December 2008 Archives

I just started reading Lev Manovich's new book Software Takes Command. He released a draft comprised of more than 80,000 words online in late November, explaining that, in line with the subject of his book which is always in process, he wanted to think about his text as something that could forever be reshaped. I'm not sure how I feel about reading the entire text onscreen, but we'll see how it goes. For now, though, a few pages in, what I appreciate already is the distinction between software as invisible mechanism and software as catalyst for contemporary culture. Lev, who teaches in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, where he also directs the Software Studies Initiative, promises to trace this history, from the mid-1990s to the present, and I'm curious about his argument, in part because I experienced this history in a very particular way. How so?

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I recently got an adorable Flip video camera. It's tiny, about the size of a cell phone, and will record about an hour of decent video. I thought that once I had it I'd be transformed into a video blogger, documenting my life on camera all the time. It didn't happen. Why not?

To answer that question, I could compare myself to someone like Susan Mogul. For several decades, the LA-based videomaker has been chronicling her life and the people around her in a series of absolutely compelling videos. Her tapes, which include the feminist 1974 classic Take Off, with its celebrated description of the dramatic effects of a vibrator, and the 1993 video Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary, a self-portrait built through the details of Mogul's LA neighborhood, both show just how powerful the first-person, homegrown ethnographic form can be. But Susan's work isn't simply about shooting lots of video. It's about something else.

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While everybody's talking about new media, Janie Geiser and many of her friends are returning to old media. "I just taught a course at CalArts on cantastoria," Janie said recently. Cantastoria? "It's a traditional form that goes back to cave drawings," she explains, noting that it was prevalent in Italy in the Middle Ages as an example of popular entertainment combining songs and large painted panels. "It's a form I really love," says Janie. She and her frequent collaborator Susan Simpson will revive cantastoria this Saturday night at the Velaslavasay Panorama as part of their activities with the nonprofit organization Automata, which they founded in 2004 as a way to unite their disparate activities and interests.

The evening will mark the beginning of the "Sight Unseen" series focusing on work that, for various reasons, doesn't get shown much. The event will include Jordan Biren and his project All That Passes Before You, Already in Ruins, which features video landscapes accompanied by live storytelling, as well as Perry Hoberman's project Denial Clinic, which combines 3-D projection and drawings, as well as Perry singing songs about about "frustration, loss and self-deception." But what makes these things so special?

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Movies by artists are often just plain weird. These films tend to ignore the basics of storytelling, and space and time become warped and illogical. In short, they don't make sense! And that can be - sometimes - a great thing.

Take Mike Kelley's odd film Day Is Done. The 150-minute musical screening this week at 7 Dudley Cinema is equal parts Lawrence Welk and Busby Berkley. It's High School Musical after four years of detention. It's a hypnotic, unnerving, strange and lurid audio-visual extravaganza made by one of LA's iconic artists, a man who played a green-tinged water imp in Bruce and Norman Yonemoto's video Kappa in 1986, and has explored the creepy edges of childhood with a host of collaborators including Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler.

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It's been a little over a week since Kevin Kelly's article "Becoming Screen Literate" appeared in the New York Times Magazine. I generally like Kelly's work - he blogs about technology on The Technium, posting thoughtful material about what he calls his "paradoxical relationship with technology." His Cool Tools list is the go-to place for unusual gadgets. And his Wired article in August 2005 titled "We Are the Web" was one of the first to articulate ideas around what's since been dubbed a Web 2.0 ethos. He described the shifts between a static Web and a more social space, calling them a revolution. "At [the revolution's] heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing," he explained, adding, "And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history." So far so good. With "Becoming Screen Literate," however, Kelly seems to take a giant step backward! Why?

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Los Angeles boasts an incredible history of visual music film art, from the groundbreaking work of Oskar Fischinger, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1936, to the dazzling visual experiments starting in the 1940s by the Whitney Brothers. Much of this extraordinary work was showcased in MOCA's Visual Music show three years ago, but this week's Filmforum presentation updates the genre with a program of short abstract videos from all over the world curated by MAD, a Madrid-based organization. The group's traveling festival is titled Punto y Raya, or the Dot and the Line, and selected projects are described as "no figuration, no narrative: just dot-lines moving on a plane." Not surprisingly, several featured projects hail from Los Angeles, including Chris Casady's Puddle Jumper, a dynamic piece visualizing pinball dings, whooshy atmospheric noise and the pops, clangs and drum flourishes that all add up to a fast-paced visual triumph. Mecanismo, by CalArts grad Joaquin (Kino) Gil, was made by looping images and sounds; the glitchy soundscape becomes a kinetic examination of black and white lines, planes and cubes in motion, moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space in very pleasing permutations. The 65-minute show features 13 shorts, each one exploring the possibilities of lines, dots, sound and motion, and overall, the program is a terrific overview of a burgeoning genre of film art. (Image: from Asperity, by Tom Jobbins.)