We wanted to create a clean and dry feeling room, not fetid and damp like so many New York restrooms, so we recorded ourselves crunching leaves in Washington Square Park (Washington Square Park is far from clean, but the air felt crisp and dry). We added some chimes that sounded cold and clear to us, too. One of our goals was to keep people from talking to us in the restroom, so we decided to make a track that was linguistically confusing. We copied several paragraphs of text in different languages from Project Gutenberg, shuffled the words, and recorded me reading it quietly. Finally, we wanted the track to feel like a narrative without actually telling a story, in order to allow for a little escapism, so we placed everything within a landscape with a stream.

This week I had some trouble with our Audacity files, so I started from scratch and laid all of our tracks within a new landscape, this time without the annoying duck that was in the first version.

Click on the image to see the rest of the panels.

McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool media, particularly his description of hot media as extending “one single sense in ‘high definition’,” connects to some of the material we’ve been reading lately in Physical Computing. We’ve been talking a lot about how focus works (based on Bandwidth of Consciousness), and several of our readings have encouraged us to pay close attention to the ways we use our individual senses. I’ve had a hard time reconciling the ‘high definition’ aspect of hot media with the idea that it necessarily affords less interaction than cool media. Some of his assignations of hot and cool seem almost arbitrary.

Click to play

This is Optimo– Very Mild, a movie Bryan and I made for class this week. We used iStopMotion while we were shooting, and then we used Final Cut Pro to add the sound. The music is Jamestown Exhibition by Bayless Rose from American Primitive Vol. II on Revenant Records.

Hank and David-- Click through for comic

One of the most compelling aspects of the movie is that while discussing memory explicitly it is actually structured like a memory, too. Very often, we remember individual snippets and images or other sensory input like smell; very rarely do we remember more than a short arc of motion in time. When we do genuinely remember motion (rather than simply closing the gaps between still images in our memories) it seems especially powerful. This connection between still images in our memory functions similarly to *****’s ideas regarding closure between panels of comics. He sees the leap of imagination required for our minds to create closure between panels as one of the most powerful aspects of comics. Similarly, I think the leaps of closure we make between the sensations that make up our memories provide them with some of their power. For example, it is not so much the exact still image of my perfectly coiffed grandmother wearing a pressed white shirt, pink slacks, and Keds sneakers, standing in her sun room and cooing to her pet doves that stirs up powerful emotions. It is all of the connections that my mind makes to that image that gives it power.

At one point in La Jetée the narrator describes images as “oozing like confessions,” as if they were an uncontrollable, emotionally necessary side product of living. But images become so important in the world the protagonist inhabits that they become his reality. He can only exist within a time he has images from, and can only understand what he sees. He  knows that gardens existed only because he has an image of a garden in his mind. Because the images he has aren’t sequential, though, it’s difficult for him to make sense of his memories.

Benjamin’s suggestion that “the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in… its unique existence in time and place” is clearly true of mechanical reproduction, but what about a digital work that is inherently the same exact digital code no matter where it is executed? Have we managed to escape what he refers to as the deprecation of presence in some way? Or have we ensured it even with the “original” instance of a digital work? Benjamin sees viewing portable art as a very different experience from viewing art that can exist only in its individual location (e.g. a painting in a traveling exhibition vs. an icon that is part of a church). How is new media that can be instantly disseminated different or the same?

Have we absorbed mechanical reproduction so well into our culture that it has become the very tradition that Benjamin argues it caused art to escape from? If so, how has absorbing mechanical reproduction changed the way we think? Is the shift from mechanical reproduction to digital reproduction bringing about some change of thought similar to Ong’s ideas about the progression from orality to literacy? Benjamin talks about modes of perception changing according to modes of existence (and, we can assume, technologies available)– how are our modes of perception shifting as our culture becomes increasingly digital?

By section VI of the essay, Benjamin is starting to sow the seeds of his political argument, i.e. that as art loses its basis in cult through mechanical reproduction it loses its autonomy and begins to be based in politics. He doesn’t state this explicitly, but I get the impression that part of the reason he views the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction this way is because he sees us as having lost our ability to interact with an individual work in an individual way. In other words, it is not only the work that has lost its autonomy, but us. So, I wonder what new media is doing, according to this idea? Are distracted by it? Absorbed by it? Is it doing something else altogether? What kind of power do we have as individuals when we relate to it?

Even though I’ve read this article several times, I still struggle with the concept of aura, although in some ways I think that is by design; Benjamin could not have chosen a more nebulous and loaded word to describe the concept. Frankly, his explanatory note (#5) just confuses me more. The connection of each statement to the previous feels circular to me and eventually just makes me think of a quote from Zoolander: “Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty. ”

Merman