Overview of the seminar:

• Methods, grading, the seminar Wordpress site, weekly participation and presentations.

Useful Tools for Doing Research: For this Course and CCT

• Learn how to use Zotero for managing bibliography and data for references and footnotes.
• Georgetown Library Online Journal Search and Use of Journals with Etext Access (also with Off Campus Login).

Introductory Readings: Ways of Thinking about "Remix" and Hybrid Forms

• Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence," Harpers Magazine, Feb. 2007.
  [All writing has been an interpretive hybrid dialogic collage of language, sources, references, unconscious quotations, remix of inherited written culture.]
• Lawrence Lessig, Remix (Intro and Chap. 1). Pdf version, from The Internet Archive.
  • Lessig TED Video on copyright and creative culture (2007)
• Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science, pp. 1-29 | Interview about Sound Unbound at Gestalten (Berlin)

• Irvine, Introductory Essay: Hybridity/Remix/Dialogism (through Part 1)
• Irvine, Hybridity/Remix/Dialogism: Theory and Examples (Introductory Presentation; we will study the music examples later)
  

Examples and Case Studies for Discussion

• Generative combinatoriality in blues and jazz: music history examples.
• Hybrid and new combinations in technologies and media.
• Hybrid technologies creating new media forms: remixing image sources and genres in film: Avatar [Apple HD trailer | movie site], The Matrix series, Life of Pi
• Apple iPhone: hybrid combinatoriality: Apple site | Wikipedia |
  Henry Jenkins and The Convergence Culture Consortium |
• Examples from art, music, movies, TV, technology, photography (class discussion)

Key concepts from Media Theory, Postmodernism, Postcolonial Theory, and Globalization Theory

Learning Objectives:
Orientation to the Major Theories, Concepts, and Terms
Our beginning sequence of units will require some "front loading" of key readings across several disciplines to become familiar with the concepts, terms, theory, and major arguments that provide important models for investigating the central issues of cultural hybridity and dialogism.

The topics this week--globalization theory, media/technology convergence, and the network society--are closely interconnected, and are best understood in a macro-level overview first. You can then pursue these fields further as you develop your interests. Each topic now has an overwhelming bibliography of published research in many subdisciplines, which makes a top-level orientation difficult, but very necessary at the beginning.

Readings

Major Topics in Post-Colonial and Globalization Theory:

• Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
  Read chaps 1-3. (Excerpts from the first edition online: Intro | Chap. 3)
  [A very perceptive book on the processes behind globalization and culture. Begin reading now, finish by next week.]
• Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). Read Preface and Chapter 1.
  [Good overview of issues from the point of view of international communications.]
• Stuart Hall, "The Question of Cultural Identity," excerpt from Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, eds. Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, pp. 596-601, 611-623.
  [An important and clear exposition from a major founder of "cultural studies" on the question of identity formation in late- and postmodern societies. Hall states in this book chapter: "All modern nations are hybrids." A synopsis of arguments explaining why racial and class hybridity is repressed in the formation of dominant national and ethnic identities. Provides useful sociological tools for understanding current identity conflicts in a globalized, networked world.]

Media/Technology Convergence

• Henry Jenkins, "Introduction to Convergence Culture," excerpt from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NYU Press, 2008.
  • "By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, the search for new structures of media financing which fell at the interstices between old and new media, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who's speaking and what they think they are talking about." Jenkins, article in Vodaphone Receiver magazine, 2005.
• Anders Fagerjord, "After Convergence: YouTube and Remix Culture," in J. Hunsinger et al. (eds.), International Handbook of Internet Research, Springer Science+Business Media, 2010.

The Global Network Society

• Manuel Castells, "Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society," British Journal of Sociology, 51/1 (January/March 2000), 5–24.
  [A densely argued article; may be difficult at first because it assumes a whole background of prior research and debate. An overview of Castell's underlying arguments in his longer, influential books on the Network Society.]
• Bruno Latour, "Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist," International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), 796–810.
  [A perceptive essay that draws on the author's lifelong study of social-material networks written as a conclusion to a major collection of papers on the network society in the journal cited here.]

Case Study Examples

• El Anatsui as Artist in the Global Artworld (presentation) (Irvine): a look at a global cultural system and some of the rules and codes behind the production of a hybrid art form.
• The Google Art Project (part of the Google Cultural Institute): How can we interpret this platform in the context of global questions? How can (can?) a Google platform mediate the cultural function for different societies? Can it be a democratizing tool, leveling the field for cultures with fewer resources? What happens to the representation of cultural artefacts when represented in the structure of this database and interface system?
• Other examples for building out global networks of interdependence and dialogic combinations:
  movies (e.g., Life of Pi), music (global traditions, sounds, styles used as common resources by musicians).
• "Globalization" as filtered through dominant industries: the "World Music" category in the Grammys. Grammy site World Music nominees and award winners 1991-2012. What is "World Music" as a market category in the recording industry?

Begin Student Discussions (Wordpress site)

Discussion Topics
There is a lot to take in for this unit. Don't be discouraged if the ideas and problems seem difficult (they are). The value of the knowledge base formed by the approaches and research programs in these readings will become clearer and more understandable as you work with this foundation and return to them after more background in the course.

For your weekly writing, use the concepts and terms from two or more of the readings and consider one or two examples of cultural works or genres that are best understood from a global, convergence and/or networked perspective. There are many examples in music, all the arts, movies, and TV and Web content programming in which global conditions have enabled and hindered the production, distribution, and reception of works and expression. Or think through an example by researching the background of its network of conditions (economic, technological, political, social).

Some questions you could ask for specific forms and genres experienced today: Is "cultural identity" leveled or flattened or a more complicated situation by iTunes or other Internet distribution? What does distribution on Youtube mean? Is "globalized culture" hegemonic (reinforcing dominant cultures) or anarchic/democratic? Or both simultaneously? If cultures and societies are always already hybrid (comprising a mix of classes, ethnicities, language groups, subcultures), then why is there major resistance to accepting mixed identities in the world?

Readings:

Introductions, Lecture Notes & Discussion Topics (Irvine)

• Irvine, The Po-Mo Site: Postmodernism to Post-Postmodernism (overview of concepts and issues)
• Irvine, Postmodernism to Post-Postmodernism: Examples to Think With (presentation; we will discuss in class)

• Ihab Hassan, "Postmodernism to Postmodernity?" and "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism" (excerpt from his book, The Postmodern Turn [1987])
• "Postmodernity." Wikipedia article. (A decent account of major issues with bibliography.)

• Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." From E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Postmodernism and its Discontents (London and New York: Verso, 1988): 13-29. His first statement of the argument that appears in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
• Jameson, Excerpts from Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (Duke University Press, 1991.) [expanded argument from the earlier article]
• Jameson's arguments and assumptions have been very influential in the humanities. For a critique, consider the course of history that he assumes, and his determinist views of popular culture.

Ways of Describing the Post-postmodern: Post-Production, Always-Already Remixed

• Nicolas Bourriaud: An art historian and museum curator's interpretation of "post-postmodern" art:
  • Remix Culture as Altermodern (his exhibition at the Tate Britain, London):
    Bourriaud, "Altermodern Explained: A Manifesto" and Video Interview
    
  • Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002). (excerpts, read Introduction and last chapter, "Use of the World.").
    Our new production platforms--increasingly using or  modeled on digital production--allow an explicit awareness of new works being remixed like the post-production process in music, movies, and television. How can our current hybrid/remix era be described as "post-producing" what has already been produced/expressed?
• Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky): Remix philosophy in "The Secret Song" (video).

Reference and Supplementary Readings and Sources

• Postmodernism: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Mark Taylor, Moment of Complexity, excerpt from Chapter 1. (Archived copy.)

Examples: Artists' Practice as Embodying Theory

Dario Robleto

I find no use in locating myself in a "postmodern" moment because it is already a given. All I know is a chopped up world. I didn't have to ponder the potentials of that world as a generation of theorists and artists did. I am surprised when someone doesn't use a hybrid approach. What this moment will be about, what it is already about, will be pushing hybridity into new territory and laying a ground work for new conceptual thinking.

I am trying to utilize the techniques of DJ culture and electronically produced music because I see in them potential for reinvigorating artists in their conceptual and political concerns as well as on a material and scientific level.    --Dario Robleto, hybrid media artist

• Dario Robleto: Artworks and Essay: On DJ Culture and Sampling in Art
• Documentary on Robleto's materials and remix process (YouTube)

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science.

Mark Amerika, Professor VJ site: On "Source Material Everywhere" and remix/postproduce.

Moby:

Interview segment from PressPausePlay documentary. (On mixed composition and software production).

Moby on re-recording "Extreme Ways," the Bourne Legacy theme song, in his studio and with a classical orchestra: Hollywood and the music studio on the same digital platform.

Examples of postmodern and post-postmodern productions (for in-class discussion)

• Madmen: What genre is this? Retro-sendup, period drama, soap opera, nostalgia? History as a style.
• Wangechi Mutu: post-postmodern post-globalization artist?
• Avatar [Apple HD trailer | movie site]: hyperrealistic cinema, the cinema/film experience is now a continuum of filmed (photo-lens-based imagery), digitally edited, and seamlessly inserted CGI 3D imagery. What is the code/category of the "real" in imagery today? Do we care?
• Irvine, Postmodernism to Post-Postmodernism: Examples to Think With (presentation)

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• Discuss a popular culture example in its genre or category context that represents some of the issues in "postmodernism" or the era of "the post-postmodern" that we may be in now. How does the work act as a nodal point of prior and contemporary relationships, connections and assumptions (movie, music, Website, TV program)?
• Some examples to think through together in the seminar:
• What could we learn from describing a Hitchcock movie (North by Northwest, for example) as belonging to "modernism" (use of cinema canons, genre forms, etc.), and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as "postmodern" (mix of genres and period stylizations). Are Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix beyond "postmodern"?
• In the context of photography used as an art form and cultural history of the 1970s, how can Cindy Sherman's "Film Stills" project be considered "postmodern"? How would you describe Andy Warhol's use of photo-based imagery in the 1960s-80s (we will study Warhol in more detail later)?
• In popular music, does "modern jazz" (bebop, Parker, Davis, Coltrane, Monk) fit in with "modernism" or "postmodernism"? What about rock and hip hop? Are the general categories not useful enough? Consider Daft Punk's recent Random Access Memories as an example of the "post-postmodern" where musicians start from the premise that the contemporary musical encyclopedia is always already remixed, and the new statement has to take a position in that context.

Key Concepts
The underlying cultural principles of dialogism, intertextuality/intermediality, and appropriation are the underlying conditions for remix and cultural hybridity. Many currents of postmodernism are closely linked to a self-conscious use of these concepts, but the underlying principles function as a generative process like the grammar of a language, and are independent of any explicit awareness.

Intertextuality/intermediality and dialogism are not theories of influences, quotations, references, and explicit sampling, though we often start with the explicit or recognizable level to visualize cross-textual and cross-media relationships. As we'll see, this is only a small part of the "deep remix" of all cultural expression in any medium.

Learning Goals:
Understanding the core theories of dialogism and intermediality as a key to understanding the ongoing hybrid process of living cultures. Dialogism also helps to reveal that this process is a condition of all cultures, and not a feature that appeared with modern or postmodern culture. In fact, understanding these key theories as a grammar of culture also helps to understand why they are normally misrecognized or suppressed.  Intertextuality (the presupposition of a network of other works in any "text") is now redefined as intermediality, or the ongoing dialogue among many kinds of cultural expressions in any medium. A new work emerges within a network of prior and contemporary works, and we interpret expressions in a variety of genres that cut across our popular media forms--TV, Web, books and magazines, art works, music.

Readings: The Core Theory: Dialogism/Intertextuality

• Irvine, Introductory Essay: Hybridity/Remix/Dialogism (read Main Concepts and Part 2)
• Martin Irvine, "Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality". To appear in The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, et al. (NY: Routledge, 2014).
  [This book chapter provides a synthesis of key concepts and research methods from many disciplines that converge on the question of combinatorial meaning making for a re-description of "remix" in all its forms. Read the sections through "Remix+" for this week. We will work out ways to use these concepts for a analytical method in the course.]
• Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text" and "The Death of the Author."
  Foundational texts in the theory of intertextuality. Barthes inaugurated an approach to writing and literary texts as a system of relations, implicit dialogues, and cultural statements that required understanding the symbolic system as a whole, not the identities or intentions of "authors" or the simple unity of an individual "work." While Barthes saw the importance of meaning systems (the structuralist starting point), he did not have access to concepts and models for generativity and dialogism, which are needed to explain how meanings are produced in understanding and in creating new expressions in a continuum with prior and other expressions. For these principles we need to draw from Peirce and Bakhtin.
• Mikhail Bakhtin, Major Theory: Dialogism, Polyphony, Heteroglossia (major statements with commentary, Irvine)
  Bakhtin is the key theorist of dialogism/intertextuality. His model of the dialogic principle of culture is usefully extended to all media and forms of expression. You should work through some of the primary statements by Bakhtin, before using summaries (although the Wikipedia entry on Bakhtin is good).
• Julia Kristeva, excerpt from "Word, Dialogue, and Novel." From Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986]).
  The key essay and interpretation of Bakhtin that brought his work to a broader community of theorists in many disciplines.
• Daniel Chandler, "Intertextuality." A useful overview by the author of a popular guide to semiotics. The outline omits dialogism and the more important presuppositional foundations of intertextuality. Remember that intertextuality is not about sources, borrowing, or direct noticeable "influences."
• Gunhild Agger, "Intertextuality Revisited: Dialogues and Negotiations in Media Studies." Canadian Journal of Aesthetics, 4, 1999. [Good overview of theories as they apply to media studies.]

Supplementary Background

• Irvine, Introduction to Meaning-Making, Intertextuality, and the Cultural Encyclopedia (see sections 6-7)
  [This introductory essay on expanded views of semiotics provides a more detailed philosophical and scientific description of the principles we are working with in this unit and the seminar as whole.]
• Graham Allen, Roland Barthes (excerpt). Useful introduction to the ideas and issues in Barthes philosophy, semiology, and intertextuality.

Appropriation, Remix, Postproduction

• Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence," Harpers Magazine, Feb. 2007. [All writing has always already been a hybrid collage of language, sources, references, unconscious quotations, remix of inherited written culture.] (Revisit from Week 1)
• Clement Greenberg, "Collage" (1959). A classic article on 20th century "collage culture" or the "collage aesthetic," which carries over into music (jazz and rock) and awareness of popular culture post-1960.
• Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins." (1993). Google Books preview. A seminal essay on the post-modern assemblage and remix art genres, especially Robert Rauschenberg (whose work we will study later).
• Kirby Ferguson, prod., Everything is a Remix: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• Dossier on Appropriation in Art Theory (Major Statements) (Irvine)

Film and Video Examples: Case Studies for Recombining Genres & Styles

• Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982)
• Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Akira (1988)
• Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell (1995)
• Andy and Larry Wachowski, The Matrix (1999), The Matrix: Reloaded (2003), Matrix Revolutions (2003); Warner Bros. Matrix site.
  • Commentary on The Matrix:
  • Senses of Cinema Review: "What is the Matrix? Cinema, Totality, and Topophilia."
  • Film Comment Review of Matrix Reloaded
  • A Matrix for The Matrix (Irvine): The Matrix and the cultural encyclopedia
• Appleseed Ex Machina (2007) CG anime film and is the sequel to the 2004 Appleseed film, similarly directed by Shinji Aramaki, and was produced by Hong Kong director and producer John Woo.

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• Using concepts and models for interpretation in the readings, discuss a recent work (one that most of us would know) in its intermedial network of relationships with other works, presupposed expressions/works, genre codes, and conceptual types (as much as you can find of both historical and accrued relations and those part of our interpretive context today). Try working with the concepts in the readings and the idea of a work as a "node in a network" as discovery techniques. Try to go beyond explicit recognized quotations, samples, or references to other works, and map out the underlying system of codes and encyclopedic knowledge that made the work possible and allows us to understand it. The most important foundations of a work in how it has meaning for us won't be visible on the surface. Example: Some of the most powerful "influences" will be those presupposed works, styles, and genre conventions that an artist, musician, designer, writer, or movie director is rejecting, negating, subverting, or cancelling to work in a different direction. The new or different expression always presupposes what is already expressed: "new" or "different" is only possible in relation to what's presupposed. What makes a "new" musical expression/work sound new? Example: styles of things are very powerful in our culture's systems of meanings. How does a style (a way of representing, doing, expressing something in a systems of ways of expressing) work in its relation to other styles, how is it encoded for value, meaning, significance, and how is it a function of the dialogic/intermedial process that comes from?

Learning Objectives and Research Questions
Thinking about cultural production as an ongoing dialogic network when we consider the status of individual works. The modern legal regime for copyright and intellectual property is based on old concepts of "authorship" and the status of individual works and expression in tangible form as kinds of property. It derives from mainly 18th century philosophical and ideological concepts of individuality, originality, and ownership.

This week, we will do a top-level overview of issues in the post-digital environment, focusing on the question of authorship/ownership and fair use policy in US law, and think through some cases for the issues that they reveal.

Essential Reference Texts (Review for Primary Resources)

• US Code, Title 17: US Law on Copyright and Fair Use
• DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) (original bill) | Wikipedia summary of issues | EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Site on DMCA issues
• Bibliography on Copyright, Fair Use, Artists' Rights in Remix Culture (Irvine)

Readings: Background on Copyright, Authorship, Property, Fair Use

• Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2008). Read book or online versions.
  • This book, and others by Lessig, have encouraged a wide debate about copyright reform.
    Focus on sections Introduction, 1-5, 6, 9-10.
    Pdf version, from The Internet Archive.
  • See also: Lessig's TED Video on copyright and creative culture (2007).
• Peter Jaszi, “On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 29–56.
  [Excellent historical and cultural-theoretical overview; Jaszi is a colleague at American University.]
• Kieran Healy, “Digital Technology and Cultural Goods,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 4 (2002): 478–500.
  [Excellent brief overview of issues specific to digital cultural goods; good follow on to Lessig's book.]
• Nate Harrison, "The Pictures Generation, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in Postmodernity," Art and Education Paper, June, 2012.
  [Good survey of issues for appropriation art.]
• Fair Use Issues site, American University, Center for Social Media
  See background on the issues, Reclaiming Fair Use, addressed in the recent book by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use:  How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (2012).
  Google books preview: Read Introduction and Chap1. 1.
• Finish: Martin Irvine, "Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality".
  I've been discussing the issues raised in this essay with colleagues in law and policy fields. How can legal philosophy adjust to the knowledge about human expression that is well-established and recognized in sciences and disciplines outside of law? What do you think?

Reference Resources and Case Studies

Film/Video Documentaries

• Jeffrey Cunnard, "Making Art, Making Law: On Appropriation Art" (online lecture)
• Most of the useful documentaries are about music sampling:
  • Copyright Criminals (PBS): Youtube | PBS Site with background and clips
  • Rip: Remix Manifesto: Film documentary by Brett Gaylor with Girltalk (Greg Gillis) and others
    View film chapters (clips will be screened in class from DVD)

Case Study:

The Associated Press v. Shepard Fairey in the "Obama Hope" Image Case

• Shepard Fairey, Obama "Hope" Image (Wikipedia: incomplete but useful summary)
• Lessig and Fairey at NY Public Library on Remix and Appropriation Art (Video)
• Article coverage: "Lessig and Fairey on Art, Commerce & Corruption"
• Henry Jenkins and Evelyn McDonnell (USC) on Fairey and Artists' Rights: Part 1 | Part 2
• AP v. Shepard Fairey: Sources and Stages in the case (Irvine)

Other Significant Recent Cases

• Richard Prince: The Patrick Cariou Rastafarian photos and Prince's "Canal Zone" collage images
  Artinfo; NYTimes coverage of Richard Prince; Update on consequences (8/30/12, Artinfo)
• Google Books Library Project: book and document digitization project: Wikipedia overview | Google Books info page | NYTimes (9/10/09) | NYTimes (9/12/11) |
• University Libraries, Google partnership, and digitizing "orphan books" (books out of print, or copyright holders not available): see coverage: Hathi Trust Digital Library, Library Journal, Columbia U. Copyright Office.
• See NYTimes Reference Page on Copyright Cases and Issues

Reference and Resources:

• Creative Commons | ArtJournal discussion of digital rights and artists' creative rights.

Law References

• Harvard Law School, Artists Law Resources (see Appropriation Art section)
• Elizabeth Stark's course, "Intellectual Property in the Digital Age," Yale Law School (online syllabus) (excellent overview of legal issues with references and links to readings)
• William Fisher (Harvard Law School), "Theories of Intellectual Property."

Questions for Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• Can we redefine "authorship" and "work" ("expression in tangible form") in ways that correspond to what we know about collective and generative culture? How can legal philosophy accommodate the "always already" state of remix culture? How can artists' or any citizens' created works be allowed commercial rights as well as reuse in the common culture?
• Are current legal/economic issues caused by technological-media shifts (technology effects), and/or do these shifts simply expose combinatoriality and remix as normative in symbolic expression through media representations (digital) and software tools that implement these pre-existing features and functions?
• Digital Ontologies / legal ontologies: What is a digital media object? How can there be "copies" of identical digital files?
• Are there other models that provide for both an economic base and creative reuse in cultural production? How can we recognize the foundations of innovation and creativity as well as insure the foundations of an economic system that provides returns for both creators and owners of distribution and publishing industries?
  

Readings and Sources

• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Era of its Technological Reproducibility" (1936; rev. 1939).
  This is the more accurate translation of the title of the work known in the English-speaking world as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (html) (English trans., Harry Zohn, 1968). Compare both versions.
  Focus on sections: Pref., I-VI, X-XII, XV.
• Notes:
  Benjamin's title in German is "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" = "The Work of Art in the Era of its Technical (or Technological) Reproducibility."
  The first link above is to an excerpt from the new edition of Benjamin's writings (Harvard Univ. Press, 2003) with the revised title.
  Benjamin's essay is a famous starting point for a long series of debates about the role of mass technical reproducibility in culture--for both traditional cultural history and modern popular culture (with the development of photography and cinema). Benjamin was part of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist writers who were engaged in a serious struggle with Fascism and attempted to counter the possibility of state-controlled press, media, and popular culture. He was writing as at the time when World War II was beginning and Fascist capitalism and state-controlled cultural economies threatened to convert all media and cultural forms into tools of ideology and blind submission. He hoped that democratic uses of the technical media could lead in a different direction--but at the time he didn't know where or how.
  For further background on Benjamin's philosophy, see Philosophical Background (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): see sections 6-8.
• André Malraux, "La Musée Imaginaire (The Imaginary Museum)".
  Overview and excerpts. English translation unfortunately as "The Museum Without Walls", a chapter in The Voices of Silence, 1951). Malraux picks up the argument after World War II. Further implications of art and culture mediated through photography, and the assumption of a global "art encyclopedia" informing the modern concept of art and art history.
• Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) [Another copy.] (Selections: Sections 1-6, 10-11, 17-18, 24-30)
• Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations" (excerpt in pdf; requires GU login) (excerpt also in html version).
  From Simulacra and Simulation, 1981; English trans., 1988.
  This essay is often cited but seldom understood. It exemplifies Baudrillard's theory and style (full of rhetorical hand grenades and provocations), and needs to be worked through and critiqued. Important points are the view of mediated "reality" as interpreted through the code of "the real," which is a mediation and style of representation, not a transparent, direct connection with a non-mediated or pre-mediated lived experience (in all it's messy, chaotic complexity). Baudrillard's works forms a chain of argument that begins with Benjamin's essay.
  For background, see my presentation, "Mediation and Representation: Plato to Baudrillard and Digital Media."
• On Questions of simulation and representation (post-Baudrillard, post-Matrix):
• Seyda Ozturk, "Simulation Reloaded," Cinetext, August, 2003.
• William Merrin, "'Did You Ever Eat Tasty Wheat?': Baudrillard and The Matrix." Scope (University of Nottingham, UK), August, 2003.
• Irvine, Overview of questions and theories: Image and representation: Benjamin to Baudrillard (link)

Photography and the Real

• Cindy Sherman: Images on Masters of Photography site | Artcylopedia |
  Cindy Sherman is widely regarded as a main example of postmodern photography, or even post-photography. Consider the questions and challenges that her work raises about the photographic image, the genres of figurative representation (the portrait), and codes for gender.

Visualization and the Hyperreal (examples for discussion)

• CNN and the televisual: TV images as hyperreal ("as seen on TV" has more "reality effect"
• "Post-photography photography": post-film cinema (virtual cameras, optical flow technology, 3D virtual imagery)
• The Matrix series: development of bullet time, virtual camera, virtual frame rates, virtual point-of-view, combination of still and motion camera HD frame captures, green screen and software/CGI
• Optical Flow in film making (pixel continuity from frame to frame), fxguide site.
• The UC Berkeley "Campanile" film that opened up digital photo stitching and 3D modeling, inspiring John Gaeta and new technology for The Matrix films.
• John Gaeta's breakthroughs in CGI.

John Cameron's Avatar: The seamless flow between camera work and CGI: software and digital editing cinema.

For Discussion:
The Deeper History of "Optical Representation" (lenses, camera obscura, mirrors)

• "The Hockney-Falco Thesis" (David Hockney, artist, and Charles Falco, physicist) developed an interpretation of "optical realism" in 15th-17th century art through the use of optical devices (camera obscura, concave mirrors, lenses) from the late 14th century on. Optics enables a way o f seeing and representing, even for artist who didn't actually use the devices in specific works. This optical way of seeing established assumptions about "realism" in painting, drawing, and pictorialism. See the book and BBC documentary:
• David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Expanded edition (New York, N.Y.: Viking Studio, 2001; 2006).
  See reviews of book and issues in the New York Times; NY Review of Books;
  Lawrence Weschler's expanded essay, "Looking Glass Issues," (revisiting issues in his New Yorker article) on the controversy and issues surrounding the questions (excellent survey).
  Excerpts from the BBC Documentary: [1] [2]
• Charles Falco, Art and Optics (University of Arizona): Background to the research and hypotheses about optics.
• Consequences, hypotheses to test, validate, and revise:
  The common assumption about the imposition of monocular perspective as a Renaissance "scientific" principle for 2D representation isn't enough to account for the "leap" to optically "correct" representation after around 1400. What we have been calling "photo-realism" -- or re-modelling the sense of "realistic" representation on photographic images -- is actually a longer history of "optical realism" -- of which photography is a more recent implementation.

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

Image making technologies and everything photographic has always been hybrid and combinatorial. Questions: What are the cultural values associated with photography and film, and how do they continue to work in a digital era? Many of Benjamin's earlier questions about the status of photography in culture are being replayed today: we could replace the word "mechanical" with "digital" in his argument, and many of the insights come alive again. How do mediated images become "hyperreal" (in Baudrillard's sense): is visual mediation the mediator/medium of the cultural ideology of representation?

Appropriation Art and Pop Art as Case Studies for Dialogic Culture, Hybridity, and Remix

Pop art appeared at a moment when high and low ("popular") culture were circulating in new ways through the mainstream media and in galleries, museums, and art discourse. The era from c.1960-c.1972 saw explicit remixing, hybridization, and appropriation from all sources in art, music, design, and graphics.

As counter-arguments for art, where high-art values emphasized "uniqueness, originality," Pop artists used repetition, serial forms, mass media imagery, commercial mediums like screen printing; where high art institutionalized the myth of "genius, unique hand of the artist, the work of art as expression of an artist's soul," Pop artists removed most of the marks of an artist's direct "touch" and subverted expectations by hand-making paintings, sculptures, and prints to look like they could have been machine-made or "anyone could make it" knowing the techniques.

Activating Combinatorial and Dialogic Principles for New Forms
The remix of materials, mediums, sources, genres, traditions, histories, and subcultures that are part of the Pop Art story provide an important case study for the generative principles of dialogism and combinatorial rules within artmaking concepts. "Pop" principles of combinatoriality and a hybridity of means, materials and sources have remained a permanent way of working in contemporary art.

Warhol and other Pop artists raided the "cultural encyclopedia" and presented new kinds of imagery and works in a "high art" context that had never been done before. Pop de-aestheticized canonical art history, and aestheticized popular mass media imagery, commercial design, and commercial mediums. The rest is (our) history.

Readings and Resources

• Honnef, Pop Art, 6-26; sections on Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol
• Background readings for art and cultural history: first definitions of "Pop Art":
  • Lawrence Alloway, "The Arts and the Mass Media," Architectural Design & Construction, February 1958. [the article often credited with starting the notion of "pop art"]
  • Alloway, "Popular Culture and Pop Art," Studio International, July-August 1969: 17-21.
  • Richard Hamilton, Letter on Pop Art, 1957.
  • Pop Art Symposium (1962) with Peter Selz, Henry Geldzahler, Hilton Kramer, Dore Ashton, Leo Steinberg, Stanley Kunitz. Read especially the comments by Geldzahler, the main curatorial advocate for Warhol and the pop movement.
  • Hal Foster, "On the First Pop Age," New Left Review 19, January-February 2003.
    Interview with Foster on the main ideas in his recent book, The First Pop Age (Princeton Univ. Press, 2011).
• Working with the idea of "the cultural encyclopedia" and institutionalized "art history":
  • Eco, "The Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader." [see especially section III]
  • Irvine, Pop and Appropriation Art and the Encyclopedia (presentation)
  • Douglas Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins." (1980/1993). On Rauschenberg, the "imaginary museum" of art history for appropriation. Important essay in art history.
• Useful reviews of Pop and postmodern artists
  • Michael Kimmelman, "Art Out of Anything," Review of Robert Rauschenberg, Combines, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Times, 12.23.2005.
  • Luc Sante, Review of 1997 Rauschenberg Retrospective, Slate, 1997.
  • Current Critic's view of eclecticism and hybridity in art: Christopher Knight, LA Times, 11.1.2006.

Examples/Sources/Image Libraries

• Image Library (Irvine): Click on slideshow and full screen.
• Image Duplicator: The Roy Lichtenstein Site [amazing!]

Lecture and Discussion Notes:

• Understanding the Visual Art "Intertextual" System: AbEx/Pop/Minimalism : c. 1950-1980s
  Pop art in a dialogic relation positioned among (and against) Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.

Reference and Further Background

• Primary source articles and essays on the Pop movement (Pop Masters)
• See Roland Barthes, "That Old Thing, Art," on Pop art and the art history encyclopedia

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

Using the terms and concepts from the readings, discuss 2-3 works by a Pop artist in the 1960s-1980s for the methods of combination and hybridizing used. What categories are combinable? What difference do shifts in medium and inclusion of non-"high art" materials and subject matter make to the meaning of the works?

“Pop art is liking things.”
"It’s just taking the outside and putting it on the inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside."
—Andy Warhol

Warhol and the New Argument about Art: A New Generative Combinatoriality for Making Art
Pop artists mobilized postmodern ideas and strategies: combining high and low culture, appropriation, and new materials reframed for the artworld. Warhol, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and many other artists in the 1960s-70s shared several parallel strategies that are now the common language of contemporary art. Here we'll focus on the concepts of hybridization that motivated Warhol's work, especially in his print making, paintings, and sculptures. (His films and photography are equally important but are best approached in a focused way beyond this brief introduction.)

What happened with Pop and Warhol was a new operational  theory of art: art was no longer a question of what could be determined by a traditional aesthetics and connoisseurship (class-based insider knowledge). Pop exposes the fallacy of believing that there can be obvious properties of art embodied in individual artworks that define the boundary between "art" and "non-art". For Warhol, "Art," continuing as an artworld production, was being redefined with many more kinds of arguments and positions, including irony, parody, pastiche and campy excess, as codes for making hybrid works based on popular media sources. Warhol used repetition and serial form (repeating images in different ways in a work and across works)--methods associated with industrial and machine processes for mass reproductions question core cultural values: originality, authenticity, uniqueness, the artwork as an expression of an artist's mind, soul, or intentions. Without stating so explicitly, of course, he grasped intuitively the function of combinatoriality and dialogism in making something new, the dialogic hybrid, and the way it can change the cultural conversation.

In the 1960s, popular media based on photography--TV, advertising images, movies, magazines--dominated attention (and they still do today!). Mass cultural imagery came bundled with popular consumer culture beliefs and values, which had been defined as the opposite of "Art" (capital "A" artworld art) in established culture for over a hundred years. But what if popular culture could be used as a source to merge with art history? Warhol de-aestheticized art history (as a body of imagery and history of prototypes to be reinterpreted) and aestheticized the "non-art" of popular culture imagery by selection, appropriation, and re-contextualizing. A transmedia collage provoking a new view of the recombinations.

Warhol’s friend Henry Geldzahler, then the curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recognized that the artist’s two great innovations were “to bring commercial art into fine art” and “to take printing techniques into painting. Andy’s prints and paintings are exactly the same thing. No one had ever done that before. It was an amazing thing to do.”

Warhol expanded the combinatorial and generative rules of art so that ideas, concepts, media, and techniques formerly excluded from the category of "art" were brought into a new art argument. He is also considered a "conceptual" artist with close connections to Dada and Duchamp, and can be considered a leader of the move toward conceptual art, positioning art as more about the artist's idea rather than the material artefact assumed to be made by an artist's craftsmanship. An art concept can be embodied in many kinds of material form (or lack thereof), including performance, ephemeral works, and time-based works.

So many art practices and genres today are Post-Warhol--street art, many kinds of hybrid and found imagery works, photography, appropriation art genres--in that they presuppose the ways of making art arguments with new materials that Warhol set into motion. Warhol understood the generative and combinatorial principles of art making, the ongoing dialogism of the art conversation, and mobilized the principles for his time and place. For those who take the time to get inside what he was up to, Warhol remains a "case study" for discovering how new hybrid forms are possible in specific cultural contexts. With the multiple cultural and institutional shifts that parallel the reception of Warhol and appropriation art through the 1980s-2000s, the concepts, techniques, and practices of this approach to art is now international, global, and taken for granted as part of the working methods of all artists.

Image Library: Warhol and Pop Art [click on slideshow icon for fullscreen view]

Readings: Art Historical and Art Theory Contexts for Warhol (read in this order)

• Metropolitan Museum, NY, "The Warhol Effect: A Timeline."
  A good overview of major events in Warhol's life, accompanying the Regarding Warhol: Sixty Years, Fifty Artists Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Read for contexts and connections to other artists.
• Richard Dormant, "What is an Andy Warhol." Review essay, The New York Review of Books. Oct. 2009.
  This essay reviews recent books about Warhol and also presents important conceptual details about Warhol's reuse of images and removing the hand of the artist from production. Selection of images and conceptual recontextualization became the primary "act" of the artist.
• Arthur Danto, "Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary," From After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997): Chap. 1, pp. 3-19 (New York Times excerpt). (Pdf version here).
  Danto has an influential argument about the accepted logic of "art history" and how Warhol and 60s artists reject the "mission" to fulfill the accepted history. It's a good launchpad for considering the "end of art" debate in postmodernism, and the question of what comes after the grand narrative of art history ended (in one ideological form) and got reinvented (in another). Danto does not argue that art has, or will, end, but that the master narrative of art history that drove the concept of art until the 1960s had ended in its validating and justifying function within both the artworld and popular visual culture.
  
  Danto expanded on his earlier argument about the conceptual basis of Pop Art in "Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1974):
  • "what they [post-Duchamp and NY pop works in the 1950s-1960s] are about is aboutness, and their content is the concept of art. The artists might as appropriately have written a paper like this, called it The Transfiguration of the Commonplace--and counted their effort a contribution to the philosophy of art, the line separating the two having all but vanished."
  • 
    Ben Davis, "What Arthur Danto Meant to Me." ARTINFO, Oct. 30, 2013. [Accessible appreciation of Danto's theories of art history and "the end of art."]
• Thierry de Duve, "Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected," October 48 (1989).
• Hal Foster, "Death in America," October 75 (1996). [On Warhol's Death and Disaster series and contexts of interpretation.]

Warhol Resources and Documentation on the Web

• The Warhol Museum | Warhol Foundation | Warhol at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art)
• | PBS Bio | Warhol ranking in Artfacts.Net's artist ranking list
• Warhol on Artnet (works available in galleries) | Warhol Articles and Interviews (Warhol Stars).

Post-Pop, Appropriation, and Hybrid Art, 1980s-2000s:

Irvine, Presentation Background on International Post-Pop, 1980s-2000s (review first)

Jeff Koons

• Artist's Office Site | Gagosian Gallery Information
• Art works in museum collections: Broad Art Foundation
• Recent press and critical coverage:
  New York Magazine, Jeff Koons Is the Most Successful American Artist Since Warhol. So What’s the Art World Got Against Him? (5/2013)

• LA-Museum of Contemporary Art, Background Guide for the Murakami Retrospective (2008).
• Arthur Lubow, "The Murakami Method," New York Times Magazine, April 3, 2005. [See slide show.]
• Carol Vogel, "The Murakami Influence," New York Times, April 6, 2005.
• Michael Darling, "Plumbing the Depths of Superflatness," Art Journal, Vol. 60, No. 3. (Autumn, 2001), pp. 76-89.
• Adrian Favell, "Tokyo to LA Story - How Southern California became the Gateway for a Japanese Global Pop Art Phenomenon." Kontur 20, 2010. Arhus University, Denmark. [Good article on the reception of Murakami and other Japanese post-Pop artists in the US.]

Wangechi Mutu: African-American-Feminist Hybrid Art

• Wikipedia background (lame, but basic background).
• At the Guggenheim Museum (Germany), Awarded "Artist of the Year" by Deutsche Bank.
• [See images in presentation].

Video Documentaries: Warhol (Andy would have loved YouTube!)

• Andy Warhol making a digital painting of Debbie Harry at the Commodore Amiga computer press conference (1985)
• From the PBS Modern Masters Series:
  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 (Billy Name and Solanis shooting) | 10 (after shooting) | 11 | 12 |
• Screening in class: Chuck Workman, The Life and Times of Andy Warhol - Superstar (1990). (Info: IMDB)

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• Choice of topics: using the terms, concepts, and background in the readings (1) Choose a work (or group of related works) by Andy Warhol as a case study for thinking through the productive concepts of dialogism, hybridity, and intermediality that we have studied so far. Read the Art Historical Readings contexts for background, and refer to ideas in at least one of the arguments in the Major Art Historical studies readings. Do a bit more background research on the work(s) you have selected for the dialogic relationships involved in making and understanding the work(s). (2) Do a similar reading and interpretation of 1-3 works by an artist who exemplifies the development of post-Pop hybridization (Koons, Murakami, or Mutu).

Background theory, history, and context:

• Martin Irvine, "The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture" (pdf). See also the thumbnail list of images cited (pdf). Chapter in The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood. London/New York: Berg, 2012: 235-278. This is a preprint pdf of the book chapter; for personal use only. This book chapter represents a work in progress toward my own book on street art and city.
• Image libraries (Picasa albums):
  "Work on the Street" Images
  Shepard Fairey
  JR installation project in DC, Oct. 2012
• Martin Irvine, "On Keith Haring's Visual Language," Presentation in panel discussion at the Brooklyn Museum for a public program during the Keith Haring Retrospective, Brooklyn Museum, June, 2012.
• Martin Irvine, "Street Art and the Digital City: Communities of Practice in the Web 2.0 Environment" (Presentation for the Theorizing the Web conference, University Of Maryland, April 9, 2011)
• Bibliography for the Study of Street Art: sources, history, theory, background (Irvine)

Sources and Readings

1980s: First Wave of post-Pop "street art": Jean-Michel Basquiat & Keith Haring

• Jean-Michel Basquiat
  • Basquiat: 2005 Retrospective museum exhibition: began at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
    Website for the show "Street to Studio: Street to Studio, The Art of Jean Michel Basquiat" [for kids]
  • Review of Basquiat at Brooklyn Museum ("To Hell and Back") (Jerry Saltz)
  • New Yorker Review of "That Eighties Show," at the New Museum, NY (New Yorker, Jan., 2005) [includes Basquiat, Haring]
  • Basquiat in the Art Market, 2000 (Artnet)
  • Art works in galleries on Artnet
  • Images of works in Image Library
  • Basquiat Retrospective at Fondation Beyeler: Interview with Sam Keller (video)
  • Basquiat Retrospective, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010).
  • Film: The Radiant Child (directed by Tamra Davis, 2010). Preview clip.
• Keith Haring
  • Background at the Haring Foundation
  • [Includes good archive of essays, articles, and Keith Haring's Journals. See Exhibition History.]
  • Retrospective: World Museum Tour
  • Whitney Museum Retrospective Exhibition, 1997, Review (Artnet)
  • Art works in galleries on Artnet
  • Keith Haring, The Political Line, Paris, 2013. Video of exhibition installations. (Martin Irvine) Museum website.

Street Art, 1990s-2000s: Documents and Sources

• Time Magazine photo essay: Art of the Street
• New York Times: Street Art 2004: "Lawbreakers, Armed With Paint and Paste"
• Wooster Collective, NY: Street Art Collective [many sources and examples]
  
• Artists
  • Banksy (London)
  • Barry McGee: Art21 background and video interview
  • WKInteract | Videos of hybrid street art in action
  • Swoon: NY Street artist | NY Times Video Interview | Examples of work | Video interview (Gestalten)
  • Shepard Fairey: ObeyGiant site | Studio Number One
  • David Ellis: David Ellis/BLU video
  • JR: | JR site | TED Prize talk | JR: Women are Heros
• Documentaries (will view segments in class)
  • Style Wars: the documentary film and website.
  • The Run Up: Street art documentary (trailer clips).
  • Bomb It!: Graf and street art documentary (clips).

• Beautiful Losers: First major curated museum show of street art; traveled to several museums, 2004-2005. [Unfortunately, the museums have not maintained the archive of this exhibition.]
• Washington Post Review, July 10, 2005.
• The Catalogue for the exhibition (DAP) [description only]
• Tate Modern, London: Street Art, 2008.
• Regime Change Starts at Home, Street/Studio, and Street/Studio 2.0: Exhibitions at Irvine Contemporary.
  Note: The Regime Change exhibition (Nov., 2008) brought Fairey's famous Obama Hope portrait to Washington, and the acquisition of the work by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the first street art acquisition by a Smithsonian museum and the first portrait of President Obama added to the nation's collection.
• Shepard Fairey Retrospective, Supply and Demand (2009-20019), opened at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
• Viva La Revolucion, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2011)
• Art in the Streets: MOCA Los Angeles (2011). Blog for the exhibition.
• Barry McGee: Retrospective at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston (NYTimes); Museum site.
• Shepard Fairey and Jasper Johns: The Insistent Image: Recurrent Motifs in the Art of Shepard Fairey and Jasper Johns (2014) at The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts.

Magazines and Websites Devoted to Street Art and Hybrid Art

• Juxtapoz Magazine | Swindle Magazine | Beautiful Decay Magazine
• Wooster Collective and associated site Streetsy | Brooklyn Street Art
• Brooklyn Street Art (Brooklyn and beyond)
  

Interviews and Videos

• Beyond the Streets: Interview with Patrick Nguyen, editor.
• Trespass. A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art. Carlo McCormick, Marc and Sara Schiller, Ethel Seno (Taschen Books). Overview of art and artists covered.
• JR: TED Prize talk | JR: Women are Heros | JR site |

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

Using the background readings and drawing from the concepts we have been developing, consider one of the exemplary street artists above to discuss in the context of the approaches we have been using in the course so far. How do you see the hybrid genres and media being used by street artists in a dialogic situation with cities and the complexities of visual culture in urban environments?

Photography is How We See, and Always Encoded in Specific Genre Frames

Photographic Genres as Ways of Seeing:
We never experience "photography" (in the abstract): we experience photographs, specific kinds of photographs (genres) framed by their uses and reception contexts (social and material).

Optical (Lens) Experience: The Social-Technical Assumption of Representation:
After around 150 years of being socialized into ways of seeing with photographs (and all lens based media, including film and video), and before that, becoming "optical" since the 15th century through paintings and drawings made with optical aids (lenses, camera obscura, mirrors), we arrive at an important social-technical intersection with digital photography. We have to learn how to look at photographs as social and cultural forms of representation to see how they work, and how we see and think "photographically".

Photographs and ritual use:
The genres and functions of the photograph have continued through many technical shifts: the iPhone and inexpensive digital cameras have confirmed Bourdieu's view of "the middle brow art form" in the millions of family and personal snapshots taken everyday, records of highly ritualized events, poses, contexts, views that conform to learned beliefs about what's pictorial, a portrait, the camera-moment.

From optics to pixel grid:

Photography has always been formed from hybridizing/new combinations of technologies and methods: the invention of photography involved optics (lenses) + chemistry + material support = photographic image.

Since the introduction of digital photography and the digital darkroom (Photoshop), we have seen a shift in thinking about/with photographic images:

from what the lens "sees" (principles of optics, focus, perspective, light sources), and metaphors of capturing, registering, mechanical means

to what a screen can display (digital pixels, imitation of camera lens point-of-view, focus, and perspective).

Now many images are made to look photographic, and are still called "photographs," whether a lens, or many lenses, were used in the making of the image.

Intersections of technologies and institutions:

Photography has always been linked to developments in technology for the film medium and cameras as optical light capturing devices. But the interesting history is found in the many conceptual uses of photography, the institutions and social organization of the medium, and the mass adoption of cameras in the middle class for "taking pictures" of family and domestic life.

What important ideas can we extrapolate from the social and technical history of photography, from early cameras to digital cameras and camera phones (iPhone)?

Post-Photographic Era: The Era of Ubiquitous Photography

Some observers and theorists of photography and film are talking about our current era being "post-photographic": we live in a culture trained to read photo-produced images (and images as judged or assumed to live up to photographic expectations), yet many of the images we experience every day imitate photographic features without being produced by (or solely by) a device with a lens and recording medium. What are the implications of living "post-photographic"? Is this an extension of the notion of the hyper-real? With photographic "realism" still providing the codes for "the real"?

Background and Sources

• Irvine, Introduction to Photography (presentation)
• Photography to Post-Photography [Resource Page] (Irvine)
  Review "Exemplary Photographers" (and photographers' examples in The Photo Book)
  
• Key Issues in Studying Photography: "Making a Photograph" vs. "Taking a Picture" (Irvine)
• Review Modern and Contemporary Photographers in The Photo Book: Araki, Arbus, Baldessari, DiCorcia, Dijkstra, Fuss, Goldin, Gursky, LaChapelle, Leibovitz, Mann, Mapplethorpe, Prince, Sherman, Sugimoto, Tillmans, Wall, Warhol
  
• Taylor, Moment of Complexity, 125-143
• Image Libraries: Post-Modern Photography | Contemporary Photography (Irvine)

Introductory Readings, Theory, and Statements on Photography

• Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Statement on Photography" ("The Decisive Moment" theory), 1933.
• André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly, 1960. (Focus on pp. 6-9.)
• Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," from Image, Music, Text, 1964.
• Rosalind Krauss, "A Note on Photography and the Simulacral," October 31 (1984), especially pp. 55-62.
• Christian Metz, "Photography and Fetish," October 34, 1985.
• Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art.
  • Extracts from Bourdieu, Photography. See especially Part 1, sec. 2. pp. 73-75 on "The Social Definition of Photography.
  • Main points: with the commercial success of small portable cameras in the 1950s-60s, following the adoption of photography in middle class families, photo taking became a form of socialization in middle class domestic life with many kinds of ritualized events and genres (portraits, snap shots, private events, travel, etc.). (This social foundation of ritualized uses precedes the more recent ubiquitous use of photos made with portable, inexpensive digital cameras and smart phones.)
• Douglas Crimp, "The Photographic Activity of Post-Modernism," October 15, 1980.

Supplementary Background

• Further context and interpretation for Pierre Bourdieu's Photography: A Middle-Brow Art:
  Bourdieu's book is one of the most important statements on photography from a socio-historical viewpoint. These articles are a good review of Bourdieu's theory, which is also cited in the Krauss article.
  • J. A. Gonzalez, "A Contemporary Look at Pierre Bourdieu's Photography: A Middle-Brow Art," Visual Anthropology Review, 8/1, 1992.
  • Review of Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art in Contemporary Sociology, 21, 1992.
• Göran Sonesson (Lund University): a specialist in pictorial and visual semiotics (excellent essays)
  • "Semiotics of Photography" (an essay covering many of the issues in the semiotic approach)
  • "Pictorial Semiotics: Current Issues" (scan this useful overview of theoretical issues and major theorists), 1993.
  • "Post-photography and Beyond," 1998.
  • "Visual Signs in the age of digital reproduction," 1999.

In-class discussion: leading photographers and hybrid genres

• Artworld and Fashionworld: image making, branding, hierarchy management, cross-over image-making
  The Cross-Over Hybrid Network of High-Fashion, Fine Art Photography, and Advertising
• In class screening of documentaries:
  Video documentaries of prominent photographers and their processes and medium:
  Sally Mann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, Nan Goldin, Chuck Close

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• Using the concepts and background in the readings, discuss 2-3 photographs by photographers from two different historical contexts (choose from the photographers cited or listed in the readings and backgrounds above). Think about the role of the medium and the genre(s) that the photographer was working with. Questions to consider: What are some of the main genres we experience everyday (ritualized snapshots, advertising, magazines, Websites, TV, in galleries/museums, etc.); how does the publication and material context of the photograph frame its meaning; thinking with Bourdieu and other theorists above, what do you make of the quantity of ritualized, personal snapshots and portraits done everyday with smart phones and posted to Facebook and Twitter?
  

Remix and hybridity in music involves many aspects at multiple levels simultaneously:

1. At the macro-cultural level: "remix culture" and hybridity as the normal, living context of cultural production, which is now rendered more visibly as such through the digital media platform. We are now more aware that "new" stages in music are always hybrid, and that "traditional" or received music genres, though seeming to be a unified whole, were mixed to begin with.

2. At the level of music technology: recording and performance equipment, consumer playback equipment, technologies and instruments, software & hardware, networks of distribution (human-social and computer networks). The implications of the digital media platform for music, and the ongoing hybridization of forms, genres, sounds. Sampling, remix of sources in both studio recordings and live performance. If it exists, it will be combined and hybridized.

3. At the level of the cultures and sub-cultures of music production, styles, and genres: the remix and collage aesthetics of blues and jazz, electronic and digital music composition from the classical and "high" music culture traditions, hip-hop and the global hip-hop diaspora, reggae and dub music, disco and club music, global hybrid forms--all have their generative rules or shared logic of creation, collaboration, remaking, production and performance.

4. At the level of globalization, information flows, and the DNA of a networked world: Multi-sourcing of music post-globalization, hybrids of sources and digital sounds, horizontal recombinant DNA of contemporary music, real-time awareness of musical forms from cultures and sources all over the world. A networked urban phenomenon: music produced in global information cities, dense nodes of cultural information and remixing, distributed via the Web and Internet file sharing.

5. At the level of political economy, cultural goods, intellectual property, and the economic models for the production, ownership, distribution, and use of digital music: the ongoing debate about copyright, consolidation of "copyright portfolio" media corporations, Creative Commons and alternative legal and rights models, alternative distribution and licensing models. Music now considered a "service" on demand or token of social relations and exchange, rather than simply a product with discrete objects to be bought, sold, or licensed.

We can only hope to introduce some of the interesting topics in points 2, 3 and 4 in this unit. Perhaps you may be able to investigate other issues later.

Background Readings

• Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Excerpts from Chap. 1 and 7. [Excellent background on the social contexts of music recording history (Chap. 1), and digital music and sampling (Chap. 7).]
• Alex Ross, “The Record Effect,” The New Yorker, June 6, 2005. [Short, accessible introduction to recording technologies.]
• Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science (finish book, listen to CD). (DJ Spooky's [Paul Miller] website)
• Carol Becker; Romi Crawford; Paul D. Miller. "An Interview with Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky--That Subliminal Kid)," Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 1. (Spring, 2002), pp. 82-91.
• Eduardo Navas, "Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture" and
  "The Bond of Repetition and Representation."
  [Now chapters in Navas' Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (about the book and excerpts from chapters.)]

Film and Video Documentaries

• Press/Pause/Play (website). On Vimeo (HD). [We will screen portions and discuss in class.]
• Lecture/Interview with Brian Eno (begin at ~21:00).
  

Playlists (Required Listening)
[Please use good earphones. Control volume by mousing over the bars in the top right of the widget.]

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• This week we will work out applications of the concepts of generative remix and combinatoriality in cultural forms in popular music genres. To apply our concepts on actual famous music examples, you will describe a representative set of songs or album-length collection from playlist A-D above, and think through the genre ideas that enable new combinations in the time and place of the album's production. (Alas, some important music prototypes like The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band --often argued as the most important rock-pop "concept album" and considered as a prototype to work with or against by hundreds of other musicians--is not available through the online streaming services. But see the Rolling Stone description in the 500 Greatest Albums, which places the album as no. 1.)
• After listening to the selected iconic "prototype" songs in playlists 1-3, choose one of the concept albums (main selections) in playlists A-D for your descriptive essay. Of course, the playlists 1-3 aren't meant to be encyclopedic or provide models for everything in the albums selected in A-D, but you can probably make some conceptual connections and easily find hybrid remixes of ideas and styles. Do some background research on your album for the context of the recording and technologies used, and the creative combinations employed by the musicians.
• Hints: Daft Punk, for example, wanted to make an encyclopedic album that "sampled" styles and genres that they see as part of their musical identity as "electronic" musicians, but using state-of-the-art technology to record live musicians mixed with digital sound sources and processes to make the music sound more "analog," more humanly preformed. (They cite the Beatles' and Pink Floyd's concept albums as models even though these are very different kinds of music.) The songs on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue were recorded in one take as a live performance (a high concept for capturing improvisation within a within a musical form in a recording studio), and the music channels the deep roots of African American blues into a hybrid modern jazz form (note the "shuffle blues" patterns in Playlist 1 which Davis re-harmonizes in different rhythms). Pink Floyd's famous album is a state-of-the-art encyclopedia of studio composition, recording, and mixing for rock at the height of the pre-digital analog studio of 1973. Janelle Monae's album is a tour-de-force of equally encyclopedic ambitions using the traditions of hip hop, soul, and dance music with all the resources of the digital studio. Do your best on discovering the networks of musical relations, and we'll discuss further methods of analysis and description in class.

Background and Theory:

• Irvine, A Method for Studying Complex Artefacts: Understanding Remix and Combinatorial Forms in Music (presentation, key points on methods for describing composition and interpretation in music)
• Irvine, Popular Music as a Meaning System (a synthesis of theory and method with DIY techniques)

On the Music Studio as an Instrument and Integrative Creative Platform

• Brian Eno, "The Studio as Compositional Tool," (1979, published in Downbeat, 1983).

Playlist Reference Index (Grooveshark)

• Recognizing "Sound Stacks": What's in a Signature Sound and What Does it Mean in Our Culture?
• Play the first 2-5 seconds of these tracks first to see if you could recognize the sound anywhere, then longer sequences to see how the sounds fit in our larger network of sound-meanings in the "cultural encyclopedia."
• Interpretive "Remix"
  (1) Charlie Parker, "April in Paris" sampled / homage in (2) Amon Tobin, "Stoney Street" (electronic/hybrid)
  (3) Billie Holiday, "Summertime" (original big band recording), remixed in (4) in "remix" series for Verve.
  (5) Billie Holiday, "Speak Low" remixed and rearranged by Bent.
  (6) Dinah Washington, "Is You Is or Is You Ain't," Verve remix.
  (7) Natalie Cole and Nat Cole, "Unforgettable." Studio over-dub mix with Natalie singing duet with (deceased) father's famous recording.
  (8) Bob Marley & Lee Scratch Perry, "Sun is Shining" (dub version). Perry is a main pioneer in dub recording and the "versioning" process in Jamaican reggae studios before sampling in hip hop and rap.
  (9) and (10) Patti Page, "Old Cape Code" (in over dub harmonies from 1950s recording) remixed/rearranged by Groove Armada as their track "At the River."
  (11)-(14) First four tracks from Thievery Corporation's Mirror Conspiracy album (discussed in detail in the essay above), exemplifying hybrid remixes of styles and genres without quotation or reuse of recordings.
  (15-17) Three songs representing interpretive remix of styles and genres produced by Thievery Corporation.

Film Documentary

• Press/Pause/Play (website). On Vimeo (HD). [We will devote a major portion of class time to screen sections of the film and discuss ideas in class.]

Background and Reference Sources for Electronic and Digital Music

• Wikipedia: Electronic Music | Techno Music | Electronic Music Genres | Sampling | Hip Hop Music History
• Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (hosted by techno.org and Digitally Imported)
• Visualizing Network Connections and Hybridity: History of Sampling (Java)
• Music Map: visualization of networks of affiliation
• Remix Fusion Map for Thievery Corporation & ESL studios: music sourcing/mixing (Irvine)

Background on the History of Popular Music Genres and Prototype Songs & Musicians

• Wikipedia: Popular Music Genres | Timeline of Music Events (links to major events by year)

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• Thinking through the music meaning models and main concepts of the course and in my outline in "Popular Music as a Meaning System", expand on your approaches last week for a more detailed description of examples of songs and/or musicians that cane be used to understand dialogic meanings and music hybridization in contemporary culture. You can provide links or embedded video/audio in your post response for the week. Review the description of the layers or dimensions of hybridity in the notes to last week's syllabus unit, and find examples to discuss that exemplify one of more of these dimensions. We will also devote time in class to working through examples together.

The Human Body as Hybrid Symbolic Vehicle:
Body-Machine and Sexual Hybridities

"Sex times technology equals the future - that's one of the most powerful equations there is going. You can't shut it off, you can't smother it with brackets and parentheses, hide it away in a footnote. It's there."
--J.G. Ballard (Interview, Spin Magazine, 1989)

Orientations to the Question of Humanity, Technology, Hybrid Bodies

• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur; literally "The Uneasiness in Culture") (1930) (Wikipedia overview) (etext excerpts).
  
  Freud's famous essay looks at the effects of modern industrial society on the human psyche. Major arguments: individual and collective/social repression of libido and aggression is the price we pay for "civilization" (Kultur). We need to recognize the effects of civilization's alibis and repressions for not dealing with libido, resulting in the return (and revenge) of the repressed in other forms. Machines and technologies are seen as prostheses of human mental and bodily functions that we have not adapted to.
  
  This view is closely parallel to Freud's study of "The Uncanny" (Unheimlich), the sense of strangeness, uncertainty, fear, and anxiety felt when encountering objects or beings (fictional or real) not clearly animate or inanimate, human or nonhuman (like robots, cyborgs, and monsters) (etext excerpts).
• Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: Summary of main arguments.
  Foucault's reinterpretation of formerly accepted views of Victorian and modern repression: sex is always "put into discourse." By extrapolation, the sexualized fantasies as represented in imagined cyborgs and androids enable expression of forbidden or taboo desires by transferring them to "machines" (which we "know" are not "real").
• Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999).
  Excerpts from Prologue and Chapter 1.
  How has our technological culture, with many kinds of human-machine inter-dependencies, exposed problems and contradictions in the earlier humanist idea of a pure "human" nature as a universal value? Does technological inter-dependence create new conditions for "being human" which requires a new concept of the human?
• Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" (excerpt from Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181: pdf.
  An influential view of postmodern sexuality and gender that uses the idea of the cyborg as a symbol for re-imagining hybrid sexual and gender identity. How can we use the idea and imagined representations of cyborgs and androids as ways of thinking more deeply about what is repressed and misrecognized about the body, sex identity, and hybrid or mixed states of identity?

Popular Culture Imaginary from Frankenstein to Cyborg/Android Movies and Television
(We will screen some of these in class.)

• Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982) (from the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick)
  Replicants (androids): dystopian future and film noir femme fatale meets sexual fetishization of the cyborg/android.
  Screening in class: bio-tech birth of the Replicants; Dekard's visit to the uncanny "friends" of Sebastian and fight scene with Pris. Frankenstein moments in Roy's coming to self-consciousness and wants to meet his maker.
• James Cameron, dir. The Terminator I (1984) and II (1992). Wikipedia background on series. Machines and advanced intelligent computer networks create hypermasculine time-traveling cyborg soldiers. Arnold Schwarzenegger's character of the cyborg "Terminators" became a reference point for imaginaing the mythology. Classic dystopian scenario with a touch of the leather kink.
• Robocop (1987), Dir. Paul Verhoeven (remake scheduled for 2014). A cop in the dystopian future of Detroit is brutally murdered by a police-protected drug gang and then revived--modern Frankenstein style--as a programmed cyborg cop with his human identity memory erased (almost). The police dept. has been outsourced to a private corporation, which is building robotic and automated "policing" weapons and developing programmable cyborgs as "super police". What could possibly go wrong?
• Cyborg, Dir. Albert Pyun (1989). B-movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as a martial-arts-skilled cyborg in a dystopian plague-ridden future. A sequel, Cyborg 2, with Angelina Jolie, was released in 1993. These "bad" movies are good for revealing what is "derivative" from earlier movie concepts and formation of the common, stock mythology canonized in Hollywood movie plots.
• The Borg in the Star Trek series (Next Generation TV series and movies) (1989-90s): one imaginary for the borg-sexed hive-mind body: 7 of 9 and the Borg Queen. Popular and successful representations of cyborg bodies and sexualities, and the "dehumanizing" threats perceived in human/cyborg/machine fusions.
• Eve of Destruction (1991): the value of B-movies for revealing the popular psyche: gender on the rampage.
  Eve 8 is a weaponized cyborg, and becomes the sexualized and aggressive version of her designer. A female cyborg designed to pass as human for military intelligence with a fully armable nuclear bomb in her torso. What could possibly go wrong?
• Robert Longo, dir. Johnny Mnemonic (1995). Based on a 1981 short story by William Gibson, an early conception of the wetware data world in Neuromancer ("jacking in" to cyberspace with brain interface connections). Production not approved by Gibson. Wikipedia background.
• Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell (1995) (Anime: 1995; based on the manga begun by Masamune Shirow in 1989; English version, 1995).
  A very influential anime (major inspiration for The Matrix) that imagines sentient androids (organic and machine/computational intelligence) as workers and data carriers, who also achieve self-consciousness to question the nature of their existence and their "soul" (the "ghost in the machine"), a Frankenstein theme. Wikipedia background. Clip: birth of The Major (cyborg) scene.
• Andy and Larry Wachowski, The Matrix (1999), The Matrix: Reloaded (2003), Matrix Revolutions (2003); Warner Bros. Matrix site.
  The "Matrix self" is sexier, aestheticized, stronger, idealized, fire-arms and martial arts proficient, preferably dressed in black vinyl and leather from a high-end designer fetish boutique.
• Appleseed Ex Machina (2007) CG anime film and is the sequel to the 2004 Appleseed film, similarly directed by Shinji Aramaki, and was produced by Hong Kong director and producer John Woo.
  This movie takes the anime cyborg to new levels of detail with 3D animation and CGI effects for rendering a cinematic experience.
• I, Robot; Avatar; Minority Report; A.I.; etc.: ongoing aestheticization of body-machine, utopian projections thwarted by machine catastrophes, and repressed sexualities. Movies from around 2003-present mainly implement an established Hollywood formula, which often recycles the earlier ideas in action/adventure and monster-movie genre frameworks.

Weekly Student Discussion (Wordpress Site)

• Discuss one or two examples in popular culture of hybridity or mixed identities in the body, and/or questions of the technological condition of being human, and the anxieties and questions that these ideas provoke. Beyond the obvious medical interventions with prostheses and implants, what do you find in the ways that "body-machine" and "computer-human" combinations are represented and imagined?

Discussion of final projects

Final Project Essay Instructions and Resources (read instructions first)

In class: round table discussion of research projects in progress.

Due date: final project essays are due one week after the last day of class.

Archive of earlier student essays: scroll down to heading for final projects by semester.