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“Beauty in itself is inefficacious. But this also means that beauty is in and of itself utopian.” - Steven Shaviro 

The second essay on “Aesthetics” in No Speed Limit got me thinking about the issue of beauty and accessibility (a line of inquiry also sparked by the above quote). My final project is still kind of up in the air in terms of the message that I want to deliver -- do I want to buy into the MAPO mask and try to sell the idea of it as a speculative artifact, or should I focus on how a product like this might ultimately fail? 

Right now the MAPO mask will cost you around $200 dollars. 

Shaviro defines Accelerationism as a “speculative movement that seeks to extrapolate the entire globalized neoliberal capitalist order” (9). What we can gather is that trying to do away with capitalism is futile, but rather we should look at ways to reconfigure or extend the possibilities of such an order. I turn to the future of the MAPO beauty mask and how this would fit into the larger market, as a source of competition. The MAPO mask will act as a jumping off point, but something bigger and better is bound to come along. This idea also recalls some of the earlier discussions we had about “completing the set” and how this is entirely impossible. I want to further explore the potentiality of MAPO as something more than an expensive beauty product that most people can’t afford (as of right now).

How do Aesthetics operate in the future? Much of the criticism around world-building we’ve discussed in class surrounds the hollowness beyond what’s there for looks or “cool factor”. Shaviro writes, “Aesthetics is never essential, but this is what allows it to be irreducible to the essential” (26). Maybe aestheticism in the future should be exploited because it’s there just for fun? I mean we could all live without the MAPO mask but is that what makes it so special? Is the MAPO’s only job to make us beautiful? 

“It’s a call for a steampunk that explores all the conditions of its history: of the mill, and of the workhouse. It’s the same impulse that, when a friend throws a 1920s party, makes me want to turn up as a polio victim”. James Bridle, Starpunk

Woodstock, 1969. 

1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” commercial, also used to end the Mad Men series. 

So this post takes me back exactly ten years, to a VHI four-part documentary series called The Drug Years. I remember watching this documentary along with others on Woodstock and the 60s/70s more generally, and becoming fascinated (even curious) with drug culture as it was portrayed in it’s heyday. Because of this sparked, albeit shallow, interest in 60s counterculture, I also remember checking out The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe) as a high school sophomore and not knowing what the hell I was reading -- I never finished it. 

In retrospect, I was so busy glorifying hippie culture and what I thought the 60s looked like, that I never stopped to consider the ugly side of this era as well -- the civil injustices, racism, sexism, rise in divorce rates, etc. I always think about Mad Men for this conversation, as the show tries to work against the cliches that we’ve come to understand the 60s as representing, by exposing the “realness” of what life was like back then; the show is a way of discussing these issues as they might have been dealt with. What Bridle argues for is a reevaluation of how we talk about these imagined histories, by looking at them as they really were. In turn, this can shape how we come to settle what we think the future will look like, by first authenticating the past and present that will come to inform this vision. 

Aleksandra Domanović 'Substances of Human Origin', 2015 

Aleksandra Domanović, ‘Torches of Freedom’, 2013 

Aleksandra Domanović 'Little Sister II', 2014

✨ http://www.tanyaleighton.com/index.php?pageId=587&l=en

An excerpt from the above link: 

“Through 3D modeling, Domanović has cast the ‘Belgrade Hand’ as an actor in her ongoing exploration of women’s liberation, art history and the history of former Yugoslavia and the Balkan region at large. The hand – the first of its kind and able to haptically respond to touch – is a representation of Yugoslavian innovation.

Focusing on the role of women and minorities as often overshadowed or misrepresented agents of technological innovation, Domanović’s sculptures, in their quotidian poses – a hand holding a cigarette, apple or baton – subtly engage a history in which these objects have a deep semiotic and historical significance. The cigarette, in this instance, is rather a ‘torch of freedom’, a term coined by psychoanalyst A.A. Brill in the early 20th Century and then used as a marketing scheme by pioneering ad-man Edward Bernays. Bernays hired women to smoke publicly as an assertion of their social equality, while at the same time conveniently awakening a massive and previously untapped market of smokers.”

Continuing somewhat on my last post about the “future aesthetic” and what future bodies look like, we turn to the idea of exploiting the body for future use in Bret Victor’s “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interactive Design”. Thinking critically about the use of our bodies and particularly our hands in the future brought me to the image “Torches of Freedom” which I had stumbled upon weeks ago here on Tumblr. This image led me to the gorgeous website for the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin, which houses many innovative artists such as Domanović and her work on gendered future bodies -- particularly how the hands and what they carry represent the liberation of gendered social conventions (the cigarette as a “torch of freedom”). 

Visually her prototypic hands eliminate a gendered formality as the hands could essentially stand in for anybody, yet what they are depicted as holding (a cigarette, ketchup bottle, bird) somehow ground them in the everyday/familiar. Here the cold, mechanical hand intersects with say the tenderness of a tiny bird, bridging the distant future with something we can identify. ✨ Some of the materials she uses for these are models are plastic, polyurethane, aluminum, and carbon fiber. 

Victor illustrates the numerous uses we can attribute to the manipulation of our hands, the very tools that define our humanness. Although I do buy his argument that we need to figure a more useful way of integrating our hands into future technologies, I do take issue with the ableist discourse he might take for granted in pushing this agenda. He slightly touches on this problem in the “Responses” section when he says, “Channeling all interaction through a single finger is like restricting all literature to Dr Seuss's vocabulary. Yes, it's much more accessible, both to children and to a small set of disabled adults. But a fully-functioning adult human being deserves so much more”; this seems to be more of an afterthought however. He does give a disclaimer that he doesn’t have all the answers to the oversight of useless hands in “Future Visions”, yet it is useful to think about who is left out of these bodily oriented interfaces. How can we better serve those who aren’t able-bodied in the future? 

MAC Cosmetics’ newest campaign for Spring 2016. The models aren’t radically different looking, save for some shiny silver attachments and glossy eyelids. 

I do like this idea of beauty working for us. 

A test subject of sorts? http://feinshowroom.blogspot.com/

The highly conceptual Speculative Everything was very approachable in its terms and what it set out to do -- to muse on the “what-if” question or questions. Through speculative design, we “give form to the multiverse of worlds our world could be” (160). That is, through design fiction we give rise to or formulate possible futures and not the other way around. The future is not something that happens to us, but rather something that comes out of the present conditions we have set for it. Looking at the countless interpretations of postulated realities and anti-realities got me thinking about how fixed our popular idea of the aesthetic future really is.

In popular culture and mass media we have been conditioned to think about the future in cosmic terms. I am personally interested in fashion and beauty and what (other) art does with these things, as these are of course art forms in and of themselves. So it was a happy coincidence when I saw that MAC Cosmetics’ new Spring Campaign was “MAC Future”. With shade names like “Meta-Fabulous”, “Cybernaut”, and “Super Nova” we resort once again to a cosmic rendering of what our future will look like, as another world “out there”, far removed and completely disharmonious with our own. It’s as if our own terms, ideas, values, etc. are not equipped to explain a fictive future, or at least a marketable one. 

The answer (as evidenced with this campaign) is to create a new alien version of ourselves, a couture rendering of the space-aged human. This idea is invested in the covering of our human bodies, a way of masking the basic human with newer, sexier technologies (in this case fashion). One problem arises with the ideal streamlined human of the new age and that is -- the future looks very white. A simple Google Image search of “futuristic beauty”, “future beauty”, or even “beauty” in general takes you to slew of white female images. Go to Speculative Everything and turn to page 16, again you’ll see the famed “white space” of the future applied to future fashions. A colorless future is highly problematic, as it reasserts the hegemony rooted not only in beauty, but in identity politics. 

Something I want to explore further in my final project and MAPO Kickstarter is the erasure of colored bodies in fictive futures. With MAPO, semblance is crucial as everyone is instructed to put on the same kind of mask. It would seem the white, anglocentric model of beauty today seems to heighten in future renderings of the ideal human. Thankfully, future rhetoric reasserts that our predictions of the future are usually wrong (2). That our depictions of future bodies as devoid of color are highly unlikely; but what does that still say about the kind of colorless future we want to see? 

“At M·A·C, we’re always looking toward the future. We just happen to see it in the world of colour”. - James Gager, Creative Director, M·A·C Cosmetics

The Walkman model I owned in all its steel blue glory.

Christophe Chemin, “Nivôse” - part of a series of artworks commissioned for the #PradaFW16 Womenswear collection. I like the idea of 'Sound’ (in red letters) at the center of such a visually charged piece.  

https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/how-christophe-chemin-helped-prada-explore-the-complexities-of-womanhood

"One set of strategies embarked upon by iPod users in their effort to deal with the contingent and chilly nature of urban space is to aestheticize it. This aesthetic colonization of urban space is in part a technological tale whereby urban experience becomes synonymous with technological experience” (Bull 198). The testimonies in “The Audio-Visual Ipod” cite musica mobilis as a means of setting the scene, a soundtrack for navigating the world around. Music provides a bridge to outside stimuli, so that each listener’s experience is unique to their simultaneous performance of walking and listening. It’s interesting to look at the idea of performance not only in the musical sense, but in the literal performance of this dual act. Is there something charged in the way one walks when listening? What comes to mind here is use of music in fashion shows, where as the runway is a more isolated event, it still influences the “performance” of the show. If I was giving my testimony on this kind of experience it would be on my walk to class, as music makes this trek a lot less mundane by “creating movement and energy in the user where there was none before” (Bull 203).

The conditions of mobile listening are examined relationally when Hosowaka says, “Walkman users are not necessarily detached from their environment, closing their ears, but are unified in the autonomous and singular moment – neither as persons nor as individuals – with the real” (108). I think Hosowaka is saying that the user is attached to the real in that the “reality” he constructs for himself (through music) is not possible without that music. So the combination of the two events (walking + listening) is what makes up the real. Something about the sound holds the user’s experience of the world in place.

“Radio that instantly connects you to any conversation”.  Stitcher logo -  https://www.stitcher.com/ 

A lot of why we listen to the things we do stems from either the mood we’re already in, or the mood evoked by the listening itself. Either way, sound directly affects our own situation by nudging us in the direction of how to feel.The images I chose this week may not be visually inspiring in themselves, but they do call to mind different poles of listening relevant to the notion of “Active and Passive Perception” Michel Chion discusses in “The Three Listening Modes”. How does one “listen with the ear” as opposed to “with the mind” (Chion 52)?

For the first image, I chose the Stitcher logo, a podcast app. Don’t get me wrong. I love podcasts, especially when I’m getting ready or doing tasks around the house. Weirdly enough, I’m not a huge talk radio fan while in the car. Something about driving makes me want to zone out and fall back on my music. Of course my boyfriend on the other hand adjusts the radio to NPR whenever we’re driving. My critical thinking turns off when I’m in the car. This is my place to space out on sound, either with CDs, radio, or my beloved Spotify app. I’m cautious to oversimplify these distinctions, but could we acknowledge the first method of listening (podcasts, conversational) as active, since we kind of have to follow along and do some analysis? Whereas my preferred avenue of sound in the car would be passive? I can miss a few words, turn the volume down, etc. and not feel like I’ve missed something in the sound’s content or meaning. “Semantic listening” also explains why I can enjoy french music even if I don’t understand the language. 

“Music for everyone”. Spotify logo & headphones. https://www.spotify.com/us/

Another important aspect to sound Chion mentions is its relation to film and how it bolsters our reaction to what’s on screen: “The emotional, physical, and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration” (51). He points out that our reaction to sound intersected with a visual medium doesn’t have to refer to music, but can come from sounds of breathing or other unsettling, unfamiliar noises (we see this a lot in horror movies). 

This is why an effective soundtrack/score becomes just as important to the film as any other visual aspect (lighting, direction, cinematography). An example that comes to mind is the use of song during the end credits of Mad Men. To me, the episode is not complete until I hear the closing song, even though it technically isn’t part of the action/narrative of the show. Rather the song is used as a marker of meditation to sum up the themes of that particular episode, a way of expressing these ideas in a way the dialogue can’t. This inseparability of sound from image calls to mind the observation that “song interferes with our perception” (Chion 53), in the same way that sounds conspires with our imagination of the world around. 

✨Link to Mad Men end credits playlist:  https://open.spotify.com/user/pauldahill/playlist/0ot3K2fvyYyrKIxGlOTJcm

“Vicki! I-I thought I heard your voice!” (1964) by Roy Lichtenstein, framed by a bustling city scape. 

A young boy looks away from his mechanized factory town. 

Taking into account the terrains of sound we’ve learned about in Acoustic City, one theme prevails on how we perceive sound, namely our close proximity to it. Going back to the first chapter “Urban Soundscapes”, we learned about the economies of sound in the city, a point that “Acoustic Gentrification: the Silence of Warsaw’s Sonic Warfare” returns to in discussing how noise operates at socioeconomic poles. Kusiak signals to “urban inequality” (207) as a marker of how sound is either cloistered or exposed, depending on one’s privilege, and the tensions that arise whenever these communities overlap.

Maybe one way of looking at how sound is distributed, would be to suggest its evenness without these imposed boundaries. Perhaps sound is evenly distributed across the landscape, and our privilege stems from our ability to tune out the undesirable noise. Despite our imagined boundaries, we are all exposed to the same set of sounds. 

Because class affects how we interact with noise, it might be useful to consider how sound would operate in a world that didn’t entitle its listeners any sort of privacy, what would this cacophonous world look like? Boundaries of sound are important to the individual as well, an idea explored in the “Mobile Listening” chapter from last week’s readings. Recently, sound (particularly music) has become more privatized for consumers (see Kanye/Tidal fiasco).