What I can do

CONTENT: PAST>PRESENT>FUTURE

Just got done listening to the Lessig and was pretty impressed at the way he feels about the struggle between owning and sharing cultural material. I say "material" meaning everything that is produced in both a open source or proprietary manner, but is then instilled in some facet of culture as a physical OR conceptual entity. Some examples would be an iPod as a physical object or and iPod as a cultural landmark.

My own work. I use personal (extremely so, though it is "lessened" by the fact that it's uploaded to an online community) photograph owned solely by the personal who photographed the image. This is how I make my living recycling images that (unless greenlighted by the owner through Flickr's creative commons partnership) I cannot sell. Material I CREATE cannot then be reintroduced back into the places it was taken from because I did not create the original. I have considered this, and will most likely keep producing until I need to address that issue (I must at least consider it).

All content produced will the end goal of being sustained is self aggrandized content. EX: A work (PRESENT) is more important than the work that it borrows from (PAST) i.e. the reason for its creation; A work (PRESENT) must aim to be recognized by prospective additions (FUTURE). But here's a question: after the first generation of change to the original work, how do we define the importance of various successions on what we know the current version to be?
How do we define presidents? What are the greatest successes in the civil rights movements?

WHAT CREDITS ARE NECESSARY TO FURTHER OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE POINT WE ARE AT NOW WITH THE CONTENT WE PRODUCE WITHIN OUR SOCIETY?
Is it crucial to consider the length of time Michael Jackson has owned a certain Beatles song or who he sold it to and when?... sure, if your interests lie in royalties. The current system of how we frame items in our culture (again "items" being both tangible and non-tangible concepts, though a physical object is easier to identify) is through a capitalist market. That is to say the reason we have 100+ year copyrights is because it places them in a vague position of HOW they can be used in the future, but assures one thing: WHO created them.

Notes and Conclusions about ARARAT

I had stepped out when Ash announced our specific task and was informed were are supposed to write a blog entry on the movie. With these vague instructions I asked myself "Why would Ryan want us to see this movie. He obviously thought it was related to the class." As a heading and guide to the notes I began to take I wrote "HOW DOES THIS FILM USE SEMIOTICS OR SYMBOLS?" The following is a series of notes (that parallels the timeline of the movie) I took and a explanatory blurb as to how they are relevant to our class' conversations.

NOTE -The old man (David) wears a uniform (official, inspector, questionnaire, regulator. He asks questions and let people talk).
EXPLANATION *His role is that of narrator, but in a way that he sets up the situation for the characters reveal themselves.

-During the mothers lecture at the museum there's a symbol in the back of the room that is spotlit. It is of a young man reaching upwards and has other characters knelt beside him.
*This could be an embedded symbol for Raffi as a man coming of age and becoming independant and trying to define himself independently of those near him.

- The scene of the director and assistant talking to the artist in his studio (now realize its the set and the artist might be the director of photography or someone with a vision of how the movie should be shot).
* This made me think that the film placed a parallel between an artist and social upheaval. They (artist and community) are two modes of resistance and change happening at the same time.

-The scene that Ari says you couldnt see Ararat from this point is when I realized that there were various media used to represent an idea or event in time, could even represent a feeling.
* Medias used by different characters
Gorky=paint
Director= film
Raffi=story (both talking to the camcorder during his trip and retelling his heritage in the airport)
Ari=history/research/"fact" (I have an additional point to add to this later see "%%" below)
Actors (Ussher and Bey) and Celia= they had their own personal ideologies to explain their own "histories"

-Scene where Raffi is held up in the airport w/ the film might be another way of describing a "story" the way of explaining through information combined with narrative.
*The words in the film clue you into the tactic of multiple way to process the events that happened in the past. "Story of Raffi and Celia" Raffi corrects his mother and says dont call it a story.

-There's a scene where a village woman is translating "Ussher's" words to the boys to go find help, but how well does this idea or concept the physician is trying to convey translate.
*Metaphor for how actual events get processed through many things including time, cultures, technologies, etc.

-The "behind the scenes" setting and shots acted as a backdrop telling the "truth."
*Pulls one in and out of what's real. Subversive.

%% IMPORTANT
-The scene in the bookstore where the young girl confronts her stepmother about her father's death addresses the issue of memory and encoding. The mother says "Even if I could remember it the way you wanted me to, I doubt I could"
*Even though she's a historian she relies upon the information others have left for her, leaving a wide amount of subjective slippage. What does it say about her conclusions about Gorky and others when she has trouble sorting out her own personal memories.

-In the interrogation room in the airport Raffi's video camera is pointed toward him yet is in vcr mode so it's playing the shots he got in Turkey.
* It's a mirrormirror on the wall in that a camera is meant to capture the likeness of a person, yet the image playing of Raffi is that of the place where he went for answers to his own identity. (dont know if I explained that correctly)

I have other thoughts but I am waaay past 100 words...In short this film was a multichannel/level attempt to show that:
a)there are several ways to describe histories
b)memory and retrieval of this information is based upon the way it was packaged (this is also VERY true in neurobiology)

Response to Miller's, Pictures for Rent

This article is an intersting view into the niche of stock photography as an example of how photographs can act as semantic currency. This is because what is contained in a picture is heirarchical, and these subtopics can be exploited when combined with other ideas/media of related content.

I found the artistic interpretations of artistic commentary of stock photography particularly interesting. Why "Post-human" (the piece with the 4 seperate men on the telephone next to a photo of a woman reclining on the telephone) works is because it plays to the inherent taxonomy of the social language within the photographs. The use of the "invisible/cordless" communication lines of the telephone connect all of the subjects (of which the 4 men are grouped yet seperate, and spatially equal to the woman). Once this connection is identified the roles of the figures are considered with the men being "executive" (mysoginistic) and all vieing for space (or attention) from the woman who is portrayed reclining in a bikini (suggesting her work-role affords her time to relax while others work).
All of the specificities contained in a photograph are somewhat fluid to a certain extent, with larger headings identifying formal qualities. Special interest groups can sift through stock photographs by identifying the formal qualities within the photo (man/woman, # of people, location, etc). However the details color the specific message within the particular event being "documented." And this type of photograph can play on traditional framing and composure to focus content.

The reference to Irving Goffman was interesting in that he deals with social roles and the masks we adopt in an attempt to include ourselves socially, at least from his book "Presentation of Self in Everyday Life." So I view this as relating to the gestures and objects having imbued with social connotations.

Response to Lupton/Miller and Hadden

I believe that symbolism and mass deception was the dominant force in deceiving the german people into accepting the rhetoric of the Nazi party. Having said that, symbols can be a catalyst to allow for an emotional or contextual/cognitive understanding of ideas that might not be able to be coveyed through speech. An example of this is the self definition of the swastika itself that was stated in the article. By pairing the idea of the swastika having a noble and national pride, with the agenda of dominance over culture and fascism, the Nazi party was able to associate the to without directly stating the association;simple juxtaposition.

C.S. Pierce "How to Reason"

This article seems to parallel a psychology course I took over the summer called “Learning and Memory.” I took the course to understand how we interpret images and encode experience. As we were introduced to the course there were many examples of how we learn, the most notable being Pavlovian response, which is esentiall what Pierce is getting at. The bulk of this response will be pairing of experiments and phenomena to Pierce’s inferences.

His reaction section is interesting in that one phenomena described in the class was related to victims of armed robberies. In almost all cases of armed robberies the victims (those who interacted w/ the assailant) had trouble describing the physical features of the purpetraitor or even what color clothes they were wearing, but could identify the smallest detail about the weapon the criminal had bradished. This is because they were reacting, they were not processing on a cognitive level, but simply focusing all of their implicit energy on the task at hand.

I enjoyed his description of certain symbols existing in several forms. One example I can think of is by reading aloud a list of spelled out colors ie “red” “blue” etc but they are colored nonmatching colors a blue “RED,” purple “YELLOW.” What’s going on here is two forms of processing combined, the semantic symbol of language pulling up a subject that exists in our visual realm being combine with a visual cue that can be described in a vocal (back into semantic) manner.

Though I found the reading pretty consistant of how I know psychology and logical philosophy to work, I am often weary of artist as a psychologist or delcaring too definatively what is happening certain works of art. I think there is more here than Pierce can descern with psychology.

Thoughts on K. Neilson's "Image"

Any image is a documentation. It is somehow an attempt to encode, represent, symbolize, or explain a desired concept. Much like as in a picture, an image uses composition and content to reveal a percieved (whether "accurate" or not) event that is grounded in real world cues. Neilsen talks of these lankmarks of understanding, saying "The icon is seemingly linked to the world by way of an inextricable and inexplicable recognition between visuality, experience and image, a recognition that we may perhaps never fully apprehend." That is to say we can subconsciously processes the provided information in images and though we may come only to a tentative or understood conclusion about their meaning, we have evolved to automatically sift through and put the pieces together automatically.

I do agree with Neilsen and her classification of various types of informational communication, however, concerning sight-based images it is simple to break down the meta-states she lists into "present" and "non-present." Again using photographs or digital based work, we know that the two-dimentional configurations infront of us are simply chemical compounds or a series of code to create a composition, but we are able understand what is being depicted as visual material apart from it's source being that of a computer screen or a photo or a canvas (Ittleson, Perception of Nonmaterial Objects).

The quote Neilsen uses from Régis Debray that "there is 'no degeneration of the natural into the artificial, of the true into the false'; 'it is a question of man's relation to artifacts from the very beginning' (Debray 1996, 166)" can be seen as equivalent to the human construct of beauty. It is not the object itself that holds the character of beauty, but rather the placement of the perception of beauty unto the object, as Ittleson explains, "beauty is a nonmaterial aspect of a material object, but is typically experienced as being a material property of the object. One does not cherish the internal sense of beauty, but rather the beautiful object. The object may be a painting, a play, a novel, a dance; it may also be a scientific theory or a mathematical proof. It is the beautiful object that seduces us, possesses us, and ultimately controls us." This is very similar to the idea of semiotics and language that "car" means what it does only because we ascribe the lingual term to the physical and perceptual object. So though much of the information we understand exists and is rooted in material archive, our ability to percieve the metaphysical concepts (i.e. emotions, social behaviors, idea) is what truly defines an image.

Daniel Bennett

Ittleson, William H. "The Perception of Nonmaterial Objects and Events" LEONARDO, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 279–283, 2007.