Ghosts of Pre-Modernity: Butoh and the Avant-Garde

Some years ago after I had completed my M.A. in Asian Studies, was working full-time, raising a young child and starting on my second Masters, I discovered that someone in Germany had cited my thesis on Butoh. Elena Polzer had very generous words for it but also mentioned that it was difficult to obtain. (You can find her excellent thesis here: “Hijikata Tatsumi’s From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein“)

In 2006 I published a condensed version of it in Performance Paradigm# 2 essays on “Japan after the 1960s: the ends of the avant-garde” and via Academia.edu. I received notice that it had generated noticeable interest, particularly in Europe. It was even cited in Laura Cull’s book: “Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance.”

I vowed to get my thesis published…the easiest method to get it out there in the meantime would be as a digital e-book on Amazon.com.

Radical Transformation – Magnum Photos at the Harry Ransom Center

Heraclitus tells us that you cannot step in the same river twice, because it’s not the same river and you’re not the same person…but this is precisely what great art and photography can accomplish. In the largest donation made to the Harry Ransom Center, two thousand Magnum prints have inspired a selection of dramatic, frozen instances from our cultural memory of the 20th century.

Museum reviews on Examiner.com

I’ve been busy the past two years as a digital librarian for a semiconductor company, but I’m trying to dip my toe back into art criticism. What follows are a sampling of earlier reviews.

The Human Touch – Blanton Museum – July 29, 2012.

“The sculpted bust of two young black girls byJohn Ahearn, playfully whispering into each others ear is full of humanity and joy. Unlike the mimetic idealism we see so often in historical portraits of children, Ahearn captures fleeting emotional subtleties in his realism that we know exist and that are usually lost only to memory.”

The Collecting Impulse – Blanton Museum – July 25, 2012.

“It’s difficult to tell what is more fascinating about the exhibit, the marvelous cross-section of New York contemporary art or this generous and devoted couple….They were a couple that built relationships with artists, asking and valuing their opinions. Quotes from these artists about this couple can be found throughout the exhibit, praising their pure and authentic eye as well as their practicality.

Recovering Beauty – the 1990s in Buenos Aires – Blanton Museum – May 14, 2011

“After years of violence and oppression through the 1970’s to early 1980’s, the art from the 1990’s show a society in transformation, re-evaluating identity, positions and expression.”

Future of Gaming and Digital Scholarship

“The Most Dangerous Gamer”

“Never mind that they’re now among the most lucrative forms of entertainment in America, video games are juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy. At least that’s what Jonathan Blow thinks. But the game industry’s harshest critic is also its most cerebral developer, a maverick bent on changing the way we think about games and storytelling. With his next release, The Witness, Blow may cement his legacy—or end his career. In a multibillion-dollar industry addicted to laser guns and carnivorous aliens, can true art finally flourish.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/?single_page=true

“I think the mainstream game industry is a &%$&-up den of mediocrity,” he told me. “There are some smart people wallowing in there, but the environment discourages creativity and strength and rigor, so what you get is mostly atrophy.”

Myself – I’m into museum studies, digital curation, digital archiving, physical archives….and to a lesser extent gaming. But I was once very hooked. It’s the storytelling, participation and interaction, problem-solving, exploration, information organizing and collecting…all those drives are powerful not just for learning – but for collaborative learning and knowledge-production.

While there is a brilliant but lonely genius to the games of Jonathan Blow…there is something different at play with the studio – http://www.secondstory.com/ – something that connects to and inspires cognitive activity beyond solitary puzzle-solving…

When I think of what is stored in archival repositories like the Harry Ransom Center – and so many other museums – I think about the possibilities of bridging the power of interactive ‘gaming’ with the exploration of Art and Archives. When I recall powerful museum exhibits that transformed me… I think, what can be done to carry gaming further? I am certain that we are only at the beginning, the first steps of realizing what these techological ‘toys’ and digitization methods can ‘do’ for our creative records. We are in an age where there is a simultaneous need to preserve and to integrate knowledge so that we can solve so many of humanity’s problems. The evolution of gaming may hold the key.

Re-configuring Progress and Development in the age of Sustainability Needs

Considering how lifestyles in the “developed” West consume the greatest amount of resources and have tended toward wasteful practices, what are non-Western lifestyle habits that we in the West could adopt? We may need to change our ways as populations grow, migrate due to climate change and resource restrictions. One thing that we’re doing is growing more vegetables, herbs, chilis and peppers, getting beans, spices and lentils in bulk, especially from the local Indian grocery. We are learning to make Indian, Middle-Eastern and Asian dishes in low-energy ways (crockpot) and would like to learn how to create a solar oven as we live in a very hot climate with lots of sun exposure. We are drying clothes outside, catching rainwater for the garden, not watering our lawn, drinking more teas and iced teas and running indoor fans. I would like to see more telecommuting and working earlier and later, with staggered siesta times to conserve energy for people to rest. People would be healthier, happier and there would be less carbon spent during the higher temperature times of the day.

We need a way to reframe the notion of “development’ or ‘progress’ so that it is not immediately equated with increased resource consumption and carbon creation. There needs to be a way to reframe a move back to practices of the “less-developed” world in ways that are not negative or patronizing. We need to rethink the 20th century industrial/colonial linear paradigm that has this world on a crash course. How can we describe a move toward sustainability, conservation, investment in renewable resources and energy in ways that are practical, positive and possible? Some may observe that the “developing” world is already leading on this topic…How then can we in the “developed” West release our grasp on wasteful practices and learn from the rest of the world? This concerns how we structure our work-day, how we build our homes, or how we manage the water we use (can we begin to implement home-irrigation methods using a natural-filtered process to use grey-water from laundry machines, showers and dishwashers? – something that would be especially useful where homes would like to grow their own vegetables and fruit trees).

In as much as the 21st century seems to be shaping up to be an Asian century, I believe it would be good to revisit the work of early 20th century Indian, Chinese and Japanese intellectuals who debated traditional Asian values vs. the goals of colonial modernity in the pre-World War period. Scholars like Okakura Kakuzo and Rabindranath Tagore.

And I am of course also looking to practices in pre-Colonial “Latin” America and Africa as we are discovering that colonial practices destroyed the sustainability these populations had achieved over thousands of years and lead to current states of poverty. I’m considering lifestyle, permacultural and social practices that fostered greater communities and well-being. Examples of efforts to heal these communities can be seen in the following resources (for Africa and South Asia): A Thousand Suns, a permaculturalist on “Greening the Desert”, Barefoot College, and the work of Narayana Krishnan.

What are other theories, examples and practices that could offer those in the West a way toward a greater “progress” or “civilization” in how Gandhi might have understood it? As the rest of the world “advances” and the climate and resources of the world change radically and constrict, how can we all adapt in ways that are positive and sustainable? What about the stories we’ve been telling ourselves, need to change? How do we need to re-define “leadership?” How do we need to re-consider “development?”

Techno-diversity: toward an ecology of (social) networks

In debating the brewing “war” between Facebook, Twitter and GooglePlus it dawned on me that these services are really rather different. It would make greater sense for them to focus on and develop their strengths rather than race to homogenize themselves into identically mediocre platforms.

Twitter does something very unique and the kind of data dynamic that results from Twitters model, the way in which data flows in its network, is very different than that of Facebook because Facebook has primarily been a “walled garden.” With the advent of groups, news pages, fan/business/institutional pages, this has become less so…but the interaction model is still very different than that of Twitter. Facebook offers its non-person content files a different sense of “place” – something more static that can more easily collect threads of user content. Twitter is “faster” and far more impermanent. This is not a better or a worse thing, just different.

Google Plus looks to offer a potentially unique blending of the two. Perhaps this is part of what Facebook is upset about….but one of GooglePlus’ strongest draws so far is its superior social filtering features – the intuitive and usable “Circles.” See, users liked the ability to post within a walled garden…but we wanted to create rooms. Facebook’s “lists” (among many other privacy features) were labryinthian nightmares. But Facebook still has a world of content on there that it should develop ways to respect and protect (enabling searchability, the ability to tag and archive content) rather than trying to run after other services going “Me too!” and cursing the ingenuity of others. If Facebook doesn’t want to go the way of Yahoo’s mistreatment of Flickr or Delicious….it should pull its CEOs out of the parties and think hard about the Information Curation questions from the point of view of its Users (not its commercial sponsors).

I think there could be lots to learn from other network models that had advantages, but suffered executive hubris and neglect. MySpace was a great site for small businesses and musicians. Why? Let’s think about this…what could they do on MySpace that they could not do on Facebook? I’ll touch on some of this later in this post, but feel free to chime in.

Tribe.net…..There is a great amount of content on Tribe.net. What were the drawbacks in terms of Information Architecture….how did Tribe.net not succeed? I am not talking about funding or policies..I’m talking primary about Information Architectural models. What was it about Tribe.net that made it “free-er” seeming than Facebook? What was off-putting?

And then there’s Livejournal. I could devote an entire post at least to the lessons we can learn from LJ. There are many great features it has. There are surely drawbacks as well.

My primary point however is that all of these need not try to be identical to each other. Yes, they could learn a lot from each other…but it is also good to have choice. I enjoy Twitter in a different way than Facebook or GooglePlus. If the latter two could evolve to pick up some of the archiving/search/usability features of LiveJournal….or allow for content promotion (while respecting artists’ content-ownership rights) like MySpace or Flickr….or allow for deep levels of cultural content like Tribe.net….We could really enrich the online cultural environment in ways that 1) in two months or two years content won’t be lost and 2) users could retain ownership of (or at least more easily control) their content rather than be merely providing free consumer research and promotional images and copy.

Interactive Narratives for Digital Humanities Gaming

As I witness my 6 year old’s engagement in games like Zombie Farm, with its complex rules and scenarios, I reflect on the tremendous cultural holdings of libraries, museums and archives and wonder how can we engage the next generation in this material? How can we make learning using archives and collections something that can meaningfully compete with traditional gaming narratives stemming from fantasy, horror and science fiction? What are the constructive elements that take content that is scientific, relates to premodern folklore or modern day fears…and translates it to an engaging game? For decades the gaming industry has rested upon the work done by the pioneers of table-top gaming (D&D, etc.) and arcade games. In the meantime, educational interactive gaming has not caught up, reamaining trapped in tired metaphors of flash-cards and treasure hunts.

A number of creative and analytical things are on my mind right now….I am in the initially messy stage of compiling issues, factors, observations, possibilities and visions. I am spurred on first by the amazing work of Game Researcher Jane McGonigal who persevered through recovery from a brain injury by creating a game out of it…a game that could prove useful for anyone dealing with recovery (from quitting smoking to perhaps behavioral plans for children with special needs): http://blog.avantgame.com/2010/07/superbetter-ignite-talk-and-kickstarter.html

I am additionally moved by Ali Carr-Chellman’s TED talk about how to re-engage boys in learning through interactive gaming:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html

It then occurs to me…the metaphors in video games are similar to sports, scouts and to martial arts. They are about ‘leveling up’ (belts, badges, etc.), having ‘allies’, defeating opponents, working with teams, engaging in strategic thinking.

The narrative archs as stated before deal primarily with mythos from European-folklore based fantasy, East Asian folklore, space operas and martial-arts based dramas, Lovecraftian horror, Vampire fiction, Zombie fiction and military scenarios.

Contemporary app. games are gradually deviating from these, but they still in part stem from the original objectives set up in the age of table-top gaming development: mystery-solving, puzzle-solving, collaborative problem-solving with teams.

These are all things that are not found in our school system or museum and archive exhibits.

How can we successfully carry these over to games involving content in historical or cultural archives? How can we make such games familiar in template, engaging and meaningful?

Lastly, because the following videos struck a cord in me that I have yet to completely process in terms of its relevance and application: The following 4th grade male teacher in Japan uses team and literacy activities to develop social and emotional empathy among children: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armP8TfS9Is

Can we develop games that encourage use and understanding of the materials of cultural heritage while also developing social and emotional literacy? Can we do this through games and activities?

Lots to chew on.

Digital archives, e-reading and what is lost?

Sitting down with a pile of recent New Yorker magazines given to me by a neighbor, eating a bowl of homemade soup, I marveled at how it felt to become engrossed in a medium that did not electronically glow or hum at me. Neither did it tempt with boosts of social-media-induced oxytocin when my interest in the author’s narrative began to waver. My mind felt calm as I fell into the developing piece. I fell happily into a zone unlike the frenetic zipping around on Twitter, or the emotional juxtapositions on Facebook.

We have studied the brain activity of those online, those watching TV, those playing videogames….we are learning so much regarding how internet and computer use is creating changes in mental pathways. Have we studied the difference between MRIs of print-media readers vs. e-book/ blog/RSS/social a readers?

There is a perceived convenience in compiling, scanning, processing large amounts of citations and PDFs for research….but there is an experiential difference in going through printed articles, piles, folders, and books. I would argue that this experiential, emotional and intuitive difference informs and allows for differently motivated discoveries, reflections and insights.

How much is romantic projection and how much is neurologically accurate? And is there really a difference between those two? Is it a matter of platform? Would I feel differently if the manner in which I interact with the digital archive resembled that of shuffling through piles and pages? Would it be different sitting in a cafe versus sitting in front of my computer like a TV? Would it be different if I were using a touch-screen to move files into bibiliographic software? There are various impediments to my answering that question – limitations having to do with the cost of new equipment, my familiarity with certain software.

Still, is there some loss of serendipity? Some level of intuitive control and mastery that years of working with paper publications has developed that the comparatively fickle and everchanging technologies of databases and metadata/retrieval systems has made too difficult for many to accomplish? Just when one develops a system of organization do frameworks and schema change and the world is captivated by promising new novelties. Akin to an office changing email platforms every two years, each model claiming improved usability and access…..the most productive professors may still swear by hotmail, Eudora or Pine. The busiest administrators may still print up every email and file everything in paper stacks. Why? Because if too much went electronic, they know they would lose information. What they have and have done works, because their brain is busy with what else they have mastered.

What does this have to do with electronic reading and archives? Something occurred to me recently while organizing and backing up my files from my classes. I have electronic folders filled with PDFs. I have a delicious.com account swimming in tags. Viewing these files, double-clicking to open them does not invoke the same emotional revelry that relaxed flipping through old readers or paper files does. Is this actual or merely personal? Is this generational? As a teenager in the late 80’s and early 90’s I would go to Telegraph Ave., equipped with all the latest free weeklies (SF and East Bay Weekly, East Bay Express), the latest Sandman comic books, some article of local poetry from Zeitgeist Press, a used book or two of modern literature or philosophy. Armed with these and a notebook I would order a cappuccino at the Caffe Med, walk upstairs and I would tune out for several hour listening to post-punk on my cassette walkman.

In this manner, I would browse these printed volumes, writing down quotes, book titles, zine publishers, artists names. It was this research activity into literary, cultural and creative works that fueled my acquisition choices as a book buyer in the mid-late 90’s (before corporate culture had me packing off to graduate school). Gen-X bohemia aside, my important point is…I did not spent the majority of that time trying to figure out how to flip my cassette over, or how to access an article in the back of a magazine or newspaper, or fretting over why I couldn’t find certain comic book issues in my bag or pile on the table. The connection and interaction with information access and recording seemed as smooth and natural as one’s own synaptic flow. Perhaps those younger than me, the ‘digital natives’ are silently scoffing at my concerns. But I am still curious – how similar or different are these two methods of content discovery?

Fast-forward a couple years – shortly after these early 90’s, outside of library/university records the “social/research web” was limited to usenet groups. I scoured dozens, printing FAQ sheets, discographies, with some vague idea of preservation. Fifteen years later I realize this kind of activity is what amazes me about current digital archiving practices. But as I now find articles in printed newspapers and journals and waver between cutting them out to collect yet “more paper” vs. the time it would take to go online to that journal to seek out the electronic copy of the piece and save the citation in delicious.com (hoping that in future I could retrieve it with compatible metadata or even hope that the url still worked! )…there’s a strong chance things could become lost. I have file drawers of printed pieces from newspapers and magazines from 20-15 years ago, many of which are inaccessible online and out of print. I am glad that I can peruse and discover articles I did not remember possessing. I also have boxes of notebooks that I wrote things down in. Obviously beside the differences in recording and retrieval there is a dramatic difference in public access. Who else beside myself can access these files or these notes?

I do not have easy answers for these inquiries other than an acknowledgment that these are challenges for both the processing of digital and traditional archives as well as challenges to cross-generational acceptance and standardization of ever changing technological methods of publishing, experiencing and preserving information.

Returning to the notion of measuring qualities of brain activity – is the activity conducted on the early days of the web, usenet groups, similar to that of surfing newsfeeds and engaging in social networking? Is there a difference between this kind of mental activity and that of reading printed material? Is zipping around a printed newspaper or magazine different than that of becoming engrossed in a novel? How is a graphic novel different? Or a video game? What does the MRI of someone reading Dostoevsky or Proust look like?

If human brain pathways are evolving – could we be losing “earlier versions” of our brains? Like languages, dialects and accents are lost…are we losing earlier pathways and structures? Many studies argue that we are re-mapping our brains through our use of the digital. What if these lost parts correlate with improved stress reduction or focus or things that we currently try to medicate for? Are there activities that also use these same neural zones? Painting, gardening, yoga? Do we want to substitute a reading experience that feels like yoga or gardening with a reading experience that feels like navigating a busy freeway? Perhaps for those who enjoy the taste of adrenaline, that has its place…but before we completely switch over our means of informational input (a transition as dramatic as the printing press or discovery of electricity) it might do our mind and creative processes good to fully understand what we are gaining and what we might be sacrificing.

Running the Numbers – Austin Museum of Art

“Running the Numbers” is an exhibit that opened this weekend at the Austin Museum of Art, of Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan who produces artistic visualizations of the data of American consumption and waste. All of his works reproduce or reflect canonical works from art history or use a variety of familiar aesthetic techniques, to produce arresting pieces of beauty. However, this was a sobering and uncomfortable viewing, revolving strangely less upon the physical works themselves, the blown-up photographs and digital mosaics, than upon his visualization techniques, political conceptualization and in particular, the grim data presented.

The piece “Ben Franklin” (2007), a digital mosaic composed of small hundred dollar bills totaling 125, 000 (representing $12.5 million) created the pixilated image of Benjamin Franklin. The work was a visualization of the amount of money spent on the war in Iraq every hour from 2003 to 2008. It was a very large image (as were many of the political and environmentally oriented artworks) and in front of the piece sat a bench. Contextually what struck me the most about these works was the behavior that they inspired in the viewers. This was the first art exhibit that I attended with the audience spending more time reading the signage than gazing upon the pieces themselves. There was almost a sense of shame and nervous sobriety as the crowd milled about, glancing in furtive awe at the works. At the same time however, the atmosphere grew to resemble a quiet town hall, as viewers found themselves sitting on benches in from of these pieces and opening up into thought provoked discussions. These conversations were not so much about the artist, or even his aesthetic execution or material, but about the concepts that he was trying to drive home. Two individuals sat in front of the “Ben Franklin” work sharing an intimate discussion of the war, with personal experiences and regrets . I had to walk gingerly around them to gain a look at the artwork’s signage, their presence providing almost a layer of community performance art, protected by the meditative, free speech zone of the provided bench.

The ownership of the object in question was not clearly stated, but the exhibition was organized and distributed by the Museum of Art at Washing State University. As the piece was a digital photograph blown up to dramatic scale, the object’s condition was not in considerable danger by being exhibited as a digital master copy resided elsewhere. There was a difference in the information about each object between the signage, consisting predominantly of data, and the brochure describing the pieces’ artistic contributions: their composition, visual techniques, and which famous pieces they were nods to. A third informative layer was exemplified by the cell phone audio guide, which was found next to environmental pieces and provided information on how to keep Austin green and beautiful or asked what the role of artists in a green world was. These three forms did not contest each other, but each served different purposes: describing standard fields of information, providing historical and subjective assessments and offering relevant tie-ins with the audience and meaningful community opportunities.

As for any noticeable bias, the political views expressed by the artist were consistently backed up by the accompanying literature, promotional materials and audio guides. This is not entirely surprising, as the artist is alive and was engaged in the exhibition of his ideas. There were no critical or alternative views presented, no refuting of his statistics or techniques by the museum or curators. While greater detail on the source of the data would be appreciated, counter-arguments might be unnecessary as his critiques of American waste, consumerism and military spending are already generally debated and suppressed through the influence of corporate interests upon the media and public policy. The exhibit contained no comment on this political context and gave little depth or explanation as to “how we got here” other than providing benches in front of these large-scale, stunning works of terrible beauty.