John seems to be a person very wrapped up with his life as an artist, and this is a sentiment I can respect.  His reading responses consistently relate back to his own intentions and how he personally reacted, and it’s obvious he takes the readings very seriously in this aspect.  He’s not afraid to voice his opinion about whether or not he believes the idea behind the reading is applicable, and the fact that he is able to wrap up essential points and ideas very quickly and economically leads me to believe his viewpoint is well established.  This is not to say his blog doesn’t need some improvement.

John also seems to be a bit afraid to voice his opinions in complete detail.  While he will state the basis of his stance, some of the readings fall short in their argumentative qualities.  Often he will say ‘it made me think about x’ and not give the details of his thoughts on the subject.  I enjoyed looking at his progress on the assignment as well as the photo of the beach he took, but for a blog where every reading response relates to his own beliefs as an artist, I’d like to see more of his art.  John is also missing the internet use log and the description of his net fast, which I would have loved to read.  He is also missing several of the reading responses.

Philip Guston talks about art the way I would expect someone of his stature to talk, and it’s fantastic reading.  He talks in circles, he talks about things that aren’t necessarily to the point, he shares his own thoughts about his work in the same tone that he talks about the entirety of art, and everything seems to be just as it should.  He shares anecdotes about the way his work is received, how he creates it, even doubting whether or not his subjects are appropriate or whether they would make a good painting.  He spends a lot of time talking about a period where he was painting a lot of pictures of the Klan when the Klan was actually a threat to society.  He talks about how, if they were accepted as a social norm, they would also have to appreciate things like abstract expressionism, a fairly clever subject for self-reflexivity.  It makes sense that the Klan would want to suppress such a painting, but in all reality, why should they?  Do they deny that humans need to express themselves?  Do they deny that their own activities in the KKK are a similar form of expression?  Do some people only express themselves through violence?

I think that it may be hard to apply Guston’s words to current waves of art, but I’d like to try.  In Guston’s day, things like intellectualism and appreciation of current waves of painting seem to be an accidental form of elitism, something that can only exist inside smaller pockets of society.  Ask anyone above 60 who was not in this pocket about these types of paintings and you will generally receive bafflement or even anger at the audacity of painters to call things like abstract expressionism ‘painting.’  Avant-garde cinema, by contrast, has been a part of cinema since cinema’s beginning, and therefore is more abstracted from what people call Hollywood cinema.  In other words, a new medium provides opportunity for new artists to go in and make ‘amateur’ works, and until professional works arise in the medium, the amateur works become the only works.

I believe people that work in an old medium, like Guston, simply try to find ways to (in his own words) ‘stay on the treadmill,’ to trust themselves and their instincts and to try not to be derailed by new trends.  I think there’s a trend in art you could call ‘aggro,’ but I’ll choose just to call it annoying.  I saw a performance a few days ago where a guy acted as if he was a ‘gameboy musician,’ and the point of the show was that he was ‘drunk’ and subsequently destroying and attempting to fix his equipment throughout the show.  When he could no longer continue he began apologizing and describing his pathetic life.  I initially couldn’t tell if he was serious, but I found out through youtube that every single one of his shows follows the exact same format.  20 years ago, no one would have given the guy a second thought.

Another person who seems to follow a similar format is Nardwuar, a punk rock ‘journalist’ who shoves his microphone in the face of musicians and miraculously, obsessively lists off idiosyncrasies in their careers and the careers of musicians related to them, while also taking on a bizarre and nerdy stage personality.  Initially I thought of him as a recent phenomena, and his newer videos really work.  Our generation really values that sort of obsessive researching and bizarre presentation.  Comparing his newer videos to the videos he did in the 90s gives an interesting new perspective.  Shoving his microphones in the faces of Kurt Cobain and Thurston Moore circa 1991, despite even his greatest efforts at running circles around them research-wise, the musicians either don’t care, or know more about what they’re talking about than him!  I realized that in the information age, his sort of nerdy confrontation makes a lot more sense, and he seems to be enjoying an influx of success through blogs, twitters and forums who obsess about music just as much as him.  

It proved to me that it can often take a long time for your process to be accepted, but also that annoying things are really popular now, that the gap between pop culture and performance art is closing, and that these things that have become the internet, these new mediums, don’t even matter on their own, but rather effect us bit by bit until attention deficiency and obsessive compulsivity become the norm.  People like Nardwuar, despite his inherent lack of intellectual inquiry, can come off as ‘smart’ through a combination of presentation and insignificant facts written down on paper.  Guston talks about how his trifles become subjects, that painting doesn’t necessarily have to exist and generally gives a Hemingway-esque disconnect between his ideas and their own importance.  He is modest, but also realizes that the fact that his style has been accepted is a combination of luck and perseverance.  The same can be said of these internet phenomena, the ‘new medium’ is just changing the way we’re able to read them, as well as the reactions who become the subjects.

Clay Shirky’s argument that humanity develops responses to social imbalance through the use of cultural artifacts is not new.  Since the advent of cinema, there seems to have been much debate about the need for people to ‘go to the movies,’ a phrase now used as a synonym with breaking from reality.  The through-line between substance abuse and television addiction seems to have been retrofitted to meet his argument’s needs, and occasionally he sounds a bit overbearing with his constant comparing of ‘nerdy’ time-wasters such as Wikipedia or World of Warcraft with television: these things have three very different social functions.  I would like to refute the idea that the internet, presenting interactivity as a ‘healthy alternative’ to professionally-made entertainment, is ‘better’ than television because it is inherently more ‘cultured.’  While traditional culture, such as live performance or gallery art, has the ability and intention to involve the viewer, this intention has a high price tag.  This is to say that when you create art with the intention of telling the viewer ‘you can do this too’ (not by any means a new artistic goal), the implications of what the viewer will be doing are far more important than just the simple fact that you have motivated the viewer to do ‘something.’  Memes, presented as a ‘low-rent alternative to Cartoon Network’ are usually inspired by a sort of bafflement with the stupidity or outrageousness of a certain person or photo or video, and live and breath off of sensationalism.  While memes do present a slight suggestion towards ‘you can do this too,’ it is in the same way tabloid photographers say ‘you can make money off of this.’  While creativity exists in altering an image to make it funny, the humor usually has a very specific connotation to the intended audience.  In simpler terms, people that make memes are usually just trying to get that meme famous, and their process is not one of simple creativity but of tactical sociology.

I do believe that Clay has an interesting argument, it occasionally seems like he is making large, easily agreeable and understandable points while bypassing what is now a 20-year-old debate that simply takes place on the internet.  I see nothing wrong with his logic of trying to clue in casual internet users to these phenomena and how they function socially but I do wish he was a bit more skeptical.

What McCloud’s points represent to us is a further understanding of how the internet affects our brains.  He makes comparisons between using simple tools, like forks and knives, and using more complex tools, like cars, in that our identity shifts and the tool becomes part of our “extended identity.”  In an entirely created world, like a movie or a video game, our “extended identity” is shifting into that of the character.  The internet, as opposed to those mediums, is in fact a tool rather than a form of entertainment, and has an even deeper connotation in this aspect.  We understand what we are supposed to do on the internet, our identity assumes a search bar or even a piece of code.  However, like any tool, our success with it can be hard to grasp.  I always find it funny when people complain about a minor change to one of their favorite websites (especially when they use that very website to illustrate this complaint), and then 3 days later have forgotten the change has ever happened.  This is because, whether you’re using a silver fork or a plastic fork, the fork is still ‘part of you.’  The habit of logging in, scrolling and reading is more of an extension of identity than a conscious choice, just like a cigarette or a serious drug habit.  Humans are incredibly adaptive beings and these adaptations are nothing new, other than the fact that they place entertainment and productivity so close together.

The author of this piece forewarns the audience that his writing represents a completely subjective take on Trecartin’s universe, and also that he doesn’t wish to “sell or explain” his worldview, and while the take is certainly subjective, he does end up doing a little selling and explaining. But how can you defend your own appreciation for an artist without selling them? I have seen some of Trecartin’s work (never actually made it entirely through one) and I must say, the appreciation he illustrates, as well as specific points made along the way, never truly comes across to me.

There are a few things about Trecartin’s work my understanding has expanded upon because of reading the piece. For instance, the comparison to John Waters and his collection of “freaks” definitely seems to be part of the pleasure of watching Trecartin’s work. The actors, all manipulated digitally as well as with makeup and clothing choices, never really seem like real people. The world inside Trecartin’s head is exemplified by constant babble and mutated, incomplete shapes that stand in for people, companies, countries or ideas. The abstract and the real collapse, a parallel between Trecartin’s mind and the changes in the social constructs causing his (as well as our generation’s) mind to twist into the form we see in the videos.

While it may be difficult for me to read his work, and while my critique of him would definitely focus on the work’s annoying and somewhat pointless nature, and while I might find it difficult to intellectualize something that comes off that way, I hand it to the author of this for doing so. While certain points in the text make sense to me, others seem to be trying to fit an artist’s rambling and inconsequential dialogues into a genuinely clever and incredible worldview. What definitely irks me about writing about his work is that they make Trecartin seem to use the internet’s ugliness as a generational definition. As if his work is indicative of the entirety of the internet generation. While I may be using emotional appeal to ‘ignore’ points that he brings up, coming from a younger point of view, I still fail to make sense of how this work appeals or extend to more than a niche market.

Wafaa Bilal is one of those artists who seems to know exactly what he wants to do with a medium using only its essential properties.  Rather than excavating the web for artifacts, trying to define a web ‘culture’ or evoking a web aesthetic, his project is bare, raw, real and unrestricted by the attitude of internet definition (or redefinition) often exhibited by many other internet artists.  He is sure-footed and believes in his purpose more than its results, and the qualities resulting of his attitude in his work are inspiring.  Wafaa’s entire story, his battle to be an artist in a time and place defined by violence, division and suppression, is almost a microcosm of, yes, domestic tension, which would explain his propensity to want to express microcosms in his work.  The art itself, mostly an experiment in relationships between Wafaa and the online viewers, represents a multitude of technological problems: the way technology can obscure reality, can retain anonymity, often leading to verbal abuse, and can even be physically harmful.

I was touched by Wafaa’s story and his attempt to use the piece to reconnect with his family in Iraq.  Wafaa is a classic iconoclast.  His ideas and desires completely coincide with his upbringing: minimal but full of tension, survivalist, spartan and real.  His emotions are the result, not the material.  Many artists use process to translate their emotions to a page or a painting, Wafaa uses his art to drive his emotions out, almost as a form of therapy.  The story of his life, especially moments like throwing the paint on the mural and all the descriptions of “sneaking out” to paint all express this mentality.  He is a selfish artist, the opening of debate through his art is only a side effect to his personal satisfaction, however the responses through the web are a subplot that is much more relevant to this class.

The internet is occasionally more interesting, or at the very least more brutal, when masses of people are involved.  The mask of anonymity can bring out true ugliness, and the routes to which people who stumble upon sites like Wafaa’s are a source of constant questioning.  Digg.com, the breaking of Domestic Tension to which is a turning point in the book, seems to be one of many ‘portals’ on the net that have constant democratic outpouring.  One of the essential issues of these sites is that it is a mixture of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, somewhat lowering the bar to making popular stories to things that have a certain sensationalism.  Digg is a news site that aggregates according to popularity, and popularity in such a candid forum can often be misread.  People that get their news from Digg.com generally aren’t going there to read good journalism, they’re looking to entertain themselves.  Therefore Wafaa’s art piece, like many things on the net, are subject to masses of hackers (an entire culture to its own), trolls and griefers, of which Wafaa seemed to have very little knowledge, resulting in furthering his emotional breakdown.

I think that, while these open forums have the potential for abuse, they are an essential property to the net, and like Wafaa, I’ve often experienced exasperation on forums where I’m just trying to get help.  However, also similar to Wafaa, the initial shock of these interactions fades and the actual content these people have to post or say, their opinions and emotions, however coded or obscured by their attitude, is a real vocabulary of our generation, and certainly has potential to create beauty along with its ugliness.

My day starts out rough.  I sleep through my first class on accident.  It starts at 10PM, I don’t know why my alarm can’t just agree with me.

I roll out of bed and walk outside to smoke a cigarette.  I decide I should really use this day to do this assignment before I get too far behind in dates.  I walk back inside and decide to do a couple of dishes.  I’ve got it down where I do a couple every day so the sink doesn’t get full but I can also skip days.  It’s 11:30.  I pour myself a bowl of Lucky Charms.  I start to remember last night, how I helped my friend shoot her 290 (a film class) project without a hitch, and I’m really stressed out about setting up this weekend to shoot mine.  I stayed up most of the night trying to finish some assignments for other film classes and now bad time management is kicking my ass.  My grade will now be sufficiently lower after the 2nd unexcused absence and it’s barely February.  I really want to go on the computer, maybe even just to email my screenwriting teacher, maybe to try to forget it happened.  But it’s still 11:45, class is in session, I’d look like a jackass with an email dated during the class.  I decide to take a shower instead.

I take a walk, listening to music.  I catch up on some class readings.  I get distracted halfway through one of the chapters and lay in my bed listening to music.  I realize I haven’t done my laundry in forever.  I’m in the middle of my laundry when I get a call from my friend Jack.  He wants to talk to me and smoke a cigarette with me.  He comes over and I tell him about my missed class.  He says he understands, he just missed a deadline for a paper.  I talk to him about the net fast.  I look at my calendar on my phone because when I’m bored I kind of fidget with it, when I realize that there’s going to be a showing of Columbian Avant-Garde short films in Norris today.  I invite Jack.  He decides to come with me.

We’re sitting in Norris.  Jack is only halfheartedly interested, but the mention of free Columbian food from a local restaurant perks him up.  We watch the shorts.  They’re totally awful.  We skip the Q&A.  We walk to the place where the Columbian food is supposed to be served and realize it hasn’t arrived yet.  We mull around, checking out DVDs and talking to my friend Eli, who liked the shorts to our mutual loathing.  My friend Andrea comes by incidentally and discovers the Columbian food.  We try to convince her the films were terrible as Eli tries to convince her they were great.  It’s kind of awkward because Jack doesn’t know either of them.  We get interrogated by some lady with awkwardly red hair about why we aren’t watching the Q&A, as if half the attendance didn’t walk out start mulling around the lobby with us.  Red haired lady goes up to some guy and then they both kick us all out of the lobby (the catering staff ‘needs their space’).  We wait in the cold and watch as nothing happens inside.  Outside, we all share our annoyances.  We talk to some lady who also hated the films and got out of there to get some food too.  She tells us we’re paying too much money to put up with this crap.  She’s probably right.

We finally get served.  The food is decent but not amazing.  Jack has been mentioning about this kid I need to meet and how he’s wanting to hang out with us tonight.  I had previously listened to some of his music and thought it was phenomenal.  It’s electronic music heavily inspired by Aphex Twin and that whole era.  He’s apparently the kind of guy who repairs, makes and tweaks his own equipment.  Jack tells me he just took some acid, so we should probably only stay for a little bit.  We head over.  I start admiring his equipment and he offers us some Jack Daniels.  I accept and Jack refuses.  Jack doesn’t like whiskey.  The guy is really spaced out but still functioning.  He’s able to hold a decent amount of our attention as he explains how this circuit he just built is able to create resonance.  He starts contact juggling and encourages us to try to learn how.  I try and don’t get anywhere.  I finish my whiskey and we decide to leave.  I feel like he’d be more of an interesting guy if he wasn’t tripping, but nonetheless a fascinating individual.

Jack runs into another of our friends, who is heading to a party and looks a little drunk.  He has a friend with him we don’t know.  Jack tries really hard to get him to hang out with us because they’d apparently made plans earlier.  I try to explain to Jack why it’s awkward to ask drunk people to hang out with you when they’re in the middle of other things.

I owe Jack a little bit of money and he asks for a milkshake from Spudnuts.  I pay for it and we go back to our separate apartments.  I’m very tempted to go online.  I play some music and watch part of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia off of my hard drive.  I realize I don’t have the patience and then I go to sleep.

I realized that it really wasn’t that hard not to go on the internet.  I think I’m fairly easily pacified with media, company and weird events, but the temptation is still very prevalent.  As evidenced I did consume media as I often do, those habits were able to stay partially intact as I was still offline.  There were still several moments where I almost broke it.  For instance, I thought I might go online at night thinking it was an “entire day” more or less and when I saw the scheduled event in my iPhone calendar I was tempted to make completely certain you didn’t need a reservation, but rather trusted my memory.  I can see how some of these things may even be consumed into the “cloud.”  How someday we might require internet service at every moment just to listen to music or watch movies and the day was peppered with internet related things.  For instance the Columbian event was (God knows why) broadcast live and streaming to France over the internet.  The constant presence is a bit strange, especially when you feel removed from it in the moment.  Although I think it would be incredibly hard to try and unplug for a month, a day was totally worth it.

    The Shallows brings up a growing phenomenon in a global, quite grand schema of human interaction.  It essentially argues, using personal experience as well as scientific evidence that our brains are becoming rewired to interact exclusively with the throes of internet psychology and that this is already leading to real consequences.  The article is at once straightforward and broad, a biography positioned alongside surmounting evidence of the larger extent of the problem.  The NY Times article is a simpler, less academic approach to essentially the same argument.  The two have radically different approaches, one for the pursuit of knowledge, the other a piece of sensationalist journalism.
    A major theme in both works is the seemingly unobtrusive nature of our connection to electronics and technology in general.  For Nietzsche, the rolling ball becomes his new hands, the iron sharing authoring credit.  When the monkey is given pliers, they act as part of his hands.  My favorite point here, however, is that these adaptations happen as a result of consistent preference.  The monkey (although being forced to) adapts neurologically because his brain consistently tells him to make the same decision over and over.  One thing to keep in mind is that these connections only seem unobtrusive as they are appropriate.  When connections become obtrusive they are stripped away.  It astounds me that the neurological paths were considered “fixed” at adulthood until the ’70s.  To me, it would seem that more than our bodies, our brains adapt to situations presented to us and I can’t imagine something like that not having a physical counterpart.  The ability to speak a language, to adapt an accent, things like classical conditioning all seem like they’re too instantaneous and subconscious not to have direct pathways leading one action to an immediate reaction.  However, the more interesting argument is as to why the internet in particular is taking the shape of a regular, mass-experienced social and neurological adaptation.
    It is my belief that navigation through the internet to find the information you are looking for can be trained much like one can be trained in any other function.  It’s a simple method of finding the text you’re looking for at one particular moment and gathering memory slices of half-read sentences, traveling from link to link until you’ve come to the conclusion.  The idea behind The Shallows is that there is no conclusion, you keep searching and finding and the never-ending addiction spreads itself over all your other daily activities required of you on the internet.  The question I’d like answered is why?  Most people have innate curiosity instilled in them.  When we are young, we ask strings of questions that never end.  The internet plays the part of the infinitely patient mother, answering all our (in the grand scheme of things) meaningless questions in rapid fire succession.  One lesson our mothers usually get around to instilling in us is that some questions don’t have a specific answer and must be discussed, experienced and lived with.  This lesson is sometimes able to evade us on the internet.  We sometimes think in short term.  it is my belief, however, that the internet can also be an equalizing force in academia.  While some may grow to lack the patience the internet may take away, often the internet can also give one patience, as long streams of text and image can take hours of searching for one to find a “point.”  What Carr and I disagree on is the idea that the internet cannot adapt to longer form media and must be defined by its current form as an ADD-riddled stepchild smashing up academia’s fine institutions, and even some of its members.  I believe the internet will eventually adapt and enrich every form of informational pursuit and that the distraction element will be a matter of self-control just as inherent as the fact that we read from left to right.

    The musings of these two artists shift topics and areas of focus, flow effortlessly into several different profound artistic revelations and find new things to talk about much as any natural conversation would.  It’s almost eerie to think how much ambition flows between the two but is also hard to pinpoint an exact focus.  Their conversation exists almost as a hyperlinking session, where each point highlights a particular thing that vaguely overlaps another thing the other wants to talk about and keeps moving.  The basic theme of the argument spurns from the idea that artists, like the public, should be motivated to “do it,” whatever “it” happens to be. 
    In the case of this conversation I want to highlight 2 crucial arguments they happen to make: 1) that their art is more important to them, and hopefully to the public, when the medium they hope to explore is either in its original context or given more depth because of its context; and 2) that their views on “piracy,” given different timing in history have different but not mutually exclusive meanings.
    Cory, in finding a niche by going between different types of imagery.  His Super Mario Clouds finds a halfway between video game culture and museum culture, drawing inspiration from works like Richard Prince’s rephotographs.  The phasing piece Sweet 16 finds its voice in applying a well known pop culture staple and applying Reich’s experimental ideas to them.  Cory, however, realizes his place among the net and his work is contextualized as a constant collision of these forces.  I actually just found another video on Youtube taking a scene from Family Guy and (quite appropriately) parodying Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain.”  The role of the net artist to “play with the net” is somewhat limited in that aspect, as the Web 2.0 idea hoisted the “do it” mentality as its primary goal without the pretensions of the art world.  In the case of Dana, her work seems contextual in that they must be consumed by people in particular moments, taking a video from here and putting it there, making videos without purpose other than the fact that they were video and they were something.  While Cory pushes the buttons of the art world while also being a technical wizard, Dana takes her inspiration directly from the technological nature of the mediums themselves, context to be a continuation of that theme.
    The theme of piracy seems to be a natural extension of this constant context flipping.  The pirate, now a common title for millions of internet users, was for Dana a point of pride, since the idea of someone hoarding enough equipment to displace video was so unheard of it probably didn’t have laws surrounding it.  Her piracy was so harmless, take a video from over here, project it over there, yet the idea was obviously formative on those wanting to use images and tropes from everyday reality as a medium.   Pizza Party, it seems, played with the idea that the internet is so conjoined with its users on all levels that accessing them from other angles and finding ways of breaking the systems could still make things happen in real life.  Both the artists seem to have an idea of malleability and use it to their advantage.  In a way the conversation seems to be more about this constant change and collision and less about the seemingly dormant Web 2.0 babies that are hinted at as the new “DIY” artists.  The interaction and initiation of this new generation is subtly hinted at with the ability to track the exact popularity, and the extent to which people have re-appropriated these things and made them their own as well.  “Do it” now has another dimension in a way, “Do it if I can play with it too.”