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mining, surfing and storytelling

A quotation from a 2003 article by Henry Jenkins entitled Transmedia Storytelling:

Many of our best authors, from William Faulkner to J.R.R. Tolkien,
understood their art in terms of world-creation and developed rich
environments which could, indeed, support a variety of different
characters. For most of human history, it would be taken for granted
that a great story would take many different forms, enshrined in stain
glass windows or tapestries, told through printed words or sung by bards
and poets, or enacted by traveling performers.

I haven't yet read further into the subject, but it seems to me that world-creation (or something like it) takes other forms too, that we might not recognise as marketable, or, in fact, as relating to the same world. In fact, I would want to break down the notion of world-creation as such in terms of character and setting, to ask whether creators who bash away at consistent themes in different ways can sometimes be creating a recognisably related view of a set of topics that fans can view across both settings. For instance, for me, David Milch's John from Cincinnati works on similar themes to Deadwood. Addiction, forgiveness of the self and others, transcendence through the organising power of symbols... etc (and the same ensemble of faces keep showing up in different roles). A parallel dimension, if you will.

Miracles happen in JFC, but don't they happen in Deadwood too? Jane finds a little happiness and Hearst leaves without destroying everything. (And as many possibilities are denied amidst appalling agonies of irony: Hostetler's death, for one.) We don't recognise them as miracles at the time, because the story is told in a different way, and we get to allow ourselves a bit more of a feeling of knowing how it came about, of glimpsing (through the language, largely) what we think of as the forces that bring such events to pass. Whereas in JFC they just surf in from somewhere outside the plot. (Or they seem to, perhaps because John's language itself is impenetrable to such a degree.)

I don't know whether one could seriously hold this comparison up to the light, but it points up that we also hold valuable creators (like Milch) who make powerful stories that on one level deny the extension of the world that spin offs, franchises and sequels allow. Yet on another level their stories and their human consistency interweave them in topics that are of such wide interest as to enmesh them as parables of real life. (I don't mean, by the way, that Buffy and Tolkein don't do that.) And, anyway, there's a spinoff book from Deadwood for example. But this takes the form of almost philosophical disquisitions by Milch and his players on the nature of the story and its characters, inviting us to extend its meaning by extending our interpretation deeper into it, rather than simply extending the region the plot covers. To 'mine' it, if you will. What would it have meant if the Deadwood films had come about? Would it have meant that Deadwood became a transmedia story? Or just that the story itself got finished?

Of course, telling a story over more than one medium does make it transmedia, purely in terms of its media support. But perhaps there's a different distinction to be made -- one that we might have to call something else -- that is less about spreading the story over different media, as much as it is about the narrative's fragmentation and appearance from different angles. For example, if Deadwood had been completed as a pair of films or as a mobile phone novel, it would doubtless share consistency with the story told in the HBO series. But if I propose, for example, that Milch's oeuvre examines many of the same themes from different 'dimensions' (a clumsy word for what I mean, sorry), then there's a coming together of something from different approaches involved (even if they happen to be based in the same medium). This opens up my idea of what this world-creating actually comes from. Need it imply a map? Or, if I watch the same ensemble do a series of plays, might I not, as a viewer, be able to construct relationships between the possibly disparate narratives? I'll read on, of course, but I'm as aware as I can be that a whole lot of successful TV hangs together at the moment because their stories are solidly built, and this, surprisingly, makes them more accessible to the real world. Mad Men and The Wire seem to modulate themselves towards different aspects of their subjects (The century of the self and the intermeshing of society, politics, education and the media, respectively). They don't seem to me to be designed around opening up franchises:but they do open up connections to their sources.

Perhaps it's just this: a well-told story always invites us to explore further, because of its self-consistency. It need not be intentionally porous, because our imaginations work best on something we can believe in. If multi-platform storytelling is for anything other than novelty's sake, it will need to engage with the distinctive voices of its forms. I think that to identify the mere presence of different media with the dimensionality that a truly multivocal or multi-storied approach would take, would be a mistake. But I don't need to labour my muddled point any further. There is, after all, an ancient chant of computer operators that goes 'garbage in, garbage out'. This is as true of stories as anything else.

Borges Quotation

"People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading," says Borges. It is interesting that Borges, who, if anyone could, could see the way that the alphabetic world composes the life we live in, post-Gutenberg, bothers to set a distinction between the two. We are situated readers of the world itself, characters in our own emplotment.

I'm working on material that will help me towards expressing this. Mostly involving music stands and bits of paper.

Technorati Tags: reading, review, studio log, writing

Richard Rorty/Patriotism

I didn't agree with (or, frankly, understand) all I had read of Rorty, but his recent death is a great loss to American philosophy. Here's a quote from his last interview:

Richard Rorty: When I visited Tehran I was
surprised to hear that some of my writings had been translated into
Persian, and had a considerable readership. I was puzzled that rather
fussy debates of the sort that take place between European and American
philosophers, and in which I engage, should be of interest to Iranian
students. But the reception of the talk I gave on “Democracy and
Philosophy” made clear that there was indeed intense interest in the
issues I discussed.

When I was told that another figure much
discussed in Tehran was Habermas, I concluded that the best explanation
for interest in my work was that I share Habermas’s vision of a social
democratic utopia. In this utopia, many of the functions presently
served by membership in a religious community would be taken over by
what Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism.” Some form of
patriotism — of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes
for the country’s future — is necessary if one is to take politics
seriously. In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must
be prepared to counter the clergy’s claim that the nation’s identity is
defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically
secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’
respect for one another rather than on the nation’s relation to God.

(via 3Quarks Daily)

That "specifically secularist form of modern fervor" sounds like just the ticket. So how do I get to practice good citizenship? Why, through my artwork of course! if only it were that simple.

But sometimes it does work. I'm thinking of a couple of public-spectacle pieces that really swept me along. The Sultan's Elephant, by Royal DeLuxe is one, and Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapoor is another. It's a shame that both of these are such large scale, expensive pieces; I could've made a better point with a small, cheap book that gave as much pleasure and wonder. But both of these pieces inspire wonder. Both give pleasure to the crowds that beheld them, both drew together crowds in the city in a way few other things do. I felt part of the city, part of the experience that was taking place amongst all these people around me, who were, at that moment, emphatically my fellow-citizens, the people with whom I would shape the future. If that's not patriotism, what is?

Technorati Tags: art, reading, review, studio log, writing

imaginal method

The use of allegory as a defense continues today in the interpretations of dreams and fantasies. When images no longer surprise us, when we can expect what they mean and know what they intend, it is because we have our 'symbologies' of established meanings. Dreams have been yoked to the systems which interpret them; they belong to schools – there are 'Freudian dreams,' 'Jungian dreams,' etc. If long things are penises for Freudians, dark things are shadows for Jungians. Images are turned into predefined concepts such as passivity, power, sexuality, anxiety, femininity, much like the conventions of allegorical poetry. Like such poetry, and using similar allegorical techniques, psychology too can become a defense against the psychic power of personified images.

If the mother in our dream, or the beloved, ar the wise counselor, says and does what one would expect, or if the analyst iterprets these figures conventionally, they have been deprived of their authority as mythic images and persons and reduced to mere allegorical conventions and moralistic stereotypes. They have become the personified conceits of an allegory, a simple means of persuasion that forces the dream or fantasy into doctrinal compliance. The image allegorized is now the image in service of a teaching.

In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights. Thus the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The 'worst' images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul.

James Hillman Re-Visioning, 8

Have we in book arts, come some way along the path of turning our field into an allegory, thus limiting its power to cross boundaries and do its work of transformation in culture? What would the remedy be? Where should we turn for palliative/transformational images of what the work is?

Technorati Tags: art, book, reading, review, studio log, writing

Tartanry

Away with all this tartanry, this obscene and irrelevant clutter of sporrans and gewgaws!

Alasdair Maclean, 31st March 1980

(A handy quotation for use on Princes Street or the Royal Mile, or merely when confronted by plaid.)

Technorati Tags: quotation, tartan, scotland

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The Past Inside the Present

This is what I mean.

"The past inside the present."
a quotation from Boards of Canada: Music is Math

Some more cogitation on Whistling Copse as being at the centre of a number of different possibilities. The hidden fortress is not merely a stronghold but also a doorway. I'm thinking of Mythago wood again, I think. I haven't made work about it since I was a teenager, but it seems to be interesting me again. Let's describe it a different way. It's a special context wherein our thoughts and unconscious imaginings take on physical form. It shouldn't be too difficult to see the original fantasy setting recast from that into something a bit closer to the more widely-acceptable context of the social construction. Something entirely imaginary which impinges on the real because we, collectively, believe in it. (This encompasses our major social bonds and beliefs like money and marriage. They are real because we believe they are, and they and constructions like them exist at the pinnacle of causal force for us and our societies).

What Mythago Wood can do is allow these beliefs to take on form for the individual: the individual, in this context, takes the responsibility/unconscious responsibility, for generating the materials he or she encounters. It conjures up those moments where we are 'running offline' from the rest of society: we still carry those social structures in our heads, but it is up to us how we administer them when we are alone, in a dark wood. And perhaps, the wood is right there in the room with us.





Technorati Tags: hidden fortress, BookArt, art, sketch, sketchbook, drawing, studio journal

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Dreaming By the Book:Elaine Scarry

Link: Amazon.com: Dreaming By the Book: Books: Elaine Scarry.

I have been reading from Scarry's "Reading by the Book" about the power of the verbal arts (of narrative direction in particular), having read of the book in Marshal Weber's Justice is Beautiful. I am still working on Turndust, and it seemed that it would be interesting to use the insight this book offers in conjunction with my artist's book. The relationship between what I would call the haptic radar of the imaginary that narrrative offers, the staged directorial emphasis of book form, and book art is interesting. Though Scarry is speaking about written narrative exclusively, there is much in the way that books present narratives of imagining that still holds true in artists' books. They remain directed experiences, directed unveilings.

Scarry's writng about veils and transparency as being characteristic of the directed 'perception' of imaginary narrative is interesting. Books peel off layers of supposition, building solidity by the interface of many visual phenomena, many of which are rendered 'transparent' by the poetic echoes and 'pre-echoes' of the unfolding story. Page by page, narrative visual art builds the object for its audience. But this is stretching a point. Narrative artists' books do something very much like this, but perhaps I need to modify the metaphor that gives my explanation its paradigm and hence its explanatory power. But I suspect that there are family resemblances between directed verbal narrative and its visual cousin. The actions of rhetorical construction are common to them both: although visual art offers something up to the senses, is the narrative of that visual artwork contained in the sensory material of its pictures, or in the narrative instructions they convey? But this is to risk confusing ideas and objects.

So far in my reading of Scarry's work, she deals with objects, not the ideas of story. The ideas behind verbal narrative and visual narrative can be identical. The objects depicted are not. Except... I know that one of the things I want to do in books is to establish places and objects by looking at them again and again, changing their relationships one to another to set them up in an imaginary space very solidly, because here is a place where something will happen. (My model here is Sophie by Ral Veroni which does exactly this with some classical ruins. (Coincidentally, or not-so-coincidentally, it is printed on semi-translucent paper, which emphasises the continuation and relation of the seperate images. I have never recovered from seeing this book, whose impact I have been trying to recapture ever since.) But it seems to me that exactly this examination, this overlaying of one image atop another as we see it in artists' book narrative, serves to create properly imagined objects in much the same way as the verbal arts.

Scarry's book has motivated me to include a verbal prelude to my images in Turndust. One of the things I want to do with this is to carry the seed of the verbal into the visual. My images include writing in my handwriting, which is germane to the other autographic marks conveying the image. To me, I can see my hand in both. I want to open the vista verbally, using the metaphor of the wind, to carry the reader's intention across the landscape's solidity and texture. This experiment will, I hope, engage the reader's intention in the text, then suddenly open this text visually. However, becuse both text and image are hand-drawn, Ihope to sustain 'the realm of reading' across the other surfaces of the book. I think that the comparison of images conjured to the minds eye by the verbal introduction, and those deposited and overlayed by my visual artwork will be instructive. I think that they both will serve to construct the narrative. But what is the phenomenology of this depositing and overlaying. I am insisting here on the persistence of the image in the book form. That they go beyond being optical surfaces to becoming narrative information that takes it's place in the (artificially-constructed, imagined, and not perceptual) linear track of story. To this add the notion (again, I get this from Weber's citations, this time of Anton Würth quoting Derrida ) that languages' linear character is a displacement of the cognitive tumbling act that is really going on. [“Linearity is the displacement of multi-dimensional symbolic thinking.”] That multidimensional tumbling act is always the background to reading, and the poetics of the artists' book are no less susceptible to it than any other narrative.

"Imagine the face of the world. Patches of warmth and coolness stir the air into currents, build columns and rivers of air and vapour that stroke and bathe the surface of the sea and the land. Air pushes through, an invisible phalanx that moves across the world from horizon to horizon. Sometimes violently, as when bark will split and trees crash down under its insistence. Sometimes tenderly, as when the petal of a flower is disturbed, or the head-feathers of a sparrow are perturbed. Stroking, pushing, tearing, You cannot see it. But you can see the clouds move. The crops move, stroked by the side of a hand, springing back from their bending in waves. the dust moves, the leaves are stirred, the stillness is gone. Now,/..."

assignment 3

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Key Texts (Research Methods Assignment 3)

Presenting a limited number of texts has forced me to hinge my arguments on just a few core ideas. This 'stripping-down' introduces a certain amount of mental mobility into my understanding of and presentation of my ideas, in the same way that speaking from basic notes rather than from a prepared statement makes for more lively presentation. Having a smaller range of tools to set up makes me think about what to do with them a bit more clearly.

David Byrne on Architecture

Link: David Byrne's Journal

In my opinion there is nothing inherently wrong with tall buildings. A limited number of anything is like genetic diversity; it’s of value to the species as a whole. I can, however, see that these residences are definitely top-down design — there is no room for the evolution and mutation of function, form, use — it’s all planned in advance. The creators all assume the inevitable victory of science, reason and logic over messy instinct, intuition and impulse.

David Byrne is writing about the riots which have been going on in France, and points out part of the problem is that same one that affects doldrum housing projects everywhere. I think the text highlighted above is the heart of his argument, and also the caveat that saves it from being just another blunt critique of Modern architecture: it's not the architecture that's the problem, it's the fact that it's designed as part of an all-encompassing system. Byrne is critical of architects and city planners who think they can see everything that needs to be seen (I'm sure those people would understandably wring their hands andreply that they never thought they could see everything- they just did their best). At the same time, Byrne opens his piece like this:

A quote from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961):

“To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a dissected rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are understood as systems of order, they actually look different.”

I think that the new understanding that informs his suggestions is of the same order. Aren't we potentially trying to plan freedom again by trying to contrive solutions like 'build more heterogenous cities' , or 'implement project xyz to integrate immigrant populations'? Not to cast stones on his suggestions though- they seem- at least in the present time, like good ideas. indeed they seem like needs and principles I wouldn't want to try to run any kind of city without. Isn't there a risk that making the architectural answer something along the lines of 'heterogeneity' is just making the problems and their effects more complex, more heterogenous, and thereby defering and componding their solution? Or, conversely, does it offer a chance to make responses and identities much more fine-grained on the scale of the city, with much smaller solutions happening much more frequently?

                               

the garden of eden

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either,or; it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

From Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin