Hi guys,

Just wanted to leave a link to my blog/project on here incase any of y’all wanted to contribute or just check it out:

articulatedauras.tumblr.com 

-Kelsey

Thank you to the volunteers (all three team projects!) who will present their final projects on Tuesday of next week, in RKC 100. This is where we did our HTML tutorials with Maxwell earlier in the semester. Presenters and non-presenting attendees will earn extra credit, so feel free to come along to watch even if you are not presenting. I have truly enjoyed your immensely thoughtful, creative projects, and (having seen the proposals) have no doubt that these will also be fascinating.

Thanks so much to everyone for such an exciting and energy-filled semester. It was great to work with you and I hope that you all stay in touch. Here’s a parting video to add a little symmetry and holiday cheer to the end of the term:

But convergence culture is nothing if not widely participatory, so there are also 11 more examples here: 12 Days of ‘Gangnam Style’ Christmas Light Displays. Enjoy, and happy holidays!

Art works no longer reside just within the four walls of a 3D gallery or museum but also (and sometimes exclusively) within the limitless confines of the world wide web. The post-internet era has created a new dynamic in the perception, creation, and reception of artistic works across all media.

Questions we now face are those of curation and creation. How does one exhibit work via the internet (utilizing its capabilities of reaching vast audiences) that is just not a picture of a sculpture or a painting? How does one create art that becomes/is intrinsic to the internet?

The internet has opened up incredible access to art works across the globe. From the comfort of my home I can essentially see any great artwork in a matter of seconds.The real complication is new artworks. An artist can now bypass the traditional route of gallery validation by injecting their work into the world wide web and finding their audience across the globe. But this proliferation of art online creates an onslaught of images that users scrap through trying to decipher their own tastes. With sites like flickr, tumblr, and pinintrest we see just that. The user is now an arbiter of taste and judgement. Aggregating countless photos/videos/songs that inspire, represent themselves or appeal to them to show others. These users are curating an aesthetic while also curating themselves. It is a digital gallery of “me”, it is no longer significant who the original source of the image (or in most cases “the image of the image”) was but rather that the user has posted it themselves. Posting “The Mona Lisa” is no longer a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s actual painting but rather a post-modern re-appropriation to the iconography that surronds the image: the Louvre -> Gallery aesthetic -> High culture -> Couture -> Ironic decadence etc. More than just artworks or images it is the collection ideas and the representation of those ideas that these users engage with the digital world.

To think of these users as curators complicates the notion of curators as a whole. Who gives curators the right/authority/clout to become an arbiter of taste and style? The user democratizes this process and by curating images that resonate and reflect themselves they move past curating through the illusion of creating content. While actually just reposting images from elsewhere it is if they are creating it themselves by nature of their accumulation. We come to expect images and posts that center around an aesthetic and therefore see what is new on their site as providing us with new content from them, ergo they take on the role of the artist.

Vierkant’s The Image Object Post-Internet has similar arguments with Benjamin’s in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Art works’ nature changes with the advancement in technology. However, when post-internet not only has increasing reproductive ability, but also incredible recontextualizing ability, what work of art loses is not only its “Aura,” but even its origin.

Vierkant’s claims, “In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author. …For objects after the Internet there can be no ‘original copy.’” She believes that when art work can constantly be edited and recontextualized by its viewers, the “original copy” does not has special value anymore. The artwork is forever in progress and what matters is the empirical interpretation of individual when he or she gets his or her piece of information.

His belief in the progressive nature of art in Post-internet age together with his claim “Art is a social object” in the beginning of the article reminds me of my behavior on Tumblr: Every night before I go to sleep, I choose a picture that I like in Tumblr, reblog it with my own notes. The notes are usually completely irrelevant with the picture, but when I post it I feel like I am  giving the picture some new meaning and I am recreating some thing, because when my friends see my post, they always try to draw some connection between my note and the picture and have an interpretation of my post, which is absolutely not what I meant. In this process, me and my friend basically do not care what is the origin meaning of the picture or who its author is. What we care is only how the post, that is the assemblage of my notes and other’s image fit in our own life. We recreate the image, recontexualize it, and socialize with it. This continue sharing of images in Tumblr is a perfect illustration for Vierkant’s idea of art in process and the absence of its origin and this may explains why “art looks much better on Tumblr”: because we can  all be artists.

I guess my behavior on Tumblr exhibits that I agree with Vierkant’s claim that “objects after the Internet there can be no ‘original copy.’” However, deep down in my heart I am struggling: I do not want to be plagiarizer, and no matter the image I use is relevant to my nots or not, it is the muse of my post, it has the “divine power of inspiration” that I can not deny.

I had already finished the book when Gary came to talk to us, so when he said Eunice becomes the most important/likable character towards the end, I was pretty taken aback. I could be misremembering his words, I know when I questioned him, he seemed pleased there could a dissenting opinion (his being eunice=good).

I thought Gary created Lenny as a likable dufus, the one who constantly frustrates the reader, but whom the reader can’t help but root for. Eunice, and her calculated betrayal of Lenny, never really earned my affection throughout the book like Lenny did. So when she switched teams and started playing on Joshie’s, who embodied a lot of what is wrong with the SUPER SAD(edit:oops) world, I couldn’t help but immediately despise her.

I didn’t really understand what Gary was talking about then, but I couldn’t talk about it due to spoilers, etc.

What did you guys think?

Don’t forget! Monday Dec 3 is the final Close Reading Media session, this time with Keith O’Hara on Infographics.

Tuesday will be the last class session on this novel! You know what to do.

You may also wish to reflect on your meeting with Shteyngart last week. Did meeting him and hearing his ideas about the novel and our current relationships with media and technology influence the way you thought about the remainder of Super Sad True Love Story? What do you think about his own use of a website (including a parodic YouTube video), Facebook and Twitter?

Image via The Guardian

Shteyngart describes the terror of the “rapture” in New York City vividly. There are flames, explosions, lives lost and mass confusion. Even before he obviously references the Freedom tower, I was thinking about my own experiences on 9/11, and the collective reaction of New Yorkers at the time.

Although I was only 9 or 10 at the time, I can remember that day more clearly than almost any other in my life. I walked from P.S 116, in Murray Hill, down to the Williamsburg Bridge with my friend’s Mom and thousands of other New Yorkers, completely clueless, save for the snippets we could catch from local bar televisions. Crossing the bridge, I felt like Lenny on the deck of the ferry. I could see the black, expanding wall of smoke coming from Lower Manhattan, and I didn’t understand why it was happening. Similar, in ways, to how Lenny reacts to the bombing of the ferry his friends are on:

“And then, as the flames bloomed across the ferry’s upper decks, as the John F. Kennedy reared up, split into two, disintegrated into the warm waters, as the first part of our lives, the false part, came to an end, the question we had forgotten to ask for so many years was finally shouted by one husky voice, stage left: “But why?”(248)

It has been said before, but the reaction of New York to 9/11 was one of incredible camaraderie. The firefighters were heroes, everyone cried for everyone they never knew and that black cloud of toxic dust eventually left, leaving only a stained downtown.  There was no twitter, no facebook. On the Williamsburg bridge, my friend’s Mom, Trina, desperately tried to contact her brother who worked downtown, with a cell phone that had an antenna and parts that need to be flipped to function. I felt like everyone was conscious of the heart beating next to them, and was concerned about their family, especially after confirming their own was safe. The fairly callous reaction by many in Super Sad True Love Story (I read ahead, there aren’t any spoilers below don’t worry) is based in the integration of social networking in their society. I’m not relaying anything groundbreaking by suggesting our personality, so attached to our online networks, is making us more narcissistic, and I think it affects the reaction to the attacks. In Super Sad, it seems like those who are least connected care more, care less about their own pleasures. They are less focused on their own rapidly approaching demise, and more on the people around them.

If 9/11 had happened in the age of Super Sad, it would have sucked a lot more to be a New Yorker.

“Speaking of the light, I had one luminous moment with Eunice this week. I caught her looking at my Wall of Books with some curiosity, specifically at a washed-out old cover of a Milan Kundera paperback- a bowler hat floats over a Prague cityscape- her index fingers raised above the book as if ready to tap at the BUY ME NOW symbol on her äppärät, her other fingers massaging the book’s back, maybe even enjoying its thickness and unusual weight, its relative quiet and meekness. When she saw me approach she slid the book back on its shelf and retreated to the couch, smelling her fingers for book odor, her cheeks in full blush. But I knew she was curious…” (Shteyngart 205)