C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

                  

   

It has become evolutionary at this point to admire and worship our man-made, synthetic versions of nature and ourselves — while also denigrating/ignoring the original reality from which they came.

As animals and plants become extinct, our fascination and even preference for artificial representations of them [stuffed animals, cute photoshopped hallmarky dogs and cats, remarkably life-like fake plants] dominate. It’s easy to see why — we can extract from the originals all that makes them safe and easy and forgo the figurative thorns (fake plants that don’t stink, rot, have imperfect petals, aphids; stuffed animals or robo-animals that aren’t temperamental, biting, are perfectly obedient, have no excretory functions, are docile, and are able to receive passively all our fantasies and projections).

We weren’t content to extend absolute mastery over nature. Now, annoyed with captive nature’s occasional recalcitrance, or just plain annoying Otherness, we scrap it and make it in our own image, like Gods.

The most fascinating aspect of all this is how it turns inward, upon ourselves. Unable to accept the beauty of variation and imperfection, we will turn to human simulacra more and more — there are already on the market incredibly expensive and highly-lifelike female sex-dummies. Genetics, cosmetic surgery, these aren’t innocent practices, over time they embed this idea in the collective unconscious: “we will not tolerate our own variation and that of others. we will airbrush ourselves and others to make everyone safer to everyone else’s eyes and sensibilities. there is something ugly and frightening about people who don’t conform to our safe expectations, and it’s our duty to remedy this”. And the more people internalize this script, the more they seek to externalize it and inflict it on others.

This is all born of fear. It is a kind of self-directed fascism, an inability to tolerate nuance and variation, a hunger for the imposition of strict standards for what is appealing and what is not.

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   
          

   
   
Here’s a report of 20th Century Fox having unfavorable movie reviews yanked from You Tube.

Is anyone surprised? The net makes truth & opinion so much easier to access, so ubiquitous, it’s inevitable that it be corrupted and stymied by those with the will and force to do so.

The net, welcomed with so much teary-eyed idealism in its early years, and now in its accelerated, endlessly-fractalled adolescence presenting all sorts of pains and frustrations to those with something to suppress or revise — be it corporation that can’t handle criticism or individual who is embarrassed or alarmed to find traces, ghosts, echoes of him/herself on the net (I think of coworkers of mine who get contorted in endless knots of conscience over harmless pictures added to their profiles and which they now realize can be viewed by a mistakenly-added manager or boss).

The net makes you accountable. The net holds a mirror right up to you. It’s going to intensify as info about people and entities/companies/corporations continues to burgeon; data mining/exchanging in the medical and marketing and social networking sectors is astonishingly widespread. And if you’re not ready to own up, the net doesn’t give a fuck. You’re either going to have to accept yourself as individual or entity or do what Fox is doing here, and scrub very hard with the biggest steel-wool brush you can find until the spots are out. In vain of course, since in the time it took you to scratch out one blemish, ten thousand more appeared. Whack-a-mole in an endless prairie with a billion new squinty critic-bloggers for every fifty you bash. Pointless cyber-crusades against armies of deathless data.

In a way, Fox is only doing what most of us do in the small sphere of our own lives — redact until the story’s right, photoshop away until that Facebook shot looks perfect. They just looks even more villainous because, well, they’re 20th century Fox.

Obviously the stakes are higher when a corporation with more power and resources than an individual uses its clout and dollars to suppress truth. This is more momentous and damaging than when an individual tries to bowdlerize their wikipedia entry.

Still, the underlying assumptions tie both acts together: truth is mutable, is a function of what can be spun, shown, suppressed; surface-truth (what we present to be the case) trumps actual truth (what is actually the case).

How often have you, in your own life, tried to edit your story? How many sentences restructured, whole passages struck? How subtle the tweak, how skillful the erasure, or how crude the demolition? If there was a Wikipedia entry about you full of everything you’ve done, would you do your level best to edit until the reportage turned into fable? Until all events which could provoke criticism were excised? Or would you look at yourself full in the mirror, flaws and all, and own yourself, take responsibility for all you are?

Let’s rail & rail often against 20th century Fox and any other corporation or company that seeks to silence opposition through cowardly suppressive measures. But let’s also consider our own complicity in this culture of selective presentation, of endless redaction, of failure to own up to and accept ourselves with integrity. We may find that even in the age of deathless data we, like Fox, still imagine we can and should run from ourselves, scramble in futility like people trying to dodge raindrops in a thunderstorm.

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

The paintbrush shown in the above video is a remarkable piece of technology. It’s eerie but breathtaking to watch a human being capture complex, varied patches of color, texture and motion and reproduce it all with a flick of the wrist.

At the same time this is essentially just another sampling technology, taking the camera to its next logical evolutionary stage: not only snap the world out of context, but repurpose it in real-time.

As sampling technology then, it has the same potential to be used to honor its medium (I think of Edgar Varese’s musical compositions, or some of the soundscapes in a Public Enemy song) or debase it (contemporary pop which lifts entire melodies and motifs from older artists, slaps on a new lyric and calls it a new composition). It all depends on who handles the technology.

Still, at the risk of seeming all Ludditish, all I see are people creating more distance (or having distance inserted) between themselves and life through technology like this. I think of all the concerts and live music I’ve been to in recent years where, more and more, the audience is content to view everything through a lens, snapping away, only occasionally putting aside the camera to experience the event unmediated.

Or botanical gardens I’ll go to where people rush up to a bonsai tree, or orchid, or kiku flower, snap a few strained photos and hurry off to the next shot, never pausing to experience the subject in its immediacy, apart from the impulse to contain and preserve — and sample.

People are being conditioned to relate to the world outside of them as opportunities first & foremost for sampling and capture, whether by camera or this new LED-paintbrush, & not as opportunities for real, developed, fully-rounded experience.

Many will answer a concern like mine with: “Well, um, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”
 (Read More . . .)

Lists.

LISTS.

SWEET JESUS POTATO GUNS we love our lists.

Can I please have a day of Internets without another godforsaken Authoritative Top Ten List of important shit befouling my screen?

I remember seeing High Fidelity years ago and thinking: damn. People love lists. An entire film based around a man’s list-rank organization of his love life’s vicissitudes. & I remember simultaneously liking and feeling odd about that. It tapped into the geeky anal organizer in me, but it also felt cheap, easy, hydrogenated, canola-oiled, sort of throwaway and disrespectful of the experiences under discussion in the film.

Since then it’s only gotten worse, in media, art, blogs, & I’ve become increasingly alarmed at everyone’s insistence on reducing history & day-to-day experience to a tidy assortment of ratings, rankings — everything crammed through this OCD quantitative sieve.

It’s as if we don’t trust experiences unless we can package them & stamp them with a tag/number — so much anxiety in every step of that machine-like categorization. You can feel it pulsing behind the numbers, a teeth-chattering, skittery little ghost-droid, antennae frantically waving, robo-tentacles eager to seize more data parcels to slot & secure. Hell, I’ll be doing it at the end of this post.

The uninterrupted modern brain/eye-fuck of data datadatadadtaddtatdtatdata must make us this way. So much info hailing down upon us from every source that all we can do is try to make ourselves bots in the face of it: analyze, arrange, parse, order, next data set please.

My mother called me yesterday to hear my voice.

I said: “Mother, what are the top five reasons you love me?” She responded readily, with a tagged data set including supplemental links to her & my amazon wishlists.

I felt 6.5 EU (emotional units) of love at that instant, and we exchanged relational signifiers before disengaging our info-relay.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008