Presentation Topic: Constrained City / the pain of everyday life

Constrained City / the pain of everyday life by Gordan Savicic

 http://pain.yugo.at/

Description

It's an art performance by a Austrian artist Gordan Savicic who's interested in the investigation of the environmental effects on human's mind and behavior. For example, one becomes annoyed in a train crammed with lots of people or in a noisy public space, one the contrary, one becomes relaxed in a countryside with beautiful landscape and fresh air. It's a very interesting and experimental art performance with a psycho-geographic dimension. According to Guy Debord a French theorist, Psycho-geography is "...the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals..." (Guy Debord presente Potlatch, 1996) In this art piece, Savicic studied human's behavior and emotion towards the urban environment and also experimented on the outcome and side effect of modern technology and mechanism.

It's an urban systems' experience consisted of electromagnetic waves. The artist put a 'strait-jacket' with motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console which detects electromagnetic signals generated by wireless networks. The motors in the jacket tighten his body when wireless networks are detected. Thus, the higher the density of electromagnetic waves is, the deeper the wounds on the body become.

A new way of experiencing the urban systems

In the experience of human-machine interface, the artist became a Cyborg with a 'city-shaped' body, being able to perceive the invisibility of electromagnetic waves that human can never experience without the device. According to Christiance Paul, Cyborg is “an increasing fusion of the body and the machine”(Body and identity, p.167) Regarding the same passage, some art projects associated with human-machine fusion “try to introduce the body to digital perception…”(Christiance Paul, p.173) In this art performance, the piece of hi-tech brings human to a new dimension of human perception where one’s perceptions are extended from the limitation of human inborn ability, including sense of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. With the perception provided by the machine, one’s behavior is changed by taking an alternative route to work or to school due to the awareness of the electromagnetic signals. Thus it shows the psycho-geographic dimension of exploring the urban systems by applying "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.“, according to an article “A New Way of Walking”. (Joseph Hart, 2004)

Is it necessary?

To me it’s unnecessary to use this piece of hi-tech into our lives. There are two main reasons for the objection, including its possible outcome of technology obsession and its moral problem. 

In the art performance, one benefits from technology by having an extra sense to experience things from a new aspect. However one may ignore his ability to see, hear, touch, taste and to smell. For example, there’s a very common situation that we occasionally make mistakes on spelling and become too lazy to write by our hands as we always write texts using computer software, such as Microsoft Word a very useful writing tool which can automatically correct most of the spelling and grammatical mistakes.

The increasing relationship with machine and modern technology not only provides human a new way of exploring the city, but, according to Savicic, it also reveals their desire to explore pain. (Concept, Theory October 15, 2008) The pleasure of self-torturing is indicated in the design of the jacket. The jacket is anything but wearable that resembles a piece of skeleton or a strait-jacket worn by mental patients. It reminds me of corset and foot binding which are the feminine fashions in the old days for women who desire to get a perfect body shape and feet. In this art performance, because of the desire to build a closer relationship with machines, one would choose to put on the jacket not matter how painful it causes. Ironically, one can be more than a human, surpassing the limits of human ability but at the same time he lowers himself and accepts the pain by the poorly-designed jacket which is not even humane to wear. Technology seems to advance people’s lives. However we seems to forget to question ourselves if it’s right to subject ourselves to machines. If everything in this planet can be done by technology, what does it mean being a human?

Comment on “Will Computer Games Ever Be A Legitimate Art Form?” by Ernest Adams

Ernest suggested a broad definition of art since he believes that the difference between art and non-art becomes vague. Some practices which involve aesthetic considerations, design for example, cannot be fit completely into the general categories of art, such as literary arts and fine arts. According to his article “Will Computer Games Ever Be A Legitimate Art Form?” he explained that “…the types (decorative arts and industrial design) move more and more away from “pure” art and into areas with more utilitarian considerations…The boundaries between art and non-art are not hard and fast; there is a grey area.” (Ernest, p.255)

Because of the indefinite boundaries between the two, some folk culture and products do share some common characteristics of many great works of art, such as Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s “David”, which stand the test of time. Tetris, for example, the world-famous game through decades can last as long as good works of art. Regarding the same article, “Tetris is so simple and elegant that its appeal could last for centuries…Tetris is, perhaps, a work of kinetic sculpture, and I could easily imagine it being displayed in an art museum.” (Ernest, p.257) Although most games hardly be regarded as art, they can be as much interesting as works of art.

Besides aesthetic, Ernest believes that a work of art should contain ideas and intrinsic value. The value of a work of art shouldn’t be attributed only to its appearance, but its concepts. According to Ernest, he said: “For a novel to be art must be more than merely entertaining. For a painting to be art it must be more than merely decorative.” In video games, idea is needed to be considered as art to make us discuss and study them, other than ‘fun’, and they shouldn’t have to be made for profit. According to Ernest, “Art is not about useful…does not involve merchandising…not about what the customer wants to buy. It’s about what you have to say.” (Ernest, p.260)

The above models for an art video game seem ideal. It’s impossible for the producers to make video games only from the perspective of an artist. It cannot be wrong that some video games as Ernest mentioned such as “Balance of Power” and “Planescape: Torment” (Ernest, p.259) do make you “feel things” (Ernest, p.259), however, the point is little convincing to me because when you speak of ideas and thinking, it’s something that you won’t ignore in your daily activities. If art conveys ideas and makes you “feel things” so do TV programs, comic books and movies. The production of a video game involves a team of professionals: technicians, designers, sound effect composers and so on whose goals are different. If videogames are made for its own sake, the people behind it are all artist, not so-called practitioners, or, if so, one would neither contribute to videogames required high cost and a group of smart brains nor invest on it without money in return. Or if it does, it shouldn’t be termed game but art. The essence of art isn’t merely depends on its message. To me, a great work of art is about the dedication of artist, like Michelangelo whose whole life dedicated to sculpting. In his sculptures, such as “David” and “The tomb of Julius II”, the dynamic and powerful form of the figures makes the works masterpieces. True art shows beauty, perfection, artist’s passion and love for his works and also the power which moves and inspires people.

Comment on Gamer Revolution

According to the film, what are some pros and cons of playing video games for individuals and societies?

Advantages:

Learning about life

According to the Sims creator Will Wright, for games like Sims, young people can learn things about life, especially about complex things, rather than from books. Computer games can be a playful aspect for education.

Self-confidence building

Young people have a sense of accomplishment through computer games. In the virtual digital world, they can be or a soldier or a superhero to complete a certain mission. The games provide a new form of expression and communication in which people express their emotions and feelings by engaging into the game. 

New Career Path

Computer games can change people lives. People are hired as professional computer gamers in South Korea. They become national heroes who are admired by millions of fans and earn lots of money. 

Promoting

In the US Army, they use computer games as a mean to attract young people to join the army due to the recruitment problem. Through the game produced by the army, the army can recruit potential ones to work for its country.

Therapy

Patients with cancer can understand more about their illness through the cell-killing game. It’s not about shooting lives but saving lives by killing bad cells in patients body.

Disadvantages:

Racism

Some computer games has bias against a certain race, for example, a western first person shooter game whose player’s mission is to shoot down Arabs. This type of game conveys the message of racism which gives young people wrong message and values. 

Aggressiveness

The content of some computer games is full of offensiveness and violence, such as a Syria’s first person shooter game in which gamers who act as a crazy Arab killer are invited to slaughter Muslims. It’s way too violent and disgusting to kill their own people.

Should governments have the right to ban certain games? Why or why not?

Some statistics show that the behavior of the teenagers who always play computer games is more offensive and aggressive. It’s all about "monkeys-see-monkeys-do" that they may react the same way as what they see. However, there’s no direct connection between aggressive feelings and aggressive behavior. The problem is not about the game, but the player. One’s pleasure on shooting people in a game has nothing to do with reality. Maybe it does only if one gets the wrong message about the game and cannot understand the distinction between fiction and reality. I think it’s unnecessary to ban violent computer games. However, there should be laws to set PG on violent games or to forbid young people who’re not mature enough from buying or downloading such games.

Video Games

Sims is one of my favorite video games. There are few reasons that I like this game that I can create a "virtual me" who may be perfect in everything , such as good at playing piano, drawing pictures and socializing, and I can design my own dream house as much fancy as i want to. In the game I don't have to worry about living, schooling, relationships and stuff because if anything goes wrong with my "virtual me" I can just leave the game and start it over again. It's a complete different thing with reality where we take risks and make decisions everyday. It's really a very interesting game that I can do something offensive or even morally wrong in real life. When I played Sims at the age of 15 I used to drag people into the pool, making him drowning and locked a group of people into a room where I set fire on. I felt excited while I was torturing people in Sims but as I grow up, now I found that it's really a nasty thing to do even if it's in a virtual world because playing video games is about having fun and lose yourselves into the game and I don't thing causing violence against people in the game is fun at all.

New Way of Visual Experience

Inter-Discommunication Machine (1993) created by an Japanese artist Kazuhiko Hachiya is a very interesting installation in which two persons exchange their visual fields to one another through a hi-tech visor which functions as a device transmitting one's view to another. The concept of the piece is that one look at things from the perspective of the other person by seeing what the other see. It's not only a new way of visual experience that go beyond human 's sense of sight but also an experiment on how human's senses react with their bodies when those visual messages input into their brains.

I found the motif of Yin Yang very interesting in the installation. The artist applied the Taoism cosmology into his art work, indicating the importance of interdependence and compound of being in the opposite's shoes in the sight-exchange experience. In Taoism, Yin Yang is a very fundamental philosophical concept  describing the interdependence and interaction between two opposite elements as a whole. Yin represents the feminine and weak side, and Yang the masculine and strong one. Although everything in the universe is different and opposite to one another, such as masculinity and femininity, fire and water and day and night, the two sides are changing and interconnecting together as one. In the symbol, Yin and Yang are shown flowing, circulating and infusing itself into its opposite. It means Yin doesn't not mean 'all weak', but its weakness can be strong in some aspects, and at the same time, Yang can become weak anytime too. This concept is always a crucial concept to Chinese people across time, suggesting everything has a balance to sustain a harmonious universe, or otherwise our planet will become a big mess to live in. 

Mouchette.org by Martine Neddam

"My name is Mouchette" 

"I live in Amsterdam"

"I am nearly 13 years old"

"I am an artist..."

"This is enough. Leave me alone. Browse my site! 
Quit my site Leave me alone! Leave me alone...come closer"

"What is the best way to kill yourself when you're under 13?"

"Finally, I can come that close to you. 
Do you also want to come that close to me?"

Mouchette.org is a website of Mouchette a persona created by an artist Martine Neddam. Mouchette is a nearly 13 year-old girl who claim herself as an artist because she said so: "I heard that the only way to become an artist is to say you are one. And then you can call "art" everything you make.... Easy, he?" On the site, there are several interactive activities, such as participants are invited to give advices on how to commit suicide under the age of 13, to join Mouchette's international fan club and to answer Mouchette's questions along with your name and email address.

The main color theme of the site is pink suggesting girlishness and youth. On the home page, a profile picture of an innocent girl is placed on the left top corner and the close-ups of pinkish flowers are randomly shown as the background. On the "***digital flesh & blood***" page, there is a close-up of a girl licking the glass of a scanner along with a question "Want to know what my tongue tastes like? Try it on your screen and tell me". After participants submit their answer, they will get to "***bisou****bisou****bisou***" (Bisou means kiss in French) a page of a close-up of a girl’s lips sucking her figure. On that page, participants are invited to "meet my father". The link directs them to an introducing page of "my father" of an animated background of a raw meat carved "Papa". As they click on a link "Dad and me", sentences related to Mouchette’s father are shown on the page, such as "This page show the love I have for my father", "I made a portrait of my dad out of a piece of raw meat because of that "flesh and blood thing" between him and me." and "My dad is such a hmmm.... moving person! That's whay I made this animated portrait of him." 

As participants reload or go back to the page, gasping, weeping and giggling sounds of a girl react. Small icons of ants appear on some pages, the itching sensation of an ant can be conceived as the eagerness and yearn of an adolescent girl. Besides that, a little fly is shown as the symbol of Mouchette herself because her name Mouchette means "housefly (mouche)" in French. The idea of the name came from a 1967 French tragical film by Robert Bresson, Mouchette (1967). The story of the film is about a girl Mouchette whose life is miserable commits suicide by rolling herself into the lake after being raped. (fig.1)

The Images and words are the powerful and playful languages in the site. Because of the decorative flowers, the pink color and her lovely profile picture, the image of Mouchette appears to be innocent and sweet. However, she’s very complicated. The content of the website is sexually suggestive, bizarre and morally wrong. The extreme close-ups of the skin, tongue and lips of a girl convey erotic feeling as if she allows participants to touch and feel her intimate parts. One the pages of Mouchette and his father, the sensational sentences seem to indicate her sexual attachment to his father. In the complex, their impure and strange relationship is illustrated by flesh and blood.

The web site is also associated with moral issues. On the “suicide kit” pages, Mouchette welcomes participants to share tips of commit suicide for teenagers. It’s supposed to be a joke. However, many people take it seriously posting comments to tell people it’s wrong. According to a comment of “get. a. life” on 07 Nob 2010: “Get a life, seriously. Think about someone other than yourself, someone who is actually in real pain; watch the damn news, read the newspapers. You have a whole life ahead of you, and posting dumb emails about killing yourself is not going to get you anywhere.Its a pretty easy answer, a 3 yr old can work out how people die, so why are you wasting your time? Get it into your twisted mind that life is hard; just dont be so selfabsorbed and dramatic.” To me the tip sharing not only serves as an irony of adolescents (such as teenagers who are Emo, melancholic and full of problems), but also allows people to work out the meaning of life through discussions.

(fig.1) Film still: Mouchette (1967)

Do video-sharing sites such as Youtube enhance or worsen creative culture?

Youtube becomes predominant that attracts millions of users worldwide to access to it in every second. Various amateur videos uploaded by Individuals are shared without boundaries so Youtube a platform builds a network and extends it across the globe where people are allowed to share their own thoughts and creativity out of the system of mainstream media. At the same time other users participate in discussions by making comments or making another video to respond the one they are interested in. I believe by active exchange of new ideas the new branch of amateur creativity is growing stronger from our culture.

The main reason for the tremendous success of video-sharing websites, like Youtube, resulted from the global circulation of creativity. The concept of this type of circulation in the activity when people interacting with one another, according to Marek in “Creativity meets Circulation: internet, amateurs and the process of evolution 2009”, is what we call “collective creativity” (p.7): “…people sharing enormous amounts of audio-visual material…This circulation of ideas in a process you may label as collective creativity.”(p.7) Let "Chocolate Rain" for example, a popular funny clip on Youtube produced by a vlogger Tay Zonday. After the video has gained reputation on the internet, a series of “Chocolate Rain” parodies was published, such as the Starwars-inspired version by another active youtuber named Chad Vader and the Super Mario one by Stupid Mario Brothers. This phenomenon is very common as the digital technology allows us to rework original sources by editing and mixing. As Marek mentioned in the essay: “The digitalized nature of this material allows endless data-editing…it seems like there are no external boundaries for the creativity of the community…” (p.9)

Chocolate Rain Original Song by Tay Zonday

Chocolate Rain by Chad Vader

By the development of technology, the circulation activity of free digital video-sharing offers alternative ways for people to redefine the meaning of ‘creativity’. According to Marek in the essay, the mass media has been giving attentions to the amateur products because they are more “authentic” than ones by the professionals. The works by professionals who follows the traditional rules (Hollywood filmmaking for example) dominated the creative culture till the emergence of the technology of video-sharing. The role between ordinary producers and the professionals is becoming less distinctive than before. Marek suggested they both seem to part with the old-fashioned system. (p.2) For instance, the amateur products are “professional products look less attractive” (p.2) and the professional ones “try to imitate the ‘amateur look and fell’ in order to be perceived as original and authentic” (p.2). Therefore, the transition of the two parties becomes one of the outcomes of “collective creativity”. In the case of “Chocolate Rain”, it becomes the inspiration for artists. American musician John Mayer who was inspired by it made a spoof of the song. In my opinion the song turns out to be an impressive song by the singer! If there weren’t people who share their own idea and creativity we will cling on our old way and concept of producing things. Idea will be frozen without interaction through sharing.

Chocolate Rain remix by John Mayer

ENJOY!!!!