Response to Donna Haraway’s essay “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”) & Hito Steyerl’s essay, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” & Kenneth Goldsmith’s book, Uncreative Writing : Managing Language in the Digital Age.

 

 

 

Limerick response to Adorno, Horkheimer and Debord

 

 

 

So here’s the thing.

I devoted much of my studio practice time this semester to reading. To be candid, there were points along this erudite trajectory when I wanted to run screaming. The spectacle and the futility of artifice, as an interpreted takeaway from works such as Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Adorno and Horkheimer’s  “The Culture Industry”, and even to lesser degree Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulations,” became a forecast of doom. My mind raced along with our social acceleration into a furious spiral of collapse. And then within hours, or minutes, or best of all –– simultaneously, I found a joke, an absurdist light in it all. Instead of spiraling into a theoretical abyss, I reached hungrily for the next text.

As my reading continued, taking cues or ideas sparked from readings (and often as a break from keeping my eyes glued to snaking lines of words on the page), I started experimenting in media.  Most of my activity centered video and the internet, though I also took up biometric and energetic embroidery. In early September, inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith, I tried grafting code from (previously) edited videos on top the video. This attempted action crashed my MacPro laptop repeatedly. This idea was put on hold after several days of looking unsuccessfully for loopholes. Next I returned to an earlier idea of working with found footage, partly as an extension of my recycling sensibilities and in part for the challenge. I find found-footage-editing-collages to be difficult! Is it because I envision such complex weavings that never really manifest? Or rather that the Resolutions are too poor (see also Steyerl-maybe I have not found a way to embrace these fully!)? The footage is not quite what I had in mind. Conversely, short of my initial complex imaginings of what might be done with it, I am left trying to jam a square peg in a round hole for lack of an in-the-moment-oneness with the video clip’s potential and relational aesthetics. The list continues. Farming footage is certainly not a time saving approach. This I can confidently proclaim. That said, while reading Haraway and Steyerl, I became interested in themes of verticality, and began to consider the free-fall body. Less of the Cyborg, and rather a conversation and contemplation on the complexities of inner space and outer space. This progressed slowly, like your computer rendering in the background while you surf the internet. In my case, I kept reading. Stop, surf, gather. Resume reading.

One day late in the semester, I mentioned all of this background activity to my mentor and the idea arose in our conversation to create a companion video to my bibliography, as a means for summarizing the readings. The deeper I moved into this project, the less inclined or rather interested I became in it. Perhaps it was just that particular moment in time, that I found a video summary of the readings through found footage was not what I wanted to say. Perhaps it was that I have not fully settled into what to say in this format.

Are these videos complete? No, I never assumed they were ‘done’ in that video-editor-as-author sort of way. They do boil down the essences of what I read on many levels and I don’t find them to be overly navel gazing, which I feared they might become with a forced narration*. Will I go back and rework them? Maybe. More importantly, will the readings themselves influence future work? Yes, absolutely.

 

 

 

 

 

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