Very Abstract Paper Abstract

Like Sarah, I would like to apologize for my tardiness. Here's my belated, and still fairly formative, abstract:

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I would like to examine the function of food and cuisine in contemporary migrant cinema in Germany. I intend to look at food both as a representative of ethnic and national cultural traditions, and as a new global/transnational phenomenon, in part using the McDisneyization framework outlined by Allan and Liska. How can food function as a bridge between the migrant and the tourist? I am thinking specifically of the frequent pattern in Germany of immigrants opening a restaurant that serves their particular ethnic cuisine, which Germans in turn visit to satisfy a touristic desire to experience the exotic. I am also interested in the literal and figurative questions of consumption that surround the ethnic food industry.

Specifically, I would like to examine food as a trope in three exemplary films from contemporary Germany: Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, Christian Petzold's Jerichow, and Thomas Arslan's Dealer. All three films deal with German multiculturalism, but in a way that "backgrounds" political discourse. Akin's film is essentially a romantic-meets-family comedy, Petzold's a forbidden romance, and Arslan's a social realist urban drama about life on the margins and the slow drift into criminality. All three films, however, employ food--and, specifically, the immigrant-owned restaurant--in different ways that speak to the cultural flows and transnational impulses of contemporary German cinema, something I would like to explore and elucidate in this paper.

Long Beach and the future of global music

I'm sorry for the lateness with this, guys, but here is my proposed abstract for our paper. I am hoping to send this for consideration to the EMP Pop Music Conference as well and could definitely use any feedback you may have! Thanks for reading!

Los Angeles is often discussed academically as the city of the future, a region of newly globalized madness where people from around the world intermingle in a postmodern landscape like never before. The sprawled out, self-segregated nature of this city creates a culture defined by detached nostalgia, distance and resistance and indeed this can be felt in the music created here from aggressive gangster rap beats to the whimsical anti-war songs of Laurel Canyon’s heydey. Only 25 miles to the south, however, the neighboring port city of Long Beach plays a different tune. Instead of music created by Los Angeles’ uniquely disparate-yet-global circumstance, Long Beach’s own density-defined urban dynamic allows the city’s global influences to come together in new and distinct ways. As the most diverse city in the country, Long Beach fosters a culture of forced collisions and creates a space that has been home to a slew of new global music forms that are as experimental as they are unintentional. Drawing on globalization theories surrounding both the city of Los Angeles and cultural production, this paper will analyze the new sounds produced throughout Long Beach music history as well as their global and glocal contexts. I will explain how the globalization of Long Beach has and continues to contribute its influence into popular music and why new sounds emerging from the city such as reggae-jazz-hop, Khmer-rap and emo-gospel, are being organically produced through the globalized nature of the city itself.

Thoughts on Consumption

Instead of writing a single, cohesive response this week, I wanted to instead present a few general points that surfaced in my mind as I went through the readings.

The first is tied to the film Kung Fu Panda, and the ways in which it was able to make a culture that has historically been presented as so undeniably foreign, seem foreign, but yet also, somehow, at the same time, American. Although DreamWorks rather than Disney produced this particular film, I think that the trend towards the ‘McDisneyization’ of culture is equally visible here.

For one thing, when I stopped to really think about what culture was being represented in the film, I found that I could only go so far as to say “Asian” or, perhaps even worse, “Eastern.” How was this possible? Well, for starters, I think the creators of the film were very careful to include only the most general cultural signifiers that are associated with “Eastern” culture, such as martial arts (Kung Fu in particular is Chinese, but it is often conflated with Karate or the less well-known Judo, which are both Japanese), vague references to Buddhism, and the blending of architectural styles. Although this may or may not have been a conscious decision (I would argue one can be careful to do certain things without necessarily having to be conscious of why one is doing them), the visible muddling of East Asian cultures present in the film further augments the problematic conceptualization and perceived “familiarity” of American audiences with East Asian cultures as “culture.” To solidify the perceptual transformation of these cultural products from “foreign” to “American,” which has already begun to occur as the result of our increased consumption of these products removed from their cultural context, the character voices and dialogue were also extremely important in solidifying the domestic feel of the film. What does it mean, if anything, that the voice of “The Dragon Warrior” was a white American comedian/rock musician from Santa Monica, CA? Is this film really intending to represent East Asian culture(s), or it is meant merely to recreate the American interpretation of it/them?

The second point I wanted to raise was also tied to the film, particularly as it relates to travel, journey and/or adventure narratives. The beginning of the Bauman article opened with reference to King Pyrrhus and his insatiable desire for new conquests. This immediately led me to reflect once again on Kung Fu Panda, although this time as a serialized narrative, or at least on the seeming inevitability of the sequel. Although I haven’t quite gotten around to seeing Kung Fu Panda 2 myself, over the summer I worked with a group of elementary and middle school kids, many of whom were extremely excited to report that, after seeing the film, they were sure there was going to be a Kung Fu Panda 3. Of course, from a corporate perspective the huge financial incentives for this trend seem clear. But these financial incentives are at least in part due to the willingness of the audience to return, once again, to see familiar characters go on new (or perhaps not so new) adventures. What is it about a story that makes us want to come back for more?

This question also surfaced again more broadly for me on page 11, when, engaging Kierkegaard, Bauman wrote that “[t]hey all wish to ‘constantly finish and to begin again from the beginning’ and so to forget about that end which is bound to finish it all and beyond which there would be no more new beginnings.” After I got over my confusion, I was instantly reminded of the feeling I get when I know I am nearing the end of a favorite movie, or the equally disappointing realization that there are only a few more pages left of a good book. Although I have been reading or watching hungrily for however long it has been, yearning to get to the end of the text, when I finally get there, is immediately replaced by a subtle sort of disappointment that I have actually arrived at my destination. What should be satisfaction has somehow already been replaced by a desire to consume more/again. Hoes does this fit into Bauman’s argument surrounding the need, desire, and wish?

Finally, and on an entirely separate note, I also found myself thinking quite a bit about the relationship between consumerism and academia. To what extent are we, as academics, being trained to be products or to market ourselves as such? Particularly with the heavy emphasis placed on publishing both books and articles, as well as presenting at conferences etc, I wonder how much of the current state of academia can be understood or explained as a result of our consumer culture. In addition, I also think about the importance of curating a professional identity as an academic, particularly online through websites such as academia.edu as well as personal WebPages and/or blogs. This in particular makes me think about consumerism as a hopelessly endless cycle, where we are not only required to maintain all of these different representations of our self as a product (which is exhausting and, at least for me, seems quite impossible), but then at the same time we are also expected to consume (and somehow keep up with) the products of others (i.e. reading/buying books, subscribing to professional groups like SCMS, reading articles, attending conferences, networking etc.). I am not entirely sure where I would like us to go with this last point, but because academia has (in my opinion) a tendency to situate itself outside the realm of such issues, I think it is even more important for us to consider it as a product of consumerism.

"erratic eruption" of reading-related ruminations

THE PAST

First, to go backwards (as is my mercurial wont to do so). A friend of mine hosted a Halloween party this weekend in which the guests were to dress as their favorite infection, broadly defined. You want to be the Tea Party? Go for it, makes good sense. Boym's reading inspired me to dress as Lady Nostalgia and hand out Nilla wafers instead of madeleines. And my boyfriend fashioned me a newspaper pillbox hat (thank you, Interweb) in no time. The ease with which I managed to put together an early- to mid-20th century mash-up costume required some introspection. This whole time I would have sworn I wasn't all that nostalgic.* I'm no futurist but I am a planner. Onward to the Future, and all that. But seriously. I had about six pairs of shoes, three skirts, and couple sweaters to choose from, each more steeped in nostalgia than its predecessor. So maybe my thinking isn't terribly nostalgic, my consumption most definitely is. Which is why, as much as I want to believe Canclini, I'm not so sanguine.

But a quick past-tense sidebar. Or another one. I'm a huge fan of Marc Maron's WTF Podcast for manifold reasons. For one, I love the candor of the interviews. He really manages to dig into the comedian / comic actor's mind and unearth some real insights about the human condition. Comedians gladly line up because of the subculture's authentic sense of community and camaraderie. Packishness, in the nicest way possible. For another, and I'll stop here, he's managed to do this entirely outside of the entertainment business's draconian and often soul-eating parameters. It's because he spent the majority of his career as his own worst enemy, burning bridges and alienating entertainment executives (and friends too) as if with an apparent supernatural edict. By 2009 he had no prospects, so he picked up a digital recorder, started interviewing comedians from his garage in Highland Park, and put them up as a free podcast. He is now one of the darlings of the comedy world. Happy story. Okay, maybe there's something to this consumer citizen.

Back to consumptive nostalgia. What strikes me about Mad Men is that although it's marketed and consumed as reflective nostalgia, to hear the creator and cast tell it, the house view is determinedly restorative. This was acutely clear when I listed to Maron interview Jon Hamm a few weeks ago. Because, let's face it: our favorite ambiguous dreamboat is a card! Hamm holds his ambivalence is actually reasonable, given the time. His Don Draper searches and falters, suffering from the same "insecure sense of entitlement" shared by the rest of his generation and all those hence, Bauman's strategy of rationalization and irrationality exemplified on AMC.

THE PRESENT

"There is no charge for awesomeness -- or attractiveness." And there is nothing stronger than a fat panda with a big, soft belly and a high-kick who finds the answer to all of life's problems in his own reflection. I realize the tone of the previous sentence makes it sound as though I'm not so into Kung Fu Panda, but that's not true. I find the movie enchanting, onomatopoeic eye candy. My problem is that its message hints at Bauman's dual aspect of power and responsibility of the individual, specifically the darker Herb Cain-esque inanity-slash-social-slur that if you're not rich, that's your own fault. It's not fair to single him out, I realize, as this mentality is regrettably pervasive in our culture. I only point to it for its temporal resonance and frankly, because I was a bit mega-kapow kicked in brain hearing an African American rejecting structural inequity whole cloth.

THE FUTURE

Of course Po's big soft panda belly and its Valley of Peace home aren't the only things that benefits from flexion. Bourdieu's flexploitation and policy of precarization remind us that all the materials in the real and comics worlds (see actual spiders' and Spiderman's webs) are the ones with the greatest give. They have the greatest tensile strength, married with malleability. Therefore, our sense of instability is the foundation for our actions. To wit and per Mad Men, postwar America had the baby boom to give it meaning, wherein increasing reproductive rates helped firm up collective feelings of "responsibility, patriotism, and achievement" (May 1998, p. 160) amidst otherwise insurmountable feelings of impotence within the world.

Years later, writing months before September 11th, Bauman proposes we continue to be swayed by this insecurity and "new and improved" (p. 27) fears. He later avers, however, that "wisely...consumer markets seldom" (p. 27) sell salvation from natural dangers. I'm not up on the latest in militant militia marketeering, but I had a feeling that Bauman's sigh of relief in early 2001 might today be replaced with a sharp intake of breath and knitted brow. And so I did a Google and discover our last three classes sync up nicely on the Terra Vivos site. Yes, this is an egregious example, but were we so inclined, we could all go in on a cooperative doomsday shelter. The management at Terra Vivos appeal to the site visitor's sense of nostalgia, fear, and neoliberal consumption, offering up a subterranean, post-Quickening development, complete with homeowners' association bylaws. Please click through this website; everything is so strange, from the nefarious engineering specs, to the friendly promise of lounge areas and dental care, to the use of Vimeo for their marketing videos.

* Okay, I'm lying. Whenever people ask me 'when' I'd like to be from, I say 1920s New York, seated right there at the Algonquin Round Table.

Tourist Practices in Minecraft

(1) ABSTRACTS

I propose a combination of creative and critical works inspired by tourist practices in the computer game Minecraft. Minecraft is an open-world sandbox computer game in which players inhabit, explore, and work in procedurally-generated world spaces. While these spaces have the feel of fantastical places, separate from the “real world” and existing for the player alone, there is an ironic edge to the game that is critically under-acknowledged: video game spaces are no more “separate” from players’ “real lives” than are resorts, theme parks, beaches, tourist traps, or any number of other such fake-fake-spaces. In short, playing Minecraft promotes the same kind of problematic mindset as any other tourist practice.

My final project will consist of three separate but connected artistic projects: a Minecraft “Travel Diary” and two photo & video-documented projects, “Minecraft Memorials” and “Minecraft Vacations”. Pulling my ‘findings’ from these projects together, a critical framing essay will connect my artistic output to the existing trend among Minecraft players to act as tourists and create documentation of their ‘travels’ through the game-space. This practice-based essay will be constructed in-progress on the Research Catalogue, an online workspace hosted by the Journal For Artistic Research. In addition, I am a member of a proposed panel that, if accepted, will speak about Minecraft-based art practices at the first ever Minecraft convention, “Minecon,” which will take place 18-19 Nov. 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

MINECRAFT DIARY: Beginning in mid-November with the first release of the full version of Minecraft, I will begin a writing project inspired by the long literary tradition of travel diaries. This project will be updated most days, and will constitute a growing, dramatized narrative that will continue until the end of the fall semester.

MINECRAFT MEMORIALS: Within public Minecraft servers, I will lead several installations of virtual memorials to real-life coal mining accidents. “Practice installations” have already occurred, though I may have lost the documentation due to recent hard drive failures. The first “official” installation will occur in William Huber’s CTCS 505 class, in the next few weeks. Documentation of the installations, as well as blueprints for those installations, will be provided.

MINECRAFT VACATIONS: I will travel to other people’s public Minecraft servers and act like a tourist, taking photographs, asking questions, and doing whatever seems fun. These will not be large, remarkable servers, but small group servers that are not necessarily expecting me, and will not necessarily want me around. I will document my actions, as well as the owners’ responses, positive or negative.


(2) LINKS

Blimp Filled with Tourists Crashes in Minecraft Server: http://minecraft.swgi.org/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;pic=43

Block Tourist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfMIao0c8bQ

Journal For Artistic Research: http://www.jar-online.net/

MineCon (18-19 Nov. 2011): http://minecon.mojang.com/

Minecraft: http://www.minecraft.net/

Minecraft Memorials: http://minecraftmemorials.tumblr.com/

Minecraft Urbanism, by Sam Kronick: http://minecrafturbanism.blogspot.com/

The Minecraft Tourist: http://theminecrafttourist.blogspot.com/

Oprah Project Proposal

Oprah Winfrey has become synonymous with both the American Dream and philanthropy. Her rise from poverty to unprecedented success and wealth was used as evidence on The Oprah Winfrey Show that anything is achievable in America. Globally she has transplanted the American Dream and myth of success through charitable ventures such as The Angel Network, O Ambassadors, and The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. This paper looks to examine the rhetoric associated with such philanthropic campaigns to empower women domestically and abroad. The act of charity is imagined as transformative for both the donor and the recipient. Domestically these charities act as a therapeutic release of the excess of commodities and wealth in the US and abroad these charities attempt to transport the inventions of post-racism and post-sexism that Winfrey embodies. Furthermore, Winfrey’s campaign genders citizenship through philanthropy and encourages the woman subject to be "made-over" into a good-citizen.

To research my above hypothesis I will examine the history of philanthropic practices in the US. I will also look at how citizenship is imagined through both gender and consumption. Finally I will examine the creation of myth, in particular the creation and maintenance of the American Dream.

Bibliography

Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.

King, Samantha. Pink Ribbons, Inc. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2006.

McCarthy, Kathleen D. Women, Philanthropy, and Civil Society. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2001.

Ouellette, Laurie, and Julie Wilson. "Women's Work." Cultural Studies 25, no. 4-5 (2011): 548-565.

Webber, Brenda. Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity.

Broadcast Yourself (At Your Own Risk): Social Media Inhibitions and the Policing of Cyberspace

Abstract Title: Broadcast Yourself (At Your Own Risk): Social Media Inhibitions and the Policing of Cyberspace

With TV shows like To Catch a Predator that reinstitute a cyberspace Foucaultian panopticon in a moral-legal policing act, how is this model of societal policing operating in conjunction with the increasing inhibition and erosion of safety precautions associated with social media interactions? I will specifically look at two realms of traits located in social media in order to address this cultural and societal policing that is increasing in visibility, while simultaneously operating in a seemingly invisible way. The first realm I will address is the fused models of narcissism, self-proclamation, and customization that are located in the contemporary state of social media (i.e. Facebook and Youtube paradigm of broadcasting oneself), as well as the ways in which these models structurally and ideologically breed a sense of identity authenticity and verisimilitude. Secondly, I will look at the the shift in new media regulation to a model of deregulation, by considering David Morley and Kevin Robins’ recognized shift in media and mediated approaches to identity. Simultaneously tracing the practices of corporate deregulation and cross-platform/customization that mark new media evolution, with the shift from network exclusivity to network ubiquity/visibility, will provide a means of understanding how structures of safety are being undermined by legal forces in conjunction with the increase in user inhibition. I will be ultimately raising this discussion in the context of addressing the ruptures of moral-legal policing that take advantage of this erosion of cyber self-regulation in a deregulated media market, in order to trace the societal anxieties associated with the freedom of cultivating a visible self that mark legal policy and cultural/moral code in its infiltration of cyberspace.

Beware the Moon and Keep off the Moors

I had intended to cleave to my dissertation topic and write about instances of diaspora in urban dance films, but I got caught up in the spirit of the season and decided to write about gypsies and werewolves instead. Also this paper will allow me to address my ongoing interest in the concept of Balkanism, the political and geographic reality of the Roma, and the romanticization of gypsy culture in our collective imaginary. So here is my old school paper abstract:

Drawing from current studies on the Roma, the mythologized conception of the gypsy in popular culture, and the theories of Balkanism that seek to deconstruct and redress those stereotypes, I plan to explore the strategic deployment and attendant meanings of the gypsy figure, specifically in the American horror film. Gypsies are undeniable stock figures in the genre, exemplified by the Universal horror cycle of the 1930s and 40s, and as an established generic staple they have unquestioned semiotic value. As part of the gothic mise en scene, their appearance and narrative function have become familiarized to contribute a sense of supernatural Europe in the popular imaginary.

Instantly recognizable by a codified set of traits, horror film gypsies perform on a dual level: diegetically they serve as harbingers of doom and vessels of wisdom within the story, and on the level of representation, these characters (and the actors who portray them) are performing their “gypsyness,” in a manner that adheres to the theories of Balkanism and that ties in to larger and ongoing debates about Roma identity, stereotypes, and persecution. As the perennial dark Other, gypsies punctuate the European filmic landscape as outré curiosities, alluring but suspect, and they are meant to convey an air of old world antiquity and the ineffable unknown. But rather than relegate the gypsy as a plot mechanism who imparts exposition, or simply a visual design motif, we should assess the gypsy’s function and placement in horror movies and its political, racialized dimensions as a social critique or xenophobic caveat that is reflective of the production era and extracinematic concerns. As my textual analysis, I will be examining two versions of The Wolfman (1941 and 2010), both of which rely heavily on gypsy mythology and fetishization but to very different ideological ends, given their disparate social and political contexts.

GPL Project Proposal

The Voigtländer Nokton 25mm f/0.95 MFT:
Resolving the world through the fast and shallow view of a single prosumer lens

In this paper I plan to examine how various threads of mediated global technoculture converge in around and through the above-mentioned camera lens. Inspired by the Lury’s writings about tourist objects and the Sean Cubitt talk I attended at ISEA Istanbul in which he encouraged the academic interrogation of media technologies and the systems that produce them, I am interested in how an object such as a camera lens might serve as an in-point for critical analysis. Investigative paths leading from this approach include 1) the culture of an online community of digital video technology enthusiasts 2) the tensions of progress and nostalgia in video technology 3) the international history of camera lens brands and manufacturers and 4) the aesthetics of emptiness I see within the media objects produced and shared within the online communities discussing and gushing over this Voigtländer lens.

At this stage of the project, I will admit that I do not have a clear conclusion in mind about what this will all add up to. I have a strong sense that the investigation will lead to productive insights. The online community in question is called dvxuser.com. At its start, the site was dedicated to a camera that is now quite outdated, so that even in its name, ‘DVX User’, we can start to see some of the interesting tensions of technological enthusiasm. Another thing I find fascinating about the community is that simultaneous to its devotion to the newest most cutting edge tech, the ultimate dreams and desires for those technologies is to basically perform and function as well and attractively as 35mm motion picture film, cameras and lenses, albeit at a much lower cost of purchase and production.

The industrial history around the Voigtländer 25mm lens is also representative of this movement forward towards the past in a number of ways. The venerable Voigtländer brand is Viennese and goes back to the 18th century but was purchased in the 1990s by a Japanese manufacturer called Cosina that had previously mostly produced OEM lenses to be sold under the brand names of other companies such as the German behemoth Zeiss - Japanese expertise sold with an Austrian aura of legacy. None of these companies or stories was of much interest within the video community until Cosina decided to make a new lens for a new camera format that just became popular because of a Panasonic video camera adeptly situated at the price frontier of prosumer and professional gear. The lens they came out with blew away the rather paltry offerings that were available for the format at the time, in terms of quality, functionality and price. This sparked a worldwide shortage of the lenses and fueled the intense, covetous discussions that I first piqued my interest. The system of authorized retail and gray market distribution of the lens is another interesting area I plan to explore.

Where I want to end up, and where I will probably introduce a mixed-media aspect to the project, is in an examination of the media objects created and shared alongside these text-based discussions of the lens. What people like about the lens is it has a breathtakingly fast f-stop, meaning that it allows lots and lots of light into the lens and can capture very clean, rich images in very low, naturally occurring lighting situations at quality levels previously impossible for this range of cameras. I will argue that there are political dimensions to these aesthetic possibilities when relatively low-priced technologies are capable of producing images that would rival our expectations of expensive Hollywood output. All well and good except that the other quality of the lens that makes it sought after, and the flip side of a very fast f-stop, is that it has a very shallow depth of field, meaning that when a subject is in focus, everything else will be blurred. So even as the technology is capable of seeing more, it sees less. I will argue that this is more than just a fact of optics, but is part of a cultural aesthetic obsession driven by a desire to emulate the taken for granted aesthetics of a particular brand of Hollywood output rather than push technology and art into new possibilities for the representation of contemporary experience. I will curate and discuss examples of user-generated videos using the Voigtländer lens to support this idea. I also have an idea for a short, creative companion video piece that I want to develop more before trying to write about it.

The Playful Politics of the Flash Mob

This paper is actually growing (rapidly) out of a small midterm project I have been working on in CTCS 505; the proposal/summary is below. It's rough--any and all constructive criticism is not just welcome, but begged for. It also contains about half a dozen links to various flash mob videos, let me know if any of them do not work.

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“'We are Legion': The Playful Politics of the Flash Mob”

Over the past decade flash mobs have risen as a global phenomena, temporarily transforming and transporting real spaces and people into a game-like space of “pretend,” and uniting communities across geopolitical boundaries through virtual media in the spirit of play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQLCZOG202k

This paper is built around three basic observations of the flash mob:
1) That flash mobs provide transient, suspended (playful) realities in otherwise socially, economically, and politically ‘landlocked’ spaces.
2) That flash mobs mobilize urban populations into these spaces via social media.
3) That social media is the mechanism for mobilization as well as viralization, communicating with global populations beyond the extent of the flash mob and activating new bases.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG24E0EbQ7E

Despite the playful departure from reality that flash mobs provide [1], they are also inherently locative, drawing the keen attention of the participants and the observers to the space of mobilization and the social, political, and economic context of the space that is both being engaged and ruptured by the flash mob’s act of play. As a result, flash mobs also offer an opportunity for populations to engage with their local identities, within the safety of a positive space that is temporarily disengaged from the socioeconomic and political ramifications of such discourse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7zvoM2Frko

Simultaneously, flash mobs also engage global citizenship at a viral level. As an organism, a flash mob is born within virtual media, as the mobilizing call ventures forth through Facebook or Twitter, and then later returns to the Internet via Youtube or other video sharing sites, fully developed and executed, where it then spawns, its footage posted and reposted hundreds or thousands of times, and inspires half a dozen more flash mobs across the globe. The memorial flash mobs for Michael Jackson demonstrate this point particularly, as one tribute video from the Netherlands surfaced on the internet, it inspired a new flash mob in Sweden, which inspired one in San Francisco, which inspired a massive one in Mexico, and so and so on to the point where the Cebu prison in the Philippines--famous for its prisoners’ Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ tribute several years before--produced its own MJ memorial tribute (with extremely high production values) a week later. To be a part of a flash mob is to claim both local and global citizenship, as the mobs coalesce around ideas and events that flow across boundaries through social media.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gHnZJTs8K4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7z8ZiRcQ9Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZC6JuTlOVM

As a result of the global-local engagement of flash mobs, the previous observations should be revised:

1) That flash mobs are not entirely removed from their social, political, and economic contexts, but rather create positive spaces through the invocation of play, which are not denuded of context but rendered harmless and safe within the transience of the space.
2) In offering this positive space, flash mobs provide populations the opportunity to engage with ideas of global-local identity as well as the social, economic, and political contexts of their spaces through the act of mobilization.
3) That flash mobs are inherently products of social media and global communication, thus flash mobs also offer crucial intersections for engaging global-local citizenship.

However, within all flash mobs there the tacit threat of “real” urban mobilization. Returning to the idea of flash mobs as play, Gregory Bateson theorizes that play and games are a type of metacommunication; what is demonstrated, acted out, or “played” with inside the playful space gestures towards another action or communication that exists in external reality (ex. “Battleship” guestures towards actual war games). In flash mobs, the underlying metacommunication is that of urban mobilization--a potential threat that is continually rendered harmless through the flash mob’s playfulness and transience. The current fascination with flash mobs has as much to do with the idealistic, “spaceship earth” mentality that they can engender as it does with their implicit dark side--every flash mob could easily become an angry mob. The Cebu prisoners’ Michael Jackson tribute is particularly haunting for this reason; though the intent is to invoke community and solidarity, a video of several hundred mobilized, almost fascistly atomized prison inmates shouting, “they don’t care about us” gestures a little too far towards the aggressive and destructive potential of the flash mob. When the bubble of suspended reality around flash mobs ‘pops’ the mobs become politicized, sometimes aggressive, and lingering. Such a threat is particularly pertinent at this moment, in the wake of the London riots as well as the ongoing evolution of both the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall St. movement. Each of these instances has relied upon the same social media resources to mobilize urban populations--some violently, some not--yet each of these is a flash mob after the “play” gets taken away; the people remain, still engaging with their global-local identities and their political, social, and economic realities, but the safety of a positive, playful space has disappeared.

[Note 1: Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois both theorize that play is inherently “unproductive” and does not affect the reality external to the playful space.]

ABSTRACT

This is a proposal for this conference: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=25938467410048
I'll submit my abstract after our class meeting on Tuesday, in order to include feedback.

Videastes vs. Cineastes: the (identity) crisis in African cinema.

Since 2009, Nigeria has surpassed the United States as the second largest film industry in the world, just behind India. Delivering more than two thousand titles per year, Nollywood, as it called, has set an impressive example of creating a viable movie industry in black Africa. The use of video and digital technologies has boosted the film production in Nigeria by considerably reducing the costs and the duration of the filmmaking process, as well as enabling a lucrative commercial exploitation. This has greatly empowered a new generation of Africans storytellers, who are now using video production as a way to compensate the low, and irregular presence of African fictions on African screens (TV & theaters).

Effectively, the Nigerian model of intense video activity has been quickly and widely imitated, almost replacing traditional cinema (35mm) in many Sub-Saharan African countries such as Ghana, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, or Cameroon. In fact, video filmmaking has now become the alternative solution par excellence in black Africa. Yet, instead of being unanimously embraced and appreciated, this video boom has created a split in African creation, in which the videastes (those who work with video) compete with the cineastes (those who work with film) in redefining African cinema.

The questions that this paper will attempt to answer are why the two currents are in disagreement, rather than in support of each other? What are the main reproaches made to the Nollywood model? Why is it seen by cineastes and scholars as another “problem” for African cinema, rather than the “solution” to the everlasting issues of funding, distribution, marketability, or visibility of African films?

The bulk of the essay will offer a survey of the new struggles between videastes and cineastes, which are currently bringing African cinema to a state of crisis: an identity crisis (what is the “good” African cinema), a commercial crisis (funding and distribution of African films), and audience crisis (who is the intended audience of African cinema).

Temporary bibliography
Barrot, Pierre. Nollywood: the video phenomenon in Nigeria. Bloomington: Indiana Press University. 2009.
Diawara, Manthia. African film: new forms of aesthetics and politics. New York: Prestel. 2010. (DVD edition)
Pfaff, Françoise ed. Focus on African films. Bloomington: Indiana Press University. 2004. Armes, Roy. African filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara. Bloomington: Indiana Press University. 2006.
Saul, Mahir & Austen, Ralph ed. Viewing African cinema in the twenty-first century: art films and the Nollywood video revolution. Athens: Ohio University Press. 2010.

Looking Inward Out the Window: Infiltration of a Private Television System on Public Transit [paper proposal]

This paper is opportunistic. Since last year I’ve been the research assistant for LA Freewaves’ Out the Window, the very excellent and equally improbable video takeover of LA Metro bus Transit TVs. One of ten winners of the MacArthur Foundation’s third HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) Digital Media + Learning Competition, Out the Window shows animations, documentaries, narratives, and experimental videos about, by, and in Los Angeles. By sharing unique perspectives from throughout the city, the project offers a kaleidoscope of the legion social, cultural, economic, and creative dimensions within the incredibly complex postmodern Los Angeles.

Out the Window is multi-phase; this paper is concerned with the first. Starting in the fall of 2010, Echo Park, Historic Filipinotown and East Los Angeles youth participated in a collaborative learning project wherein they acquired digital media communication and technical media skills, honing their critical thinking in the process. They wrote and produced short, two- to six-minute videos exploring various dimensions of their lives and L.A. Narratives and aesthetics range considerably, but common is the theme of immigration in all its variegations.

Their video production is just the first half of the project. Teens’ works were keyworded and edited according to content and/or location to curate mini-shows for screening on the 2,196 Metro bus’ 4,366 Transit TV televisions. Following each curated piece, student-authored, location-based questions written for and to the riders appeared alongside an SMS number, inviting rider response. Using out-the-window.org as a platform, students could access these questions and keep the conversation going.

The project’s formation and concomitant processes underscore Out the Window’s abiding and equal emphasis on both the youth and ridership. Of the estimated seven million people riding Metro buses weekly (Metro 2011), a full 38.7% live in households making under $25,000 per year. Considering that 69.5% of these seven million live in households of three or more people, this figure is significant (Scarborough 2010). The average rider spends over an hour and half of the bus in a single day, generally split into two 45-minute commutes (Williams 2006). The Out the Window collaborators believe these individuals, for whom the Internet and new media are less readily accessible, should be no less served by these innovations. If their youth are to transcend in today’s society, they must have networking and communication skills to navigate creatively the digital landscape and do so on their own terms and in their own social structures.

Out the Window’s methodology likewise reflects an awareness of the prevailing public art dialectic and its peculiar Los Angeles landscape. For one, LA is notoriously park poor across the city, but this dearth is asymmetrically exaggerated according to wealth. Low-income and concentrated poverty areas and neighborhoods inhabited by majority Latino, African-American, and Asian-Pacific Islander populations have extremely limited access to parks and open space (Wolch et al. 2005). And while the bus is not public space in the strictest sense (you still do have to pay for entry), it is the closest thing that much of the Metro ridership has. The Bus Riders Union movement registers this commitment to the riders’ rightful if informal ownership of the buses and the consequent rights to authority (Soja 2010).

What did we learn from phase one? The youth films screened from June 12-19, before and after which we conducted surveys of 461 riders to better understand who they are, what they think of Transit TV, what programming they would like to see, their bus riding habits, their access to mobile and web technology, as well as their own feelings about art. The results confirm our transit accessibility and digital divide hypotheses. To wit, 76.5% of Spanish speakers self-identified as Latino; of those Spanish speakers, 47.8% ride the bus every day, compared with just 38.3% of English speakers. In addition, 43.9% of Spanish speakers never use the Internet, whereas 51.5% of English speakers usually use it. This relationship exists even when controlling for age. We also learned, despite nonprofit One Economy Corp. producers’ and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act policymakers’ assumption that the Latino riders will watch the Transit TV telenovela exclusive, “Los Americans,” a meager 6.1% of Spanish speakers professed interest in the genre. 77.4%, meanwhile, would like to see more news.

Again, this paper is opportunistic. Over the break I will compose a planning and policy piece, wherein I’ll address such things as institutional inertia, the importance of leadership, and how something that should never have happened did, still does, and the promise presented by that unlikely process.

To write all that, however, I need first to explore the potency of media art in this particular milieu. What else can happen here? What can’t? What does this research tell us about systemic problems and how can we use digital media to attenuate them? Digital culture’s power here, I submit, is paradoxical. On the one hand, we see the great democratization of information afforded us by the communications revolution. The development of media art now costs virtually nothing and can go anywhere. YouTube announced on May 25 of this year that over 48 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. On the other, the “we” in the information age are specific. Access to the digital public sphere is constrained by one’s socioeconomic status and even the most benign agencies persist in making disconcertingly revealing conclusions about ethnicities’ media preferences. My aim with this paper is to establish a working knowledge of the digital media literature as it intersects with immigration and media literacy, and apply these findings to this public art experiment in using the television to show people what is out the window.

the present of nostalgia

Hello, learners!

I recently caught up on a few episodes of one of my favorite podcasts, the Slate Culture Gabfest (if I haven't browbeaten you into listening to it, you should really start, it's utterly fantastic). Three editors/writers for Slate get together each week to discuss three topics in popular culture, and I happened to catch a discussion of Instagram and other various iPhone apps that imitate the look and feel of old photos instantly on your phone. It seemed germane to this week's readings on nostalgia, so I thought I'd go ahead and throw it up here.

See you all Tuesday!

cfp for conference on negative cosmopolitanisms

Some of you may be interested in this cfp for a conference to be held at the U of Alberta in October, 2012. I met some of the organizers over the weekend. Sounds like a great venue with some heavy-hitter keynotes. Ignore the submission deadline; they're still accepting abstracts.

http://www.efs.ualberta.ca/~/media/University%20of%20Alberta/Faculties/Arts/Departments/English%20and%20Film%20Studies/Documents/Conferences%20and%20Events/Cosmopolitanism_Conference_CFP_Sept_2011.pdf

Cinematic Scar Tissue and The Guilty Pleasure of Fresh Wounds

This week’s film and the readings have an interesting duality to them that has unexpectedly forced me to question some of my own perceptions towards media (and mediated depictions) of terror and the voyeurism of spectacle. I think this duality stems from the alignment of the expansive, transnational and political nature of discussing the nexus of terrorism, war, and news coverage, counterpoised by the highly personal and interiorized aspect of our own relationship towards these images, most palpably and problematically in the unintentional but implacable desire to screen carnage, pain, and suffering. I think Ahmed’s “The Contingency of Pain” evokes this dialectic in terms of the experience of pain as one that is simultaneously private and internalized as well as something shared, public, and publicized. I found these readings surprisingly moving in that I was left with the sense of something intimate and corporeal, rather than external, and I believe my reaction is due to the way these spectacles of terror become ingrained and somewhat sought-out in our daily lives.

I want to look at the readings in concert with an interesting interview with Jil Godmilow, a filmmaker who would probably resist and resent being called a documentarian because of the highly fraught associations and assumptions about the genre, including its naturalization and presumed veracity, its reliance on classical fictive narrative tropes such as resolution and closure, and its tendency to appeal to and exploit the emotive capacity of the (usually privileged, white, Western) audience who can feel a cathartic purging, only to return to their safe normal lives. Godmilow, who espouses a type of agit prop often Brechtian style of filmmaking that defies expectations and refuses typical identification, sums up her ethos as follows in describing what doc films should do: “I want them to do two things: first, acknowledge their interpretive intentions (their instrumentality), that is, cease insisting on their innocence as pure description; and second, but their materials and techniques in the service of ideas—not in the service of sentiment or compassion-producing identification” (“How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film? With Ann-Louise Shapiro).

This cleaves to Bennett and Tyler’s interpretation of the formal properties and artistic restraint of Road to Guantanamo, which they view as an intentionally spare attempt to avoid affective manipulation and traditional pathos, “In the absence of dramatic visual effects, the formal minimalism seems designed to neutralize the emotional impact of the interview so that the emphasis is placed on the factual details of the men’s incarceration, rather than an evocation of the psychological consequence of their experience” (31). They continue to suggest that “in resisting it [the conventional emotional breakdown shot] the film also refuses to offer the spectator the emotional drama and perhaps, the voyeuristic/sadistic pleasure she/he expects and desires” (32). I want to return to the concept of voyeurism below, but on a quick note I personally believe the authors are overstating the lack of affective appeal here—I think the very use of oblique images and often wry understatement or downplayed scenarios actually serves to stimulate and rile up the audience—perhaps we as a audience have become highly sensitized to a typical docu-drama’s manipulative pathos and its appeal to sentiment, so this is simply a more savvy and sophisticated way of hailing us a co-suffers. I personally found that the lack of heavy-handed drama and pathos in no way diminished my affective response. Not despite of but because the characters were so dead-pan and nonchalant as they described unendurable torture, it allowed me to take up the pathos for them—I became angry, upset, disgusted, taking up the mantle of fury and righteous indignation that they seemed to refuse. I would argue that Winterbottom paints a neutralized palette that allows the audience to inject their own highly colored, intensified emotions.

To be fair, Bennett and Tyler do acknowledge that Winterbottom's formal decisions were not entirely without intended affect, “Affect is conveyed not through a humanitarian appeal to empathy, but by provoking in the spectator a residual sense of bemusement and politicized anger at the illegality and injustice of Guantanamo and the wider ‘war on terror’ represented synecdochically by the film” (32). True, but this seems to imply a more detached, pragmatic type of response. Even the term "politicized anger" sounds controlled and purposive and does not (in my opinion) encompass my own emotional reaction to watching it. “Politicized anger” connotes a sort of detached indigence about iniquity, the bureaucratic morass, and the general inefficiency and farcical nature of the government—but during the screening I got the sense that we were all reacting on a more visceral and primal level, with this impotent anger that we can’t do anything about the situation--not a politicized anger but a human one.

Back to voyeurism and “Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy”….Jil Godmilow frequently refers to the “pornography of the real” in reference to the unbidden and often unconsciously sought pleasure we get from delving into the suffering of others or witnessing extreme disaster and tragedy, and then returning unscathed, “there is no escape from the ethnocentricity of the viewing position. The audience has to struggle with their pornographic desire for the real (in this case debasement) and their discomfort with the documentary form that delivers it to them” (86). The pornography of the real concept forced me to interrogate my own relationship to and experience with spectacles of pain and suffering. I’m not a monster so I wouldn’t classify this as unadulterated pleasure, but it is a sort of stimulus, an intensity (or intensification as Ahmed might call it)—it turns the sensorial dials up a bit and definitely offers us a taste of the outré, dangerous, or horrific, while allowing us to maintain our position of safety, order, and political and cultural hegemony, as opposed to the depictions of danger, chaos and abject alterity on the screen.

Jil Godmliow and perhaps Winterbottom (though it’s arguable) engage in a sort of refusal of this type of affective porn, which in turn results in an almost perverse frustration on our part that we are denied this visual main-lining. Once the gratification is denied, it makes me all the more aware of how problematically conditioned I am and how disturbingly strong my desire is to see these images. I want to see the gore, hear the harrowing details, see the suffering or the CGI-like explosions. Kellner’s article brought up the oft-referenced point that the Twin Towers imagery belongs indelibly to the hyperreal—it looks so inescapably like a shot from a blockbuster action film, that we are almost incapable of conceiving and processing this image any other way. Similarly, I’ve noticed that whenever I watch a 9/11 special on TV, even if I’m only paying cursory interest or it's on in the background, I always wait for and watch the shots of the towers going down, and even more so, the shots of falling bodies. I hope I’m not alone here and sounding ghoulish, but there is this intrinsic urge to bear witness and “feel” more deeply, if only temporarily by watching the pain of others. I’m hoping there are inherent humanist elements of empathy in trying to reconcile that horror by projecting yourself in to the situation and imagining what you’d do, but there is also dark side in the way that this voyeuristic/sadistic desire has consumed and assimilated mediated spectacles of death and destruction.

This then leads me to wonder about the artistic responsibility or productivity in denying the audience these moments of dark pleasure—When artists intentionally (for political, idelogical, or formalist reasons) decide to de-center the supreme reign of visuality and explicitly not show certain images, is that an effective mode for articulating a mobilizing message, or is it denying something fundamental and humanist that would ultimately lead to empathy? Basically, when in comes to pain, show don’t tell or tell don’t show?

Cosmopolitanism

I'd like add "cosmopolitanism" to our discussion. It came up in the Morley and Lury readings but not as the main focus. These are some of the thoughts that my experience at the "Cosmopolitan Cinemas" workshop in Montreal over the weekend may contribute to our engagement with global media theories:

Cosmopolitanism is both indispensable and ambivalent as a theoretical and political tool. It's indispensable as a possible way to oppose the rhetoric of consumerist, cheery multiculturalism that has taken over and fused together state and corporate approaches to the politics of difference. Cosmopolitanism has been recently resurrected across the humanities-social sciences spectrum, particularly in localized manifestations that usually yield hyphenated cosmopolitanisms. The discourse of cosmopolitanism assumes the possibility of exchange, understanding, hospitality that crosses national borders and is can lead to a global solidarity that contests the neoliberal capitalist framework of globalization. However, this also implies a core of universal humanism, which can never be entirely extracted from the terms roots in European Enlightenment philosophies. This universalism has been proven over and over again to be suspect as a license for intellectual exceptionalism, elitism and racist imperialism in its extreme forms. (Heidegger and Kant come to mind.)

I noticed during the workshop that, in its cinematic dimension, cosmopolitan theory tends to converge on certain "proper" objects, which are mostly self-reflective transnational festival films or humanitarian documentaries. Much of Akin's, Innaritu's or Haneke's work, or a film like Road to Guantanamo would be prime candidates. There was a paper entirely focused on the latter. My nagging unease about cinematic cosmopolitanism has to do with how it separates "good" objects from "bad" ones, such as Nollywood films or reality TV -- e.g. something like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Art films, too me, cannot help but reinforce a cosmopolitanism for the few, and undermine the idea of critical cosmopolitics that many hope to achieve by reinventing cosmopolitanism in hyphenated, localized, particularized forms.

The discussion kept returning to the relations between aesthetic and political effect, especially when it comes to documentaries. How come documentaries that are openly activist, that tell you what to do to confront a problem, usually lead to complacency and non-action; whereas ambivalent ones that simply indicate the problem and observe its various aspects are more likely to be triggers for action? (Someone cited recent studies that have been done about this.) This is a pretty old dilemma, which recurs in familiar debates (avantgarde modernism or realism? move or alienate?). But it seems to take on renewed emphasis as it is posed in relation to the global, in the circulation of global media products among hybridized audiences.

Paper Abstract

I know I am a bit early with this, but nevertheless, here it is....

Together Online: Diasporic Identity on AfricanHipHop.com

Cultural identity has been one of the most prominent themes in contemporary discourse surrounding the African Diaspora. Who belongs to the diaspora? How is this belonging articulated? And how can unity be attained without collapsing important cultural differences? In other words, how can a common diasporic identity be developed amongst the many disparate cultural identities already established throughout the diaspora?

In this paper I will attempt to answer these questions by examining how the complicated web of African diasporic connections is understood and constantly remade through the website AfricanHipHop.com. Through a careful consideration of both the content and the organizational infrastructure of the site, I will reveal how, using the common language of hip hop, artists, authors and users of AfricanHipHop.com offer one possible approach to the conceptualization of diasporic identity. To contextualize my discussion I will also situate the site within the larger context of diasporic practice and the Internet. Finally, to evaluate the viability of this approach I will conclude by considering both the strengths and limitations of AfricanHipHop.com as a space of diasporic practice.

Keywords: Diaspora, Africa, Hip Hop, Internet, Popular Culture

I am just going to leave this here...

http://the53.tumblr.com/

"Those of us who pay for those of you who whine about all of that... or that... or whatever. "

This seems like something folks from my conservative suburban hometown would love unironically.

Honeymoon Period

My fiancé and I are currently in the process of planning a trip of a lifetime- our honeymoon. We have considered every single destination imaginable and are now narrowing our decision by places we have not been and/ or somewhere tropical. Growing up, my family never had money to travel outside the US, so our trips were primarily to Southern California and Oregon. We once visited Hawaii, but it was planned after learning the news that my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor and my parents were uncertain about his prognosis. That trip was more sad than fun. For my high school graduation I returned to Hawaii with friends and later that summer went on a cruise to Mexico with my folks. (We only left the ship for an hour once we arrived in Mexico because it wasn’t worth the risk- wink, wink.) It is our human nature to narrativize our travels corresponding to our own personal story, rather than to a larger national or global narrative. The outside world only becomes relative in our tale when it deviates from our own personal standards and expectations. Travel can only be defined in difference through exceptionality.

The Jamaica Kincaid piece is one of my favorite pieces as it critically examines travel through the familiarity of a travelogue or personal narrative. Can you imagine if an edition of Eat, Pray, Love came out that replaced the illusion and romance of travel with the reality? How would the book clubs meetings go if members could no longer use Eat, Pray, Love as a platform to boast about their own world travels, but instead looked at their vacations as a moment of exotification of the other? That is what we pay for though when we travel, right? On my honeymoon I don’t want to be face to face with poverty. I want to pretend for a week that the world is perfect. It is my right as an American to experience the world isn’t it? Furthermore, it is my right as an American to experience the world while never sacrificing the luxuries of being an American. Otherwise why would so many budget travel websites have popped up the past couple years in the face of the recession? The world is our playground. We can feel guilty later on when we visit an independent theater to catch a documentary about impoverished children on an island nation who were afforded an identity by US filmmakers and grants. Let me travel to their poverty through the filtered lens and leave the theater as an aware citizen of the world. I promise to go home and “Like” a related charity on Facebook and I will maybe even send that charity a check, but please let me turn my back to it when I vacation in their home. And yes, I am being entirely cynical.