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[integer@www.god-emil.dk]

>THE LENS OF IMAGES 

>All I am saying is ...

residue = irreducible


>Desire, Commodities, Media and Hacking 

du = irreducible 



>David Cox, September 2001 
>
>d.cox@mailbox.gu.edu.au 
>
>Images are themselves a lens on the culture which makes them. Walter 
>Benjamin was both right and wrong about art in the age of mechanical 
>reproduction. He was correct in stating that as images proliferate, their 
>overall commercial value in depreciates. He was wrong in assuming that 
>manufactured images are worth less than their 'real world' referent. 
>
>As manufactured goods accelerate away from the decade in which they were
>made, they themselves gain a kind of new cultural value. Some commodities
>seem to accrue more cultural gravitas than others. The dodgiest of global
>trade in junk, the antique market bears testimony to the ways in which
>even the most trivial of manufactured items can become obscure objects of
>desire once made to enter the domain commodity relations. 
>
>Culture is What I Say it Is 
>
>If desire is expressed through the commodity, and the commodity is that 
>which is supposed to stand in for desire, to desire an end to commodity 
>society is the desire to embrace that which consumer society deems no 
>longer useful or valuable. Alongside this is the desire to re-inscribe 
>certain specific things with new and unauthorised types of cult value. The
>culture hacker collects things which seem to have no value. She makes of
>the   world around her a quilt of emblems of her own desire. She
>anticipates a world in which control and governance have shifted away from
>the surrogate mercantile type of economy to an economy of desire itself.
>The act of deciding what will become a cult item to oneself personally, is
>the first step toward emancipation from the Empire of Signs. Surely,
>others will come to see the significance of the enshrined emblems of
>personal liberty as self evident tokens of a broader idea of libertarian
>social and cultural possibility. 
>
>Desire is Free 
>
>The hacker society is one which values desire above commodities, it makes
>the search for pleasure the same as the rejection of the mainstream culture
>itself. It is anti-suburban, anti middle class and pro urban. It yearns
>for experiences, which affirm the centrality of the creative act as a
>social relation between people of like mind. Where ideas, pleasure and fun
>and mystery and desire fuel the work of the media hacker, her world is one
>of constant uncertainty. Intertextuality, the migration of meanings from
>one context to another. is the catalyst of social change for the media
>maven. Play with them long enough, and you'll see that meanings arrive on
>the back of shots and sounds as stowaways. You stow away with those
>meanings too, a refugee from the Society of the Spectacle. 
>
>Choose (a) life 
>
>In culture jammer cinema, its the selection which makes the shot. It is 
>both choosing and looking but not just the act of choosing, rather the
>noble decision to make choosing the centre of ones life. The decision to
>make looking for elements to play with results in the media hacker viewing
>problems facing her with curiosity, a sense of experimentation. No barrier
>should be taken seriously. No limit to access to the principle of free
>expression. You find some old films, you make a new film out of them. You
>find some old cassettes, you chop up the bits and make a new work out of
>them. Old media are windows on the times they come from. Images are like
>lenses onto other times and other places. 
>
>History Speaks While the Guy Holding it Drinks a Glass of Water 
>
>Media speak as if the ventriloquists doll of history. Looking at the sea
>of ancient images which constitute the western imagination, it is easy to
>see why so many museums are becoming theme parks. In a corporatised urban
>space, the notion of a civic use for cultural memory is potentially
>subversive. Implicit within the old-school idea of the museum is that the
>centre of civic life lies with local governance. Sponsorship and
>theme-parking does away with such troublesome notions of government in the
>service of a population, for its own sake. We must construct our own
>museums of cultural memory. If we don't remember the period before the
>Dark Times, nobody will. Bradbury at 451 degrees knows more than you do,
>honey. We're burning up to tell you like it was, like it is, like it may
>yet be. 
>
>The Worm Hole Theory of Collage 
>
>William Burroughs insisted that his cut-up works of writing had properties
>of prediction about them. Implicit within this idea is that collage is a
>kind of dimensional travel, where intended meanings become disrupted so
>radically that the act of reworking words in a newspaper article or shots
>in a film actually disrupts the time/space continuum. Try showing a
>collage work to anyone not up with radical postmodernism and just sit back
>and wait for the questions about authorship, ownership, copyright and
>other methods of psychological police torture in the service of the State
>and Capital. 
>
>Assembly Instructions - Read Carefully 
>
>Jamming is more than a sytlistic technique. It is more than a simple set 
>of artistic practises. It is for its most central practitioners, an entire 
>philosophy of life. It means looking at the world as a kit of parts. The 
>beatnik sensibility is one in which only the relation between images and 
>sounds makes sense, not the parts themselves. The relationships, the
>moment between notes, the silence in a jazz riff, the double splice and the
>katchink sound it makes as it moves through the projector. The distortion
>on the tape, the hiss, the crackle. The hole damn pop sensibility. 
>
>Text is Picture is Sound is Authority is Negotiable. 
>
>William Burroughs knew of the power of words as images. His ideas about
>the provisionality of meaning, and the dependence ideas have upon the
>cultural contexts in which they emerge have yet to be fully Understood,
>dealt with let alone let loose sufficiently widely enough to overthrow
>society!!! 
>
>The intensity of a shot well cut with a sound also well selected will rock
>audiences for a long time to come. Hacking is the spirit of play the
>spirit of letting the material speak to you. Listening and looking for
>patterns hidden in the material. OKAY BUBBA, SQUEEZE THAT MONKEY!!! To
>quote Ren 'n' Stimpy before they went commercial. 
>
>Familiarity and Defamiliarisation through Detournment of Everyday
>Experience. 
>
>Encyclopaedias are often surrealistic juxtapositions of things organised 
>alphabetically, imagine a film whose sequence of events matched that of 
>the encyclopaedia! Aardvarks, to Zoetropes, that's all she wrote. 
>
>Jamming Retail: Shops as Museums of the Present. 
>
>You search for things as if you were in the biggest thrift store in the 
>world. The world is a bit thrift store. K-Mart is no longer a shop to buy 
>things in. It is the museum of the present, for the archaeologist of the 
>below $40 consumer item. Everything is on special, and in all but price 
>itself, is free. You look at the world as if it were some other place at 
>some other time. You turn your alienation into an asset. Suddenly the 
>culture of the lower middle class becomes an urban toolkit of survival and 
>of anti-boredom. Things on the street, in gutters, behind fences, thrown 
>away packaging become the fuel for a free imagination, accumulating in the 
>growing database of ways to be free, as well as on the mantelpiece at
>home.
>
>"Price Check, aisle four, hardware, manchester and adult males!!!"
>Store detectives are too busy masturbating while looking at security
>camera monitors to really stop desire in its tracks. 
>
>Database vs Narrative: Complementary Philosophies of Media 
>
>Database is about the connections between related but separated elements.
>Searches provide lists of elements. Narrative is about linearity,
>sequential series of events, it is about organic growth, root like from
>the bottom up, from the top down, any which way but loose-lipped. 
>
>A culture jammed event is a combination of database and narrative.
>Database provides the navigational basis for searching for things,
>indexing, cross indexing elements, while narrative provides the structural
>framework for those database philosophy inspired found elements. The web,
>search engines, videogames are databases of experience you navigate
>through. 
>
>Narrative, by contrast is about hearing events out, having them unfold in
>a predetermined sequence. When you combine the logic of database and apply
>them to narrative you have a potent combination of forces. Look at all the
>videotapes on your shelves. All the books. Go to your cd collection. Now
>imagine that they were all in a database and you were able to combine
>every track of every cd, every scene of every film, and every chapter of
>every book into new works, determined by say, your favorite bits of each
>type of media. As the entire lot is now able to be reworked into new
>combinations, cultural reworkings become not only possible, but necessary.
>As we move toward a database culture in which all texts are made available
>to all others, the empire of signs starts to crack as surely as the Berlin
>wall. Twas booting killed the beast. 
>
>To refine texts into fragments for later recombination is the philosophy 
>and working approach of the idea hacker. To see all the world as a sea of 
>samples is the privilege of the free. Academia tries hard enough, but is
>stymied by its own working methodology, its own beurocracy. A cultural
>studies department with no time tables in a permanent Burning Man would be
>the closest thing yet to New Babylon. 
>
>Database as non sequentialism for its own sake 
>
>Database offers the technological means as well as the methodological 
>basis for searching, indexing, seeing patterns between media elements. 
>Narrative offers the moral container within which those elements can be 
>organised in such a way that they reinforce the broader moral standpoint. 
>Hacker culture is about living ones life as if authority had already been 
>done away with, as if ones own liberty were a birthright and access to all 
>things were not only possible, but to be expected. The ultra rich and the 
>ultra poor are both familiar with what it is to be on the outside of 
>society. With a database, you know about ways in which search criteria can 
>be applied, for example by key-word, by date, by numerical index and so
>on. 
>
>Database is a natural extension of the quality of computers, but only
>hackers can redeem computers from the shackles of work, and all that goes
>with it. Where the provisionality of meaning proliferates, there you will
>find the possiblity of life beyond commercial society. The mainstream world expects 
>meanings, like people themselves, to remain behind the counter, within 
>boundaries, within their pre-determined cultural office dividers. In the 
>early 1990s when a nightclub in Melbourne screened ultra-realistic ads 
>warning people of the dangers of drink driving in the context of sado 
>masochism, the shit hit the fan. Infuriated that their social realist ads 
>depicting supposedly real traffic accidents were being detourned to
>satisfy the desire of a cultural minority. 
>
>Napsterising Everything, For All Time 
>
>Guy Debord insisted that plagiarism was a key to liberty. He even went so 
>far as to to say that progress implies it. If the future of our world lies 
>in the belief that all meanings should be stripped of any claim to 
>authenticity then museums, universities, and other last remaining bastions 
>of modernist essentialism whould allow students to copy texts freely, 
>
>Copying music, films, books, indeed any type of media can only ultimately 
>assist in the eventual devaluation of ideas as commercial entities. What 
>if suddenly the Napsterisation of all ideas were made possible. All films, 
>all music, all books, all texts became enterable within the realm of 
>database? 
>
>Once made database elements, the constant generation and regeneration of 
>meanings could technically at least, be enterable into a kind of Nelsonian 
>Xanadu realm in which all films and all texts could be perpetually 
>reworked and recombined. 
>
>You might have noticed that when downloading files from Napster, you would
>often get cut off. This would result in most files being only partial
>songs, or sounds. We have a generation emerging who are Quite happy to
>have only bits of songs, bits of films, bits of texts. The fragments are
>horny! They want to get it on and procreate. 
>
>All I am saying is give the pieces a chance! 
>
>David Cox. 
>
>
>
> David Cox B.Ed, Grad Dip (Hons) 
> Lecturer in Digital Screen Production, 
> School of Film, Media and Cultural Studies 
> Nathan Campus 
> Griffith University 
> Brisbane 
> Queensland 4111 
> Australia 
> Telephone: ph: +61 7 38755165 
> Mobile: 0438 050863 
> Fax: +61 7 38757730 
> Email: d.cox@mailbox.gu.edu.au 
> personal web site: http://www.netspace.net.au/~dcox/dcox.html




























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