How fun it is to say “the Internet went on strike today.” Of course, e-commerce went on trucking along, but protest actions by giants like Google and Wikipedia, Craigslist and reddit made sure only Luddites and the willfully blind would remain ignorant of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act (SOPA/PIPA), pending legislation that threatens the structure and spirit of the web. Wikipedia’s English-language page “went dark” in protest of the bill; Google replaced its iconic logo with a censor bar; Tumblr enabled its users to “black out” their pages for the day; WordPress created plugins to allow bloggers to do the same.

These are the big guys, who have big stakes in the future free flow of information. The fate of lil’ guys like Hydra is, for now, tied up with theirs. We publish on a WordPress platform from our Mozilla browsers, we garner readership and comments from Google hits and Tumblr, and (perhaps more often than we’d like to admit) our research forays bring us into the bowels of Wikipedia.

Better and more qualified policy wonks have explained the nuts and bolts of how SOPA/PIPA will stifle innovation, encroach on free speech. Instead of attempting a clumsy recap, or pretending that anyone in Congress would notice our humble blog’s blackout, we offer a tailored account of what the implications of these laws would be for us, and perhaps for others like us.

Our mission statement as it stands is simple: to undertake – to experiment with – the essay in an online format.  We once considered a more fleshed-out attempt to explain ourselves in a discussion that dissolved into the ether of email inboxes:

Hydra is a collective of writers with varied interests, bound together by a vision of what is possible when the strength of life perseveres and pushes against the wire and concrete. We reject containment. We are world-town and we are polycephalic. “Without the possibility of parole.” We smash sentence, we write.

Begun as a dream in the misty oviduct of the Northern California Bay Area, its original heads have split or moved, moved and split, and are now spread over this lizard-green globe. Following a range of callings, our interests span the cultural, political, and galactic spheres of life. This is to insinuate that, in our minds, the cultural, political, and galactic spheres of life are inseparable domains. Therefore, following such as what we might call our editorial policy, we strive and look for the indivisible and the syncretic, the symbiotic and the cross-fertilized. These are aspects of what might be called a borderzone standpoint. And in this magazine are its highways to tomorrow’s classical thought.

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Concretely, what does this mean? We are interested in exploring and cultivating new practices of online criticism, such as:

• Use of the hyperlink – to engage in dialogue with the ideas and words of other writers and artists, to cross-reference our own articles in order to build and elaborate on cohesive intra-publication themes, to highlight the intertextuality and multi-vocal character of our writings, to reference external material without disturbing narrative flow, to replace formal citations, to offer readers the option of more fragmented, non-linear, and/or autonomous modes of reading that can lead to independent exploration (surfing) and multitasking (especially with the use of “tabs”).
• Use of embedded media -  to more precisely reference the musical/cinematic/visual works that we wish to comment upon,  to set tone and atmosphere and to suggest context or trains of thought better alluded to than written out, to demonstrate synchronicity between ideas and artworks across different fields and temporal divides, to speak in the format and parlance of music blogs and experiment with the idea of article as mixtape, as bricolage, for juxtaposition, as pastiche, to create written works fully fused with visual and auditory elements, which is to say, to create “essays” that are also “experiences.”
• Multiplatform publication / microblogging – to find readership, like-minds, and fellow enthusiasts (particularly, with regard to our more obscure interests), to engage in the discipline of keeping ourselves concise,  to play with redigesting, disassembling, and reconstructing our own product, to recognize ourselves as part and parcel of the content-producing masses.

SOPA/PIPA threaten these exact tools, the building blocks of our experiment. And on a more basic level, by endangering the vitality of the online spaces where we meet up and interact,  SOPA/PIPA could preclude the maintenance of psychically-bonded-but-geographically scattered, borderzone families like ours.

If it sounds far-fetched that all this could be put in jeopardy under the auspices of enhanced copyright enforcement, consider the very real possibility of an Internet Black List of alleged infringers — part of the original SOPA/PIPA drafts — that could knock sites off the web.  Take a look at the structural parallels with the Great Chinese Firewall. Hell, look at hip hop bloggers, and the crazy, Orwellian shit the American government has already done to them.

This legislation imperils the the type of syncretic and cross-fertilized creative expressions that we find most inspiring. The anti-circumvention provisions before Congress would hobble the efforts of international activists to evade internet censorship, surveillance, and persecution, further isolating us from the dissident artists residing under repressive regimes that are well-beloved by our editorial staff. At risk are technologies like Tor, the anonymising software that masks users’ IP addresses, which was instrumental during the Egyptian protests. Also VPNs, proxies, etc.

Simply put, SOPA/PIPA are at odds with the development of shit we like to talk about, and how we talk about it. Such as: the art that has flourished through the new media of Youtube, Google Streetview. Such as: cross-border musical flows. Can you imagine Worldtown without the World Wide Web? Without online mixtapes, the international blogosphere, or soundcloud? These laws would impose an untenable drag on parody, remix, assemblage, homage, détournement, cover/fan art and (horror of horror) the proliferation of memes.  Which is to say – if and when the Revolution comes, we will stand with Cheezburger.

“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.

This mirror image is most likely not the Earth as we know and understand it–it is not, for example, an Earth in intimate collusion with the sensuous limitations of our bodies, nor is it an Earth defined by our ample ignorance of its largeness, making it more terrifying in its localized concentrations–rather, the Earth of Google Maps is a Zone in which human desire and its waste product creep up along the blueprinted, line-traced passageways like an ineradicable weed, a gnarly and phantasmagoric apparition, the human face blotted out as a way of preserving the integrity of the machine that recreates not the visage but les yeux sans visage.

For Orpheus, and equally for the 9-eyed camera of Google Street View, the Gaze is All, while the face, the body, and what political or symbolic value of identification can be attributed to these detached limbs and voiceless creatures of accident, dissolve in the withering sight of the mobile Panopticon. Jon Rafman’s curatorial project, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, collects the most striking screen captures he finds on Google Street View (or through scouring other blogs devoted to the service) and exhibits them as a way of reinforcing the human presence that is always on the cusp of disintegration, threatened as it is by the randomized framing of the autonomous panoramic camera.

Rafman manages to rediscover the Orphic gaze in Google’s aesthetics of informativity, and it is this gesture of arduous selection (a selection made precious by the extent of effort involved in picking his subjects out of countless mundane specimens) that restores something of the human sight to the Panopticon’s alienating lens. The restoration, however, is not totalizing, and while the human trace receives a name and a scent of the familiar, the senses remain divided: human sight, left on its own, can sometimes begin to take on the contours of the machine, and a type of hallucinatory disorientation can sometimes seep in the images.

A clip of the alien consciousness from Tarkovsky's "Solaris."

It’s been a few months since our last cosmic rundown here at Hydra. Another lunar eclipse has come around, so perhaps in the spirit of celestial cycles, I feel called once again to contribute to this thread. For the uninitiated, we initially birthed the idea of a cosmic rundown in order to sketch out disparate, marginal, and systemic connections underlying artistic explorations of the beyond, both spatial and temporal, and the natural phenomena upon which these events orient themselves. With such a broad category as the intergalactic, you’d think that we could write a rundown a bit more often.

But I’ve become a bit concerned with the somewhat sedimented notion of futurism which informs our typical methods for determining what counts as the cosmic in the arts. The visuals tend to fall under the prevailing authority of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris; the sonic sphere meanders between the bleep and blap big band orchestral jazz of Sun Ra and the driving motorik pulse of electronica (especially under the starship of Baldelli); the literary texts navigate dystopian near-futures and the Cameronesque ills plaguing technological demolition of the natural world. Yet I don’t mean to dismiss any of these concerns. Indeed they all still seem quite relevant and even urgent in an age where we are rapidly exhausting natural resources, raising the local to global access in vast online fabrics, and persistently threatening our very own existence with weapons powerful enough to destroy life as we know it. Nonetheless, I’d like to grapple with the cosmic a bit from the peripheries, and attempt to zigzag through alternate ways of thinking through the future, one perhaps not so engorged with technological bedazzlement and fear.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ukfGAd8T4

This article will serve as an experiment; consider it something of a multimedia DJ mix on futurism loosely viewed through the lens of the cosmic. Let’s start with a marginal yet still paradigmatic musical rendition from the French disco ensemble Space. Like their German counterparts of the 1970s, Kraftwerk, Space forged a soundtrack for what they understood as the future. But Space’s music has an embedded lushness that Kraftwerk eschewed in favor of sparsely programmed rhythms. It’s partially owed to the full band’s incorporation of the live backing elements of American disco, fusing delay percussion with drum machines and warm synth lines. They also brought into play the sonic trajectories of local experiments with synthetic melodies and deconstructed noise ushered in just a few years earlier in 1970s France by the iconoclast composer Jean Michel-Jarre.

Space, Summers, and the Sound of the Future

Space released Magic Fly–a record that topped the charts in Europe and crossed over surprisingly in America– in 1977, just a couple months before Donna Summers forever changed popular music with her concept album I Remember Yesterday. Produced by the forward thinking studio wizard Giorgio Moroder, I Remember Yesterday was structured in two parts, past and future. How the future side fit into the equation of remembering yesterday raises all sorts of disorienting questions about mind, memory, and time. Disregarding such conundrums, the now infamous and absolutely hypnotic anthem “I Feel Love” pulsed with a driving artificial momentum and washes of synthetic harmony that seemed to take the time of the dance floor itself into warp speed. Brian Eno infamously called the song the sound of the future, and since, the future of popular and unpopular electronic music has been, well, pretty much right along those lines.

Black to the Future

An alternate strand to this narrative, and one that has recently been rejuvenated, is Black Futurism. Initially just an intriguing essay by Mark Dery published in 1995–with the potent title “Black to the Future“–Black Futurism has become something of a movement. I recently attended a small exhibit “The Black Futurists: Black Progressive Thought to Science Fiction” in the Sargent Johnson Gallery nestled in San Francisco’s historic black and jazz neighborhood, the Western Addition. The exhibit was put on by an East Bay coalition of artists, thinkers, and writers, Black Diamonds Shining, who openly take Dery’s seminal essay to the heart of their project.

In the gallery, there were walls layered with figures and streaks of color, faces, cut-out ephemera, words, and coagulations of musical and historical references that brought to mind the assemblage graffiti approach cultivated by Basquiat. George Clinton and the Mothership Connection got down with Prince’s funkified hybridization of genre and gender. A Betty Davis/Cleopatra collage oozed sexuality with a wink to Miles channeling the gods from his horn. Sun Ra vibrated in the call from the extra-terrestrial spaceship he reportedly heard in his home of Alabama so many moons ago, and Lee Scratch Perry took on the ghost of a mystic, a dub sorcerer, a machine bricoleur. Designs linked all the panels like chains or spirits in a sort of poly-rhythmic flow that guided my eyes across the shadows, ghosts or hieroglyphs brought to life.

After a few times moving around the room, absorbing from near and far, I concluded that the exhibit illustrated a sonic visualization of the Black Atlantic–the cross-breeding of fictions, musical narratives, travels, exchanges, and mythologies across the rhizomatic spatial configurations of the African diaspora. The internal tensions of that diaspora wrestled in the poly-rhythmic wall panels, fighting for an affirmative sense of future that was rooted in a unified but hardly stabilized cipher of the past. One nation under a groove.

Techno Rebels

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg8ktVDbWlg

Another East Bay music collective Deepblak Recordings riffs off themes of black futurism in synthesizing the sonic spheres of techno, jazz, and Afro dance records. That’s a rare feat for Oakland, a town known for the hustling wordplay of Too $hort and the bounce of hyphy more than black electronic music. Label head and producer Armon Bazile (aka Aybee) recounted a telling story of a club-goer spitting on his friend’s turntables because he didn’t have any E-40 records. Few casual listeners of the genre recall that techno originated in the industrial failings of Detroit by the black and brown Belleville Three who flipped the “techno rebels” concept from Alvin Toeffler’s The Third Wave into a pulsating mode of rhythm and blues.

A personal favorite of mine from the Deepblak camp is the uplifting cosmic groove of Afrikan Sciences. I also have on Blaktronics on heavy rotation–a name lifted from Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrel’s Blaktronic Science record, which includes some choice soothsayer poetics on the aura of cosmic funk in the liner notes: “reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of the modern Afrikan American music/speculative fiction universe.” Deepblak’s podcasts are also a good place to start for a full on dive into their techno-jazz wavelength, a sort of cyclical moving forward-backward-around a celestial map of the many musical incantations called forth by Sun Ra.

Speaking of the myth himself, the origins of the ever enigmatic Sun Ra may begin to become clearer starting next month–or rather, more robust. The first volume of a huge 20 disc box set from the Sun Ra archives will cover early recordings of his be-pop 1940s and 50s period, including some obscure 78rpm recordings and more than a few lost tapes. Although, I must admit that I’m still working on Professor Ra’s recommended reading list and what might be the only recording of his 1971 guest lectures at UC Berkeley.

Groove, Light, and Another Future

www.youtube.com/watch?v=je0VXof1j7Q

Rethinking the future might necessitate a redistribution of our spatial relationships. For one, I’d suggest that we have to undertake a highly challenging project of attempting to unwind the regimented dichotomies that parse space and time as diametric relationships. Perhaps Africa Hitech, the duo of Mark Prichard and Steve Spacek, reflect this vision most acutely. Their musical futurism spins time forward not so much in terms of drum programming and cascading synthetic keys as by way of traveling through the poly-rhythmic spatial arrangements of Black Atlantic traditions from the clubs of England to the shores of West Africa, right back to Detroit’s techno dirges and chants.

“Light the Way” off of the recent and excellent93 Million Miles from Warp accomplishes this best. It’s a soaring song, cycling through lyrics on how light makes vision possible while the interlocked rhythms brings to light that groove writes the future.

Mochilla's Eric Coleman (on the left) and Brian Cross prepare for the gallery opening. (photo Mike Park)

I dropped by San Francisco’s Peek Gallery last week for the opening of an exhibition on Mochilla, the Los Angeles production company composed of photographer/filmmaker/DJ duo, Brian Cross (B+) and Eric Coleman. Talk about a party. Less than a half hour in, the spacious gallery — part of the new third-space unit of The Summit SF — filled to the brim with enthusiastic Mochilla followers and the occasional straggler called from the Mission streets to the banter, blue glow of the Mochilla’s music-films, and surely, the deep crates of free alcohol at the bar. I made out with more than a few freshly made Caipirinhas and cold Tecates on the closest to a summer evening it ever gets in San Francisco.

There was barely enough room to look at the collection of large, handsomely framed photographs placed on the long slice of gallery wall. Cross and Coleman chose only 20 pieces respectively to represent the past 10 years of Mochilla in action, selecting from a broad range of work loosely tied together by musical themes of rhythm and melody, with a primary focus on the subjects of instrument, urban and natural environment, and of course, the musician.

Among a few standouts, I particularly enjoyed portraits of a shadowed J Dilla in the studio and a looming Madvillain, clad in signature mask and mixer. A couple documents of an overturned car and collapsed home depicted the ghostly spaces–remnants of vibrant life and color–which populated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Perhaps the most striking, though, was a simple photo of a boy jumping head first into a deep blue body of water, the ripples sprawling to the contours of the frame.

10 years of Mochilla

Last year, Los Angeles-based production group Mochilla released Timeless, a trilogy film series documenting three concerts performed in L.A., early 2009. For these concerts, Brian Cross and Eric Coleman shined light on three composers who have helped influence and shape hiphop in different ways: the originator of Ethio-jazz, Mulatu Astatke; leftfield Brazilian arranger, Arthur Verocai; and a gutsy rendition of J Dilla’s beats arranged by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with a 60-piece orchestra. The films paint intimate portraits of musical exchange and live performance while paying tribute to some of the overlooked giants of the sprawling African musical diaspora.

In many ways Timeless is a culmination of themes explored in Mochilla’s films from the past decade. Their first project, Keepintime: Talking Drums and Whispering Vinyl (2001), and the follow-up live recording and DVD release in 2004, captured improvisational collaboration between L.A. hiphop producers and DJs, such as Madlib and J.Rocc, among others, with some of the powerhouse session drummers who inspired their sample-based work. Brasilintime: Batucada Com Discos (2007) also navigated the dynamic tension between an older generation of drummers, this time including legendary Brazilian percussionists and the new school of analog producer/turntablists.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kbwRoikF9o

But not only did Mochilla depict creative partnership between these two forms of percussionists, they also translated the cut-up aesthetic of the DJ and rhythmic momentum of the drummer to the inner workings of the films themselves. A pastiche of words, music, and imagery composed of still shots and footage drive forward the fragmented stories and striking moments of reconciliation that unfold on screen.

More recently, Cross set off to Columbia to document the Petronio Alvarez music festival, as well as collaborative work between Will Holland (a.k.a. Quantic) and Ernesto “Fruko” Estrada, who could be credited with forging the rootsy, Afro-Columbian take on salsa. Mochilla also shot a good deal of the footage for Banksy’s street art disaster film from last year, Exit Through the Gift Shop; caught wayward rapper Jay Electronica at the Pyramids in Egypt and recording in South Africa; and documented Nas and Damian Marley on tour. To put it short, the dudes put in work.

“I look more for the off-handed moments that can be sustained as photos in themselves,” Cross tells me over the phone, while working in the darkroom basement of his home in Los Angeles. “I’m trying to be iconic, but at the same time I don’t want to make publicity photos for record companies,” Cross says. “The videos, in a way, can be much more interesting because the fluidity allows for a certain kind of candidness.”

Brian Cross, hip-hop, and working through the diaspora

Cross, 44, has quite a history with such candidness in his work. Born in Limerick, Ireland, he moved to San Francisco’s Mission district in 1990 before attending CalArts in Southern California to study photography. While still completing his degree, Cross started writing what would become a landmark book on the emergence and socio-political implications of hiphop in L.A.: It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles (Verso Books, 1993). He is responsible for a number of iconic album covers of underground hiphop acts, from Freestyle Fellowship to Ras Kass and Mos Def. And Cross also made headway with more than a few magazine photo spreads and music videos throughout the past couple decades, including, notably, an arresting multi-textured piece for DJ Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” off Entroducing….. (Mo’ Wax Records, 1996).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=InFbBlpDTfQ

Looking over Cross’s ever-growing body of work, some primary themes consistently arise: Through the lens of hiphop, Cross orients a number of conversations, multi-generational interchanges, rhythmic confluences, and resistant divergences that weave through the diaspora of African musical traditions in the Americas. “There’s an anthropological side as well as an ethnomusicologist side to it—an attempt to make a map of the diaspora in terms of the music set by the present,” Cross explains. “The goal is ultimately to document in a way that is not strictly historical, but to let the past speak to now rather than the other way round.”

Michael Krimper I find an interesting dynamic in your film work and the documented live performances. On the one hand, you’ll take hiphop producers and DJs and pair them with percussionists, so as to put the contemporary in tension with the recent past that informed those contemporaries. On the other hand, there’s another element of featuring the music of those composers themselves. In what way do you think the past speaks to the present, as you put it, in both those approaches?

Brian Cross The idea is that somehow you don’t want to frame it off. In other words, for Keepintime, we didn’t want to get Paul Humphrey or Earl Palmer involved in something and frame off the dialogue in terms of, ‘Ok Paul, we want you to play the classic break on “One Man Band (Plays all Alone),” and now we’re going to layer something on top of it and develop a routine.’ But that’s not what’s interesting about Paul Humphrey. Yeah, it’s amazing he did that, and that’s why we’re choosing to work with him. But Paul Humphrey is somebody living and breathing; he’s our past, but he’s also our present. We want to open up a space of dialogue that is open to this series of works but isn’t limited to it.

For the Brasilintime project, we could have gone to Brazil and found obscure musicians who made amazing recordings and complete the narrative in the way that normal Eurocentric or Western versions of the story go: We bring them to Carnegie Hall, we do a concert, venerate them, and show them that Carnegie Hall is in fact the best venue in the world and is the most important place to see music. Whoa whoa whoa, back it up, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to go to there and engage, and try to actually build a bridge to the music. Let’s not have this as a one-sided sentence that leads in a single direction.

Generally, what we try to do is to de-center, to find ways in which we can open up, because, invariably, when you do these things, that’s when you make discoveries. Oh, Mamao and Wilson das Neves played on the Jose Mauro record, he died before the record came out, and then Dilla sampled it … that’s when you make these discoveries.

The musicians of Brasilintime (photo Brian Cross)

You know I don’t mind the Buena Vista Social Club [1997] record. Ry Cooder is a great producer and a great musician, but the film is fucking awful. It’s so fucking wrongheaded. And that director, Wim Wenders, is smarter than that, man. We’re people of the left, he knows better than that. Of course, everybody got involved and was super happy that these guys were finally discovered, and we can fully appreciate how beautiful their music is and the contributions they’ve made. But then Carnegie Hall is put into the equation; we don’t need to reaffirm the same set of cultural values. We don’t need that. Maybe that’s kind of a trite example, but I’m interested in trying to forge ways to talk about music, or to explore possibilities of music, that don’t fall into the same set of traps that most writing and television and documentaries about music fall into.

MK Yeah, there are standard methods for placing outsider music, or the marginal narratives of musical traditions and musicianship, into the mainstream narrative, one of validation internal to our own frameworks of understanding. As a photography and filmmaker, how do you approach a sense of the outsider, or the musician who is resistant, or peripheral to the grand narratives? What techniques do you take up in order to engage these musicians and traditions and make them visible for a broader audience?

BC Well, when it comes to Brazilian music, I’m pretty serious about my shit. I do my research thoroughly. I try to put my best foot into it. But other than that, it’s pure human relationships, man. For me, here’s my pet peeve: Too much of the stuff happening right now is done without real social engagement. It’s through the Internet, whether it’s digital digging, or people paying 800 dollars for an obscure record from Ethiopia or Angola, when you could buy a ticket to go there for the same amount. You should be going. That’s the responsibility. The responsibility is to go there, actually experience it, and see what works on the ground.

To go back to Ry Cooder, when he went to Cuba to make Buena Vista, that wasn’t the music people were listening to in Cuba. People were listening to Timba, and Timba is a completely different thing. I just think there’s a lot more to be gained from actually going to say, Baranquilla, and spending time there in the town—meeting people, buying records, meeting musicians—than there is from surfing the Internet and finding the latest hot cumbia re-groove from Argentina or whatever. If you’re serious about your shit you have to go there, engage on the ground, and see what makes sense. You like Wu-Tang? Go to Staten Island. Go for a walk around the projects. Go visit P.L.O. Liquors where all those songs came from. That’s the kind of compliment you need to be paying people. And there’s ways to do this that aren’t touristic. You can go and feel the vibe there. It might seem obvious, but it gets lost in these discussions.

MK Do you see that as your primary motivational force? That your projects are prefaced on this desire to travel, meet these musicians that inspire you where they live and make music; find out what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and be a part of it?

BC Well, the two things are kind of contingent. It’s cyclical somehow. I’m there, experiencing, helping to build bridges as best as I can, and I’m also thinking about photographs because that’s what I do.

MK How do you think this approach fits back into your earlier photo work in Los Angeles and your book, ‘It’s Not about a Salary?’

Clip from It's Not About a Salary (photo Brian Cross)

BC It’s an extension of it, really. You know the book is a very primitive thing, if you actually sit there and read it from cover to cover, which I did for a project a couple years ago, and I was highly embarrassed (laughs). But there was no model. It’s not like Can’t Stop Won’t Stop [Picador, 2005] existed, and someone had put that work down. I was 26, I had been into hiphop since I was 17, and I gave it a stab. And, of course, I put myself into a cultural debate that I didn’t know much about, for my own peril.

Ostensibly, the work isn’t much different. In that book, yeah, it’s about hiphop in Los Angeles, but I also managed to talk to Roy Porter, The Watts Prophets, Kamau Daaoood, Horace Tapscott, and a whole slew of other people who didn’t straightforwardly have anything to do with hiphop in Los Angeles. But in another way, they had everything to do with it. What has always been interesting for me with hiphop is that it has this historical reach. That’s what I tried to bring into the book. There’s definitely things which I don’t agree with now, and suppositions that I made or thought what would happen which didn’t. But it was a critical moment, right before The Chronic [Death Row, 1992], which I think was really a world changer.

The amazing thing about the golden era of hiphop, as they call it now, that era up to ‘95 or ’96, is that it was incredibly inclusive music. There was Japanese Koto, all sorts of rhythms from the Caribbean, rock, jazz, funk, you name it. That sourced people into record stores in different ways. The categories didn’t make sense as they did previously. That’s the magnetic lure of it. Somehow, hiphop allowed this extraordinary ability to look at previously recorded things and make them work in the present. For me, that was a critical modernist moment, or as the prevailing discourse has it a post-modernist moment—the collage and montage.

MK That brings up another interesting point in your work: the idea that when listening to hiphop not only is the origin of the break or the sample concealed, but also the artist’s background is concealed. The identity of the artist is mystified. Would you say that your projects aim towards making visible the musician as a person rooted in an environment or social setting?

BC The two-sided sword of the invention of youth culture is that it posits a kind of energy and dynamism to what we call youth. The problem is that the way it’s commodified is made contingent on the exclusion of anything outside youthful values or youthful thinking. I don’t agree with that. And if you look at the music of the diaspora, it’s not there. These kind of generational fishers don’t exist in other traditions of music: not in Latin, not in African-oriented music, and in my understanding of European folk traditions, they’re not there either.

While I find aspects of youth admirable, it shouldn’t ever be considered an exclusive category. For instance, David Axelrod is in his late 70s, and he has as much to contribute, and as many interesting things to say now as he did when he was 30. The thing is we’ve consigned him off to a category as if he doesn’t exist. And that seems ridiculous to me. I mean James Gadson still has fire now as a drummer just as he did when he played with Bill Withers. Why would we decide that he no longer has importance? It’s not like people have stopped listening to Bill Withers. But that’s how our music culture works. We fetishize the appearance of youth, but we’re not entirely clear on the implications of that. So, I like the idea of putting the person in the room if I can. For inclusivity, it has to be that.

And we have to get past the old ways of thinking, too. When I was first doing this, it was all super secretive. No one was supposed to know what your samples were or where your drums came from, because that was your tool kit, and if everyone had the same tool kit, it wouldn’t be interesting anymore. But I don’t buy that. In the end, there’s a deluge of information out there, it’s what you do with it that’s important. Your understanding and ability to manipulate the history is what’s important.

James Gadson (photo Brian Cross)

MK Even when you put out ‘Keepintime,’ I imagine that people worried that you would unveil the alchemic creative process, otherwise covered up, behind a hiphop record.

BC It goes back even before that. Take the video I did for DJ Shadow’s “Midnight In A Perfect World.” It plots out a series of concerns that I’m still interested in. You know, Earl Palmer is in there, and the sample is from a David Axelrod record. And they didn’t clear the sample. Shadow was terrified that Earl was going to recognize the song. But Earl didn’t even remember David Axelrod the person, let alone the record (laughs). They weren’t hits! Earl wasn’t sitting around listening to Axelrod records. But if you’re going to be too scared to talk to him, we’ll never learn anything from the guy. And then he shows up, and we’re transported to a whole different world: New Orleans before World War II.

You could say rock n’ roll came from the soles of Earl Palmer’s shoes. He was a child vaudeville performer, a tap dancer, and he battled against Sammy Davis Junior, and a lot of cats from that era. But he was never the best dude, and he was always interested in drums, so he taught himself how to play drums. So, that shuffle beat, that swamp beat as they call it, which became the foundation of rock n’ roll drumming, came from a guy who’s a tap dancer in black vaudeville as a child, who figured out a way to transform his tap dancing onto a drum kit. Think of the multi-billion dollar industry that rock n’ roll has become, and we still don’t know these things. We have to sit down and talk to these guys to find out these stories.

If It Fits in the Backpack: 10 Years on the Road with Mochilla
Thru 06/30
Peek Gallery @ The Summit SF

An earlier version of this article was published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Blu's commissioned mural on the side of LA's Geffen was promptly removed after completion.

The first retrospective on the history of graffiti in an American museum has proved immensely contentious. (The very first retrospective worldwide was at the Fondation Center in Paris in 2009, “Born in the Streets”). A couple months ago, Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and spur for the graffiti exhibition, commissioned a mural from Italian graffiti artist Blu on the side of the Geffen. When Blu painted a critique of the cycle of money, violence, and war, Deitch had the controversial mural promptly removed. Censorship was a strange way for Deitch to preface an exhibition tracing the contemporary history of unsanctioned graffiti art.

Placing a show called “Art in the Streets” in a museum is also strange, if not something of a paradox. Hence the clunky title of this article, Art in the Streets in a Museum.

More recently, a few writers have pointed out a commercial conflict of interests. To curate the exhibition, Deitch hired Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose, both of whom have close ties to an increasingly lucrative marketplace where in many ways graffiti’s gripping aesthetic is commercialized.

In addition to these tensions, I haste to mention the abundance of conservative lash backs and policing frustrations: mostly concerning the horror that vandalism and hoodlums should be celebrated in a museum, in addition to the fear that graffiti has spiraled in the vicinity around Geffen’s downtown location, and finally, the anxiety that the exhibition will convert more of Los Angeles’s susceptible youth to a lifestyle of graffiti and crime. With all of the ink already spilled, what more can I say?

Perhaps I should mention that a great deal of the art in the exhibition is pretty good. In entering the spacious Geffen building, I immediately noticed something typically absent in art exhibitions. Excitement. Enthusiasm. A huge block letter masterpiece spelling out “WOW!” at the entrance (shown above).

I came to gather that the colorful works covering the walls, installations placed throughout the building, many films from the likes of Spike Jonze and Tony Silver’s Style Wars, Henry Chalfant’s and Martha Cooper’s documentary photography of the early days of New York subway graffiti, and various pieces of ephemera actually mattered to the people visiting the exhibition.

Some of the installations sought to produce an immersive experience of bringing the streets into the museum. “Street Market” by Stephen Powers, Barry McGee, and Todd James is a clustered array of rotted buildings and thin alleys that evokes the decay of the urban environment in the last few decades. Piles of trash and empty beer cans are strewn about. Tags cover the sides of the claustrophobic buildings and metal fences which surround them.

Swoon’s elaborate paper and glass sculpture, made out of the basic materials of stencil work, played with light and shadow. The dramatically set work called attention to the fleeting nature of graffiti–an ephemeral form of art that is typically buffed just as quickly as it makes its appearance in the city streets and infrastructure.

A more trite example of this immersive tactic comes from Neckface who installed a dark corner alleyway, littered with trash, and even a fake sleeping homeless man on the floor. But it is possible that someone else planted the homeless doll there, as if there could not be any more lack of subtlety. There’s even a scrawled Neckface tag on the black wall and some ghostly sound effects which gurgle from hidden speakers. Immersion quickly degenerated into the artificiality of a Disneyland-like spectacle.

One of the more transporting spaces was a room dedicated to the bizarre work of Rammellzee, the late graffiti artist, toy maker, and avant-rapper who teamed up with Basquiat for “Beat Bop” back in 1983. Ram wrote what are perhaps the earliest manifestos of New York letter-based graffiti circa the early 80s golden era. He connected graffiti’s pseudonymous form to medieval calligraphy and conspiracy theories regarding cryptic secrets hidden beneath the letter and number.

Unfortunately, copies of those manifestos were not present in the recreated “Battle Station“–a space that resembles Ram’s one time flat in Manhattan–where a great deal of galactic sculptures, neon lit and heavily armored, hang ghostly from the ceiling. It is a trip into the embodied psyche of one of graffiti’s more peripheral personalities.

Banksy, of course, also gets a spacious room all for himself. His work suggests a critique precisely of the tension of bringing street art into the museum. For the centerpiece of his work, Banksy asked local high school students to tag panels in a range of vibrant colors. He then framed the panels in what resembles a tri-partite stained glass window of a Church. Near the bottom is a stencil of a figure kneeling in prayer to the tags.

Banksy steamroller and stained tag window, credit Billyburgwick.

A great rupture explodes between the work and the audience, and the distance between them stretches far in the sanctified space of the museum. At the other end of the room, a security camera guards its nest of baby security cameras and unhatched eggs. Near the middle, a steamroller looms near as if warning us of the onslaught of the commodification of the medium.

The question still remains: What do we lose when we rip street art from its natural world in the neglected spaces of the urban core into the carefully planned and articulated space of the museum? Is graffiti the sort of art that can retain its meaning in a strictly aesthetic form?

At least the documentary footage and photography, even some of the installations, helped orient us back to the natural origins of graffiti.

Much of the exhibit was predicated on the idea of inserting graffiti into a grander narrative of art history, primarily I would say, as some sort of marginal descendant of Pop Art and maybe even of some of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, such as Dada. I suppose it was a necessary choice on the part of the curators. In order to legitimate street art in a museum, it has to make sense within the historical narrative of what is considered museum art.

But I would have much preferred a framing of graffiti that focused more extensively on its internal narrative outside the boundaries of, and at times at odds with, the historical trajectory of contemporary museum art.

A room upstairs traced the different temporal stages of graffiti’s development: 1970s New York subway art and Los Angeles cholo graffiti, the gallery scene in the 80s, and graffiti’s infectious spread to other parts of the country (San Francisco, Chicago) as well as to other parts of the world (Paris, Sao Paulo). Also explored was how graffiti influenced skate boarding, tattoo art, and some realms of street fashion.

1970s New York: Lee Quinones and Vaughn Bode

Surely, for more than a few “Art in The Streets” mattered negatively. The scourge! Vandalism celebrated! Property crimes not condemned! These are the people still convinced by the argument that graffiti, in its pure unsanctioned form as vandalism, can never be art. Why you ask? Because it damages property! These are the same subtle rhetoricians who then go on to insult graffiti artists’ intelligence. What a world.

I wonder why it is so important for these critics to dismiss the artistic status of graffiti on the basis of its illegality? Is the value of art still, or has it ever been, so powerful that it should be based on its legality? I imagine not. Graffiti is illegal and art. Let’s move on in the conversation.

Art that transgresses property rights and the bureaucratic institutions that grant permission is problematic and intriguing enough in its own regard. We need to start raising questions about the symptoms in our cities that have generated graffiti. What is happening to our public space? Who has a right to this public space? Do our laws regarding property rights, in the public and private spheres, require revision? Is vandalism ever tolerable? At what point do we draw the line?

Oh, and let us not forget the incontrovertible broken windows theory. No matter how many times the problematic research has been called into the doubt, and severely interrogated, the beast keeps on rearing its ugly head.

A fairly crude formulation might go like this: There’s a domino effect instigated by graffiti. Once social and parental order has broken down in a neighborhood, a.k.a. there’s apparent graffiti everywhere (the paradigm broken window), then all sorts of crimes will arise from the spoiled crevices of that moral decrepitude. First robberies. Then drugs. Murders and rapes will soon follow.

Here’s some choice selections from the LA Times Opinion section:

– “The exhibition honors such alleged high points in graffiti history as the first cholo tag on the Arroyo Seco parkway and the defacement of L.A.’s freeway signs, without the slightest hint that graffiti is a crime, that it appropriates and damages property without permission and that it destroys urban vitality.” [link]

– “It might have been possible to mount a show that acknowledged the occasionally compelling graphic elements of urban art without legitimizing a crime. Such an exhibit wouldn’t include glamorizing photos of freeway, subway or L.A. River vandalism — and would unequivocally condemn appropriating someone else’s property without permission. “Art in the Streets” does not come close to that standard.” [link]

– “I say that if it hangs in a museum, or is put up on a building with permission, it can be art. But if it’s put up on my garage, it’s vandalism.” [link]

To those who fear the purported rise of graffiti in downtown, I would like to know to what extent the murder rate has increased in proportion to those graffiti tags. And to those who think that graffiti “destroys urban vitality” or amounts to urban blight, I would ask why a blank wall is any better than a tagged wall?

If it is purely a matter of aesthetics, and nothing is better than something as these minimalists contend, then it would be consistent to also condemn public advertisements and ugly street signs. Perhaps cars also. Indeed, we should strip our public spaces of any mark of human life.

And let’s please make a distinction between graffiti on your “garage” and graffiti in public space: in the alleys behind Melrose, across the concrete banks of the neglected L.A. River, on a trash dumpsters in MOCA’s parking lot, over the monstrous jeans ads on the Sunset strip. There is a difference, and it is about time we start discussing these issues seriously.

But these critics, despite their lack of creativity, underscore an important problem with “Art in the Streets.” The exhibition simply does not directly address the illegality of graffiti. We see pictures of early Los Angeles cholo tags on the river, huge throw-ups on billboards, a collection of photographs from the New York subway heyday, and yet, not so much a cautious discussion of the idea that graffiti is unsanctioned and illegal.

It is as if Deitch and his team of curators tried to wipe the illegality clean out of graffiti.

Yet that illegality and subsequent criminalization of graffiti is nonetheless tacitly lurking in the exhibition. Infamous LA graffiti artist, Revok, who features work in “Art in the Streets,” was recently arrested for his vandalism and sentenced to 180 days in jail.

A billboard masterpiece from Revok.

There’s also not so much of a discussion concerning the fact that for the most part black and brown youth from economically depressed neighborhoods initiated graffiti. This may be the only visual art movement in the history of the world that was created, developed, and self-fashioned by teenagers. Let alone teenagers who had close to nothing. Teenagers who responded as they could to the disillusionment and failures of the post civil-rights era–who were directly ignored by new institutional policies of Reagan’s ‘benign neglect’ towards ghettos country-wide. Is this not an important facet of the internal narrative of graffiti?

That is good preparation for reducing graffiti to an aesthetic of stylized pseudonyms, geometrical patterns, wheat-pastes, and ideas that just happened to occur in the street–ready to be spliced from its natural environment to be placed on museums walls, or in an advertisement campaign for Nike.

For some time, at least, sanctioned graffiti art will retain the residue of its edge, like a badge of its once dangerous and rebellious past. But eventually, that past will decay, and the market will have appropriated yet another fearless movement into its ever expanding reach over every small facet of everyday human life. Here come the steamrollers.

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.

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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/

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. — Susan Sontag

Last month the lunar eclipse fell on the winter solstice for the first time in nearly 400 years. If you were in the northeast of Sarah Palin’s great America, like me, then the onset of heavy clouds preparing for a torrential blizzard and more to come, might have blocked your view. Not to worry — Wonder in the face of the cosmos, forever beyond and other, can be achieved at any moment with the right sort of word, image, sonic frequency, or combination thereof. Ah yes, it’s about time for another cosmic rundown.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9t8Oex9BpQ

Hydra favorite The Soft Moon, one sonic incarnation of Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Luis Vasquez, released his self-titled debut in December to welcome in the winter solstice. Influenced by the cryptic melodies of post-punk and krautrock’s motorik beat as much as Afro-Cuban polyrhythms, Vasquez channeled an array of eerie hypnotism into this whirlwind of a record. The Soft Moon taps into the raw underbelly of the cosmic — a cold and lonely desert wind blowing over soft desert sand — where the resonance of some fetid and unsalvageable mourning climaxes in the dirge of a sublime dystopia.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE3uqVRGQHY

After watching the introduction to British director John Akomfrah‘s stunning documentary on the spiritual frontier of afro-futurism, 1995′s Last Angel of History, I searched everywhere on the internet for the full version. All I found was a $300 copy of the dvd from Icarus Films. Much love to you Icarus. But my research was not in vain: while trying to manifest some search bar destiny, I uncovered a surge of dusty and quite edifying mid ’90s literature on rhizomes, rhythm, and outerspace: Erik Davis’ “Roots and Wires” and Mark Dery’s “Black to the Future.” So who has the missing link?

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4A3YSjWwCc

To indulge in the luminescent side of the cosmic I’ve been rocking Cut Copy‘s sophomore effort, the sprawling Zonoscope. The Australian band — who are about to go on a world tour – expanded on the catchy new wave/disco hooks and gushing arpeggios of their debut record, In Ghost Colors, for a sound that expands pop at its border zones and ventures into wholly satisfying out-there territory. The closing track, “Sun God,” clocking in at 15-minutes, is an incredible trip into the heart of the ero-tech. For more from the Cut Copy vaults, I recommend the “So Cosmic Mix” for a blend of rock, disco, and scrapped electro new wave, sure to send you into the juicy flesh of the void.

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I’m not sure how I stumbled upon this collaboration between filmmaker David Kaplan and game designer Eric Zimmerman: a mesmerizing concept film called Play, commissioned by the Independent Television Series as part of Futurestates. In Play, immersive videogame worlds — layered within each other in an endless chain of avatars like a multi-tiered Inception dream world where you don’t even know who is at the source of the dreams — confuse any coherent notion of the real.  I was hooked immediately after pressing, yes, the play button. What if the point of a game is to lose yourself? To forget the rules and come out, if you’re good enough, transformed into something other? What if the stakes of losing mean that you simply and utterly lose yourself? I’m damn excited for the near future (isn’t it always the near future?) when the game-film will emerge in all its sound, artistic glory.

Lee "Scratch" Perry in the studio

The studio must be like a living thing… The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine by sending it through the controls and the knobs or into the jack panel. — Lee “Scratch” Perry

Automatic supersonic hypnotic funky fresh / Work my body so melodic / This beat flows right through my chest. — Ciara, “1, 2 Step“

When Sarah Connor first tries to escape from Kyle Reese — her bodyguard baby-daddy from the future — in The Terminator, Reese recites a distinction between human and machine in order to woo her back into his arms. He quips: “Cyborgs don’t feel pain. I do.” Reese’s statement both comforts Sarah and increases her terror of the Terminator, a being that does not share her vulnerability. The cyborgs of James Cameron’s Reagan-era dystopia not only do not feel pain — they feel nothing at all. The consequences are disturbing. We learn that the machines become so intelligent that they overturn their original programming, emancipate themselves from human control, initiate global thermonuclear war, and — as if things couldn’t be worse — try to exterminate all human life in the radiated haze of the post-apocalypse. Apparently, creatures without feelings degenerate into systematic violence rather quickly.

Cameron’s portrayal of artificial intelligence captures a persistent fear that haunts much of our art and thinking about advanced technology in the post-war period: the fear of our helpless subjugation to the destructive potential of our mechanical and digital tools. But I’d like to point to another way to view our relationship to technology, one that focuses on our creative use of machines to produce sensual effects. While machines don’t feel, we certainly use them to construct and guide our own feelings. I’ll call this sphere of creative production ero-tech, from the ancient Greek words eros, for desire or love, and techne, for craft. This past year, the genre of ero-tech thrived in music, film, and literature.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqLETO_epi8

Cameron already understood the sensual powers of ero-tech in The Terminator. There’s a brilliant scene when Sarah hides in the club Tech-Noir, where the forces of ero-tech, bumping out of the speakers in the form of pummeling new wave rock, come face to face with the destructive programming of the cyborg (death-tech?). This depiction of the supposed antinomy between the erotic and technological, as well as the subtle synthesis of the two, anticipated not only the Terminator sequel but also Cameron’s cinematic tour de force, Avatar, released just last December.

Avatar is the redemptive alter-future of The Terminator. While many critics have enthusiastically praised Cameron’s creation of the enchanting hyper-reality that is Pandora, they have torched the naïve storyline of a white man’s colonial immersion into an indigenous peoples’ way of life. But Avatar is more than a dancing-with-wolves fantasy. Rather than a return to the so-called “primitive” or pre-technological, Avatar‘s redemption requires a technological absorption into nature.

The pleasures of plugging into Cameron's Pandora (film still from Avatar (2010))

Pandora is a virtual environment, not so much a primitive or indigenous one, as fellow Hydra writer Jose Moctezuma illustrated in quite lucid terms. So the untapped natural environment on screen is, as it were, one of artificial origins and made of artificial material, planned and put into effect by a team of merely terrestrial design experts. There’s a cautionary tale buried in Avatar regarding how we might use technology differently. Rather than using our technology to manipulate the natural world and its resources, we may instead choose to “plug into” and embody nature. The enlightenment dream of mature humankind gaining control over nature is replaced by a sustainable dream of harmonious interaction, which privileges the intensity and visceral inexhaustibility of life itself.

Other films of 2010 played with similar themes of plugging into the world — a world no longer clearly demarcated by determinate boundaries separating nature from artifice. Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void explored the seductive qualities of technology and its psychedelic effects on consciousness. The fluorescent lights, skyscrapers, and subterranean nightlife of Tokyo disorient the audience as much as the drugged out protagonist, Oscar, who stumbles through a DMT-inspired vortex of a night. After being shot by corrupt police in a barroom urinal, Oscar dissolves into a disembodied dream state where a montage of hypnotic visions and coagulated desires grasp towards coherency without ever reaching it.

Film still from Nolan's Inception (2010)

Similarly, in Inception, director Christopher Nolan pulled us into surreal architectonics, where the built environments of cities, cinema, and dreams merge seamlessly into warped hyper-realities on the screen. We never find out whether we’re plugged into DiCaprio’s mind or just to Nolan’s imaginative reality. David Fincher approached the theme of the virtual-real blend in less intoxicating but just as stunning terms in The Social Network.

Much of this year’s music, crafted from an array of digital software, analog equipment, and acoustic instruments, explored the psychedelic effects of ero-tech. Warbling bass, deconstructed melodies, and electric noise galvanize Flying Lotus’ foray into bio-digital sonic programming in Cosmogramma. The record wanders into cavernous musical territory, where the intimate reaches of self and outer stretches of galactic funk coalesce in prismatic forms. Flying Lotus continually utilizes the corporeal effect of the low end to disorient the body and rush bursts of blood to the mind. This is head music to its fullest. Cosmogramma teeters on listenability, continually rerouting directions and breaking away from conventional expectation. But if you can manage to stay on board, Fly Lo’s disquieting space odyssey soars and beckons to fertile and vital paths of sound.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uCyv05SG1g

Hypnagogic pop is ero-tech too. Washed Out’s album High Times, released at the cusp of the year, channels the natural rhythms of both moon and ocean into rolling bass lines and blistering synth melodies. The record progresses in the motions of an electronic lullaby, coaxing sun-soaked bodies into submission under its vibrant rays. There are darker edges to the technological spirit of the beat as well. Forest Swords pulls more from the miasmatic spheres of televised noise and bleached surfaces to craft something of a sublime dystopia in Dagger Paths. The hypnagogic sphere of sound taps into a somnambulant energy source that hums along in the belly of organic life, where electricity breathes without discrimination into machine and animal alike.

But perhaps the clearest vision of musical ero-tech is the pinnacle Chicago house, self-titled record from Virgo, reissued this year to a generation of fresh ears.  Emerging in Chicago in the late 1980s was a genre of dance music — culled in underground warehouse parties in districts across town wracked by the de-industrializing economy — that borrowed from the mechanical poly-rhythms of Detroit techno, the emotional resonance of local boogie funk, and the lineage of Motown soul. Synth arpeggios whirl around bubbling bass lines, laboring to magnetize the ear and hypnotize the body. What Virgo induces is a sort of technological automation which rises in its frenetic repetition to the level of a spiritual chant; robotic movements come to generate with each thrust a wave of erotic output. The dance of the listener can be bodily and sexual just as easily as internal and intellectual — what dub alchemist Lee “Scratch” Perry calls a mental dance.

Film still from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)

Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid also pursued the quest for emancipation explored in the history of pop and soul music chained to the rhythm. Cloaked in references to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Sun Ra’s afro-futurist arkestra, Monae plays the part of an R&B cyborg set on the path of humanity’s final liberation. The cyborg digs allow Monae to transgress stagnate gender and genre conventions that tend to circumscribe the artistry of black female songstresses. But her robotic enthusiasm often sinks into a flat performance, conceptually appealing but emotionally cold, not quite rising to the ero-tech mastery of Grace Jones.

More successful than Monae in programming life into machine music are Emeralds and Actress, who let fluctuating rhythm dissolve into electric surges of energy, plugging us into a state of guzzling wonder.

Emeralds – “Now You See Me” (from Does It Look Like I’m Here? (2010))

Actress – “Maze”  (from Splazsh (2010))

Music journalist Dave Tompkins explored the relationship between machine and voice in his book on the history of the vocoder, How To Wreck a Nice Beach. Tompkins, in his inimitably bugged out writing style, cleverly traces the creative usurpation of the vocoder: Originally built as a tool to scramble voices during World War II, the vocoder became the musical weapon of choice for avant-garde musicians experimenting with electronic pop compositions in the 1970s, and the feverish electro of black funkateers in the 80s. These musicians more or less learned how to play a weapon in order to disembody their voices into a sonic buzz and croak–the sounds of a humanized robot.

Kode9, or rather, the British philosopher Steve Goodman who moonlights as both a dubstep producer and the labelhead of Hyperdub, explored similar reconfigurations of war technology for creative purposes in Sonic Warfare: Sound, Effect, and the Ecology of Fear. What many military sonic weapons aim to produce, a crowd controlling dread in an audience, is deconstructed and reimagined in the use of acoustic force in dub, jungle, drum n’ bass, and other bass heavy electronic music.

Gary Shteyngart’s satirical and moving novel Super Sad True Love Story also criticizes what seems the automated movement of the tech-era towards Deleuze’s nightmarish warnings of the society of control. Super Sad takes place in the New York of the near future where books are smelly novelty items, hipsters are pushed out to Staten Island, and America’s collapsed economy culminates in a police-state takeover. Handheld computer-phones called apparats guide the desiring and status seeking lives of the story’s inhabitants, an unwieldy bunch wracked by loneliness and a festering urge to live forever.

Samsung's i8250 "Beam" cell phone, released in 2010.

In Super Sad, an unlikely love story develops between an older Russian-Jewish, second-generation man, a comedic alter-ego of Shteyngart himself, and a recent college graduate Korean-American girl. Strangely, the sexual attraction the man has for the girl seems to parallel the sort of seduction new, dazzling technology tends to induce on its consumer body. Her body is clean and young, sexy and virile, just as our machines glow with an aura of possible intimacy and indulgence.

How far will the eroticization of technology go?

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)