The Internship - A Vision of a Google World

The Internship is a 2013 comedy directed by Shawn Levy, written by Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern, and produced by Vaughn and Levy. The film stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. It is a lighthearted look at the labor market and generational politics, with a light romance background story. It is not going to be a classic in the future, but it does have a lot to say about the sort of world we would have if Google defined culture. I am thinking about the combined vision of society and production it presents. The title itself is a giveaway I suppose but the deeper I get into the film I see it as an account of the working conditions and social order that organizations such as Google would like to see as standard in the world.

Obviously competing for jobs. But this competition also includes identity. Because to quote the film; "sometimes the most radical move is to be yourself". This self is defined by senseless hard work and no fixed status. The self also has a physical dimension, and the dinner between the Aussie executive and Owen's character defines what a jerk is: with "A moment on the lips forever on the hips" - bodies are people.

The only way to be educated is by paying for tuition (as two strippers tell us) or attending corporate colleges (Google Campus, the scene of most of the story). Its about 'hard work' and not "a fancy education". The often referred to University of Phoenix or as they call it in the film "the Harvard of the Internet" is real and "offers campus and online degree programs, certificate courses, and individual online classes":

"The University of Phoenix (UOPX) is an American for-profit institution of higher learning, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, United States. The university has an open-enrollment admission policy, requiring a high-school diploma, GED, or its equivalent as its criterion for admissions. The university has 112 campuses worldwide and confers degrees in over 100 degree programs at the associate, bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree levels. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apollo Group Inc., a publicly traded (NASDAQ: APOL) Phoenix-based corporation that owns several for-profit educational institutions." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix

Failure is described in the sauna scene as a flawed information footprint. Working in a strip club while studying to be a dental hygienist is success, as the money falls from the air in one scene with the pole dancers. But not having a straight story online is a huge problem:

"Google has singlehandedly cut into my ability to bullshit" "
"Cramping your style?"
"Making you a better person?"

"Yes"

The need for a registered and monitored presence online is emphasized in the Google Help sequence. Firstly Google Online help is only available to business customers. There is no direct online support for non-paying customers. But the character who does not log in and therefore his work does not exist is part of the hegemony of sanctioned and controlled information.

The society of The Internship is not about inclusive places, social positions or even people. Its about progress through the artificial creation of needs. It is defined by the line in the film "We've had lots of jobs but we are trying to build a future here".

I associate the surveillance and corporate governance of The Internship with the emerging Trans Pacific Partnership, whereby production is governed by the beliefs that;

"commits the parties not to set or use labor or environmental laws or practices either for trade protectionist purposes nor to weaken such laws or practices to encourage trade and investment" (http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/145583.pdf p13). 

Its a free market for labor and environmental laws. When the competing interns in the film approach a mom and pop pizza place to advertise with Google, the line they take to sell the service is about a form of globalization we are increasingly familiar with today:

"Hasn't the neighborhood gotten a little bit bigger?"

"We're not asking you to abandon the artistry, we are asking you to expand the reach"

"All waiting at the click of a button"

Its a disturbing vision where everything is channeled through the search engine and all alternative forms of organization and regulation are void. Information may be power. But all information is reality.

(BTW - Flashdance, a meme in the film The Internship, came out in 1983. On January 1 1983 the migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially completed  and this is considered to be the beginning of the true Internet).

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Triumph of the Dandy

"Harking back to a time when people really believed that splendour and refinement were states of the soul, not mere acts of display" - Mick LaSalle, The Spectator

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a film that presents a dandy in immaculate proportions. The cologne aficionado extraordinaire and lover of mature women Monsieur Gustave H. is played by Ralph Fiennes. Gustav H. is a study in Libertine Dandyism. Exactly how it is so I would like to explain here.

Firstly, the film The Grand Budapest Hotel is a work of fantasy and escapism, but it has two clear  underlying concepts that are steel-hard in a fluffy glove of old-world class, etiquette and delicate pastries. Firstly is the idea of tolerance. The film is laced with tension points that seem to show the cruel injustice of intolerance. Violence is never far behind when someone judges someone else as being 'wrong' in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Secondly, the film features a Europe that is imagined by people who do not live here (i.e. Americans). In the film Europe is a place where disfigured but beautiful young women make pastries by hand in ancient buildings, it is snowing all the time, fluctuating war is constant between almost indistinguishable ideologies (all based on cruelty), the aristocracy are remote, aloof and dazzling and eccentricity is widespread. Its a bit like if Baron von Münchhausen took over Disneyland during a particularly long and bitter winter in the Bavarian Alps and made it an adults only theme park. This is the cynical version of what is a charming and due to the underlying message of tolerance, brilliant film. But I am most interested in the return in these barren times of the dandy.



M. Gustav H is the concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel and his word is law in the establishment. 

Concierge: 1640s, from French concierge "caretaker, doorkeeper, porter" (12c.), probably from Vulgar Latin *conservius, from Latin conservus "fellow slave," from com- "with" (see com-) + servius "slave" (see serve (v.)). 

M. Gustav H likes the ladies, old/er rich blonde ladies. Gustav H also enjoys tailored clothes, perfumes, food, drink and the society of his peers. He lives alone in modest circumstances within the hotel, eating his meals (often simple affairs of bread and soup, alone. But society is important for Gustav H. Apart from his women, workers and friends he belongs to a secret society, The Society of Crossed Keys, a network across Europe made up of the concierges of the best hotels. The members of The Society of Crossed Keys assist each other regarding their concierge work and get help regarding any difficulties they may find themselves in. Gustav H. is loyal to his values and colleagues (preserving an order of class and occupation). He twice risks his life for "my lobby boy" who is an immigrant is menaced by fascist thugs. Gustav H. also states he "goes to bed with all my friends" and is of the view that "there still are faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity." This civilization is the code of the Dandy.

A gentleman is cultured to the point of refinement, but a dandy is cultured to the point of decadence. To alleviate his boredom, he will often grow overstated, perverse, toying with vulgarity. The dandy is responsible to no one other than himself. Being consistently well-mannered is far too bourgeois for the dandy: he holds to the more aristocratic character, in that he often feels himself above such workaday concerns as manners and accountability. In order to avoid being thought banal or trite, he becomes impossible to predict: tender and kind one moment, cold and cruel the next. He has transcended any dowdy middle-class notions of what 'refinement' is. There are good reasons why the dandy was reviled: he was a self-absorbed, egotistical, useless prick. Nineteenth century books are rife with this dandy vs. gentleman distinction, even having adjoining pictures of each species for clarification. (The Dandy as Libertine)

The inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel is the work and reputation of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, letter writer, biographer, socialite, commentator and essayist. George Prochnik, the author of the forthcoming book, “The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World” reports that early on, when the writer resided in his first bachelor-pad in Vienna, he enjoyed entertaining guests. Zweig served them “liquors sprinkled with gold leaf in rooms that were buried in books and painted a deep red that one friend described as the color of the blood of 4,000 beheaded Saxons. Rich, handsome, a dreamy sensualist who chain-smoked Virginia cigars and once had an essay he penned about Handel printed entirely on silk, Stefan Zweig was the quintessential dandy cosmopolite.” (From Greg Archer)

The Grand Budapest Hotel’s production notes contain an essay, entitled “The Cosmopolitan Apocalypse of Stefan Zweig,” by George Prochnik, which may help explain—more than the film itself—why Anderson is attracted to Zweig. It argues: “Today, when governmental surveillance and the official documentation of every aspect of existence are once again multiplying so aggressively that many people feel their core individuality to be threatened, Stefan Zweig’s impassioned pursuit of personal freedom seems more relevant than ever. His anguished existence of exile has lessons for us all about the values of civilization that we should be fighting to save in our own time” (From Joanne Laurier).

These values are emphasized and exemplified in the dandy. The dandy personified in contemporary times is Sebastian Horsley, recently deceased. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Horsley;

Sebastian Horsley - Dandy in the Underworld.

Consumption and Distribution of Audio Culture in the Global Online Marketplace

I know this is regressive, but I still love it. The Black Angels, Don't Play With Guns (fuzz and thunder)

"Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming a universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority" Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life p. xvii.

Online streaming of music is becoming the normal mode of consumption in many communities. Streaming removes the accidental element of finding music that was present with Mp3 blogs and once upon a time, record shops. Even the Forced Exposure catalog allows you to mix and match. On programs such as Spotify there are recommendations for similar music, based on record label classification -  in other words holding you pretty much in the structure determined by the companies that are taking 70% of proceeds on the service.

Streaming services like Spotify were always an attempt to find a business model that could function to the satisfaction of the labels in the infected climate of what was supposed to be 'post-Pirate Bay' marketplace, following the conviction of the three main players behind it. It was the publishing companies, studio owners and major record labels that wanted the Pirate Bay stopped and for a model to be introduced that would continue a capital flow in a market dominated by the Internet. Spotify founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon were in the right place at the right time. This does not solve the problem of artists not making money or "the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself".

“We’re punks because we’re restless,” Ek said recently. “We’re punk but in a positive way. What we’re about is trying to build something for the long term… Our mission is to bring all the music to every single person on the planet.” What would this entail, bringing "all the music to every single person on the planet”? It would basically lock us into a muzak-style delivery system where blandness is added to every note.

If all the music is available, what about the music that is not? There will always be music that is beyond the reach of easy delivery (thank goodness!) such as that brought to us by musicologist Christopher Kirkley who has put out two albums of Saharan cell phone music, under his excellent label Sahel Sounds. Mr Kirkley has to travel, and search and work for this music to be more accessible for more people. If it was otherwise, the music would not be the same as it is today, a voyage into the far sonic realms that bring the mind into a new experience. This still relies on the Internet, but it does so with a Do It Yourself (DIY) aesthetic that runs true of many folk cultures and genuine marginal communities, such as the Punks of 77.


Punk was about finding a relevant form of musical expression for what (mostly young) people where experiencing in the hard times of 1976-78 (as is depicted in this contemporary German documentary looking at the first wave of punk/anarchist culture in London in 1977). Today the online streaming of music is the same business as always just under a different brand name.  “We’re back to the same revenue levels as during 2004, and if the development continues in the same way we’ll be back on turnover similar to those during the “golden days” of the CD in just a few years,” says Universal Music Sweden’s MD Per Sundin.

Recently in The Guardian, former front-person with Talking Heads and leading figure in the second-wave of (New York) punk David Byrne made some dire predictions on how unlimited streaming of music will effect music culture. 

"The inevitable result would seem to be that the Internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left. Writers, for example, can't rely on making money from live performances – what are they supposed to do? Write ad copy?"

As an artist of some success I understand that Mr. Byrne sees the money problem with Spotify as the cornerstone of culture and growth. However I do not think the money problem is where the real danger lies in a service that desires to deliver "all music to everyone".  Streaming music will suck creative content out of the world because could well be the world. It will determine the perimeters for cultural expression. This brings me to my next point.

 Here's to the Future
"Bob Dylan is endlessly cited in discussions of innovation, and you can read about the struggles surrounding the release of Like a Rolling Stone in textbooks like The Fundamentals of Marketing (2007)."

This weekend I discovered two bands that on first listening to I am surprised I liked so much. The Black Angels and Thao and The Get Down Stay Down are two United States, (presently) West Coast acts that do their thing so very very well. The Black Angels have refined the late 1960s fuzz garage guitar sound with psychedelic overwashes to a degree one could have only dreamed of back in the day when we huddled around the latest import release of the Nuggets series (1984-89). The Black Angels revive the instruments (original Rickenbacker guitars,  effects boxes, keyboards...it must have cost a fortune), the images (psychedelic posters include the image of Nico as their logo) and the hippie trippy lifestyle with lyrics like

I hear colors running through my mind
I can feel it dripping in my eyes
I see colors ancient spectrum lives
In through me they enter, make me shine
So bright.

We could be in San Francisco without the conflicts and causes. The music of The Black Angels is exciting the first time your hear it. But I have found after a listening a few times it sticks in your head, but does not give anything new, and it follows a very predictable pattern.

Thao and The Get Down Stay Down are an equally brilliant, super-tight, folk-noise outfit that present poetic songs that soar and swoop on par with classic examples of the genre (Incredible String Band, The Band, The Carter Family, Bob Dylan and more). This is talent, no doubt about it. But it is technical talent  that is well presented and easy to consume. Thao creates quirky videos where she expresses her hipster self ("Thao arrives for the first day of rehearsals with the Get Down Stay Down prepared for anything...except music" - ha ha....because its not just the music, its a life and remember please avoid panic buying).

Similarly if you consider an artist such as Larkin Grimm, we have a timeless attitude to the production of music. When I saw Larkin some years ago, I felt she was channeling Buffy Sainte Marie. I suspect this is a general sense of nostalgia for these and many other contemporary acts (Thinking First Aid Kit etc). Those that take us back are those getting the major promotion. What about the distasteful Robin Thicke, who brings a 1960s gender politic with him, and he even looks and sounds the part as well.

When we listen to these acts that draw so heavily on some of the past high points of mass musical consumption are we paying for the museum? Is this consumption are the streaming services becoming more like the museum of music, in an attempt to get us back to "the 'golden days' of the CD". If this means forcing people to listen to the same music they were listening to in 1989 (CR-R was marketed in 1990), then that is what the labels seem willing to do. I believe this is what will kill real original creativity. Not ready availability, the creation of a mass minority, to evoke de Certeau again from my opening quote, and a resulting softening of edges and a mixing of styles for the purposes of marketing. It becomes a question of collecting a certain number of cultural signifiers and you have a 'edgy' act, as is refelected in (the serious I think) comment from the below video:

banjo? check
gang vocals? check
bearded man? check
groundbreaking.

However, I will continue listening to Thao and The Get Down Stay Down and The Black Angels as what they do is great, I would even say they are reassuring in these uncertain times (that is the idea I suppose). But I am worried we will see more culture that uses old tools, old tunes, old structures old images to reach present-day paying (trapped?) audiences. While more contemporary art forms and creative movements (such as remix) are forced offline and underground. This is a mass conservatism that does not have renewal as part of it structure. It recycles on and on and on edlessly (like a copy of Mojo Magazine). There is no change. I believe a lot of Indie labels share this gloomy perspective as they attempt to find a niche with some degree of originality in a hostile market. In the streaming world the DIY of classic punk is replaced by senseless name-dropping that means an image is as about as deep as the rebellion becomes, and associated renewal, goes by the wayside. Attitude is replaced by lifestyle, and hope by ambition. This says nothing about the times we live in today.

Thao and The Get Down Stay Down - We The Common (Live)

Hipster versus Dandy

Inner-City Style- Redfern, Sydney circa 1996 (For 2 years I lived in the room on the platform behind the weather balloon)

Since the year 2000 I have been seconded away raising kids and working in one of the more remote parts of the world, in a small town that did not have a very stratified social milieu. A month ago I moved to the big city and frankly it has been a shock. Apart from the pleasures of urban life, while I have been away a culture has developed around the inner city of the Hipster. The hipster phenomenon has provoked some reflection for me regarding; what was I when I was 23? When I was younger I lived the whole bohemian inner city warehouse, communal life. I tattooed myself and dressed according to my own variation on fashion. But I remember distinct differences to the inner-city culture of cool (Brisbane/Sydney/Amsterdam/London/Stockholm) in the mid-1990s than how it appears today.

Fashion in mind - me circa 1995.

The inner-city of my youth was more dandy than hipster. Although I believe I came into the early manifestation of hipster, just prior to the Internet launching a thousand YouTube bands and fashion and CD-r labels. The networked culture of contemporary hipster robs it of its earlier radicalism circa 1947. For my youth poverty was an attribute rather than a stigma. Experience was an asset to be guarded and used when necessary rather than a badge. One's social circle was centred on the bar or band you attended or following from personal connections on a local level. We were politically engaged on the level of everyday life. The food coop, market,  the recycling centre, the gallery and the dealer were monumental points for social organization. The festival took precedent over the café. Happenings were inherited from earlier counter cultures and being a musician did not necessarily mean you played an instrument (I drove the van for a band and wrote lyrics for their singer). Education was regarded generally with suspicion. While I had been to university, the cooler kids in Newtown, Sydney came from the School of Life (I am still trying to apply for a faculty position with this famed institution). 

While reflecting upon the proto-hipster I think may have been, I thought about the other great inner-city creature of the early 21st century; the contemporary dandy. The nonchalance one attributes to the dandy was often valued over the performance of the hipster in my youth. Hedonism, nihilism and creativity were parts of the culture I participated in. These today are not part of the conformity and political correctness of the hipster.

Contemporary dandy Sebastian Horsley (1962 – 2010) imparts his wisdom

("The author of his own misfortune")

Hipster

"Hipster refers to a subculture of young, recently settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers that appeared in the 1990s. The subculture is associated with independent music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, Apple products, liberal or independent political views, alternative spirituality or atheism/agnosticsm and alternative lifestyles." - Wikipedia

- Buys expensive second-hand clothes in 'Retro Shop' that is called Vintage (often they are actually new)

- Follows music and fashion from blogs, Internet radio, webzines, magazines, films, and television.

- Overly conscious of peer grooming; while the hipster attempts to project an air of anarchistic disregard the level of conformity among hipsters is frightening (see following video)


- The hipster congregates in specific neighbourhoods, seeking out the approval of their peers and driving up real estate prices. Globalization is not on the hipster agenda.

- The hipster avoids danger.

Dandy

"A dandy (also known as a beau or gallant is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of Self." Wikipedia

- Has clothes made or simply acquires them via channels of generosity or neglect.

- Does not follow

- Is anachronistic in a disregard for politics, culture, society, law, philosophy and identity, distilling all into a life of desire and the pursuit of beauty.

- The dandy is at home anywhere and nowhere.

- the dandy likes danger

I would like to see a return to danger and exploration with inner-city culture. I don't think this will happen while the hipster culture hijacks peoples youth in the pursuit of image and spectacle.

Motherboard TV: Douglas Rushkoff in Real Life

For someone who likes to talk about the virtues of disconnecting, the media critic Douglas Rushkoff seems surprisingly always on. When I visited him at his storefront office near his home in Hastings on Hudson, New York, he was preparing to teach a new class, getting ready for a BBC interview, writing an essay, staring down a pile of articles to read, trying to figure out his new iPhone, and hurrying to finish his third book in three years – a graphic novel called ADD, which revolves around gaming culture, celebrity and the pharmaceutical industry. “It also asks the question,” he says, “what if attention deficit disorder weren’t a bug, but a feature?”

The hyper-speed hyperlinked life is familiar ground for Rushkoff, whose first book Cyberia, made him a popular tour guide to the Internet in the early 1990s, and an early prognosticator of its radical potential. But much has changed between the awkward days of “the ’Net” – then a non-commercial collection of public networks, accessed by local ISPs – and the overloaded era of Facebook, YouTube and iPhones. If Rushkoff is well versed in the language underneath the “digital revolution,” he’s also become one of its most outspoken critics.

“A society that looked at the Internet as a path toward highly articulated connections and new methods of creating meaning is instead finding itself disconnected, denied deep thinking, and drained of enduring values,” Rushkoff writes in 2010’s Program or Be Programmed. His remedy is simple, if ambitious: once people begin to understand how software works, “they start to recognize the programs at play everywhere else – from the economy and education to politics and government…All systems have embedded purposes. The less we recognize them, the more we mistake them for given circumstances."

Understanding how things work In order to make them work better is the basic hacker ethos, but Rushkoff has applied it to his broader discussion of the way the culture and politics of the many are driven by the interests of the few. Between his landmark Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool to his recent book Life Inc., Rushkoff has indexed the risks that capitalism and corporate influence pose to democratic society. Or, to extend the metaphor, he’s sought to show how we the users routinely get screwed by an “operating system” that’s over 500 years old.

“We’re leveraged in so many ways, it’s like, our economy is leveraged to produce more than it can in order for it to survive,” he says. “It’s leveraged to grow. Human beings are financially leveraged now. So how do you roll that back and say, well, you know, ‘this is it’?” Or, rather, “How do you get the good of a zombie apocalypse without the zombies? That’s sort of what I’m trying to help people with.”

Enter Occupy. Rushkoff has watched the movement with cautious optimism, penning editorials on CNN and organizing November’s Contact Con, a powwow of net roots activists and open source hackers working to foster new civic-minded apps and hardware. To include prizes, Rushkoff enlisted the help of Pepsi, which ultimately granted $10,000 to the Free Network Foundation, which was profiled in our recent documentary.

Rather than shun corporate sponsors, Rushkoff revels in what they bring to the table, and in the contradictions of the movement. Occupy’s power, ultimately, is its meme — the idea that a citizenry can not only protest the system but demonstrate a new way of responding to it and reworking it. Like his call to program, Occupy’s nebulous mission may be hard to swallow or carry out. But that also lends it its own kind of power, he says. Its radical promise isn’t unlike the earlier Internet’s: a distributed and open system that could change civic discourse and remake culture.
But as on the strange battlefield of the Internet, Occupy could also crash against its own giant ambitions, which will be heavily tested in the next few months, starting with next week’s “general strike”. Progress will have to be made gradually, says Rushkoff. “There are ways to slowly move towards a sustainable life path, and it’s just a matter of doing that, and I’m hoping that more people in Occupy start seeing it that way – in that more subtle way, rather than exclusively in the kind of activist, let’s-get-pepper-sprayed by cops way.”

Much has changed in the decades since Rushkoff started critiquing the system. But his philosophy is still animated by a big question, one that applies not only to the digital spaces of the Internet, built by the Facebooks and the Googles, but to other kinds of “public” spaces too, in town squares, Congress, and culture: who programmed these spaces, and to what ends, and how can they be hacked into something better?

Visualizing the Decline of Empires

This is mainly an experimentation with soft bodies using toxi's verlet springs.
The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline.

More on that project mondeguinho.com/master/visual-experiment ations/visualizing-empires

TechGnosis and Symmetry

In talking about Erik Davis, one can't help but talk of hybrids, things crashing into each other and having mutant children, millennial mixes of the ancient and the modern, often quite fringe but distinctly new. Davis floats in a very twenty-first century subcultural style, a mèlange of futurism and primitivism, call it cybermysticism or as Davis does "techgnosis".
Mission by Anais Lunet, Alexandre Bailly
Look at this mission also on Check-in Architecture website http://www.checkinarchitecture.com/mission/59 or on Google Earth http://www.checkinarchitecture.com

Here's an incident of the coincidental. Leaving my office on Friday for the Christmas break I tuned to my rather packed bookshelves to choose a book to read. I wanted to read one from the backlog that I have been meaning to read for a while but work (thesis) has prevented me from doing so. I grabbed Erik Davis' TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, which has literally been on my shelf for over a year on a never ending revolving loan from the library. I started reading it yesterday and to say I am enjoying it is an understatement. Then, a magazine arrived in the mail today, Arthur is its name. It comes from San Francisco and it is very 'groovy'. I have been reading Arthur online, from the blog and website for a long while. I ordered a paper copy two weeks ago maybe (things move slowly in San Fran??) but I was nonetheless so glad to see it today. And whose name is on the front cover, you guessed it, Erik Davis: Trance Planet: The Analog Life, Arthur issue 31

Digital Islam

I just joined Digital Islam: Research on Middle East, Islam and Digital Media. I am expecting to be happy I did. It looks like an amazing site and community of scholars and resources. One thing that stuck me is the long list of video games dealing with images of Islam and the Middle East. The above image is taken from Kuma War - Battle in Sadr City. Kuma, the company making the game, is affiliated with Stars and Stripes magazine and Military Spot, the US army's web portal. The critical reading of such games should be an essential skill developed in language and cultural studies education today.
The reason behind my contact with Digital Islam is the submission of an abstract for a paper (Digital Space and Religion: Representing the Sacred in 3D Virtual Worlds) for the conference “Changing Societies – Values, Religions, and Education” here at Umeå University next year (June 9-13). I recommend it to anyone interested in the subjects:

At present societal changes take place in societies worldwide. As a result of this, issues related to value changes surface. Issues related to democracy, to identities, cultures and ethnicity are brought to the fore. Through migration, the patterns of religious activities are also changing. The presence of citizens with more varied religious affiliations, some with new understandings of the role that religions play in society, poses new questions to respond to. Gender relations are another societal area where changes are taking place. The roles of women and men – or girls and boys – and equity between them have become crucial issues and are nowadays complexly interwoven with the others mentioned above.

Free Culture Game

Italian artists Molleindustria promise "radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment," and their latest effort may be their most direct statement against the pleasure industry to date. Touted as "playable theory," the Free Culture Game offers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art. A circular field represents The Common, where knowledge can be freely shared and created; your job is to maintain a healthy ecology of yellow idea-bubbles bouncing from person to person before they can be sucked into the dark outer ring representing the forces of The Market. Your cursor, shaped like the Creative Commons logo, pushes the ideas around with a sort of reverse-magnetic repulsion field (a clever alternative to the typical shooting, eating or jumping-on-top-of-and-smooshing actions of many other 2-D games).

Troyano: Digital Art and Culture

Troyano is a collective of independent Chilean artists from Santiago, which organizes cultural activities relative to art and technology. TROYANO formed in 2005 to do interdisciplinary research on art and digital culture. Their recent publication, Art and Digital Culture, brought together work from contributors as diverse as artists and theorists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia, and the U.S. This publication grew out of two major conferences TROYANO organized in 2005 and 2006 with the support of the Spanish Cultural Center and the Museum of Contemporary art in Santiago, Chile: Elena (2005) and Updating, Art and Technology (2006).

Toryano want to propose in the contemporary Chilean society a debate on the “creative” use of media in opposition to a purely economic, utilitarian and commercial vision of technology diffusion. Chile has been in close commercial relationships with Japan, Taiwan (and now China) for decades, it's an important copper producer (the copper is a fundamental component to produce technology) and it has been always projected to a reliable and dynamic “modernity” (but also neo-free trader and reassuring for Western Countries) so the critical position of the Troyano group is an unfounded position.

A Video of TROYANO presenting their bilingual publication, Art and Digital Culture, at CRCA on UCSD campus, on Tuesday, May 29th 2007. (Realplayer, 1.23 mins) An interesting insight into Latin American digital media activism and cultural actions presented in English.

TROYANO: CRITICAL CHILE NEAR AT THE FUTURE (a text interview of three of four components of this group - formed by Ignacio Nieto, Italo Tello, Ricardo Vega ed Alejando Albornoz)

Remix: A Scenario on Kurtz

This is draft post I stumbled on this morning. I tidied it up a bit (sort of) and here it is, in the half light of day:

Ok, Consider this. I would like to try to follow a particle, an idea, an image through a sequence of narrative manifestations as remix. Lets take the figure of the lone rebel lost in the other, the man who knows morals but is immoral:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

T.S Eliot made references to Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) in his poem The Hollow Men. A central theme of both works is the morality that goes with (or is absent in) power. In Heart of Darkness power is contrasted with what is alluded to as the biblically constructed Agapē (IPA: /ˈægəpiː/[1]) (Gk. αγάπη):

We talked of everything," he said, quite transported at the recollection.
"I forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last an hour.
"Everything! Everything, of love, too."
"Ah, he talked to you of love!," I said, much amused.
"It isn't what you think," he cried almost passionately. "It was general. He made me see things--things." (Heart of Darkness)

Kurtz, as we all know, 'lives' on:



T.S Eliot published The Hollow Men in 1925. In this video from Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), in a scene deleted from the original cut (1979), Kurtz (Marlon Brando) reads the first stanza of Eliot's poem. The themes of The Hollow Men are well known but can be summarized for the purposes of my narrative trace with a paragraph from Jeff Willard:

A full, line-by-line annotation of Mr. Eliot's poem is painfully tedious and, I believe, robs the poem of its intended final effect. The reader feels an overall mood of disgust laced with pity for these men, who, upon realizing their imminent damnation, make one final lunge at salvation. But the impetus of their effort is not a thirst after salvation for salvation's sake, but rather a fear of damnation. However, a general understanding of some of the more important allusions and the progression of the poem lends a great deal to the enjoyment of this masterpiece. Literary Allusion in "the Hollow Men" By Jeff Willard

Now we fast foward to The Proposition (2005) a film written by Australian cultural icon Nick Cave. In The Proposition three brothers are pitted against one another in the unforgiving space of the colonial Australian outback in 1880s. One brother, Charlie Burns, must find and kill his older brother Arthur if the younger brother, 16year old Mikey is to be spared execution. Arthur is the Kurtz of The Proposition having gone into the interior, befriended the natives and committed several acts of extreme violence. Arthur has taken on the near spiritual dimensions of Mista Kurtz:

Jellon Lamb: [speaking about Arthur Burns] "We are white men, Sir, not beasts. Oh, he sits up there in those melancholy hills; some say he sleeps in caves like a beast, slumbers deep like the Kraken. The Blacks say that he is a spirit. The Troopers will never catch him. Common force is meaningless, Mr. Murphy, as he squats up there on his impregnable perch. So I wait, Mr. Murphy. I wait.

Charlie has three opportunities to kill Arthur. The morality of the situation, institutional power over life and death, blood being thicker than water, the value of life and the power relations of colonialism are all themes in The Proposition.

The questions raised by The Hollow Men, the cavity left by the morally bereft, are answered in a soliloquy by Arthur to his brother, who has been sent to murder him by the allegedly moral forces of frontier establishment (the police):

Arthur Burns: Love. Love is the key. Love and family. For what are night and day, the sun, the moon, the stars without love, and those you love around you? What could be more hollow than to die alone, unloved?

Between the publication of Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Proposition (2005) 106 years pass. There are many other texts that take up the themes of humanity interconnected, the power of some over others and the morality of dominion (see The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda) and I think there of course will be more. The transmission of the narrative image of Mista Kurtz through the 106 years is not just intertextual as it develops and changes, takes on a life of its own. The questions raised by Kurtz/Arthur remain the same. A textuality that moves beyond the page or screen needs to be constructed for us to account for the life and legend of Kurtz remaining so powerful now in the 21st Century. This textuality I am tempted to call Remix.

Canonization of the Sixty Eight Generation

As I write in the dark of the Scandinavian night, on the other side of the Atlantic the Super Tuesday thing is unfolding. It is interesting and I am looking forward to finding out winners and so on in the morning. What just occurred to me is that Hillary Clinton was born in 1947, Barack Obama in 1961 and John McCain in 1936. These birth dates really cast a defining form around each of the characters in this democratic drama. But what made a connection for me was a discussion I had with two collegues the other day at the lunch table.
It was point out in the conversation that we are now watching the formation of a cannon from the culture that has been produced by and has accompanied those born in the 1940s. Just off the top of my head I can think of several figures I have encountered in media and conversation just in the last few days that I believe represent part of this canonically body:

Serge Gainsborough (b. 1928)
Dorris Lessing (b. 1919)
Bob Dylan (b. 1941)
Gianni Versace (b. 1946)
Iggy Pop (b. 1947)
Rudi Dutschke (b. 1940)
Cornelis Vreeswijk (b. 1937)
Germaine Greer (b. 1939)

Of course the list could on and on. The point I am vaguely trying to make is that a generation is moving on to the next (and perhaps final stage) of its enormous influence over cultural and (perhaps...we'll know tomorrow) political life with the retirement of many from the 1940s set. Those (very few) that manned the barricades in 68, those more numerous that took up the fashions and attitudes of Dylan, Gainsborough, Versace (when they had more money in the 80s) and those many who served in the military and worked hard through the 70s are now settling down to relax and enjoy their pensions. The outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election will perhaps be a transitional event between the generation that has been in power since they took over from their parents and grandparents in the 1970s and 80s, and those who came of age in the 80s and began being heard in the 1990s. The cannon of works that have been so important to the generation born in the decade around World War II will be in a state of flux over the coming years but it seems to be now starting to set around the edges. Those who built it will no doubt be making use of it in their final years. I wonder what is on Obama's iPod?

Nick Cave: Dostoevskian Hero?

"Dostooevky's hero is a déclassé member of the intelligentsia, cut of from cultural tradition, from the soil and the earth, a representative of an 'accidental tribe'. Such a person enters into special relations with the idea: he is defenseless before it and its power, for he is rooted in objective reality and is deprived of any cultural tradition. He becomes a 'person of the idea,' a person possessed by an idea. An idea for him becomes an idea-force, omnipotently defining and distorting his consciousness and his life. The idea leads an independent life in the hero's consciousness: in fact it is not he but the idea that lives, and the novelist describes not the life of the hero but the life of the idea in him; the historian of the 'accidental tribe' becomes 'the historiographer of the idea.' M. M. Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsvky's Poetics, p22.

Free TV and the Monkees

At the moment the Swedish public television station SVT is running an advertising campaign about how it is politically and economically independent and therefore 'Free'. I am not sure it is as simple as that (i.e. the people pay therefore we can say anything), but I agree there is an integrity to the public broadcaster in Sweden that is important. However, I have encountered similar levels of 'Independence' in other state run media services in other countries that while they do not favor individual concerns such as business' they do follow national agendas and conform to concepts of 'common sense'- which leads me to my next topic.



The soundtrack to one of the ads being run by SVT is Circle Sky by the Monkees from 1968. Not only is it a great tune, it comes from one of the most surreal psychedelic films produced in the 1960's. An underground classic that rates with other psychadelic films produced which involved Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Roger Corman; Wild Angels, The Trip, Psych-Out,

Head (1968) begins (without any opening credits) at the dedication of a bridge. After a politician struggles with constant feedback with his microphone as he tries to give a speech, the Monkees suddenly interrupt the ceremony by running through the assembled officials, to the sound of various horns and sirens. The rest of the film is essentially plotless, a seemingly stream of consciousness stringing-together of musical numbers, satire of various film genres, elements of psychedelia, and references to topical issues such as the Vietnam War. Trailers for the film summarized it as a "most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, love story, mystery, drama, musical, documentary satire." Some film critics[citation needed] now consider the film to be an allegorical deconstruction of the Monkees' experiences as pawns of the Hollywood starmaking machine that, like their real-life story itself, contains some sinister truths lurking underneath what appears to be a colorful, entrancing facade. Wikipedia

I watched Head many times as a young student in Australia in the late 1980s (along with Easy Rider and a lot of Al Pacino films), as we had a cheap VHS copy of it someone had bought in some closing down video rental. Thinking about it now it was a cut-up or remix and looking at the imdb it seems to have been constructed as such:

The movie's origin was in Ojai, California, where the foursome [the monkees], Bob Rafelson, and Jack Nicholson spent a weekend in a resort motel verbally tossing story ideas into a tape recorder. This became the script for this film.

The SVT campaign today is getting a lot of attention based on its criticism of other media outlets and their ownership structures. However, Head is a strange source for a state broadcaster to appropriate material from, as it depicts a lifestyle that, shall we say, is not really legal in Sweden today. I wonder if the perceived freedom of the 1960's (and the now wealthy demographic that can remember that time) is the target for Circle Sky, "We were free and we can be free again....with SVT." To get some idea of 'where Im coming from..man' here is the theatrical trailer for Head from 1968:

The Speed of 24

Over the weekend I have been reading Interface://Culture - The World Wide Web as Political Resource and Aesthetic Form (so far a great introduction to the subject that would suit a mid to uppper level undergrad course as a text, the Introduction is online). One of the essays in Interface://Culture is A Hard Day's Work: Reflections of the Interfacing and Transmedialization and Speed of 24 by Bo Kampmann Walther. The article argues that "the television series itself is structured according to a logic of games, which revolves around speed - speed could even be considered the the main character or "I" of 24." (205) In light of this idea the video 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot: Jack Bauer saves the world with AOL 3.0. is a brilliant manipulation of the concepts of speed used in 24. The question being, could it work if Jack was relying on a dial-up modem and 0.1 Ghz? For me it also provoked ideas about Fan Fiction and remix and the proximity between the two forms. Here is the video:

Digital Ethnography

This should put things in perspective somewhat. Student numbers are dropping and it is not just due to demographics. Those students that do turn up are are in classrooms that manifest a 100 year old learning system and are often badly resourced. The technology is not going to solve the problem rather the situation has to be modified to accommodate the technology in terms of what the culture/s can teach us. Check out digital ethnography blog at Kansas State University.

Representation and Self-Representation: Arabs and Muslims in Digital Games

Representation and Self-Representation: Arabs and Muslims in Digital Games
by Vit Sisler
This paper presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented in mainstream European and American digital games. It analyzes how games — particularly of the action genre — construct the Arab or Muslim ‘Other.’ Within these games, one finds the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world reconstructed into a series of flat social typologies, often presented within the framework of hostility and terrorism. The second part of the paper deals with selected digital games created in the Middle East, whose authors are knowingly working with the topic of self-representation. Recent digital games originating in the Middle East can be perceived as examples of an ongoing digital emancipation taking place through the distribution of media images and their corresponding meanings. A key part of this ongoing digital emancipation involves the construction of Arab and Islamic heroes, a process accomplished by exploiting distinctive narrative structures and references to Islamic cultural heritage.