When technology actually helps us do creative things ....

I like how this week is titled Dreaming. It seems appropriate for the Angela Joosse's installation art - which has a dream-like, otherworldly quality. This holds true especially in her installation piece in The Leona Drive project, Dear Ruth.

This mixed media installation piece took an amalgamation of personal relics of one woman's life, a resident of 9 Leona Drive for 40 years, and deposited them in all over the kitchen of the house. It was done in a way that I'm assuming Ruth never really decorated her kitchen. Psychedelic colours and glowing lights accompanied excerpts from poems, cookbooks, letters inserted in cupboards and projected into the sink.

I can't believe no one bothered to clean this woman's stuff out of her house after she died. There were so many sentimental remnants. Angela's work paid tribute to Ruth's life where no one else bothered to, and did it in a contemporary, artistic way that admired this mysterious post WW2 life and probably inspired lots of people.

Installation art is super cool. The Leona Drive Project facilitated the work of several artist projects for an exhibition in a 6 vacant homes that were about to be demolished. The installation artists worked to create multi media projects, including the use of audio, architectural installation, projection, photography sculpture and performance. The installations in the project all relate back to the concept of the "good old days" ... where women made tuna noodle casseroles, vacuumed in high heels and crime went unreported. Dear Ruth takes the life of Ruth, a product of the good old days, and turns it into something a little more radical, a little more colourful, and somewhat sinister.

I find it a bit sinister, anyway. But I suppose the point of art, if it is to be called art, or good art, must be a bit hair raising.

In Angela's artist statement on her website, she reveals the thing that horrifies her - the prospect of creative acts and revolutionary ideas being appropriated by those venues that can turn anything (and everything) into marketable products. That seems to be the dominant fear with technology. A fine line exists between technology helping us to be radical and revolutionary, and slipping into a state of technopoly. Either that, or we simply get distracted by Craigslist or something ... either way, its a fine line between help and hinder.

Angela notes that we are drawn to phenomena that are little known, in order to keep our work fresh and our ideas innovative. She expresses anxiety about the paradox of merit in giving a voice to that which is unknown, and at the same time, the disgrace of making this sacred unknown palpable for consumption.

Oh, paradox! We live in such ironic times. Where is the line between paying homage to something and simply messing it up? They say you should only cover graffiti with yours if you know it can be better. Not everyone is going to agree that my tag is better than Pam, Beth or Sherry's tag. And I don't necessarily believe that the sole purpose of art is to please other people. If that were so, there would simply be no challenge or radicalism.

Angela ponders how we can let the phenomena teach us the terms appropriate to its description. I think the difference between paying homage to that which we wish to represent, and simply messing something up is this - we have to let the phenomena speak to us, instead of imposing our preconceived, self serving ideas on it. And there are limits. We have to leave a bit of mystery, I think. The artist can satisfy the desires, but must leave a little bit of mystery for the phenomena, to acknowledge its unfathomable depth.

"The camera can so easily reduce the fullness of living moments to quantifiable fragments" Angela states on her website, testament to the fact that it's the artist job to produce a feeling of the vastness of life in their art when the media doesn't do it automatically. Dear Ruth was a success because we saw Angela's interpretation of Ruth, with continuous glimpses into the vastness of her many relationships. The installation celebrates that there is more to life than we really see.

He wants to put Elton John in a headlock and pour beer on his head.

DJ culture has fallen into a place in my life in the city where I can't seem to escape it. I find that a DJ creates a musical atmosphere unparalleled by any other performance. It provides an element of live music, but at the same time, can be ambient. It is unintrusive, and doesn't require an "audience" to sit down and necessarily watch a "show".

I have no qualms with mashups. Lots of people do, as made evident in RIP: Remix Manifesto Personally, I see no reason why taking ideas from other artists and making it something new is frowned upon. Artists do it all the time. To me, it's creativity, its sharing, its consciousness. One thing is for sure - mashups are permeating our society left right and center. They exist everywhere, not just in DJ music, but in the DIY ethic of punk rock, certainly in the pop music of acclaimed stars like Lady Gaga and Beyonce, rap - which relies heavily on sampling, remixes, parody and SO much more. Other art also exhibits mashups - video art, collage, fashion ... the list is infinite, it seems.

Mashups aren't just a recent phenomenon, although it seems like they are gaining considerable popularity of late. Frank Zappa did it in the 1960's, extracting a guitar solo from a song and inserting it into a different song. He called it "xenochrony". He did this in his album Shiek Yerbouti - which is one of my favourite albums of all time - and it sounds so good because of the crazy layers of sound that he utilized this technique to produce. No one gave him a hard time about plagerizing himself, then. Which is essentially, what he was doing with this technique. Sometimes it is necessary to reuse ideas, recontextualize them, and turn them into something new.

So why do people hate on Greg Gillis?

He as a good grasp of the legal consequences of his work, is no fool when it comes to tissue engineering, and appears to throw a mean par-tay.

As we learn in the documentary, sampling even a single note is grounds for a lawsuit ... and his music is "a lawsuit waiting to happen". The issue here is the stealing of intellectual property. His computer is his instrument, one that lends itself wholly to remediation. He sees the moral struggle with collaging two songs together as something that will be dated very shortly. I totally agree. We will look back in a few years, maybe not even that many, and laugh at those on the "copy-right" (as opposed to the "copy-left") with scorn for being so rigid and dreary. Lots of people already do - Girltalk included.

Copy right = copy LAME.

The clip of the interview with Lars Ulrich and his Napster dealio was the most laughable peice of garbage I have ever seen. I was astonished at how conservative and power hungry he was. If I was in Lars's shoes, I would sit back and be satisfied at the musical legacy I had left on the universe and the expansive fan base and millions of dollars I had. I wouldn't be pissed off because some kid who can't afford to buy my CD somewhere downloaded it because he wanted to get down.

I felt really bad for all those poor souls who were being charged crazy sums for downloading music. (Especially that pastor.) These people are only products of their time, not pirates. It just comes down to: would we rather pay to have music, or have it for free? We seem to have the choice, these days. There are so many artists who promote free consumption of their music. Radiohead's album In Rainbows was a "pay what you can" album. But I suppose a band like Radiohead, who has an established fanbase and generally, millions of dollars, can afford to do this.

Is Girltalk a criminal? Not any more than I am, than everyone in the world who downloads free music is, or anyone who has ever sung "happy birthday". Is Girltalk an artist? I think so. In fact, I think he is more of an artist than a lot of stars who make music today.

I tried to become a shape shifter after viewing this film.

I've often heard Waking Life be referred to as a stoner film.

I've watched this film a handful of times, and I thoroughly disagree. When I think of stoner films, I think of Wayne's World, Half Baked, Cheech and Chong ...

But do any of those so called stoner films have:

- Awesome rotoscope?
- Intellectual banter / meditations of Bazins film theory and the meaning of life? (demonstrating actual logic?)
- Touching depictions of intimacy and relationships?

Kait says: no!

With that being said, I'm not being ironic when I say that this film had an intoxicating effect on me, for lack of a better word. I first saw it when I was 18, and was entranced by the visual effects. Four years later, I can really appreciate this film for what it is - a cornicopia of existential ideas married with vivid, interesting imagery. It is virtually the antithesis of a Hollywood film, in that it requires that the viewer not be a stupid head. It wants us to think! It wants us to be entranced by the warping images! It wants us, above all, to appreciate human existence for what it is - absurd!

Absurd, but with inherent beauty, I reckon. The film shows us that everyday reality is more complex and multilayered than it first appears. It does this with the help of its crazy rotoscope action.

Rotoscope animation uses live action footage which is then converted to digital files and then drawn over using a special software, frame by frame. The products of this type of animation affords a slight deviations from the "true line" differing from frame to frame, which, when animated, cause the animated line to shake unnaturally, or "boil". Avoiding this shake requires great skill in the drawer, though causing the "boil" intentionally (as in Waking Life) is a stylistic technique sometimes used to emphasize surreal qualities. Rotoscoping also allows other special visual effect like glowing. This was used in the first Star Wars films for the effect of the light sabers !

Although I do think A Waking Life would be improved had there been light sabers, it is pretty interesting to note that rotoscoping is a technique that has been around since 1915, and is still gaining in popularity. Walt Disney used it for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937 and Cinderella in 1950. The effect in each of these wildly different films is obviously quite different as the technique has changed over time.

One of my favourite parts in Waking Life is the one on one interview with a blonde woman who talks about language. She says something like this : "Language was made for our desire to transcend our isolation, and have some sort of connection with one another. It had to be easy when it was simple survival. What is anger or love? When I say love, it comes out of my mouth, hits the other persons ear ... they register what I'm saying and they say they understand, but words are inert, they are symbols, they are dead. So much of our experience is inangible and cannot be expressed as speakable."

This is a concept that I think really relates back to Narrative in a Digital Age. It is pretty clear that language was originally made to overcome our isolation, but as we become more advanced in communication, we are also becoming increasingly isolated as a result of our technologies. Have we come full circle, then? Words are inert, yes, but it seems like the evolution of words has made us become more inert. The venues we now use them in do, at least. As for our experiences of the words, well, I guess those are dwindling too. Love now equals luv, lav, or that lame heart emoticon that I don't know how to conjure and hope I never do.

Language had to be easy when the purpose of it was for basic survival. We don't have to worry about surviving thunder storms or hunting animals anymore, so our language is failing, and it doesn't matter. We don't hunt in packs, move around nomadically together, or even live in big families anymore. Our need to communicate is purely recreational now, it seems. Technology, especially instant messenging technology, has obviously had hugely dertrimental effects on language. Text message vernacular is an entirely different language than the one I used before I had a cell phone.

For the longest time I seemed to make the same typo. Instead of "me" I constantly typed "ne", or something. Thats not it, but I can't remember exactly what it was. I know this isn't it because my typo had a softer sound, it was two vowels put together to make a wishy washy two letter word that was no way indicative of "me" (I would like to think). And I started thinking about it a lot, too. The most personal word, me, had become something else entirely. Something that meant nothing. It wouldn't even register in the other persons mind what I was trying to say, unless they read it in context. But the singular typo, out of context, made no sense. This small word that signified my entire self, meant nothing.

So technology tried to kill me, essentially, and I survived. Barely.

Why this bothered me I have no idea. It must have been a subconscious insecurity about my place in the universe or something trivial like that.

Waking Life wants us to ask ourselves why we privilege reality over dreams. And by what criteria do we distinguish the two? I don't think it's a coincidence that the audacious animation used in this film, a mix of organic, life like imagery and computer generated elements, inevitably presents another tension - one of man and machine. We naturally conclude that man is on the side of reality, yet what we have in this film are technically distorted depictions of people talking about extremely life intensive issues. Philosophy, science, romance, holy moments. It works, though. I feel like I want to reach out and touch these blobby people as I understand their dilemmas and passions. The technology of rotoscope actually makes these people seem more real.

A little about split screens ...

I remember being really impressed with split screens in film for the first time I watched The Rules of Attraction. There's one scene in which James Vanderbeek and Shannyn Sossamon both walk down the halls of their University to see their grades posted somewhere. They meet at their destination and the screen becomes whole. (They proceed to fall in love, naturally. Getting marks back is oviously soOoOoO sexy).

This film uses the technique of split screens in many situations to show these two main characters having many "missed connections" in close quarters, but feeling the same emotions and having very similar experiences though it takes them a while to meet.

Both The Tracey Fragments and The Rules of Attraction represent something of a personal crisis, but the former uses the split screens more to portray the troubled protagonists multiple perspectives of a world in which reality and fantasy are blurred. The multiple fragmented images of the same things recall cubisms fragmentation and epistemological challenges to Western thought. In this sense, the film is pretty radical.

McDonald, the director, was inspired not only by other films that employed this technique throughout history, but also a Beastie Boys video, and Piet Mondrian's grid paintings. This is a quote from the main man himself: “By editing the film in this split screen fractured/Cubist/Pop Art kind of way, we felt that we could capture Tracey’s interior emotional state quite well”

I agree with him. The film is clearly very painterly in its influences - it's a visual jam of chaotic activity. Visually, it really is similar to a cubist painting.

I was aware of shifting my attention all over the screen - particularly when Tracey is dreaming, at the corner store, that she is a celebrity. Screens all over the place were kind of overwhelming. But that was the point, I reckon. It makes for a more active participation, a more selective participation, a more sensory experience.

Things I learned this week: Ellen Page is a golden god, split screens are cool.

“They never should have grounded me – now I have nothing” ... sounds like a quote from an emo teen in a self indulgent drama, but Tracey is anything but self indulgent. While she is "emo", she has copious reasons to be - her brother is missing, her parents are abusive dead beats and she constantly finds herself in situations with threatening / hostile men.

Tracey’s character is easy to feel for. The viewer is shown a fragmented view of her life by split screens, scenes behind bars, and broken imagery. Although I spent most of the film cringing, it was a total pleasure to watch. This film exhibits many postmodern techniques, such as visual fragmentation, non linear plot line and blurring between fantasy and reality. There is also a recurring theme of animals, particularly horses and birds, to denote freedom – the freedom that Tracey wishes she had. She’s oppressed by her problematic relationship with her parents, the kids at school, and the disappearance of her brother, for which she is held responsible.

A quote that stuck in my head when I watched this film is said as Tracey is on the bus in the shower curtain she grabs before she flees from Lance’s bleak apartment. “How do you know what’s real and what’s not when the whole world is inside your head?” The story within a story technique employed in The Tracey Fragments naturally triggers the viewer to question the reliability of the narrator.

As she is on the bus, looking at the camera, telling her story, she tells us that her dad has previously expressed qualms with her exaggerating. He can't tell “whats the truth and whats a lie” when it comes from her mouth. The viewer is shown pieces of her fantasies as well as reality, with little distinction between them. Tracey’s questionable relationship with Billy Zero is an example of such exposure of her imagination. We see them both portrayed all goth glam in the super steamy sex montages of her fantasies, which look like something from a music video. Then a minute later, we see her being kicked out of his car onto the road in a more realistic representation of the dreary world in the film. But the portrayal of reality isn’t exactly true to nature at all times, as fragmentation and obscurity of vision is a regular occurrence.

Tracey’s life has been a perpetual state of crisis, and if I were her I’d live in a dream world, too.

Tracey, as she narrates the story, makes many references to the cycles of nature and life and how creatures of the universe are all connected. Horses watch her and Billy Zero in their fantastical escapades, and she is spliced with a horse as she runs away from her house near the beginning of the film. She tells us of the connection we, mankind, have to these creatures even though we might not know it. She tells us -when horses fall, foam comes out of their mouth. Then they are made into glue and kids glue bits of paper to cards and the children eat the glue and the children become the horse.

In another statement exemplary of the cycles in nature and life, Tracey tells us the country creeps her out – because dead bodies live in graves, swamps, ditches, in the country, creeps her out. A man dumped the body of a girl into a ditch, it melts into slime, then flowers grow and a bee sucks the flower and makes honey. And the family of the girl buys the honey from the store and the family eats the girl.

These cyclical correlations adhere to the postmodern theme of absurdity of life – animals, humans, corpses and insects are all connected because we share this earth and live on it together. We aren’t conscious of this fact all the time, it’s easy to forget it. Yet, the viewer is made aware of this simple, all encompassing truth once again as we are guided by the wisdom of our unconventional protagonist.

Sonny, Tracey's brother, is often portrayed as a dog or seal like figure, on all fours, barking. She even calls him a "bad dog" when he follows her to the forest. Sonny is one of the few characters in the film that seem to bring Tracey pleasure. When he presents her with a necklace for her birthday, she is genuinely touched. Unlike Lance, her sketchy “friend” who gets his ass handed to him by an enormously aggressive man who ends up raping Tracey – or at least such is implied. (But she slashes his throat with a can of beans in a fury of instinctual fervour that inspired my room-mate and I to laugh out loud in feminist triumph.)

Anyway, Lance is a total creep who grabs a crow from outside his window even though Tracey protests. She asserts that crows are like people, and will be tarnished by his human hands – much like herself. Lance grabs the crow, casting a “human’s spell on it”, robbing it from the natural world free of oppressive institutions and messing with it with his greasy, substance riddled hands and killing it.

The end of the film has a surprisingly optimistic ending. Tracey gets off the bus at last and walks through a more or less deserted park, but runs into Billy Zero and his entourage of lowlife homies sipping on 40’s in the middle of the afternoon. She tells herself in her head that no one can stop her, no one can make her stand still, (like the horses and birds we see so frequently in the film). Tracey gives Billy Zero the cold shoulder and walks on as it starts lightly snowing, giving us the impression that she continues walking on in this world that is “as crusty as the flowers on this fucked up shower curtain”.

I think what makes this film a masterpiece is the fact that it takes bold risks that might confuse the (less attentive) viewer. Watching this film as a "class reading", I prepared myself to be more critical, ask more questions of it as I was watching it, than I would have if I were just kicking back watching it with a group of pals. The viewer who is looking for a good kick back film will be disappointed, I think. But I was not. On the contrary, I found this to be one of the best films I have seen in many moons.

This is the cutest caterpillar I could find.

Neil Postmans holistic / hippie analogy: "Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. If you take away the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not simply left with the same environment minus the caterpillars. You have a totally new environment, with new condition for survival. The same is true if you add caterpillars. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology doesn’t add or subtract something, it changes everything."

(from "Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology")