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I was part of the brainstorming, implementation and localization team of the original Stop the Clash video in 2007, when I worked at Avaaz.org.

I presented my ICM midterm project yesterday.  I wanted to explore how text and images play a role in political propaganda and how they serve to construct a cult of personality.

The image above is just a scaled-down version, the real version is a 42 inch x 42 inch poster.  The poster consists of a text mosaic derived from a scan of a Cultural Revolution era LP cover of propaganda songs.  My Processing program reads the color information in the pixels of the source JPG and replaces it with characters from the Chinese version of The Little Red Book.

Here is a close up of the text mosaic, taken from the Technicolor Dream Coat guy on the bottom right.

I hope to one day present the poster in an over-the-top kitsch setting.  I want to frame it with red Christmas lights and build a “shrine” to the Chairman, with flowers and Tsing Dao beer bottles.  I also have another poster in the works featuring the Dear Leader composed out of the Korean-language text of his On the Juche Idea.  Ultimately, I want to create a triptych, but I haven’t decided on a third subject yet.  Uncle Ho?  Or maybe Grandpa Marx?

Here is a snapshot of me presenting the piece to my class.  Photo credit: Catherine White.

Today in Comm Lab, we covered how to edit audio using Audacity and GarageBand, both of which I have worked with before, but it was good to get a review. This week’s assignment is to create a 2 minute audio piece using audio we recorded or found sounds.

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.

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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 finished my midterm projects for Physical Computing and Intro to Computational Media on Friday, so I decided to get out and get some “culture” by attending the ArtOut with Marina Zurkow at PS1 in Queens.  Elizabeth, who I worked with to make the Herbivores animation, has an in-depth post about the visit.  I don’t have a whole lot more to add to what she said.  I also thought the Børre Sæthre piece was incredibly immersive, especially the part with the unicorn in the partially fogged up glass and the “bathroom” installation with the gun and balls.  I can definitely identify with his boyish sense of humor and mischief.  I don’t want to give away too much, just go and see it for yourself - it’s only a few minutes from Midtown Manhattan, and admission is only $5 or $2 for students (a lot cheaper than the main branch of the MoMa which charges $20).  I found Olafur Eliassons’ Take Your Time stunningly imersive as well.  The photo doesn’t really do it justice because it can’t really capture the size of the installation nor the interactive effect of the mirror.

Lest you think that PS1 has been totally taken over by the Scandinavians, I also highly recommend the NeoHooDoo exhibit for a defiantly New World perspective.

While I was a little burned out with working with physical materials after the struggle to build the Electric Chair Bear, my trip to PS1 has injected me with a bit more inspiration and a renewed desire to work with different materials and to create works on a large scale.