Alter – modernity

Where are we at now?

What can we say about our era?

Cyberspace= before the web people used to read newspapers.

Pre- Cyberspace= Cini file

Cinema – space of the pre cyberspace era.

Conceptual notions of space, which we occupy.

Galleries (full of real art, that you can feel/touch)

Terry Flaxton – Important video maker/moving image.

20 years ago he made video à now he makes new digital tech. 3D images and also plays with interface between moving and still.

Poststructralism:

A photograph of me? “Oh that’s me”

When in reality it’s not me, it’s only photography of me.

The photograph ‘of’ me has its own space, as well as I am also in my own space.

We as humans have entered a space of Cyberspace.

Due to cyberspace we humans have lost interest to physically use ourselves to feel and be part of Art, why get up and travel to a gallery to see something live, when you can just sit on your computer and see it?

Is it the same?

No because a picture in a gallery is there because its unique and deserved a place in that space, its alluring detail and visual description allowed it to have a space there.

In the past people occupied more space around the world, before the media and technology, people were out and about, researching with their own hands, not using a mouse to do it for them.

Now the only space people seem to occupy is the distance between their eyes and their computer screen.

What can one remember about their life, there childhood, their playground, how far can we remember.

The media has occupied so much of our minds that we have pushed most of our memories away and we store unnecessary information instead for example, games, face book etc, these might be fun and good to communicate with, but what can you learn from them?

We are loosing reality by burying our lives and ourselves in cyberspace.

We feel like technology is part of our every day lives, and we wouldn’t be able to function as humans if it never existed.

But, us humans are made out of organs and skin nothing in our bodies is technological, so why do we crave technology?

Because technology found its way around the world, to suit every single individuals lifestyle so we feel like we belong to technology.

I believe were walking UBS’s, the media plug us in and out when they feel the need.

“The wiki leaker “ = imprisoned for publishing truth???

Now how can that be right, how can we be sure the truth is right?

How can we be sure what were told is right, is even right?

Or we can just type it in Google?

And read what other theorists have said and take their word for the truth?

Ken Loach: -Film director – cast’s amateurs’ in dramatic roles that talk about society.

‘Codes Of Realism” what we see in the real world is then shown in photographs and film.

Why can we see all sorts of stuff on the Internet and NOT on the newspaper?

The show “Mis-fits”

Group of teenagers (young offenders) doing their community service, all have individual powers, and stereotype youths attitude today.

There is one episode of Mis-fits where there’s a villain who lives through a game, Grand theft auto and he is being CONTROLLED by this game.

This straight away brings up the argument that youths these days are playing so much video games that their mind actually craves it. The Media make money from this, but the youth get influenced wrongly!

One of the young offenders in the show, ‘Alisha’ say’s “that’s what happens when you guys spend all your time on these video games”

This is corruption of the youth.”

As well as the villain who’s in visions his life as a game, runs over an old lady! In the game he would receive 200 points for this, but he doe sit in real life and kills her and carries on driving like this is OK!

Should we censor these video games/pornography available to these young people?

Are playing video games full of violence and watching pornography,

Worse then seeing brutal images on the Internet, which is also available to these young people.

Spaces of the past, much more tangible for the right audience, and insightful for the youth.

What’s the space of the future going be like?

More freedom for the youths to watch what they like with no limit, or will there be restrictions, for example cinema 18+.

Our contemporary space is bombarded with new technology on a daily basis, and our minds are becoming more and more needy of the Internet!

Stanley Kubrick: Dr Strange Love /clockwork orange– Made censored movies which almost ruined his career.

Brazil: the first scene of the film is what sets the story in a moment.

The fly is buzzing around the office, a gay squashes it and it falls directly into the typewriter.

The pursue, the dystopic story of the wrong guy (Tuttle to Buttle)

This Film is functioned through a postmodern narrative.

Critique of everyday life is the pass the parcel of where critical theory has got to!

Consequences of Postmodern era- the breakdown of high and low art/culture a mix up of distinctions.

Watching an episode of the Simpsons, which was made about the “millennium bug” we can see airplanes falling from the sky and all technology going mad, due to ‘Homer’ forgetting to do his computer check. This was made for humor but was not humorous topic, as it was really a big issue raised in the world.

The Millennium: When the year 2000 was coming, people were afraid that computers worldwide were going to die out.

‘The Millennium Bug” people thought the clocks on computers wouldn’t go up to 2000.

However, why did people loose faith in the ability to design a clock , when we’ve been making clocks before since”        “

Millennium feeling of an end, and end of technology!

We are in a state of ligitimation crisis

Tony Oursler’s- Alien Invasion/close encounters- science fiction – trying to predict a positive future.

Do we believe in progress?

People tend to look back and are starting to appreciate old things and start to look back to religious beliefs.

We are like robots, we do what were told to do, but we don’t know what the script is.

The question is, is change really good for us?

Dirlik quoted “Chinese postmodernism, like all varieties of this cultural trend, is made possible by and is almost exclusively dependent upon the technology of reproduction and representation, not that of production, where China has gained the reputation of being the world’s biggest labor-intensive…contemporary advancement of science and technology…It was rumored that the VCD version of ‘Titanic’ appeared on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai a few days before the film had been released in the United States”

YouTube – ‘The Day Today’ gay desk plays on reality, and real events, real news! Satire’s the reality of the news.

Suzi Gablik – has Modernism Failed? … Everett stated “Gablik, like the contextualists, believe that art communicates the artist’s intentions. She disagrees with the postmodernists and says that they are all like the formalists; both say art has no meaning. She thinks art has a social responsibility and that we, as part of a culture, must expects from art meaning that transcends the secular.”

Andy Warhol – ART – The break with the modern and postmodern, the cult of personality.

Klein argued, “Yet, postmodernism is alive and well. Many would agree that Andy Warhol and other Pop artists, who would later explore issues of art production and reproduction, and the death of the notion that art must be original and a single object to be viewed on a pedestal. Postmodern art has a plethora of satire, irony and black humour as artists continue to critique art and life.”

Andy Warhol was the break for modern to postmodern art.

Andy Warhol took images, which left marks onto peoples lives and reproduced them.

Taylor affirmed “In the world of Simulacra created and sustained by complex networks of exchange, differences become indifferent until it seems as if nothing is special…for Warhol this leveling process holds the promise of realizing the equality of which his Avant-garde predecessors dreamed. What Europe imagines, America realizes.”

“you can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink coke, too. A Coke is  Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it and you know it”  Andy Warhol

http://web.media.mit.edu/~kbrennan/mas790/02/Denzin,%20Analytic%20autoethnography,%20or%20deja%20vu%20all% 20over%20again.pdfLaura Mulvey-, a film theorist who wrote an essay on “the visual pleasure and narrative cinema.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window,’ Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the conventional Hollywood plot film is greatly admired.

“the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle.” (Mulvey 1989: 14)

Christian Metz- French Theorist

Freud – “woman identifying the gaze” it all originally started from Freud- and then other theories made their own theories based on Frued’s theory.

Zizek- feminism

Surveillance:  I think that we have lost all our privacy, it’s rare to go somewhere, and not have cameras, your being watched everywhere you go, and it’s become normal to us to have cameras around us.

So much it gives us a false sense of security for example a train station, we feel safer if there’s a camera there.

Ina way it makes us lazy puts our minds at ease.

Also, gives us a sense as if were being watched over by someone, but who’s actually watching us?

  how much privacy are we “actually” entitled to…

Walter Benjamin – a marxist and a theorist of “the mechanical age” of camera and art.

Because of the technology around we are able to survey each-other, the ‘camera’ limit your privacy. After photography was born then Secret cameras were invented. (never been kissed” “the trueman show”.

Before all this, only people with importance, such as actors would be allowed to be seen on photography/film.

“A ‘flâneur’ French noun best translated as ‘stroller.’ The figure of the flanuer has become one of the emblems of modernity.”

if we imagine viewing  the original picture of the Mona Lisa and then seeing her everywhere in souvenirs it completely losses its depth of originality.

when something is reproduced it loses its ‘ora’ (Dictionary of critical theory)

Nowadays any one can be on film and sometimes without them even knowing about it,

whether your somebody or not, secret cameras, once when first invented were the highlight for that era, and today anyone can buy/wear  secret cam, which connotes it is no longer a secret in fact it has lost its originality, its ‘ora’.

Marshall Mcluhan – Best known for “the work of the mass media”- “the medium is the message” – now we are a global village due to the media.

Just because the media portrays something in a certain way, it’s our choice to look away.

Even though we are manipulated through the media in what sometimes seem like incomprehensible ways, we still can rely on our inner self to not believe the media, media is everywhere, lives with us, feeds through us.

Within the postmodern tradition one could say Baudrillard is a part of a truth which is merely a point of view. The camera films the event, but it is always filmed from a certain viewpoint. As such, on each camera, the event is registered differently.

“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth, it is truth, that hides the fact that there is none, the simulacrum is true (Jean Baudrillard)”

Barry, P, (2002) 2^nd edition, Beginning Theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory: Cambridge University Press.

Macey, D (2000) Dictionary of Critical Theory: Penguin

Williams, R (1977) Marxism and literature: London: Oxford University Press

Websites:

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http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96feb/copernicus.html (accessed 19th Oct 2010)

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http://www.examplesof.com/society/ideology.html (accessed 23rd Oct 2010)

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http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GLOSSARY/MODERN.HTM (accessed 3rd Nov 2010)

Films/videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9v2hcsL5i0&feature=player_embedded (accessed 25th Oct 2010)

Semiotics = The Study of Signs

“Signifier”  ->   Signified

Humans, react to colour in various ways.

Colour red connotes, power/passion. Colour black connotes death/evil/mystery.

Abstract art, images that leave the perceiver to decide what the image signifies. The more indistinct, the more the viewer has to work to find meaning.

Post-structuralism

A contemporary theoretical discipline of notion.

It was birthed by the philosophy of structuralism, which many of the critical thinkers of post-structuralism were exceptionally critical of.

Derridas Theory

A role model of deconstruction believes, systems of thought which we believe to be unified concepts: justice, truth, beauty etc, are really the end results of cumulative social construction.

The differences between good/evil, right/wrong, that define most of our society’s thinking, are ways of interpreting reality on our own terms.

“Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order o be the genesis of something?”

~Jacques Derrida~

Althussur ‘ideology’

I think, Althusser’s conception tears down the myth of the liberated free soul, and in view of that, wipe’s out any conception of moral activity.

“The “Crisis of Modernity” is the sense that modernity is a problem…The crisis is, the present is a transitional point not focused on the future, but simply changing through forces outside our control (this …directionless change we call the ‘postmodern’)…We see ourselves as having lost tradition…we are not repeating the past…The experience of modernity is in fact, to live in traditional ways, and to repeat tradition in unrecognizable forms.”

The “Now” which is primarily distinctive within society, and the way we perceive culture, is distinctive to the past which is phrased as ‘modernity’ by theorists/scientists. (Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Freud, Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin) but the exertion in opposition by its people, is the crisis of modernity.

I wouldn’t say that critical theory starts with an assumption of equality, I believe it starts with a mission of equality. The central assumption of the critical theorist is that complete social equality is a worthwhile goal. This is less like an assumption, and more like a theory based on experimental evidence.

We view history as remains. As time cycles with clear initial Stages and closing stages. When history is in truth, a never-ending Road!

Today we focused on The meaning of ideology.

We looked at feminism and participated in a discussion about gender.

Ideology:

In the book ‘Marxism and literature’ Raymond Williams states:

“Ideologies may be based on religious, social, political, or economic grounds. In many cases, they’re a combination of these elements. In practice, they tend to expand and become more complex as the practical issues related to the concept, principles, rules and laws become more involved.”

Feminism:

Contradictory with the world’s portrayal of women’s rights and equalities, Feminism or the women’s civil rights movement initially started to facilitate women attain equality in the legal systems, and employment systems.

Previous to the women’s civil rights movement, job opportunities for women were often limited within society. Women were offered derogatory low pay positions, such as prostitution.

Since women began to speak out, opportunities for women enhanced. Their employment conditions improved, and their pay improved.

Feminism and Gender Roles – BBC Four

“Karl Marx posits that a society’s dominant ideology is integral to its superstructure.”

This theory depicts, the world through a Marxists vision, which we then as humans believe we are using in our daily lives, either consciously or subconsciously.

Today we looked at Nicolaus Copernicus.

“Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole Universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, ‘with both eyes open’.” ~ COPERNICUS

We also analyzed Saussure’s work into structuralism and post-structuralism and defined the meaning of both conventions.

Roland Barthes defined structuralism as a mode of analysis of “cultural artifacts, which originates in the methods of contemporary linguistics. Structuralism developed out of Saussure’s work on language. Saussure never used the term “structuralism,” his approach was premised on the idea that any serious study of linguistic phenomena had to be based on the view of langue as a structure, whose properties were structural properties.”

Roland Barthes defined post-structuralism as “having been variously described as a shift of interest from the signified to the signifier, from the utterance to enunciation, from the spatial to the temporal, and from structure to structuration…Post-structuralism entails a critique of the concepts of the stable sign, of the unified subject, of identity and of truth”.

I think, Marxism observes the economic world Exactly as it has been constructed: as a fixed game.

“Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point however is to change It.” ~Karl Marx

Marxism I believe, is not concerned with studying the world for its own sake but rather with recreating it.

In ‘Beginning Theory: An introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory’, Peter Barry quotes – “Frankfurt school of Marxist aesthetics. The school was founded in 1923, as a political research institute attached to the university of Frankfurt… They practiced a form of criticism, which tried to combine Freud and Marx, as well as aspects of formalism. The best-known figures here are Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno”

In ‘Dictionary of Critical Theory’ David Macey argues that: “of all the tendencies within western Marxism, the critical Theory of the Frankfurt school is the most austerely intellectual, and the most bleakly pessimistic…Habermas is the most important contemporary representative of the Frankfurt school.”