Introduction to the book Digital Resistance

The introduction to this book brings up many good points which I would like to address. The first is the need for people to name things. The author talks about the fear with which the Critical Art Ensemble approached being named because naming yourself means that you become pigeon-holed. It is a way for everyone to understand what you're doing, and also to judge. I think they were wise to fear being named because it is true that definitions do create boundaries (page 5). This is one reason I find it so hard to talk to people who aren't artists about artists because I don't want to define myself as 'just' a photographer. I also enjoy working in 3-d, writing/poetry and hope to make videos too. I know why people have a need to define and understand what other people do with their lives, it's so that they can feel like they understand them. It's a very one-dimensional take of a person but unfortunately many people operate like this. It's like when I told my English 102 Teacher I was British, she assumed my compliance in the oppression of the Irish and post-colonial woes all around the world and was very frosty with me for the whole semester. I am more than my countries history. CAE is more than 'tactical media'.

The idea that joy can evolve from naming yourself is interesting to me (page 5), the author talks about the sense of relief that many participants felt upon belonging to a named group because it opened them up to hybridization (page 5&6). The group welcomed any and all cultural hybrids, artists/scientists. The CAE group sought to broaden itself in order to reach as many people as possible through as much media as possible. Comparing this to the Infernal Noise Brigade you could say that the CAE has a broader appeal than the INB. The INB was focused more on political protesting through music while the CAE has multitudinous aspects. Both groups have similar aims, intervention by challenging the status quo and subverting what is accepted but their delivery is different. I think the CAE has more application to work in different social structures because, as the author says, they change what they do depending on the social spaces/hierarchies present in the areas they are working. INB seemed to have similar approaches wherever they were, not to discount what they did at all because it was very effective.

I agree with the notion of power in the archive as discussed in pages 9 & 10. The belief that the meaning of archived materials changes with time is very true to me and I think it was wise of CAE to try to leave as few traces behind as possible. As they say, what traces remain are active, rather than passive in that they could incite a viewer to action. I think this is a very clever course of action, especially with digital media. Digital media should not exist in an archive on a floppy disc growing old. It should be a phoenix on the internet, waiting to be rediscovered and recontextualised by a new generation.

Assignment Three: Typologies of Walking and Not Walking

For this project I was inspired by Kim Sooja's 'A Needle Woman' project. In this series the artist (or model) is always in the frame of the image with her back to the viewer. She is presented in different places all over the world but she is always the same.

I wanted to create a series of photos with me in the frame, always dressed the same in an outside place I usually enjoy going to. I chose Reid Park because I live fairly close and enjoy spending time there. Right now I am going through my two year 'removal of conditions' period in immigration status. This means I have to collect evidence that my husband and I are a real married couple with intertwined lives and intend to stay together. It's very stressful trying to gather enough evidence to avoid suspicion and I'm finding it hard to enjoy life at the moment without thinking about it. Even when we go out walking in the park it's on my mind and that's what made me think of this project. I am in these places but I am not interacting with them. Sooja's work is a protest against the anonymity of sweatshop workers (as I see it) and globalization. This project is my way of protesting the bureaucracy of immigration and the way it affects my life. In this project I wanted to convey a lack of something, it's personal to me (immigration story) but I want the casual viewer to get a sense of emptiness/death/searching from the images.

Week Three Walk Two

I did this experiment yesterday but it's taken me a while to think about what to say about it.

I decided to SMILE all day, with people I would actually show my teeth and wandering around I would keep a slight smile on my lips or a broad smile, depending on what I felt like.

People always tell me that I am hard to read or that I don't smile a lot. In fact, a boy I had a crush on at school wrote me a Christmas card one year that has 'you should smile more!' written inside. I've always been shy and never been good at showing emotions, I could say that's a product of being the youngest of five children but that situation is just as likely to make one extroverted.

I wondered if smiling all day would make me feel happy, even when I wasn't but really it made me feel strained, like I was lying about something. I have a friend who's lived in France for a long time (she's an American) and she said that when she first moved there she would smile at everyone, say 'thank you' and 'have a nice day' to people she met until one day her partner (who is French) sat her down and explained the puzzled looks she'd been getting. In France they don't understand why you say something you don't truly mean, it's an empty phrase and they have no time for it. Similarly, why are you smiling at people you don't truly know, they aren't your friends and they don't expect it.

I noticed that when you smile broadly at people they tend to smile back at you, which can be pleasant but also awkward, perhaps as if you're now expected to strike up a conversation. I went about my normal daily activities while I was smiling and browsed in a few shops I don't usually go into that often. Clerks always ask you if you need help and if you're smiling broadly when you say no they look sated, which is an odd reaction.

While I was smiling I remembered when I used to walk home from school alone. I started to be allowed to walk home alone when I was around 13 and as I walked home at the same time everyday I would pass several older people on their way back from the supermarket. I would smile at them but never say a word. Every day for years just smiling at the people I passed as I walked home from school. They nearly always smiled back. I have no idea why I smiled at strangers like this except that probably my Nana told me it was good manners at some point and as the people I passed were about her age I wanted to please them.

It was an interesting experiment but I don't feel any different after it, I think if I was less timid then I would try to strike up conversations with strangers but the thought of doing that makes me feel a little bit sick. I think that's probably a good reason to challenge myself to it.

Week Three Walk One

I asked my husband, Brian, what cause is most important to him and he answered 'Education' without any hesitation. Brian is a teacher, right now he's teaching at a charter school in town but before that he taught at the SUSD and was made redundant following budget cuts in 2010. Education is important to him, not just because it's his job but because he believes it is the most important aspect of society. "Did you know that prisons look at the reading scores of 6th graders to decide how many extra prisons they're going to need to build in the following 20 years?" He says things like this to me all the time. When he was made redundant from his job Brian was probably the least surprised to discover that while the SUSD now has an average class size of above 30 they have continued to hire more administrators, obliterating teachers jobs.

I walked from our house to the local school, Blenman Elementary and using pavement chalks wrote out some of the things he has told me about Education over the years. I hope that someone at the school sees it and it makes them think.

Infernal Noise Brigade Discussion Points

I understand the idea of protest through noise, disrupting the traditional notion of a person holding up a sign 'human bleating' their lament at the injustices of the world but I don't really feel that either one is 'better' than the other, as Jennifer Whitney seems to suggest. Perhaps it's the fact that the INB were such a new form of protest and the shock value of it made people take more notice of what they were actually trying to say. I do not mean to say that all protests are futile but there is a sense of finality about the act of protest, it's more of a last-stand than anything else. The recent protests at tuition increases in England did not change anything in the status quo and society moved quietly on. Monsanto has successfully lobbied the FDA into submission so that they no longer have to tell people when they're consuming products that are genetically modified...so what has really changed in the last ten years? The transnationals are, if anything, more bloated than ever and the majority of people really have no idea of the world and their place in it. College doesn't do much to help, you take a couple of INDV classes and learn about the destruction of natural habitat all over the world so that you can live your comfortable life and still nothing changes. I don't have a solution, I am as much a culprit as anyone else. I always feel an intense emotional connection to protesters and think, 'fuck yeah, I'm going to quit my job and do things like that too!' then I remember I'm married and have other responsibilities. Not that the people in the video aren't married or have responsibilities but the important factor is that they are a community. They work as a community, sharing their responsibilities among themselves which gives them more real time to do what they want to do with their lives. I think about the communities where child-rearing is seen as a village effort, no one mother is alone in it like most of us are here in the West. There is a disconnection in society that means we no longer really have a community, yes we're all living in the same place but we don't connect or rely on each other - we're independent of one another. I feel like the protesters need to 'grow up' and infiltrate the corporate world, take their ideas inside the companies and change from within but it is near impossible to survive being tainted by the corporate world.

Whitney's article talks about the first 'public/private' collision taking place for the INB when they invaded a Starbucks and started to play. For me, this was the most effective and unexpected visual in her piece because we all expect protests to happen on the streets. We all expect the police to be hostile and gas you but what we don't expect is the protest to invade the comfortable sphere of our being in a coffee house. This approach is probably bound to incite more anger at the participants because it disrupts all peoples business but it is probably very effective at getting people to pay attention to why you're protesting.

I think about the Style Wars video gallery scene when I think about trying to take the INB into a gallery just by showing photographs or artifacts and for me it really wouldn't be as effective as the protest. The INB exists for the protest, it is a living, breathing organism as Whitney describes - they all knew signals on which beat to take up, how fast to walk, when to turn etc. To dissect it and place it in a museum would mute the message that the participants were trying to get across. Like in the Style Wars video, I am sure that the people visiting the gallery would feel moved by their experiences viewing parts of the INB but fundamentally the message would be different.

Who has the power in a protest, who is in charge? Are the protesters in charge because they have taken over the streets or are the police in charge because they hem the protesters in with their batons and riot gear (or whatever US police have - I'm more familiar with the UK riot police...surely the US police don't carry their guns to protests?) or are the corporations hosting international events in charge because it is ultimately their presence in a city that means protests will be organised there. All participants in protests have the power of their respective spheres, the protesters rule the streets, the police rule the sidelines and the multinationals rule the corporate world. All these spheres have the power over their representation and message, the protesters relay their message through their music, mission statements, slogans or by direct interview. The multinationals relay their message through 'impartial' news outlets, designed to undermine the message of the protesters but the police really don't have a say in what they do. A protest is most effective when the lines between those spheres blur and merge, just as in the Starbucks protest or in the Shell office protest described in the footnotes of Whitney's article. These protests are most effective because the participants behave in an unexpected manner which is the most disarming way to get your point across.

Style Wars Analysis

Style Wars is a Documentary from 1984 about the rise of several subcultures during that time, most notably the graffiti subculture.

Graffiti artists liked to work in areas where the trains were parked for a long time so that they were able to truly invest time in their work. "When you first against a train, it's like everything seems so big, like, wow! It's like you're in a yard of like metal giant, like I mean everything is like so hard and so steel like you're just there. You're like a little dude like in the midst of these metals and like you're here to produce something, well, like you're here to try to produce something." (Dondi, Style Wars). The tunnels that run under the city include some areas where the trains are parked for an hour or more. This gives the artists a great opportunity to spend some time working on the trains, however, if there is no train there or there is a guard the artists also work on the bare walls. It seemed like they used the walls as a bulletin board, exclaiming their presence to the other artists that work in the tunnels. Although the tunnels are underground, dark, damp and depressing they are bringing vibrant colourful life via their graffiti to the walls. Sometimes they come across abandoned tunnels or stations, which are like tombs or time-capsules. These kids are changing the face of those walls, giving them life again.

The urban poor in America are among the most oppressed groups in the country and most likely the hardest working. The myth of 'pulling yourself up by the bootstraps' is nearly always virulent but the audacity of youth sees it for the delusion it truly is. These hip-hop kids are breaking out against the system of repression as they see it. They do not want to fit in to the norms society has created for them and by creating wildly colourful displays in public places they hope to draw peoples eyes to the injustices that occur every day in the city. The kids talk about 'going all city' because that way other writers will see their name and then they will have power in their own group. The breakdancers are pushing against the boundaries set for 'dancing', gaining control over a medium that they invent. They are making their mark within society or making the dominant culture aware of their presence through their subversion.

The artists 'own' nothing in the subway in the true sense but they do own the subway through their creations, in a more metaphysical sense. They talk of knowing each other through their work, learning about one another by what they observe and even making enemies of other artists. Tagging on public spaces does extend ownership to the artist. Banksy is a great example of this because the majority of his work does not get painted over and is in fact cared for by the people who own the walls it is painted on (http://sfist.com/2010/05/02/chinatown_building_owners_lovingly.php). While Bansky is considered a professional artist I don't really see him any differently from the taggers in the documentary. They both have the same aims which is to undermine the establishment through their artwork. This is why Banksy continues to choose corporate/public spaces.

Graffiti and hip-hop culture are classless, which is why white kids or affluent kids are attracted to it. I feel like all teenagers want to subvert what is expected of them by the dominant culture or their own class. So the white kids want to play against the stereotype that they're 'good/obedient' kids and the poor kids want to show that they're not 'bad/disobedient' kids.

"People look at a person and like, 'What? You write on trains,' and, 'You vandalism,' and all that. Yeah, I vandalism alright, but still in general, I know what I'm doin'. I did somethin' to make your eyes open up, so why is you talkin'?" (Kase, Style Wars)

Kase makes the point that although he is technically breaking the law, as he sees it he is making people pay attention to the larger injustice that is taking place. I really agree with this and in my mind this is the best kind of art, that which seeks to illuminate the viewer to something which is happening all around them but that they are unaware of. This is why Banksy is so successful for me, especially his work on the wall in Palestine.

The work of Cap really annoyed me a lot, it seems so pointless to anyone but him and to have no real meaning to anyone but him. I felt like Cap was this bully like figure in the graffiti world, someone did something to annoy him at some point so he's ruining all their artwork for the rest of their lives. It seems so senseless whereas the work of someone like Kase has a point to it, it has a higher meaning. I feel like I shouldn't be so subjective about this, after all it makes me like the city official who says 'graffiti is the application of paint to a surface, is that art? I don't know' (paraphrasing). Why is it that the artwork of the burners is so much 'more' than the artwork of the bombers? It's a hard question to answer, like why are professional photographs any better than snapshots, apart from obvious technical superiority. Caps whole attitude about it annoyed me the most of all, he really sounded like a little kid whereas the actual little kids showed a lot more maturity than he did.

I feel like the gallery scene demonstrated that a lot of people don't understand the purpose (as I see it) behind graffiti. They see the pieces on canvas and think it's the same but it isn't. It's true that the colours are just as intense when painted onto canvas but what is missing is the message behind it. Graffiti is an attack on the establishment, art galleries are part of that establishment and when you put subversive art on canvas it loses part of its meaning (at least for me). I think it would be better to have the graffiti actually on the walls of the gallery but of course, you can't make money that way.

Week Two Walk Two

For this walk I decided to use an avoidance technique of wearing sunglasses indoors. I went to the Tucson Mall because I wanted to be sure that I would be passing people and outdoors in the summer in Tucson that's never guaranteed.

As I walked into the mall wearing my sunglasses I felt like I was avoiding someone I knew but didn't want to see. There were crowds of people inside but no one was paying me any particular attention. I went into a store and started browsing the racks and this is when I started to feel weird, like people were staring at me. I left the store and started to walk in the mall again, I felt far more comfortable walking in the mall than I had felt browsing in the store. My sunglasses are dark and cover a good portion of my face so they truly feel like a barrier. Walking around inside with them on made everything a purplish hue and I really felt very disconnected from everything that was going on around me. I sat down on a bench for a while and watched the people going by, a little boy asked his mum if I was blind but she hurried him along. That was something unexpected, I know blind people sometimes wear sunglasses but I started to feel like I had wrongfully elicited someones sympathy for a condition I do not have. This made me feel the most uncomfortable of all and I decided to take my sunglasses off.

Repeating my walk of the mall without my sunglasses on I felt much more at ease and found myself actually trying to look people in the eye but unsurprisingly, no one really did - or if our eyes did connect they swiftly looked away. I went into a store again and started to browse the racks, I felt much more at ease this time and didn't feel like anyone was staring at me.

I think I learned that the expectations of society matter more to me now than I ever thought they would when I was a punk kid. I felt uncomfortable from wearing my sunglasses inside because I was worried about what other people would think, when really very few people either noticed or cared.

Week Two Walk One

I set out on my walk deciding that the first evidence I saw of any subculture would be the subculture I would focus on and catalog. At the first stop sign I came across I noticed that it had been tagged, so tagging it was. I continued walking for an hour (then turned around) and kept looking for tags. I was amazed at how many there were in my neighbourhood and at how oblivious I had been to their existence. The strangest thing was the lack of tagging on walls, the taggers kept to city property: trash cans, stop signs, other road signs, mail boxes, telegraph poles, side curbs and things like that. Does tagging connote ownership of something? In this case I don't think so because it seems like the taggers use city property as a kind of 'bulletin board', so they can see each others names and know who lives in what neighbourhood.

The most interesting thing for me was the erasure of tags, either through weathering or physically painted over because a lot of the time the paint used to paint over it did not match the original paint.

Assignment Two: Inside/Outside the Scene

This week I decided to do the second option, creating a 'tag' or 'burn' of my social scene into my site of investigation. I placed the tag in my neighbourhood (in my garden) because I investigated my neighbourhood for our first walk this week but I didn't see any evidence of tagging in personal gardens. It's my garden, my personal space and my social scene!

The scene I have chosen is Doctor Who. I have been watching Doctor Who since I was five years old, it was cancelled shortly afterwards but I collected books, vhs tapes and magazines of the show. I went to conventions and collected autographs from the stars. In short, Doctor Who is a science fiction show about a character called 'The Doctor' who travels through time and space in an old blue 60's police box (the box has a camouflage circuit which is stuck on police box) called the TARDIS. The box is dimensionally transcendental (bigger on the inside). The Doctor is a Time Lord which means that if he is ever mortally wounded his body can regenerate itself completely (which is handy because it means that the character of the Doctor has been played by 12 different men so far).

For me, Doctor Who was always my special secret escape from the world, very few people my age back then knew anything about it. Now it's a different story because Doctor Who came back in 2005 to critical acclaim.

I decided to do a burn of the TARDIS because it is such an integral part of the show (the actor who plays the Doctor may change but the TARDIS always stays the same) and a very iconic symbol.

I had a great time creating the outline for the TARDIS burn and spent a lot of it thinking about tonight's episode and how the story arc is progressing this series. I used a black sharpie (couldn't find the blue...) and drew the outline from memory.

Michael Bull. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos & the Management of Everyday Life

Bull's article is about the use of personal stereo equipment to alter ones perception of time, travel and each other in the modern world. I found the interview segments particularly interesting because of how important the interviewees made their walkmans in their lives. I remember when walkmans first came out in the UK; they were the must have accessory for anyone (and insanely expensive!). I didn't experience owning a walkman until I was around 14 and portable CD players were the new big thing. It is true that the novelty of being able to listen to music while you are going about your daily business makes it all more tolerable somehow. Bull talks about how people tend to 'zone out' of their actual environment, especially when traveling. Having worked in London I know that's true. However, while I was reading the interviews with the people who ride the tube everyday I couldn't help wondering if this activity is as prevalent now after the 2005 bombings as it was then. I lived in London in 2006-7 and rode on the tube often, I noticed more people doing things that didn't involve headphones (reading, playing on a ds or phone) than a carriage full of people listening to personal stereos. I feel like a lot of the novelty of owning a portable music device has worn off. I understand that Bull wanted to interview people that use their walkmans often but I feel like he's looking at a one-sided sample. All the people he interviewed seemed to be crazy about their walkmans; needing the music to wake them up and put them to sleep. Certainly, I went through a phase in my teenage years where I was plugged into some kind of device 24/7 but no longer. I wish that Bull had included some interviews with people who own walkmans but don't use them all the time. I feel that he would have gathered some interesting insights into how people view their days when they use them compared to when they forget them at home.

The interviews with 'Mandy' from page 31 onwards were particularly interesting because she seemed to use her walkman as a device to shape the world around her. Mandy felt that by listening to her walkman while she was travelling that she was never really alone and she used the landscape of what she saw (or did not see) and the soundscape of her stereo to create her own world. This personal anecdotal evidence was far more interesting to me than most of what Bull said because the personal interviews give me a way to connect to the article. I started to think about my own use of walkmans in the past and why I don't really use one anymore but when I did use one it was used as a tool to shield me from others and as a way to pass the time on boring commutes. Examining my past through this one lens makes me think about the choices I made back then in how I chose to spend my time. It makes me nostalgic on the one hand and annoyed on the other because in a way I never really interacted with what was around me. In short, I think the interview segments within Bull's article are what really made it work for me because it provided an emotional link which led me to analyse my own use of personal stereo devices.

Mapping Senses Analysis

Before I listened to this article when I thought of a map, I did think of a road map or some kind of cartography map and I always thought that those maps included everything because I wasn't really thinking about what 'everything' meant. I never thought of power lines or sewer lines as a map, yet they are mapped for the companies that service them. I wonder what a true map of a city would look like, would we even be able to look through it? I find myself imagining some kind of 3-d hologram like you see in sci-fi films.

The idea that any map leaves out details is interesting to me. When you focus only on one sense then you are missing out on the others, yet, when you do focus on one sense that sense becomes stronger. There's a trade-off, you're able to notice more when you're just listening to the things around you yet you lose the experience of seeing them with your eyes.

I found Deb Monroe's piece particularly compelling. She is mapping her own body through her sense of touch but her map is all wrong. She is not really feeling the truth of her own body, just want her brain thinks she feels, or rather, what her hypochondria is telling her she finds. I started to feel sorry for Deb, thinking that she was obsessing over tiny details and driving herself crazy thinking she's got some kind of terrible illness every time she comes across a new freckle or gets a headache.

I started thinking about the kinds of maps I keep and my mind went immediately to the restroom. Wherever I am, I need to know where the nearest restroom is and I chart in my mind the quickest way to get there. If I have been to a restroom before and know that it is frequently empty I keep it in my mind, building a map of the abandoned restrooms so that if I ever need them, I can find them quickly. There's one on the top floor of the Drama building that is usually empty and one on the top floor of the Student Union that is usually clear of people. The reason I do this is because I have a chronic illness called Ulcerative Colitis which can make me need to rush to the bathroom. The reason for wanting an empty one is if I am ill, I'm likely to have diarrhea which can be very embarrassing if you're in a bathroom full of people waiting to use the stall. Before I got UC I never noticed restrooms, never really cared about them but since I was diagnosed I keep a list in my head of the memorable (clean, usually empty, soft toilet paper) restrooms I've been to so that if I'm ever in that place again - I know where to go. The restroom is such a pinnacle of my illness; it's the place where I spend the most time when I am ill. It has become a much more important place to me than I'm sure it is to most people.

Assignment One: Ephemeral/Site

I've been thinking about desire lines and other lines created in the landscape and I wanted to create some kind of line. I'm spending the weekend at my in-laws and I noticed that they pruned a tree from their front garden and left it to dry out in their back garden. I started thinking about the twig fences I would see back home and I started breaking twigs off the tree and creating a line in the back garden. I wanted this to be evocative of a desire line in an unexpected place. The back garden works for this idea as it is not the kind of place you usually find a well trodden pathway like a desire line.

Walk #2, Desire Lines

I grew up in a town called Basingstoke in the north of Hampshire in England. There's a village near us called Micheldelver and by that is Micheldelver wood where we would go walking after Sunday lunch. My parents have always viewed footpaths as optional and there were many times when we would begin walking the condoned path only for my Dad to veer off into the woods, following a 'desire line'. I used to insist that we would get lost that way but my Dad kept following the paths. One time, in the middle of winter, we had gone out walking and my Dad had followed a path down into a deep, dark, wood. The temperature suddenly plummeted and the sky, already an opalescent white started spitting out snowflakes. The flurry turned into a blizzard and my parents started to panic, my brother ran on ahead and found a woodsmans hut. We sheltered under their garage as the hut was empty. Finally the snow let up and we followed a trail made by a jeep out and back onto the path.
Desire lines are different in Tucson, unless you're up on Mount Lemmon. They are still there but not as obviously so. I was walking in Reid Park, hopeful of finding some when I came across a hill near one of the child parks, two sides of the hill were stripped bare of grass. Children must come racing up here and then barreling down the other side, maybe even on bikes. There were some children in the park and I didn't want anyone to freak out about me taking photographs so I concentrated on the desire line. Once I found one I started seeing more but then I started to wonder if these were true desire lines or just dead grass. They seemed to start but then peter out, not really going anywhere.