MA Candidate Media Studies
The New School For Public Engagement- Department of Media Studies
My Academic Plan
I am looking to complete the program by Spring 2015. Since I am faculty and maintain a practice, I must be judicious with my time. I am committed to the process and am eager to engage, learn and produce.
My area of focus and interest is in the convergence and application of media and technology tools and methodologies with my design thinking background to map across education and the urban environment. Specifically around the role gamification and interactive video design play in public engagement and advocacy for change around resilience and sustainable practices in business and education. I am also interested in how online platforms enhance and disrupt traditional educational models, what are the ramifications, what are the different modes of teaching online stable vs. unstable bodies of knowledge? How will networks, open source and issues of access shape this movement?
Graphic of Academic Plan (Currently a Placeholder)
Projects and Writings
Kankyo's target audience is tweens and teens, who increasingly spend more time on their mobile devices where they increasingly accessing information and use them for sources of learning. By using these devices as a platform for engaging, we hope to encourage young adults to engage in their environment in a more proactive way, improving advocacy and education around urban environmental issues and resilience thinking from a very personal level, empowering the individual.
Reading Responses, Thoughts and Musings...
As I read Benjamin’s On The Concept of History again after many years, my mind wandered to Lou Reed who we lost this month and while reflecting on his contributions to society, music and his generation, I noted that like Benjamin, Reed struggled with the obvious dichotomies of time and place.
Both were social critics and provocateurs. As profound change-makers for their generations, Benjamin and Reed were raised in conservative Jewish households framing their points of view from an early age. Both experimented with narcotics to enhance their perceptions. Benjamin with hashish and other such drugs looking for “profane illumination” and Reed with heroin and alcohol to alleviate pain he suffered from electric shock therapy he underwent due to his parents’ fear of Reed’s latent homosexual tendencies.
The missing link perhaps is Reed’s mentor, Delmore Schwartz, a literary scholar and poet in his own right who was his professor at Syracuse University back in the 1960’s. Schwartz was a poet and critical thinker. His first book In Dreams Becomes Responsibilities, he explores notions of societal pressures, regret and demise.
Like Benjamin and Schwartz before him, Reed was considered an innovator and inspiration for his generation. Brian Eno remarked, ” The first Velvet Underground album only sold a few thousand copies but, everyone who bought it formed a band.” Benjamin associated with the Frankfurt School of thought, like Reed and Schwartz in their own right, challenged the social norms and political structures of his day. Schwartz used the medium of poetry and storytelling, Benjamin with critical reviews and radio, Reed’s poetry to music, sound and image. Artists that represent a generation are able to reflect on the zeitgeist while creating the “new” always remaining one step ahead.
All three also wrote about the fragility of urban life, reflecting on its ephemeral qualities and speed of change. The harsh realities of urban society not often illuminated in public discourse. One can elaborate more on the many similarities among them, but what stuck with me from this reading was Benjamin’s notion of time and place, “XVIII In relation to the history of organic life on Earth,” notes a recent biologist, “the miserable fifty millennia of homo sapiens represents something like the last two seconds of a twenty-four hour day. The entire history of civilized humanity would, on this scale, take up only one fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The here-and-now, which as the model of messianic time summarizes the entire history of humanity into a monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the figure, which the history of humanity makes in the universe.” As I feel all three artists or creative thinkers would agree on this.
I was taken by the history and terminology McIntosh illuminated for this genre. By providing context and examples, I was better able to understand the importance of remixing. From the arts to politics, I have been exposed to these mash-ups over the years but never put them in chronological order or was even conscious of how technology influenced the genre and how effective remixing is. I particularly was taken by Dana Birnbaum’s early work, as a pioneer in feminist remixing, I really didn’t understand how visionary she was when I was young and first saw some of her work. The examples cited from the eighties brought back vivid memories of the socio-political feelings of those times (yes I am old enough to remember them) and how spot on and how avant-guard the work was of Negativland or the Duvet brothers.
In Russo and Coppola’s piece, they continue to elaborate on the history providing evidence that this is really not a new genre but what makes it current is the use of latest technology. Touching upon copyright issues and the notion that all media is edited and therefore remixed is provocative but they make clear, it is ultimately the messaging that really is the distinguishing character and what constitutes entertainment.
Their crediting Youtube’s launch in 2005 and the onset explosion of access and ability to easily cross-pollinate due to technological access was likewise illuminating, in under a decade it is hard to remember what media was like before this platform emerged.
What resonated acutely was the link to Kiki Miserychic’s article on vidding and it’s artistic references and inspirations to Appropriation. Here she cites Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal, Alexander Calder’s Circus video and Nam June Paik “In-flux house” video installation as examples of appropriation art paralleling notions behind vidding art.
Continuing with Sherrie Levine as an example of a “straight appropriator” in the vein of Duchamp. “Marcel Duchamp insisted that the quality of an artwork depends not on formal invention but on the ideas that stand behind it.” I personally have been taken by Duchamp’s notions behind his “Readymade” series and named my former company after him (Duchamp’s Irreverent Guiding Spirit, inc. D.I.G.S.) coming from a traditional artistic “technique” background, into an idea artist, then into the commercial design world, I expressed this convergence at first putting out product that questioned society’s notions of consumption contrasting issues of environmental sustainability and preservation. I later continued to use repurposed, reclaimed materials appropriating within production.
Other areas I am interested in investigating further would be performance and installation art’s that incorporates the senses then uses media/video to capture and render it in a new form that lives on in it’s own right. Both articles opened up new areas of investigation for me. I found the selection particularly interesting and enlightening.
Silent, Invisible City: Mediating Urban Experience for the
In Mattern’s Silent, Invisible City, Mediating Urban Experience for the Other Senses, we walk delightfully through ponderings, reflections and experiments on ways of capturing human senses of urban built environments within media and art to enable a fuller contextual experience and potentially new ways of designing the urban environment. Mattern reflection on Zardini “They also have the potential to enhance exhibitions exploring urban history or city life, to play a role in the development of multisensory and urban pedagogies, and to open up new directions for media art.”
This desire to trigger an emotion or revive a feeling, memory or sense response of a place in time right away sparked thoughts on how perceiving senses involves the way our brain processes the intake of information. As Mattern points out, media past and present has engaged sight and sound well with a high degree of complexity and refinement, even the sense of feeling layering in vibration and other modes of engaging the physical touch experientially. This article kept gnawing at me, resonating with some of my past and present fascinations with engaging nostalgia and sense memory which overlaps with studies in neuroscience and brain stimulation in augmented realities where sound and image combined stimulate more areas of the brain then they would individually. I could not help thinking back to two incidences where I have had similar meditations.
Touching on Marks “haptic perception” theory I recently attended a talk held by the World Science Festival on Neuroscience and Music in Film called the Art of The Score: The Mind Music and Moving Images. On stage were Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel, the Coen Brothers, Carter Burwell and Alec Baldwin as moderator. They compared the uses of musical score from original movie True Grit with the updated Coen-Burwell version to map the patterns in the brain each combination engaging different parts of the brain in unique complex patterns. Through Dr. Patel’s extensive research using neuroimaging, he is now testing the use of combined image and sound to stimulate memory in Alzheimer’s patients.
I question why certain senses get marginalized be it in urban design, product design, education or in art while others enhanced or augmented or how does scientific research compare with those loosing one of their sense instead of memory cognition, some research finds, although debated, their other senses make up for the loss, a sort of overdrive of the other senses. How does technology play a potentially new role? Reading about Digiscents, Scenteck technologies and Zan’s experiments including scent into their products, inspired me.
So then where does smell come into play? This takes me to my second meditation on sense mediation. I’m still not sure and am eager to delve deeper. Why is smell so sentimental, so strong and visceral and hardest to capture or recreate? One possibility, which is debated in some research suggest that the olfactory cortex has a direct neural link to the hippocampus. Apparently all of our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed in the thalamus – and only then make their way to our memory center. The olfactory bulb is apparently less developed in humans then in other mammals and that it does not develop after birth, it is commonly the first sense to loose in aging and in Alzheimer patients.
Mattern’s point, after delving into Redive’s work and towards her conclusion, “raises question to the effectiveness and ethics of reproducing verses representing various sensory experiences” reminds me of project I once did where, as a designer, I captured a tetralogy of books about Alexandria Egypt (The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell) and its cast of characters in fragrance for both the home and body. This multisensory collaborative experiment evolved into a collection produced for retail markets. Not only involved olfactory research it also included a 3D encapsulation including imagery, story, shape and font.
To this day it was one of my most memorable projects; probably as it engaged more of my senses then customary. It involved literature and the author’s descriptions of the city’s smells and its physicality, personal memory sense of its urban environment, historical context and imagery of the city, only lacking was flavor in an otherwise sensorial bacchanal utilized. Looking back and now forward with the possibility of incorporating the invisible part of the city encourages me to press forward in my work, critically framing how I might challenge myself to engage more senses and silence in my everyday output.