Click to do it.
I’d like to say I’m looking forward to it, but it’s an unashamed truism in my family that we look gift horses in the mouth. In fact, we’d look any form of gift animal in the mouth, because animal dentistry is expensive. They just don’t see the positive sides.
Back when I had a tv, I saw a program where Cheetah – the monkey from the 1940′s Tarzan – was in his ape retirement home. He wears pants and smokes cigars, which means it’s a significantly better retirement home than most of the one I’ve been to. Like cats and dentistry, there is no way that you can convince Cheetah to stop smoking those stoogies.
Hey, smoking’s a right.
You can, however, communicate with Koko, the gorilla fluent in sign-language. She’s even demanded that she sees the dentist before; she’s also demanded that people show her their nipples.
I’m not expecting any nipples in my Basic Techniques module, but I do expect the same sort of cross-species confusion. How are those with artistic backgrounds going to get on with the logical thinking processes expected of programmers? Badly, I suspect, from knowing some of my cohort.
Personally, I would like to completely avoid any timewasting with patcher languages. I’m going to nod wisely at your arguments and then point to the smoking chimp wearing a diaper, because there is no way on earth you’ll ever get me to use a patcher language out of choice.
Continuing on, I’d also like to say that I feel this module is going to eat my time right when I don’t have any. I think this should have been the first module in the course, and Theoretical Foundations of Digital Media should have been either special sessions or otherwise shifted. Why?
When I finish this course, people aren’t going to ask me about my views on cyberfeminism. They are going to expect me to work some kind of art-magic, which is what this module is heading towards.
I was shopping with Brian in Morrisons when I noticed how bitter I had become. I turned to him and said “I hate cake”. It’s offical: I’m suffering from some form of bitterness that has subsumed my soul. This state is not unusual for me though; however, I think I’m going to have to say that this current wave of bile flooding my system is in no way helped by the problems I’m trying to consider in this article. But, like a scabby knee, I keep coming back to pick at it.
I know how you feel, kitten.
Back in Hans Abbing states that it is the the partner that supports the artist, the economic benefit that these people bring to their households is still significant.
And, as writer Jacques Monin points out in this article,
the British as a nation are too dependent on a notion of wealth and earning as indications of success and happiness. This is a common theme that can be found in the writings of many commentors at the moment, from Alain de Botton to that “barefoot doctor” guy. Balancing this out in popular culture is the glut of property porn on television, preaching the notion of happiness being linked to a nice detached “family home” in which a nuclear family can be raised. Like the idea of painting as a cutting edge art, this is obviously a fallacy – it’s just as easy to be an unhappy family in a detached house, no matter what its value is.
I’ve been titling these pieces with the word ‘mavernship’ because it’s really about the issue of cultural influence that I need to discuss. As the organiser, communicator, and adminstrator of NewcastleGraft, I’ve gained a small amount of internet fame. This is entirely for my ability to be communcicative about art in the Newcastle area, and up till now, I’ve been doing that in a generalised way, supporting any activities within the area that could be put under the general banner of ‘art’. This, of course, included a vast number of activities that helped artists support the raft, as that raft-like conglomeration of businesses supported them in turn.
The only reason I’ve been able to become recongnised for my communication skills is the fact that I have some small facility with computers and other new technologies. Only last year I spent some time explaining the idea of Facebook to a local gallery, something which could be a valuable skill as a “social media facilitator” (listen to that podcast when done here). Sadly, over the past five years I’ve seen very little engagment with these technologies from institutions involved in the raft. Some, yes, but nowhere near the amount that I thought we would see by this point.
So enraged am I by the lack of good practice in this area that I cannot even begin to list the horrible manglings of internet ettiquette that I’ve seen practiced by galleries and artists. From my current vantage point as a postgraduate student within Newcastle univesity, I am seeing an even more comprehensive thrashing of good practice. Don’t. Get. Me. Started. That bitterness I spoke of at the top of this post rages when it sees the things done by those folk.
And so, I have to ask the question – how should artists be using the communication platforms that are available now to remove themselves from traditional employment? How can the internet be used to support creative practice, beyond the traditional, slow-reacting forms of support espoused by the Arts Council and other leaders? That will have to be the subject for part four.
This site’s not finished yet – the ‘about‘ page is less than informative, the theme’s a little clunky – so you might not know that I’m doing a leading-edge research course in academica. Well, I haven’t really brought it up.
As part of that course, we are occasionally required to write essays, and I wanted to post up my essay that I’ve just completed. The full title is “I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE: How are the use of memes and tropes by those within online communities
building a self-critical approach to contemporary cyber-culture?”
I’m also going to post up the proposal for the essay, which was radically different to the actually essay (in my opinion). This was mainly due to the fact that, upon really reading some of the authors namechecked in the proposal, I found my skin crawling at their apparent misconceptions of contemporary internet culture. This is one area where I find that the value of fiction writers such as Charles Stross far outweigh the perceived academic value of authors such as Paul Virilio. Why?
Where this essay goes into a academic discourse about the effects of a convergent culture on socialisation, and how networked lives will be different to what has gone before, Stross has written a novel called “Halting State” that looks at the dramatic knock-on effects of today’s technology. Some of the questions he poses are what will it be like when the police start to use networking in a realistic way, and how will the future economy cope with online gaming?
I am planning to post a longer article about Stross’s work and other sci-fi authors who are influencing and predicting the changes related to technology, but that will have to wait.
I-see-what-you-did-there (Essay)
online-essay-proposal (Essay Proposal)
Topics covered in these essays include 4chan, twitter, and social networking. All constructive comments are gratefully recieved.
