nevermind the bricolage

The Swastika: can it be redeemed?

As many may know, one of my ongoing jobs is at an art school in the advertising department where I teach on words and concepts and ideas in the world of ad and design. I'm fortunate to be able to explore any number of topics in most of the classes I teach and it allows me to indulge my own fascination in things like the origins of swearing, how language works, where ideas come from, design and culture--so many things really. 

Some where along the way I came across the work of Steven Heller , a man with a storied career in the world of visual and graphic design. He has written something like 120 books on issues related to graphic design and visual culture, covering a mind-boggling range of topics.

My latest read has been his book on the swastika. Swastika: Symbol beyond redemption? is an exploration of the origins of the symbol and its transition to symbol of evil. It's a provocative work that has been called polemical. It's a fascinating into controversial territory taken from a very personal angle. You can read an interview with the author here, which might deepen your curiosity, beyond the provocative icon he explores the book is also a great tool for thinking about how symbols work in society.

And here is a talk he gave on totalitarian regimes and their use of propaganda which is really worth a look and listen.

Steven Heller on propaganda & design at Gel 2009 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Adolf Hitler was a logo.

 

The new literacies

I'm about to start a new term at the theology school and my focus this time around will be theology and media culture, divided into two sections: television and digital media. So I have been mentally gathering thoughts and ideas and genrally scouring corners for ideas and materials to supplement my own thinking. I have spent the past couple of years thinking a lot about the interface between technology and faith, I think we have underestimated the link in terms of how technology reframes the way we look at the world.

Yesterday I wrote a blog about Twitter and Facebook, encapsulating my thinking and feeling about their various contributions to my self-understanding and how I interact with them, but in the course of that blog I also confessed to being a bit of an Instagram addict. I love imagery, always have, in all the modes they come to us, painting, two-dimensional, three-dimensional, photography on and on. I live in a world shaped by my relation to imagery, in fact, I do much of my thinking using imagery of one form or another as a starting point.

I came across this image and I think it is pretty interesting. The photography archive at The Library of Congress is a tiny square, a single pixel in a huge sea of Facebook and other digital media repositories (now we can't discuss this in terms of quality, it may not necessarily play out the same way on a graph if we were to apply quality or style etc. to the issue). I'm thinking about this in terms of what it says about our broader cultural context, and what it says to me is that we are living in a time where there are new literacies emerging and one of them is a new visual literacy, perhaps we might even say, hyper-visual literacy. We are awash in images, it's part of our 'new normal' to follow on from another recent blog post. There was a recent iphone ad that talks about the number of photos taken everyday with iPhone 5,

 

What does it mean that so many images flood our lives, well, I think it means that the meaning of the images themselves has changed--they have shifted from being artistic artifacts or some sort of representation of reality and they didn't really contribute much to the structuring or constructing of meaning, that was left to text, but these days it seems that our visual literacy is different and we reagrd images as expressions of reality rather than simple representations, and they make meaning, or at least we use them to make meaing of our lives whether text is present or not.

The conversation about the rise of the image and the fall of the word, of text, has been around for a while now, but we may actually be closer to that reality now, in terms of how we think about various and ascendant/descendant forms of literacy,  than when those conversations began and essentially ended. Like many ideas, it may have been slightly ahead of its time, and now is a better time to think it through.

 

the best way through the fog, is through the fog

Embrace Ambiguity from IDEO on Vimeo.

 One of a series of in-house videos from IDEO on some of their core values.

if everything is porn is nothing porn?

Part of our conversation last week in the theology/youth culture class inevitably turned to the issue of identity, sexuality and physicality. The undercurrent of most theological discussions undertaken at seminary seem to wend their way toward talk about sex--largely because I think it is a topic so widely sloganized but seldom addressed and, let's face it, it's a big area of human existence that warrants more than a cursory good/bad comment about this or that act. Anyway, we had wade through the usual distractors in the conversation, namely,  the party-line church responses to sexual activity, then the hot-button social agendas of  trafficking and slavery and then of course to  pornography (that sounds callous I realize and I dont intend it to be, and distractors might be too harsh of a word, perhaps starting points would be better--but the simple fact is, that the larger conversation around human sexuality in many of the christian environs I find myself in tend to focus on these issues and they have to be worked through in order to get down to the real issues people really want to discuss, which are much more subjective, personal and intimate.

We actually didn't spend too much time wading in the deep waters of socio-sexuality's darker threads, perhaps it is the benefit of an intensive or perhaps it was a particularly sharp and engaged group of people--probably a bit of both. And we held this conversation in the larger frame of identity construction in the 21st century and the effect of youth cultural dynamics upon it, so we didn't belabour too many of those expected topics. But after class was over and I had a bit more time to think things over, it occurred to me that everything is pornography today--we speak about food-porn, interior-design porn, fashion-porn, porn-violence--what we mean, I think, is an overdose of imagery related to a particular topic, the stylizing of things for maximum effect and titillation--be it the representation of food, particular fashion styles, people having sex, a Tarantino movie (interestingly, the film-maker, Nicolas Winding Refn-Drive/Only God Forgives refers to himself as a pornographer in a recent Guardian interview)  or the perfect design and layout of an interior room.

The question is: if everything is porn, is anything porn? Does that mean we live in a world where everything thing is viewed through a pornographic lens, and if so, what do we do about that? I realize that these 'other pornographies' are perhaps more nuanced versions of the 'real thing' but that raises the question of what the 'real thing' is when it comes to porn, whether or not pornography is the portrayal of the sexual act itself or the particular way it is styled and represented? I imagine that a collective 'duh!" is being expressed by many who have done much more focused thinking on the topic of pornography. So I'll answer my own thought and say that I think pornography is the stylization and fetishization of sex and the removal of the real with regard to sexual activity. But if the removal of the real is the essence of pornography and everything is now porn, is nothing then real? Aaaah!! The great existential questions of life. I blame Jeff Koons. Not really, but I do think that Jeff Koons was one of the artists of the late 20th century who applied this equation to his work, particularly in his sculptures and images involving himself and his Italian porn-star wife. These works, one of which is featured at the top of this post, featured him and his wife in varying stages and positions of intimacy, in graphic detail. Koons said that they were not porn, or intended to be seen as such, they were simply images of a couple in love--but many did--perhaps because we are capable of turning anything into porn--especially images of people engaging in sexual or congress, copulation, fornication, shagging or fucking. etc., or perhaps because they are pornographic, but that determination would be up to the viewer I think. "the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction"--this is one of three main definitions offered on pornography in the dictionary--the first two refer to erotic depiction--but again, these days anything can be eroticized and nurtured for maximum arousal--think of the way the advertising industry presents food--they even have a magazine for food stylists!

So the depicting of food in a sensational manner qualifies as porn, as do most things in our visually-driven world, and , in a culture built upon desire/false desire, it's hard not to feel bombarded. But the real issue might just be that our focus on pornography is mis-directed--perhaps we should worry more about food porn and all the other mainstream depictions than the stuff we usually get bent out of shape about. Or maybe nothing is porn anymore because something is generally defined as much by what it is not as by what it is, and if everything is porn, which it seems to be...

I find it interesting that Koons wraps himself and his wife in the embrace of a snake--echoes of the Garden of Eden, and he did in fact proclaim that they were the new Adam and Eve--media man and woman. So welcome to the new Eden, where it seems everything is naked and unashamed.

A few years back Rick Poynor, wrote a book called Designing Pornotopia, in which he argued that we were in the process of creating an environment where our "dreams of sex are allowed to permeate areas of life they would never have been permitted to until recently." It's worth a read. The term pornotopia is drawn from the work of Stephen Marcus who defined it as, "that vision which regards all of human experience as a series of exclusively sexual events or conveniences." I guess all of this leads me to the conclusion that a conversation about sex is no longer about the genital interactions of particualr humans as much as it is about life in virutally every experience and expression--I feel a new class coming on!!

(p.s. take the time to check out some of the links)

plenty

"Do not ask yourself if you can or cannot cope. It is not about adaptation or choice. The Greek god of hunting and rustic music, pan, is a symbol of plenty and abundance and has never been stigmatized as a problem. Humankind was always impressed by the billions of stars shining in the clear night sky-and never was in a panic about its plentitude." Franco Berardi

I was impressed by the ideas drawn from Italian philosopher Franco Berardi, in one of the books I am presently reading--Geert Lovink's, Networks Without A Cause--which I am finding very stimulating. The book is a critique of social media, but it is also a critique of theories around social media and the way ideas or opinions get traded with little critical reflection on their holistic engagement with issues at hand. Berardi's quote at the top of this post comes in a chapter on the Psychopathology of Information Overload and I really appreciate the way Lovink tackles it--mainly by challenging the idea that too much information is the problem--again, quoting Berardi, "the problem is not in the technology. We have to come to terms with it. The killing element is the combination of info stress and competition. We have to win, and to be the first. The real pathogenic effect is the neo-liberal pressure that makes the network condition so unlivable-not the abundance of information itself."

This book is one of the first social media critiques that actually stimulates my own thinking about it. I have found many of the books on this subject just a little too confident of their own veracity and I haven't fully bought the arguments put forth. This one, however, is really working for me--I find myself generating a new resource pool in terms of thinkers, books and concepts---semio-capitialism/personal information autonomy/hedonic lassitude/soft narcosis/depressive hedonia--(just in one chapter).

It's a good read and may challenge some ideas already firmly ensconsed in your own reasoned reflections on this topic, but one of those books that should be included in any comprehensive reflections on this topic.

water

 

This past Thursday was World Water Day and on Friday I participated in a conference at Woodbury University. The Drylands Conference was a one-day gathering to explore design, sustainability and general issues related to water in the Los Angeles area. It was fascinating, opening me up to ideas (and a literal and conceptual dictionary of words I have never heard before) about how to think about water in the 21st century. I was asked to speak on different aspects of water--to bring a wider focus to the conference--my topic was Water Utility: Mystic rivers, sacred springs and primordial oceans. I spoke about the uses of water in lfe and religion--the way water becomes a metaphor and a symbol of so many things in our various cultures. I opened with the above video--just for a laugh.

culture madness?

I came across an interesting article on The Morning News site. It originally appeared in the Boston Globe and was about the DSM--The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness--it's like the Bible for the psychiatric field, a compendium of the more than 350 ways they have determined that our minds can fail us. The article focuses on a little compendium of illnesses catalogued in the back of the book, about 25 little-known illnesses. They are called 'culture-bound' illnesses and what is described are a number of conditions that up until now have been regarded as mental issues that are cultural--i.e. culture-bound. The article names a couple--susto — a distinctly Latin American fear that one’s soul has panicked and left one’s body. Or pibloktoq, also known as “arctic hysteria,” in which Greenlandic Inuit strip off all their clothes and run out into the subzero Arctic tundra. The argument that is laid out in the lengthy piece revolves around the desire, amongst some in the profession, to abandon what is considered by them to be a relic from a colonial age. At its heart the question is about whether or not it is time to view the West as a culture, as well as to consider how much culture plays in the manifestation of mental illness.

I have read many times that melancholy is a particularly British malady--something backed up by a number of books, and writings since the 17th century when a sort of cult of melancholy arose in Britain. What is also highlighted in the article is the fact that the 1994 edition of the DSM contains no British or American culture-bound illnesses--i.e. other cultures may or may not have them, but we don't. But off the top of my head I can think of any number of conditions--Chronic Fatigue for instance--that you would be hard-pressed to find in many other less developed environments and societies. I think culture influences us profoundly and deeply much more than we might care to realize. it is another argument I suppose between universality and particularity. Anyway, the article is well worth a read and I would be interested in responses to it.

Hovey Design

The Hovey sisters' have a keen eye for design and their blogs are frequent visits for me. They've just launched a design company and I love the room pictured above, right up my alley, I am a big fan of that old colonial with a hint of new thrown in-look.

composers as gardeners

Brian Eno in scintilating form in a talk he gave at the Serpentine Gallery on Composers as Gardeners. I put the whole thing here, it's not that long. Found it at Edge.

"About the time when I first started making records, I was also starting to become aware of a new sort of organizing principle in music.  I think like many people, I had assumed that music was produced, or created in the way that you imagine symphony composers make music, which is by having a complete idea in their head in every detail and then somehow writing out ways by which other people could reproduce that.  In the same way as one imagines an architect working.  You know, designing the building, in all its details, and then having that constructed.

In the mid-'60s, there started to appear some music that really wasn't like that at all.  And in fact, it was about the time I started making music, and I found that I was making music in this same rather unusual new way.  So that the music I was listening to then in particular, in relation to this point, was Terry Riley's "In C" and Steve Reich's famous tape pieces, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out."  And various other pieces as well. 

Of course, I was also familiar with Cage and his use of randomness, and new ways of making musical decisions.  Or not making them.  What fascinated me about these kinds of music was that they really completely moved away from that old idea of how a composer worked.  It was quite clear with these pieces, for example "In C," that the composer didn't have a picture of the finished piece in his head when he started.  What the composer had was a kind of menu, a packet of seeds, you might say.  And those musical seeds, once planted, turned into the piece.  And they turned into a different version of that piece every time. 

So for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing.  Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.  Now, I was sort of looking for support for that idea.  The term 'bottom-up' hadn't come into existence then.  Chaos theory, complexity theory, so on, they didn't exist.  I don't even think we had catastrophe theory then. 

Monsters

"There are monsters on the prowl whose form change with the history of knowledge." Michel Foucault.

In honour of Halloween we explored monsters in media yesterday. Zombies, vampires, aliens invaders--the monstrous makes it appearance in our world in any number of ways. What does our fascination with these creatures mean? Why do we enjoy being scared out of our wits? These and other questions were part of our class exploration. It's been said that monsters have their 'tentacles wrapped around the foundations of history', every age and culture seems to have them--the Middle Ages was fascinated with bestial humans, the Renaissance era with wolf-people and conjoined humans, the early modern world with Frankenstein and Dracula, on and on throughout our histories, these monsters and strangers appear again and again.

There are Biblical monsters and biblical roots for our western monsters--Leviathan and Behemoth--the Great Dragon--the Devil--an amalgam of any number of biblical images coalesced into that figure which is at the root of much of our monstrous imagination.

I talked a bit from Richard Kearney's remarkable book, Strangers, Gods and Monsters. He argues that these three figures are the backbone of our self-narration. Strangers operate as a limit experience for us as we try and identify ourselves over and against others--Greeks and their Barbarians, the Europeans their 'savages' etc. Gods are those figures whose power and mystery exceeds our grasp and monsters signal borderline experiences reminding us that we are never wholly sovereign. All of these ideas play out in our cultural imagination and story-telling. These creatures defy the accepted norms of identification and invite us to consider again and again what it means to be human. They are the expression of our fears and concerns, as well as our hopes and aspirations--they say the unsayable, says Kearney.

I quoted John Sallis--What if the truth were monstrous? But nobody really bit on that one, so I didn't explore it too far. I really like the Foucault quote--that the monsters change with the history of knowledge--you can trace their expansion and multiplicity as our world becomes more and more inter-connected and over-loaded---monsters and strangers multiply in our story-telling---a tale of Vampires coming out (True Blood) becomes a pluralized world of vampires, witches, shape-shifters, fairies, more and more strange creatures echoing and voicing our fears and challenges in the 21st century. As our understanding of the universe expands it is no longer just the Martians attacking, it is alien civilizations of all kinds (District 9, Alien etc, etc.) and even technology and technological aberrations (Bladerunner, I Robot etc) become part of our monstrous exploration of human self-understanding.