#narratology is very complicated

[chronotopes]

Book log 2: are you my mother, alison bechdel

I wanted to read this one after I finished Fun Home when I was 15, and I’m now very glad in hindsight that I couldn’t find it at the Nashville Public Library. Not because it’s not fantastic but because I don’t think I would have really been in the space to process and internalize it in the way I am now. It’s a book with a lot to say about it - as ever, I am fascinated and compelled by the way bechdel writes intertextuality, the intertextuality of Writing with Writing with Life. So much of what compels me about memoir has always been about the connections of time and texts and life to me, the connections we trace and then remember forever after the fact, and I think I can confidently say this understanding is in part grounded in having read Fun Home at a young age. Anyway: all this is to say the most interesting thing about Are You My Mother? to me is the profound resonance that comparing its structure to Fun Home presents for me. A father is a nonlinear narrative that can be remembered as linear by the audience, an unclear story that nonetheless holds some clarity, a point A to point B no matter how fraught and complicated. A mother is spirals within spirals, psychoanalysis, the absence of an ending, the absence of an admission. That is not universally true but on a narratological level it feels true to me.

[smute]

didnt want to add this to a stranger's post like some kind of asshole so im making my own:

the (willing) suspension of disbelief does not mean "this is a poorly composed narrative so i'll just ignore its flaws and then i'll be able to enjoy it"

the phrase itself is very old. samuel taylor coleridge first used it in his biographica literaria (1817) and the term later found its way into pop culture where its meaning has been expanded further and further over the past 200 years. my boy sammy was mostly concerned with poetry though, and he proposed the concept to explain how modern audiences of his time might still be able to enjoy the more fantastic elements in poetry just like their less enlightened ancestors (very oversimplified). the thing is... scholars today don't really use the term in any other context. what most people mean when they refer to the (willing) suspension of disbelief (i think) is part of the concept of aesthetic illusion.

in narratology, aesthetic illusion describes the mental state that we, the audience, enter when we become immersed in a text or performance. think of it as an ideal position on a sliding scale between complete rational distance (observing something without interest) and total immersion. ideally you want to be closer to the latter but not quite all the way there. we want to experience a represented world in a way similar to real life, not identical to real life.

the experience is different from dreams, hallucinations, psychosis, etc. because it starts with a concrete representation (text, performance, movie, etc), not out of the blue, and because it's not a perceptual error. it's something we want to experience on purpose. and this is where the word "willing" in willing suspension of disbelief comes in. this sort of interaction requires an unspoken contract between author and audience, in which the creator of a work provides the audience with a story, and they agree to accept the reality of that story as it is.

you suspend your disbelief the moment you pick up a novel or press play on a movie, but the rest (and this is the important part) is up to the creator of the work. it is not the responsibility of the audience. violations of internal logic, a lack of detail, a lack of clarity, contradictory information, and unrealistic or improbable events (e.g., deus ex machina) can all impair verisimilitude and cause the aesthetic illusion to fail (again, oversimplified, this depends on genre conventions, your own cultural background etc.) but that burden lies with the author. and there's not really all that much you can do about it as a reader/viewer.

so when people say stuff like "you gotta suspend your disbelief a little bit"... they usually mean something entirely different: dont be overly critical. give this book/movie/play a chance. stop searching for flaws. and yeah! i think reading in bad faith is something that's becoming more popular, and that's a problem. cinemasins brainrot if you will. it just doesn't have much to do with the thing that "suspension of disbelief" refers to.

anyway this isnt a "shame on you for using this very specific term wrong" kind of post. it's one of those terms that's used very differently in popular culture--i just wanted to give a simple (ish) explanation for anyone interested in media analysis etc.

[recents]

the fact that killua’s narrative in canon (to me) clearly falls outside of that dichotomy already makes it interesting to me.

the route that a lot of shounen narratives containing a character with a backstory like killua’s might take is to not ever narratologically acknowledge his trauma as trauma at all.

there are plenty of reasons a writer might consciously choose to do this. i think the biggest, when dealing with narratives like hxh, which have the age demographic they do— 10 to 17 years old, i know it’s easy to forget sometimes— is that they don’t want to take perceived agency away from their child readers.

there’s very competent writing out there on why a lot of children’s media doesn’t often portray child warriors as “child soldiers.” if the genre of a given text already portrays some form of fighting as, in the right circumstance, heroic and noble and just, if violence is a way of taking agency and solving problems, then yeah, of course it will come across to an audience of children as incredibly infantilizing if child characters are treated as too precious for combat when adults aren’t. and if the children are allowed to fight, then an upbeat adventure story doesn’t work, really, if that violence has a lasting psychological toll on its perpetrators. like gosh what a downer huh!

there are ways to complicate this, to portray fantasy child warriors, for children, in the “traditional” way, that also treat violence as having moral ramifications and consequences, but in an age-appropriate way for its child viewers; i think avatar: the last airbender is a great example.

hunter x hunter, though, doesn’t go down that path at all. it never has to, because it never bothers with portraying victory in combat as triumphant at all. hunter x hunter is soaked to the brim with violence, consistently portrayed with palpable disdain. it’s a shounen about violence that’s completely disillusioned with violence.

just like i have every other day for the past Decade, i am once again thinking about what a genuinely interesting fictional character depiction of a survivor of extreme, prolonged childhood trauma killua is.

[livthomasba1b]

Week 2: Narratology - The Shapes of Stories

To begin with in this week’s lecture we reviewed what we had learnt last week in relation plots and Aristotle’s ‘4 Cs’:

Then we referred back to Freytag’s ‘pyramid’ (The Technique of Drama, 1863), with a particular focus on the adapted version of this:

Using this pyramid we can establish particular ‘points’ that occur within a narrative:

Exposition – meeting the character(s), initial set up

Trigger – identification of conflict

Complications – a sense of things getting worse

Crisis/climax – leading to turning point/change

Resolution – catastrophe or denouement?

With these in mind we watched the 2016 Sainsbury’s Christmas advert and attempted to recognise where in the story these points from Freytag’s pyramid appear.

The shapes of stories varies, Aristotle divided plots into two types: ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, novelist John Gardner, agrees with this stating that great literature contains only two types of story:

‘A man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.’

After hearing this I did agree to some extend and could think of some films randomly off the top of my head that follows this:

Toy Story - Buzz Lightyear comes along and changes the dynamic between Andy and Woody.

Rango - Rango leaves behind his ‘pet’ life and comes as a stranger to a western town.

Vonnegut’s Basic Thesis:

A story has ups and downs that can be plotted on a graph, revealing the story’s shape. This idea first occurred to Vonnegut in 1947, when noticing similarities between the New Testament and Cinderella. 

I found this talk very interesting, yet a simple idea. When it’s presented on a graph it makes the shape of a story clear and easier to understand. He states that it is an exercise in relativity. “The shape of the curves are what matters and not their origins”.

The first shape Kurt Vonnegut shows us is the ‘man in a hole’, simply somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. 

This shape is a nice curve and “easily fed into a computer”, people like this story and it’s rather simple. 

Another one that is also simple is called ‘boy gets girl’, it starts on an average day, an average person finds something wonderful, their ‘average’ life has gotten better and it’s amazing, but soon after they lose this and the curve goes down. However at the end they get it back again and the curve returns to a higher level.

After showing these, Vonnegut talks of a story that creates a different curve, one that seems much more complicated and too hard for a computer to digest. It’s the story of Cinderella. 

“People don’t like stories below average” since it’s too depressing for viewers to try enjoy, however Cinderella’s story starts way below average: her mother has just died and her father has remarried to an awful woman, with two horrible daughters. There’s a party one night at the palace and Cinderella can’t go, instead she has to help everybody else get ready for it. However she doesn’t sink lower at this point, since she’s already at her lowest since her mother died.

The fairy godmother then comes along and gives her shoes, stockings, her dress and a means of transportation. She goes to the party, dances with the prince. However when the clock strikes midnight she must leave, causing a slight inclination to the graph, lowering the curve back down below average, but not back down to the same level as before. This is because of the wonderful night she had and the memories she’ll keep forever about them. Cinderella remains at the level until the prince comes along, the shoes fits and she shoots up to infinite happiness. 

All stories have a different shape, some simple and some not so, but from this method of using graphs it makes it clear to me that trouble of some sort must occur! As seen in all the graphs above, as some point the curve goes below the average line, a story wouldn’t be very interesting if nothing happened, if someone or something didn’t struggle:

 We enjoy seeing fictional characters suffer’ ….’basic stories acknowledge our basic anxieties’ (Thomas, 2012)

‘Only trouble is interesting’ (Burroway, 1987)

David Mamet (playwright and screenwriter) says: ‘Stories happen because somebody wants something and has trouble getting it.’

Using this similarites can be found in stories like that of Cinderella and The New Testament. 

Archetypal theory

Recognises a limited number of ‘plot-shapes’ deriving from dreams, myths, rituals and other ‘elemental’ human experiences. (Abrams, 1988)

Story is basic and elemental to human experience, deeply embedded into our culture and our consciousness.

Structuralism and formalism

Structuralists and formalists are both mainly interested in the devices (the effects, conventions, and codes) used to convey a story to its audience. - can be linked to semiotics. 

Primarily interested in literary/artistic devices and techniques.

Proposes that we have learned these codes and conventions through linguistic exposure.

Form

‘[T]he form of a work is its principle of organization; but critics analyze the nature of this principle in diverse ways…

[jng-animation]

BA1b.Narratology - 8/1/20

This weeks lecture continued with the subject of story, however, looked more at the ‘shapes of stories’ (in terms of Conflict vs. Non-conflict plot types).

We started off the session by looking at the concept of trouble in stories. The idea that a story will only become interesting if there if an element of ‘complication’, for example: think of a story about people living happily. They continue to live happily all the way through the middle of the story. At the end of the story they live happily ever after... This story is not deemed interesting as there is no change in plot, or trouble interfering with the characters. This was then linked back to our last Narratology seminar, in which we looked into the storyline of the Sainsbury’s Christmas advert, as well as our own adverts. The formula of ‘Character + Conflict’ was in both of these, I.e. The lonely snowflake, the character being the snowflake, it’s loneliness being the conflict to its story. Some people even look into their own life experiences to conjure stories, as they know what they want or do not want the most. It’s common practice to use the events of ones own life as a template or influence for a story. This common use of ‘character + conflict’ is deemed a ‘conventional story structure’ and very much follows the pyramid designed by Gustav Freytag: exposition, conflict, complications, climax and resolution. A story with an exposition and no conflict wouldn’t come to a good enough falling action (resolution). Before linking this to Freytag’s pyramid, we were shown a short live-action stop-motion film called ‘Neighbours’. This film consisted of two ordinary men with their ordinary houses, sitting in their gardens on their ordinary deckchairs (the two men’s lives were symmetrical). A conflict arises where the two men fight over a flower that grows between their gardens. This complicates to each man destroying the others lives. Climaxing at each man dying at the others hands. And finally resolving in a flower growing on each mans grave. The 5 stages of Freytag’s pyramid are very clear within this story, but proves that complication and conflict makes the story interesting. However some argue against the ‘conventional story structure’, one big name being director Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro has been quoted saying: ‘You have to liberate people from [film theory], not give them a corset in which they have to fit their story, their life, their emotions, the way they fee about the world.’ Aside from the belief that ‘conventional story structure’ is a restriction to the characteristics of a story, the facet that it’s structure is ‘conventional’ doesn’t lead it to be a ‘conventional film’.

Stories have always been varying in shape. The early times of narrative, Aristotle believed there to be plots divided into two types: ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, which are two leading genres today. However, literary critic Northrop Frye divided stories into four ‘mythoi’ (plots or organising structure) based around the four seasons of nature’s life cycle: Comedy, Romance, Tragedy and Satire. One man even graphed the physical shape of a story, using the ups and downs of its structure much like Freytag’s pyramid, that man was novelist Kurt Vonnegut. The shape of many stories can be seen as very consistent and similar to each one, for example: it was the similarity between the structure of ‘The New Testament’ and the story of ‘Cinderella’ that struck Vonnegut for the first time in 1947. Because of the popularity’s it’s kind of story structure it has become a common repetition in our culture, Vonnegut explains: ‘Every time it’s retold, somebody makes a million dollars’ this is done by following the same basic ‘shape’ of the original story structure. To add even more plots to the mix, in 2004 Christopher Booker identified ‘seven basic plots’:

•Overcoming the monster

•Rags to riches

•The Quest

•Voyage and return

•Comedy

•Rebirth

•Tragedy

These are all easily visible when looking into a story, examples can be seen throughout many movies and films of modern Western culture.

The lecture finically finished off by looking at the differences between common Western and common Eastern narratives, showing how the Western approach usually prioritises ‘individual experience’ according to Gish Jen (2013). Where as Eastern narrative emphasises ‘morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent’. This is built around the idea of the common Western narrative containing a basis of ‘3 act structure’, and the Eastern narrative of a ‘4 act structure’. This 4 act structure is called ‘Kishōtenketsu’, which is originally derived from poetry. The acts follow as:

•Introduction (Ki)

•Elaboration (shō)

•Twist (ten)

•Emphasis (ketsu)

The concept of a twist is the key to the 4 act structure. The twist will usually be surprising to viewers in the sense that it is unexpected, however it may not follow the common idea of a ‘twist’ as Westerners would understand. Usually seeming unconnected to the previous events of before, we may not understand why we’re being shown this ‘twist’. It’s the job of ‘ketsu’ to draw the previous strands together and suggest a connection.

This lecture has left me very heavy headed with information, but never-the-less has me inspired into knowing more about traditional and experimental forms of narrative.

[gavinhalm]

Glittering Beasts: Jeremy Blake's Time-Based Video Portraits and the Archive

Jeremy Blake achieved initial art world success in the late 1990's with a series of works that blended his background training in painting with digital technologies in which he combined digitally scanned, abstractly painted shapes with more realistic imagery to create large audio-visual, screen-based video projections. His achievement in this realm has been hailed as something of a major turning point for painting because of this unique hybridization (JBW, 9), but the more interesting aspect of his work may be his highly abstract, poetic approach to narrative and story telling.

Though there is little question that Blake created a new way in which to combine painting and technology, this fact probably would hold more interest for those who would wish to find art historical precedents of a traditional "painterly" nature (AMC, 4), at the expense of the narratological experimentation he produces in his pieces. Also, within these narratological explorations, there is a distinct shift from his early work, which dealt with abstract architectural spaces and fictional characters of the artist's creation, to a set of later works which take as their subject actual persons of historical and pop-cultural note.

Early Work

In a series of short tripartite video works between three and seven and a half minutes–Bungalow 8, Guccinam, and Mod Lang–Blake deals with themes of urban space and architecture, real and imagined (Teine, 144), which all obliquely engage issues of urbanization, Hollywood superficiality, and environmental concern. In these pieces, Blake utilizes the software platform After Effects (or, more precisely, worked with an animator friend at the LA-based motion graphics design shop, We Are Royale, using After Effects †) to create video panels of color and vague geometric shape, combined with colorations and "texture mapping" (to borrow a term from 3D modeling) derived from his own painted textures to render cool, almost lifeless architectural spaces (Teine, ibid).

What these early works also do is to abstractly and critically illuminate the hedonistic social structures of image-obsessed Hollywood and their materialistic movers and shakers, especially in Bungalow 8, a notorious pool-side cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Guccinam (Teine, 145), and anticipates the direction Blake was to take towards more concrete narrative issues in his work.

--

Mod Lang is the start of Blake's more narrative phase and "stars" a fictional character of the artist's devising that is a hybrid of a 60's rock and roll star (a slight referencing of Keith Moon of The Who) and a famous architect, with no particular connection to a historical person but which symbolizes that era's plethora of famous designers of various stripe. In Mod Lang, Blake uses his painterly skills to create a work that doesn't actively show a character per se, but instead subsumes traditional filmic characterization into a complicated set of shifting, quasi-architectural spaces, thus trading a "physical" character for a set of subjective referents which turn physical space into a kind of psychological construct. 

It should be noted that this is very different from, say, "first-person perspective" films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which project the main character's gaze out of his own eyes in order to interface with the “real world”. Instead, Blake’s first-person perspectival gaze in Mod Lang is one that actively creates the world in which the character exists through the artist's use of abstract shapes of an architectural nature, as well as almost psychedelic painterly colorations.

In short, Blake achieves an unacknowledged shift in first-person, filmic characterization through his various painterly-techno-filmic techniques in Mod Lang. The closest film-historical approximation that one can conceive of is perhaps Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, but even here this particular film is closer to the works we will discuss in Blake's later phase because of its combination of filmed reality and abstract painterliness executed on the film negative's surface.

Later Work (the Winchester and Wild Choir Trilogies)

The later portion of Blake's oeuvre, consisting of the Winchester Trilogy (2002-2004) and Wild Choir (2003-2007) that he mostly finished before his untimely death by suicide in 2007, are works that engage actual historical figures of varying fame. Also, these works throughly intertwine Blake's earlier interest in architectural space with the psychological being of each of their characters through the use of historical research, in the case of Sarah Winchester, to more physical archival/material research in Wild Choir.

Winchester Trilogy

The Winchester Trilogy is Blake's move into more structured narrative concerns and in this set of films, the artist takes on the (in)famous history of Sarah Winchester and her "Mystery House", as it is currently called. 

Situated on the outskirts of San Jose, California, the Winchester House exists at the complex nodal point of a number of geographic and historical convergences; being in the same general vicinity of not only the birth of cinema (near the famous “Farm” of Stanford University, where Muybridge created his proto-cinematic oeuvre), but also a mere few miles from the birth of the personal computer via Apple Computer in Cupertino--All of this adds to the subject matter of Sarah Winchester and her labyrinthian house filled with ghosts, and combines into a fascinating nexus of forces and information.

In brief, Sarah Winchester was a wealthy widow of the son, William Wirt Winchester, of the famous gun maker, Oliver Winchester, who invented the repeating rifle--the "Gun that Won the West". Sarah was thoroughly and continually haunted by what she thought were the ghosts of those that perished at the receiving end of her family's creation, became despondent with guilt over these deaths, and eventually decided to build an incredibly complex house with such things as stairs that lead to nowhere, floors without covering, thus exposing only beams, and other such “neurotically”-driven architectural fancies.

In the Winchester Trilogy, the techniques used by Blake vary from hand-held 8mm film of the house, hand-drawn tracings of the exterior, to the overlaying of a variety of scanned-in, painted shapes in order to render "physical" the ghosts and specters that haunted Sarah (JBW, 12). Within this disparate matrix of materials, Blake importantly links her visions and paranoia to issues of Western expansionism in the United States while culling fragments of pop imagery taken from Western genre films to incorporate into his work, thus borrowing heavily from filmic conventions of narrative and suspense (JBW, 14). Also, the artist devotes a whole part of the trilogy to filming the three Century Theatre movie domes built in the 1960's that are on land only a few dozen feet from the Winchester House, thus bringing the story of one woman's house and history into the larger context of violence as portrayed in the mass media (BOW, 46).

The end result is a work that skillfully intermixes, interleaves, and overlays the psycho-physical reality of Sarah Winchester/House (they are, finally, one and the same), media culture in general, and also the greater historical forces at work during this period in history in the country as a whole, thereby erasing not only the distinctions of the imaginative/personal/physical, but of the imaginative/personal/historical--There is no difference between Sarah Winchester, her house, or US history concerning the American West in Blake's work, and all of these elements are visually integrated into a singular quasi-narrative, poetic presentation that is neither literature, nor film, nor (history/portrait) painting, but instead a fascinating genre-leveling combination of all.

Wild Choir

The three parts that constitute Wild Choir ("Reading Ossie Clark", "Sodium Fox", and the unfinished "Glitterbest") are, respectively, about a 1960's-era fashion designer (Ossie Clark), a contemporary "Generation X" singer (David Bermen), and a 1970's punk-rock figure (Malcom McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols–Teine, 163). 

In this trilogy, Blake utilizes a variety of archival materials including journal entries, poetry, interviews, photographs, music, and other relational materials (commercial and otherwise) in order to create what could be termed "psychological portraits" of the subjects at hand. In his work, the layering of Blake's usual painterly techniques and archival materials are used in a more literal/referential way than was done in the Winchester Trilogy and this allows for what would seem to be an even more "truthful" narrative to emerge.

What is arguable is whether this later attempt does justice, through its use of so much archival material, to Blake's earlier explorations of poetic narrative. Does the inclusion of the archive create a fuller portrait of the "sitters"? Or, to paraphrase Derrida from his Archive Fever, does the archive cover up more than it exposes or illuminates? And if so, is this in a sense a step backward for Blake in regards to creating a new kind of psychological portrait?

Even if the house of the Winchester Trilogy and the journals and other archival materials in Wild Choir are conceptually readable as similar kinds of texts, the more subjective rendering in the Winchester Trilogy (partially through an absence of archival material) creates a more enticing atmosphere in which to construct a sense of the portrait's sitter, as the sea of sign-and-signifier baggage that comes with dealing with so much archival material arguably ends up painting a mental portrait too similar to that which we could create ourselves by going to the library, or researching on the internet, the lives of the people in which the artist has an interest. ††

--

In Sonja Teine's PhD thesis on Blake, the only book-length publication on the full body of his work at this time, the author believes the Winchester Trilogy did not actually portray an individual (Teine, 160) and therefore is significantly different than Blake's later "psychological portraits" of fashion and music stars in Wild Choir. But, within the Winchester Trilogy, it is the intertwining of the psychological and architectural spaces of a historical person that dislocates Teine's position which would place this trilogy more on the side of Blake's earlier architectural interests rather than the later, psychological portrait phase of his work.

Indeed, this all begs the question: should there be a difference between the psychic/psychological forces at play within Mrs. Winchester and her house, and the similar forces at work in the diaries and writings of the three persons that were used in the trilogy that followed Winchester? Is writing more descriptive of what it means to be "human" than architecture? Especially in relation to the very personal, psychological architecture constructed by Sarah Winchester?

Teine's seemingly strongest argument, in which voice-over narration of the journal entries and poems of the three subjects in Wild Choir take conceptual primacy in illustrating a portrait over the music which accompanies Winchester (Teine, 161), falls apart because there is no convincing rationale for stating that a literal voice speaking from a written text makes for a portrait (in Blake’s multimedia artworks), whereas the lack of one does not.

Stepping even further out, Teine’s entire thesis (ironically) revolves around the idea that the Wild Choir trilogy of famous personages is a "crypto self-portrait" of Blake himself (Teine, 54), which is an impossibility given the categorization discussed above because there is a lack of any personal writings or texts by/about Blake in his artwork. The somewhat pop-interpretive, quasi-Freudian notion that an artist (Blake) “resides in”, “occupies”, or even “haunts”, their own artwork (either of the trilogies) through their very creation by the artist’s hand also will not hold when what constitutes an artistic (multimedia) “portrait” is set in such an dichotomous fashion.

In short, whether or not there is a "literal" bringing-into-being of the portrait's sitter through vocalization of his/her own words (via journals, or recordings, or what have you), there is still the possibility of portraiture outside of archival texts like the ones used in Wild Choir.

It is the opinion of this writer that Teine's categorization of the Winchester Trilogy as an earlier work concerned more with the architectural than with psychological portraiture does a disservice to the work because it is more valuable to think of it as a piece which is the start of Blake's growing concerns with narrating the interiority of historical personages, and thus it categorically falls on the side of the later Wild Choir.

Glittering Beast in the Archive

In the end, Blake trail-blazed new narrative pathways with his video portraits, especially with his portrait of Sarah Winchester and her house, all of which moved between traditional storytelling and poetic abstraction to the point that they have little precedent within the history of either film, literature proper, or fine art portraiture. 

With the growing significance of the archive within Western artistic circles at the time of Blake's suicide in 2007, it is not surprising the artist might have felt a pressing need to engage the intellectual monster of sorts lurking within all of those journals and writings he found so alluring. It is sad that he is no longer with us so that we could have seen how he would have emerged from this labyrinth, either with another ground-breaking body of work, or injury from his fight with this most 21st century of Minotaurs.

Notes: 

† Subject discussed during a business email exchange (2008, while working at Dentsu America) between myself and We Are Royale, who were also responsible for the “dream sequence” inter-title animations directed by Blake for the film Punk. Drunk. Love. (2003).

†† One of the most exemplary artists who is able to consistently transcend the potentially overwhelming weight of interacting with archives is Christian Boltanski.

Bibliography:

Teine, Sonja. Jeremy Blake's Time-Based Paintings: Sodium Fox: Fragmented Crypto Self-Portrait, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbruken, Germany, 2012.

[AMC] Jeremy Blake: All Mod Cons, Blaffer Gallery publication on occasion of exhibition of the same name. Terrie Sultan, Director, Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, 2002

[BOW] Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal with texts by Mark Durant and Jane Marsching. DAP Publishers, New York, NY, 2006.

[JBW] Jeremy Blake: Winchester with texts by Jeremy Blake, Benjamin Weil, and Mitchel Schwarzer. SFMOMA, San Francisco, 2005.

[boatiechat-blog]

Snape, Dumbledore, and when the end narrative is counter-moral

I’m reposting here, with minor edits, a (long, sorry) comment I made under a super rich discussion on the abuse Snape suffered. My main thesis is that Rowling uses narrative and symbolic cues to paint characters as positive or negative, especially in the first book, but then subverts these alignments with several plotlines. This is not resolved in a satisfying way in the end, with a reversal to black-and-white morality based on redemption, undermining the more subtle developments of the mid-series.  *** I think all of those analyses [about Snape’s victimhood] are absolutely fascinating and pretty spot on, but there is one thing that gets glossed upon in all of those replies. This a work of fiction shaped by narrative processes that are meant to manipulate our emotions into feeling a certain way. Most of the disagreements I see in fandom, and the conflicted emotions people have within themselves regarding Snape, usually boil down to this. I’m taking most of my analysis from Margrethe Bruune Vaage’s book The antihero in American Television (she’s my PhD supervisor and a total badass, I love her). Most of the arguments can be used for literature too, but for the specific narratological points, I would refer to Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds, Representing consciousness in fiction. I- How do we form moral judgements? Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene speak of a “dual process” of moral judgement. The first one is rational: one weighs the pros and cons, the various outcomes, the validity or impact of a certain course of action, and passes a judgement. The second is intuitive: it’s a quick-and-dirty process, through which we intuit a positive or negative value to an action based on subconscious, or at least not causal, connections. See it as a shortcut of sorts: if you hear someone raise their voice in anger at an old person, your first intuition would be distaste. You do not make the conscious reasoning “this person is vulnerable and disoriented, therefore one should use patience and not violence in order to interact with them”. You’re like “wow, that’s mean”. Rational judgements can, with time, transform themselves into intuitive judgements. For example, someone might weigh the pros and cons of eating meat, decide to become, vegetarian, and stick to it. Years down the line, the very thought of eating a steak could be repulsive for that person, without needing to rework through the rational judgement all over again every time. II- How does that apply to fiction? Fiction deactivates, or at least, tunes down, the rational part of our moral judgement values, encouraging us to use intuitive judgement, which can be relatively easily influenced by narrative methods. Basically, when you’re reading or watching a work of fiction, you put your reasoning mind on hold and you buy into the moral undertones of the work you’re reading. Which is why people actually root for Walter White, or Dexter, etc. Bruune Vaage calls it “fictional relief”: the fiction relieves you of the burden of making rational judgements because it doesn’t really matter, and so the things one might find reprehensible in real life can be justified in the fictional world (such as stealing, or killing). Depending on the work, killers and thieves can be the most moral people around (ex Game of Thrones). Sometimes, our rational judgement kicks in, and we find ourself torn by our feelings. This is what makes anti heroes so compelling. We KNOW that selling meths to kids is not a moral course of action, but we still appreciate seeing it. III- Which brings me to Harry Potter: The first few books try very hard to present Snape as a repugnant character. “Repugnant” is related to disgust, which is an intuitive form of judgement. Snape is dark, dirty (greasy hair), unpleasant and rude, and harassing the people he was supposed to be caring for. Dumbledore on the other hand, is presented as a positive, comforting figure. Sweet, excentric grandpa, who supports and comforts Harry and the trio. He gives them information, sets them on their tasks, and generally moves the narrative forward by empowering the (very young!) protagonists. This pattern is very effective, and, it’s a children’s book. We don’t expect subversion of these tropes at all. Repugnant = BAD, Comforting = GOOD. Even the sounds of their names evoke contrasting reactions.The performances in the film reinforce these impressions. As the narrative progresses, we learn more things about the backstory and past actions of Snape and Dumbledore. We learn them as the trio does, so it comes after the first impressions we had, and progressively. In HPAPS, people accuse Harry of being biased against Snape because he’s mean. This subversion is progressive and subtle. First it is revealed that Snape was not trying to steal the stone. Then, several books later, it is revealed that he is a member of the Order of the Phoenix. To complicate matters, we also learn that he HAD been a Death Eater, but had repented for .. dubious moral reasons (selfish, regarding the one person he loved). We also learn that Harry’s dad was arrogant and a bully, but that he did change, that his mother used to be a friend of Snape, but stopped when he got radicalized by an extreme racist cult. We learn that Dumbledore had used Harry while knowing he had to die. I’m trying here to present things in the most morally neutral way possible, but it is almost impossible. At the end of the series, both Dumbledore and Snape have sacrificed themselves for the Cause, and proved their alignment towards the Good. A lot of “do they end justify the means?” arguments have been made, but I won’t get into that. My point is: at the end, the two most prevalent adult figures in Harry’s life, polarized from the beginning, ended up being a lot more ambiguous and morally grey that what was suggested at the beginning. The characters are rich, and the tension between moral alignment, likeability, and perspective (we see things from Harry’s PoV, mostly) are absolutely fascinating. I love it! It produces a lot of rich discussion (like the ones above). But ... IV- Where, IMO, Rowling failed: A lot of these discussions happen because people have turned their rational moral judgement back on. At no point does the narrative condemn Dumbledore for the creepy, irresponsible things he’s done. Ultimately, the narrative redeems Snape, by having Harry name his child after him and Dumbledore. “the two bravest men I knew” is a very dubious line. The end of the last book returns to the morally obvious distinctions of the first few books, despite the fact that the narrative, the trio, AND the readers, had grown up. Our rational judgements tell us that Dumbledore and Snape were part of the Good Guys. That Dumbledore was friendly and supportive of the protagonists, while Snape was rude and emotionally violent. Dumbledore, despite his abusive behaviour, remains likeable all along (there’s a plot arc in which Harry learns the bad things Dumbledore has done, but still decides to see him as a positive figure -- after all, it’s LOYALTY that helped Harry in the Chamber of Secrets). Dumbledore’s abuse of Harry is never really discussed, let alone the very real abuse he conducted against Snape, or Lupin. None of what has been written above is touched upon AT ALL in the books or movie. All of this is (very valid) rational extrapolation from the facts we get in the books. Snape is never really presented as likeable, but he and Harry share a touching moment when he dies, and Harry seems to (IMO, unbelievably) forgive him years of abuse and degradation. Rowling seems to think that the resolution of a conflict implies the disappearance of its consequences. Snape redeemed himself by making the moral choice, so he’s forgiven. The trio defeated Voldemort, and so “all was well”. The narrative tries to make us feel something that most of us are reluctant to feel. The “fictional relief” is not enough to make us buy into the smoothed out morality of the epilogue. V- How I think it should have ended: I think fighting with the good guys does not make one not be an abuser (Snape), and being likeable while fighting for the good guys does not make you not be an abuser (Dumbledore). Both in their ways were shitty people that had a positive impact on the world, and a mixed (at best) impact on Harry. It would have been much richer and complex if, for example, the wizarding world had recognized the heroism of Dumbledore and Snape by giving them posthumous titles or honours. I can buy into the fact that Harry could still have positive feelings about Dumbledore because I totally believe he was groomed into loyalty from a young age, and that in itself would be an interesting aspect if it was brought forward by one of the other characters (my bet would be Hermione, she’s always had perspective, or Ron, as he has a very strong sense of familial support and morality). Similarly, imagine if Snape had been celebrated, and the trio (plus Neville, and most of the Hogwart students) had expressed doubt, or at least mixed feelings towards it. I’ve had feelings of antipathy for people who had done far less egregious things to me than Snape did to the students. Hostility and enmity do not vanish after having been present for years, with cause, just because you understand, rationally, that a person was actually on the right side of history. Imagine a scene in which the trio learn that Snape and Dumbledore are going to be celebrated with a new special Wizarding medals. Harry understands for Dumbledore, but Ron/Hermione point out all the dubious things he’s done. Then all agree that Snape shouldn’t be celebrated. Our own history is full of very morally dubious people who still get celebrated: (Churchill, Ghandi, Nelson ...), while others, much more deserving, get forgotten, like McGonagall (a woman), Hagrid (mixed-race), or Dobby (an elf). This could have been a really deep and interesting ending, leaving open all the moral ambiguities created by the later books and films, and putting the character’s perspective better in focus, while allowing our own interpretation of the events.

[rex-sidereus]

@treeofmana i dug through my notes, and this was like - mostly to articulate stuff for myself. but here ya go.

why assassin’s creed is brilliant as a franchise. 

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the fuck is ubisoft’s deal – why are they so uneven. why can I beat george washington into a bloody pulp as a native american character, and at the same time the mother of the said character is violently an unnecessarily killed for the purpose of his backstory. And then I realized that they are just dumb – like, very dumb. because capitalism is dumb.

like, we had family friends who would breed those samoyed dogs, which look like barking floof clouds. and those dogs are not really intelligent. apparently one would walk around and just randomly eat entire sticks of wood during its walks until it ruptured its stomach and died. and that’s how dumb ubisoft is – it is a gorgeous floof cloud of entertainment going from one potential source of profit to another and keep doing the thing that works until they eat the wrong stick and it backfires in spectacular fashion (ac unity).

but with ac they did tap into a thing so good it is nearly impossible to sink ( even gods fucking know they try, shooting themselves in the foot out of a machine gun) – because the urban environment & the way you interact with it become extremely important, and only in only a way that video games can provide - because the very mechanics that the game offers you, the way it is built goes directly into the layout of the space and your relationship with it.

my basic pitch is that ac is amazing in how it ties together the radically individual experience of a very developed world and complicated narratology/ideology (kinda same thing when we’re talking about texts).

ac relies on a functional urban environment ( the formula breaks in black flag – but in a very satisfying/unsettling way, I’d argue). It is essential because it in itself serves as an instrument to weight the protagonist against the society. each of the ac games is either an archetypical hero’s story or a careful play on it that my jaws hurt – rejection from the society, katabasis, initiation, return to the said society with a coherent mission, yet always separated with the veil of knowledge. run boy run the world wasn’t meant for you + a soldier on my own, etc. you can move really fast and really effective through an urban space, can scale nearly everything, can drop nearly every chase, blend into the crowds effortlessly - use the city itself as your weapon, yourself a weapon of the people, a tool of zeitgeist that gives a final push. because “nothing is true, everything is permitted” - as a philosophy of positive nihilism, taking your own agency & responsibility. it’s honestly boderline anarchic in it’s approach + method.

[my favourite intellectual stretch to go unto is that ac unwillingly follows the development of the atlantic republican thought – xii century renaissance + near east / Italian renaissance / republic of pirates / seven years war / amrev / frenchrev / industrial rev uk – and the games do better or worse depending on the extent that they are willing to engage with the topics of individual vs social agency + responsibility; and the gameplay, environment, and the narrative are really hard to separate in this case].

all of ac’s protagonists carry extreme individualism which comes with the mobility and power of a killer, and follow quite the archetypical narrative of a hero turned into a weapon by destiny, an armed prophet. and for them to be coherent as such, the environment needs to be distinct, thought through, dynamic, and responsive enough to highlight that ‘self’/‘outside of self’ distinction.

on the level of ideology, you are installed directly into the political discourse, because you are actually making history, and the big name figures are your friends/ allies / lovers / enemies / people you can’t save. the whole conspiracy theory thing is just so gorgeously unrepentant, and the double unreliable narrator & narrative within a narrative thing are all buffers towards the lack of historical accuracy - but beyond the obvious separation of sides, they mostly do a shockingly good job. and for me it feels like embracing the inherit absurdity of trying to conceptualize and bring sense into the past, and taking it to the outmost. it is also reclaiming the history from academic pedantry and to something one can be playful with, to something driven by emotions.

and ac also marries history & scifi in a terrific way, that honestly bends and expands both genres as they should be. I honestly don’t think anything could compare to getting into a fist fight with alexander vi in the middle of an alien vault. It is absolutely not believable, but believable should be left at the door when you’d think you grab unto the ledges as protagonists do.

there are two meta-narratives in place besides the main historical one. the greater one of the precursor race + their artifacts, and a more local one of a person entering the animus. [insert all the narratology I don’t have the training to articulate]. their limitations and virtues of the protagonists are so gorgeously framed by the narrative, because in a story of that scale they are rather actors, not heroes - there is no falling into the ‘hero’s shining and morally unchallenged presence solves all problems’ at all. it is complicated and problematic, and different narrative levels interact call each other out constantly.

the story of the historical protagonist is viewed by the modern day protagonist, and both impact each other and the greater precursor narrative – and all feed into the collective experience of a player.  and what saves it from a self-imploding mess is that those stories are deeply internalized through the protagonists with their radical individualism granted by them through the use of space. ac is able to survive a narrative mess because a sense of character self and an experience of the space in the games is so strong.

so, overall, ac binds the urban and the political through eyes of one person, writing a history and an experience of a individual, is fundamentally irreverent to canon and propriety, and expands the genre bounds - all while being ridiculously, ridiculously fun and beautiful.

[unitba1b]

November 27th - Narratology week 1

In today’s lecture, we approached the various definitions of terms associated with narratology and various relevant schools of thought.

There was particular attention brought to the distinction of Story as “a sequence of events”,  Discourse as “how it is told”, Structure as “the way the narrative is put together” and plot as “the order that events occur”. I found these distinct definitions to be useful guidelines for picking apart the elements of the narrative I would choose to further research in my essay. 

We also explored the structure of Freytag’s pyramid that’s commonly found quite popularly in western media, following an, “exposition - trigger - complications - crisis - climax” pattern of progression.  We also discussed what makes a story effective, and relatable through the idea of character’s possessing identifiable traits and flaws that their audience can empathize with. 

I think that discussing the more formulaic and identifiable patterns to be found in storytelling acted to make it a lot easier to understand and approach. When looking at the idea of stories as a whole, it can be a bit intimidating to approach the topic as the sheer volume and variety of narratives can make the topic seem very abstract. I feel as though the frames of analyzing narratives we discussed acted to somewhat simplify the idea of analyzing a narrative and make it a lot more approachable. 

[tm0500042]

Narratology Seminar

Following on from yesterday’s lecture we looked at a Sainsbury’s Christmas advert from 2019, and analyse it for the standard storytelling points of 1: Exposition, 2: Trigger, 3: Complications, 4: Climax, 5: Resolution

1: Protagonist Set-up as being very busy at work and struggling to think of Christmas Presents

2: Disruption in transport and demands at work

3: Long cues in shops and further issues with transport and work (a pile-on effectively)

4: Sees a Christmas Cookie that resembles him and realises the best thing he could do would spend more time with the family

5: The protagonist clones himself to allow him to spend more time with the family

We were then asked to formulate an advert following the same structure based on this byline; A Christmas tree fairy who’s afraid of heights.

From this we developed the following story:

1: A Christmas fairy on a high-up shelf, sitting next to a toy soldier. The fairy looks down and gulps, and we realise she is afraid of heights 2: A child rushes over to grab the toy soldier, but leaves it on the ground and rushes over to his mother for money. The boy leaves the soldier on the floor in his excitement

3: A shopped is coming toward the soldier with the cart which will crush the soldier. The fairy gulps, hesitant to jump...

4:... but eventually grabs hold of some Christmas lights and swings across to pick the soldier off the floor. The boy sees the fairy in action and goes “wow!” 5: It cuts to the boy’s home and we see the fairy on top of the Christmas tree, and she smiles down at the soldier, sitting on the fireplace.

[jameswattsba1b]

Weekly Review 9 (12/02/18)

This week I have started to prepare all of my work for submission in a couple of weeks, which means several of my projects are drawing to a close.

In my Narratology project I made some further progress into conducting research for my essay. This was heavily focused around Propp’s character functions, as a continuation from looking at his 31 story functions that I examined last week. In this, I found that most of the characters from Aladdin fit into these functions fairy clearly, with the only interesting exception being that there is seemingly no False Hero character in the film. Also, I found that Jafar occupies both the Villain and Dispatcher functions. Aside from this, I also conducted some minor background research into the original Aladdin story, noting that it was not originally part of the Arabian Nights collection, instead being added in by Antoine Galland when he was translating the stories into French. Once again, this research is helping to build a solid foundation for my essay, but I will need to conduct some more in-depth research before I begin to write the essay itself.

In my Animated Sketchbook project I took images of the interior of my car to use as reference for my panoramic image, which I also arranged into a position as it would appear in my final image. Using these images, I attempted to draw out a rough version of my panorama’s background, so that I would know where everything will be positioned on each page in the final version of the image. Even though these images turned out to be very rough, they will still undoubtedly prove to help me when producing my final image.

In my 3D project this week, I spent some of my time adding the last few improvements to some of my existing animations, focusing on the ball bounce, wall bounce, and the spot jump animations. For the ball bounce, I simply adjusted how each of the balls bounce in the graph editor, to make them seem more believable; for the wall bounce, I added some anticipation to the ball being thrown at the wall, so that it winds up before it moves towards the wall; and for the spot jump I changed the speed of the landing after the jump so that it appeared more believable. After this, I produced two new animations using a more complicated rig than we have used previously, as this one was a fully rigged humanoid character. In the first of these, we made the characters look at their phone before giving a reaction of our choosing. For this I made the character lean in close to the phone and giving a confused expression, before suddenly jolting back in surprise and horror. For the second animation, we had to make the character perform a double-take, going from looking at their phone, to the camera, back to their phone, and finally looking at the camera again. For both of these animations, we used stepped keyframes, so that Maya would not add in betweens automatically, which made it easier to alter keyframes without having to worry about it altering the in betweens. Despite having some challenge with working on multiple limbs that moved independently of one another, as well as moving the figure whilst also using facial controls, I ultimately think that both animations were successful overall. In both, I managed to include multiple principles of animation, most notably anticipation and follow through in the reactions in both animations. There were some flaws in both however; in the reaction animation the character’s elbows move unrealistically when the character leans forwards, while in the double take the character moves too fluidly in the first half of the animation. I intend to correct both of these in future iterations of the animation.

Finally, in my Stop Motion project, I attempted to improve some of my earlier animations, specifically the ball bounce and the emotion walk cycle. My revised ball bounce sadly turned out significantly worse than the original version, due in part to my use of an inferior workspace when animating, as well as having my back to a window, which affected the lighting noticeably in each frame. On the other hand, my improved emotion walk cycle turned out rather well, as there is now a clear difference between the two emotions that the character shows, arching its back upwards when it is fearful, then arching it downwards when it is angry. The only downside to the animation is that the less human-looking figure makes it slightly less obvious what emotions the figure is showing.

[kieranconveyy1]

Week 2 - Narratology

This week we learned about what questions we will be doing for the 1500 word research essay and learned about the different shapes of stories and what structure is used and there are two theories into how a story is created one that took my personal interest was Kurt Vonneguts form of story. We also used the Sainsburys advert as an example of what a story entails and we had to find where abouts in the advert the initial introduction, the trigger, the complication, the climax and the resolution all were in the advert. I think overall I made some very good notes in this lecture and am building up towards my essay question which I am going to think about doing over the holiday. 

[ba2akbm]

Motion Graphics Project Evaluation

Fairytales have always been a favourite of mine, so I was really excited when I saw this on the VLE. I didn’t know it was a group project until the briefing, and I was slightly nervous as last year’s group project didn’t go very well for me due to extenuating circumstances. I think if anything this made me more determined to do well and actually impress my group to begin with. I did a lot of research into the story and even bought a pop-up book based on the original Grimm fairytale that I thought we could draw inspiration from, and I believe it ended up being one of the main inspirations for the storybook theme of our motion graphic.

I enjoyed the freedom of this project, and it built a lot more knowledge onto the lectures on fairytales we had for Narratology last year. I think most people had the idea of going Lotte Reiniger-esque and doing silhouettes, which save a lot of time and very easy to animate and move in After Effects. My group decided to go with actual characters, and we learned to move and animate them ourselves as time constraints didn’t allow for our lecturer to teach us. While I think simple is good, I really liked the fact we pushed the boat out and went with something that I could learn a lot from.

We also decided on job roles so that everything ran more smoothly. Originally it was going to pan out with group members creating everything for their set beat and nothing else, but we realised that it wouldn’t create the uniformity we needed because of how detailed our motion graphic was going to be. I was in charge of creating the outside of the house as well as the inside, which was for my beat anyway. The group sat down early on and created a colour palette based on what we envisioned and wanted it to look like, so it was a process of sketching out house ideas and then applying colour to them in a way that matched the rest of the animation.

I’m quite skilled in Photoshop, and decided that instead of using Illustrator to create assets it would be easier on me with time constraints to stick to what I knew. After Effects was a program I hadn’t used before I came to University. I practiced a lot with it over the summer, just trying to get used to the controls and how to use it efficiently and working out key shortcuts. This came in handy as everything for this project had to be animated in After Effects. I find it to be quite an intuitive program, and although it looked very complicated when I first opened it it’s now easy and relaxing to work in for me.

Group work is always difficult for me because I’m a very organised person, and I structure my days ahead of time so that I don’t ever have periods where I’m not sure what to do with myself. Work like this tends to throw that out the window because you have to conform to everyone’s schedules and not just your own. We had a few impromptu meetings and sometimes I just couldn’t make them, which in the end I feel like may have hindered me a little as decisions were made while I was not there. That’s not to say I didn’t have any say, but I do think in future I will be a lot more forward with when I am free and what I want to do as part of the group.

One of the main things I am taking from this assignment is that communication is key. On my last group project we didn’t speak and there were no meetings so things just didn’t get done. With this group, we all spoke a lot via Facebook messenger, and were able to send links to interesting animations and things to research, and throw ideas off each other as well as review and critique each other’s progress. It felt a lot like it would feel like if we were working in an actual animation company, which I think is a vital experience as you have to know how to work and get along with others to create a good end product for a client/deadline.

Overall, my skills have definitely progressed through this project. I now have a sense of how to animate with a character rigged in After Effects, I can do camera panning animations, experiment with 3D scenes and point lights. I enjoyed learning about motion graphics and the purposes it’s used for, and think it might be something I’m interested in learning a lot more about and maybe specialising in at a later date.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Revolutionizing the Erotics of Writing

Kathy Acker is one of those writers who will easily get under your skin. Discussing sexuality, masculinity versus femininity, semiotics within social life, and narratology at a time when many writers and thinkers were beginning to redefine and push the boundaries of both prose and verse writing, Acker is one of the most notoriously risqué writers of her historical moment. At her peak, she was active from the 1970s to well into the ’80s, though she surrounded herself with writers, theorists, and artists from the 1960s onward. She wanted to be a writer, but didn’t know what that meant exactly. Was being a writer a lifestyle choice or was it to understand oneself as a long scroll and body of language?

Two new books, by Chris Kraus and Douglas A. Martin, explore Acker’s life, work, and legacy. Kraus’ After Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), September 2017) could be characterized as a formal biography – though it’s much more complicated than that — while Martin’s Acker (Nightboat Books, October 2017) is a series of fragmented mini-essays and ruminations about Acker’s work. In reading these two books, one can only wonder: How far and impactful was Acker’s reach? What kinds of reactions did her writing elicit? And who, if anyone, can be considered an appropriate spokesperson to bring forth the ideas of language so deeply rooted in every word Acker expresses? Martin quotes Charles Olson: “to write about something is academic, and to do it in your writing is visceral.” Kraus and Martin perfectly represent this dualism. While they are both bound to the rules of their chosen genre (which ironically, their subject systematically defies and rejects) each author has a very different relationship to the subject. Martin, who did not know Acker personally, is writing at an academic remove; conversely Kraus and Acker were part of the same community of artists and writers.

Although Kraus’ proximity to Acker is obvious (her partner, writer and theorist Sylvère Lotringer was Acker’s lover at one point, which Kraus discusses in her book), her exploration of that closeness is lacking. She never discusses her relationship with Acker. Nor does she specify her reasons for undertaking this work. Yet her intentions are clearly to work through the writing of an author who used her sexuality as a weapon to bring fire to her words, regardless of any personal affinities she may have for the author. Kraus finds herself writing the story of Acker’s life by way of literary criticism and traditional biography, as would a novelist and her subject. Interestingly, Acker did the same; she started to write by using methods of appropriation, extracting passages that spoke to her from novels by others and repurposing them in her own writing. In her novel Don Quixote, Acker turns a canonical work of fiction into a narratological text that explores the creation of the characters and their awareness as characters in novels. (She writes, “I have no self … Don Quixote’s narrator declares. … I’m forced to find a self when I’ve been trained to be nothing.”) Her characters are iterations of herself that she systematically fictionalizes for the sake of her genre. Similarly, in Kraus’s book, Kathy is her character, yet the events Kraus describes to her readers are real. This is where Kraus’ mastery of writing becomes a highly complex and enthralling experience.

For a writer whose life was so enmeshed with the experiences of being seen and talked about, Acker never truly established a fixed identity outside of language. Her identity was formulated by and in language, through the stories told by and about her, and the ways in which she used her body to manipulate the language employed to characterize her.

As Martin explains,

Identity is consolidated in this way, lines are drawn in desert or sea sand, and we may feel boxed in ourselves…You are this one thing, before you are this other, you are told. Identity in Acker is in a tension with the reductive, what is seen, what is said.

An I: the idea of any stable identity becomes for Acker the field to derange or rearrange, the constituent points and poles of which can and might be moved and refigured, for a number of pages.

The anxiety of influence that loomed over all of Acker’s work made it difficult for her to find a true “I” to relate to, a true moment in which she felt comfortable with herself as herself and not as a projection of someone else’s language. As Kraus perfectly summarizes: “Conjunction, disjunction. Husserl, Melville, Descartes. She was hoping to write herself into a void: a state of hollowness she felt inside and out that might still lead to all possibilities. And yet— the anxiety to name it constricts.” Both Martin and Kraus characterize this void as Acker’s desperate desire to take up space in the literary community, to be known, read, understood, purchased, made love to, abused, loved, hated — and the list goes on.

Kraus believes that it took cancer for Acker to understand the value of friendship, love, and the precarious nature of life — though she never entertained regrets. It was meaning that she longed for. According to Kraus, “Meaning, to Acker, had always meant power. It was a protection against chaos and failure.” Writing was a way of life for her; interactions and relationships could be rearranged in the same way that words could be. Martin elaborates this point, stating, “words are ready-mades to be re-curated and re-fused. Some words become little areas of pain, intensified or attenuated by the mosaics within which they are then dropped.” This gave her a sense of control over her life. Kraus excepts from a letter Acker wrote to poet Bernadette Mayer:

Why not be polemic? Why be always the fucking same thing? Why do many poems “look” & sound alike whereas when I go into a bookstore I see all the kinds of shit & the writing don’t look the same. Why shouldn’t writing be everything?

And writing was everything for Acker. She introduced critical theory to the London punk scene, used the texts of theorists prominent at the time, and applied their work directly to her prose. Martin explains:

[Y]ou could take a bite from Cixous, some form from Kristeva, a swell too from Irigaray, as how Acker approaches these women in theory: in further parts, inserting them into her own texts. There she lays them and plays with them, to see what happens when she holds them in her sights. She moves around their various angles and orientations with her own. Just as well as one could dress up as a stripper, you could dress your writing up with a theorist.

It’s all a waiting game for Acker: who will be the first to identify which theorist her books render narratological? For Martin, she’ll always find ways of dressing up a theorist’s work with more language. For Kraus, it’s about understanding the writer, the text, the reader and the characters. How do you make the distinction between all of these roles? Should we?

Though Kraus and Martin come from distinct background and bring to the table varying sets of knowledge, craft, and experience, they are both interested in the ways in which Acker revolutionized the erotics of writing through her constant integration of language in all aspects of every day life. These two books are remarkable contributions to the critical work written about Acker and should serve current and future generations as inspiration to push the boundaries of what is linguistically sound, to eroticize the mundane, and to never stop being a character in a story.

After Kathy Acker (2017) is published by Semiotext(e) and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

Acker (2017) is published by Nightboat Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The post Revolutionizing the Erotics of Writing appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[sketchbook-project-ba1b-1602522]

"Weekly Summary - Week 3” - 09.01.2017-13.01.2017

Animated Sketchbook - 09.01.2017

For this animation, there was no storyboard, yet I was inspired when re-watching Disney's ‘Ratatouille’, when the scene follows Remy’s escape through the kitchen. The idea was to have a 'Sack of Flour’ running through a kitchen in fear, a contrast from my previous animation 'Sleeping Beauty’, mostly due to wanting to explore more interesting and dynamic animation techniques. Beginning with a run to then have the sack jump and land, a more ambitious and challenging task in comparison to 'Sleeping Beauty’. I decided to have the 'Sack of Flour’ trigger a rumble, causing knives to fall from above. Since I wanted my animation to contain a rumble in the kitchen, the 'Principles' I wanted to incorporate into ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ is 'Staging’, 'Solid Drawing’ and ’Exaggeration’, so I could flaunt the sack’s movements to sell to the audience the state of panic that the ‘Sack of Flour’ is in. Like I said previously, I wanted to work to challenge myself and push my limits, which I feel I did. It's my best animation so far in the 'Animated Sketchbook’, and I plan to one up this animation and keep attempting new and challenging ideas. 

For the ‘Animated Sketchbook Reel’, I need to make 'Three Animations’, one of which needs to be a 'Self-Portrait’ of myself having a change in expression. I planned to base it off my 'Thinking Exercise Animation’, using techniques such as 'Secondary Action’ and 'Exaggeration’ to create a fun, exciting change of expression. I reviewed my sketchbook looking at different ideas I’ve had throughout the project. After reviewing, I came to the conclusion that I wanted 'The Flour Bender’ sketch to be my second animation. This sketch depicts a 'Sack of Flour’ bending flour, an homage to the series 'Avatar: The Last Airbender’. A fun, interesting animation idea due to the animated show having such excitingly 'Dynamic Animation’ and effects. And finally, for my third animation, I decided to have my very own character reacting to his situation. I wanted to reference is the one involving the seagull and water. This way I can create a 'Secondary Action’ using the liquid, which would be a new and exciting prospect for me. I plan to keep these animations rough. This way I can focus on motion rather than presentation, working fluidly to really portray the 'Dynamics’ of the character’s movement and really adhere to what a sketchbook truly is. “A safe place to play, to experiment, and to be unusually free” - Laura Heit

I reviewed the ‘Thinking Exercise’ animation, as well as viewing previous sketches of myself in my sketchbook. I tried a few styles to see what way I wanted to animate my face. In the end, I decided to go with a more stylised approach due to a detailed animation taking too much time. I wanted the hand to be the 'Secondary Action’ of the animation. So before attempting this, I studied reference on hands to simplify the process of drawing them for myself. Taking into account the 'Semiotics’ used in simplifying the design. I drew the basic shapes for the animation, filling in the 'Keyframes’, 'Tiedown’, and 'Inbetweens’. Reviewing the expression, it clearly shows the slow, sustained change in expression, exactly what I was going for. The hand is going to stay 'Rough’, however, I need to re-aligned it since it shakes quite a bit during the scene.

Narratology - 10.01.2017

We began learning about a particular type of ‘Narrative’ - the 'Fairy Tale’. Looking at tales like 'Bluebeard’ (1697) and 'Cinderella’, seeing how they'd changed over time, originally shared with adults, yet over time it has been adapted for the children of the time. Having their disturbing psychological messages changed to tales suitable for children, but still containing an important moral. We looked at 'The Company of Wolves’, written by Angela Carter (1940-1992), a dark subversion of 'Little Red Riding Hood’. After, the topic 'Is animation the ideal medium for a fairy tale’ came into play. Discussing how 'Metamorphosis’ and 'Shapeshifting’ is a dominant characteristic of fairy tales, and animation in turn. We looked at work from Caroline Leaf’s 'The Street’ animation to 'Fantasmagorie’ (1908). After watching the videos, we learned about the rules that come with writing a tale.

The Law of Threes - 'three is the maximum number of men and objects that occur in traditional narrative.’

The Law of Repetition - actions in folk tales are typically repeated 3 times

The Law of Contrast - other people should be antithetical to the hero; therefore if the hero is generous, other characters should be 'stingy’ to contradict him.

The Law of Twins - two people can appear together in the same role and should be similar in nature.

The Law of Patterning - situations and events are told and re-told in 'as a similar a manner as possible’.

Then we moved onto 'Propp’s dramatis personae' and the variety of character tropes and the roles they play:

The Villain - who appears twice. Firstly, a sudden appearance. Secondly, he would be sought out.

The Donar - is encountered accidentally. Orivudubg the hero with a magical object or helper. Not always a benevolent character.

The Helper - is the ally that aids the hero on his/her journey.

The Princess and her Father (who function as a single 'agent’) - tend to be sought after, and act as a reward later in the story.

The Dispatcher - sends the hero on his/her journey.

The Hero - is the protagonist, and the one to undertake the journey.

The False Hero - assumes the role of the hero but is unable to complete the hero’s task.

Additional, we looked at how these roles can differ within the story. Looking at examples, such as Snow White being a victim-hero, while 'Anna’ from 'Frozen’ acts as a seeker hero. We moved onto the last part, entailing details about the '31 functions’, organised into 6 stages:

Preparation

One of the members of a family absents himself from home.

An interdiction is addressed to the hero.

The interdiction is violated.

The villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance.

The villain receives information about the victim.

The villain attempts to deceive his victim.

The victim submits to deception.

Complication

The villain causes harm or injury to a member of a family.

or

One member of a family either lacks something or desires to have something.

Misfortune or lack is made known; the hero is approached with a request or command; he is allowed to go or he is dispatched.

The seeker agrees to or decides upon counteraction (Only appears in tales with a seeker-hero).

Transference or donation

The hero leaves home. (At this point the donor enters the tale).

The hero is tested, interrogated, attacked, etc, which prepares the way from his receiving either a magical agent (object/animal) or helper (magical person).

The hero reacts to the actions of the future donor (passes or fails a test, does or does not render a service, etc).

The hero acquires the use of a magical agent.

The hero is transferred, delivered or led to the whereabouts of an object of search (often located in another kingdom).

Struggle

The hero and the villain join in direct combat.

The hero is branded.

The villain is defeated.

The initial misfortune or lack is liquidated (The narrative is meant to peak at this point).

Return

The hero returns.

The hero is pursued.

Rescue of the hero from pursuit.

Recognition or difficult task.

The hero, unrecognised, arrives home or in another country.

A false hero presents unfounded claims.

A difficult task is proposed to the hero.

The task is resolved.

The hero is recognised.

The false hero or villain is exposed.

The hero is given a new appearance.

After learning about 'Proppian Analysis’, we joined into small groups in order to make our own. We’d been assigned to analyse an animated fairy tale and comment on how the animation enriches the experience.

Storyboard Introduction Masterclass - Animated Sketchbook - 12.01.2017

I imported the frames into 'Photoshop’ and organised them into chronological order. From here, I created an 'Animatic’. During the editing process, I experimented with a variety of different effects, observing and trialling to see what works best at creating the atmosphere needed for the scene. During the process, I also tweaking the 'Timing’ of the frames and effects, controlling when the flashes and fades are triggered. These effects really worked in sequences such as the flash of the camera, flashing to white when the bulb pops. Additionally, using solid black in some scenes to reveal the information slowly created suspense when watching the scene. Now finished, I can say I’m pleased greatly by the final result. Researching the different techniques to add me in the process of making the 'Animatic’ really paid off, as well as giving me the experience needed to undertake the project.

Conclusion

This week has shown the most progress so far. For the 'Animated Sketchbook' project: 

I produced my best animation so far in the 'Animated Sketchbook' project.

Made a great start on the 'Animated Sketchbook Reel', making great development on the animation.

Created an 'Iron Giant Animatic' that covers the meeting between 'Hogarth' and 'The Giant', which is 'Timing' and editing in order to set the scene.

During 'Narratology', we covered 'Fairy Tales', 'Folk Tales', 'Propp’s dramatis personae' and the '31 functions'. A great lesson that really challenged my understanding of a story, even containing exercises to allow me to put my newly learned information into practice. For next week, I plan to continue as I have, working hard and challenging myself so I can put these newly learned techniques to use.

[jng-animation]

BA1b.Narratology Brief - 4/12/19

So this lecture was packed full of information, that I would like to have a lot more of the slides in here to present the information in a more explainable way, but I’ll try my best with wording. The topic of the lectures starting this new unit is ‘Narratology’ and everything that encompasses narrative, plot and story. Specifically this lecture we went into the key themes and terminology used within Narratology.

To start off we looked at the definitions and distinctions made between ‘story’, ‘narrative’ and ‘discorse’. Story - is a sequence of events in the order the events occurred. A Narrative - is the form a story becomes when it is told. And finally Discorse - is the means of how the story is told, through what medium (speech, book, film, etc.). We looked at how these definitions are express, for example, the story of Cinderella is the same throughout each adaptation, but the narrative may differ across each. This links into how stories are told and particularly in Western culture with the ‘conventional story structure’. This structure is a form a story can take when it is presented much like its achieving a goal. This is conventional, or common because it is appealing to us to be able to relate to the moving forward ‘work like ethic’ of the story, as said in the quote above by Maureen Furniss. This then brings us into ‘plot’, and how this affects the characteristics of the story. The plot is very much the order the story itself is told within the medium, whether the beginning of the story is before the middle, or the middle is before the beginning. Much like how in a murder mystery, the first thing to happen (who killed the person) is the last thing we find out. We use this rearrangement to add dramatic effect to our stories to embellish them with interest and curiosity. We also use rearrangement in our stories to add the effect of ‘causality’, when one thing happens, in turn causing another thing to also occur. This is appealing to our brains, because we readily guess at what is going to happen next in the story, and gain a feeling of accomplishment when we guess correctly at what is happing next. Stories can also be woven with themes, messages and lessons, to teach the audience using the discorse of the story. However, this must also be accompanied by ‘human choices’, which means all events must be happen with reason, not just random and meaningless choices.

In the lecture we also looked at one of Disney’s famous rules to writing good stories for their movies. Using this our lecturer asked us to get into pairs and create a story of our own using this guideline, as well as one of the (true) newspaper headlines. However, we had to make the story from finish to start. Me and my partner wrote the story as seen in the 6th picture above:

Finally we looked at the views of Aristotle and Freytag. Aristotle believed that plots should be: connected, complete and self-contained, as well as contain a moment of change. The moment of change links into the themes of lesson, the change allows the viewer to learn from the story. Aristotle believed it must be complete and self-contained, having a beginning, middle and end, to become a whole. His views wanted stories to be self resolving rather than relying on other material to complete the story.

Going back to ‘conventional stories’ we looked at Gustav Freytag. Freytag created a diagram to represent the flow of a conventional five act story. These acts being: the introduction, the rise, the climax, the falling action and the catastrophe. This was then updated into more modified version that is more aligned with our stories today, consisting of: the introduction (exposition), the trigger (conflict), the rise (complications), climax (Turing point) and finally the falling action (the resolution). The triangle is also in a slightly different shape to represent the gradient of the story, and how quickly the story escalates and its duration.

This lecture was very informative, as I had already known a large amount of the contents but it allowed me to piece it into a bigger picture of how narrative is used in more complex manors.