Transmediated poetry 001 | The Grid: Object #002

a poem is a piece of writing that “partakes of the nature of both speech and song that is nearly always rhythmical, usually metaphorical, and often exhibits such formal elements as meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure.” [*1]

A grid has the rhythm of a peddle tone. Contrary to the avant garde concept as such it does tell a story. It tells the beat of the story, the transfixing tension of the narrative.

The Grid is at once meter, rhyme and stanza. It is the metaphor to all and nothing. The Grid is Zen poetry.

Repeated geometric forms are assigned collectively as a second order counterpoint of rhythm and melody.

The different variations of color are variations in frequency implying an unheard of melody. The metaphorical attributes are figures “applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.”[*2] The compiled grid is a data map for the taking.

This Grid is a reminder of an artist who lives downtown Beijing. The stories implied remain unknown, untold; potential content masked. It showcases his canvasses while hiding their figurative work on their antithetical sides. Hidden, filtered out during a transmedial process, narrating that what remains unseen from the oil painter’s sight. The Grid offers and dismisses even more. It is transparent and hides.

 

[*1][*2] Oxford Dictionary

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Reality Appropriated.

on this blog’s reality page a collection of definitions for virtual reality, real virtuality, augmented reality, hyperreality can be found.

In a MIT Press publication of this month, Hello Avatar. Rise of the Networked Generation, reality is appropriated yet again. There B. Coleman introduces another variation on the theme, namely “x-reality.”

It is introduced as follows: x-reality is ” the continuum between online and off-, … that [what] crosses between the virtual and the real… The emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations…. our networked life.”

According to MIT’s own review it is a book that  examines our “many modes of online identity and how we live on the continuum between the virtual and the real.”

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The Purposeless Art Series | Object 001

While reviving an old 1981 text by Rosalind Krauss published in her MIT’s October journal touching on The Originality of the Avant-Garde, an eye-opening perspective on Rodin‘s reproduction processes and the mechanics surrounding his The Gates of Hell was cast into my thinking.

For all with a monolithic faith in Rodin’s uniqueness and originality I suggest to study the processes surrounding his finished-unfinished work The Gates of Hell. Krauss’ text is useful in this.

Yes, I refer to The Gates of Hell as being finished-unfinished; as being in a state of flux. A tiding state between finished and unfinished. Rodin never finished it, yet it (.. it is perhaps absurd to think of its “copies” as we know The Gates of Hell is contained within a cast medium) is simultaneously present at the Musée Rodin, at Stanford University’s Rodin Sculpture Garden as well as at Musée d’Orsay.
Did I miss any locales? Is it hereby proven that Hell’s gates are omnipresent? This simultaneous presence combined with the tension of being either a copy or an original reminds me somewhat of the quantum physical Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously being and not being. The Gates are, yet are not. They are finished and yet not. They are unique and yet cast multiple times. These gates give access to a fuzzy state between being settled under the resting dust of Rodin’s plaster as a mold covers a moist wall in his sculpting studio, and the solid access by the French state to reproduce the work ad infinitum.

As Krauss hints, Walter Benjamin‘s concepts in regards to mechanical reproduction are surely not isolated to photography nor to new(er) media (i.e. newer than sculpting). The potential lives instilled in The Gates of Hell create wonderful analogies between the copy-paste questions so often raised surrounding new media art processes (as if the issues surrounding its production processes are as fresh as anything digital is claimed to be) and the solid multidimensional image of the hard labor and the uniqueness attached to the tangible art form of sculpting. In this sense sculpting is not positioned hierarchically but rather as yet another thread within the art’s media grid across spacetime.

That is as far as I’ll currently take the excursion to Rodin and shift to the topic within Krauss’ text that actually instigated my post here.

The Grid.

The grid is not only a key term in creative concepts surrounding virtuality (cf. Second Life, Tron), or in geography, urban design or simply in electricity networks. Krauss used the concept of the grid stating that the grid “possesses several structural properties which make it inherently susceptible to vanguard appropriation. Krauss states the grid does not allow language to fluidly pass through, “the grid promotes… silence.”

I agree with Krauss, the grid offers a tension between impenetrable domination and lack of hierarchy. I naively assumed the lack of the latter universally implied openness. Although there is openness found through the mesh of a grid, the perception of the grid is rather opposite and oppressively closed. Although the grid has no center and thus lacks hierarchy it is neither perceived as open. Not only fish are caught in it.

At the same time and ironically the grid implies an ultimate openness as if it were a border-less tabula rasa: all is conceivable when “superseding” the grid. The grid supports mapping. Mapping could support transition and association. The grid can be unlocked as an ultimate trans-coding catalysts for metaphoric thinking.

The grid is conceivably related with the digital: zoom into a digital image and its grid—as in: the collection of all its square pixels—becomes evident.

I felt the urge to put this to the test, give form to my sensation and to appropriate the grid (here ripped from Adobe Photoshop’s software grid) simplistically in an idea for a series starting off as follows:

 

The Purposeless Art Series | Object 001

The Purposeless Art Series | Object 001 a vanguard appropriation of cliché concepts

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Digital and Digitized Objet Trouvé

An objet trouvé is according to the Oxford Dictionary an object “found or picked up at random and considered aesthetically pleasing.” Wikipedia introduces it as follows:

“The term found art—more commonly found object (French: objet trouvé) or readymade—describes art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function. Marcel Duchamp was the originator of this in the early 20th century.

The surreal concept of the Objet Trouvé is a dramatic concept when considering the digital or virtual realms of thought and praxis. Can one unearth an Objet Trouvé within the digital? Can an Objet Trouvé be captured within virtual reality or real virtuality?

Here on the bottom of the myexspace page I created on this blog you can find some visual contemplations surrounding what I surrealistically baptized as Digital Objet Trouvé. It’s the revolt against the functionally organized bits, the surreal of the surreal; a hyper-anti art, or a counter-anti art perhaps?

Here is a latest discovery that has been cataloged as #010:

 

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Digitized Urbanity

The process behind the following photograph sequence is quasi identical to the Architectural Orphanage Series. The work is thus also simplistic, non-obtrusive and intangible media technology hacking with an abstract artistic result. As in a petri dish one can culture microorganisms, these works are a culture of media.

This is a first selection of a series I have entitled “Digitized Urbanity:” abstractions of ubiquitous but ignored urban objects, sites or micro-happening  in otherwise often visited locales.

The photographs were taken in a guerrilla-styled low-profile manner.

The resulting images were used as raw material within an organically following editorial process. From a linear techno-centric point of view this process evolved in an unorthodox manner; a manner unintended for the surface purposes of the used media (i.e. the standard software & hardware of the used mobile machinery).

The process was finalized while sitting down in front of the computer sequencing the pictures into a video format:

DIGITIZED URBANITY-0Avi001

 

 

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transtechno modding | ScanDrip Series—Driplight 003

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appropriation art

DRAFT v1.0
…open for rebuttal and suggestions
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.
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While open for refutation or fine-tuning, I have observed that appropriation—as part of the larger scope of  [mechanical] reproduction—in the arts (and to a lesser extent in content|media|communication) can be categorized into three distinct mechanisms:

1. The Guild|Apprentice Mechanism.
2. The Culture|Commentator Mechanism.
3. The Medium|Thief Mechanism.

 

That stated, what is of higher interest to me than the actual cornered-off categories  is that what is in-between these categories.

 

1. The Guild|Apprentice Mechanism..

 

Primarily, this is appropriation for the sake of learning.

To a certain extent, on the one end, it functions to stimulate a dynamic for ode, and on the other end, one for “prosperity” of style. The former is a process establishing past into present; a living form of archeology. The latter is a copying to project continuity into the  future. Within this mechanism, the master nor apprentice thus do not live in the present. The present is monopolized by the master while claiming strands into the past and future.

 

2. The Culture|Commentator Mechanism.

 

Primarily, this is appropriation for the sake of reflection. Reflection here can be defined in multitude. In a sense it provides a dynamic that “throws [one] back…without absorbing [the entirety of the work from which the sample is taken].” One is culturally transported ever so slightly or ever so concealed. The appropriation becomes a re-contextualized citation potentially stripped from its original connotations.

Via convolution, meaning undergoes re-media-tion; a healing. At least the captured moment of past creativity goes in hiding away from becoming/having been diseased.

To a certain extent surrealism, irony, black humor or critique are at play as well.

 

3. The Media|Thief Mechanism.

 

sub categories hereof could be entitled “Plagiarist mechanism” and “Pirate mechanism.”

Within the Pirate mechanism the content is either multiplied via its given medium or transcoded into an even more flexible medium. For instance, a film on a DVD is pirated and sold as an unlicensed copy for commercial purposes or it is transcoded and illegally made available over torrent networks for download.

One can argue there are also social and political issues at play. For instance, a work might not be distributed within a certain territory due to the fact it is blacklisted (i.e. censored or other) or it is no longer commercially viable. The latter absence of distribution is commercially motivated and thus monopolizing cultural accessibility across the board (i.e. the popular is the most profitable) by means of ignoring niche or boutique markets.

 

The Plagiarist mechanism…

[when time permits more on this]

 

Besides the 3 categories one can, secondly, give consideration to the idea that “variations on a theme” are profoundly different from the appropriation of an element from a work.

 

 

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