“There are people there with these amazing signs about their own lives: ‘My college fund got depleted, I was at city college, my ID is taped on here, and now I dont know what to do.’ Or ‘here is the summons and complaint that i received from Citibank and these are my kids and this was my house, and now these were my kids.’ It’s kind of upsetting but really nice…”

Something about the meme makes me recall David Lynch’s Interview Project, an online series of short video documentaries centering on the lives of “normal” people across America. In Interview Project’s 121 mini-biographies, the filmmakers (including Lynch’s son Austin) ask complete strangers piercing, existential questions. It is a source of ever-renewed wonder that each stranger has an answer, and that the answers are so often so rich and brimming with hard-luck stories and lived experience. Lynch describes the project’s production: “There was no plan, really. The team found people as they were driving along the roads, going into bars, different locations…. There they were. The people told their stories.”

Respectful, tender, sometimes funny — the Interview Project is similar in tenor to radio endeavors of this genre like This American Life and NPR’s Storycorp. They also share apparent purposes: to capture a cultural snapshot of America, to record individual oral histories and disseminate them online for the purposes of popular cultural consumption.

A common ethos of combating social atomization drives these projects, but I can only speculate as to the source of the alienation they contend with (narrowcasting? automobiles? capitalism?!?!?). I think about a fax that Don DeLillo sent to PEN American Center, and reorder his statements for my own purposes:

DeLillo: The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense.

I hypothesize: At the same time that the ways we can communicate with each other with increased frequency and across vast distances have proliferated and democratized, a certain sense of intimacy has disintegrated from our exchanges. I interpret these signs and projects — as well as the Occupations — as creative attempts at recreating that intimacy, experiments in stitching us back together.

Perhaps this communicative imperative will require us to return to older platforms like radio, which somehow retains the ability to broadcast as if from a confessional. The producers of Storycorp ban cameras from their recording booths – in part to prevent participants from becoming self-conscious, but also as an expression of the philosophy that the human voice is a vessel for the soul, and that to listen to the voice, in its simplest, purest form, is a way to honor the core humanity of an individual.

It is both impressive and quintessentially Lynchian that the Interview Project manages to do with physical appearance what Storycorp does with the human voice. Lynch’s work has never shied away from the oddities of physical features, whether beautiful, grotesque, or some combination of both. Interview Project similarly captures the singularity of physical appearance, reinforcing the sense of intimacy it conveys through the visual appreciation of details like the weave of a ratty couch, the emerging laugh line in a face, or the sweat dripping from a brow.

What does the physical occupation of a park contribute to the Occupy movement’s critique? I wonder this as I pass by the rows of tents in downtown Los Angeles set up blocks away from the cardboard dwellings that belong to the homeless denizens of skid row. I reread these words:

But in the case of public assemblies, we see quite clearly not only that there is a struggle over what will be public space, but a struggle as well over those basic ways in which we are, as bodies, supported in the world – a struggle against disenfranchisement, effacement, and abandonment.

…

For politics to take place, the body must appear. I appear to others, and they appear to me, which means that some space between us allows each to appear. We are not simply visual phenomena for each other – our voices must be registered, and so we must be heard.

…

This is not a matter of finding the human dignity within each person, but rather of understanding the human as a relational and social being, one whose action depends upon equality and articulates the principle of equality. No human can be human alone.

I pause for a moment on the word “abandonment,” reconsider Dan Savage’s “It gets better project,” and am newly struck by how significant a moment it is when an individual — and then tens of thousands of individuals — collectively engage in mini-biography, in personal storytelling via Youtube, for the express purpose of saving lives.

Listening to Storycorp, I consider the human microphone: (a) the emphasis it places on voice, on the word spoken back aloud; (b) Joseph Stiglitz’s awkwardness; (c) how a friend once told me about a couples’ counseling technique (reflection technique?) that requires one partner to repeat what she heard the other say before she may respond. If the human microphone is therapy, what is the pathology?

Storycorp creator Dave Isay has said he hopes the interview recordings he produces can be used to “teach civics and history and compassion.” I think of how Interview Project demands of the viewer a skill becoming swiftly obsolete: The ability to look your neighbor in the face. I consider the idea that the physical Occupation simulates a neighborhood, and decide that that is what makes me sad about it.

Is it ironic, or to the point, that these stories on paper, the visual representation of a banded-together 99% majority, are so personal and individual? Either way, something quite powerful that pulses at the heart of the Occupy movement would be cast aside if this intimate particularity were to be overwhelmed by any overarching dogma or action plan. For what these various audio-video projects indicate is a growing national need for people to share—and to hear—small stories of simple adversity and individual dignity, recollections of secret fears and small joys — standing independent of grand narrative, ideology, or aggregate justification.

Posters protesting Ai Weiwei's detention scattered over his "Sunflower Seeds" installation at Tate Modern (photo: Cai Yuan)

“Sunflower Seeds” is an installation art piece composed of one hundred million (100,000,000) porcelain sunflower seeds raked into a carpet across Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Each kiln-baked “seed” was hand-painted by a resident of Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain production capital. From afar, the work resembles a field of grey.

The piece’s creator, artist Ai Weiwei, was arrested and detained by Chinese police on April 3. The government has held him incommunicado ever since, creating a furor in the international art community.

According to the trusty state-run media, Ai Weiwei has confessed to the crimes for which he is being held: pornography, bigamy, tax evasion. Those who have followed Ai’s career as an artist and public figure, however, see this as official retaliation for his increasingly strident critiques of the Chinese government. In an interview with Dan Rather Reports just before his arrest, Ai stated that he considered on a daily basis whether he had the strength to endure detention. (Ai’s own father, renowned poet Ai Qing, was beaten severely and detained for years in a re-education camp by Communist authorities who disapproved of his politics). Fellow Beijing artist Hao Guang said that Ai Weiwei had “known for a long time this day was coming.“

Ai standing in the rubble of his demolished studio.

This January, Chinese authorities razed Ai’s Shanghai studio. The previous November, Ai was placed under house arrest when he announced he was throwing a “river crab feast” at his studio in sly protest of the government’s threatened demolition. Crowds of people showed up to the party anyways, despite Ai’s absence.

The notion of a “river crab feast” refers to a pun popular among Chinese internet dissidents. In Mandarin, the phrase “river crab” is a homophone of the phrase for “harmony.” The Chinese government describes its censorship and web-filtering efforts as “harmonizing” society; “harmonious society” is a catchphrase of the current regime. Dissidents have therefore created cartoons and songs depicting “river crabs” as evil little creatures that go around destroying fertile grounds. (More detail on the epic battle between the “grass mud horse” and the “river crab” here and here).

Like his Egyptian activist-blogger counterparts, Ai Weiwei is active on the Internet and a firm believer in the liberating potential of the web.  He tweets, blogs, and uses a variety of aliases on microblog host Sina.com to skirt Chinese censors that regularly block him from the site. After the deadly earthquakes in Sichuan, Ai used the web to launch a networked citizens investigation into the number of deaths resulting from collapsed (read: poorly constructed) schools. When he was beaten by police in the course of his investigation, he tweeted photos of himself being treated for a brain hemorrhage from his hospital bed.

Ai Weiwei, "So Sorry" (2010) (installation)

Ai’s investigation ultimately resulted in an installation art piece entitled “So Sorry.” The piece is constructed out of colorful children’s backpacks arranged on a building façade built by Adolf Hitler in Munich. The 9,000 backpacks spell out “She lived happily for seven years in the world”  — a quote from a mother whose daughter died when her school collapsed during the earthquake. The piece is made to stand in contrast to the Chinese government’s refusal to give a full accounting of deaths resulting from the Sichuan earthquake in the wake of the disaster. With the contributions of volunteers, Ai published the findings of his investigations on his blog, along with some angry missives directed towards what he saw as public officials’ exploitation of the disaster for propaganda.

“Sunflower Seeds” also references the power of the Internet, in Ai’s vision. Ai invited Tate viewers to engage him with questions and comments about the piece online. In an interview with the Telegraph, Ai noted that the number of “sunflower seeds” used in the piece — one hundred million — is roughly a quarter of the total number of Chinese Internet users.  As reviewer Richard Dorment put it: “Without the internet, Ai is saying, his countrymen are destined to be crushed underfoot by rulers who do not see – and do not want to see the individual within the mass. But with four hundred million people in touch with each other through the internet, who knows what may happen in the future?”

It is interesting to view “Sunflower Seeds” installed in the West because the piece simultaneously triggers all of the stock narratives used in Western media to talk about modern China.  These templates can be summarized as:

• The “OMG horrors of totalitarianism” narrative (of declining popularity, generally speaking);
• The “OMG horrors of capitalism” narrative (which can be economically protectionist, anti-capitalist, or environmentalist in nature); and
• The “New China is so fun with its kitsch and avant garde entertainments” narrative (oft overheard in bars).

Ai has embedded an anti-totalitarian message into the piece, and so reviewers will be inclined to mention the political context, triggering narrative #1. Although Ai intended for viewers to walk on top of the “sunflower seed” carpet, the Tate barred visitors from doing so after it discovered that the porcelain dust was creating a health hazard and there was lead in the hand-painted “seeds” — those developments and the mass-produced quality of the work trigger narrative #2. Finally, Ai is an icon in China’s contemporary art scene, and so an exhibit of his work will naturally trigger narrative #3. And yet Ai brings the weight of history to the work in a way these narratives typically can not.

New Yorkers protest Ai's detention.

Ai’s detention similarly brings together disparate groups of concerned folks.  Human rights advocates are concerned because Ai’s detention comes as part of a broader crackdown on dissidents following this spring’s call for a “jasmine revolution.” They see Ai’s arrest as a calculated message from the Chinese government to its people that no one — no matter his fame or international connections — is immune. But the disappearance of Chinese human rights lawyers and activists has not and probably will never disturb the enjoyment of arts-enthusiasts and dilettante expats satisfied to witness Beijing’s blooming arts scene. On the other hand, the disappearance of “China’s Andy Warhol” is bound to turn some otherwise-blinkered heads.  The disappearance of the man who  designed the Bird’s Nest stadium that formed the centerpiece of the Beijing Olympics — that will raise international attention in circles where even the detention of writer Liu Xiaobo would not give pause.

Ai Weiwei, "Study of Perspective - Forbidden City" (1995) (photograph)

Chinese authorities have stated that they are “baffled” by the international uproar over Ai Weiwei’s detention. They shouldn’t feign bemusement. It is conventional wisdom that rock n’ roll brought down the Iron Curtain. Here again, popular culture may tear down another curtain: this time, one of apathy.  It is an apathy the government has intentionally cultivated through years of  investment in exchange programs and scholarships, in Expos and Olympics, in profit opportunities for foreign businesses and jobs for wayward young Americans. It is probably also an apathy built by time — which is to (sadly) say, the Chinese government’s political repression may have outlasted our attention spans. But for this moment, at least, the Internet, art, and artists’ camaraderie have pulled aside that curtain to place on view for the public the human reality it conceals.

————————-

The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei is on display at Tate Modern through May 2, 2011.
The Divine Comedy, an exhibition by Olafur Eliasson, Tomás Saraceno, and Ai Weiwei is on display at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design through May 17, 2011.

Sign the twitition to free Ai Weiwei here.

Updates at http://freeaiweiwei.org/

Fans perch on fences and dumpsters, hoping to see Odd Future play SXSW (photo: Hydra)

From Lil B to Justin Vernon, John Maus to Odd Future, James Blake to Cass McCombs – this year’s South by Southwest synthesized vulnerability with bravado, youth with history. Hydra writers Mike Krimper and Adri Wong did a few rounds about town, making sure to catch our favorite artists in live action. Our photos and field notes.

Odd Future at the Scoot Inn

After an hour and a half in the sun, we began to bond with the 18 and over crowd assembled outside the Scoot Inn to see Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All and Tyler the Creator, the pack’s rapidly rising star. These young hooligans proved to be the group’s true fans; they scaled the surrounding fence, dumpsters, and trees to catch a peek inside Thrasher’s 21+ showcase, and they persisted in these efforts even when confronted by angry metalhead security staff that launched a volley of beer cans at their heads.  But fans outside were rewarded when Tyler sauntered right by them — followed by the thoroughly swagged-out Odd Future crew — inspiring a horde of teenagers to tear through Scoot’s metal fence and storm the crowd.

Needless to say, Odd Future tore it up. They moshed the stage and launched their skinny bodies off speakers and rooftops to crowd surf, breaking one audience member’s nose in the process (Tyler issued hasty apology: “I don’t wanna get sued!”). Their performance oscillated between ferocious rants and child-like asides, all layered over guzzled Madlib-sounding programming, slowed down to a Nyquil-intoxicated drone. The combined violence/tenderness of Odd Future’s music surpasses any formula for rap thus far devised: the extremes of Eminem confessions and Wu-Tang mafioso hanging on edge. These kids were a SXSW favorite for many and are surely about to make heavy noise beyond their Los Angeles skater affiliates, hustlers, business whores, bloggers, and groupies.

Perhaps it was their vibrant but ebbing youth, or the feeling that they were on the cusp of breaking through, but the sprinkling of Odd Future’s appearances throughout our week made us feel like we were living a historical moment.

Later that night we would see the Golf Wang again, in a surprise performance at the Fader Fort. For a second time, we were alerted to the impending performance when we noticed a tie-dye shirt and hiked-up pair of gym socks bowleggedly swaggering by us, the very reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson himself.

***

Lil B, Spoek Mathambo, Deyarmond Edison, and Diddy at the Fader Fort

Odd Future’s California compatriot in swag, Lil B, managed to beckon the largest cohorts of any Fader Fort act, yet he seemed to disperse it just as quickly.

Even before Lil B made it on stage, he had already determined the composition of the audience for his forerunning acts. But the kids ready to go dumb and rap fanatics waiting for the former Pack member couldn’t handle the performances of Khaira Arby (too world music) or  Spoek Mathambo (too out of this world). Mathambo played an amazing set to a dead-eyed crowd that was sadly more excited about watching Kanye West dance to township tech than listening to it. But Mathambo, undeterred, leapfrogged energetically about the stage with a lone saxophonist for accompaniment, opening bravely with a rather avant-garde jam about blood diamonds.

Equally ignored was Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) and college band DeYarmond Edison. “Who is Justin Vernon?” asked one member of Based God’s base. “A balding middle aged white man from Wisconsin,” responded an irritated Bon Iver fan, unsuccessfully searching for an opening in the crowd. A spirited and lengthy rendition of Carol King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” served only to heighten the sense of absurdity at the Fort.

Finally, after a raucous introduction by P Diddy, cooking dance and all, Lil B, dressed in fatigues and shades, took the stage.  To the disappointment of the crowd, which was  waiting for B to mercilessly ride his pretty bitch flow, Lil B poured his heart out onstage with a sprawling set of Youtube confessionals and spiritual revelations before muddling into swag-worthy rhythms. Mike was feeling it even if no one else was — that’s why he came to see Lil B, to get learned on the #rare cosmic greasings of the Based God himself.  After all, dude admits he doesn’t even know if he’s a rapper anymore. “Rapper artist” maybe?  His words, not ours.

Lil B was emphatic about his cross-genre status, referencing obscure indie rockers and insisting that his music was not hiphop — it was, in his words, “ambient rap” (not to be confused with “ambien rap?”). What other kind of music could rapper artists make? But after a well-received rendition of “Wonton Soup“, the Based God also informed us that we were listening to the next 30 years of rap music. So it was particularly ironic when Diddy, not one to miss an opportunity to bask in the applause of a thoroughly intoxicated audience, jumped on stage again at Lil B’s departure and stole the show with renditions of his Wiz Khalifa verse and B.I.G. classics.

***

Friends of Friends at Barcelona

Bay Area DJ Shlohmo was among Lil B’s fans, as we discovered during his set at Barcelona, a venue that provided us with an air-conditioned, electronic/dub retreat during the high overhead sunlight hours of rock-centric SXSW.

Shlohmo’s live performance had improved significantly since we last saw it, a few moons back when his debut record Shlohmoshun dropped and dude was still busy “Hotboxin the Cockpit.” Even the whiteboy-dance he put on as he spun a track of Lil B’s pretty bitch flow was charming.  That song, full of brazen obscenities, also signified the dividing line between the aggressively virtuosic first act of Shlohmo’s set and the softer, gentler sound of his second act.

In the second half of his set, Shlohmo showcased music from his new EP Places and sung unabashedly into a mic that distorted his voice so that he sounded like a sultry ingenue, or a sprite. This approach — one that has greatly expanded the emotional range of his tunes — seems to take influence from lo-fi beats and a healthy history of R&B electronics.

Before Shlohmo, we saw a set by Low Limit, who some in the audience knew primarily as half of musical duo Lazer Sword. His music was reminiscent of Hood Internet — who we’d seen play earlier that week at the Mohawk – but much more precise on the buttons. The superior sounds could also be attributed to Low Limit’s movement away from strictly glitch/hyphy remixes into the more unchartered waters of funky/house and all that upper tempo range of grimey club music that doesn’t shy away from warm synthetic melodies. Which is not to say that a solid mashup of Passion Pit and Juvenile couldn’t get our toes-a-tappin’ and our booties groovin’.

The following set by Mexicans with Guns was — in a word — adventurous. Donning a mask that transformed him from the average amiable San Antonian to a formidable DJ, Mr. Ernest Gonzalez traversed the globe to find a variety of funky dance and latin beats, displaying for us his consummate talent at pulling out the rhythmic essence of any genre, be it traditional or club. And holding it down for lo Mexicano from cumbia to Cypress Hill, which drove our TexMex crowd absolutely wild.

Paraiso (Mexicans with Guns Remix) by mexicanswithguns

***

Stay tuned for part 2: Jamie XX, Salva, James Blake, John Maus, The Soft Moon, Das Racist, Shabazz Palaces, and more.

Sonically speaking, what happened in 2010?  It seems the world went tropical while the streets went club; the World Cup pit the saccharine (wakawaka) against the strident (vuvuzela). Remix reached its house-y zenith — transforming Gyptian’s “Hold You” from single to myriad — guided along by an ever-so-generative stock of conversational young indie DJs. Mostly male, lets be honest, with center stage looking increasingly fresa/Euro, but by no means was this the year to mourn the death of the wild female MC we observed in the oh nine, notwithstanding the Times’s celebrity provocations. Bloggers fanned the flames of networked niche-scenes and artists internationally confronted the double-edged sword that is Fader love. 2010: there was a proliferation of genres, several quality mixtapes, quite a few innovative rumpshaking jams.  Here are about ten favorites.

—–

Spoek Mathambo – “Mshini Wam“

The PR describes him as “part ‘prince of township tech’, part ‘suburban space invader.’”  Individually, the South African artist perfectly captures the tension in this post. While his darker electronic Afro-futurist stylings are at the heart of his recent celebrity, Mathambo’s bold, jubilant flow and the more organic oh nine feel of “Mshini Wam” — complete with female-choral-refrain and harsh-edged synths — make this song stand out even on a record replete with other choice tracks.

—–

Dave Nada – “Punk Rock Latino”

“I cant play house/techno shit,” Nada thought, confronted by a bunch of bachata-reggaeton-lovin’ Latin kids upon the cusp of his creation. “I’ll get jumped.” And so moombahton was born (or so the story goes).  About two months after the release of his Moohbahton EP, T&A Records put out this hyperactive club-banger.

Munchi – “Pun Ain’t Dead”

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, a twenty-somethin’ Dutch-Dominican kid sounded out in response. “Who the fuck is Munchi? Just a kid with big hair that loves to make all kinds of music and share his love for music in the clubs.”

—–

Maluca – “Tigeraso”

Says Maluca of her work:  “I was influenced by a lot of different styles of music – hip hop, salsa, meringue, reggae, house … My parents exposed me to a lot of different stuff.  I am born and raised in New York and I don’t know if it’s so much the music that’s influenced my music, but I think more so New York influences my music.” And it shows. This catchy remix fav mixes sultry sass and danceability with a decidedly New York edge.

—–

Banana Clipz Mega-Mini Mix by Chief Boima

Bay Area! Stand up!

I couldn’t pick between the equally bumpin’ “War Dem Want” ft. MC Tidal (@ 2:20) and “Afro Latino” ft. Los Rakas (@ 0:01) as the track to select off Oro11 & Boima‘s Banana Clipz EP; then this megamix conveniently showed up on soundcloud. The tracks are impressive individually as well, so I recommend you get that mixtape.

—–

Bomba Estéreo – “Fuego”(Frikstailers Remix)

Bomba Estereo’s “Fuego” was a quintessential oh nine worldtown jam; the Frikstailers remix is just one example of how Argentinian label ZZK has shepherded the sound’s transition into a new decade.

Compare the stripped-down beats, otherworldly echo, and electronic kick of the Frikstailers remix with the warmer, more instrumentally elaborate original:

—–

Das Racist – “Who’s That? Brooown”

Surprise! The boys who brought you the Taco Bell/Pizza Hut song got rhymes. “Who’s That? Brooown” is just one of many hilarious free-association raps reppin’ boroughs Brown power on their mixtape  Shut up, Dude.  Other notable favorites include “Fake Patois,” “Ek Shakeesh,” and “Nutmeg” — the latter of which includes a meandering anecdote about a Dominican friend-cum-assassin that never fails to get me chuckling. This track gets special mention, however, for its super-infectious hook (“What can Brown do for you / what has Brown done for me / lately?) and the throwback video-game music video that accompanies it.

—–

Poirier ft. Face-T – “Wha-La-La-Leng”

Canadian artist Poirier has been described as an “activist” for soca – a fast-paced dance genre hailing from Trinidad and Tobago.  His record Running High displays a melange of additional international styles, from dancehall to bashment to kwaito.  “Wha-la-la-leng” shows off Poirier’s gift for cross-cultural production, uptempo beats, and collaboration with a diverse set of MCs to produce blustering, hard-hitting musical creations.

—–

Rye Rye ft. M.I.A. – “Sunshine”

Save the Palestine Summertime Schoolyard Jam! I hope she won’t cut me for saying this, but doesn’t it seem M.I.A.’s passed on the torch? B-more club queen Rye Rye is a worthy heir to Arulpragasm’s crown. “Sunshine” might be one of the most underrated tracks on this list, but that won’t stop me from putting this joyful street shit on loop.

—–

Los Rakas ft. Faviola – “Abrazame” (Uproot Andy remix)

It was a good year for Los Rakas — as mentioned, they got up on that Banana Clipz EP; they caught the attention of the international electrocumbia elite; and along with DJ Uproot Andy, they produced what I may now hazard to declare the jam of the year:

Lars Larsen and his analog video synthesizer (photo: Gro Kallevik)

Last week, psych/synth-pop band Neon Indian premiered the music video for their song “Mind Drips” on IFC. It is officially the first music video to be shot with the aid of the LZX Visionary – an analog video synthesizer styled in the way of video art tools from the 1970s.  The video’s crawling arrays of psychedelic color and light were recorded using the Visionary’s real-time pattern synthesis and compositing techniques, and they convert a simple Alice-in-Wonderland-esque storyboard into a “florescent cotton candy of a video,” a “sensuously extended dream sequence that makes you feel like you’ve woken up trapped in the 70s – and not in that fun, safe, ABBA kind of way either.”

The video was directed by Lars Larsen, an electronics designer and multimedia artist (http://www.lzxindustries.net/).  Larsen also engineered the technology behind the video, along with technical partner Edward Leckie. Hydra sat down with Larsen to discuss the LZX Visionary, his collaborations with Neon Indian, and the prospects for an analog audio-visual revival.

Hydra:   Where did you get the idea for the Visionary?

Lars Larsen: Well, I’ve been working on this project for the last two or three years.  I went to film school at the University of North Texas, and I got into electronics shortly after film school, started building synthesizers and became really obsessed with a lot of the 70s and early 80s devices, most of them DIY, unique projects. There weren’t really any that were made commercially viable; it was out of most artists’ budgets at the time. So mainly this project started out of a frustration for the lack of this kind of tool to make video art, something I wanted to do. That’s where the desire for the whole project came about: needing the tool and the tool not existing.

H:   So do you identify as an artist or as an engineer more?

LL:  As both, really. The technology itself is art in a way. Being able to design a tool – it’s like designing a paintbrush but it’s also a piece of art in itself, especially for me personally. The aesthetic ideals and workflow structure of this are mainly designed with how I want to use it in mind.

H:   Why the fascination with analog, or with that specific time period?

LL:   It’s more the analog technology than the time period. The time period was kind of truncated. There was a very vibrant period of video art from the mid-70s to the 80s, but as soon as computer graphics came in, people became very excited about the fast evolution of all that and they sort of lost interest in the analog tools for manipulating a video image. Same with analog audio too – audio synthesizers. And that’s why we’re experiencing a revival of analog synthesizers in music right now. Because there was a period that was too short – things happened really really fast – and now it’s slowly coming back.

H:   It seems like people are even doing that with early computer technology. Because it evolved so quickly, artists are going back to experimenting with elementary computers.

LL:   Yeah, and most people have conceptions of computers in terms of software now – it’s less linked into the hardware that it’s actually on. The earlier you go back, the more transparent the reliance on the hardware.

H:   How did you start working with Neon Indian?

LL:   Alan [Palomo] started school in Denton where I was living at the time. He was a close friend, a really nice guy – there was a house where one of my bandmates was his roommate, along with a couple other guys, and they all had their own things going on … Then he started the Ghosthustler project that started getting him some popularity. I remember the two of us sitting in this living room working on stuff on our laptops together …

H:   We were lucky enough to catch a recent show here in Austin where you did the visuals. Do you go on tour with Neon Indian or just collaborate on some shows?

LL:   I did some shows in New York with them last December, and I try to do them whenever they’re in town. I don’t go on tour with them all the time, but I like doing [the live shows] as much as I can. They play a DVD I made for them when I can’t. I should be doing video at the Dallas show they have coming up in February.

H:   How does the video-recording, film work that you do with the Visionary relate to your live performance work?

LL:   It’s interesting … It’s a common misconception that this [gesturing towards machine] is just pre-set effects – you know, with video you have this notion of a “video effect” – whereas this is more the building blocks to achieve certain effects or to create certain kinds of signals.

So, to answer your question, its applications are really just as broad as other tools – the same way that you might use a keyboard synthesizer either in the recording studio or live. Since it’s a modular system, you can pick the modules that suit whatever you want. If you want to generate a lot of crazy patterns, you can pick a lot of oscillator modules. Or there will be other systems that are more focused on processing different video streams – from different cameras, or so on – and making them interact in different ways.

Analog video is different than digital – because unlike digital, where the video is a series of images going by, and that’s how it’s stored on the computer – it’s a continuous signal, just like how you hear audio.  So you can perform really exact manipulations on [analog] video as it happens.

H:   So do you ever feel like you’re “jamming?”

LL:   Yeah. That’s why it’s important to have knobs and switches and patch cables, because unexpected things happen. On the computer you can’t make unexpected things happen as much.

H:   Can you walk us through the steps of shooting the “Mind Drips” video?

LL:   There are two main things going on:

The first half is some computer compositing … The background pattern that’s keyed out behind the grayscale footage – that’s generated from video oscillators. They’re modulating each other, and then they’re controlled with a sequencer, and the sequencer is locked to the tempo of the song. And I use other different modulation sources.

Lars Larsen breaks it down. (photo: Gro Kallevik)

In a digital workflow you have to deal a lot with data types and what can affect what is defined by the software environment you’re using. In an analog system it’s kind of open. All you’re dealing with is voltages.  The same voltage that makes the amount of red in the video can also affect the number of lines in the pattern, or whatever. It’s all arbitrary and that’s where a lot of the power comes in – with the keying and relationships between the different video layers.

The second half – the effect I really set out to do – is a video feedback, keying technique. So the shots were edited together, and that was rendered out as black and white video and burned onto a DVD. That was used as the source for the video synthesizer.

The way the colorization and color effects worked was – from the use of an old feedback camera. So there were two video sources running into the video synthesizer. One was the footage from the video, and the other was this feedback camera – and the camera was pointed at a video monitor that was showing the output of the whole thing. So it feeds back on itself. The camera is looking back at its own image of itself in the monitor. The way I got color and motion out of that was by manipulating exactly how the camera was positioned relative to the monitor and the focus controls and, most importantly,  through the patch that I had which took different regions of the source video and applied colorized patterns of the feedback to it.

The basic idea is the two images are blended together and manipulated in different ways. The parts where you see the oscillating patterns going up her [the woman in the Mind Drips video] arms is all from the keying patch. The keying patch splits up the grayscale image into different amplitude regions – like, 50% gray, 60% gray, replace that with specific colors. It’s kind of like writing a computer program, but you’re doing it with patch cables and knobs.

H:   Do you feel like you are already part of a community of “analog people?”

LL:   Yeah. I’ve met and am good friends with a lot of artists through creating this thing. There are six system owners right now – and they’re in New York, Japan, Australia. There are a lot of people who have been waiting around for this kind of technology to be made available. But it’s definitely a niche thing. I don’t expect every post-production house to have one in the back, or for it to be useful for all applications.

As for other video artists – there are some great visualists here in town [in Austin], several groups. The group that helped me shoot the Neon Indian video is called Blackmagic Rollercoaster (blackmagicrollercoaster.com) — they’re local filmmakers. My friend Chad Allen does work with video mixers and video feedback. There’s a local public access show called “Everything in Heaven is TV” – a lot of my friends do that.

H:   Do you have any more projects planned?

LL:   There’s a music video I’m working on for Os Ovni, a local band here in Austin.

My ultimate goal is more narrative-type applications, a symbiotic relationship between the effects technology and the scene that’s being recorded as it happens. Like: cutting between cameras based on the character’s microphone amplitudes, things like that.

H:   How much – if at all – does media theory, cultural theory inform your interest in this work?

LL:   It has a lot to do with it. This existing has a lot to do with the relationship between the tool and the artist, functional and creative applications. Making a tool that is creatively inspiring creates its own art, in a way.

You know, I think that there is a point at which computer graphics get boring, so now we go back to: “How can we achieve an interesting effect?” rather than “How do we achieve a super photorealistic render?” I think we are going to see – or at least, I am hoping that we see – a resurgence in use of analog technology with video.  Things like this [video synthesizer] existing is a first step, really.

Visionary in a box. (photo: Gro Kallevik)

still from "A Man Escaped" (1956), dir. Robert Bresson

So what is the perfect film ?  Or (one might choose to ask the more precise question): from whence does that perfection derive?  Hydra‘s own Jose-Luis Moctezuma interrogates this question — with all its cinematic and metaphysical nuances — in the current Fall/Winter Issue of Cerise Press, through an article exploring the greatness of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped.

Wondrous indeed the film which is both perfect and great; rarer still the film whose perfection derives from a deliberate minimalism and severe reduction of expression. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) is one of those rare instances of a work whose greatness is directly characterized by its mechanisms of refinement; the film does not so much present a sheen of indisputable perfection as it reveals the hidden engine by which its nature produces a kinema of inward and outer symmetry.

…

The art of cinematography, as we well know, derives from a technologic origin, so that the cinematograph (the element of kinema inscribed on film) is produced through an arrangement and operation of mechanisms. Bresson’s intention, however, is not to repeat or sublimate the mechanism at work as its own end, but to transcend and transform dumb machinery via the corporeal and emotional actuality of the human model, its covenant inscribed on film by the model’s acts of faith (or contrary acts) …

You can find Jose’s complete discussion of the film and of Bresson’s theory of cinematography in “Anatomy of a Perfect Film: Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped,” available in Cerise Press’s online journal.

—–

Cerise Press is an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.

The n+1 editors are some sensitive altbros. Original photo: NYT

Upon first reading, Mark Greif’s NYT essay on “The Sociology of the Hipster” inspired in me something of an epiphany. I did not wonder, as I have since, if the empty tenor of his article (more zen than nihilistic; more antiseptic than cynical) was cultivated from some number of pre-“making it” years cobbling together a living by writing laudatory commercial copy for academic literature. My brain did not assemble the manifold Marxist ironies, identify the doctrinal heresies. No – instead I was hit with a simple clarity of divine proportions. I knew exactly what I thought about the essay, and I knew that thought’s name. I knew its name could not be spelled out; it had to be abbreviated: “WTFC.” Who The Fuck Cares.

I must emphasize that although I am now aware such an acronym pre-existed my kneejerk brainstorm (or so Urban Dictionary tells me), at the time I had never heard or seen such a term used. Yet out of the electronic detritus, the chaos of feeds and links – pushing past the dusty volumes of critical theory I’ve stored away in my memory out of loyalty to my alma mater, that dying figurehead of that dying species, the public intellectual institution – this is what came to me, springing forward, pure and resolved: WTFC.

I can see a younger, less “wired” version of myself getting spitting mad about Greif’s essay. I’d wave my arms around and say something about self-importance, and lack of class consciousness, and Bourdieu, and Marx, and the takeover of the Times by the Style Section, and the bourgeoisie, and the narcissism of armchair intellectuals, and even more stuff about class – most likely butchering the points that have been concisely and cogently phrased here and here, and in Bourdieu’s own work (which serves as its own response to Greif’s project).  I probably would have been annoying, a little hypocritical, perhaps shrill – displaying much worse than the quiet dignity with which Greif put forward his 1000 words of nothingness.

So what joy to find a new tool in the toolbox, to discover how my psyche has secretly cultivated a nuanced practice of micro-engagement – a way of responding to things that are not worth fretting over in the larger scheme of things, but are significant within particular echo chambers I frequent, or are just irksome enough to call for detractors to voice their dissent if and when they are bored at work, all while maintaining healthy emotional distance. Micro-engagement: small assertions of my taste as applied to your ideas or philosophies, but pls note I can’t be bothered to spell them out. Micro-engagement: it makes me one very blasé hipster.

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition … These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

Mark Greif, The Sociology of the Hipster (Nov. 12, 2010)

My spontaneous acronym-creation branched – I speculate – from the practices of limited-scope voice I have developed with Internet’s help over the last 10 years: the upvote and the downvote, the tumblr heart and the reblog, the retweet, the hashtag, the 1-5 stars, the facebook “share.” If NYT has not yet installed a rating feature for me to actualize the irritation brewing inside me (“this was not funny! this was not useful! this was not cool!”), my brain will invent its own noncommittal platform, allowing me to express in four very capslocked letters the vague disapproval I feel vis-a-vis Greif’s unselfconscious insularity while maintaining a grasp on proper perspective. That perspective being: this is far from an important topic.

Hydra has previously mulled over how the Internet affects the human cognitive process – whether it short-circuits our logical functions, whether it degrades our attention spans, whether it presents potential for new modalities of creative learning and/or teaching. It was a fascinating experience to be confronted without warning by a personal demonstration of how the brain can be cultivated by the digital milieu, by the “habitus” of constant abbreviation and meme-making. (Couldn’t help it, Bourdieu is my dawg).

Although much has been said about the Internet’s encouragement of intellectual micro engagement, less critical thought has gone into the idea of emotional micro-engagement. By this I do not mean to invoke the “oh my god our children will never be able to have friends IRL” luddite fearmongering of the early 2000s, nor to make claims about the depth of feeling that can be achieved by online dating or gchatting. What I am referring to is emotional micro-engagement with current events, with newspaper and magazine articles, with essays, with literature, with the products of that industry we call content.

The closest thing we have to a treatise on this phenomenon is, ironically enough, the Alt Report / Hipster Runoff – and that’s more a performance of emotional micro-engagement than an explication. Still, instructive. Reducing emotions to a few limited options: <3 u. miss u. h8 u. Because how should we feel about the troublesome race and gender dynamics in Diplo’s relationship with Skerritt Bwoy and daggering, and how can we feel anything about it without warping things out of perspective, without taking too seriously something that is kind of inane and frivolous to begin with? (Here is one suggestion: don’t publish a book on it.)

Developing practices of limited engagement may be dystopic to some. It stinks of empathy fatigue and insincerity – those hallmarks of hipster apathy. But the reality is that there is too much content for everybody to care deeply about everything (a problem we at Hydra aspire to perpetuate). The question is not whether to approach the world with seriousness (as explored in this previous Times piece featuring n+1 and the Believer), but when, how, and how much. One might call it the equitable  (ethical?) distribution of one’s passions. New media has changed the parameters, if not the question, of that experiment.

Moreover, there is value in being able to respond to a premise without reifying or legitimizing it. I could write a letter to the NYT editor expressing my grievances regarding Greif’s essay, but then I would be complacent in the newspaper’s choice to publish the piece.  I would be overstating my opposition to the essay, holding up its merits as something to be debated, when in actuality its primary effect was to cause my eyes to glaze over.

But in this new collaboration between me and my friend Internet, there is potential for us to stay in the conversation while de-legitimizing the content we encounter.  By platform-switching (pushing an excerpt of a Times article to a tumblr, for example) we can say without words: “This does not belong in the book review section, and not just because people shouldn’t be allowed to review their own books. This is at most a ‘note’ on Facebook that I do not wish to be tagged in.” Twitter may or may not make us a social movement in the aggregate, but it achieves something on the individual scale irregardless:  it lets me put Greif’s “sociological investigation into the hipster” on the same plane as my mother narrating her television shopping network adventures — lets me care about his essay and its goals the exact amount that it deserves to be cared about, which is just barely at all.  #wtfc: micro-engagement makes this a position statement, an ethos.

***

“What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation” was published last month.  It is available at New York and LA bookstores and at the n+1 store.

Gaza smuggling tunnel (image: Reuters)

More and more I feel that we live in a world of tunnels

Some evidence: the overwrought celebration surrounding the world’s longest tunnel, newly completed, in Switzerland. Also: the recent spike in illicit tunneling activity between the United States and Mexico, as reported by the New York Times.

The craziest thing about our tunnel-world (shall we say – our Tunelandia) is its mirror image quality. Above every tunnel runs a highway (kind of like the old joke about the cat-buttered-toast monorail). Just think: at the exact moment that two desperate immigrants were using a shoe-horn to tunnel from Belarus to Poland, EU passport holders were cruising through the gates into the Schengen region above them with the blink of an iris scan and the swipe of an ID card – a biometric booya, if you will.  And as drug cartels industriously burrow below Nogales and Calexico,  thousands of trucks coast across the NAFTA-highways atop those cities’ surfaces, their flatbeds laden with sneakers, tortillas, steel.

Herman Melville once wrote: In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport, whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. I think about that quote a lot when I’m in Texas.

Highway | Tunnel

Here is a thought on the border: Where globalization has contracted distance and exploded movement, Control descends to restrict access; Where access is restricted, a tunnel will appear. “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”  These were the terms of the Web Wars of the early 2000s (e.g. Napster, Kazaa) – For what is a torrent but a tunnel from me to you, burrowing through the dark net beneath the Information Superhighway.

All this talk about how Arcade Fire is from Texas

Houston, to be exact, which is home to an extensive underground tunnel network and a eerie landscape of over and underpasses, toll highways built for the exclusive use of the paying rich. None of which seems to serve any function except to divorce particular streams of commerce and humanity from others.  Arcade Fire’s new album draws inspiration from the claustrophobic sprawl of Houston’s landscape, building on themes expressed in songs on its earlier Funeral album like this one:

… And if the snow buries / My neighborhood
And /  if my parents are crying
Then I’ll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours
Yea a tunnel / from my window to yours

You climb / out the chimney
And meet me in the middle / The middle of the town …

Arcade Fire – “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”

Beneath Gaza territory lines, smugglers herd cows through tunnels

These are tunnels that serve as lifelines during times of sanction and embargo for a kidnapped population while tanks sit atop its highways.  Other items trafficked through these underground channels (import and export) include:

• canvas sacks full of food
  

  Gaza smuggling tunnel (image: AP)

• beauty products
• second-hand clothes
• Israeli coffee
• blue jeans
• mobile phones
• cement
• fresh fruit (figs, lychees, mangos)
• chickens, pigeons
• hair gel
• popsicle sticks
• firearms

As covered here, here, and here.  And in this amazing piece in This American Life, featuring real-time conversation with a Gaza tunnel operator via cellphone on the trials and tribulations of his business.

What’s happening beneath Gaza is not unlike the situation along the Southwest border between the U.S. and Mexico, where law enforcement finds more than one new illicit tunnel a month.

Some are short, narrow passageways that require those navigating them to slither. Others are long, sophisticated underground thoroughfares strung with electric cables and ventilation hoses.

One high-end tunnel found in Calexico, Calif. originated in the master bedroom of a Mexican home and extended to a garage on the American side. It had a phone line and air conditioning…

In Gaza, tunnelling has become such a critical and lucrative activity that Hamas has started taking over the trade and taxing/licensing independent tunnel owners.  I am not privy to the details of the operations conducted by the traficantes probably under my feet right now – but in light of the the cartels’ increasing institutionalization, I would wager they are working according to a similar organized profit scheme — as they have done vis-a-vis hopeful migrants.

These tunnels are passageways created by and necessitated by coercive stoppages forced into the natural flow of social commerce. They are reminders that every misery has its resistance, its stubborn will to survive – but also its petty profiteer. Gilles Deleuze once said this: the coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill. What he might have meant was this: even underground, the Man will be right behind you, shouldering his way into your excavations, levying taxes & installing keycard machines, asking you for your papers.

Sometimes I think about all the tunnels under Europe

Here are the tunnels I think about, off the top of my head:

1. the “Chunnel“
2. the new Swiss super-long-tunnel
3. the Large Hadron Collider
4. the “Tube,” etc.

How can one small “continent” have so many big tunnels? And apparently the EU hopes to connect all of Europe by tunnel sometime soon, starting with the Swiss supertunnel! Do they have enough earth left beneath them to support the ground they walk on? In my brain, the ground underneath Europe already looks like this:

actually a visualization of a leafcutting ant colony structure (image: Carol LaFayette, Texas A&M)

But with more water! Hugh Holub, former public works director in Nogales, Arizona wrote about the precarious vertigo of his superterranean city: “There is a joke in Nogales that someday its entire downtown will collapse into a giant sinkhole due to the many drug tunnels in the city.” And indeed tunnels in Nogales have been discovered because a bus abruptly sinks into pavement where digging has weakened the road.

One of these days Europe will wake up in the morning and find that this has happened to Switzerland overnight:

Guatemala City sinkhole, circa June 2010

Leaving only the highways and bridges standing, suspended from nothing, traffic(k)less.

Or before then all our highways will collapse from the weight of our commerce or a lack of subjacent support. And those who were commuters will have to join their smuggler step-brethren to live in the tunnels, with nothing but the extralegal economy and our collective proto-civilization spirituality to build upon. Like some post-apocalyptic ninja turtles.

photo: Lars Tunbjork/Agence Vu, for NY Times Magazine

Upon first sight of the New Orleans Katrina Memorial, I thought it no more than an attempt at reproducing Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  From afar it looks like a series of reflective black granite walls set into a green, manicured landscape. “Ah,” I thought,”another healing wound.”  But behind the memorial, I could see the white rooftops and pillars in the graveyards that surrounded the structures — remembering how a fellow traveler had just explained to me the New Orleans practice of entombing the dead in “ovens” above ground to avoid the hazards of subterranean burial in a city that is located below sea level — and I realized with a start that those black blocks of stone were not walls, but mausoleums.

Over 1,100 individuals died in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a storm whose consequences were anticipated but neglected. Although the Memorial is dedicated to all of those who were killed by the hurricane, only 84 people are interred at the Memorial site.  They are the unidentified and unclaimed dead.  A group of funeral home owners took it upon themselves to entomb the bodies after the government failed to address the question of their final resting place for three years.

The identities of the buried are unknown, so there are no names on the surfaces of the mausoleums — only reflections.  This quality of anonymity memorializes the disaster itself as much as it does the deaths of the individuals buried within it.

The Memorial is structured so that it takes the shape of Hurricane Katrina, but also a labyrinth, such that a visitor may wander and meditate among the reflective surfaces. It is a poignant idea, which does borrow from Lin’s work on the Vietnam Memorial.  Yet it is not the shape — but the site — of this memorial that is its most evocative feature.

The New Orleans Katrina Memorial stands atop the same ground as what was historically the Charity Hospital Cemetery. Also known as the local “potter’s field,” it was a mass gravesite established by the Hospital in 1847 to bury unclaimed and/or indigent patients — many of whom were poor city residents that had succumbed to yellow fever or malaria. (In 1989, a monument was erected by the Tulane and L.S.U. Medical Schools which eerily thanked those individuals that had “donated their bodies to science.”)

The Charity Hospital — the go-to hospital for the city’s poor — was flooded out during Hurricane Katrina and never reopened.  The development of another hospital for low-income patients (one-third of New Orleans residents do not have health insurance) was mired by conflict over the appropriate vision for the “new” Charity Hospital.  Louisiana State University seeks to build a mega-complex that will turn the city into a biomedicine hub – which would require razing 35 acres of residential property in the historic Mid-City New Orleans neighborhood.

Much has already been said about the politics behind Katrina’s devastation: some shrill remarks, some apologia, more than a few documentary films. Like these, the New Orleans Katrina Memorial provokes reflection upon the organization of our society — one that can accept the extinguishing of life, whether by sickness or by drowning, as something anonymous and unworthy of note when it occurs in particular neighborhoods, to people of a particular color. But the Memorial raises these spiritual-structural concerns and pushes one to face the scale of Katrina’s human tragedy without campaigning opinions, pointing fingers, or passing judgment.  There are no answers in its surfaces — only the mirror image of yourself.  At the same time, the Memorial restores some dignity for the nameless and forgotten dead, in a space that both produces and is the product of caring about strangers. In this regard it is, I think, quite a fitting memorial.