Wilson & I

Remix of Borges and I

Wilson and I have a strange and distant relationship- similar to a child's connection to their absent father. While she and I are alike in the way we dress, style our hair, and prepare for our day, Wilson can control her day and her surroundings while I can not. I know of Wilson by the pictures she posts, by the notes that occupy my notebooks, and by the sketches that fill my portfolio. I feel like I know Wilson fairly well while she hardly bothers to know me. While I stare at her through rose-colored glasses and a hopeful disposition, while she faintly bats an eye in my direction. Those who see Wilson at her surface-level respond with kindness and love. But I wish they could do the same for me. See that I work just as hard, try to carry a carefree disposition. I want to be admired as much as I admire the image of Wilson. But that's simply it, her image.

When it comes down to it, I think that Wilson and I have more in common than she would like to think. When she stares into the mirror she sees a reflection of her parents that she tries so hard not to be. She tries not to repeat others’ behaviors that have caused her so much pain. She sees my scars, the places she has haphazardly lain a razor to my skin. I think that she doesn't pay much mind to me because, if she really thought about it, she treats me exactly how she doesn't want to treat others. While she nurtures her other relationships she neglects me, while she tries so hard not to hurt others, she cuts deeper into me. She sees everything she hates about herself and projects it on to me- so far that some days she can hardly recognize me.

But at night we become harder to decipher, our souls meld into one another and a sense of dread begins to set in within us, I get to really feel how she feels about herself and not just me- she is simply scared of being a product of the environment she grew up in. But, little by little, she grows each day- like a rose slowly emerging from beneath the concrete that once shielded her from growth, she begins to mend my wounds and understand my pain.

Exercises in Style

Exercises in Style: Shift of Perspective

I rush to enter the S bus. I’m late to work on my 26th birthday. I adjust the new felt hat I received from my wife- it has a cord instead of a ribbon, she said it looks more mature that way. When I finally catch my breath I find an odd man staring at me from across the bus. I wonder what he was staring at, and I adjust the collar on my coat so he can see less of my face, maybe he recognizes me. As people rush to get off at the next stop the man next to me bumps into me repeatedly. I’m grumpy due to my lack of sleep and snap at him to back off, although I could have been a bit nicer. The man from earlier is staring again. But I direct my attention to anything else but him and AH-HA! An empty seat! I throw my exhausted body into the cold plastic chair. Luckily when I looked back it seems that the man left the bus with the bustling crowd. I can finally make it to the cafe in peace.

I meet my old pal for coffee, although they said they wanted to celebrate my birthday we just chat about how well he is doing with his new job and how I’ve stayed the exact same. He makes a rude comment about how my overcoat looks dull and he knows just the place to spruce it up “my treat” he says.

We make our way to the Cour de Rome, he drives me in his new expensive car with heated leather seats, at least I don’t have to ride the overcrowded bus again. As we make our way through the gare Saint-Lazare I tell him that I’ve changed my mind and I like my coat how it is. He begins to make a scene about how “hideous” my coat is and how he was just trying to cheer me up since I seem so miserable. He loudly shouts, "You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat!” and while he continues rambling I turn and see the man from the S bus earlier this morning.

Album Cover AI

Proccess:

Step One InferKit to find a Band Name:

Here's what I put in:

I wanted to start a new feminist AI folk-punk band and the first thing I had to do was come up with a band name. So far this is the list I have generated:

1. Patriarchal Slime

2. Meat Market

3. Matriarchal Entity

4. Cervix Circus

5. Fist Of Feminsanity

6. Killing Club

Here is what InferKit Produced:

7. Shit Sluts of Europe

8. Misogynist Yell

9. Vixen-ista

10. Technofeminist Rejects

11. Fight the Sexist Sexist Fuckfaces

12. Bad Hijinx

13. Bad Ass Rejects

14. Repeal the Girly Fucking Revolution

I liked the sound of "Technofeminist Rejects" and decided my band would be a feminist electronic punk band.

From there I input some of the band names into the Computer Vision Explorer and here were some of my favorites:

Bad Ass Rejects

Shit Sluts of Europe

Intersection Interception

Meat Market

Matriarchal Entity

Technofeminist Rejects

Then I jumped over to ArtBreeder to make some album cover art:

I set the chaos to 1.5 and red to 6 and all other colors to 0 and got these

After that, I tossed it all together in photoshop!

RiP- Remix Manifesto Blog Entry

What about an artist's labor? Where is the balance in protecting one's "original" creative output versus opening up the collective's creative output imagined by some as freely accessible source material for active reconfiguration?

I found this question the most intriguing after watching the RiP Manifesto film because this question was somewhat covered in the first part of the film's manifesto- 1) Culture Always Builds on the Past. So to answer the first part of the question- does one ever have a truly original work? From Blues music coming from Son House to Led Zeppelin having a similar riff to Muddy Waters "You Need Love", art and creativity use past work as stepping stones into the present. While I do feel that combinations of content of the past do let people make their own unique work I wouldn't necessarily call anything truly 100% “original”.

At the same time, I understand wanting to be given credit and financial compensation for your unique spin on things, yet I do feel that this should be more controllable by the artist rather than the large corporations they sign to. For example- when Radiohead left their record label and released their album on the internet, letting their fans decide how much they wanted to pay for it. They were opening their work up to remix and innovation and told their publishing company to back off from suing these artists from using their work- and this is how I feel many artists would operate if it was possible to "make it big" without signing to a large production agency.

It's certainly a delicate balance because an artist wants to be protected from their work being stolen word for word or pixel by pixel- and one can not successfully do this on their own, but I feel the extremes of the CopyRight (in comparison to the copyleft) puts such a strict hold on what it truly means to copy an artists work.

It's similar when it comes to freedom of the press. Under the first amendment, there has to be a balance of how broad the laws are that protect free speech. When laws are too broad so many different forms of speech can be seen as unlawful and this creates a chilling effect on the press. I feel that this causes a similar effect to creativity when CopyRight laws become too broad, and in the “wild west” of web 2.0, there is bound to be a lot of copyright infringement when these real-world laws are now being applied on a virtual plane.

Using 30 seconds of an artist's song? Copyright infringement. Using the same riff as a popular song? copyright infringement. I feel like we need to sit somewhere in the "copy middle" or "copy middle-left" in order to create an even balance of intellectual property as well as creative freedom, especially in the online domain. New content is being pushed out every second of every day, but when videos are being taken down, lawsuits are being sent out in bulk, and artists are being fined for taking art and remixing it- this is discouraging to new emerging artists in the digital realm- and censoring art just seems so inhuman.

Yes Men Documentary Blog

Who are the yes men?

Before watching the film, I had no idea who the 'yes men' were and genuinely thought of the movie Yes Man with Jim Carey. But now this group holds a much more significant place in my mind than ever before.

The Yes Men started with two main men- Jaques Servin and Igor Vamos. They are a duo that 'culture jam' or bring awareness to a variety of political and social issues through their art and hacktivism.

In the film, The Yes Men- Servin and Vamos create a satire of spokesmen under the aliases of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, that work for the World Trade Organization. Through this guise, they satirize and mock the WTO and affiliated organizations through fake announcements of corporate decisions- typically in front of large crowds. But why do they do this?

The Yes Men feel that through identity correction and lies that they will ultimately expose the truth of these global organizations that are more focused on making money and heightening

consumerism than actually making a change. The film takes us through a select few of these elaborate hoaxes and shows how these men use tactics like 'spin' and flip these organizations' power structures on their heads.

One example is when the Yes Men took a satirical approach to the 2000 Geroge W. Bush Presidential Campaign. The men made a satirical website gwbush.com, to draw attention to alleged hypocrisies on Bush's actual website. This quickly drew attention and Bush was even asked about the site, and he responded saying he wasn't fond of it (go figure).

During the next election in 2004, the Yes Men went on tour posing as the group "Yes, Bush Can!" and encouraged supporters to sign a "Patriot Pledge" agreeing to keep nuclear waste in their back yards and send their children off to war. They appeared at the 2004 Republican National Convention and drove across the country at first in an RV with a George W. Bush body wrap, and then in a painted van.

I love the irony of these mens' work- because like the EVA (employee visualization appendage). It takes such pertinent issues as big brother and panopticon and manifests them in a physical form to show the ridiculous nature of these forms of civil observation. It's bright, it's shiny, it's gold, and well- shows off what most of these corporations' CEOs are compensating for- yet would never want to truly show these desires on their sleeves as the men did in their presentation of the EVA.

This proves how far these men will go in order to prove their points through intense satire. But when it really comes down to it, these hacktivists are true performance artists. Through the use of remix and sampling, these men are able to understand the cultural influences they despise and recreate them in such a fashion that it is so subtle and so believable to be these organizations. Their work really goes to show that these institutions they can mock- make the job easy for them because the ridiculous content they produce IS BELIEVABLE as content these organizations would produce normally.

5 GIFS for Techno Feminist Rejects

I was attempting to upload my gifs but all of them were too large of a file to upload to Wix, so I had to upload them all as videos. Unfortunately in this format, the content doesnt loop but just quickly hit play when they end to get the same effect!

Rhythm Science Remix

Remix has changed the way I see and consume the media around me, the art I make, as well as how I view my own identity within the realm of art. I’ve read DuBois before and I am familiar with his idea of the double consciousness, and I feel that I have experienced this (obviously in a much less serious way) as a female artist. In addition to feeling this duality of the self, Paul Miller took this self reflection further by making these connections to art and remix.

As a woman in society, one is taught to be kind, beautiful, pure, and to take up as little space as possible. In every facet of life, women are put on the back burner. They aren't taken as seriously or aren't seen as “professional” as men in their fields. But, when I make art I feel as if I can somewhat escape and challenge these norms more than I do in my day to day life. I like to consider my perspective on art and feminism as a mediator between the radical idea of what most people think feminism is and the real meaning behind the movement.

And through the use of remix I can take existing pieces and ideas to form new actionary pieces that might have “had legs” to begin with but I can really make it walk the walk. As an amateur artist, remix art seems very daunting at the surface level because you want to make sure you aren’t copying any work from the pantheon of great artists' work at your disposal. In a way, you are taking advantage of the idea of double consciousness and your new piece exists through the lens of a multiplex-consciousness. It's a remix within itself. Ideas from many facets of life, many experiences and many atomized identities are combining together to create a larger whole.

Just like culture and society, remix art is ever changing. Your art adapts to the time the artist exists within, using old ideas to create and inspire new ones that align with your existence in time. Just as techniques humans used in pre-industrial culture have subsided to new inventions and machines, old ways of remix will become obsolete just as the mono-signal has. But one thing reigns true- the tyranny of hegemonic culture still grips the throats of the oppressed in today's “modern” society. Whether it be race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, or any marginalized identity, this hierarchy of oppression that America was built on affects individuals day to day life. That's why remixing from that past is pertinent for our future. Through remix we might be creating something new, but we are revealing patterns, challenging norms, and parodying the very culture that oppressed us.

So while I may feel that my individual art or remix may fall to the wayside, or that I might not ever escape the duality of artist and woman, I want my work to be a synecdoche for feminism, a small part that can stand for the larger whole. Because while I am a woman, I am still privileged to be white, cis gender, and upper middle class. I want my work to then be critiqued and remixed to amplify the voices that are so rarely heard STILL in society and in art today.

Final Project Framework

what is your overall project idea?

For my final project, I am going to create a freestyled audio track using a combination of patatap, soundtrap, and ubu. With the audio I would also like to create a digitally collaged music visual similar to the examples shown in class.

what is your working title?

Bad Hijinx By Techno Feminist Rejects (Meat Market)

what will the format(s) be? (video, net art website, sound work, live performance, something else?)

I would like my final performance to be a prerecorded video with the music I produced and the visuals I remixed to make a music video for TECHNO FEMINIST REJECTS.

how will you adapt it for online presentation/performance?

In order to adapt it for the ease of online presenting, I will be prerecording everything and I will present it in class over Zoom but it will also be posted to Vimeo.

what technology will be needed to execute the project?

I will just need my laptop and access to the internet!

who is your audience?

Who else but the worldwide fans of the new riot girl band Techno Feminist Rejects!

most importantly, discuss the project theme, conceptual framework, and why remix is an essential method to communicate your artistic message

There is undeniable intersectionality when it comes to consumerism and sexism. Between the power structures of patriarchy and capitalism, there is a strong link between the motives of consumption and sexism. It "buy buy buy" to fill a hole in your soul that was dug out artificially by the media for as long as we can remember interacting with the world around us.

There are clear gatekeepers when it comes to determining hierarchy in America- rich, wealthy, white, cis, straight, men have ruled the top of media since the foundation of our colonized country. These men have been in control of the media the American people consume on a daily basis. All media may not have been made this way deliberately- but it certainly has an effect on how we perceive the world around us especially when it comes to beauty standards, success, and what we consider valued and normal in society.

I want to take a harsh and morbid approach to feminism as a way to disturb those viewing what I create. I feel that so much feminism today is about empowering those who are oppressed- which is amazing and has helped me immensely- but what happens when you address your oppressors as murderers, what happens when you show the morbid reality that women, people of color, and those labeled as "others:'' experience on a day to day basis. When you aren't the one in the throne- you can't see the suffering of those in catacombs below.