The Blog
Entry #6 - South Bend Performing Media Festival
03/20/2025This week I researched artists who presented at the Performing Media Festival in South Bend, Indiana. One thing I immediately noticed was it was difficult to find some of the artists listed, if I could find them at all, since many of them do not have a website or any sort of documentation listing their participation in this festival. An artist that I could find was Salvatore Siriano. Siriano is a video artist, sound artist, and noise musician from Chicago, IL. However, Siriano has not done any writing on his work, and the abstract nature of his pieces make it hard to decipher if there is anything there conceptually. These factors make it appear as if he is only making ‘art for art’s sake’; art which is complacent in the status quo as explicated in the Walter Benjamin essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Hopefully in the future, Siriano will make work that is more conceptually and politically charged, and also engages in shifting the status quo of the neoliberal regime. Mr. Siriano, if you wish to contact me about the conceptual and political nature of your work please feel free to reach out to me on my instagram.
Entry #5 - The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility; Part 1
02/17/2025This week I began reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. There is a lot of theory involved so if you haven’t read it this entry might not make a lot of sense. After reading sections I-IV, I found that Benjamin’s work very much applies to the ongoing removal of the Third Place in society through the means of social media.
Benjamin writes that even the most perfect reproductions are lacking the unique quality of being in the here and now. Similar to reproduced art is unable to capture this quality, the artificial reproduction of community on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. these platforms also lack the authenticity of being in a particular space, at a particular time, with particular people face to face. In the Third Place, the base is often owned by a member of the community found there or even communally owned. In both cases, this is usually someone of the Proletariat, meaning they have similar, if not the same amount of control over the means of production as their fellow Proletariat community members. However, this is not the case with most major social media platforms. Often, this ownership role is filled by a member of the Bourgeoisie while the majority of their users are Proletariat. This dynamic of allowing a member of the ruling class to control the Base of a community also allows them to exploit that community’s superstructure, as well as form it to their will. This could be in the form of selling user data, using users’ output to train AI models, and/or choosing to police certain aspects of their platform in a way that maintains the status quo. I hope to continue to reflect on this concept as I read further; specifically on social media as a tool of production. When that happens, I will make another blog post and expand upon this.
Geordie Greep at Bell’s Eccentric Cafe 02/01/25
Entry #4 - Studio Time Plan
02/03/2025
Currently, my class is working on a VCV Rack patch, and here are some parameters I would like to map to a MIDI controller.
ASDR Gate (All 4)
Waveform
Delay mix
Octave control
OSC cutoff
For my first in-class critique day on March 24th, I want to present a video work. I am still in the early stages of planning the concept, but it will likely explore the intersection of video and pranks. In the weeks leading up to my crit day, I hope to use studio time to edit footage and workshop with my peers to get some in-process critique.
Entry #3 - Reflection on Baraka and Beer
02/02/2025This week, I read 2 different works: Amiri Baraka's “Technology & Ethos” and Stafford Beer's lecture "What is Cybernetics”. (This blog post is a little late because I was sick last week, sorry!)
Baraka’s essay explores Eurocentrism in mainstream technology and, similar to American Artist’s Black Gooey Universe, asks the reader to imagine alternative technology free from these Eurocentric values. One important point that Baraka makes is that “machines are an extension of their inventor-creators.” Even though this essay was written over 50 years ago, it is especially important to consider this as artificial intelligence models are developed and trained in the present day. Who is writing the code for these models? What data are they being trained on? Who produced that data? More often than not, these models project the eurocentric values and conveniences of their white creators and the data that the AI models were trained on.
Beer’s lecture at the University of Valladolid in Spain establishes a definition of cybernetics and how that definition is applied to systems in our society. Contrary to popular beliefs, the definition of cybernetics doesn’t specifically apply to complicated machinery or robots, but rather it is the study of how systems, mechanical or otherwise, are controlled and how the parts within that system communicate with each other.
Beer outlines the origins of the word cybernetics; it comes from a Greek word meaning to steer or to have complete, constant control over a ship’s rudder. One way to achieve this control is through the creation of ultrastability, which is the proactive organization of multiple, redundant failsafes within a system to keep it from stopping or failing. Ultrastability also means that the viability of a system is prioritized at all costs. One more statute that Beer establishes is that “A system is what it does.” With these definitions of cybernetics and ultrastable systems in mind, Beer examines the September 11th, 2001 attacks and how the cybernetic western capitalist system led to these attacks and the following retaliation from the West in the Middle East. The attacks actuated shock and awe across the entirety of the United States, and the fear this generated was used as the grounds for retaliation. In reality, the attacks were actually a result of prior western interference and capitalist exploitation in the Middle East (most notably the Iran-Contra affair and the Gulf War).
A system is what it does, and the ruling class’s active decisions that keep the capitalist system ultrastable and viable often comes at the expense of the working class and to those exploited in countries the system deems inferior. Again, ultrastability means keeping a system viable at all costs, and in this case, “all costs” includes the cost of countless lives and the exploitation of resources, mostly oil, for the benefit of western powers. September 11th, and the retaliatory war in Afghanistan that followed are both consequences of the capitalist system and the wealthy ruling class, who are in constant control of the system, doing what the system is designed to do: exploiting the poor as a means to make the wealthy exponentially richer.
Entry #2 - Reflection on Black Gooey Universe
01/22/2025This week, I watched and read American Artist’s lecture/essay “Black Gooey Universe” (video linked to the left on desktop or above if you’re on mobile). In their lecture, Artist explores the origin of graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, and how they evolved into instruments that exacerbate white supremacy and the wastefulness of capitalism.
One of their most notable observations is how end users have been conditioned to associate the default blank white screen with a blank slate ready for innovation. This concept not only conflates whiteness as the default and as a symbol of sterility and opportunity, but it also is detrimental to the computer’s hardware and energy resources. The additive nature of color in light requires all three lights of an LCD pixel to be activated at full power to reproduce the appearance of office supplies designed for subtractive color use. All this is for the comfort and convenience of the end user who likely does not think critically about the history and ideological grounds of the technology they use on a daily basis.
Artist also draws attention to the “ivory tower” of which western computer technology has been founded. Many of the people who are credited with developing western computer technology are old white guys. One detail that is often overlooked is that these white people are not responsible for the development of computer technology alone, rather they worked with a team to do so; teams which often included non-white developers. Dr. Mark Dean, a Black man who worked with IBM to develop early computers, holds three of IBM’s nine original patents that are still crucial in the development of computer technology today. Dr. Dean’s story is sadly often overlooked due to the perpetuation of white supremacy in our educational institutions.
I am an avid, active user of dark mode on my own personal devices. However many websites are still to this day designed to perpetuate the standard of white negative space. There are programs designed to alter the design of web pages to establish black or another dark color as the background color of otherwise bright, wasteful web design. American Artist’s lecture has compelled me to install one of these programs. It sometimes does not work perfectly, which is slightly upsetting. Many people need programs like this for accessibility reasons, such as increasing the contrast of web elements so that the hard of sight can use them. I urge web developers to consider this as they work, since dark mode is a necessity for some and not just a means of saving power or for comfort reading at night.
Entry #1 - 01/14/2025
Hello chat, welcome to my blog. I made this website for Studio Art 480, and so that is what the blog will be about at the moment. This class is an advanced electronic arts and intermedia course, and the material will mostly be taught horizontally, meaning my peers and I will have the opportunity to teach each other about topics we are personally passionate about.
One topic I would like to give a workshop on in class this semester is VCV Rack. The program is a free, open-source modular synth software that has limitless customization options, and allows users to create their own synth setup, design sounds, and even code their own synth module to alter the final output. I have used VCV Rack before in my sound art class during Fall 2023, but since then I have not gotten the chance to use it again. I am excited to engage in this relearning experience before I give my workshop in the coming weeks.
Here are three things I am interested in exploring this semester:
Sound - Music production is a part of my personal art practice, and I like to experiment with including new techniques in my work. I am prepared to share my knowledge with my peers and I’m more than eager to collaborate with anyone on projects and performances involving sound.
Video - I want to experiment more with touchdesigner and video synthesis live performance. I recently bought a midi controller with many fx dials and think the two would be fun to use together. I’ve been to a lot of DJ sets in the past few months for a photography project and already have ideas on how to incorporate video synthesis into a DJ set, if I were to do one.
Pranks as performance art - This is a topic my professor has brought up in other classes I have taken with her. I am interested in seeing how this can be executed and what ways my peers and I can come up with in order to do so.
To end this entry, I have been asked to provide a definition of what Electronic Art and Intermedia (EAI) is. From my experience, having taken several EAI courses through Michigan State’s art program, EAI is a diverse practice that envelops many mediums of art. It is about embracing and experimenting with technology while empowering artists to find the art in everyday life through EAI’s ideological history in performance art and the Fluxus movement that many of the pioneers of the practice participated in.
Entry #0 - 01/14/2025
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