Film studies has proven itself to be a fully established member of the contemporary academic community. However, it is folly to assume that the legitimacy, present fecundity, or general institutional security of the discipline was in any way historically guaranteed. Unlike the objects of study in many other disciplines in the humanities and fine arts, film developed long after the establishment of the modern university. Film lacked parallels in classical and early modern scholarship and education. There was no immediate consensus on pedagogical approaches for the medium or the purpose of educating students in film studies. As a newly and continuously forming medium, there was no demonstrable sequence or progression from convention to transgression or from mundane to masterpiece. Indeed, for the first decades of its existence it was questionable whether film would be considered as a lasting addition to human cultural expression or would become marginalised as an interesting but intellectually irrelevant public diversion not truly worthy of scholarly attention for the articulation of its merits. For some critics, the evolution of film studies as a discipline parallels developments in the university and more broadly within society. Articles by Dana Polan, Haidee Wasson, and Michael Zryd examine the institutional development of film studies both within and exterior to the university. Polan and Zryd examine the institutionalisation of the discipline within the academic context, while Wasson elaborates on the success of the Museum of Modern Art in establishing itself as a film archive, distribution, and exhibition centre. For the purposes of this present review and to limit itself to the scope of the articles under examination, the maturation of film studies within America will be isolated from a wider narrative of film studies in other national contexts. Furthermore, this review will extrapolate from the above articles in order to tersely articulate a conception of the ‘object’ of disciplinary study, namely the archive or canon from which institutionalised critical practise can define itself.
The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.
As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.
The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.
Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment.
Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.
A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system. Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema. Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).
To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Film Studies and Critical Disciplinarity (Notes)
Film studies has proven itself to be a fully established member of the contemporary academic community. However, it is folly to assume that the legitimacy, present fecundity, or general institutional security of the discipline was in any way historically guaranteed. Unlike the objects of study in many other disciplines in the humanities and fine arts, film developed long after the establishment of the modern university. Film lacked parallels in classical and early modern scholarship and education. There was no immediate consensus on pedagogical approaches for the medium or the purpose of educating students in film studies. As a newly and continuously forming medium, there was no demonstrable sequence or progression from convention to transgression or from mundane to masterpiece. Indeed, for the first decades of its existence it was questionable whether film would be considered as a lasting addition to human cultural expression or would become marginalised as an interesting but intellectually irrelevant public diversion not truly worthy of scholarly attention for the articulation of its merits. For some critics, the evolution of film studies as a discipline parallels developments in the university and more broadly within society. Articles by Dana Polan, Haidee Wasson, and Michael Zryd examine the institutional development of film studies both within and exterior to the university. Polan and Zryd examine the institutionalisation of the discipline within the academic context, while Wasson elaborates on the success of the Museum of Modern Art in establishing itself as a film archive, distribution, and exhibition centre. For the purposes of this present review and to limit itself to the scope of the articles under examination, the maturation of film studies within America will be isolated from a wider narrative of film studies in other national contexts. Furthermore, this review will extrapolate from the above articles in order to tersely articulate a conception of the ‘object’ of disciplinary study, namely the archive or canon from which institutionalised critical practise can define itself.
The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.
As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.
The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.
Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment. Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.
A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system. Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema. Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).
To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.
Notes
1. Wasson discusses an unsuccessful attempt by the Museum of Modern Art to establish a travelling theatre to counter this issue.
2. “The shift to synchronized sound during the late 1920s further spurred the recycling industry, which flourished in the wake of the uncountable silent films deemed more valuable for their silver content than for their stories, styles, or stars” (127).
3. “The HSB could maintain its image as a training ground for cool-headed professionalism while accruing an important veneer of cultural sophistication” (111). See also Zryd, p. 187.
4. Of course, one must remain conscious of the fact that music, literature, and the visual arts are also commodities with such emotionally resonant qualities.
5. As an example, Frances Trollope published Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) as a travelogue of her negative experiences with American audiences. Her description of theatrical audiences is informative: “The noises...were perpetual, and of the most unpleasant kind.... The spitting was incessant; and not one in ten of the male part of the illustrious legislative audience sat according to the usual custom of human beings”.
6. Some critics highlight that many of the technologies and communication practises which developed simultaneous to film established, in combination, a mode of public decorum predicated on the notion that one’s private space was no longer rooted to a specific domestic location, but rather was portable and could merge and cross-fertilise with public spaces. For example, see Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form, wherein he terms this process ‘mobile privatisation’.
7. The MOMA audience was known to engage “in shouting matches punctuated periodically by objects thrown in the auditorium” (126).
8. It is possible to hypothesize that many of these academics sought the excitement, the professional novelty, and the intellectual freedom of working establishing and working within an emerging discipline.
9. Zryd outlines the manner in which film graduates were being excluded from the industry due to market contraction and union stipulations; see pp. 188-90.
10. See, for example, Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.
The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.
As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.
The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.
Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment. Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.
A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system. Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema. Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).
To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.
Notes
1. Wasson discusses an unsuccessful attempt by the Museum of Modern Art to establish a travelling theatre to counter this issue.
2. “The shift to synchronized sound during the late 1920s further spurred the recycling industry, which flourished in the wake of the uncountable silent films deemed more valuable for their silver content than for their stories, styles, or stars” (127).
3. “The HSB could maintain its image as a training ground for cool-headed professionalism while accruing an important veneer of cultural sophistication” (111). See also Zryd, p. 187.
4. Of course, one must remain conscious of the fact that music, literature, and the visual arts are also commodities with such emotionally resonant qualities.
5. As an example, Frances Trollope published Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) as a travelogue of her negative experiences with American audiences. Her description of theatrical audiences is informative: “The noises...were perpetual, and of the most unpleasant kind.... The spitting was incessant; and not one in ten of the male part of the illustrious legislative audience sat according to the usual custom of human beings”.
6. Some critics highlight that many of the technologies and communication practises which developed simultaneous to film established, in combination, a mode of public decorum predicated on the notion that one’s private space was no longer rooted to a specific domestic location, but rather was portable and could merge and cross-fertilise with public spaces. For example, see Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form, wherein he terms this process ‘mobile privatisation’.
7. The MOMA audience was known to engage “in shouting matches punctuated periodically by objects thrown in the auditorium” (126).
8. It is possible to hypothesize that many of these academics sought the excitement, the professional novelty, and the intellectual freedom of working establishing and working within an emerging discipline.
9. Zryd outlines the manner in which film graduates were being excluded from the industry due to market contraction and union stipulations; see pp. 188-90.
10. See, for example, Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.
Friday, September 18, 2009
The state of academic freedom in Canada
"The state of academic freedom in Canada" from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.
Denis Rancourt, former University of Ottawa professor recently fired for refusing to grade his students, whose struggle has received national media coverage and whose firing is being investigated by the Canadian Association of University Teachers
September 18, 2009; McMaster University student centre
Monday, June 08, 2009
Electroluminescent @ New Harbours
Electroluminescent -- New Harbours Music Series Vol. 2 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.
Christ's Church Cathedral, May 8, 2009
last-second-idea improvised dolly camera, ambient sound + lighting
P + C = Electroluminescent, qzh, Throwaway Digital
Thursday, May 28, 2009
today and the other one
The professors were dancing and it was a party that I didn’t like: the usual story. An old flame walks into the bar and conversation stops, at least toward me. They know us both, I thought. Everyone else was making noise with each other and some were dancing. I complained to my friends not in the room through my phone, and we all typed for over an hour. Steve and Michael and Mel and me. I typed that my own confrontational psychology was at fault. I wondered why some of the people dancing in the room with me talk about art but are offended by the life processes which often create it. Steve typed, you are beginning to ask the big questions of life because you have a qwerty keyboard on your phone now and are a Mr. because of it. Me phone no smart. Take long type stuff. I typed that it was research into being one of those fucks with a mobile. That was definitely your duck with a noble face, Steve typed. Ha :) that is predictive text for “fuck with a mobile face”.
In the room full of dancing professors, I began to laugh. I typed to everyone who wasn't with me, is my friend my phone or is my phone my friend? I don’t know, Mel typed. I typed, it’s really only myself that I don’t like, so I put everyone else in a bag. I’m so bored. I look at people having fun around me. They barely know how to entertain themselves let alone others. Mel typed that academics are as I describe, but I knew I was lying and really just being mean to myself again. Other people happily moved in circles and were smiling. Jesus, Mel typed. Come home. I want to buy a bike.
I found a conversation after putting my drink on the bar. Alyson was a nice girl, but in a photograph I made later some people would confuse her with a television and become mad at me. I went to the washroom and when I got back the bartender had stolen my drink. You’ll have to buy another, he said and I waved my hand once in his face from down to up and left.
I’m back in Hamilton and it’s raining. Mel phoned while I showered and I missed it. She had typed as well. Her message was black on white. Cadillac cruising style bike. Good for me? Please advise as per VM I just left. I called her and she said that she had a bike ready for her. She was part of a business trading community. Businesses trading services and sometimes goods to each other using the internet and no money. A restaurant wanted photographs of their food, and Mel quoted high. She had not found anything to buy with her credits until this bike. I don’t know what it is though, she said. You’re the bike guy, so I want you to come see it.
Mel and Noel came in their big black truck, and with me in the back we drove down James North. We stopped on Canon and parked at Pho. Across the street was the bike shop. We entered and Mel fell in love with a Dutch bike. The bike store guy said that all of the machinery was contained, so she could wear anything and ride it around. Just go to work in your work clothes, he said. Or you could ride to meet friends and have a drink without special clothes. Mel liked that she could wear a dress and the shoes that she was wearing with a potential for heels. It’s so hot, she said slowly. I’m fingering it in the ass. It’s my bike and I want it. Noel said that we should go look at the other barter bike, because Mel still had credits and we should see if it would be worth selling. I said that we should see if Bike store guy would trade it in. I like Bike store guy, Mel said. He’ll take it. We left the store saying that we would be getting a new bike for the bike store guy.
When we got east, we stopped at a Tim Horton’s and bought the usual. They gave us three coffees instead of the two Mel and Noel wanted. Mel had already paid with her card, so I sold the extra double double to a guy in the line behind us. He gave Mel one dollar fifty, so she earned five cents for the deal. I said that I worked for Tim Horton’s for four years and lived on my tips. The trader was in a strip mall surrounded by offices. On the second floor, no one was inside and two of the barter bikes were against the wall. They were a matching pair of Cadillacs. I said we could just ride these bikes away out of here and why is there no security at the barter. A minute later a woman came from a room and said hi. Mel told her that she would take the barter bike for girls.
I lifted the barter bike into the bed of Noel’s truck after he placed blankets against the metal. We drove back to the bike store guy and came smiling with the barter bike. I told you we would come back, Mel said. Now how do I turn this bike into that bike? Bike store guy laughed and looked on the internet. My friend Matt came from downstairs with grease on his hands. We talked and I went down into the repair floor of the shop behind him. Get your hands dirty, he said and handed me a derailer.
Mel came down the stairs wearing a new tshirt. I’m shopping, she said, and I need bags. She went back upstairs and picked out a saddle bag for the new Dutch bike. Matt said he thought the internet trading idea was a good one. Bike store guy unlocked the bikes in front of his store so that Mel and Noel could try them out. I went next door to Mixed Media to see Dave. We talked and he gave me some money for a CD of mine which had sold. Sweet, I'm up to 26, I said and watched a kid on a new bike fly past the window. I thought that he had grabbed a bike from next door as Noel was out riding, so I chased him down the street. He stopped when I said that he dropped something. I asked about the bike and he said that the bike was his so I took a picture and went back to see the bike store guy. He said it's not mine and went back to the internet.
Noel came back in the store after riding a black Dutch bike. I like the men’s bike, he said. I was sceptical of the Dutch, but now I’m sold. Look at the seat. It’s like a cloud. Hey, I hear you did some crimefighting there. Mel came into the store with the Dutch and said that she didn’t fit the bike, but that they could get one in her size by Monday. The bike store guy said that he would try to sell the Cadillac. Three fifty for the old new and a thousand for the new new. Mel was really happy and we went back to her place.
Noel offered me his bong and smoke which had come from a field. He threw chicken on the barbecue and cut up a pineapple for me. Everything burned as it should and was soaked in tequila. Noel insisted that I smell the food. Mel’s sister Rebecca came over and got dressed. She rehearsed her lines for the stand-up that she was going to perform that night. They were printed on paper like a movie script. Mel told me that it was funny the other night when she ran through her Q’s, including one who knew everybody and Robert De Niro. She called that Q on her phone and thought it was me. She told Q and not me to come over for a smoke. It took her ten minutes before she realized that she had called the wrong Q, but she was too embarrassed about using one Q for another to not bring him over. The part of the story that I already knew was when she called me. I came late and had to leave early. Q didn’t smoke pot, but had come early and stayed late. Mel was annoyed and wanted my Q to be above his Q in her phone so that she would not make that mistake again.
Rebecca was eating some of the cooked pineapple and spilled it on the counter. We laughed and she took some of the chicken. I can’t cook, she said. Do I have chicken in my lipstick? You don’t want me for a housewife. I don’t want a house wife, I said. I don’t like houses. She repeated the joke to her sister and I was ta-da but didn’t smile. It was almost nine. They called for a car and I had to go home. We said goodbye see you on the weekend, and I walked in the rain as they were driven to comedy.
Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network
Saturday, May 02, 2009
New Harbours Music Series 2.2 - Electroluminescent
Ryan Ferguson has been performing as Electroluminescent for nearly a decade. His music draws upon a variety of influences including Krautrock, American minimalism, and the Osaka noise and improv scenes. Ferguson has spent much of 2009 on tour in support of his recently released album Measures (Black Mountain Music), which spent several months on the Canadian college charts.
Asked what he intends for the New Harbours performance, Ryan is adamant that Friday’s performance will be a unique one. “The cathedral sounds amazing. I’m interested in the way that sound moves around it. If you can get the sound up into the arch of the ceiling, it spills down the walls. I have wanted to play in the space since I heard about [New Harbours]. But I didn’t want to do my usual set in there. It’s going to be an all-synthesizer set. Sort of an ambient set. It’s a composed piece and not an improvisation. It will be specific to this night.” Ryan cites the building’s acoustics as being of particular interest to him. “I’m adding to the traditional PA rental for the church. I’m going to be running two stereo mixes around the cathedral and I’m going to add a sub as well, right in the centre. The bass frequencies are going to be at the very heart of the cathedral. I found that when Gasoline Gathers hands played there and they pointed their amps up to the ceiling, their sound fell down the walls and I found that really interesting. I want to see how I can get the sound to move around a little differently.”
The New Harbours Music Series has consciously sought to examine the acoustic properties of the many different instruments used by the performers. For Friday’s performance, Ferguson will focus on vintage synthesizer technology. “All my old stuff is coming. I’ve actually been drawing a diagram, where pieces are going to fit and where things are going to be inserted into the signal chain and stuff. I’m going to be using to Korg MS-10 and the Moog that I always use. And I’ll be using my Yamaha CS20, which is a dual-oscillator monosynth. Still no polysynths though. The other day, I say a Korg polysynth for about $500. Which is not a good deal, it’s about what you should pay for one. I was really close to buying that just so I could have a polysynth for this show. But I decided not to. The other synth that I’m going to use is the Roland MC-202, which is actually a sequencer, but it has a synthesizer section built into it. I have a Jupiter 6 that I was thinking of bringing, but it’s really heavy and cumbersome, and there are a lot of knobs and switches to figure out. I already have enough knobs and switches to figure out!”
New Harbours welcomes Ryan Ferguson as Electroluminescent along with Atlas of the Universe to Christ’s Church Cathedral this Friday, May 8, 2009 at 8pm, as part of the Art Crawl. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $5.
electroluminescent
atlas of the universe
Monday, April 20, 2009
Canadian ISPs begin to shake down their users during economic downturn
After reading Steve Arnold’s article concerning Cogeco’s new fees [Hamilton Spectator, April 2009], I cannot help but come to the conclusion that Mr. Arnold is either naive in his research or was hoodwinked by Cogeco’s PR efforts. Not only are several factual problems evident, but the tone of Mr. Arnold’s article suggests a degree of contempt for any Cogeco customer who voices dissent over the new fees.
First, some corrections are in order. Movie downloads are not 4GB each (except for some pirated DVDs). Standard definition films are typically 700MB. He is correct that many hi-def films are around 10GB in size. Importantly, I have to challenge Mr. Arnold’s suggestion that the only “heavy” internet users are those who download films for two reasons. There are many other net usage profiles that use similar bandwidth. I cannot help but wonder whether movies were singled out as the media continues to debate film “piracy”.
As an instructor at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, I have a degree of access to digital trends and usage profiles. Mr. Arnold claims that most customers are using less than the 60GB cap contingent with Cogeco’s average data plan, as it is sufficient to view “1.25 million web pages or ... 6 million emails.” There are indeed some users who use the internet of 2009 just as they did in 2000, when video hosting and telephony were relatively non-existent and file sizes were smaller. Yet, many webpages in 2009 contain streaming video content; for example, the average bandwidth for YouTube is roughly 150MB per hour. Furthermore, one can easily purchase more than 60GB per month in video and audio files from services such as iTunes. If a user wishes to upload video or photographs to an online hosting service such as flickr or vimeo, they will instantly become what Mr. Arnold calls a “heavy user”; I know of one artist who uploads at least 100GB of photographs from her home every month. Finally, education is rapidly deploying online through protocols such as WebCT. I can speak from experience that my students exchange many GBs of data for school projects.
The internet in 2009 is used for a great deal of legal software distribution, and file sizes rise nearly equal to the exponential rate of Moore’s law. It is not uncommon for modern software to be many GBs in size. The Windows OS downloads many MBs of updates every week. If I chose to purchase Adobe CS4, the download is over 10GB. Computer and console games are rapidly moving from a retail purchase model to an online distribution model, and most games are between 2 - 15GB in size. Finally, many computer users know that sometimes computers crash and software must be reinstalled. In the online distribution model, reinstalling means re-downloading. Frankly, I cannot believe that a family with two or more children online will ever be able to remain under the 60GB limit.
I am fully aware that there is no such thing as unlimited internet. Some software, especially bittorrent, does need to be shaped so that overall net traffic can flow smoothly. However, I am offended by Cogeco’s subtle association of net usage with environmental responsibility, as evidenced by Marie Carrier’s suggestion that the new fees will “make the customer responsible for their usage.” In a time when responsible usage of electricity and natural resources such as gasoline have entered into the public discourse, the “responsible usage of the internet” is a cynical and damaging marketing ploy.
The reason that the Canadian Internet experience is beginning to slow down is not that more people are downloading. The problem is that companies like Bell and Cogeco have used their monopolies to increase their profitability by limiting investment in new technologies. It is for this reason that Canada has slipped from the top three to the bottom twenty in terms of international ranking of broadband speed and service. I wonder how happy Cogeco customers will be with their 60GB cap if they were to learn that customers of other cable ISPs get much higher caps. Comcast in the States, for example, has recently imposed a 250GB cap, which is infinitely more reasonable than 60GB. Japanese customers get to use their internet for ten times cheaper per MB than Cogeco customers. If Cogeco faced competition, then we would have a higher download limit in Canada.
There is no technological reason for the discrepancy. For example, in 2000 I routinely used 100-300GB per month and Cogeco never complained. Now they say that they must limit downloads so that the net doesn’t slow down for “average users”. If my downloading 300GB per month ten years ago didn’t slow down the net, why is it a problem after ten years of computer hardware developments? The reason is that as broadband access multiplied and more Canadians switched to broadband, companies like Cogeco banked the profits and didn’t invest in expanding their infrastructure. Where, for example, is the fibre optic network promised years ago?
First, some corrections are in order. Movie downloads are not 4GB each (except for some pirated DVDs). Standard definition films are typically 700MB. He is correct that many hi-def films are around 10GB in size. Importantly, I have to challenge Mr. Arnold’s suggestion that the only “heavy” internet users are those who download films for two reasons. There are many other net usage profiles that use similar bandwidth. I cannot help but wonder whether movies were singled out as the media continues to debate film “piracy”.
As an instructor at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, I have a degree of access to digital trends and usage profiles. Mr. Arnold claims that most customers are using less than the 60GB cap contingent with Cogeco’s average data plan, as it is sufficient to view “1.25 million web pages or ... 6 million emails.” There are indeed some users who use the internet of 2009 just as they did in 2000, when video hosting and telephony were relatively non-existent and file sizes were smaller. Yet, many webpages in 2009 contain streaming video content; for example, the average bandwidth for YouTube is roughly 150MB per hour. Furthermore, one can easily purchase more than 60GB per month in video and audio files from services such as iTunes. If a user wishes to upload video or photographs to an online hosting service such as flickr or vimeo, they will instantly become what Mr. Arnold calls a “heavy user”; I know of one artist who uploads at least 100GB of photographs from her home every month. Finally, education is rapidly deploying online through protocols such as WebCT. I can speak from experience that my students exchange many GBs of data for school projects.
The internet in 2009 is used for a great deal of legal software distribution, and file sizes rise nearly equal to the exponential rate of Moore’s law. It is not uncommon for modern software to be many GBs in size. The Windows OS downloads many MBs of updates every week. If I chose to purchase Adobe CS4, the download is over 10GB. Computer and console games are rapidly moving from a retail purchase model to an online distribution model, and most games are between 2 - 15GB in size. Finally, many computer users know that sometimes computers crash and software must be reinstalled. In the online distribution model, reinstalling means re-downloading. Frankly, I cannot believe that a family with two or more children online will ever be able to remain under the 60GB limit.
I am fully aware that there is no such thing as unlimited internet. Some software, especially bittorrent, does need to be shaped so that overall net traffic can flow smoothly. However, I am offended by Cogeco’s subtle association of net usage with environmental responsibility, as evidenced by Marie Carrier’s suggestion that the new fees will “make the customer responsible for their usage.” In a time when responsible usage of electricity and natural resources such as gasoline have entered into the public discourse, the “responsible usage of the internet” is a cynical and damaging marketing ploy.
The reason that the Canadian Internet experience is beginning to slow down is not that more people are downloading. The problem is that companies like Bell and Cogeco have used their monopolies to increase their profitability by limiting investment in new technologies. It is for this reason that Canada has slipped from the top three to the bottom twenty in terms of international ranking of broadband speed and service. I wonder how happy Cogeco customers will be with their 60GB cap if they were to learn that customers of other cable ISPs get much higher caps. Comcast in the States, for example, has recently imposed a 250GB cap, which is infinitely more reasonable than 60GB. Japanese customers get to use their internet for ten times cheaper per MB than Cogeco customers. If Cogeco faced competition, then we would have a higher download limit in Canada.
There is no technological reason for the discrepancy. For example, in 2000 I routinely used 100-300GB per month and Cogeco never complained. Now they say that they must limit downloads so that the net doesn’t slow down for “average users”. If my downloading 300GB per month ten years ago didn’t slow down the net, why is it a problem after ten years of computer hardware developments? The reason is that as broadband access multiplied and more Canadians switched to broadband, companies like Cogeco banked the profits and didn’t invest in expanding their infrastructure. Where, for example, is the fibre optic network promised years ago?
Thursday, February 26, 2009
this is not creative writing
i came to a slight realization on the bus this afternoon.
some biographical detail is required for this self-indulgence.
when i was really young, i used to write for pleasure. usually the writing occurred when sitting alone in the hallway outside of a classroom, after i had been kicked out by the teacher for disrupting my friends after having finished my work. in every subject except handwriting, i finished class assignments exceptionally fast and then became an exceptional nuisance to the teacher. one morning in the fourth grade, my notebook was taken from me after the teacher found it full of stories about monsters and daemons, knights and astronauts, and other mythologies about the past and the future. at first i thought that she was mad about the violence and gore which i frequently included, and perhaps even highlighted -- this was, after all, the era of the Reagan Star Wars laser defence shield and high-body-count television and action films. my parents were called in to the school for a meeting, and i found out that the teacher didn't like all of the swear words which i had used. my father told her that to keep me from acting up in class and getting kicked out into the hall, she should let me write down the words which kept me occupied. i remember his words from that afternoon very well: "any damn word he pleases".
and so from that day i kept writing for pleasure. for the transmutation of an afternoon into a semi-tangible vision. for the loss of ego into imagination. for the fruits of productive isolation. for the way that some of my words seemed to have been worthy enough to have been printed and read by others, who then generated more words in response. for the spaces and patterns made by the writing if you looked at the whole page and unfocused your eyes. for the way that after i produced and dot-matrix-printed a series of newspapers for myself, i felt like i was part of the media which captivated me from birth. for the simple control of the ink as it left my pen and tainted the paper. for the pleasure of both failure and success. for looking to the earth and the sky and reaching through time. for something to read.
words were fun because of their appearance and sound as well as their meaning. in this sense, the joy received by writing is precisely the joy of writing experiencing itself. pleasure in this context is a derivative of subjectivity. by the age of ten or eleven, i had come to appreciate the difference between the writing which gave me pleasure and that which was deemed "good" by virtue of adherence to function or evaluative protocol. while it may sound obvious, i really liked the pleasure, the pleasure as a pleasure. the functions or evaluation of my words provided no real feedback to me. so what if i received a perfect grade for something which i had written, when i knew that the writing had given me little harbour and as such was an essentially misrepresentative process? -- as an aside, the school projects from my youth which i have come to cherish most highly do not come from my representations of truth, but rather from fictions which i was able to pass off as truths: an en-francais book report and improvised oral presentation of a translation of James and the Giant Peach involved an elaborate inter-species taxi, cake delivery, and dating service; a history paper written in high school involved an invented civilization from the Eurasian steppes which was feared throughout the western part of the roman empire for their mounted female fire archers and which had been conquered through the religious practises of an equally non-existent but territorially-aggressive group of midget barbarians; an eighth-grade science report for an invented species of reptile involved several photomicrographs of tissue samples taken from my father's "cancer collection" along with an audio recording of its mating call which i had created using a two-litre pop bottle half-filled with used motor oil; a grade thirteen kinesiology paper which examined a fake west asian sport whose history and rules were inspired by the menu of a vegetarian all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. often, i would invent extended and cross-indexed bibliographies, and on one occasion i even forged the Dewey decimal cards which kept stock of the inventory at my high school library to prove the existence of several of the non-existent books referenced in a ten-page term paper to a teacher. all of this work received top marks from ostensibly qualified instructors at ostensibly well-regarded schools.
and i kept writing. on the back of a transfer, waiting for a bus. on a napkin, waiting for a friend to return from a restaurant bathroom. in the margins of a newspaper, waiting for my mother to return from a store. on the sides of packing boxes, waiting between lines of customers at work. on the sides of buildings, waiting for my city of Hamilton to return to life. the joy seemed to be that i could fill the time otherwise spent waiting for things to happen by elaborating the happenings of my own invention.
then university happened, and i lost my attention to the joys which free writing provided to me. for some reason my writing began to tailor itself to function more than to the self-reflexive/self-excessive process of writing. i began to write only when given either an academic or a financial opportunity. remuneration, that's what writing had become. more to the point, it seems as though i now only write when i feel that i have a purpose to do so. to relay information. to invite. to make a cultural sell. the joy of purposeless writing from my youth has departed from me. until i realized that i play with words all of the time. i can, in fact, not help but play with words whenever i am given the slightest opportunity.
sitting on the bus today, waiting for my laptop to boot while the snow-covered fields of industry rolled past my window, i came to understand the illusory fiction of purpose. society provides to us a definition of purpose as a geography inhabited by adults who must guide children and the irresponsible away from the random vectors of their instincts. purpose requires a judge, an evaluative agent which can dispense truth and due consequence within the bounds of reason created by the system of evaluation itself. "purpose" is the forced conscription of innocence and creative association into the armed guilt against pleasure which many in society define as reasonable and responsible function. "purpose" is a means of looking beyond oneself to view subjectivity solely within the circumscription of ecstasis: what can you do for others with your words and how will they use them? "purpose" burns off the body, rejecting corporeality as an impurity which detempers the truth of representation. it is a means of working for others for the purpose of instrumentality: I am my words, my words are the truth; you can trust me and here is what you need to know. to be subsumed to function is to engage in a self-inflicted form of wage slavery.
writing is a geography of play. woe to thee, land whose king is no longer a child.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie -- Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton
Art Gallery of Hamilton
January 24 to May 18, 2009
Christie Sealey is well-known for her intimate and expressive portraiture work. Since she and collaborator Richard Oddie have been residents of Hamilton their entire lives, it was only a matter of time before the city itself became her principle subject. Her new exhibition at the AGH examines the city as a constellation of subjectivities. She juxtaposes the intimacies of a moment, usually with another person but also with the environment of the city itself, with a sense of alienation and introspection. Her depiction of the 401 highway as it frames Cootes Paradise is particularly noteworthy, as is a portrait of a young woman seen reflected in the small mirror of a dilapidated washroom. Through her work, Sealey suggests the question am I really all of the things that are outside of me?
In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes audio work that Sealey constructed with Richard Oddie. Interviews with many of the city's residents are layered with location recordings from around the city to produce an audio program that invites narrative supposition.
For more information, please refer to the Art Gallery of Hamilton webpage.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Sun Circle @ New Harbours Music Series vol. 2
Sun Circle, New Harbours Music Series vol. 2
stationary camera, ambient sound + lighting
P + C = Sun Circle, qzh, Throwaway Digital
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Deerhunter @ Lee's Palace
Deerhunter at Lee's Palace in Toronto, Nov. 12, 2008
handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting, some shyness
sorry about the sound, as the side of the stage was rather loud and my microphone couldn't help itself from being overdriven
P + C = Deerhunter, qzh, Throwaway Digital
Friday, October 31, 2008
New Harbours Music Series 2008 "Trailer"
New Harbours Music Series Trailer from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.
A summation of the musical performances featured at the Spring 2008 New Harbours Music Series.
Performers include Orphx, Polmo Polpo, Michael Snow + Matthew Boughner, Slither.
handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting
P + C = Orphx, Polmo Polpo, Michael Snow, Matthew Boughner, Slither, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)
A nicer version of this video is available from Vimeo.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Holy Fuck @ Pepperjacks
Holy Fuck @ Pepperjack's Cafe, 19.09.08
handheld camera, ambient lighting + sound, beer
P + C = Holy Fuck, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Janek Schaefer - Extended Play
Janek Schaefer
Extended Play
[2008, L-NE]
There really is no way to avoid or reproduce the “presence” of an art piece. A great deal of aesthetic experiences in the post-formalist artworld investigate the ontology of subjectivity, frequently by grounding the viewer of the art piece in a self-reflexive and participatory creative gesture which feeds back into the piece in question. In terms of audio, the space in which a musical work is installed is usually of principal importance to the meaning of the piece.
L-NE is an offshoot of Taylor Deupree’s 12k label which has been mandated with documenting audio installation work. In 2007, British composer Janek Schaefer exhibited Extended Play at the Huddersfield Art Gallery. The piece reflects upon the wartime experiences of Schaefer’s Polish mother. Schaefer sampled some phrases from a patriotic Polish folk song that was broadcast by the BBC to Polish resistance fighters in order to relay intelligence information on the day that Schaefer’s mother was born. Schaefer, along with Michael Jennings, then arranged this material into a ten-minute chamber piece for violin, cello, and piano. Each instrument was separately pressed onto a 7" record. The vinyl was then played on three motion-activated turntables that would interrupt the recording every time a viewer passed by them, thus invoking randomised intersubjective elements into the piece.
Of course, in order to release a linear audio version in a home-listening format, much of the original’s thematic content had to be removed. Schaefer has offered a more textured and ostensibly minimalist investigation of the original sources than the installation would have allowed. For the first three tracks, he focusses on a single instrument each. Throughout the album, but with these pieces in particular, Schaefer allows ample space for the microscopic textures of the old recordings to be defined. The sounds of the turntables are laid on top of the original, so along with a cello one can hear dust and crackle on the surface of the vinyl, a declination as the power is cut, as well as the jarring sound of the needle as it retracks within a groove.
The phrases are simple and the tones are drawn out to emphasize the texture of strings being played. ‘Accoustic Ensemble’ comes closest to capturing the intentions of the original installation. Schaefer has crafted the piece by using the original recordings played back at a variety of speeds. There is a certain emotional vibrancy to the piece, perhaps due to the density of instrumentation, but more likely due to the subtle overtones of elation – usually carried by the violin – located above the melancholy which encircles the listener through the rest of the album. Like much of Schaefer’s previous work, this is music of muted beauty and complex pleasures.
MP3: Janek Schaefer - Vinyl Cello Duo
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Larry Di Ianni and QZH talk Liberally for 90 minutes
Quintin Zachary Hewlett: First of all, I want to thank you for meeting with me. I wasn’t sure that you would want to afford my questions after our email exchange. Let’s just leave the past where it is – I am not going to bring up Red Hill or any other bugbears. Let’s just get to the Green Shift plan. I like it, and I have to say that for the first time in my life I’m considering voting Liberal.
Larry Di Ianni: Thank you. Hopefully you will like what I have to say. Well, at any rate I’ve come to appreciate the plan. When it was first being talked about, I thought Oh Gosh, how confusing is this? People are going to be totally confused by it. All of the stuff that you hear, that this is not the time, the economy’s bad, energy prices are going up. In fact, this is the answer. This is not the problem. It really is the answer, so I’m quite enthused about it.
QZH: Is that the primary problem that the Liberal Party is faced with? Essentially a PR campaign about this plan?
LDI: Well, I don’t know if it’s a public relations campaign, although PR is always part of politics. Or, at least getting the message out, which is how most politicians would put it rather than public relations. But certainly informing people and dealing with some of the myths. The Conservatives after seeing the plan have ridiculed it. I was sort of offended, personally, by their reaction.
QZH: I’d like to focus on the latter part – we’ll deal with that shift in a second. I think there’s two aspects of it which are important. One of which you just mentioned: the shift in taxation, and I’d like to get to specifics about that. But just before that I’d like to deal with something that’s perhaps on the minds of Hamiltonians more so than those from other large municipalities. Shift of course invokes cars, invokes transportation. There’s a mall in Oakville, one of the larger ones, and there advertising campaign is “Shift into High Gear”, and they have luxury items on display. Of course, you have to drive out to the mall, there’s no real transit to get there otherwise and it’s not near any residential areas. I’m wondering specifically for Hamilton, which is very much predicated on the highway model and has been for a long time – you just have to look at King and Main streets, and from an infrastructure point of view the rapid transfer of people using individual [automobiles] is the ideological framework for this city’s development. I’m wondering very specifically about the Infrastructure Surplus commitments in the Green Shift, how can Hamiltonians very specifically and Canadians in general come to understand that this fund is not necessarily going to go to highway development but instead to mass transit, which is so required for Hamilton.
LDI: Let me refer to this simple and useful book...
QZH: It’s well-produced. I read it.
LDI: Have you read Dune?
QZH: The Frank Herbert series? Yeah. Actually, when I was about six, I went to see the bad David Lynch version of it in the theatre. Disappointing.
LDI: The novel was better.
QZH: Well, [oil] is definitely our spice, and there’s no easy way to get off of it. Considering that costs are going up almost exponentially, and they’re not going to go down. A good indicator for this can be seen in the tarsands, because while most of the tarsands is deemed “industrially-recoverable”, it’s only deemed recoverable when oil reaches a certain price point.
LDI: When I was a kid, we were talking about the tarsands. This is generations ago. We’ve got oil galore, it’s just too expensive to retrieve it. Once the price reaches a certain level, it will be economic and we’ll have oil coming out of our you-know-whats. We’re at that point now, and the fact that we can make it an economic reality means that things have gotten to an exorbitant level. And then, we weren’t thinking of the environmental impact.
QZH: We’re still not really thinking about the environmental impact.
LDI: Yes we are! The Green Shift certainly thinks about that. [laughs]
QZH: Well, again I hope that it is legitimate. I do believe in Dion, however.
LDI: A decent man. I got to know him last year. I don’t know him well, but we’ve been at many functions together and we’ve had a few chats. He’s chalk full of integrity, very bright, thinks well on his feet. He answered some tough questions at a function a week or so ago about with humour and good solid information. But he’s not a sound-bite type of guy.
QZH: That’s the problem with having knowledge and integrity: you don’t fit the media.
LDI: That’s something that you either have or you don’t perhaps. But I’m hoping that people can see beyond that. That there’s a man with substance here. And there’s strength; he’s not a weak man. I read a biography on him he’s an interesting individual because of his background. How he grew up, the influence of his father, how his own thoughts were gelling as things were developing in Canada. Nationalism was flourishing in Quebec City where he grew up. And he took some principled stands in very much a Captain Canada way. He told separatists that they were not going to break up the country on a whim; there were rules for such things and [Dion] implemented those. He was reviled by the separatists in Quebec because of that, because he made it difficult and you couldn’t fudge things any longer. I quite like him, and I hope that Canadians give him a chance. I hope that they see the integrity in him and the passion. When I was mayor, I went to a sustainable cities conference in Montreal. It was great, and they had environmentalists from all over the world, it wasn’t just Canadian folks.
QZH: Who flew in on their jets...
LDI: Well yes, they had to get there and they were from all over the place. But they’re sincere people.
QZH: Yes.
Complete transcription available here.
here's the audio for the conversation:
Larry and QZH
Larry Di Ianni: Thank you. Hopefully you will like what I have to say. Well, at any rate I’ve come to appreciate the plan. When it was first being talked about, I thought Oh Gosh, how confusing is this? People are going to be totally confused by it. All of the stuff that you hear, that this is not the time, the economy’s bad, energy prices are going up. In fact, this is the answer. This is not the problem. It really is the answer, so I’m quite enthused about it.
QZH: Is that the primary problem that the Liberal Party is faced with? Essentially a PR campaign about this plan?
LDI: Well, I don’t know if it’s a public relations campaign, although PR is always part of politics. Or, at least getting the message out, which is how most politicians would put it rather than public relations. But certainly informing people and dealing with some of the myths. The Conservatives after seeing the plan have ridiculed it. I was sort of offended, personally, by their reaction.
QZH: I’d like to focus on the latter part – we’ll deal with that shift in a second. I think there’s two aspects of it which are important. One of which you just mentioned: the shift in taxation, and I’d like to get to specifics about that. But just before that I’d like to deal with something that’s perhaps on the minds of Hamiltonians more so than those from other large municipalities. Shift of course invokes cars, invokes transportation. There’s a mall in Oakville, one of the larger ones, and there advertising campaign is “Shift into High Gear”, and they have luxury items on display. Of course, you have to drive out to the mall, there’s no real transit to get there otherwise and it’s not near any residential areas. I’m wondering specifically for Hamilton, which is very much predicated on the highway model and has been for a long time – you just have to look at King and Main streets, and from an infrastructure point of view the rapid transfer of people using individual [automobiles] is the ideological framework for this city’s development. I’m wondering very specifically about the Infrastructure Surplus commitments in the Green Shift, how can Hamiltonians very specifically and Canadians in general come to understand that this fund is not necessarily going to go to highway development but instead to mass transit, which is so required for Hamilton.
LDI: Let me refer to this simple and useful book...
QZH: It’s well-produced. I read it.
LDI: Have you read Dune?
QZH: The Frank Herbert series? Yeah. Actually, when I was about six, I went to see the bad David Lynch version of it in the theatre. Disappointing.
LDI: The novel was better.
QZH: Well, [oil] is definitely our spice, and there’s no easy way to get off of it. Considering that costs are going up almost exponentially, and they’re not going to go down. A good indicator for this can be seen in the tarsands, because while most of the tarsands is deemed “industrially-recoverable”, it’s only deemed recoverable when oil reaches a certain price point.
LDI: When I was a kid, we were talking about the tarsands. This is generations ago. We’ve got oil galore, it’s just too expensive to retrieve it. Once the price reaches a certain level, it will be economic and we’ll have oil coming out of our you-know-whats. We’re at that point now, and the fact that we can make it an economic reality means that things have gotten to an exorbitant level. And then, we weren’t thinking of the environmental impact.
QZH: We’re still not really thinking about the environmental impact.
LDI: Yes we are! The Green Shift certainly thinks about that. [laughs]
QZH: Well, again I hope that it is legitimate. I do believe in Dion, however.
LDI: A decent man. I got to know him last year. I don’t know him well, but we’ve been at many functions together and we’ve had a few chats. He’s chalk full of integrity, very bright, thinks well on his feet. He answered some tough questions at a function a week or so ago about with humour and good solid information. But he’s not a sound-bite type of guy.
QZH: That’s the problem with having knowledge and integrity: you don’t fit the media.
LDI: That’s something that you either have or you don’t perhaps. But I’m hoping that people can see beyond that. That there’s a man with substance here. And there’s strength; he’s not a weak man. I read a biography on him he’s an interesting individual because of his background. How he grew up, the influence of his father, how his own thoughts were gelling as things were developing in Canada. Nationalism was flourishing in Quebec City where he grew up. And he took some principled stands in very much a Captain Canada way. He told separatists that they were not going to break up the country on a whim; there were rules for such things and [Dion] implemented those. He was reviled by the separatists in Quebec because of that, because he made it difficult and you couldn’t fudge things any longer. I quite like him, and I hope that Canadians give him a chance. I hope that they see the integrity in him and the passion. When I was mayor, I went to a sustainable cities conference in Montreal. It was great, and they had environmentalists from all over the world, it wasn’t just Canadian folks.
QZH: Who flew in on their jets...
LDI: Well yes, they had to get there and they were from all over the place. But they’re sincere people.
QZH: Yes.
Complete transcription available here.
here's the audio for the conversation:
Larry and QZH
Monday, July 07, 2008
Fat Tuesday Masquerade
Nudes by Melanie Gillis and Ward Shipman
Mask Art by Laura Hollick, Ryan Price, Michelle Purchase
and countless local mask-making newbies
Fire Spinning by Hot Carl
You can find information about this facet of this month's James North Art Crawl by clicking here.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Slither @ New Harbours Music Series 1.3
Slither plays Christ's Church Cathedral as part of New Harbours Music Series 1.3, June 13, 2008
handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting
P + C = Slither, qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
The Urban Moorings Project
Hamilton’s art community has a vibrant history of engaging with public installations. When dislocated from the antiseptic confines of the art gallery, art becomes more fluid and more of a subjective and discursive enterprise. The Urban Moorings Project is a group installation on the wetlands of Cootes Paradise. Artists Susan Detwiler, Noel Harding and David Acheson, Steve Mazza, and Tor Lukasik-Foss have created floating sculptures and gardens which are intended to question the nature of human industry and ecological preservation. Curator Nora Hutchinson describes the project as “travelling canvas, one that is ever changing…sun on calm waters extends and mirrors perfectly the sculptures and their reflections on the bay. Morning fog, dusk, and the terrible beauty of Hamilton’s factory plumes of smoke and fire play a part in this ineffable landscape. Culled into the visual frame of floating homes, there is the call of birds, the hush of wings and the sound of water lapping…”
Asked why Cootes Paradise was chosen, Hutchinson responds that when one is at Cootes, a “quiet beauty is experienced”. Hutchinson researched the history of the area, and decided that the artists would dialogue with a historical community of floating homes that was situated on the shores of Cootes prior to the 1950s. “Dubbed ‘Shacktown’ by the locals, the houses were built by workers so that they could live near their industrial workplaces. Their homes were mostly made with materials at hand – tin, tar, wood, brick. They built their homes on the water in order to easily respond to the pressures of urban development. When forced to move, they simply floated their homes upstream to a new location on the Bay. The second dialogue between the artworks and the location of Cootes Paradise, concerns the restoration efforts of the RBG to clean up the water and landscape of Cootes and to re-introduce native plants and fish. Responding to both historical and ecological issues, the artists' sculptures will be made mostly with pre -purposed materials and with a focus of using symbols for cleaning the water, to creating islands, and to address the post-industrial landscape.”
For the site, Tor Lukasik-Foss has created what he terms Viking Soliloquy Chair. Made from re-claimed oak, cedar, and mixed media, the chair transforms a sinking Viking ship into a piece of floating stage furniture useful for all manners of monologues and songs. Susan Detwiler will install a shelter frame in order to grow edible plants from household cleaning tools such as brooms, swiffers, and mops. In their piece entitled Romance Park for Endangered Turtles, Noel Harding and David Acheson have created a series of turtle basking platforms. Along with Water aeration and wetland plantings, the piece intends a theatrical stage upon which the terms of environmental engagement are to be interrogated.
For Steve Mazza, industry in Hamilton is examined as a fossil of the past which considers “what it means to live in an industrial city, in an industrial province, in a country that doesn’t seem to want to be industrial anymore”. His sculptural piece playfully engages with the notion that industrial endeavour is outdated and remains extent largely as an urban-scale museum somewhat invisible to the city’s hopes for future development and the dreams of individual citizens for a ‘perfect community’. Mazza’s industry is hermetically sealed in a greenhouse structure which suggests the need to remain conscious of the city’s past, which informs the present in both architectural and environmental terms.
Irene Loughlin of Hamilton Artists Inc expects that the public will respond in a positive manner to the installations. “This exhibition of sculptural art works is non-traditional in that it takes place outside of the gallery. A person might suddenly come across the artworks while strolling down a pathway in a walk at Princess Point. The strategy of placing art in a public place highlights the fact that art is part of our daily life and that art is a valuable part of our daily experience. The artworks respond to the elements, are reflected in the waters of Princess Point, and are affected by the wind... The installation becomes alive, pointing to the rich history of this historic site.”
Urban Moorings opens Saturday, June 21 at 1 pm at Princess Point in Cootes Paradise and will remain in place until August 5. An artist panel discussion follows at 6 pm June 26 at the McMaster Museum of Art. A film about endangered wetlands in Finn Slough, British Columbia will then be screened at Hamilton Artists Inc July 11 at 7 pm. Finally, a panel discussion between the artists involved in the project and the RGB will take place at the RGB auditorium on July 13 at 2 pm.
Hamilton Artists Inc presents URBAN MOORINGS
June 21 - August 5
Coots Paradise
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Sois jeune et tais toi (photographs)
Digital Maggies, 2008
Hunter and hunted, 2008 (Graeme Weir)
I am Error, 2008
A Winner Is You, 2008
Demolition Special, 2008 (Graeme Weir)
Sunday, June 08, 2008
New Harbours Music Series 1.3 -- Slither + Fossils
New Harbours Music Series 1.3
Slither + Fossils
June 13, 9:00 PM
Christ’s Church Cathedral
262 James street North
Free Admission
The noisier and more experimental end of jazz has always been a troubling beast to many listeners. Throughout the history of the genre, musicians have been simultaneously playing within traditional structures and emphatically breaking past them in search of new musical horizons. Free jazz attained a popular zenith in the late sixties with reed players such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and the genre was able to proliferate commercially despite the demands which it placed on listeners. Over the next two decades however, jazz was concretized in the public imagination as a genre of rigid formalism associated with easy-listening radio stations. Experimental jazz quickly relegated itself to the Japanese, European, and North American underground, where it remained a fertile though somewhat marginalised scene.
Michigan duo Slither are among the newer generation of musicians who work within the amorphously-conceived genre of free jazz (which is at this point more appropriately termed “free improvisation”). Clarinetist Heath Moerland and saxophonist Chris Pottinger have been performing torrid live shows for the past few years. Described as “Today’s jazz for today’s playboys” by Thurston Moore, Slither perform a combination of reeds and electronics that serves well to reinvigorate free improvisation fans and other aesthetes of the nearly-impossible. The cacophony which they create certainly falls within the noise camp, and a great deal of spectral beauty can be discerned as the horn instruments wash themselves of the sonic detritus. Indeed, the last time Slither performed in Hamilton, an amplified dish rack proved itself a worthy addition to the performance.
Local noise practitioners Fossils will also be performing at New Harbours. A trio centred upon the weekly improvisation sessions at band member David Payne’s downtown apartment, Fossils have been internationally championed as being among Canada’s elite experimental acts. Tape manipulation, no-input mixer feedback, prepared guitars, and an arsenal of electronics conjure a dissonant and distopic aesthetic of tortured landscapes and strained human relations. Much as the DJ scene of the 1990s revived interest in the vinyl culture of the previous generation of music listeners, the tape culture represented by Fossils signals to children of the 80s and 90s that their long-forgotten cassettes can still find a use despite the wear of neglect, magnetic drift, and oxidation.
Slither and Fossils play the final concert in the spring 2008 New Harbours Music Series at Christ’s Church Cathedral this Friday at 9 PM.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
untitled (June 3, 2008)
laying, face fragile,
in thought i am marginal to her story,
while everyting else pours into her, being
so, with grace
and upturned intentions, she is smiling
sideways, gravity marks time for us
as i, hold, still
and soft as death or a sidewalk
when life enters and exits without fanfare
until a warmth comes
closer. submersed and paralytic,
in vain do i sit beside her so
june 3, 2008
in thought i am marginal to her story,
while everyting else pours into her, being
so, with grace
and upturned intentions, she is smiling
sideways, gravity marks time for us
as i, hold, still
and soft as death or a sidewalk
when life enters and exits without fanfare
until a warmth comes
closer. submersed and paralytic,
in vain do i sit beside her so
june 3, 2008
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Sois jeune et tais toi
featuring DJs Gary Buttrum and Carla Coma,
as well as mixes from special guests
dance and silent auction
Loose Canon Gallery
Friday June 6
9pm
pay what you can
$5 suggested
all money from door, beer, and auction will
be donated for cancer research at Princess
Margaret Hospital
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Michael Snow + Matthew Boughner @ New Harbours
Snow + Boughner in an improvised performance inside Christ's Church Cathedral on May 11, 2008. This concert was second in the New Harbours Music Series.
handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting
P + C = Michael Snow, Matthew Boughner, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)
Thursday, May 22, 2008
an open letter to Hamilton Police Services
As a language instructor who has worked at Mohawk and Columbia International colleges as well as McMaster University, I am deeply concerned with Mark Nimigan’s suggestion in last Wednesday’s Hamilton Spectator that Hamilton Police Services begin focussing on “clean[ing] up” the downtown core by arresting individuals who swear in public. If police are to be used as agents of the cultural hygiene policies of a few motivated bureaucrats, then an extremely dangerous precedent will have been set.
I wish to argue with Mr. Nimigan that Hamilton Police Services does not have the authority to arbitrate what use of language constitutes “vile” and “filthy”. Police forces are not semioticians, anthropologists, or linguists, and the public should not expect them to be trained in these fields. Not a single word can in and of itself be deemed either vile, filthy, or harmful to the public. The discursive contexts in which words can be deemed as harmful to the public interest are already covered by Canada’s Hate Speech laws. Any other curtailing of public speech treads on the rights of individuals to free speech as protected under the Charter of Rights.
When viewed in terms of his support for a project of cultural hygiene, Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that entrepreneurs don’t want to “come downtown and open a restaurant or specialty shop given the atmosphere down there” is laughable at best. Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that “taxpayers” and “little old ladies” are the victims of individuals whom the author views as undesirable for the core stinks of the elitist and fascist rhetoric which characterised the eugenics policies undertaken by authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century. Mr. Nimigan, I wish to emphatically state to you that Hamilton’s poor national reputation will not find a solution in the forced removal of certain individuals from the city’s public sphere.
Two issues serve to keep many entrepreneurs from the core: blight and taxation. I wish to suggest that Hamilton Police Services be used to enforce property standards in the downtown core so that buildings are properly maintained as they are legally mandated by existing property by-laws. The collapse of the Balfour Building, which has seriously effected the operation and financial status of entrepreneurs on King William street such as Thai Memory, is the principal witness to the need for police enforcement of property standards. Furthermore, a redeployment of public health resources to aid in the core’s instances of drug abuse and mental health issues would be of benefit to the area’s atmosphere.
Entrepreneurs in the downtown core pay a higher proportion of municipal taxes as compared to suburban areas. It is largely for this reason that entrepreneurs chose to locate themselves along Hamilton’s expanding periphery rather than be contained within what should be a high-density downtown business area. As the periphery expands, Hamilton taxpayers in the core must bear the financial burden for the expansion of infrastructure – sewers, water, roads – that fuels suburban growth. The departure of stores from Jackson Square and the Eaton’s Centre have a great deal to do with this fact. Large department stores prefer suburban locations because they get free additions to their development plans.
Policies of cultural hygiene are misguided at best and more often signal a grossly-unjust disregard of the rights of individuals. Mr. Nimigan, if you wish to see the city face court challenges under sections 2b, 2c, and 24 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then by all means please move forward with your plans to act as arbiter of cultural hygiene for the city of Hamilton.
I wish to argue with Mr. Nimigan that Hamilton Police Services does not have the authority to arbitrate what use of language constitutes “vile” and “filthy”. Police forces are not semioticians, anthropologists, or linguists, and the public should not expect them to be trained in these fields. Not a single word can in and of itself be deemed either vile, filthy, or harmful to the public. The discursive contexts in which words can be deemed as harmful to the public interest are already covered by Canada’s Hate Speech laws. Any other curtailing of public speech treads on the rights of individuals to free speech as protected under the Charter of Rights.
When viewed in terms of his support for a project of cultural hygiene, Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that entrepreneurs don’t want to “come downtown and open a restaurant or specialty shop given the atmosphere down there” is laughable at best. Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that “taxpayers” and “little old ladies” are the victims of individuals whom the author views as undesirable for the core stinks of the elitist and fascist rhetoric which characterised the eugenics policies undertaken by authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century. Mr. Nimigan, I wish to emphatically state to you that Hamilton’s poor national reputation will not find a solution in the forced removal of certain individuals from the city’s public sphere.
Two issues serve to keep many entrepreneurs from the core: blight and taxation. I wish to suggest that Hamilton Police Services be used to enforce property standards in the downtown core so that buildings are properly maintained as they are legally mandated by existing property by-laws. The collapse of the Balfour Building, which has seriously effected the operation and financial status of entrepreneurs on King William street such as Thai Memory, is the principal witness to the need for police enforcement of property standards. Furthermore, a redeployment of public health resources to aid in the core’s instances of drug abuse and mental health issues would be of benefit to the area’s atmosphere.
Entrepreneurs in the downtown core pay a higher proportion of municipal taxes as compared to suburban areas. It is largely for this reason that entrepreneurs chose to locate themselves along Hamilton’s expanding periphery rather than be contained within what should be a high-density downtown business area. As the periphery expands, Hamilton taxpayers in the core must bear the financial burden for the expansion of infrastructure – sewers, water, roads – that fuels suburban growth. The departure of stores from Jackson Square and the Eaton’s Centre have a great deal to do with this fact. Large department stores prefer suburban locations because they get free additions to their development plans.
Policies of cultural hygiene are misguided at best and more often signal a grossly-unjust disregard of the rights of individuals. Mr. Nimigan, if you wish to see the city face court challenges under sections 2b, 2c, and 24 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then by all means please move forward with your plans to act as arbiter of cultural hygiene for the city of Hamilton.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Thai Memory fundraiser @ Pepperjacks Café
Once known for its fantastic Victorian, Edwardian, and modern architecture, downtown Hamilton has been garnering some media attention south of the border for the degree to which city council has allowed its heritage to decay. The architectural legacy of the city of Hamilton was built with steel money. Now it seems that the decline of the industry parallelled city council’s conscious decision to feign blindness and neglect to enforce the property standards legislation already in place to protect older structures. The collapse of the Tivoli in the summer of 2004 marked the beginning of public awareness of this issue. More recently, the collapse and controversial demolition of the Balfour Building on the Lister Block suggests that the city endeavours to maintain its unstated policy of “Demolition by Neglect”.
One notable consequence of the Balfour’s tragic end is the economic plight of local businesses along King William. Where the city falters, small business people and grassroots community organizations have attempted to restore the downtown to its former glory. It is shameful that the city has repeatedly stressed the need for private enterprise to restore downtown and then allowed positive economic developments in the core to flounder as a result of council’s own inability to demonstrate the leadership necessitated by their legal mandate. After having a successful first year of operations, the Thai Memory restaurant, located adjacent to the Balfour site, has had to close as the demolition process slowly continues. The restaurant’s owners Toon and Pat Satasuk have worked very hard to ensure a top-flight dining experience. Now their efforts are stalled as the city finally begins to get its act together on this matter.
Positive communities do not neglect their member citizens. As such, Pepperjacks Café, also located on King William, is hosting a benefit concert on Friday evening to raise money to assist the Satasuks through this financially difficult transition. Performers include the very capable Sarah Good and Terra Lightfoot, Annie Shaw, legend-in-the-scene Mark Raymond, and the always-amusing Matt Jelly. DJ sets from Jeremy Greenspan of the Junior Boys and scene-stealer Gary Buttrum will keep your ass moving well into the evening hours.
Pepperjacks Café
Friday, May 23: 9 PM
38 King William Street
Monday, May 12, 2008
30 / 30 -- Thirty Years of Hamilton Artists Inc
This video was initially six metres wide by two and a half metres tall, and had separately-edited intertitles. The audio was initially presented in a three-channel discreet mono format with stereo music accompaniment.
Without prejudice toward the previous fifty, I am fond of the last twelve minutes of the video.
Now 30 / 30 can be watched in a crappy online version, taken from a DVD source that I made a year and a half ago. The text remains readable on lower-resolution monitors, but is a bit small for 1680 or 1920. Frankly, some sacrifices need to be made to ensure a large distribution with a minimal cost. Perhaps I will format this for a 60 by 90 pixel cellphone to make the film eminently portable and completely unwatchable. Then I would surely feel as though the video had "made it".
Notes from the DVD:
30 / 30
a video by Quintin Hewlett, done in 2006
30 / 30 is an impressionistic celebration of art as it is practised in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. The impetus for this video project was to document the 30th anniversary of Hamilton Artists Inc., which is one of the oldest and most influential artist-run centres in Canada.
Diverging memories, artist feuds, technical issues – the loss of the audio masters to the digital ether, a continuously degrading camera – and reluctant or reclusive participants served to obscure an easy description of the Inc.
A polyphonous dialogue emerged from the ruined attempt at linear narrative. It was decided that any representation of the Inc. would not be authentic if it did not attempt to contain the various agreements, innuendos, discord, observations, myths, and political positioning between the members of the Inc.’s democracy.
An interview between two artists of the Inc.’s “second generation” in the 1990s is the structural locus for 30 / 30. This interview was itself structured upon the board game Trouble, which was chosen to serve as an aesthetic distillation of the interview process as well as a gag intended for Inc. insiders, for whom the two players represent the “troubling” of the Inc. The filmmaker chose to himself participate by the rules of the game being played, typically in the form of camera movement and thematic juxtaposition between events in the game and images juxtaposed in the other video field.
The video ends with two gestures of disruption, one material and the other symbolic. Alternately, they are optimistic and pessimistic toward the future success of Hamilton Artists Inc. The filmmaker intended this ambivalence to avoid the principle difficulty inherent to any “career retrospective”, namely that the summation of past glories suggests a decidedly inglorious future.
The video here presented was initially formatted for a large-screen and wide-stereo-image presentation at the Hamilton Artist Inc. gallery for December 2005 and May 2006. Fonts and graphics were resized for better display on conventional televisions, and the audio has been reduced from one stereo background music source and three discreet mono interview sources to one stereo image. Headphone monitoring is highly recommended.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Woodhands @ Pepperjack's Café
Woodhands at Pepperjack's Café, May 3, 2008
handheld camera, ambient sound and lighting, beer
P + C = Woodhands, qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
T H & B closing performances
a brief document of the closing performances of T H & B, May 3, 2008
performers, in order of appearance:
Tor Lukasik-Foss
Lesley Loksi Chan
Reinhard Reitzenstein & Gayle Young
Dave Hind
handheld camera, ambient sound and lighting
P + C = qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008
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