Media Burn

Ant Farm's Media Burn intervention was a successful demonstration of just how modern media is a manufactured phenomenon. Certainly a lot of thought was put into the symbolism and the level of satire that guided almost every aspect fo the performance. I do have some criticisms, however, specifically that it has the feel of an over-elaborate joke that drags on for too long. It is, perhaps, an extension of my reaction to events like pageants, parades, awards ceremonies, or which Media Burn pokes fun at, so perhaps on that level the artists got it right, even where I think they got it wrong.

Barbie Liberation Front

The Barbie Liberation Front was an organization that caused a significant cultural jamming intervention in 1993. Having purchased many Barbie dolls and GI Joe action figures, the group switched the voice boxes from a pair of dolls (one from either group) and then surreptitiously placed them onto store shelves. Needless to say, customers who purchased the toys were surprised to find gung-ho, combat ready Barbie dolls or effeminate GI Joes that were more interested in shopping than shooting.

The group's intention was to call attention to the glaring gender stereotyping with which the American public was indoctrinating our children with. The Barbie doll, for instance, would occassionally say "Math is too hard!" and, of course, the GI Joe action figures were unabashedly aggressive in their speech. Information cards in the refurbished packaging directed the customers to call news desks, thereby spreading knowledge of the event even further.

While the Barbie Liberation Front is effectively defunct, many of its members moved on to conduct other interventions along an activist bent. Mike Bonanno, a member of the BLF, became involved in gatt.org, a web site that parodies the World Trade Organization. (and it's predecessor, the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) The web site was so successful at tricking its target audience -- international business interests -- that its authors were invited to speak at several conferences around the world. Needless to say, the opportunity was used to further the parody by portraying themselves as WTO representatives -- and, ultimately, pranking a number of people at a conference into thinking that the WTO was shutting down because it had finally realized the damage that was being done by it on the rest of the world.

Sources:
Sonic Outlaws, Craig Baldwin, 1995
Pranksters Sink the WTO, Yes! Magazine, 2005

Quantification of "Natural Features"

Hollis Frampton's premise that "a film must be about whatever appears most often in it" is a deceptively simple premise, and I must confess I was skeptical at first as to whether the technique would truly prove insightful. Having applied this method to my evaluation of Gunvor Nelson's Natural Features, it occurred to me that the most prominent element of the film was the repeated image of expanding blotches of dark or light stains.

The way the stains appeared suddenly and spread at accelerated rates reminds me of the sort of visual distortions I'd experienced in migraines I'd suffer. When I was in grade school I suffered a moderate frequency of such migraines. In my case, the migraines consisted of flashing, spreading areas of indistinct light, colors becoming too bright for me to focus squarely on things in my field of vision. I found the imagery of the faces "bleeding" off into areas of expanding shadow over light to remind me very strongly of this.

The other elements of the film seemed to build on that. The audio was jarring and inconsistent, sometimes too quiet and sometimes too loud. With the sort of migraines I suffered, sound was also a problem during the episodes. The strange overlapping of images and outlines seemed to feed my hypothesis; visual disruptions like those caused by migraines to recognize faces where there are only vague, resembling shapes.

James Benning

James Benning proved himself to be a man of many talents with his math presentation. In general, there tends to be a sizable divide between the worlds of math, science and engineering, and the worlds of art, literature and philosophy -- it's unsurprising that the Art and EMS buildings are at opposite ends of our own campus, after all.

In my experience at both ends of the campus, most math instructors treat their area of expertise as something sterile... a large, artificial construct that hangs over the rest of the world like a suspension bridge over a river. Benning doesn't treat math as something purely abstract and didactic; rather, he finds ways to tie it to human insight and reality. For example, his discussion on the history of the number zero in Western mathematics was definitely intriguing and insightful in illustrating how our society has been (and still remains, perhaps) in tension between it's newer scientific traditions and its older religious ones.

I have to admit that, while I had a hard time focusing throughout the whole demonstration (for me personally, none of the math Benning presented were new concepts), I was impressed at how well he grabbed the attention of the audience at large. The feedback I've been party too has been overwhelmingly positive. I suspect that Benning managed to introduce our class to a world most of them never thought would carry any interest or insight for them. This is no small feat, and it is a credit to Benning as an artist that he was able to reveal an aspect of the greater world to us.

The Spiral Jetty

The one aspect of the film that really grabbed my attention, as an element seemingly out of place or with indeterminate meaning, was the "mud, salt crystals, rocks, water" refrain. The narration walks the whole compass, cardinal and interposing directions, twenty times in all, associating each direction with the same refrain.

My first impressions of the refrain and its exhausting repetition were that it was prolonged, superfluous and somewhat tedious. Having read Smithson's essay explaining the process by which he envisioned the Spiral Jetty, I've come to suspect that this was an example of him constructing a resonance. The spiral is very carefully constructed and appears virtually flawless, both when viewed in its entirety and and when its paths are traced at personal range. Walking the jetty means tracing a pattern that spirals inwards on a circular path, forming layers of still water and rocky pathway. By the time one reaches the center, one is completely surrounded by the layers -- looking out in any direction means that one's eyes must cross the layers of the spiral.

In many ways, the refrain seems to be an attempt to echo this notion that the jetty is a demonstration of layered repetition. Smithson equates the layered rings of the jetty -- which one spies in 360 degrees from the center point -- with the layers material that suffuse the the jetty and its larger environment. Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water... these can be considered both elementary substances of the jetty and of the lake and its shore. While the jetty is an artificial construct, it still belongs to its environment because it was made from its environment, and Smithson envisioned it from thin boundaries that permeate the vista of the Salt Lake -- sky and earth, lake and shore, mud and water, cracks and solid ground. These boundaries are viewed through the thin boundary that separates one's self from the environment -- perception itself as a permeable boundary. This is perhaps one of the realizations that Smithson was hoping his audience would discover in exploring and contemplating the Spiral Jetty.