#dac12

In this blog I’ll talk about the class of May 8th about the topic ‘celibrity culture’. In class a quote by Andy Warhol from 1968 was used as an example for the upcoming/current celebrity culture. 

In class two interpretations of this quote were given: 

- Anyone can be famous, worldfamous, for 15 minutes. It’s temporary. Only for those 15 minutes. This could be explained by the current ‘internetculture’. The internet is worldwide, so if you or your photo gets on the internet, it’s there for everyone to be seen. Though than you have to see the concept of ‘being famous’ of ‘being known’. But of course everyone can think of certain ‘celebrities’ who are famous for being known… You know.. Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian.

- It would be justified for anyone to be famous for 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter who you are, you deserve, as anybody, to be famous. Everyone deserves to be famous. 

You could say this point of view is exploited in the real-life series and talent shows you see so much nowadays. That concept is utilised (‘uitgemolken’) to the max. It differs though, some of those people are only famous for those 15 minutes and then you’ll never hear or see of them again. But some of those actually become ‘celebrities’, for example the ‘cast’ of Jersey Shore. 

I think you can say Andy Warhol made a pretty accurate prediction, or like, it came true. 

The development of digital technologies has made possible the exchange of information worldwide and especially the emergence of distribution platforms and social networks has contributed to the appearance of a new form of culture based on the process of sharing.

These practices of collaboration imply that information is no longer spread in one way but in a multidirectional process allowing the consumer to respond and contribute to this material. This accessibility to digital tools has enhanced the possibilities of the old consumer to become also a producer of digital content, expanding the activity of amateurism.

One of the most extended ways to respond to these digital contents is remixing, understood as the activity consisting in taking pre-existing materials to combine or re-interprete them into new creative art forms. This remix culture is based on the assumption that every emergent culture is built on the past and art is always influenced by previous forms.

The concept of remix has traditionally made reference to a type of music composition that became very popular in the late 1960s. Nowadays the term is still used to describe the activity of taking previous music samples to create a new song under the forms of remix or mash-up but also it has been extended to other fields like visual arts.

We can underline a lot of examples of the use of remixing, mostly based on the copy-paste technique. In this way, they could be found in a lot of areas, from music to literature. In the literature field, William S. Burroughs inspired by the collage technique used by the painters developed the cut-up method to create new texts. This method consisted in cut up passages from own books or other writers works and paste them together in a random way.

Otherwise, one of the most popular uses of remixing at this time are "supercuts" inspired by the fan culture which is organisated around the consume of media products. In that way, remixed videos are created as a way to tribute on or in the opposite to make fun of the original work. These kind of videos started proliferating on the internet and becoming viral with the coming of youtube.

In the link placed below you could find a few examples of "supercuts" that make fun of hollywood movies clichés although I guess most of you have already seen one at least.

http://mashable.com/2011/04/16/movie-cliche-supercuts/#VuE_jqYNi3c

Artificiality

I'm not sure what's going on in my brain, but for some reason a Digital Art and Culture lecture reminded me of a film starring Tom Cruise again. I'm not that much of a fan of mr Cruise, but I do love one of the films he's starring in: Vanilla Sky.

Vanilla Sky is what some people would call a “mindfuck movie”. It fits in the same category as films like Donnie Darko, American Beauty, The Butterfly Effect and Memento: all of the mentioned films have strange storylines and can be difficult to follow. The story is about rich playboy David Aames, who is in a friends-with-benefits relationships with wannabe singer Julianna Gianni. At a party, he is introduced to a girl named Sofia, with whom he falls madly in love. Julianna gets jealous and emotionally instable, and attempts to kill herself and David by crashing her car.

This is where the confusion begins. When David wakes up, his face is more or less ruined by the car accident. It takes a while for him to go back to having a social life, but when he does, he hooks up with Sofia. They're happy together, but David starts suffering from nightmares, and at some point starts confusing these nightmares with reality. He ends up confusing Sofia with Julianna and accidentally kills her.

Nothing in David's life seems to make sense anymore. This changes when, during a session with his therapist, David sees a television commercial for the so-called “Life Extension” company. He and his therapist decide to go to the Life Extension office to look for answers. When they arrive there, it turns out that David has signed a contract with Life Extension. The company turns out to be specialized in cryonic suspension: freezing people who have died in order to wake them up at some point in the future, when there's a proper medical treatment for whatever killed them. In the “real world”, David has died, and he has been able to program his own dreams during his cryonic sleep. He has never had a serious relationship with Sofia, but hasn't killed her in the real world either.

The saddest moment of the film for me had nothing to do with David's life story. It were a couple of lines spoken by David's therapist, Curtis McCabe. He is sure he's real, and if David decides to go back to the real world, he'll stop existing.

Though this film has nothing to do with androids and the like, it has everything to do with what's real and what's fake.It managed to really touch me.

The last class was devoted to recapping the various theorists and concepts that we'd been discussing, and also to evaluating on the course. As Eva and I had already finished the writing of our paper the day before (in order to be able to concentrate on the upcoming tests after that), this came a little too late for us. It was, however, useful to have all the theorists and concepts, or at least a few, summed up like that; it made me see the course from a birdlike perspective for the first time, and made me realise that the classes hadn't been random after all! Even though I have often wondered what on earth certain theories had to do with the digital, I now realise that we've often been discussing not so much the digital itself, but some kind of sensibility that came with the digital medium. We've also discussed lots of media-theories that apply to most media, which is a good thing, since we hadn't done so before (in cultural studies, at least).

There have also been topics, theorists and such that we had discussed before. I've noticed a considerable overlap with the Cultural Theory course, which I think is a sad thing; we'd only just finished said course, so I was pretty disappointed to find that we spent entire classes recapping what we'd just learnt. Other than that and some other flaws (the book didn't go into theory much) it was good to have a course on the digital. Since even though it is a recent thing, our generation has grown up with and we tend to take the digital sensibility for granted. It was good to approach it again from a different point of view, take a more bird-like overview and have some useful concepts handed to us which helped to grasp the newness and specialness of the 'new medium' - though to us, it feels like it's been there forever - all the better. 

All of the discussed theories came together in the last lecture of Digital Art and Culture. It all started with the rhizome and ended with the sharing of information. Meanwhile there were lectures about celebrity, privacy, cyborgs and so on. We were in doubt about the topic of this last post, should we give a summary of all our previous posts or should we look ahead at the exam?

We read our previous posts again and although the subjects of the posts were all different, we did find a theme. In almost every post, we have given an example to explain a theory which was discussed in the previous lecture. We used different YouTube videos, such as the Flying Dutchman, robots who are playing football and the virtual hairdresser. But also different pictures and sites, like Devaintart.com. These subjects are so diverse, that we sadly can’t discuss all of them in this post. So we came up with another idea.

We are going to talk about Anonymous. Maybe some of you are not familiar with this organization, so first we will give you a quick explanation. Anonymous is an organization that contains members from all over the world. But probably you already expected; they are all anonymous. We don’t know anything about their identities. When they appear in public, they are all wearing the same masks. The members think of themselves as freedom fighters. They want to maintain the free access to information on the internet. In order to defend their interests they hack websites from different authorities, such as banks. Those banks lose control over their own websites and Anonymous gets power for a couple of hours. With this small amount of information, you can link different theories to this subject, for instance hacktivism (activism by means of hacking websites), the gaze (the way in which they get power) and identity (they are anonymous) on the internet.

With hacktivism Anonymous tries to make a statement trough hacking. They don’t harm the server, so after they are done, everything seems back to normal. But they showed the world that they can do more than we all expect. The companies are living in a panopticum where Anonymous has the gaze. They can take over the internet and so a part of the company. Take for example a bank; they will lose a lot of money when their clients can’t reach their own bank-account. They lose their faith in this company and go to another bank that isn’t hacked. And the weirdest thing is that nobody knows who the members of Anonymous are. The police can’t do anything about it. Their only identity on the internet is their membership. They are Anonymous, but it is possible that someone in your neighborhood is a member without you even knowing it.

This is only one subject to which we can link theories from Digital Art and Culture, but in everyday life you can link those theories to a lot of other examples. Take a look at the newspaper of today or tomorrow and you will find one. Digital culture is everywhere and it is not just something which we only encountered during our course. This was our final post and we hoped you have enjoyed our views on digital art and culture.

  And if you want to join Anonymous...here is their Dutch website: http://www.anonymousnetherlands.nl/

We zijn met het vak Digital Art & Culture naar het Dutch Electronic Art Festival geweest. Ik vond het heel interessant om te zien hoe digitale kunst en kunst met elektriciteit ontstaat. Ook de grens tussen wel of geen kunst is hierbij soms erg vaag. Ik vind veel dingen die ik heb gezien niet per definitie mooi. Nu is het natuurlijk niet zo dat iets alleen kunst is al het mooi gevonden wordt. Iets dat interessant is, of maatschappelijke kwesties aan de orde stelt kan ook al kunst genoemt worden. Toch vond ik bij veel dingen die hier te zien waren het moeilijk om hier echt het nut van in te zien. Sommige dingen vond ik heel interessant of mooi bedacht, zoals de bacteriën in een schilderij die met een magneet kunst vormen. Dit vind ik interessant om naar te kijken, maar een plank waar houtwormen inzitten die je niet kunt zien vind ik al weer gekker om kunst te noemen. Het idee erachter is natuurlijk heel interessant. Namelijk dat deze houtwormen een heel gangennetwerk door het hout maken, en hiermee een ryzoomstructuur creëren. Maar het feit dat je van buitenaf enkel een plank ziet, en alleen een koptelefoon kunt opzetten om ze te horen vind ik best gek. Je moet er als toeschouwer ook maar van uitgaan dat datgene dat je hoort ook echt die wormen zijn en dat dat ook echt life is. Het is natuurlijk maar net wat je je laat aanpraten, en ik vind dat we hierin ook kritisch mogen zijn! Het leukst vond ik de vriezer waar we inkonden met het zout in het ijsblok. Dit was dus ook kunst die ontstond en veranderde. Het interessante hiervan vind ik dat degen na en voor jou dus nooit het zelfde heeft gezien als jij. Terwijl ze naar hetzelfde ijsblok gingen kijken.

Ik vond het een interessante dag, en zeker de moeite waard om bij te wonen! Ik vond het wel jammer dat het festival zelf al voorbij was, en dat we dus nu enkel de expositie konden zien. Ik ben blij dat we hierheen zijn gegaan, ookal was niet alles even mooi, ik vind het heel leuk dat ik wel over alles een mening kan vormen en kan zien wat voor dingen er gemaakt worden. Zodat we aan het eind van de rit alle kennis hebben en dan kunnen selecteren wat we daarvan mooi vinden en wat niet. DEAF was wat dat betreft heel vernieuwend en geslaagd