an interesting jam

http://www.runme.org/project/+supervillainizer/

Virtual Mischief Making - Exploratory Art Software In Hard Times

Hey everyone,
I've been hovering around some DIY movement sites and personages and along the way bumped into some tactical media-manipulation tools/methods. There's a crazy gamut on a bunch of sites but here are the 2 most intriguing ones, in my opinion :

http://www.runme.org/
http://www.rhizome.org/

Many of these algorithms and software devices are free to download and manipulate right away. And there's an abundance of cutting-edge art and media info categorized in a really nice, navigable format. Do a little sifting and you might find something applicable to one of your projects.

For any of you avant-garde film buffs, I found an intriguing piece of digital performance software which expands on Hollis Frampton's performance-manipulation algorithm from his film Critical Mass. It takes the fundamentals of the film's deconstructive pattern, which is to stagger the temporality of its projection in a very calculated redundancy to produce a deviant psycological effect in the viewer, and gives the user of the software the ability to apply it to their own media AND alter the algorithm performatively in real-time! If you've seen this film and know about Frampton's intent, carrying it forward into the digital realm is pretty exciting (at least to a film geek like me).

But there's a lot of other wonderful ideas being distributed on sites like these, so have a look...

Vandalism AS Art, and Vandalism OF Art Presentation

Vandalism AS Art, and Vandalism OF Art

Vandalism:

- Vandalism is a behaviour attributed. It’s the ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable. Such action includes criminal damage, defacement, and graffiti 
1- Ignorance: ex writing a swear word on something
- Denying owner’s property, public space, or the community (no respect).
- Acting out in anger, frustration, anti-social behaviours. 
- Envy, immaturity, stupidity, jealousy
- Self-expression
2 Vandalism in a form of Activism, something that has significance  
- to get your voice heard
- action to bring about social change, political change, economic injustice, or environmental wellbeing.

- Self-expression

Vandalism as Art

Marchal Duchamp’s Vandalism of Mona Lisa which is titled “L Ash.O.O.Que, which translates to “She has a hot ass” in English.
Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa readymade, Duchamp added a moustache and goatee to a reproduction post card of Mona Lisa. 
At the time it was extremely shocking, because it is making fun of da Vinci s adored painting, Monal Lisa represents ideal beauty and with just a moustache added to her, her gender became ambiguous. 

Jacques Villeglé work using torn up billboards

Jacques Villeglé is a French mixed-media artist who is famous for his “de-collage” canvases. He puts together a college by placing images over one another, and then completely at random he rips the colloge apart. Leaving parts of images to be exposed and other parts to be thrown in the trash. The work presents nothing less than a modern ruin of advertisements, dominated by the haunted face of the woman in the middle. In the reading that I read, it said that woman in the center is supposed to represent us as the modern consumers, the woman is nearly eclipsed by all the commercialism that is around her.  

Art Mark and their project called Barbie Liberation Organization

In 1989 the Barbie Liberation Organization was formed. They spent $8000 dollars to buy barbies and J.I Joes, and what they did was basically they took the dolls apart and switching voice box circuits Teen Talk Barbie and the Talking G.I. Joe dolls 
The BLO re-packaged the dolls back in the original boxes and snuck them back into the store shelf’s, and then the store resold them to children. When the little girls opened up the Barbie, the Barbie would yell out “Vengeance is mine!” and G.I. Joes who say “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVT4T7OR3iQ  

Billboard Liberation Front / Ron English

BLF is a group devoted to "improving" billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti-corporate message.

McDonald’s
BLF made a billboard celebration of McDonald’s 50th Anniversary called “To Serve Man”. BLF included big cartoon figures of Ronald McDonald force feeding a hamburger to an obese child, with a backdrop of a well-fed Ronald McDonald and alien figures.
Robert Rauschenberg. Erased De Kooning. 1953
Rauschenberg did asked Dekooning, (who was a sucseful painter at the time) if he would erase one of his drawings. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ 

Banksy. 
British pseudo graffiti artist who vandalizes many walls in an attempt to have public awareness of politics, culture, and ethics. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. Usually his work include rats, monkeys, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly. He is often called an "art terrorist" artist
(1:20) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e0IJSOq0xg 
And this is Banksy’s Israel's Segregation Wall, called “Palestine job” in 2007
The Israeli West-Bank wall is a barrier that is being constructed by the Israeli government. The idea was to create a physical barrier between the Israeli and Palestinian populations. The Palestinian population and its leadership are essentially against the barrier, because they have been separated from their own farmlands, work places and schools, and many more will be separated as the barriers near Jerusalem are completed.
Banksy, reminds the viewers of his work that Israel's 425-mile-long West Bank barrier is considered illegal by the United Nations because it "essentially turns Palestine into the world's largest open prison."

Vandalism of Art 

When someone Vandalises an Art Work it is a form of protesting.

>Feminist Activism: Diego Velazquez “Venus and Cupid”; vandalized in 1914 by Mary Richardson.

Richardson was an active suffragist. She walked into London’s National Gallery and slashed Velazquez’s Venus and Cupid with a meat cleaver in 1914.

The “Venus and Cupid” was a celebrity picture before Richardson attacked it. It had been brought to England by one of the nation's heroes, the Duke of Wellington.
In 1906 the price of the painting was $ 45,000 dollars, at the time it was considered a notorious value for a painting. It was declared as "perhaps the finest painting of the nude in the world.”
In Richardson's own words, her motive was to protest the incarceration of Emmaline Pankhurst. Emmeline Pankhurst was a political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement (figting for women’s right to vote), and she was arrested the previous night. Mary Richardson said "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modem history." 
She also later said that she "didn't like the way men visitors gaped at the painting all day long".
As Mary Richardson puts it “there is something that the government care far more than human life, and that is security of property, and so it is thorough property that we will strike the enemy”. 
This painting was also a controversially a de-grading depiction of a woman. The viewer sees the model’s face in the mirror, but the perspective lines are wrong for her to see herself. The reflection of the woman’s face in the mirror is a substitute to what it actually should be reflecting; Venus’s genitals, not her face. 
"The incident has come to symbolize a particular perception of feminist attitudes towards the female nude; in a sense, it has come to represent a specific stereotypical image of feminism more generally.”

>Political terrorism- Rembrandt “Dunae” 1636; vandalized in 1985

This painting was a Celebrated image of sexual vulnerability.
Her naked body is open to our gaze as she raises a hesitant hand at a golden shower that is really Jupiter, a supernatural aggressor who will penetrate her defences. 
In 1985 a man entered Hermitage in St.Petersburg and mutilated Rembrandt’s Dunae "He lunged at the painting with a knife thrust in the region of Dunae's lower belly..., and then pour sulphuric acid on it."
Dunae’s vandalism was categorized as a tactic of "political terrorism", because the vandal was reported to be a Lithuanian who destroyed the painting to protest the Soviet occupation of his native land.

>Hate art: Barnett Newman “Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue III; vandalized in 1986

Newman's painting is an all-over red monochrome painting, except for a blue stripe on one end and a yellow stripe on the other.
Gerard Bladeren attacked Barnett Newman's painting in 1986.
Newman's canvases are composed of flat planes of color, relieved only by lines or rectangles that make no human reference. Yet the image has been a targets of vandalism and assault.
Bladeren was a frustrated artist who told authorities he hated “abstract art and realism”, and “he wanted to take revenge on abstract art”.

>Institutional: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematisme 1920-1927. Vandalised in 1997

Malevich’s Suprematisme is an oil on canvas painting, it depicts a white cross on a light grey background. 
The Russian performance artist Alexander Brena went into the museum and sprayed a green dollar sign over Malevich 's Suprematisme. Brena said he intended the dollar sign to appear like it was nailed to the cross. 
Brena said to the police that his vandalism is a protest against the "corruption and commercialism in the art world". 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8MM_cf2e-U&feature=related 

Power of art work: images, photography, painting, sculptures (meaning and importance that images carry)

Leonardo Deviancies’ Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist

This image was attacked In 1987 with a gun. The blast caused significant damage, but the bullet did not go through the painting because of the protective glass covering. People in London's National Gallery referred to the damage as "the shotgun wound." 

Mater Dolorosa by Durer (c. 1498)

a man threw acid on Durer's Mater Dolorosa (c. 1498) in Munich in 1988, the paint was said by newspapers to "run like blood."

These images, when destroyed are so tragic that they have been given very animated titles, as if it were a real murder, saying it “ran like blood”. 

Gridly McKim-Smith says 
“These sayings register as an implicit belief that the painting is more than an inert combination of pigment and support, the language describes the damaged paintings as if they were living victims of personal assault.”

Destroying reproduction of images. 

Images carry a certain power, and to say that one has ripped it part means that they have possessed a great amount of hate or aggression towards it. 

For example: In 1913, outraged by Matisse's painterly violations of the female body, students of the Art Institute of Chicago found Matisse guilty of "artistic murder" and proceeded to burn reproductions of Matisse’s "Blue Nude". 

Atrocity of Flag Burning  

Burning an image of something is the ultimate way to express hate.
Flags as an image carry very powerful meaning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT8VzErIRMU 

oops...other videos...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvUKPhT5jHA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJqKf5Hxfc&feature=channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfUZ4-n3Roo&feature=related

Video_Activism_Art

Here is a selection of some of the videos shown during my presentation. While watching try to contemplate the following questions...

* Does new media legitimize activist video? What modes of activism? Are there issues of contention?
For example, when the Police beating of Rodney King was captured on amateur video...it galvanized political action around police violence. The same video was then used in court to prove the innocence of the police officers involved?

* With new technology being so accessible that everyday action can be captured on it what are the possibilities and limitations of this technology in mitigating mass resistance?

*What purpose does activist video serve?

From Adrian Piper: ...the work as such is non existent except when it functions as a medium of change between the artist and the viewer...


Link to Adrian Piper:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUJ8MhXTwtI&eurl=

York to the Power?

Glitter Graphics

Dogs, People, Significant Otherness

A video love letter while reading Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto; Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, to my significant other who is pictured holding my dog.

Harper Girl's undying crush!

How to open up the field of vision

NeoLiberal vs. NeoCon

Neo Liberal vs Neo Con

Whats the difference?

are they interchangeable?

shoukri

Decorated Oil/Propane tanks

http://www.ohiobarns.com/othersites/arttanks/artistictanks.html

Yanna's Sketch #3

A Brittney and Zach Tactical Media collaboration for another class

a video mix for feminist cultural theory by zach and brittney (aprox 5mins), (its about Judith Butler, a real diety)

What the Computer Heard:

The following is a transcript of some of my presentation today as heard by my laptop:

Information exchange on communication and any two-way or multi-wiki system is evolving human is a cybernetic system also in this regard humans become more like 80 information processing and. Have said something that I see that you will from there I was watching this documentary in which explored some artistic and fine arts exploration of technology specifically cybernetic we have the whole earth have is an interesting precursor to guess cybernetics in way he he he was accountable only to a bunch of different technologies and the technologies which would offer people needs to function in their society if they want to to the next exit and it is at a theater near you would not like you and yours on my CD actually got them out of a plane I have a yes or he is a show that this had to to create a reader future civilization we know to isolate itself from the technology and then go into sports again and basically use technology to harm civilization just wanted to update to him exactly what I am going to talk about going into too much detail because I can than a can of worms and searching technique isn't as so many this versus that some of them were just a techno-optimist versus Goliath in a traditional sense using technologies to benefit society or to harm society and it's a big moral question trashiness by a versus the Violetta position is basically a transfusion use of technology to and if it were not at the benefit attack to enhance the human race or humans as individuals and Violet are generally opposed to any sort of biological change of the human race thinking purity which also brings an ethical and religious questions Christians a really good book that I enjoyed reading called Citizen cyborg questioning the ethics between behind a course using emerging technologies to create a separation greater separation in class and whatnot and then of course there's the politics and regulations are in place preventing function or ever existed and we have usable manifesto which once you're convinced he was a arrested 96 and is the law manifesto essentially is a opposition to all things technology the you are violently opposed to technology by wanting a single check box in the mail for the purpose of getting his message to publish decent 16 bombs killing and injuring 23 and it is a math test and preaches the use of technologies due to the Macy's now there misuses the key word here because what if we can use technology responsibly and didn't have people like you are viewing the technology will be away from it and using it to add to it as it is manifesto so what I've been reading a little bit about how to do this one of the ways would be democratizing technology and making it available to all our people all in the world on but we have a really long legal there are still many many countries in the world that are not North America 90 democratizing any any fashion of technology but on the other exponential growth which were talking about the UK establish a set of rules because things are changing so quickly Qaeda comes into play here because in the last 30 years more countries have been more than 100 years idea Vincent wrote this is just beginning to be seen to have a question that I have no answer to our how could we or should we democratize weapons of mass destruction if you cyborg citizenship which would be cyber citizenship and transmission technology such as biotechnology genetic research and whatnot and where do they sort of falling spectrum of is is a cyborg with cyborg uses of our society or is it better to question what Institute of human eating a more tiny into talking earlier about cybernetics and some modern-day techno-utopias we have sort of rour showed me it basically he uses performative art on creating these these giant technological appendages for integrating himself with the machine and in the performative way and that's a video cybernetic organism with their number were also experienced new media art as an example and have expanded Cinema media forms such as video were incorporated into dance music and in a way that was not possible in before it be the inception of the technologies I want to see a book that is in in my life I technology music technology to as I call it creative that to create things that would not otherwise be able to sell I could think of a couple of other disciplines that you know anything fired at least which use technology in a similar mechanics paint brush you going to there are some costing you just created out of an age of humanity which is essentially a technology itself defined very interesting because we're all work well in this technological society which is a stunning and there is opposition in the medical field and when I reached down to me which of those which are hosted by their essentially preventing the growth of our young can think of the word he growth of the accidental program talking about which we'll allow for new forms new media forms new media forms and paradigm shifts of going about creating art so to address I want to talk about Iowa politics in Canada we talk a lot about guess the right the last defense of the progressive in terms of cultural politics in cultural studies and forces the economics I but with technology is actually the use of technology to benefit the individual works to augment human to do things that were not otherwise possible increase in sort of a new dimension of politics in the book as images Citizen cyborg if of all the politics and the pilots oppose any sort of doesn't matter where they are the other two sides of the other two dimensions of politics but there is a third mentioned a facilitator opposing the line experiments on stem cell research thing but not to make a anchor said the underside of the trans-human to do anything possible to to better ourselves a know what to say about piece in terms of surveillance is that idea that technological singularity and we have surveillance for now which is very personal in it does occur the information of motion of human and whatnot that they say I don't personally have a problem it is information when the same as the site of the technological singularity which a manifestation of that spiritual growth. I'm talking a zoning change whereas the FCC surveillance in our current culture of I don't know if you are a meets sort of this human is human aspect of it where someone is watching you on this or even the idea of a dog Rocky but if we can use it as a way of collecting data and the need that he exponential growth and now computer processing and analyzing the algorithm where they meet in the music video in analyzing the data in creating data on Venus in very expansive sense we would be able to reach this point of technological singularity would function as a sort of what it is basically the point where there's line that cybernetic wine is so so blurred that just doesn't exist anymore and the problems that are sort of see are the envy of future shock that telling Cheney affecting culture and human as we are now so profoundly that they think they cease to function box there to do a single-handedly adding there will be able to function will just pull exactly the data so far and I didn't detect the optimist would say you will figure make new technologies which allow for the future shock after shock to just pour L. on the is also the end of the patient recursion and innocent recruited in where the question of technology propagating itself the data we create a self-aware machine that could create on its own without the aid of a human than creating itself again and again and again until you have a problem back to two notable two notable people in this I was reading was on the software side of things was Ray Kurzweil only add to the inventor and futurist is also is an honor and authored using me for a fancy right for you once I singularity and has no attention to being a test of his being a cultural movement toward a uses the urgent technology to improve the human I mentioned earlier and they are basically trying to where or when certain techno-utopian landmarks or whatever the anything time working to encourage other and his first book with each intelligent machines in 1990 and is essentially updated twice with the agent machines and 90 and as well 2005 singularity and you actually have a little chart to my school and it was just a literally racks of exponential growth in computing is most concrete example I can give you where you stand sort of a 8000 or even even longer uses beginning before I can even occur which appears to still be my opposition to you know this is growing for a fee negative fear change I don't know but he idea that everything was while exponential changing the heresy of many acts with him to cough up the familiar two generations prior and was while why we resist technology is not that these questions are what are the ethical implications of technology what defined human citizen international law I thought just now starting to see recent multicomputer technologies and some of the emerging technologies and energy to get upward spiral into a some sort of elite banks of the singularity is rejected sooner than you something in fat and I have no claim to blacks that the ideas some of some of which I've read but racy receipt at were so close already to Andy calculations equivalent to an insect way and soon after that amount in that a single human brain and not NASCAR after all that human brains

Surveillance Art Projects

Surveillance
- the accumulation of coded information which can be used to manage the behavior of those about whom it is gathered
- direct supervision of some individuals by others who are in positions of authority over them

“surveillance systems are bound up w/ wider relations of power and discipline, reinforcing existing inequalities along traditional lines of class, gender, ethiniciy and age.” (Media and crime p.194)

“the spectacular manifestation of power gave way to a new forms of discipline and surveillance which increasingly infiltrated different spheres of life ... the spread of these mechanisms gradually gave rise to a kind of “disciplinary society” in which the visibility of the few by the many has been replaced by the visibility of the many by the few, and in which the spectacular display of sovereign power has been replaced by the normalizing power of the gaze.” (Media and Modernity p.133)


Panopticon
- Jeremy Bentham’s circular prison building design in 1785
Panopticon

Panopticism
- a generalizable model for the organization of power relations in modern societies.
- provided an effective alternative to earlier forms of exercising power
- Visibility is a means of control

Big brother
- George Orwell
- all-seeing, all-knowing, invisible super-power
- “The novel 1984 has become famous for its portrayal of pervasive government surveillance and control, and government's increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. Since its publication, many of its terms and concepts, such as "Big Brother," "doublethink" and "Newspeak" have entered the popular vernacular. The word "Orwellian" itself has come to refer to anything reminiscent of the book's fictional regime.” (Wiki - Nineteen-Eighty-Four entry)

Exhibition - collections of art pieces
Crtl-Space
http://ctrlspace.zkm.de/e/

Performance
Surveillance Camera Player (NY)
they are unconditionally opposed o the use of public surveillance cameras by either police or private security guards, and they manifest their opposition by performing specifically adapted plays directly in front of such cameras.
they hope at the public will now want to be more aware of and will fight harder to protect the rights to be left alone, to be anonymous, to have the privacy respected, even in public places.
http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html

Web based
i-see by Institute for applied autonomy
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html

Visual / Photography
Observing Surveillance
http://observingsurveillance.org/

Installations
Dan Graham - Time Delay Room
http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/e/works/18

ZKM Marie Sester Access Project
http://www.accessproject.net/archive.html

Video
John Lennon and Yoko Uno - Rape
http://www.ubu.com/film/lennon-ono_rape.html

Detournement
Benjamin Gaulon - 2.4Ghz
http://recyclism.com/twopointfour.php

SVEN Surveillance Video Entertainment Network
by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, Vincent Rabaud
with Nikhil Rasiwasia and Jesse Gilbert
http://deprogramming.us/ai/

Life: A User’s Manual
'Life: a user's manual' is a series of public performances and online mappings that examine the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they intersect with the visible world around us.
http://www.ubermatic.org/life/

Digital Art
Surveillance Screen Saver
http://i.document.m05.de/?p=418

Installations from a detourned city

Moving In Tune

Heated Backwater

sketch #2

Read the Fine Print

???

Just found this video on youtube and wanted to share with the
class, so what do you think about this?

INFILTRATION DIAGRAM

Pursuant to Zach's posting, a diagram of urban tresspass modes compiled by the late Ninjalicious (from Access All Areas).

PROJECT FORMS

A compendium of possible project proposal forms.

Guy Goma for YorkU president!

The cab driver applying for a job at the BBC was confused for a media expert and then interviewed. He did a fine job showing us all that a cab driver knows about as much as a media expert; and that here in the York context, business education and interdisciplinary education is going to render experts who are experts at nothing other than self promotion and the highest platitudes of entitlement and consumerism.

Space poetry; Desire Paths

Desire Paths:
-subvert intended design
-democratic
-mark by erosion
-save time
-can be muddy
-can be trespassing
-libraterating

CBC censored on conservative campus shell groups

source: wikileaks

http://file.sunshinepress.org:54445/cbc-opcca-story-2009.mp3

"CBC Radio One's Evan Dyer reports on the OPCCA tapes released to Wikileaks^[1] and the tangible example of the Campus Conservatives' "dirty tricks" in setting up front groups on campus, including the Star Trek Club, Star Wars Appreciation, Games and Leisure, and the Friedrich Nietzsche club at Carleton University in Ottawa.

After running a few times on CBC Radio One's early morning news cycle on March 20, 2009, the story was abruptly pulled. Thus, this tape has been released to Wikileaks, given the concern that this story was pulled or censored from within the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

This story, originally posted to Wikileaks, has been written about in the Ryerson Free Press^[2], the Cord Weekly^[3], the Queen's Journal^[4], has been the subject of countless blogs, and the Canadian Federation of Students issued an official press release about it^[5].

This CBC Radio One story, however, uncovers a new angle of this issue, which is an actual case of Conservative front groups being set up on a university campus."

my question: how can we start to map the neoliberal take over of our university in effective ways?

James Victore

I just want to share this link:

http://www.jamesvictore.com/

It is the website for New York based designer, James Victore. A lot of his posters have gotten many attention and even in Museums such as MoMA. Also, his works is what inspired me to do my presentation on. Graphic Design is more than Aesthetics and to sell a product, when used correctly, it is a powerful tool for public awarness over different social problems.

RESISTANCE(S)

A compendium of resistances.

Goat Button

(found)

Sketch # 2

Abbreviating Language- http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/textmessageabbreviations.asp

Living in a world of text culture/ generation

• Easier to make a phone call
• People using the abbreviations when they talk “L.O.L” or “W.T.F”
• Twitter
  
• Written English language is suffering
• difficulty of expressing emotions with words
• Losing touch with reality (ironic)
• social retraction

Confusion - Cantonese Tonal (nonsense) Poem

This piece was created for another class last term. The question I raise is when does language become merely sound and lose its meaning? In Chinese language, a lot of characters share the same pronunciation. So we can combine different characters in a way that they sound identical but they have totally different meanings. Also, since Chinese is a tonal language, by simply changing the tone can change the meaning drastically, or just turn the whole thing into nonsense.

Among the 40 lines, only the last line has real meaning. All the rest are the permutations of tonal changes.

Discussion (originally posted by Marc)

• Were the tonal choices based on semantics or sound?
• Meaning keeps changing through the tonal variations - some have a specific meaning, others are nonsense, but the variations are so subtle that one can mistake sense for nonsense (on a sonic basis) very easily.
• The contradiction between the written sign (grapheme) which has a meaning, and the pronunciation / tonal articulation which turns the written sign into sound nonsense. The written and the oral keep bouncing off of each other, creating different kinds of confusions/contradictions...
• At first, one has the impression of hearing the same sounds repeated over and over again. As one progresses and becomes more sensitive to the material (because we have heard it repeatedly), one starts to notice the subtle shifts in tone. (Think of Steve Reich's Come Out, which is actual repetition in contrast...)

Recording of performance

Explanation