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Here is my first attempt at animation with Adobe After Effects, inspired by Surrealism, Dada, and early MTV animations.

All the source images were taken by me or Kris and can be found in my Flickr account.

Music: Netmaster 2 (Safety is Dangerous Glitch Mix) by HEPNOVA.

[YouTube] [Vimeo] [Blip.tv]

Noir is the new video I made in Comm Lab @ ITP with Elizabeth, Catherine, and Kristin.  It is a music video for a song of the same name that I recorded circa 1998-1999 under the Ronald Raygun band name, and re-released online in 2006 under the new HEPNOVA brand.  It was the second or third song that I have ever written.  Telephone Tag was the first, and either Noir or Bionic Boyband in Bollywood was second/third.  I did the vocals and played all of the instruments except for bass.  The bass credits go to Nico of Tsar Nicholas and HEPNOVA fame.

The video is a pastiche-y hommage to the films noirs of yesteryear, shot on location in Lower Manhattan, with basically no budget and only three weeks from pre to post.  Here it is in all its charmingly ghetto glory:

Noir from lee-sean on Vimeo.  Also on Blip.tv and YouTube.

Joy Garnett painted the Molotov Man (above) based on a photograph that Susan Meiselas had taken (below) of Pablo Arauz, who was taken part in the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua.  When Garnett presented the work in an exhibition, she was hit with a potential lawsuit from Meiselas’ lawyer, although Meiselas says that she did not end up suing in the end.  Garnett believes that the Molotov Man had become a culture symbol, a part of the visual vocabulary and fair game for reappropriation, while Meiselas argues that specificity and context are everything.

The blogger nmazca poses the question, “Who owns the rights to this man’s struggle?”  Nobody asked Pablo Arauz whether or not his image could be reproduced.  His struggle belongs not just to him, but to a collective anyway.  The image of Pablo Arauz as the Molotov man is now an icon and not the same thing as the reality of Arauz the Sandinista, the family man, and the truck driver.  He is the symbol of a struggle that transcends his own personhood, much like Tank Man (AKA the Unknown Rebel) in Tiananmen Square.

The claiming of Arauz’s image as a form of exclusive intellectual property just seems ridiculous to me.  By threatening to sue Garnett, Meiselas was not so much protecting the context of Arauz’s of struggle in so much as protecting her own economic interests in the form of her claim to intellectual property.  Molotov Man, in becoming an icon, belongs to everyone and no one.  Like language itself, it is part of the Commons, and it is not something that should (or can) be privatized.

I believe images and symbols should be available for artists (and everybody else) to remix and mash-up, but the fact that two relatively privileged content creators in New York are debating ownership over the image of a Nicaraguan Sandinista strikes me as a phenomenon similar to what Lethem, in last week’s reading, called “imperial plagiarism.”  I’m glad Molotov Man inspired Meiselas to snap the photo and Garnett to paint, but reading the article I can’t help but to feel a like I want to shake them both and say, “IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” It’s not about your photography or your painting, but ultimately it is about Pablo Arauz – the person, not the icon – and his personal struggle.  Let it inspire you to tell stories, take pictures, and make, but don’t try to claim what has become part of the Commons.

First of all, Lethem isn’t really a plagiarist because he cites the sources from which he lift phrases.  In any case, I get many of his points, and it was a great literary ‘reveal’ at the end of a well-written piece.  I agree that The whole idea of copyright needs to be reassessed as society and technology changes.  In fact, technological change often makes legal structures of intellectual property ownership quickly obsolete.  As Lethem says:

In the contemporary world, though, the act of “copying” is in no meaningful sense equivalent to an infringement—we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or send or forward one—and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

Lethem also refers to modern American copyright law’s “limitless bloating.”  It is indeed a blunt instrument, that while seemingly universal in its scope, seems to best maintain and benefit the position of copyright holders at the top of the socio-economic-political hierarchy.  What does Britney Spears really have to lose if I release an unauthorized cover of her songs?  I am but a peon compared to the ASCAAP and the major label’s legal departments.  But on the other hand, for a struggling independent artist, it would really suck if some major entertainment-industrial-complex corporation ripped off my work.  Sure I could sue, that’s the American way after all, but it would probably be too expensive and too much trouble.  There is also the hypocrisy of what Lethem calls “imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or ‘primitive’ art works and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists.”  This kind of plagiarism represents a one-way appropriation, and not a multilateral cultural exchange of ideas.  Neo-colonialism posing as creative production?

The problem is with what do we replace our current copyright regime?  Creative Commons seems like a step in the right direction, in that it gives content creators choices on how to share, or to use Lethem’s language, “gift” their works of art to the world.  Derivative works are inevitable and essential for the continuation of art.  I think artists should be relevant to their place and time, which for us now means a society saturated with the signs of commercial advertising and pop culture, and enabled by facile digital replication.  Yet there is endless potential to mine that mundane world for remixing, mash-ups and the next big recombinant art form, which won’t let antiquated copyright law get in its way.  As Lethem says, “We’re surrounded by signs, our imperative is to ignore none of them.”

Elizabeth and I teamed up again to work on our audio pieces for Comm Lab this week.  Although we did record audio from the streets of NY together for last week’s assignment, we decided not to use any of it and instead decided to choose a pressing socio-political theme of the current economic “crisis.”  I took photos and recorded audio from an anti-bailout protest on Wall Street last month.  We were particularly attracted to some snippets from a speech given by the charismatic looking gentleman pictured above.  We also used samples of other protesters chanting slogans, and put everything over a beat that I composed.  In some amazing coincidence, almost all of our samples fit over the beats at 109 BPM.  Only one sample of chanting protesters had to be slightly stretched in Audacity to fit the tempo.

Download the MP3 or the AIFF.

The danceable audio anger that resulted from our musical collaborations reminds me a little bit of the Muppets doing N.W.A. And for further musical explorations relating to pigs, I suggest NIN’s Piggy and March of the Pigs.

Elizabeth describes more of our process in her blog:

We used several applications to make the piece. We cut up the audio in Fission, a commercial software for simple cutting. It is really usable. The beats were composed in iDrum…. We used Audacity to change the length of some of the audio pieces so that they all had the same beat. Then we assembled the song in Garage Band.

Besides the soundtrack to Herbivores, I haven’t done much music lately. Especially since the last time Hepnova made music together was almost a year and a half ago. Later this week, I’m scheduled to work with Elizabeth, who I worked with earlier on the Herbivores animation, but I just couldn’t wait to get back into making music again, so I just went ahead and composed my own piece today. I will still make another track with Elizabeth later this week.

This track is called Subway, Streets & Stars. It is composed of recordings I made in the subway and streets of New York City as well as an audio sample of stars (the ones in space, not the ones in Hollywood) from the BBC. I used Fission to chop up samples, iDrum to create rhythmic loops, and GarageBand for putting everything together.

Click here for the uncompressed AIFF version.

First of all, I think McLuhan is brilliant.  I love the way he effortly brings together seemingly disparate references like Greek antiquity to Shakespeare to pop culture to make his arguments.  He has been on my “to read” list for a long time now, but I never got around to it until it was assigned for Comm Lab.

It is important to note that the subtitle of Understanding Media is “The Extensions of Man”.  For McLuhan, media are not simply forms of communication such as TV, radio, newspapers, etc., but but any technology that extends the human body or mind.  Clothing, cars, houses, are all media according to this broad definition.  McLuhan gives an example of axes as media.  When metal axes were introduced to an aboriginal community in Austrialia that previously only had stone tools, the entire patriarchal social order was disrupted.

This brings us to another point that media are agents of change.  By extending the human body – the senses and the mind – media have both a prosthetic and an amputational effect.  In encountering new media, we both gain and lose something.

McLuhan divides media into high definition/low definition, hot and cool.  High definition is hot.  It gives a lot of information and requires little interaction from the user.  Low definition is cool.  It provides little information and requires the user to make an effort to fill in the gaps.  For example, the telephone is cool, while the radio is hot.  Television is cool, while movies are hot.

Of course we need to talk about McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “The medium is the message.”  I’m still trying to grapple with the full meaning of the phrase since I haven’t gotten through the whole book yet.  But from what I understand, McLuhan seems to be saying that there is an inherent message embedded in media themselves, that transcends the explicit message transmitted by the media, and creates social change over time.  If we return to the metal ax example, we could infer that the metal axes were not just about cutting things, but that their introduction to a stone age society represented a message of social upheaval that turned the hierachical order upside down.

Here is another quote that really resonated with me (page 31 of the Critical Edition of Understanding Media, edited by W. Terrence Gordon, 2003):

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.  The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

The mixing of art and technology – hmm, sounds just like ITP!  It seems that the work we do here all relates to putting McLuhan’s theories into practice.  Not that I presume to be a “serious artist,” although I certainly aspire to be one.

I had a bunch of vegetables left over from the making of my stop action video, Herbivores as well as some other vegetables in my pantry that I needed to use up, so I decided to cook up a big batch of food to last me the week.  I seasoned some cauliflower, brussels sprouts, carrots, edamame, onions, ginger and garlic with a curry vinaigrette (homemade curry powder, Dijon mustard, sherry vinegar, and melted butter), and put the mixture on a baking sheet and roasted it in the oven (~400 degrees F) for 45 minutes or so.  Then I used the roasted veggies as a sauce for some whole wheat penne, and garnished with chopped dill.

Herbivores from lee-sean on Vimeo.

A stop motion video by Lee-Sean Huang & Elizabeth Fuller for Communications Lab at ITP

Watch on Vimeo, BlipTV, or YouTube

“Making of” photos on Flickr

I worked with Ruxy on this week’s Comm Lab assignment, which was to tell a story using 4-10 sequential images. We created our comic using Photoshop and images we found online. The final assembly of the comic was done with Comic Life.

We were inspired by an article published in the LA Times on September 28, 2008, that cites a conversation Sarah Palin had with Wasilla, Alaska resident Philip Munger in 1997, in which Palin said, “dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time…she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks.”

Click here or on the image above to download the hi-res PDF version of the comic.  Also available as a T-shirt!

I had to brush up on my Marxist fundamentals, which I haven’t really engaged in depth since my undergrad political science classes, to understand some of the historical/political references that Benjamin was making.  This sent me on an hours-long quest looking up articles and reading articles online related to the issues Benjamin brings up.  I find the essay prophetic, as if Benjamin can somehow look into the future and see Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and even more obviously propagandistic films like The Eternal Jew.

Benjamin writes: “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”  And he continues, “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice — politics.”  I don’t think politics can be viewed as something separate from ritual.  Politics and religion have always been linked.  Also, in political narratives that legitimize power, there are invocations of “cult value” or “instruments of magic,” be it a “founding myth” of a state or nation, or in the idolization of certain historical founder figures.  To me, they are two sides of the same coin.

“This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.  Communism responds by politicizing art.”

These are the last two lines of the essay.  Maybe I’m not understanding nuance here, but aren’t these the same thing?  Both Fascism and Communism are mixing the art with politics or politics with art.  I believe that art and politics have always been bedfellows and that the role of artists is to comment upon and engage with their societies and times.  Sure, politicians and others can use art as a means of persuasion or propaganda, but others can similarly use art as a means of resistance against coercion and hegemony.  The innovation of mechanical reproduction, or in our times, digital distribution and network communication make art an even more powerful and even more dangerous two-edged sword and tool for oppression and for liberation.

I don’t necessarily agree that there is a decline of the aura in art, but instead, I think that the ritual value and the aura of art have changed.  There is still a ritualistic quality to going to see a movie at the cinema as an “event” or happening.  Or the ritual fetishistic quality of unwrapping an album or CD recording and playing it for the first time.  In fact, even with MP3s replacing CDs and movies available to download on demand, there is still an aura attached to the real thing.  Audiophiles and DJs still appreciate the qualities of vinyl or CDs over MP3s.  Even with the ubiquitousness of music through the popularization of iPods and other MP3 players, live music shows are still an event, a spectacle, something with an aura that has ritual value.  In fact, the relative banality of ubiquitous mechanically/digitally reproduced music probably makes us appreciate live shows even more.  Probably the same goes with movies.  Sure, I can BitTorrent a movie and watch it on my laptop to avoid paying money to see it in a theater (but of course I wouldn’t because that would be unethical and even illegal), but there is still a lingering aura in seeing it in a theater, for the immersive experience and for the ritual social value of experiencing it with friends or a date.

I worked with Mustafa today for this in-class assignment for Communications Lab at ITP.

In-class Exercise: The 30-Minute Film Festival. In teams of three you have 45 minutes to create a short video that contains a simple narrative arc. Create a blip account. Upload your video. Embed it into your blog. We’ll have a short film festival.

The inspiration for this short film came from a squashed pigeon I saw in the middle of Broadway when I was crossing the street from the subway to school this morning.

Click here or on the image above to play.

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong draws from cultural anthropology, Greco-Roman classical antiquity, and modern (McCluhan and company) to illustrate the differences between primary oral cultures (societies that do not have written language) and “chirographic” or literate cultures.  Ong rejects the term “oral literature” as “preposterous.”  The term “literature” implies writing, but oral storytelling is not simply unwritten stories.  Ong claims that there are fundamental structural differences between orality and literacy.  He points out that these differences are hard to grasp for people like us in predominately literate societies, as the written word has influenced so much of our culture.  From a historical standpoint, orality is more the norm than literacy.  Writing is a relatively recent development in human history, and even today, with about 3,000 languages in the world, only 78 have what could be considered “literature.”

The sharp distinction between orality and literacy are is inherently problematic.  Ong himself admits that the origins of language is oral.  In the state of cognitive development, even in literate societies, people start out oral first, then they become literate.  Ong introduces the concept of “residual orality,” meaning vestiges of orality even in literate cultures.  In this way, orality is so central to the human condition, as a cognitive and psycho-linguistic phenomenon, that it does not disappear with the onset of orality, but rather changes and is augmented by literacy.  But of course this change and augmentation is not necessarily “lossless.”

Ong provides a list of 9 characteristics of thought and expression characteristic of oral cultures that differentiate them from chirographic ones:

1. Expression is additive rather an subordinative

2. Aggregative rather than analytic

Ong claims that oral cultures are more likely to use set expressions or “clichés” than literate cultures, although these set expressions linger even in post-literate cultures.  Even if Ong meant no value judgement, I question whether this is not due to social prejudices and taste, rather than something instrinsic to literacy.

3. Redundant or “copious”

I’ve read some pretty redundant and copius text in my day, and heard a lot of redundant and copius speeches and sermons, so I don’t know if this is something we have moved away from in a literate society .  In any case, Ong admits that this redundancy and “copiousness” of style persisted up until the early 20th century in Anglophone cultures, so is this really something unique to orality, or is it merely a shift in stylistic norms?

4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative

With no way to preserve knowledge in the long term, oral societies must spend a great deal of energy in repeating and performing oral knowledge as a way of remembering and transmitting that knowledge.

Even though writing allows you to preserve culture and collective memory, the written corpus becomes to vast for people to keep track of.  Knowledge still has to be repeated and orally performed in post-literate cultures in order for it to be passed down.

5. Close to the human lifeworld – “primary oral culture is little concerned with preserving knowledge of skills as an abstract, self-subsistent corpus.”

Even so, oral cultures are able to construct elaborate and fantastical legends and fables, so there is no lack of imagination there.  I would argue that there is rich metaphor and symbolism in oral traditions, even if there is not what Ong would consider to be “abstraction.”  But maybe I am missing Ong’s point here.  In any case, as someone completely immersed in a chirographic society, it is really hard to comprehend a primary oral society, let alone analyze it.  Our whole world view is filtered through the lens of written language.

Ong himself declares, “[f]reeing ourselves of chirographic and typographic bias in our understanding of language is probably more difficult than any of us can imagine.”  Yet is it impossible?  In writing the book, Ong seems to have believed that he has been able to bridge the gap and attained some degree of understanding of a primary oral state.  But we are never able to free ourselves from a chirographic/typographic bias, so we will never know for sure.

6. Agonistically toned – “orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle”

Ong writes, “Growing up in a still dominantly oral culture, certain black males in the US, the Caribbean and elsewhere, engage in what is known variously as the ‘dozens’ or ‘joning’ or ‘sounding’ or by other names, in which one opponent tries to outdo the other in vilifying the other’s mother.”

This is echoed in the way as hip hop MC’s “do battle.”  This also reminds me of the ball culture depicted in the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, where “combattants” from rival “houses” engage in verbal duels known as “reading.”

7. Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced

Writing in 1982, Ong could not have predicted the phenomenon of internet chatting, which makes written communication a widespread “live” interactive phenomenon, rather than a distanced, one-way communication.

8. Homeostatic – “oral societies live very much in the present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance”

While this is true, politicians and people working in PR know the limits of collective memory.  The scandal of yesteryear is quickly forgotten in the media deluge of the modern news cycle.  There are limits to individual and collective memory due to the vast amounts of information floating around.  Of course, written language allows us to keep a record of the past, but up until very recently, this has been a tedious process that has required access to historical records and the ability to conduct research.  In the post-Google age, the internet now becomes an easily searchable collection of knowledge that can be quickly retrieved.  It becomes harder to bury the past in the stacks of imposing archives.

9.  Situational rather than abstract – people in oral cultures tend to think more about the situation – the here and now – rather than the abstract hypothetical

Part of the power (and the limitation) of oral language is its dependence on place and time.  Once a word is verbally uttered, it is gone.  It has an ephemeral quality that the written word does not.  Oral language is always tied in with physical action, whereas written language can be preserved and transmitted with ease.

In Ong’s words, “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence…Sight isolates, sound incorporates.  Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer…The spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups.”

If this is true, then reading something off of a printed page (or computer screen) is not the same as hearing the same words live in a room.  There is a socially cohesive quality to the spoken language, as well as a mystical quality, as Ong points out in the theological example of God ‘speaking’ to human beings in Christianity.

In chapters 1-3, Ong primarily addresses orality, but in chapter 4, Ong addresses the characteristics of writing.  He claims that “[m]ore than any single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”  Writing, like computers, is a form of technology and completely artificial. But Ong does not condemn this artificiality, but instead praises it.  He states that “[t]echnologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness…writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.”

In this way, one could infer that humans and technology are mutually transformative.  Humans alter the environment to create technology.  They create paper and inks to write language, thus transforming raw materials into something new.  But this technology of writing likewise changes people’s ability to think and reason.

When Ong starts talking about Asian language scripts, he starts to drop the ball a bit.  He predicts that Chinese characters will eventually disappear as pinyin (Chinese romanization) and the Mandarin ‘dialect’ is spread throughout the People’s Republic of China.  While pinyin romanization is now firmly established as a pedagogical tool in teaching Chinese to beginning readers in China and foreigners learning Chinese as a second language, the characters (hanzi) are not going anywhere anytime soon.  While the character set has been simplified in Mainland China, the traditional character set is still in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and much of the Chinese diaspora.  Also, his claim that the Chinese ‘dialects’ (which are actually mutually unintelligible languages sharing a common root, much like French, Spanish and Italian all derive from Latin) are “basically of the same structure” is also false.  There is structural similarity, but modern written Chinese (which replaced classical Chinese – wenyenwen, an archaic written language with a similar function to Learned Latin in the European Middle Ages) in the early 20th century is based on spoken Mandarin.  Even if native speakers of Cantonese or Taiwanese are proficient in written Chinese, there is a big gap between the written language they use and their actual spoken language.

He also makes a factual error about Japanese script.  Japanese is not written with “a syllabary and Chinese characters,” but TWO syllabaries and Chinese characters (kanji).  The two syllabaries – hiragana and katakana – both express the same sounds, so are technically interchangeable, but have distinct roles in the written language based on stylistic usage.  Also the Chinese characters often have 2 or more ‘readings’ or pronunciations based on the context.  They are not pronounced only, as Ong describes, “in its own non-Chinese way.”  Some kanji readings are based on and attempt to imitate Chinese loanwords to Japanese, although the pronunciations have changed over time and been adapted to the Japanese phonetic system.  Other readings are purely Japanese, and the characters have only been borrowed semantically, with no regard to the Chinese pronunciations.  This would be akin to us writing French words in English, but pronouncing them in English, i.e. if I wrote “oiseau” but pronounced it “bird.”  Although this analogy is a bit awkward because French and English both use more-or-less phonetic alphabets, whereas the Chinese ideographs are not phonetic.  Finally, Ong’s description of Korean being a hybrid of Chinese characters and the Korean alphabet is no longer true, as the Korean alphabet is now almost always used exclusively in writing in all but the most academic contexts in Korea.

As part of Communications Lab at ITP, we were asked to visit and comment on the New York City Waterfalls.  I went with my classmate, Catherine to observe the Waterfalls from the South Street Seaport on September 7.

Living in New York, one often forgets that Manhattan is an island.  Access to the waterfront areas are cut off by highways, so it feels that New York faces inward and upward, rather than outward towards its maritime surroundings.  The topography of NYC is known more for its urban peaks and valleys created by skyscrapers and the artificial oasis that is Central Park, rather than for its maritime orientation and island nature.

Even when I am by the rivers in New York, I feel like the water is just something I look past or through, concentrating my eye on the view of Brooklyn, Queens or New Jersey across the water.  That is to say that the built environment dominates ones perception of the city.

The Waterfalls draw attention to the qualities of the water itself.  By elevating the water and dropping it down as waterfalls, Danish-Icelandic artist and creator of the Waterfalls Olafur Eliasson reminds us of the vast force and volume of the water.

The Waterfalls are clearly fake, you can see the scaffolding, and maybe that is the point.  Nobody would mistaken them for Niagara falls or anything like that.  But man-made structures still have the ability to evoke the beauty of the natural world.  Or at least that is the theory behind landscape architecture and garden design.  A garden or a park is not a forest or a meadow, but they evoke these natural environments and demonstrate the beauty of nature.

My favorite Waterfall is the one under the Brooklyn Bridge.  It plays with the sillouette of an iconic fixture of the NY skyline.  It invites us to look down and over at the river that the Bridge traverses, and not just the Bridge as a part of the terrestrial built environment.