Monday 31 October 2011

Lecture 2 - Technology will liberate us

Here are my notes from the second lecture Technology will liberate us on 20/10/2011.

Summary

  • technological conditions can affect the collective consciousness
  • technology trigger important changes in cultural development
  • Walter Benjamin's essay 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' (1936) significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change.

Task
  • draw a doodle - original
  • faithfully copy this - copy
  • and again... - reproductions
  • and again - reproductions

A reproductions can either be a work in its own right, or merely an image representation of the original.
The relationship between art, design and media is born from this scenario. Who is copying who?
The transformation between that is the relationship between art, media and design.

Machine Age; Modernism

Walter Benjamin and mechanical reproduction - wrote some critical essays but his work was never completed due to him committing suicide after the war.
  • the age of technology of art
  • parallel and specific to new developments; a duality expressing the zeitgeist
  • dialectical due to the copy, reproductive nature and the role of the original
  • the aura and uniqueness of art
On encountering an original work, there is an ora that is distinct from anything that is then reproduced or copied.

Photography is at the beginning of this technological relationship between art and design.
The camera eye is still one of fascination as it can come from a number of points - not just your perception or what you see, it can be used for multiple viewing points.

The camera eye has a variable gaze, and a new consciousness conveys and represents technological progress and the faith within it.

Photograms - the early experiments with technology and photography

Benjamins provokes two strands of thoughts which have then been explored by Freud and Marx
Marx brings about that an understanding of technology and how it is a work of art.

Once art and design enter modes of production and consumerism, the values of it can be changed.

A copy of something onto something can increase its value - up for reinterpretation.

Margo Lovejoy - photography has overturned a seat of art. Form of aesthetic. Technology moves something into a new context, therefore meaning the value of it becomes under question.

Freud - What the material aspect of how it can express our deepest unconscious. 

Films can play with our subconscious and deepest desires. The material way at looking at the developments of technology.

Kineticism - the idea of capturing movement.
The pre curser of cinema photography. Exploring how we pursue space. The understanding of space and time begins a whole dialogue of de materialism of art and design.

Once you start to look at the moving image, it starts to move away from form and object. Once you move into just image, you can replicate and reform it. With photography becomes the de materialism of art and design.

Dadaism is clearly using technology to produce image. Instead, with photography and technology, images and objects are ordered and coded and styled. This is the beginning of the development of art and design merging together- how you code and replicate and style and order it can be resting in either the context of art or context or design or both. It is why you see design increasingly from this period within art.

Marx is associated with the term technological determinism. He believes there is a logical relationship between economical reproduction and social existence. He sees it as a role and tool for progress, and also a tool for alienation.

The main issues Marx discusses - 
  • technology drives history, 
  • technology and the division of labour, 
  • materialist view of history, 
  • technology and capitalism and production, 
  • social alienation of people from aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism,

Electronic Age; Postmodernism

Post modern and post machine - as we move into it, many electronic works were still made with modern aesthetic, the emergence of information and conceptual based works, the computer has become a centre in both art and design, there is an openness to industrial techniques, and collaborations between art and science.

We consumer the technology, and in term develop new techniques - everything becomes that much more image and illusion based. 

Boundaries are broken between different forms of medial and subjects. 

Simulation and Simulacrum
  • It is the reflection of a profound reality
  • It masks and denatures a profound reality
  • It masks the absence of a profound reality
  • It has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is it's own pure simulacrum
  •  - Jean Baudrillard (1981)
Whats to say by reproducing an image doesn't make it a object/form in its own right? What do we call original and what do we call copy? It is a reflection of a profound reality, masks and absence of reality. Becomes a reality in it's own right. It's confusing, because it's all to do with what is virtual and what is not.

What is a reality and what isn't a reality? 

The word of mouth masks the absence - we take it as real, we take it as factual because it's what we hear.

Nam June Paik

The illusion of power.

John Walker and art and mass media; Art in the age of mass media (2001)
  • art uses mass media (1990 - 2000)
  • Art in advertisements
  • The artist as media celebrity
Digital Age
Margot Lovejoy; Digital Currents
  • digital potential leads to multimedia productions
  • technological reduction of all images so they are addressed by the computer
  • new contexts

Multimedia work
  • interactivity
  • performance
  • transdisciplinary
  • time, space and motion explored in art and as art
  • collaborations
  • computer as a tool for integrating that media
Colclusion
  • art comments on the ideology of every day life
  • art can be expressive of progressive
  • technological tools can blur the line between production of fine art works and commercial and design production

Seminar Notes - Panopticism

Notes from seminar on 17/10/2011.

Review of Panopticism lecture.

Panopticon - Jeremy Bentham, design for building, 1971, used for prisons, schools, hospitals, institutions.

Constant visibility/invisibility - institutional gaze

Self discipline - depersonalises

Self regulating

Isolation - like a laboratory, experiment

Individualising the experience increases psychological actions

Binary division - eg mad/sane

Productive - concentrate harder, no talking, got to work

Seek to correct unproductive behaviour

Make people insane to make them sane

Under surveillance

Shift from physical to mental discipline - modern disciplinary society

Society where social control is woven into every kind of existence

Examples of Panopticism

  • Facebook - performance of yourself behaving how you think someone else wants you to present yourself to the world
  • Schools
  • Hospitals
  • Media
  • Advertising - shows images of 'perfect' life all the time. should look/should act? makes people not comfortable with who you are, correct body for someone else
Dosile Body - easily trained, controlled

Power - power is a relationship A > B
   - school teacher has control over a class rather than its more
   - a <-> b
   - only exists because they allow it
   - students sit quiet let themselves be controlled

Affects the controllers as well as the controlled

Thursday 13 October 2011

Lecture 1 - Panoptcism

The ways in which our society controls and disciplines people.

Complex institutional framework.
   - think about the way the way we, artists, designers, makers, our ideas are not only produced by us independently.
   - before we get to the creative act determines what we produce.

Panopticon is an allergry of social control.

<image of panopticon>

This, as a building, has the same principles of controls as our society has the same principles of control.

Michael Foucault (1926 - 1984)
   - philosopher
   - activist
Two of his works  
 - madness & civilisation
   - discipline & punish: the birth of the prison
These both survey the rise of madness and civilisation, and social control.

Discipline. Punishment. Madness.

Madness & Civilisation
   - madness is different socially 
   - mad people were incorporated into society 
   - part of society
Towards the 1600's - a different attitude starts to emerge
   - moral attitude
   - those who 'weren't useful' were stigmatised
   - 'the great confinement' - houses of correction
        - everyone who weren't socially productive were thrown in.
        - the insane
        - criminals
        - poor and unemployed
        - single mothers
        - idle - people considered lazy
 
Take those who aren't productive and force them to be productive with violence.
   - the error was that it corrupted people more
   - the insane made the sane more deviant
   - specialist institutions start to emerge
   - a different between sane and insane start to emerge

Inside the asylum, the inmates are controlled in different ways.
   - treated like children/minors
        - if  they do well they get a reward
   - important shift
   - society realise there's a better way to control people
        - mentally rather than physically

All sorts of knowledge emerge
   - they legitimise these institutions 
   - this mental source of social control represents from someone else being in control of your own behaviour to you being in control of your own behaviour.

Those who were deviants, were seen to by social embarrassment.
   - to show if anyone chooses not to obey they will also be socially humiliated

Guy Falks
image

Quote under image.

Not to correct his behaviour, but to make an example of it. That anyone who dares to confront the king will be treated the same and have the same punishment
   - made to scare people off the thought of even considering it

Disciplinary Society and Disciplinary Power
   - modern discipline - making us useful for society

The Panopticon
   - designed by Jeremy Bentham - proposed 1791
   - could be a school, hospital, asylum, prison

Modern one is build in Cuba.
image of it

Another modern one in the states 
image of this

The panopticon - the ideal mechanism of gaining power and control
   - each prisoner in their cell constantly see the central tower so they know they are being watched, but can't see each other.
   - the central tower wasn't lit so the prisoners couldn't tell if they were actually being watched
   - knowing you are/might be watched has a peculiar effect
        - it internalises the individual
        - always behave in the way you feel you should whilst being watched
   - gives immediate power
   - once you accept you're always being watched the people start to control themselves
        - keep themselves disciplined
   - resulted in not even needing guards to control it because the people just control themselves.

image of in cell

People controlling themselves rather than being controlled
   - don't need any physical way of controlling people, just mental

Faucault Quote, 1975

The institutions were used for a variety of purposes.
   - the had the function of laboratories
   - they used to measure things like performance and contrast

   - allows scrutiny
   - allows supervisor to experiment on subjects
   - aim to make them productive

This lecture theatre is designed to make us learn more productively
   - we can only really talk to people to left and right of us where as Richard can see us all 
   - the way we are arranged are most productive 
   - allows him to survey us
   - make us more useful and do what he wants us to do

   - reforms prisoners
   - helps treats patients
   - helps instruct school children
   - helps confine, but also study the insane

New mode of disciplinary power - Panopticism
   - don't just want to punish those who don't do what we say - correct and punish them
   - surveillance of bodied/people
   - about training people
   - getting people to train themselves the way you want them to be trained

Constantly visible
   - easier to be caught out

Open plan office
   - not just a trendy design
   - efficient system for the bosses
   - allows the boss to constantly see what the workers are doing
   - the fact you know you can be constantly seen makes you not because you know you can be caught out
   - the boss can just be sat there as a visible reminder

The Office
   - film crew following main character around
   - he knows he is constantly being filmed
   - he modifies his behaviour
   - put on a face of being the perfect boss
   - just the idea of being watched caused him to change his behaviour

You are acting in a way you think a correct citizen is supposed to act.
   - behaviour conditioned by all sorts of factors

Right now
   - monitored
   - registered
   - grade
   - can be seen

Library
   - automatically know you have to control yourself in a library
   - same with art galleries
   - just know you have to be quiet
   - perfectly behaved, despite what like out of it

Modern Bars
   - open plan
   - change from being intimate to spaces where you now you're being watched
   - walk into a modern bar feeling less atmosphere
   - everyone is watching you
   - spaces are much easier to control

CCTV
   - most obvious example
   - another example is Google Maps
        - photos of streets 
        - personal levels of own homes are available to everyone
        - another way to get caught out?

Lives are recorded
   - everything that we do is recorded
   - fear of being caught out
   - resulting in more productive, well behaved people

Not just physical places, or the design of places
   - fundamentally, for it to have an effect it relies on you being visible and knowing that you're being monitored

A register is not just a record, but it's also a panoptic sign to be monitored 
   - our knowledge of ourselves goes into Richards hands

Don't question it, just cooperate to not raise any awareness to wether would be doing something wrong

Security cameras are usually revealed to visibly instruct people that they have to behave, not to catch them out

Some just put as a reminder that you could be caught out, but not actually set to catch you out - speed cameras, etc

The fact in college how staff have red cards and we have blue cards controls us, and gives us a status of power. If you see someone you don't know with a red card, you would immediately act more appropriately.


It's not just a form of mental control, there's a direct relationship between mental control and physical control. These power relationships control our bodies and forces us to act in a certain way and has physical responses. We become docile bodies - self monitoring, self-correcting, obedient bodied. Docile bodies in the terms that we won't repel. Makes ur work harder and come in when were supposed to, etc.

The whole keeping healthy thing
   - not just keeping healthy, but also to endure people work harder and better
   - people are living longer so expected to work longer and harder because they are healthier
   - constant physical reminder that our bodies are constantly on display
   - no one makes you go to they gym and fret about how you look, you do it to yourself. You make yourself anxious.

Everyone watches telly, but it's like a metaphor for the panopticon, fixed forward watching something centrally.

Foucault and Power
   - definition is not a top-down model as wth Marxism
   - power is not a thing or a capacity people have - it's a relation between different individuals and groups and only exists when it's exercised.
   - the exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted
   - there there is power there is resistance.

Facebook - everything you post is recorded by everyone who can see it. You control what you post, put on an act of yourself for others. A form of control - must announce to people things like relationship changed, and can actually loose jobs over it as there is always someone somewhere watching.

There is always something controlling our actions.

Things to go away with today
   - Michael Foucault
   - panopticism as a form of discipline
   - techniques of the body
   - docile bodies

Level 05 - Briefing

14 lectures - Thursdays 11:00am

Seminars - Group 2 1:00pm - 3:00pm
We will be split into 4 groups then we will have a seminar every 2 weeks.

Private study - 120 hours / 20 credits
2 hours reading per lecture
10 hours seminar development
20 hours essay development
60 hours e-learning

bagd-10cts.blogspot.com

CTS Blog
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741.6 library

Introduction to Communication Studies - John Fisce

23rd January - essay deadline