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#I wanted to make a proper 2000 followers celebration drawing but got to 2000 too fast and didn't get the chance
forgettable-au · 3 months
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What do we think? I think he's like the coolest scientist to ever science
HEY HAPPY 2000 FOLLOWERS‼️HOW DID THAT HAPPEN SO QUICK?????
I'm genuinely so shocked about that I'm so so glad you're all enjoying this AU so far hehehe:D
Also I just made the 1000 followers celebration post like a month ago or something??wow
Here's the guy ‼️‼️ I wanted to practice drawing him quickly and in different poses. I think I achieved that, all this was made with just the lasso fill tool it was soooo fun and I loved not being worried about details just SHAPE
ALL SHAPE (and colors)
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asromaworld · 6 years
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Totti’s interview with the Corriere dello sport
So, what has changed?
 “Everything – my life, my mind, my body… I was used to the same routine for such a long time, waking up early, having breakfast and then going to training. Now I have to plan my days. The impact has not been easy.
"I asked the club for some time off to recharge my batteries. I wanted a break to clear my head and enjoy spending time with my kids. They agreed and I thank them for that; now I’m able to start this new journey on the right foot. I have stayed in football, which is my life. It’s everything to me.”
Will you always be in football or is it a case of never say never?
“I will always work in football, I’m convinced of that. I’m lucky enough to be around the team, the coach and the directors – I watch matches with all of them. I travel on the team bus and I stay with the squad before games. I do a bit of everything.”
What can you bring to the role of director as someone who never trained to be one?
“I was a footballer and I understand all the dynamics that go into that. I know how to treat the players. Only someone who knows what to say, can read people’s looks and understands the right moments should go inside the changing room. I have this advantage over other directors: I experienced the dynamic of a changing room. I’m in there every day, just like before, only now I don’t get changed.”
How does wearing a jacket and tie suit you?
“At the beginning, I was talking to myself like a madman: ‘I’m injured, I’m suspended, I’ll be back [in a kit] soon.’ I’ve got used to it now, though.”
Let’s rewind the clocks to 28 May and your goodbye to football, a goodbye that moved half the world.
“I didn’t expect it to be like that, it went beyond football. It was so emotional because of my love for them and their love for me. I wasn’t Totti or the Roma captain at that moment; I was everyone’s brother. The people’s faces full of love were for me.
"This might sound bad, because Roma are above everybody and I’ve always put the club before myself, but just then I understood the result of that game didn’t really matter to the people.”
The new stadium is almost under way – why don’t you play the inaugural game?
“Enough now, otherwise it will become too difficult. However, owning our own stadium is fundamental. It will also improve how the fans follow the team. Currently you park three kilometres away and you have to pass through ten turnstiles. It wears on you.”
Can you ever see yourself not at Roma?
“I could have gone to Real Madrid once, as I would never have played for another club in Italy. When I made the decision, it came from my heart and my mind and I’ve never had any regrets.”
Was there ever a second opportunity to leave?
“The last few months under Spalletti were difficult. We had a good relationship before he left the first time in 2009. When he returned, I put myself at his disposal. I would have preferred to play more often, seeing as it was my final year, because I don’t begrudge him anything. I accepted his decisions with dignity. It was upsetting, but I know it’s up to the coach and ultimately, they’re judged on their decisions.
"I had offers to go to the Emirates or the United States. I would have made lots of money, but I would have ruined 25 years of love as well. It could have been a good experience, seeing as I was out of favour with the coach at that time, but I chose Roma on this occasion as well.” 
How’s your relationship with Jim Pallotta?
“A bit rocky at the start, but then we cleared things up. He was looking at things in white and I in black. Then we found middle ground for the good of Roma.”
Did you watch Italy v Sweden?
“I didn’t think such a football tragedy could happen. I’ll turn on the TV in June and Italy won’t be on. It’s surreal.”
Would you have put Lorenzo Insigne on?
“I’d have started him. He’s one of the few players who could have won that game.”
Where does the Italian FA need to start again from?
“Damiano Tommasi. Firstly, because he’s my friend and secondly, because he’s talented. He looks the part: young, transparent and clean. If he’s representing you abroad, you’ll come across well.”
And who should be the coach?
“Vincenzo Montella. I’d bring Roma’s title-winning side back together.”
Do you have any regrets in football?
“Not having played with Ronaldo, during that period when he was on fire at Inter. It was my dream and his as well. He scored loads of goals, but he would have scored more with me.”
Should your mate Gianluigi Buffon continue playing or retire?
“You can play just as well at 39 as you did at 22; it’s all a question of mentality. However, in Italy we’re obsessed with people’s age. When Buffon makes a save, he doesn’t look 39.”
Who will win the Ballon d’Or?
“Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, but I’d prefer Messi.”
Do you like VAR?
“Yes, but we need to know how it’s used. Who makes the call?”
Would you have got a few more penalties with it in use?
“Yes, but they’d have picked up a few more of my moments of madness.”
Do you know the most watched video of you is when you kicked Mario Balotelli?
“There was no need for VAR there. It was building up for years because of everything he was saying about Romans. Going on and on… But even so, it was a bad thing to do.”
What happened to Daniel De Rossi?
“It was instinctive and unfortunately these things can happen in games. Afterwards you say, ‘How on earth could I have done something like that?’ It’s hurt him more than anyone; all we can do now is be close to him.”
How’s it going with Eusebio Di Francesco?
“Everyone’s happy with him, it’s a united group of players. He’s open to dialogue and doesn’t mince his words. He’s a no-nonsense Abruzzian and says what he thinks.”
Will you ever turn to coaching?
“Let’s say that it’s not my priority right now.”
Who will win the Scudetto?
“There are three or four teams at the same level, but Juve will always have the edge. As for Napoli, they’re a great side to watch and they can win the league if they avoid too many injuries.”
It’s Napoli v Juve on Friday. Who will you be supporting?
“I’d like a draw because if we win we gain points on both of them.”
Apart from Roma, who would you like to win the title?
“I’d prefer Napoli, just for a change. They’ll be tired of celebrating in Turin, while in Naples they’d dine out on this Scudetto for 100 years. I’d like to see a team from the South crowned champions.”
And what about Inter?
“No, not Inter.”
On your 40th birthday, Spalletti gave you a model of the DeLorean from Back to the Future. If you could, would you prefer to go forward or back in time?
“I’d go back in time. I was at my best between 2000 and 2010, they were fantastic years. I’d be happy to relive just one of them.”
When did you realise you would be a footballer?
“When I signed my first professional contract at 16. That’s when I understood it was a proper job.”
Your son Cristian is 12 years old and plays football. What kind of football dad are you?
“I’m a model father. I teach him what my parents taught me: respect and manners. For sure, his surname weighs heavily on him. When he’s playing, people hope that I come along to watch him. I let him do his thing and I don’t say anything to him. In about three or four years, I’ll see what he’s truly made of.”
Could you ever tell him he won’t be a legend like his dad?
“Better the truth now than a lie that might hurt him in the future. As for having any other children, never say never: maybe a little brother for Cris.”
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Why You Should Learn More About ranch for sale Montana
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Joseph Clifford "Joe" Montana is usually a famous, retired soccer quarterback. Montana played for that San Francisco 49ers for fourteen seasons, starting off in 1979. Although taking part in for the 49ers, he begun in 4 Tremendous Bowl video games as well as the staff went on to acquire all of them. In 1993, and 1994, which had been his final two playing seasons, he played to the Kansas Town Chiefs. In 2000, Joe Montana was spot in the Pro Football Corridor of Fame. He's hence The most iconic and celebrated football gamers in background.
Montana Fights Starvation in America
Given that his retirement, Montana obtained a house in Sonoma County, California. On the other hand, in 2009 he place the home up available for purchase to move to some horse ranch and winery, which generates wine under the label Montagia. Montana incorporates a philanthropic character, which happens to be evidenced by way of his assistance of numerous charities. His Key charity is Feeding The usa, which he supports by endorsing fundraising situations and private donations. Feeding The usa's Huddle to Fight Starvation is actually a software whose target is to provide absent 20 million foods to hungry People. It is a huge software that lasts numerous months of fundraising efforts, and seeks to have interaction the general public and buyers. A number of other companies Take part over the fundraising attempts, pledging to donate foods or funds. By way of example, Kraft pledged to donate 7 foods to Feeding America for at any time $one donated.
Montana Volunteers for Children's Triggers
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Living in San Francisco All over again
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inspiringcityuk · 6 years
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You might have seen them dotted around the streets of London. Owls peering out from the walls. They are caricatures of the real thing, yet they’ve been watching over the East End for years.
Dscreet is the street artist responsible. Always fascinated by drawing cartoons and comic book characters as a kid. He would become obsessed by owls following a trip to his Grandma’s house. Picking up a book on ornithology he saw the anatomically correct illustrations in there and made up his own cartoon version. He didn’t know it then but the tag for which he would become known had taken root.
Dscreet Owl in Shoreditch
MELBOURNE BEGINNINGS
Originally from Australia, Dscreet’s art, his style and his inspirations were formed around the streets of Melbourne. At first a keen skateboarder, he told me how his early  interest in skating would merge into an interest in tagging and then later into graffiti. Hip hop culture too. Imported from America it would associate itself with graffiti imagery and would start to permeate itself into the street psyche. Books such as Subway Art and films such as Style Wars would influence in Oz just as much as they influenced in the streets of London and Bristol.
This was around the late eighties when according to Dscreet, Melbourne was artistically one of the best places in Australia. “By the time I got into graffiti, it was very well established in Melbourne and around the world.” Citing influences from the period, he talks about local old school writers such as Merda and Puzle. Pushing the limits of their wildstyle, their work on the trains and the streets would be spotted and admired. Ultimately it would become an obsession for Dscreet. One which would start when he picked up his first spray can in 1991, at the age of just 12.
Recent piece by Dscreet in Croydon
DSCREET
It took a while to settle on the name for which he has now become so well known. “I had loads of tags at first” he laughs before reeling off a number of experimental names such as ‘Scribe’ and ‘Crease’. “I was a proper, proper toy, most of the stuff I painted as Scribe was really embarrassing.”
“I think I was most active illegally between 1996 and 2000” he says, telling me that it would have been around this time that he really started to settle on Dscreet. “Graffiti is about getting your name up in the most visible or iconic way you can like on trains or on rooftops” he tells me as he starts to explain the origins. “In a way it’s got it’s own visual loudness to it but you’ve got to do it quietly to avoid detection. So for me there was an alignment.”
Mi Manera Owl by Dscreet
PAINTING TRAINS
“I was out every night on a mission, it was very intensive” he says as he starts to talk about his time on the tracks. “I was doing a lot of bombing, a lot of streets, a lot of trains.”  They would become an obsession! Taking every opportunity he could to get out onto the dangerous sidings. “It’s a total rush, it’s got a completely different energy to painting on the streets.”
For the young Dscreet it was a way to associate himself with the roots of graffiti. “It’s where graffiti as we know it today, stylistically evolved” he says. “On the subway trains of New York, you are tapping into the roots of what graffiti was really defined by. It’s dangerous, it’s dirty, it smells and you shouldn’t be there…. You’ve got to evade detection, everything is against you.”
Dscreet Graffiti piece from 1999
Graffiti piece by Dscreet from 2004
Dscreet painting trains in Melbourne
Dscreet out on the trainyards
OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM
He likens the experience to an extreme sport mixed with art. “It’s a very physical thing ” he says. “There’s a whole other level of risk involved in doing graffiti on trains which doesn’t exist with any other art form. It makes it unique and special and I think that’s why people get hooked on it. You’re really against and outside the system.”
It’s an insight into just why so many (mainly) young men chose to risk their lives going trackside. Much less prevalent now, it’s difficult to imagine just how common it was. “Everything is against you. Yet people are still producing beautiful looking pieces on the side of trains. Then watching them roll through the city and everyone sees them. That’s a massive rush for anyone and it’s really exhilarating. I only ever wanted to do one but when I did one I was completely hooked. I just wanted to paint trains all the time.”
‘Voodoo Child’ by Dscreet
THE OWL
Moving to London, the Owl for which he would become known really started to come to the fore in his work. “I started doing the Owls by throw up. I enjoyed the repetition and quickness of it. I also really enjoyed the simplicity of the Owl.” The personal connection to it was important too. This after all was his cartoon, his creation that had come to the fore, rather that others work copied onto the street.
“Owls look like mystical fantastical beings” he explains. “A little bit like a dragon or unicorn, something that shouldn’t exist in real life but they do because their features are so exaggerated. Even their movements…. they just captured my imagination.” The symbolism of the Owl was important too. “It’s associated with the Greek goddess Athena! Which is why in society we associate the Owl with wisdom.”
The Owl also went particularly well with his tag. “An Owl is silent in flight and is always just observing. Looking and being aware of its surrounding. It just seemed to work with the tag ‘Dscreet’ so it was a good match for what I was doing.”
‘Burning Down the House’ by Dscreet
TOP 40 COVERS EXHIBITION AT BSMT SPACE
Music is another big influence in his work. Lyrics are there in every piece, sometimes hidden behind but often up front. Sometimes written in words and sometimes using the 1’s and zero’s of binary code as an alternate way of spelling them out. “It’s an analogy for the way we share digital images through algorithms” he tells me.”Nothing is “real” anymore, binary code is our visual language now.”
The lyrics he chooses will have meaning for him and music is the basis for his solo exhibition at the BSMT Space which is kind of the reason we are meeting. The show features his top 40 songs or at least his artistic interpretation of them. Combining art with music, this is about celebrating the joining of both.
Dscreet was interviewed during October 2018 and all images used in the body of this piece were courtesy of the artist. The exhibition runs from 18 October 2018 to 1 November 2018 at the BSMT Space Gallery in Dalston. The opening night will feature music from DJ Ian Joliet with a specially designed playlist featuring musical covers of the artwork.
DSCREET GALLERY
Shutter from Dscreet
An owl by Dscreet and photographer
RUN and Dscreet on display at the Tramshed in Shoreditch
Dscreet – An Interview with the Graffiti Artist Painting Owls on London’s Streets You might have seen them dotted around the streets of London. Owls peering out from the walls.
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tendance-news · 6 years
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But, as everybody knows, El Clasico is about more than goals, galacticos and 88 years of epic footballing rivalry.
READ: The match that changed football
READ: Catalonia's Parliament declares unilateral independence
FC Barcelona became a symbol of Catalan identity during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which ruled between 1939 and 1975, giving rise to the club's motto "Mes que un club" (More than a club). Real, meanwhile, were the club of the capital and widely regarded as representing the Spanish establishment.
Catalonia's dramatic bid for independence in October -- on Thursday Catalan pro-independence parties held their absolute majority in snap regional elections -- increases already heightened tensions ahead of Saturday's match.
But how will this potent concoction of politics, sport and history impact those closest to the action? Here are the stories of those whose pulses quicken most for the spectacle one observer described to CNN as a "cattle prod to the senses."
Who do you think will win Saturday's El Clasico? Have your say on our Facebook page.
The Player - 'Losing to Barca feels like falling into the bottom of a well'
Former Brazil international Savio played for Real Madrid from 1998 to 2003, making 105 appearance and scoring 16 goals.
I've played in a number of big matches in Brazil, in France, and other derbies in Spain -- Zaragoza versus Osasuna in Spain's Aragon region, Flamengo versus Vasco da Gama in Rio -- but none of these can compare to Real versus Barcelona.
Everything about this rivalry is different, it's the biggest derby in the world because of the quality of players on display, the greatness of both clubs, the history and, most importantly, the political rivalry -- Catalonia with the independence issue and Madrid being Spain's capital.
Savio playing in El Clasico in 1999
During the week before the match there's huge expectation. You know that it's a match which will be watched everywhere in the world.
As a player who came from Brazil, little by little I started to learn what El Clasico actually means to people.
Before joining Real I'd follow the game in Brazil, but when you're living it up close, you learn more about the league, the rivalry, the culture, and I really got to understand what El Clasico was about. We didn't need the Spanish players to explain to us what the match meant, we could see for ourselves.
Former Real captain Raul is fourth on the list of all-time leading El Clasico scorers (15)
My favorite El Clasico was one whih ended 2-2 in the Camp Nou in 1999.
It was very dramatic match. We had gone 1-0 up through Raul, but Barca had hit back and were leading 2-1 until Raul equalized in the 89th minute and did the "shushing" gesture to the Camp Nou crowd, putting his fingers to his lips, which everyone remembers. I assisted two of the goals and ... I cherish this game a lot.
When you're in the stadium, be it Camp Nou or Santiago Bernabeu, there's huge pressure. The atmosphere is one of celebration, but there's also tension and the dressing room after an El Clasico can either be one of extreme happiness or sadness.
If you win, everything is wonderful, that's why it's such a special game. But when you've lost against Barcelona it feels like you've lost a big title or a trophy. Aside from losing against a rival, you have to face all the criticism -- from the fans to the media -- it feels like you've fallen to the bottom of a well.
The Barca fan - 'I just want to win -- even if it means Messi scoring with his hand'
Catalan Pau Riera, 29, is a lifelong Barcelona fan who now lives in London.
I live El Clasicos as if they were finals, regardless of the position Barcelona is in the table.
It doesn't really matter how your team is performing during the season. This match stands alone and I just want Barca to beat Real, even if it's with an offside goal in the 94th minute, or Messi scoring with his hand.
For some people, El Clasico goes beyond football and they see it as the relationship between Spain and Catalonia. However, I prefer to keep it as it is -- a sports event.
Copa90: El Clásico - Real Madrid vs. Barcelona 03:32
Read: El Clasico -- step inside soccer's 'Colosseum'
Quiz: How well do you know El Clasico?
The rivalry has actually normalized over the last few years. When Jose Mourinho was in charge of Real, from 2010 to 2013, it got to a point that both teams were hating each other badly and there was too much tension around it.
For me, the worst moment though was when Luis Figo switched teams in 2000. I was a kid when that happened and he was by far my favorite Barca player. It hurt me so much that I hated him and Madrid for years and years.
Barca players burn a picture of Luis Figo after he controversially moved to Real for a then world-record fee in 2000
During the match, streets are empty as everyone is at the bar. Clasicos are probably the most social football matches because even if they broadcast the match on TV you prefer to gather with your friends and watch it at the local bar.
Family-wise my parents and sister don't especially follow football, but they usually do for El Clasico. My Dad enjoys a Real defeat more than a Barca win!
Before and during the match, I'm definitely more nervous than I'm an for any other match. I suffer every time Madrid has the possession of the ball.
I've always said that the day Barcelona and Madrid play the final of the Champions League I will probably not be able to watch -- it'd be too much for me.
When Barca lose to Real, I'm usually in a bad mood until I manage to stop thinking about it. I can't read any sports news for the next couple of days.
But beating Real is a great feeling of euphoria and satisfaction. When Barca beat Real 6-2 at the Bernabeu in 2009, the score was so unexpected it meant the celebrations were more explosive too.
Every time Barcelona scored my friends and I were jumping, shouting and hugging random people that were also celebrating. People were on the tables, glasses were crashing ... it was a proper mad celebration.
I'll probably be watching Saturday's match at a pub with a couple of friends from Barcelona. Clasicos in London are always a lottery because you never know if you'll be surrounded by Madrid supporters. It's fun to see their faces if you win -- but if they beat us you just want to disappear.
The Journalist - 'It's a brilliant test of your ability'
Graham Hunter is a Spanish-based football journalist and author of 'Barca: The Making of the Greatest Team in the World'.
When I began my career, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, worldwide there were fewer people who considered themselves as fans of Real Madrid or Barcelona.
It was not an unknown phenomenon, but both clubs have since strategically ballooned their audience and fan base around the world and now there is outright vehement adoration and love for either Real or Barca from people who have never been to Spain and will never go to an El Clasico.
El Clasico: '100,000 people whistling' 01:37
I don't believe it's using adjectives for the sake of it, El Clasico is like theater, it's like opera, the grand themes are all there.
Year in, year out, almost without exception, certainly with a higher strike rate than any other game in the world -- even the Champions League final -- El Clasico delivers. The last time there was a goalless draw was in 2002.
It gives you quality football, dramatic football, it gives you that certain thing that pulsates from the football pitch to the audience in the ground and through a television set. It remorselessly delivers and I think that's a key factor in El Clasico's appeal.
If we're absolutely truthful about AC Milan versus Inter Milan in Italy, or Germany's Bayern Munich against Borussia Dortmund, or the big English games, you can see exceptional contests, but not as often as El Clasico.
Reporting on the match is just thrilling. It's a brilliant test of our ability, your learning and your communication powers.
The challenge for each and every one of us is to be at our best. If your stomach is not full of butterflies, if you're not genuinely outright nervous -- did I predict it properly, have I analyzed it properly -- then you shouldn't be in the industry. El Clasico is like a cattle prod to the senses.
Barcelona fans cheer their team during the Copa del Rey against Real
Go to CNN.com/sport for more stories & features
On Saturday, I think Real will probably reignite the league and will show that when they're on form, currently, they're a better side than Barca.
A Barca win doesn't make them league champions, but a Barca win means Real won't win the title. I have a sneaky suspicion that Real will win this, and I've a sneaky suspicion that Real are legitimate candidates to become champions again.
As far as the impact of Catalan independence vote on this match, irrespective of where you stand in the debate, not one of Barcelona's players has come out and demanded independence.
But, when it comes to going to the capital against savvy Real Madrid support, it will be used to heighten the booing, whistling and the tension, to see whether that will put the Barca players off their stride.
The Real fan -- 'If we lose Christmas is going to be bad'
Colombian born Majin A. Hemer Sierra, 33, is president of the 124-member strong official Real Madrid fan club in Atlanta.
Sometimes Americans talk to me, people who don't watch soccer, and think it's just a game, and I try to explain to them that it's not only 22 guys kicking a ball.
We're talking about two different ways of seeing things for everything: how to play football, politics, the way you think. Our way of seeing things, as Real Madrid fans, is different to Barcelona fans. We are used to being the best and we say that being a Real Madrid supporter means you're already a winner in anything! I've been receiving text from friends about the match since Monday and every day the intensity gets higher.
Real Madrid have won eight trophies under Zinedine Zidane
The match is 7am Atlanta time, and our regular Irish pub usually opens at 11am, but it will open early on Saturday. The owners have been gracious enough to say they'll have the doors open and the TV on in enough time before kickoff.
Personally, I'm OK in the week leading up to an El Clascio but from an hour prior to kick-off that's when I start to get nervous.
I'm Catholic so I'll just do the cross and pray. People have their own rituals. I have a member who wears the same Real Madrid jersey for El Clasicos, he'll only wear that jersey for El Clasico. Many of our members have things they do before an El Clasico.
Nobody wants to lose an El Clasico. If we lose, I know for sure that my Christmas and the rest of next week is going to be horrible.
Even though we're in America we see ourselves as part of Real Madrid and the club makes us feel that way. In football, you feel the same whether you're inside the stadium or not.
The passion here is the same as in Madrid - if not more so because most of the people in the stadium are already used to seeing Real every weekend and have seen many Clasicos but, for us, it's something different.
Additional reporting by Duarte Mendonca
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javleech-blog · 7 years
Text
New Post has been published on Jav Leech
New Post has been published on https://javleech.com/why-the-spirit-of-flash-gaming-must-by-no-means-die/
Why the spirit of Flash gaming must by no means die
    From around 2009 to 2011 I edited a Flash gaming weblog referred to as Flytrap for AOL. A belated effort to expand the enterprize’s then-vast downloadable video games business, Flytrap was a tawdry, clumsy little component, all celebrity plugs and clunky-to-put in force gallery modules plus a bizarre dollop of tabloid sleaze. We had each day knock-knock jokes, FarmVille diaries and a section entitled “Hot Manly Action”, although no outright softcore content, thank god. I failed to assume an excessive amount of my work on Flytrap on the time – it becomes just there to fill gaps among articles on Real Games like Dead Space 2 or Uncharted. In hindsight, even though, it is clean that I had my heart inside the wrong vicinity. Games like Uncharted may be the industry’s obvious peaks, however, the ocean they’re poking out of – the bubbling innovative firmament with out which this art form could be actually impoverished – is Adobe Flash.
For many players nowadays, of direction, Flash is trash – a rickety plug-in for advergames and obnoxious video pop-united states that have been progressively sidelined by way of the major browser organizations. Just study the famous outcry, or lack thereof, over the assertion that Adobe will discontinue aid in 2020. It’s worth, then, a short refresher on what Flash has meant and way. For starters, Flash once intended YouTube. The video service that now draws around 400 hours of amassed viewing time a minute began existence as a Flash app in 2005 (the first-ever YouTube upload, a video of a co-founder’s trip to the zoo, continues to be to be had these days and a peculiar artifact indeed). Flash also intended FarmVille, the greatest of Facebook’s bucolic time-wasters, and Candy Crush Saga, which made its debut on King.Com in 2010. In fact, there was a length while Flash supposed so-referred to as “rich” – this is to say, lively and/or interactive – browser experiences complete forestall.
Icebreaker Nitrome has usually stood out among Flash sport developer thanks to its glowing, Nintendo-esque 2D art. In a charming hour-long GDC presentation from this February, Kongregate.Com’s director of premium video games John Cooney estimates that in 2009, ninety-nine in line with the scent of computer systems with net connections had Flash established. It’s easy, then, to look why so many up-and-coming coders opted for Flash inside the noughties. The mounting base of the most a hit console ever is chook feed by evaluation, and for a time, the Flash scene changed into reachable in a manner even dedicated middleware equipment and improvement groups on PC couldn’t rival. There have been no publishers to assuage – when you owned the development tools, all you needed to do become add your game to a domain. As Matthew Annal, co-founder with Heather Stancliffe of venerable Flash developer Nitrome, recollects: “When I installation Nitrome I desired to make unique games and even though I toyed with J2ME for cellular, Flash became surely the simplest space at the time in which you may make small scale original video games and discover enough audience to show a profit.”
The primordial model of the software program, FutureSplash Animator, wasn’t honestly designed for sport-making in any respect – created through Jonathan Gay in 1996 following an unwell-fated attempt to break into pen computing, its key characteristic turned into the guide for community-based animations run with a simple scripting language. Over time, but, Gay, his studio FutureWave Software and parent employer Macromedia added greater alternatives, culminating inside the debut of a “right” recreation toolset, ActionScript, in 2000. The toolset grew alongside the upward thrust of Flash animation and gaming portals like Newgrounds and Miniclip – its critical update perhaps being ActionScript 3.0, which offered full integration with ECMAScript, a programming language specification that is, in the shape of JavaScript, foundational to the sector huge net.
Nitrome dealing with director Matthew Annal on a career in Flash gaming In the start, there wasn’t a lot of competition, as maximum games were hobby initiatives that might be quite terrible. This made it easy for us to make our mark however additionally gave Flash as a platform a stigma that it was not an actual video games platform. To a diploma that feeling by no means fully left, though given the volume and best of many games on mobile/PC and even console down load shops, these days I think it changed into just showing the manner that matters could end up.
As a few years handed, Flash games were given more expert and early portals like Miniclip, Kongregate & Newgrounds gave way to many extras. There became unexpectedly lots extra money in it and from that also comes more competition.
Facebook got here onto the scene and all at once there has been lots cash there, and all of the speech was of entering into that marketplace and making it wealthy. This brought about Flash getting used for much bigger, extra informal video games than it generally had earlier than, and in-app purchases had been all of sudden a monetization model that far outperformed ads. In hindsight, all of it appears like what caused the cellular version we have these days.
Of direction Facebook video games kind of dwindled away, and at Nitrome we are glad we hadn’t jumped on that specific bandwagon. All seemed properly in the international of Flash games after which Apple brought out the iPhone.
The iPhone had a large effect on Flash video games, and not simply due to Steve Jobs’s refusal to allow the Flash player on iDevices. People all of sudden started spending greater in their time on their mobiles and much less on their browser on their computer. Year on year, Flash game audiences commenced to decline and as advert networks noticed the shift to cellular they too were increasingly transferring their consciousness there.
Flash games were never worthwhile on the same stage as mobile video games nowadays, and we noticed, separately, video games studios both close their doors or pass into different areas – normally, like Nitrome, to cell however often to PC or console too. It helped that at the equal time Flash started out to say no that mobile sprung up in conjunction with downloadable stores on a console.
    The latest declaration may be the final nail in the coffin for Flash, but the community that got here from it in a whole lot of approaches keeps to thrive on other platforms and the use of other gear. Flash games portals at the moment are app shops, and the Flash improvement tool is now Unity or Game Maker, however, the spirit is an awful lot the equal. “Initially I sort of stumbled into Flash, however, got I bet ‘serious’ about it proper after ActionScript3 came out,” Adam Saltsman, author of Canabalt and the drawing close Overland informed me when I emailed for his mind at the software’s retirement. “ECMA is a fun and sloppy trendy for a scripting language – see all of the shenanigans you can do in JavaScript, as an example – and ActionScript3 gave you bitmap-stage/pixel-stage get right of entry to for each imported belongings and display/output. And it becomes… Nominally go-platform. And ran inside the browser. And in case you didn’t use huge song documents, the game sizes had been quite small – Canabalt became some hundred kilobytes perhaps. So for someone seeking out a type of sandbox for doing speedy development or iterative improvement, and looking to proportion games with online communities and solicit comments and gauge reactions, it turned into kind of a dream come proper.”
spider There are intercourse games after which there are intercourse video games. Anna Anthropy’s Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars is an arch exploration of masochism, featured on Adult Swim’s dependably adventurous recreation channel in 2011. It helped, of course, that the Flash toolset became so low priced. “Eventually they made the AS3 compiler without cost, so in case you have been programming-minded you could literally make Flash games absolutely at no cost. No revenue share in case your budget is just too big or some thing placing over you. This type of atmosphere I suppose helped produce numerous first-rate 1/3 celebration libraries (like Box2D, as an example).” Saltsman himself could release a free ActionScript development library, Flixel, in 2009, which has been used for hundreds of games.
Early Flash gaming was rife with copyright theft and reduce-throat business processes – it turned into not unusual for pirates to ask for bribes to eliminate games from portals that ranked higher on Google than the developer’s own website. Website advertizements have been extra profitable than they may be now, however licensing offers were also an awful lot much less beneficent. Across 2005-2007, but, the arrival of professionally-run systems Mochi Media and Kongregate plus the Flash Game License market helped stabilize the marketplace, sparking what Cooney styles a “renaissance”. By the top of the decade, the largest Flash games may want to attract upwards of $one hundred,000 in licensing prices, and an extensive minority of Flash recreation builders had been capable of work complete-time. There have been greater ways to earn money, too, consisting of the capacity to make payments within apps – the beginnings of the loose-to-play craze, and a formative have an impact on cell gaming, to which many Flash recreation studios would finally gravitate.
It changed into an excellent time, all advised, to be going for walks a Flash gaming blog. Among my favorites from that length are the primary actual-time physics puzzlers, or “puzzlers” – games like Crash the Castle, in which you release boulders at stacks of masonry to squish Monty Python-esque nobles, or Nitrome’s pleasant Ice-Breaker, in that you have to slice up the extent to free frozen Vikings. There have been the viral sensations, like the famously stupid limb-simulator QWOP or Adult Swim’s joyous Robot Unicorn Attack, and construct-and-proportion games like Line Rider, where you would pencil in a path for others to skate down. There were point-and-click on extravaganzas like Samorost from Czech developer Amanita Design, a fungal fairy tale with lush heritage art. There were philosophical platformers like Coma, a tour of a pastoral dreamscape with a few fantastically considered audio. There has been a stunning amount of video games with political and social issues, from Molleindustria’s powerful investigations of the quick meals industry through geopolitical sims like Oil God to a small avalanche of interactive satires about Israeli profession of the Gaza Strip.
Mcdonalds Molleindustria’s The McDonalds Game takes you via every degree inside the creation of a Big Mac. As that listing of weird bedfellows suggests, there has been a lousy lot of experimentation and sharing, with noticeably few overarching publisher or platform-holder preoccupations to fear about. “The Flash dev network has always been exquisite,” notes Matthew Annal. “Everyone wants to assist each different and display of new strategies. There became always someone looking to do matters that had been no longer designed for the platform. Way again earlier than Adobe added 3D there have been many 3-d hints going from SNES-style mode 7 to proper 3-d texture-mapped items. Whenever we had a trouble at Nitrome the solution was constantly on line someplace, or someone become inclined to assist. Many events sprung up across the platform, too, and it became constantly superb to meet with these compatible human beings. I assume a large part of this turned into there was never a cause to not get on with other studios. It never virtually felt like we have been in finishing touch for anything, so everyone desired desirable things for other devs.”
Many of latest higher-known “indie” builders cut their tooth on Flash. Ed McMillen labored on dozens of Flash titles before hitting the huge time with Super Meatboy and The Binding Of Isaac: I particularly love Time Cfuk, a room-based totally platformer with a time travel element which payments itself variously as about “finding logic in irrelevance” and “verbal exchange with folks who you don’t like”. Other standouts include the self-explanatory text journey Don’t Shit Your Pants, whose developers might go onto make cult hit roguelike Rogue Legacy, and Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back, a descent to the underworld.
CONTINUE? Xbox One backward compatibility of Xbox 360 games changed into Microsoft’s large surprise at E3 2015, and when you consider that debuting the feature… Pokémon Go guidelines, tricks, and cheats guide to help you trap ’em all Pokémon Go, the region-based totally loose-to-play recreation that has taken the iOS and Android app stores through a storm, permits gamers… Some Flash video games, such as The Behemoth’s Alien Hominid or Thatgamecompany’s Flow, have made their manner to different systems; others were updated to run on HTML5, lengthy trumpeted as Flash’s successor. But unfortunately, a huge wide variety of those titles are vulnerable to being misplaced forever. Last yr, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Firefox announced or implemented plans to dam Flash on their browsers. Apple specifically has constantly been keen to pull the cause on Flash, regarding it as technically deficient, a security legal responsibility and a danger to its own app commercial enterprise: in 2010, Steve Jobs penned a legendary 1700 phrase takedown, commenting that “the cell technology is ready low power gadgets, touch interfaces and open internet requirements – all regions wherein Flash falls short” (Adobe retaliated with some fairly cheeky adverts).
Qwop Charming novelties like QWOP cashed in on the popularity of aggregators like Digg, Fark, and Stumbleupon. Most Flash developers could agree that as a bit of technology, Flash has had its stand downs. “Linux assist became a disaster,” Saltsman says. “There have been like, three unique weird ways of manufacturing desktop apps out of your net plugins; games could be decompiled very without difficulty (I wager this become a pro and a con in a few methods); it became notably un-robust in terms of conventional game loops (with out 0.33 party libraries, I imply); the sloppiness of the language became very fun however may also hugely ambush you on the worst times; performance might be unpredictable and extremely black-field-y, and so on.” These are negligible downsides when set against the ethic of journey, freedom, and camaraderie that grew up around Flash, however – characteristics which can be usually well worth striving for, at the same time as the app itself fades into obscurity.
“I’m now not sure it will likely be remembered as such,” says Anna, “But in my thoughts Flash paved the manner for both current indie video games and unfastened-for-all-fashion app shops. I guess the legacy of Flash is likely that it brought about the self-published indie motion we see nowadays.”
0 notes
lavleech-blog · 7 years
Text
Why the spirit of Flash gaming must by no means die
New Post has been published on https://javleech.com/why-the-spirit-of-flash-gaming-must-by-no-means-die/
Why the spirit of Flash gaming must by no means die
    From around 2009 to 2011 I edited a Flash gaming weblog referred to as Flytrap for AOL. A belated effort to expand the enterprize’s then-vast downloadable video games business, Flytrap was a tawdry, clumsy little component, all celebrity plugs and clunky-to-put in force gallery modules plus a bizarre dollop of tabloid sleaze. We had each day knock-knock jokes, FarmVille diaries and a section entitled “Hot Manly Action”, although no outright softcore content, thank god. I failed to assume an excessive amount of my work on Flytrap on the time – it becomes just there to fill gaps among articles on Real Games like Dead Space 2 or Uncharted. In hindsight, even though, it is clean that I had my heart inside the wrong vicinity. Games like Uncharted may be the industry’s obvious peaks, however, the ocean they’re poking out of – the bubbling innovative firmament with out which this art form could be actually impoverished – is Adobe Flash.
For many players nowadays, of direction, Flash is trash – a rickety plug-in for advergames and obnoxious video pop-united states that have been progressively sidelined by way of the major browser organizations. Just study the famous outcry, or lack thereof, over the assertion that Adobe will discontinue aid in 2020. It’s worth, then, a short refresher on what Flash has meant and way. For starters, Flash once intended YouTube. The video service that now draws around 400 hours of amassed viewing time a minute began existence as a Flash app in 2005 (the first-ever YouTube upload, a video of a co-founder’s trip to the zoo, continues to be to be had these days and a peculiar artifact indeed). Flash also intended FarmVille, the greatest of Facebook’s bucolic time-wasters, and Candy Crush Saga, which made its debut on King.Com in 2010. In fact, there was a length while Flash supposed so-referred to as “rich” – this is to say, lively and/or interactive – browser experiences complete forestall.
Icebreaker Nitrome has usually stood out among Flash sport developer thanks to its glowing, Nintendo-esque 2D art. In a charming hour-long GDC presentation from this February, Kongregate.Com’s director of premium video games John Cooney estimates that in 2009, ninety-nine in line with the scent of computer systems with net connections had Flash established. It’s easy, then, to look why so many up-and-coming coders opted for Flash inside the noughties. The mounting base of the most a hit console ever is chook feed by evaluation, and for a time, the Flash scene changed into reachable in a manner even dedicated middleware equipment and improvement groups on PC couldn’t rival. There have been no publishers to assuage – when you owned the development tools, all you needed to do become add your game to a domain. As Matthew Annal, co-founder with Heather Stancliffe of venerable Flash developer Nitrome, recollects: “When I installation Nitrome I desired to make unique games and even though I toyed with J2ME for cellular, Flash became surely the simplest space at the time in which you may make small scale original video games and discover enough audience to show a profit.”
The primordial model of the software program, FutureSplash Animator, wasn’t honestly designed for sport-making in any respect – created through Jonathan Gay in 1996 following an unwell-fated attempt to break into pen computing, its key characteristic turned into the guide for community-based animations run with a simple scripting language. Over time, but, Gay, his studio FutureWave Software and parent employer Macromedia added greater alternatives, culminating inside the debut of a “right” recreation toolset, ActionScript, in 2000. The toolset grew alongside the upward thrust of Flash animation and gaming portals like Newgrounds and Miniclip – its critical update perhaps being ActionScript 3.0, which offered full integration with ECMAScript, a programming language specification that is, in the shape of JavaScript, foundational to the sector huge net.
Nitrome dealing with director Matthew Annal on a career in Flash gaming In the start, there wasn’t a lot of competition, as maximum games were hobby initiatives that might be quite terrible. This made it easy for us to make our mark however additionally gave Flash as a platform a stigma that it was not an actual video games platform. To a diploma that feeling by no means fully left, though given the volume and best of many games on mobile/PC and even console down load shops, these days I think it changed into just showing the manner that matters could end up.
As a few years handed, Flash games were given more expert and early portals like Miniclip, Kongregate & Newgrounds gave way to many extras. There became unexpectedly lots extra money in it and from that also comes more competition.
Facebook got here onto the scene and all at once there has been lots cash there, and all of the speech was of entering into that marketplace and making it wealthy. This brought about Flash getting used for much bigger, extra informal video games than it generally had earlier than, and in-app purchases had been all of sudden a monetization model that far outperformed ads. In hindsight, all of it appears like what caused the cellular version we have these days.
Of direction Facebook video games kind of dwindled away, and at Nitrome we are glad we hadn’t jumped on that specific bandwagon. All seemed properly in the international of Flash games after which Apple brought out the iPhone.
The iPhone had a large effect on Flash video games, and not simply due to Steve Jobs’s refusal to allow the Flash player on iDevices. People all of sudden started spending greater in their time on their mobiles and much less on their browser on their computer. Year on year, Flash game audiences commenced to decline and as advert networks noticed the shift to cellular they too were increasingly transferring their consciousness there.
Flash games were never worthwhile on the same stage as mobile video games nowadays, and we noticed, separately, video games studios both close their doors or pass into different areas – normally, like Nitrome, to cell however often to PC or console too. It helped that at the equal time Flash started out to say no that mobile sprung up in conjunction with downloadable stores on a console.
    The latest declaration may be the final nail in the coffin for Flash, but the community that got here from it in a whole lot of approaches keeps to thrive on other platforms and the use of other gear. Flash games portals at the moment are app shops, and the Flash improvement tool is now Unity or Game Maker, however, the spirit is an awful lot the equal. “Initially I sort of stumbled into Flash, however, got I bet ‘serious’ about it proper after ActionScript3 came out,” Adam Saltsman, author of Canabalt and the drawing close Overland informed me when I emailed for his mind at the software’s retirement. “ECMA is a fun and sloppy trendy for a scripting language – see all of the shenanigans you can do in JavaScript, as an example – and ActionScript3 gave you bitmap-stage/pixel-stage get right of entry to for each imported belongings and display/output. And it becomes… Nominally go-platform. And ran inside the browser. And in case you didn’t use huge song documents, the game sizes had been quite small – Canabalt became some hundred kilobytes perhaps. So for someone seeking out a type of sandbox for doing speedy development or iterative improvement, and looking to proportion games with online communities and solicit comments and gauge reactions, it turned into kind of a dream come proper.”
spider There are intercourse games after which there are intercourse video games. Anna Anthropy’s Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars is an arch exploration of masochism, featured on Adult Swim’s dependably adventurous recreation channel in 2011. It helped, of course, that the Flash toolset became so low priced. “Eventually they made the AS3 compiler without cost, so in case you have been programming-minded you could literally make Flash games absolutely at no cost. No revenue share in case your budget is just too big or some thing placing over you. This type of atmosphere I suppose helped produce numerous first-rate 1/3 celebration libraries (like Box2D, as an example).” Saltsman himself could release a free ActionScript development library, Flixel, in 2009, which has been used for hundreds of games.
Early Flash gaming was rife with copyright theft and reduce-throat business processes – it turned into not unusual for pirates to ask for bribes to eliminate games from portals that ranked higher on Google than the developer’s own website. Website advertizements have been extra profitable than they may be now, however licensing offers were also an awful lot much less beneficent. Across 2005-2007, but, the arrival of professionally-run systems Mochi Media and Kongregate plus the Flash Game License market helped stabilize the marketplace, sparking what Cooney styles a “renaissance”. By the top of the decade, the largest Flash games may want to attract upwards of $one hundred,000 in licensing prices, and an extensive minority of Flash recreation builders had been capable of work complete-time. There have been greater ways to earn money, too, consisting of the capacity to make payments within apps – the beginnings of the loose-to-play craze, and a formative have an impact on cell gaming, to which many Flash recreation studios would finally gravitate.
It changed into an excellent time, all advised, to be going for walks a Flash gaming blog. Among my favorites from that length are the primary actual-time physics puzzlers, or “puzzlers” – games like Crash the Castle, in which you release boulders at stacks of masonry to squish Monty Python-esque nobles, or Nitrome’s pleasant Ice-Breaker, in that you have to slice up the extent to free frozen Vikings. There have been the viral sensations, like the famously stupid limb-simulator QWOP or Adult Swim’s joyous Robot Unicorn Attack, and construct-and-proportion games like Line Rider, where you would pencil in a path for others to skate down. There were point-and-click on extravaganzas like Samorost from Czech developer Amanita Design, a fungal fairy tale with lush heritage art. There were philosophical platformers like Coma, a tour of a pastoral dreamscape with a few fantastically considered audio. There has been a stunning amount of video games with political and social issues, from Molleindustria’s powerful investigations of the quick meals industry through geopolitical sims like Oil God to a small avalanche of interactive satires about Israeli profession of the Gaza Strip.
Mcdonalds Molleindustria’s The McDonalds Game takes you via every degree inside the creation of a Big Mac. As that listing of weird bedfellows suggests, there has been a lousy lot of experimentation and sharing, with noticeably few overarching publisher or platform-holder preoccupations to fear about. “The Flash dev network has always been exquisite,” notes Matthew Annal. “Everyone wants to assist each different and display of new strategies. There became always someone looking to do matters that had been no longer designed for the platform. Way again earlier than Adobe added 3D there have been many 3-d hints going from SNES-style mode 7 to proper 3-d texture-mapped items. Whenever we had a trouble at Nitrome the solution was constantly on line someplace, or someone become inclined to assist. Many events sprung up across the platform, too, and it became constantly superb to meet with these compatible human beings. I assume a large part of this turned into there was never a cause to not get on with other studios. It never virtually felt like we have been in finishing touch for anything, so everyone desired desirable things for other devs.”
Many of latest higher-known “indie” builders cut their tooth on Flash. Ed McMillen labored on dozens of Flash titles before hitting the huge time with Super Meatboy and The Binding Of Isaac: I particularly love Time Cfuk, a room-based totally platformer with a time travel element which payments itself variously as about “finding logic in irrelevance” and “verbal exchange with folks who you don’t like”. Other standouts include the self-explanatory text journey Don’t Shit Your Pants, whose developers might go onto make cult hit roguelike Rogue Legacy, and Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back, a descent to the underworld.
CONTINUE? Xbox One backward compatibility of Xbox 360 games changed into Microsoft’s large surprise at E3 2015, and when you consider that debuting the feature… Pokémon Go guidelines, tricks, and cheats guide to help you trap ’em all Pokémon Go, the region-based totally loose-to-play recreation that has taken the iOS and Android app stores through a storm, permits gamers… Some Flash video games, such as The Behemoth’s Alien Hominid or Thatgamecompany’s Flow, have made their manner to different systems; others were updated to run on HTML5, lengthy trumpeted as Flash’s successor. But unfortunately, a huge wide variety of those titles are vulnerable to being misplaced forever. Last yr, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Firefox announced or implemented plans to dam Flash on their browsers. Apple specifically has constantly been keen to pull the cause on Flash, regarding it as technically deficient, a security legal responsibility and a danger to its own app commercial enterprise: in 2010, Steve Jobs penned a legendary 1700 phrase takedown, commenting that “the cell technology is ready low power gadgets, touch interfaces and open internet requirements – all regions wherein Flash falls short” (Adobe retaliated with some fairly cheeky adverts).
Qwop Charming novelties like QWOP cashed in on the popularity of aggregators like Digg, Fark, and Stumbleupon. Most Flash developers could agree that as a bit of technology, Flash has had its stand downs. “Linux assist became a disaster,” Saltsman says. “There have been like, three unique weird ways of manufacturing desktop apps out of your net plugins; games could be decompiled very without difficulty (I wager this become a pro and a con in a few methods); it became notably un-robust in terms of conventional game loops (with out 0.33 party libraries, I imply); the sloppiness of the language became very fun however may also hugely ambush you on the worst times; performance might be unpredictable and extremely black-field-y, and so on.” These are negligible downsides when set against the ethic of journey, freedom, and camaraderie that grew up around Flash, however – characteristics which can be usually well worth striving for, at the same time as the app itself fades into obscurity.
“I’m now not sure it will likely be remembered as such,” says Anna, “But in my thoughts Flash paved the manner for both current indie video games and unfastened-for-all-fashion app shops. I guess the legacy of Flash is likely that it brought about the self-published indie motion we see nowadays.”
0 notes
flauntpage · 7 years
Text
Thinks: Ina Blom
Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom
  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!
Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?
IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.
KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?
IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.
KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?
Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum
IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.
One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.
KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?
IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.
  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola
KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?
IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?
KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.
Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka
IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.
KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.
KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 
IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.
  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini
KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?
IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.
By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.
Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier
KH: What are you working on now?
IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.
Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.
KH: Anything else?
IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]
KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.
  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.
    Episode 583 Paul Catanese
Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu
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The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang
Economies of resignation
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nofomoartworld · 7 years
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Thinks: Ina Blom
Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom
  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!
Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?
IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.
KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?
IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.
KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?
Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum
IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.
One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.
KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?
IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.
  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola
KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?
IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?
KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.
Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka
IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.
KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.
KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 
IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.
  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini
KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?
IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.
By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.
Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier
KH: What are you working on now?
IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.
Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.
KH: Anything else?
IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]
KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.
  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.
    Episode 583 Paul Catanese
Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu
In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman
The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang
Economies of resignation
from Bad at Sports http://ift.tt/2uxxpqK via IFTTT
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flauntpage · 7 years
Text
Thinks: Ina Blom
Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom
  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!
Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?
IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.
KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?
IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.
KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?
Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum
IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.
One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.
KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?
IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.
  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola
KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?
IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?
KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.
Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka
IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.
KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.
KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 
IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.
  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini
KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?
IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.
By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.
Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier
KH: What are you working on now?
IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.
Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.
KH: Anything else?
IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]
KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.
  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.
    Episode 583 Paul Catanese
Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu
In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman
The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang
Economies of resignation
Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
0 notes
flauntpage · 7 years
Text
Thinks: Ina Blom
Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom
  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!
Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?
IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.
KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?
IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.
KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?
Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum
IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.
One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.
KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?
IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.
  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola
KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?
IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?
KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.
Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka
IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.
KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.
KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 
IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.
  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini
KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?
IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.
By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.
Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier
KH: What are you working on now?
IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.
Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.
KH: Anything else?
IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]
KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.
  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.
    Episode 583 Paul Catanese
Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu
In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman
The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang
Economies of resignation
Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
0 notes
flauntpage · 7 years
Text
Thinks: Ina Blom
Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom
  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!
Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?
IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.
KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?
IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.
KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?
Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum
IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.
One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.
KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?
IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.
  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola
KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?
IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?
KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.
Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka
IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.
KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.
KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 
IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.
  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini
KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?
IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.
By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.
Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier
KH: What are you working on now?
IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.
Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.
KH: Anything else?
IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]
KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.
  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.
    Episode 583 Paul Catanese
Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu
In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman
The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang
Economies of resignation
Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
0 notes
flauntpage · 7 years
Text
Thinks: Ina Blom
Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom
  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!
Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?
IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.
KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?
IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.
KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?
Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum
IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.
One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.
KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?
IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.
  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola
KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?
IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?
KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.
Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka
IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.
KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.
KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 
IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.
  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini
KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?
IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.
By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.
Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier
KH: What are you working on now?
IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.
Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.
KH: Anything else?
IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]
KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]
IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.
  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.
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Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv
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