as a stripper, i was a waiter/bartender, and honestly i wouldn’t even mind talking about it if the place wasn’t shady as fuck.... one of the national tv stations even made a full time documentary series about all the illegal shit that’s going down there..... but i never really did any unconventional jobs so there’s nothing fancy, but if i were to tell stories about what i’ve encountered during my ordinary jobs...... oh boi.......

10.  Do you own any signed books/memorabilia in general? i have a signed photo with Flowsik from his Warsaw concert.... and i think that’s the only thing like that, if i ever had anything else it’s long forgotten and probably is laying in some box in my mom’s basement lmao

12. What do you get on your bagels? What WOULD you get if you had access to anything you wanted? i only have bagels in the kfc breakfast offer so it’s usually some chicken, salad, cheese, egg and mayonnaise? i think? or was that the ciabatta? fuck me if i remember...... but if i could choose anything i’d probably go with smth similar, some chicken strips, veggies, bacon, cheese and moyinnaise? yeah, probably, im a man of simple tastes dsfdfg

14.  Favorite mug you own i wish i wasn’t so lazy and just take a picture of it, but i’m a lazy fuck so here i go explaining XD so its actually a middle-sized coffee mug, it’s pastel greyish-pink with two cats on it, and one of the cats is chilling on a guitar.... it was a bday present from my mums friend and it came in a cat head-like box which i kept.... it’s now on the top shelf in it’s all grotesque cat box glory..... like the ceiling cat meme

16.  Pick a song lyric to describe your current mood (and drop the name and artist!)  uhhhh tbh my mood is usually a blank space, apathy be fun like that... so ill just list some that i’m generally vibin’ with

Take a knife in the back, wanna feel my pain Make a slice to the wrist to reveal those veins I could see your face, man I feel insane

Such a mess when I'm in your presence I've had enough, think you've been making me sick Gotta get you out of my system, yeah

MGK - In These Walls

I just can’t get enough of you, but that’s alright Feeling like going on a joyride with you through the night I keep accelerating on the road with you at my side

Lexie Liu - Like a Mercedes

And it's nights like this when I'm on my own And I realize that you'll never feel like home No, I can't feel you now (Feel me now) And I try my best to stick around But when you're broken like me, you just gotta get out 

Bring Me The Horizon -  ±ªþ³§ feat. YONAKA (but i’m generally vibin’ with the whole album that this song is from)

18.  What’s that one TV show that you’re a little bit embarrassed to watch but you still like nonetheless?  okay so i’m probably not gonna rewatch it ever again, but... when i was a kid there was this german series on tv and it was called medicopter 117.... so in exam season i realized that as a kid i never got to finish it so i decided to rewatch... listen, it’s a 1997 series... but damn it was actually better than some of the crap ppl call tv show now....... not gonna rewatch tho, some moments and plotlines were frustrating as fuck

20.  Do you match your socks? yes! but only because i either have them all black (which will match anyway) or funky colorful fruit patterned ones that look a bit much even on their own so i wouldn’t really wanna mix’n’match those in fear they would just look tacky as fuck

22.  What was your “phase” when you were younger? (i.e., Mythology Nerd, Horse Girl, Space Geek, etc) well for a while i was the horse kid, then the cat kid, then the car kid and then i ended up being the resident class emo with a weird obsession over Lord of the Rings.... it was a wild ride, though the emo phase sort of stuck with me even now

24.  What’s your opinion on Lazy Susan’s (the spinning tray in the middle of tables)? the what? i stg i never encountered it in my life so i’m not really having an opinion on it, sorry to disappoint

26.  You can only have one juice for the rest of your life, what is it? definitely orange... apple has a weird aftertaste, tomato is gross, banana feels like having jizz in ur mouth.... yeah, we’re sticking with orange (also please don’t ask me to elaborate on the jizz part)

28.  What’s one thing you’re trying to learn/relearn in your downtime right now? i’m actually trying to get better with some overwatch heroes i never learned before... since the lockdown started i got a lot better with snipers and i1m actually pretty proud of it

30.  Where could someone find you in a museum? most likely in the souvenir shop trying to find the cheapest thing..... or chilling on some bench/chair after watching all the art pieces, i’m usually way too lazy to stand around and wanna get out pretty fast, but i think it has more to do with the fact that i don’t really like to hang out around people and museums tend to always have a few of those

32.  Rainbows, stars, or sunset colored clouds? stars and clouds.... but man i actually really miss stars........ that’s the only thing that’s shitty in living at the city that i can’t see the stars

34.  Do you have more art on your walls or more photographs? i think art.... i mean i have three movie posters, an overwatch one, a religious calendar from my mum, and then a pride flag and some tacky painting the landlady insisted on keeping on the wall.....

36.  Pick a superhero sidekick to hang out with uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.... okay i’m gonna admit, i’m not really into superheroes so i’m not that well-informed about their sidekicks either.... can i just hang out with loki instead or smth?

38.  Favorite mid-2000s song oh no.... assuming it was around 2005.... i was like 7 at that time? what the fuck did  i listen to back then? uhhhhhhh i’m pretty sure that was a basshunter time back then? so i’m gonna go with Basshunter’s Now You’re Gone as i remember having it on my mp3 player dfjhjkdf

40.  Where do you sit in the living room (we all have a preferred spot, and you know it)? usually at my pc, even when i have guests over because i don’t trust anyone with the playlists...... and when i’m over at someone i usually choose a fotel or smth and lay down in it as if i’ve never used a fotel before or couldn’t sit like a normal human being.... and if there’s no fotel then i’m sitting on the armrest of the sofa because apparently i can’t sit like a normal human being sdshfghsdf

42.  A song you didn’t think you’d enjoy but ended up loving  it’s this one.... one day just popped up in my youtube recommended and i was like what the fuck??????? but i’m not gonna say what it is, see for yourself ;)

44.  Are you a “Quote that relates to the photos” caption-er, an “explanation of where I took the photos” caption-er, or a no caption kinda person when you post pictures online? i..... try not to post at all??? but if i do it’s either no caption or “i randomly decided to post some pictures at 3am without thinking about a concept or caption so i’m just gonna wing it” kind of bullshit, no inbetween, i just can’t write meaningful shit under my pictures 

46.  What’s the freezer food that you stock up on when you go to the grocery store? fries..... i’m a slut for fries, best food ever......... give me fries......... i think i actually might buy some later now that we’re talking about it

48.  Do you like Jello? once again i’m way too european to have an opinion, sorry.....

50.  How are you at climbing trees? when i was a kid i was doing pretty well..... now, around 15 yrs and a few fucked up joints later i’m not sure how would i do....... if this stewpid lockdown is over i might actually convince my friend to find some trees to climb and then we’ll see....... (and then i hopefully won’t accidentally k*ll myself because he will be there to catch me if i fall lmaoooo)

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has ���subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[nofomoartworld]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

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In the school you should be powerful than others

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Twisted Legacy (11/25)

Disclaimer: Transformers and related properties belong to Hasbro Warnings: Canon-typical language and violence, Psychological torture and horror, Post-war politics, Canon divergence/Loose canon, Hospitalization and illness, Cultist indoctrination Rating: T Synopsis: [Canon Divergence from MTMTE and exRID #54] The legacy of the Primes has had a tainted past, one that weighs heavily on Optimus, his supporters, and those who seek the legacy for the future. But as they look forward for themselves and for Cybertron, a darkness looms that threatens to further corrupt the unsteady peace of their planet with its curious claim to be the Hand of Primus himself.

It’s up to Optimus, Windblade, Rodimus, and their teams to try and save all Cybertronians from this mysterious threat and, perhaps, change the future for the better if they can.

A/N: Thanks everyone for waiting on this one! We’re on part THREE! All things are coming together, all the different gears are getting turned, and I hope you all enjoy what’s in store because it’s about to get, let’s say, complicated ; ) 

Special thanks to @secretlystephaniebrown, squiggol, and Isame for the feedback! I really appreciate it!

Part III: The Risk of Saving the Guilty Chapter 3.1: The Whispers Travel

In a reasonable world -- which Cybertron seemed determined to prove it was not -- but in a reasonable world, there would have been some sort of system in order that would have given Knock Out the immediate access he deserved for the laboratory he had spent the last several weeks of his life and work in for Starscream.

And Starscream -- that was another untrusting blunder within itself. 

If only Knock Out did not find himself so weak for a decent paintjob. He probably would have made certain his arrangements were more permanent. 

Ever since the Lost Light survivors had come through the space bridge, it was a literal struggle each solar cycle to get back into the room and to his research. Most of which had been left completely abandoned by his fellow doctors. 

Honestly, Breakdown would have been more assistance in the lab at that point than the Cybertronians. 

With a long vent, Knock Out threw out his credentials again for the snarling guards and did his best to ignore the way being a colonist was giving him extra looks that most of Cybertron did not. Then he looked, with annoyance, once more to see the galactically famous Ratchet alongside the other doctors busied with the same assortment of bots. 

“Well,” Knock Out drawled out, running his sharpened nails across his desk of untouched research. “What is that idiom I keep hearing about if you can’t beat them...” 

Strolling over to the medical bay, Knock Out earned those funny looks once again, as if it was a Cybertronian thing to always wear one’s faceplate like it was about to fall off, but he was then promptly ignored. 

“Wheeljack, can you give me anything at all that soft-melds to protoform?” Ratchet barked out. “I know it’s out there--”

“Was out there, Doc,” Wheeljack informed him with an awkward rub of his neck. “Cybertron’s been in short supply of hot spots since before the war. The sort of melding material used to treat sparkling injuries would be basically a lost art.”

"You are the highest scientific mind on Cybertron, and you’re telling me you can’t work something up to suit our needs?” Ratchet asked harshly.

From behind them, one of the awake patients -- a blue and yellow jet who Knock Out was unfamiliar with -- made a point of waving a hand in the air at them. “Since I’m here on Cybertron now, too, I can actually contest that claim--”

Rounding on the jet without hesitation, Ratchet pointed a thick finger at him. “Brainstorm, you are a weapons expert. I’m not going to let you build him into a giant gun. We already have a captain who was a giant gun. I’m not willing to have a second!”

Brainstorm crossed his arms and tilted his helm, looking positively offended. “It’s not only guns. I made an entire time machine out of brief cases, in case you forgot--”

“We didn’t!” they all said at once. 

The green medic from Caminus that Knock Out hadn’t bothered to learn the name of yet then apathetically patted Brainstorm’s head. “You’ve been stuck on repeat about the briefcase for days now, Brainstorm. It’s time to move on to something else.”

“I know,” Brainstorm grunted, rubbing at his neck tenderly. “I don’t know why, but it’s at the forefront of my brain module.”

“Well, either shut your brain module off again or move it back to thinking about guns, because we don’t have time to waste on this anymore,” Ratchet snapped before looking back to Wheeljack. “Can you whip me something up to help rebuild the protoform layer?” 

“Undoubtedly,” Wheeljack said. “I’m just worried about how the mesh will hold, Ratchet. Injuries this deep and this bad... Well, in the war weren’t they mostly Cold Constructed bodies?”

“I’ve made it work on forged and constructed cold millions of years before the war. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll just be proving to Rodimus again that his tailpipe isn’t shinier than the rest of ours,” Ratchet said with a wave of his hand.

"I just feel like patience would get us along much further,” First Aid encouraged. “The more time we allow for self-healing--”

“The more time Starscream has to weave whatever version of the story he feels like it,” Ratchet interrupted the younger doctor. “Especially since Brainstorm’s questioning was no help.”

“I can’t help what I can’t remember -- no one’s driven more crazy by unused brainpower than me, I assure you!” Bainstorm defended.

Having been left out of the intellectual loop for long enough, Knock Out stepped forward toward the CR tank in question, hand on his chin as he hummed slightly to himself. It was a vain attempt at getting the other scientists’ attention, but at the very least it worked. 

Raising a brow, Knock Out looked back at his fellow doctors. “On Velocitron, most every mech is, what do you call them again, ah yes, forged. And given the frequency of racing and the dangers that come with it, we get plenty of deep protoformic injuries. As a doctor, I keep protomatter synthesized in my labs. It’s not exact, but it is nearly seamless when worked with the right hands.”

The doctors stared at him for a moment, most seemingly impressed, before turning toward the one face that was far from ecstatic about Knock Out’s explanation. 

Ratchet crossed his arms. “Do you have access to Velocitron at the second?”

Knock Out cycled his optics. “Well, no one has access to the space bridge at the moment--”

“And do you have any of this here?” Ratchet continued harshly.

“Well, no--”

“Then you’re wasting our time and Wheeljack still needs to make some of our own,” Ratchet snapped, then turned to Wheeljack. “Are you going to get me what I need?”

Knock Out couldn’t help but drop his shoulders at being so quickly iced out of the conversation again. He stepped toward the CR chamber to get another look at the half mangled mech inside. “Fine, be that way. I swear, it’s as if you don’t even really want help.”

“I assure you,” a deep voice said from the shadows on the other side of the CR chamber, nearly causing Knock Out to jump back in shock. The quiet swordsmech who had been in the lab since Ratchet’s arrival leered at Knock Out. “We are giving Rodimus all the help he needs.”

“You’re still here? Tell me, do you bots ever take a recharge?” Knock Out asked. 

The swordsmech’s steely blue gaze merely narrowed at the notion.

“Nevermind,” Knock Out sighed. “Honestly, forget trying to help any of you with these Eukarian casualties.” He strolled toward First Aid. “I’m more interested in the Rust Killers and how our research is going anyway.”

First Aid tilted his head at Knock Out. “Seriously? Knock Out, I haven’t had any time to vent, let alone continue working on that project since the injured came in--”

Having had enough of the social customs, Knock Out dropped his half cocked smile and showed a full scowl toward the doctor. “That project? Terrorists nearly wiped out your planet and all of the colonies in the Council of Worlds, and it’s just some side project?” 

“To my oath as a doctor, everything is a side project,” First Aid responded snippishly. 

“What do they teach Cybertronian doctors? The needs of the few outweigh the many?” Knock Out growled. He turned toward the Camien doctor. “And what about on Caminus? Is a doctor’s duty only to those they’re loyal to first and foremost?”

Velocity quickly raised her servos. “I’m not really here to fight. I’m not even working right now. I was just leaving with Brainstorm to meet with the rest of our amicas--”

"Everyone has their own little projects,” Knock Out sighed before walking back toward the door. “If no progress is being actively made on the Red Rust research, then there’s no reason for my brand of genius to be around. Though if you believe the Council of Worlds will continue to sponsor this lab and its experiments without further progress, you have another thing coming.”

First Aid threw up one of his hands. “But you’re on the Council of Worlds.”

“And I’m interested in the Red Rust research,” Knock Out reminded him threateningly. “I’m going to take a nice drive, test my engines and blow off some steam before I reconsider making a report about this misplacement of funds, First Aid. I’ve enjoyed working with you while you’re on task. Hopefully we can do that again.”

No one stopped him as he left the room, but of course none of them probably knew a proper retort for the slew of accusations Knock Out had just flung at them. 

After all, his interests in the Red Rust were for his own self interests -- that and his conjunx. 

As always with Cybertron, though, there was more than simply their own concerns going on. 

He was in the halls for maybe twenty seconds before Windblade collided into him. 

“Why, I never!” Knock Out ground out, checking his paint job for any scratches. He then leered at the cityspeaker. “Delegate Windblade, if you wish for my attention, use your voice box.”

“Apologies, Knock Out,” she said, mid-vent. “I am in a rush and I need to get to the shipyard before it’s too late.”

“No you don’t!” Chromia called out in pursuit of her delegate. “Windblade, you can’t leave with the Prime--”

Surprised, Knock Out tilted his head at the jet. “I must concur with the bodyguard.”

Unlike with the doctors, his suggestion seemed to at least carry some weight where the cityspeaker was concerned and Windblade stopped in her tracks, looking toward Knock Out. 

“There’s something bigger going on and it involves Optimus Prime directly -- you’ve had to have seen the news! If this Error is after the Prime and the Matrix, then there is no reason to send him alone into space--”

“Unless it’s to keep the rest of us safe,” Knock Out said, raising his brow. “You are right, Windblade, in that there is something bigger going out here. And considering I have been approached by Lord Starscream for my scientific knowledge already, I have to say he seems to already understand that perhaps even more than you.”

Her optics narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes, Delegate Windblade, it is our job as leaders, as doctors, as mechs of power, to understand when the needs of many outweigh the needs of the few,” Knock Out explained. “And if the danger lies with the Prime, there was probably more than one incentive for Lord Starscream to send him alone into space and away from the citizenry.”

Chromia vented with relief at someone spouting sensical words for once.

But Windblade’s jaw merely squared itself. “The holy and powerful position of the Prime, for many of us -- that hope only the Prime’s light can provide? It can squash a whole lot of the many when in the wrong hands, Delegate Knock Out.”

“Maybe,” Knock Out said, crossing his arms. “But are you willing to leave your position here? Let Lord Starscream run the Council of Worlds without you? Alone?”

Windblade’s wings dropped slightly.

“Energon for thought,” Knock Out shrugged before continuing on his way out. “Do try to make the right decision. For all of us.”

Without further interruptions to his day, Knock Out went for his drive. 

Ultra Magnus was not sure what gave him more work -- when Rodimus was in charge himself, or when he was forcibly co-captaining with Megatron. But there was one thing he was certainly learning under the current fear and unease: Megatron in control of a ship of Autobots, by himself, under highly suspicious circumstances, and just after most of the original crew had mutinied, was the hardest of the three options.

So hard, in fact, that the captain had hardly left his quarters in the last week of disfunction, and their ship had not yet left Eukaris’ airspace as they awaited news of the survivors. 

The former second-in-command should have happily taken charge of their situation. After all, he mostly ran things while Rodimus was the sole captain. But the burden was greater.

There was a burden of knowledge. Of injustice.

And as the former Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord, there was quite possibly nothing that caused his fuel tank to turn more in on itself than the idea that he was assisting severe injustice.

Excusing himself from the bridge, not that anyone there was doing anything under their inactive orders, Ultra Magnus walked to the captain’s office and knocked politely once. 

When there was no answer, he sighed and overrode the code to let himself in.

Megatron did not even budge from his desk. 

“I have been making contact with Cybertron over the last week,” Ultra Magnus informed his captain. “The next inbound ship will have Velocity, Brainstorm, one of the other recovered members of the away team, and the others who had departed for Cybertron.” When the former Decepticon did not look up, Ultra Magnus tilted his head. “I assumed you would want to be informed that we were about to have a medical officer again. There have been far too many unattended injuries from barfights without one.”

“Which made me wonder why you had not closed down Swerve’s,” Megatron replied before finally glancing up to Ultra Magnus. 

Ultra Magnus stood in complete attention. “Are you asking me as captain to do that, Sir?” he asked. 

“No, that would elicit more distrust and anger from an already formerly mutinous crew. As well as upset Swerve who is among the few of our group that I trust after that mutiny,” Megatron responded. “Given, he is vocal about his hatred of me, but of course, it’s the vocation of it that makes me trustful.”

“Then that, sir, would by why I have not made any such action yet,” Magnus responded. “We are in a precarious situation.”

“We are,” Megatron agreed, folding his servos together before his face. “We’re having two conversations at the moment, aren’t we, Ultra Magnus?”

“About the crew and about the situation with the recording?” Ultra Magnus asked. “Yes, we are.” He stepped closer to the desk so that more hushed tones could be used by them both. “Have you determined yet who we may trust with the information?”

“I’m not entirely convinced there is anyone to be trusted with it,” Megatron replied briskly, optics flickering in Magnus’ direction. Their steady redness was deep, calculating. As sharp as ever. “We may need to discuss with Ratchet, either directly or indirectly, and bring him in. If he understands the enormity, he would understand the need to move Rodimus onto the Lost Light for the rest of his recovery. He needs to explain what happened to us directly. Having him on Cybertron, having only half the information, it makes everyone at risk.”

“Agreed,” Ultra Magnus said. “Velocity’s arrival may give us that direct link to Ratchet we need. It would require more time without a medic in the long term, unfortunately, but you are not allowed on Cybertron and I am not comfortable abandoning my post by you under the current climate.”

Megatron nodded slowly in agreement. “We have to move quickly.”

Pressing his lips into a thin line, Ultra Magnus vented loudly.

Tilting his helm suspiciously, Megatron glared at Magnus. “What? What is it?” 

“We may need to move quicker than originally planned, Sir,” Magnus explained reluctantly. “I came in here because the same ship which is carrying crew members back from Cybertron has... another passenger.”

“What?” Megatron demanded. He gritted his denta and shook his head. “Damn Starscream.” He looked back to Magnus. “Who did he send?”

“This is where we may find a silver lining,” Ultra Magnus attempted to break the news easily. “It is someone who is going to be on Rodimus’ side, and our side if we can appeal to him.” 

Undeterred, Megatron narrowed his optics. “Who did he send, Magnus?”

Venting again, Ultra Magnus answered, “Optimus Prime is inbound for the Lost Light.”

At first, Megatron sat in his seat patiently. Only his tapping finger on the desk gave any testament to the rage building up inside. 

“I may need my office to myself for a moment, Ultra Magnus. Please be the one to greet the Prime upon his arrival,” Megatron said formally. 

Already on his way out, Ultra Magnus did not bother to look back even at the sound of a fist going through a metal table. “It will be my pleasure, Captain.”

"Rattrap, I need to know where these cultists are in my city.”

Lord Starscream had not needed to speak twice for Rattrap to know what his role was -- what his usual role was. He was, after all, the rat in every wall throughout Metroplex. He had his optics and audial receptors set everywhere. 

There were the usuals that Starscream wanted close watch on, knowing the comings and goings. Any of the delegates from the Council of Worlds, and especially Windblade and her ever present bodyguard. 

Citizens of Cybertron in high concern were also Blurr and Ironhide, any of the most outspoken against Starscream’s rule. He especially wanted attention paid to the disgruntled former Decepticons in the slums. Of those he watched, though, Rattrap found the most interest in Blurr’s bar. 

When Rattrap could manage to be one step ahead of Blurr and not be bounced from the establishment, of course. A most difficult thing considering the speedster’s famous quick feet. 

But lately there had been higher priorities that Rattrap found himself concerned with. 

There was Optimus Prime and his crew, the followers of the Primal religion who flocked to him. The former Lost Light crew trying to integrate to the Cybertron they formerly had rejected, and more. 

As a spymaster of sorts, Rattrap was finding his work cut out for him. 

And the cult -- this Error and his followers -- were such a nonentity for the most part that each day passed without so much as a sign breathed about them other than the general fear. 

They were getting dangerously close to Starscream’s plan of rounding up any and all bots with a red and black paintjob becoming a reality. Whispers of it were to the point that every paint shop and body work house in the city were booked for weeks. 

Rattrap needed to find information. Whether he got the credit for it or not, he was one of the pillars keeping their crumbling society from utterly collapsing. 

Then, slowly, it came to Rattrap’s attention that of all his rounds searching the city, he had yet to check the depths -- Metroplex’s underground and the very energon rivers that Starscream himself had tapped into before. 

“Well, if there’s not anything up here, it’s gotta be down there, right?” Rattrap asked himself, heading toward the nearest underground entrance. 

At first, his hunch yielded little. 

The reservoirs of energon, both used and unused, were weak and diluted, which at least made travel somewhat easier. Especially in Rattrap’s beastmode. 

He was nearly ready to give up on the idea entirely when he began to hear hushed tones from one of the less populated, and thus less energon flowing, districts’ pipelines. 

Suspicious, he followed the noise along the pipes, the vibrations riding up his limbs as he walked across the pipes and toward the constant rumble. Until those rumbles became words, low and distant. Then louder.

The closer he came, the more Rattrap was put in mind of an old sermon in the days before the War. Words about the Primes and Primus and things that Rattrap had hardly given consideration then and certainly had grown some skepticism toward these days. 

And he worked for a genuine Chosen One. 

After what felt like hours of travel, Rattrap finally came to where the rumbles became words he could make out, and a soft glow of fire light gave him warning for what was around the corner. 

“Bingo,” he whispered to himself. 

“Primus’ Hand has guided us to this point,” a deep voice, unmistakably the same a the mech who had multiple times at that point taken over on the airways. “His fire has lit the way, and it has showed us his chosen vessel. Fire cleanses this world and all others which owe Primus its domain. And it shall soon judge those who have come forth as false Primes. As nonbelievers. As unworthy. And it will be with your assistance, with your sacrifices, that Primus’ will shall be done.”

There were cries and screams of desperate jubilation in response. 

“Well, scrap,” Rattrap muttered quietly to himself. “Just my luck. I missed the descriptive part of the meeting and made it in time for preaching to the choir.” 

“And we shall start now,” the voice continued -- deeper, louder. “By lighting a fire to destroy those who would put our work in danger.” 

Rattrap tilted his helm at that just before the light grew brighter from around the corner and then, suddenly, he saw the trickles of energon that were in that corridor begin to spark with an unsettling light.

“Oh, damn!” Rattrap cried out, realizing what was happening and turning to race away just as the sounds of roaring flames began coming his way. 

"Well isn’t this just a rotten way to go!” Rattrap cried out somewhat hysterically as he could feel the flames licking at his tail and back paws. Then there was the tell-tale crackle of the energon reservoirs catching fire. 

Despite imminent death, Rattrap leaped uselessly in an attempt to race ahead of the upcoming explosion. His cries echoed nearly as loud as the boom to follow. 

But before his body burned and his spark extinguished, he turned off his optics. 

It kept him from seeing whoever it was that grabbed him, hard, almost like a collision. It nearly knocked the steam out of him before darting through the air, its coolness rushing over Rattrap’s beastform in comparison to the growing heat they were leaving behind. 

His spark was still skipping pulses as it all came to a stop and he realized that the explosions were a great distance away from wherever he was currently.

“I’m alive,” he said, cycling on his optics as he was gently laid on the ground and allowed to transform back into botmode. “I’m alive! Oh sweet Primus!”

“I told you, this was an interference that was supposed to happen. It was a good thing, calm down, Prime.”

Recognizing the voice immediately, Rattrap turned around to face his savior. “Windblade? But you were at the capital and--” he paused, looking over the jet curiously. Her paintjob was different, and there was something different about the decorations of her faceplate. And there was no other color but black and red. “What the...”

“I still think this is a mistake,” a second mech said, drawing Rattrap’s attention to him. “Even if Rattrap is supposed to be around later... does he have to be? He never made my life any easier after all this. Or yours.”

Rattrap looked at the mech in shock. Like Windblade, the paint was different, even the build was different in little details that amounted more and more the longer Rattrap stared. 

But beyond the black and red and the increased size, there was no mistaking it.

“Rodimus?” Rattrap asked, optics wide. “But you’re in the CR chamber.”

A displeased look grew on the mech’s face and Windblade gave a little vent. 

“And this is where our job is about to get very complicated,” she said toward Rodimus. 

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv