Drifters (The Strolling Stoned)

This project doesn’t seem to have a credits page, so I’m not sure who did it, but it’s a cool Web-based ‘drift’ through various urbanscapes inspired by Situationist International concepts. Uses voiceover reading evocative prose entries (describing sights, sounds, feelings) against images, video and audio. Each time the page is loaded, the experience (and language) is different. Been a while since I’ve strolled stoned, but I have good memories from those bright days…

 

Anthony McCall at Governors Island

“Between You & I”: Pure cinema by Anthony McCall:

 

InnerCity: An urban psychocinematic landscape

InnerCity is my obsessive project combining film, video, writing and Web-based interactivity to create a psychological and emotional “map” of the urban landscape. Very much a work-in-progress, I will be developing it over the next couple of years as my thesis project.

Abstract/Summary:
InnerCity is an attempt to record psychological/emotional responses to the urban environment.

It is a web-based project composed of images, film, video and impressionistic prose vignettes – all of which cross narrative and experimental genres, and are concerned with a kind of haptic psychogeography that situates human experience within the cityscape. The pages are linked according to themes of the urban experience including patterns, pathways, movement, memory, spaces, experiences, aspiration, connection, entropy, dissolution, renewal and evolution.

Each reading/viewing of the work is potentially unique. The pages exploring the different themes radiate out from the main Center page – a kind of day/night aerial “map” housing multiple hotspots that launch the embedded films, writings and images. This map of the city’s streets doubles as a metaphor for the body’s neural connections and emotional pathways – representing our visceral relationship to place in all its physical concreteness. As multiple lives intersect within the physiognomy of the city landscape, how we live in and move through these spaces becomes the subject of this work.

At the heart of this project are the filmed “scenes” (or endings of scenes, perhaps) which will come to populate this city. As the superior indexical medium to record the evolution of a specific moment in time and place, film is the obvious medium for this aspect of the project. I am writing and will film a series of scenes in the locations (already “scouted out” and explored in still images and prose), to populate the “memory map” of this interior/exterior city.

The website, therefore, becomes a vessel and a tool for stitching together these indexical imprints. By navigating the work according to observational themes, this interface mimics the navigation of memory and of a city’s physical landscape. The site will change over time as new writings, films and visuals are added to the site, sections are reorganized or removed, and new sections are added. The project thus will evolve over time, just as its subject does.

 

Girum

My final project for Spring 2009 Film Form class….could use a re-edit at some point:

 

Excerpts from Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”

These are sections, quotes & statements I found particularly resonant in this amazing text, which should be required reading in every high school for students, teachers, parents and principals. Reprinted without permission, naturally.

I. The Culmination of Separation

Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation….the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images….(it is) both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production…

Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediation in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight…the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society.

The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.

II. The Commodity as Spectacle

The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence…by turning the whole planet into a single world market….This constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor…The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labour as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities.

The constant decline of use value that has always characterized the capitalist economy has given rise to a new form of poverty within the realm of augmented survival…since the vast majority of people are still forced to take part as wage workers in the unending pursuit of the system’s ends and each of them knows that he must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail….accounts for the general acceptance of the illusions of modern commodity consumption. The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions.

III. Unity and Division Within Appearances

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalisation dominates modern society the world over….As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live….They embody the inaccesible results of social labour by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations – the decision making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned.

Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults – people who are masters of their own lives – are in fact nowhere to be found. And a youthful transformation of what exists is in no way characteristic of those who are now young; it is present solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of capitalism. It is things that rule and that are young, vying with each other and constantly replacing each other.

The spectacle exists in a concentrated form [dictators, totalitarianism] and diffuse form [commodity abundance], depending on the requirements of the particular stage of poverty it denies and supports.

….commodity abundance represents a total break in the organic development of social needs. Its mechanical accumulation unleashes an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desire. The cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life.

IV. The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

[to read later]

V. Time and History

With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living – an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society.

…diversification of potential historical life reflected the gradual emergence…(of the Middle Ages’) unnoticed innovation: the irreversible time that was silently undermining the society, the time experienced by the bourgeoisie in the production of commodities, the foundation and expansion of cities, and the commercial discovery of the planet – a practical experimentation that destroyed every mythical organization of the cosmos once and for all…The triumph of irreversible time is also its metamorphosis into a time of things, because the weapon that brought about its victory was the mass production of objects in accordance with the laws of the commodity. The main product that economic development has transformed from a luxurious rarity to a commonly consumed item is thus history itself….

VI. Spectacular Time

The time of production – commodified time – is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract, in which each segment need only demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all the others. It has no reality apart from its exchangeability….This devalued times is the complete opposite of time as “terrain of human development.”

In its most advanced sectors, concentrated capitalism is increasingly tending to market fully equipped blocks of time, each functioning as a unified commodity combining a variety of other commodities. In the expanding economy of “services” and leisure activities, the payment for these blocks of time is equally unified: “everything’s included,” whether it is a matter of spectacular living environments, touristic pseudo-travel, subscriptions to cultural consumption, or even the sale of sociability itself in the form of “exciting conversations” and “meetings with celebrities.”

The reality of time has been replaced by the publicity of time.

Fixated on the delusory centre around which his world seems to move, the spectator no longer experiences life as a journey toward fulfillment and toward death. Once he has given up on really living he can no longer acknowledge his own death.

VII. Territorial Domination

Tourism – Human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities – is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalised. The economic organization of travel to different places already guarantees their equivalence.

The mutual erosion of city and country, resulting from the failure of the historical movement through which existing urban reality could have been overcome, is reflected in the eclectic mixture of their decomposed fragments that blanket the most industrialized regions of the world.

…natural ignorance has been replaced by the organized spectacle of falsification. The landscape of the “new cities” inhabited by this technological pseudo-peasantry is a glaring expression of the repression of historical time on which they have been built. Their motto could be: “Nothing has ever happened here, and nothing ever will.”

VIII. Negation and Consumption Within Culture

When art, which was the common language of social inaction, develops into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too becomes subject to the movement governing the history of all separate culture. Its declaration of independence is the beginning of its end.

Art in its period of dissolution – a movement of negation striving for its own transcendence within a historical society where history is not yet directly lived – is at once an art of change and the purest expression of the impossibility of change. The more grandiose its pretensions, the further from its grasp is its true fulfillment. This art is necessarily avant-garde, and at the same time it does not really exist. Its vanguard is its own disappearance.

The task of the various branches of knowledge that are in the process of developing spectacular thought is to justify an unjustifiable society and to establish a general science of false consciousness.

…the various disciplines where structuralism has become entrenched are developing an apologetics of the spectacle….the proliferation of the prefabricated “pseudo-events”…flows from the simple fact that the overwhelming realities of present-day social existence prevent people from actually living events for themselves. Because history itself haunts modern society like a spectre, pseudo-histories have to be concocted at every level in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of the present frozen time.

IX. Idealogy Materialized

Ideology is the intellectual basis of class societies within the conflictual course of history. Ideological expressions have never been pure fictions; they represent a distorted consciousness of realities…intensified with the advent of the spectacle – the materialization of ideology brought about by the concrete success of an autonomised system of economic production…

Repression of practice…(is) imposed at every moment of everyday life subjected to the spectacle – a subjection that systematically destroys the “faculty of encounter” and replaces it with a social hallucination: a false consciousness of encounter, an “illusion of encounter.” In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, each individual becomes incapable of recognizing his own reality.

 

Web projects

Interesting participatory project reinterpreting Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” by Perry Bard at Pratt University.

Just discovered a great NYC “emotional map” by Czech artist Marketa Bankova, first published in 2000 and subsequently updated and added to. I like the concept and organization, use of images and audio…although the quality of the clips and pictures is inconsistent. Still, very cool.

 

Another landscape-obsessed filmmaker

I have not seen but would love to check out the work of James Benning, who apparently uses film to capture as well as he can the look, sound and feel of a place.

 

Francis Thompson

Just watched Francis Thompson’s 1957 film “NY, NY: A Day in New York” — what a great work. He uses kaleidescopic effects to fragment and slice the images, then stitches them together into these viscous moving images that recall something living and undulating. I like also his Escheresque compositions which the music composer unfortunately interpreted as comical; I think the sequences with people and cars distorting into themselves would have been more interesting with some kind of unsettling music.

Still, his isolation of the repetitive patterns in buildings and movements has so much in common with Vertov and with “Manhatta” — the latter of which shares with “NY, NY” the good fortune of being restored recently. The experimental sense of play (use of prisms) and joy of film for its own unique qualities is definitely present in this work.

 

Subterranean

Last semester I created a very rough short video called ‘Subterranean,’ which is partly inspired by Su Friedrich’s “Scar Tissue.” It’s an attempt to explore the interplay between the city’s fast movements and our often stagnant emotional states, the spaces of the city containing (and framing) emotion, structural frames within frames, and the play of contrasts between desire and fulfillment (the city’s promise and its delivery of one’s basic needs). It looks absolutely terrible because I shot it with a point-and-shoot, and then stretched the file sizes too much in the uploading process. It is what it is.

 

Some Vertov quotes

“…The main and essential thing is: The sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space.”

“We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.”

“I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presentation of this or that visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of the camera and is directed by it to those successive points of the action that, most succinctly and vividly, bring the film phrase to the height or depth of resolution.”

“I am kino-eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, whom I have created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just now when I also created it.”

 

Paul Ryan’s recommendations

Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography

William Mitchell @MIT

Brian McGrath & Jean Gardner (both at Parsons), Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today

Sumita Chakravarty & Michael Gillespie (on cultural issues) as NSU faculty

Deleuze, Bergsonism

–recommendations from Paul Ryan, NSU professor and creator of Earthscore

 

Early city films

Man with a Movie Camera, Kino-Pravda – Dziga Vertov

Manhatta (1924) by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) by Walther Ruttman
Notes on Berlin: “Beyond the scope of film, Berlin can be seen as part of an engagement with the city by the other arts as well.  For instance, parallels have been drawn between this film and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as well as George Grosz’s images of the metropolis.”

Rien que les heures (1926) by Alberto Cavalcanti

Moscow (1927) by Ilya Kopalin and Mikhail Kaufman

Andre Sauvage’s 1928 film Etudes sur Paris

1929 Dutch film Regen directed by Mannus Franken and Joris Ivens

Guy Debord films (not about the city per se)

More avant-garde stuff at UBU

 

Some quotes, people, writings, leads

There are so many people doing so much cool shit. Some stuff to check out….

Howard Horowitz, Wordmaps (including Manhattan concrete poem)

Van Eyck: “Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.”

Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects (intro to vernacular architecture with examples of cities built by improvisation, layer by layer – e.g. Mexico City, Cairo, etc.)

Light Trap (journal of new media)

Miranda July’s really cool website

Planet Drum (bioregionalism)

Philip K. Dick’s novels

Stephanie Strickland – hypertext/media writer/artist (Slipping Glimpse)

Anthony McCall - artist who works with light

Electronic Arts Intermix

Eyebeam Gallery

 

Funding opportunities for school

External funding info at the New School.

Also check the SPIN database (http://www1.infoed.org/); have to be on campus to use this database, as the New School pays a subscription fee for it.

More funding and grants for artists at the Foundation Center, 79 Fifth Ave.

 

Electronic Literature stuff

Conference (look for post-event video, publications?)
Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres
International conference at the Cultural Studies Research Center “Media Upheavals”
University of Siegen, Germany, November 20-21, 2008

Featuring
Roberto Simanowski (Providence, USA): Event and Meaning: Reading Interactive Installations in the Light of Art History
N. Katherine Hayles (Los Angeles, USA):  Behind the Screen: Implications of Database Construction
John Cayley (Providence, USA): Surface Text: Text as Surface in Immersive 3D Environments
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Santa Cruz, USA): What is Behind the Complex Surface?
Rita Raley (Los Angeles, USA): Locative Narrative: Figuring Urban Space in the Network Society
Anna Gibbs/Maria Angel (Sydney, Australia): Memory and Motion: The Body in Electronic Writing
Beyond Genre: Transformations of Narrative, Poetic and Dramatic Structures (Moderator: Roberto Simanowski)
Francisco J. Ricardo (Boston, USA): Framing Locative Consciousness
Joseph Tabbi (Chicago, USA): On Reading 300 Works of Electronic Literature: Is There a Literary Mainstream in New Media?
Ravi Shankar (New Britain, CT, USA): Retrospective and Barometer: A Decade of Drunken Boat

E-lit journals/publications:

Drunken Boat

ELO Collection Vol. 1

Electronic Book Review

Grand Text Auto (blog about e-lit featuring Mary Flanagan)

Some papers from Simanowki’s website:

The Literary as Distributed Cognition in Strickland, and Jaramillo’s slippingglimpse (w/video by Paul Ryan)
by N. Katherine Hayles

What is and to What End Do We Read Digital Literature?
by Roberto Simanowski

 

Landscape art & light projections

Planning to check out the Anthony McCall talk/exhibit at MOMA on Dec. 15. His work seems really interesting.

I’ve always liked minimalist/landscape/light art. I loved the Sound Garden sculpture in Seattle, the Judd and Flavin installations and everything else at the Chinati Foundation. I still haven’t made the trip to see Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field or to James Turrell’s Roden Crater, but I will some day. (More on this topic via LAND/ART (New Mexico).)

Similarly, urban sites present so many opportunities for physical projection with the many angular surfaces of a cityscape. There are a couple of text projections I know of in New York at the moment — one is a Jenny Holzer piece at the Guggenheim and another is downtown somewhere near Canal Street. Would like to find more…

 

Digital work I like, and related info

Some interesting examples of interactive digital imagery:

Invincible Cities
by Camilo José Vergara (Harlem section)

Work by UK-based artist Stanza (esp. ‘Interactive Cities’)

Their Circular Life: An Exploration About Human Behaviour [sic]
by Lorenzo Fonda and Davide Terenzi

Tao: Very pretty, simple metaphorical poem with imagery/music

the doorman [passing]: great photos and simple navigation concept

More stuff by Strasser, Sondheim & others

MISC NOTE:
Conflux Festival (Sept. 08) — How did I miss it this year??

People of the digital writing/art world:

Editors of 1st ELO collection:
N. Katherine Hayles (UCLA)
Nick Montfort
Scott Rettberg
Stephanie Strickland (Sarah Lawrence College)

Sponsors of the collection:
Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania
ELINOR: Electronic Literature in the Nordic Countries
MITH: Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland
The Division of Arts and Humanities, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota
College of Letters and Science English Department, The University of California, Los Angeles

RESOURCES

Poems That Go – digital poetry journal with critical essays about the aesthetics of new media and poetry

The Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory Web
managed by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

 

The Fall of the House of Usher

“The Fall of the House of Usher” from 1928…amazing use of sculpted space, shadow and light, costumes, editing, and animation.

Great review here by Ed Gonzalez

 

First impressions of Berger and Vertov

Notes 9/3-9/11

From Berger, Ways of Seeing

Seeing establishes our place in the world; it is affected by what we know or what we believe; it comes before words.

“To look is an act of choice.”

“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”

Definition of image: A sight which has been recreated or reproduced; an appearance or set of appearances detached from the place and time in which the sight occurred; all images are man-made.

Assumptions about ‘beauty,’ ‘truth,’ ‘genius’ mystify rather than clarify.

“Fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.”

Vertov as the camera: “Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world.”

[My initial thoughts re: "Man with a Movie Camera" – Vertov seems to have invented all of the standard shots still being used in film today, risking his physical safety to get certain shots (long before Herzog) and embracing the kinetic universe through the camera lens. He also preempted postmodernism's self-reflexive commentary by being filmed while he filmed, and juxtaposing edits of the opening-closing motions of a human eye, camera lens, and window blinds.]

More Berger…

European Renaissance thought put individual perspective at center of everything; the camera changed that, demonstrating that there is no center/single perspective.

Modern art took the visible to be “in continual flux” and “fugitive” (ex: cubism, impressionism, surrealism)

The camera has forever changed our relationship to paintings and other plastic arts; a photo of a painting changes its meaning (destroys its uniqueness) and fragments it into many uses and meanings.

Original works are now important not for what they say or contain, but for their status as originals (value reflects rarity); this status has been mystified (the “bogus religiosity” surrounding art objects) and commodified (elitist museums and outrageous values on the art market) – these 2 things have become “the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.” They are objects of nostalgia; reproduced images are essentially INFORMATION – to be used as such.

“In a film the way one image follows another, their succession constructs an argument which becomes irreversible. In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously….the painting maintains its own authority” because its totality can “reverse or qualify” the spectator’s conclusion about it.

My thoughts:

Berger assumes that film, because of its linear construction, cannot be not absorbed in a nonlinear way – or that its meanings cannot unfold in nonlinear ways. (Never mind that it doesn’t address the many forms of plastic arts in which the artist’s gestures are no where in the physical art object…Warhol, Chihuly, Judd, etc.) There are innumerable films that employ narrative or non-narrative/ experimental structures in which meanings are layered, overlapping, or circulatory. For example, a film in which the final scenes thwart the viewer’s expectations might have that viewer thinking back over earlier scenes that now have an altered meaning based on information that comes to light at the end.

Berger: “….the actual material of a painting, the paint – one can follow the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures and thus close the distance in time between the painting’s creation and the moment of looking at it…all paintings are contemporary.”

But then couldn’t that argument be made for live (non-digital) video and film documentaries? “To become the minute, to be the sensitive plate” is to record a moment using analog means in a way that “puts” the viewer inside that moment no matter when she views the film.

Berger’s thesis is very political; his concern is that the invention of the camera has enabled class disparity to continue despite the illusion of democracy the mass-produced image affords.

 

On light

Notes 9/12-9/18

From Zettl, Sight Sound Motion:

The First Aesthetic Field

Light is visible radiant energy. Television and film are pure light shows; light is the ‘materia’ of film/video

Shadows – Define shape, contour, space, location in space; note differences between attached and cast shadows.

Falloff – High contrast equals fast falloff; low contrast or diffused/balanced light equals slow falloff; spotlights produce hard light, floodlights produce soft light

Lighting’s outer orientation functions include spatial (basic shape and where it is located in relation to environment – usually fulfilled by key/principle lighting); tactile-texture; and time of day/season.

Re Time: An angled slice of light in the background can serve the function of a cast shadow to indicate time of day.

Lighting’s inner orientation functions include establishing mood/atmosphere (high-key or low-key lighting); key light position (above or below eye level); predictive lighting (changes as scene or film goes on to indicate things to come); lighting as dramatic agent (spotlights, flashlights, theatrical lighting effects meant to convey specific ideas).

I’ve always been highly aware of lighting and attracted to films and photos that use it to dramatic effect. A quintessential example is the scene in Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” when Trintignant goes to his fiancee’s apartment, and her striped dress is lit by the bars of light coming from between the blinds – the scene commonly interpreted as portraying his sense of imprisonment/lack of choice. Technically and visually, it such a magnificent use of light (combined of course with props and editing). A famous example of fast falloff that comes to mind is the Beatles’ 1964 album cover, in which their four faces are hard-lit from the side and seem to float in darkness – intoning the band’s emergence from obscurity. The early filmmakers seem to have developed all of the techniques still in use today — the lighting techniques originated by the German Expressionist filmmakers (“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “The Golem,” and “Nosferatu”).

Bear in fast falloff light:

 

On color

Notes 9/19-9/25:
From Block, The Visual Story:

The discussion of color in Block’s book leads me to think of films that use color in very striking and sophisticated ways. Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” used beautiful tableaux scenes and continuous camera dolly movements that shift the scene from room to room, each of which exists in a different color scheme (e.g., the lush reds and blacks of the dining room versus the queasy-yellowish green of the kitchen) that represent different aspects of the story. I take the reds of the dining room to represent opulence, sex, gluttony, and the abusive relationship (blood) of the husband to his wife and all humanity. The mysterious green kitchen is the place where malnourishment begins for these ill-fated characters; even the cook at one point admits he is always drunk when cooking. There is something unhealthy – like a hidden secret – about the kitchen, and of course at the end we see why.

Similarly, “Delicatessen” uses color to convey health and/or disease — a yellow-golden hue darkened (even smudged) around the edges to indicate a sad, sallow, or fading ‘Golden Age.’ The two main characters try to attain a bright, innocent happiness amidst the clawing, desperate, hungry machinations of the characters and circumstances that surround them. Though the color scheme remains consistent (and saturated) throughout, changes in brightness (and camera angles) help indicate the character’s intentions and goodness/badness. It is interesting that both of these films – which use color to such dramatic effect – focus on food and cannibalism. Perhaps suggesting we make spiritual associations from equally from color, taste, hunger and nourishment.

 

On ill-fated revolutions

From Oct. 18, 2008:

Applying Foucault to Paul Ryan’s “Geneaology of Video”

Foucault’s insight in “Power & Strategies” is that the Achilles heel of all resistance movements is their basis in contradiction and nonfunctional theories that fail to build strategic knowledge of the systemic mechanisms of power. Perhaps this is the reason most Leftist movements, such as the early video movement, dissolved without achieving their goals — in this case, dismantling broadcast tv’s hegemony. According to Foucault, resistance movements fail because contradiction alone is not a sound principle and approach to political resistance. Well-thought-out strategies based on analysis power are more likely to produce results for those who struggle against the Man.

In the context of his statement “There are no relations of power without resistances,” the power/struggle between broadcast tv and early video art/social change practicioners represents two sides to the same coin. As soon as it became clear TV was the dominant culturalisation mechanism for the country, artists and activists were setting about using the medium for their own purposes.

The anecdote about the Woodstock guy who showed a pilot video to his bosses at CBS and got fired for it, aside from leaving out the salacious details about what exactly was in the video, illustrates what Foucault was referring to in his explanation of the false logic of the so-called “weakest link theory.” The theory posits that by attacking the ‘weakest link’ in a larger political opponent, one will break the chain (of power). Perhaps the Woodstock guy thought his video represented a kind of Trojan horse — that his bosses would naively green-light his video and unsuspectingly unleash the demise of the broadcast network once the masses were exposed to a countercultural/DIY viewpoint. (If that were the case, you have to ask who was the more naive?)

The demise of the gift economy and vision of the countercultural video movement was due not to being snuffed out by the prevailing powers-that-be (broadcast TV), but to the infighting and decay from within the movement itself — a typical story for nearly every Leftist/reformist organization in modern history. This seems to offer further proof of Foucault’s argument that it is problematic for any organization or movement to formulate itself on the basis of contradicting something else — thus setting up an already negative stance (power is conceived as fundamentally prohibitive/negative) which inevitably bleeds into how the organization relates to itself.

 

Danse Serpentine 1899

Beautiful: