Dearest Pam,

I hope that this first packet finds you doing well up there in the great frozen north, or wherever your globe-trotting ways may find you.  I have to say, it’s great to just start in right where we left off from, without those two or three packets of getting to know each other.  Maybe that’s a part of what’s been so inspiring to me since the residency.  We know the dance; we’ve had our intermission and cigarettes, and now the music starts again.

Things here have been okay.  Same old shit, same old unexpected blasts from the past, same yearly anniversaries, same sunrise rooftop sessions with too many cigarettes and an intense desire to sit a little too close to the edge.  I spent a lot of time at my parents’ farm after the residency and between weddings to do the hard manual labor that makes me feel alive.  I’m not afraid of blisters and calluses and scars.  Pain as breathing.

I’ve been busy.  I can honestly say this might have been my most productive packet to date, at least it feels that way.  I came from the residency with this determination to learn the history of video art and the history of the internet, and I’ve been reading voraciously some excellent books about both, from the people who were there at the front lines of both developments.  I’ve been playing, with video, with another digital project, but perhaps especially with my writing.  There’s been such comfort in returning here and doing, if that makes any sense.  Maybe because my life for basically four months before the residency was not knowing if I’d be doing this semester, or if I’d be working at SLU as the music production manager.  Not getting that job might be the best thing that’s happened for my Goddard experience.  Certainly created a new drive within me.

So…  In this packet you’ll find three videos and accompanying audio, one digital project, new writing.  I’ve read a lot.  I’ve ordered the maximum ten videos from ILL, but we’ll see how that goes.  Researched SU’s video borrowing/viewing policy.  The fun part is that they don’t let people view their videos if you aren’t a member of their fine arts department, staff or student.  No visitor viewing privilege.  Great.  But I’ve been watching video clips online at the Video Databank, and hopefully my ILL requests will start to come in.  Renting just isn’t feasible.  Sites like ifilms.com and albinoblacksheep.com give me plenty of video to watch, even if it’s been submitted by regular video types like me, who’ll never appear in a video history text.  At least I’m watching.  I haven’t yet been over to the Everson, but after learning that they have an extensive Bill Viola collection, I’m going to see what I can do to possibly gain access to that, along with other video material.

“Shoah” and Kieslowki’s “Decalogue” are now on dvd!

Got an iPod, my first foray into the Mac world.  30gb of portable hard drive space in a device the size of a pack of playing cards.  This should alleviate any concern for free space on my laptop as I edit video, and allows me to carry seven thousand mp3s around with me.

The videos I’ve submitted are all accessible online in *.mpg and *.wmv format.  If you have trouble reading any of them, please let me know asap and I’ll upload different file types.  Since it’ll take some time to download, please let them download completely before trying to view, or else it’ll be choppy and might not download all the way.  If you’re on broadband, I don’t think this will be a problem, but then again, it’s technology, and technology hates me.

I’ve been fasting for a week.  Adds a half-assed clarity to things.

Transgression is rapidly becoming my leitmotif.

Guess I’ll start writing this thing.  Hope you’re doing well.

with much love,
Paul.
 

Video:

the fun we can have with our very own bodies.

• http://www.offensemechanism.com/bodyfunMPG01.mpg
• In March, while visiting my friend in Florida, one of my buddies got a very bad sunburn on his chest and stomach and arms and just about everywhere, because he was an idiot and didn’t use sunscreen.  He noticed how any pressure to his skin left a white temporary ghost image before his skin returned to painful bright pink.  I saw this as a great opportunity to get some video footage, so I had him start to draw smiley faces on himself.  It’s a simple video, a simple concept.  If someone wanted to dissect it, they could argue that this video subverts the traditional segmentation of female bodies found in advertisements by having an unattractive segmented male body the focus of the camera’s gaze.  He’s trying to act macho, although it’s obvious he’s in a lot of pain, and his physical audience, a bunch of drunk/hung-over big burly men with raucous scratchy early-morning voices, was laughing at him.  The video culminates in me drawing a penis on his chest.  I’m labeling him.  This is all an exploration of modern fragile virility.  Or so someone might argue if they read into it.

a dog scared by certain noises.

• http://www.offensemechanism.com/catdogwmv01.wmv
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/catdogmpg01.mpg
• I’ve never made it a secret that dogs annoy the hell out of me, and since “Happy Kitten Jamboree!” many of my Goddard peers have approached me and said I should do more work with animals, because they liked that project so much.  Again, working with Florida footage from March (it’s kind of nice to have an archive of footage with which I’ve not yet been able to do anything), I’ve assembled a project that contrasts an annoying little yap-yap dog (Colonel’s tailless and seemingly legless Halyard) with footage of some very placid farm cats that my parents have.  I’ll admit, I was egging the dog on, because every time I talked to it, it would bark.  And sneeze.  What kind of a dog sneezes when someone talks to it?  Halyard, apparently.  I’ve juxtaposed video of this loud, frantic, sneezing and yapping little dog with the gentle, peaceful images of my parents’ cats.  Even when the orange cat is biting my hand, there’s just such a gentle feel to it.  I’ve added a corny soundtrack of very serious music and drawling voiceover.  I guess since I’ve worked on such serious projects before, I like to incorporate a serious feel even to such ridiculous imagery.  To me, it’s still play.  I’m having a lot of fun with these projects.  It’s nice to not work on one video for the entire semester.  There is this fear, though, that playing around, I won’t produce video of true quality, experimentation, good composition, interesting aesthetic.  Another holdover fear from my prior semesters of major projects in which I’d devote months to perfecting it, whereas now I’m spending just a few days on each.  I need to get over this fear, because not everything I make will be perfect, or even approach perfect.

consumed.

• http://www.offensemechanism.com/consumedwmv01.wmv
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/consumedmpg01.mpg
• Experimentation with video speed, extreme close-up, variable focus, body image, transitions.  Two sets of clips, both my eye/eyes: glasses, zooming in and out, parts of the image going in and out of focus depending on both the camera lens and the lens of my glasses, and bathtub footage: submerging myself in water so that it invades my eye, covers my face.  I had no idea that Syracuse water was so hyper-chlorinated…  Raw footage reveals me almost drowning in my own bathtub as I coughed and flailed.  Bleh.  I wanted to create a dreamlike state, really dig in and play with the slow motion and fades.  To add to the dream, the soundtrack that I’ve composed is a collection of layered computer narrations mixed with clips from old projects.  Amazing new technology: http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html.  This site allows me to plug in any text and output it as audio, in any of a dozen or so different voices.  Very excited about finding that site, and I intend to experiment with using this computer voice technology in future projects.  Dream state, suffocation, blurriness: consumed.

Audio:

• offensemechanism.com
• a dog scared by certain noises.
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/catdogmp301.mp3
• consumed.
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/consumesmp301.mp3

Webdesign: sites updated/created:

• offensemechanism.com:
• folds
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/folds01.html
• I really, really, really hope that people will be able to see beyond the basic image that I present in this project.  It’s a vulva.  Yup.  I’m a young white male heterosexual artist working with an image of a vulva.  I found the image on a run-of-the-mill porn site, and decided to use it in a project.  I think it’s a gorgeous image, and in this project, I’m trying to get the viewer to get over the sexual baggage of that image and recognize that aesthetically (at least for me), it’s beautiful, full of texture and nuances.  Demystification of the body through conscious segmentation and mystification.  Does that make any sense?  My recent writing in the new novel has been intensely sexual, sensual, emotive, brutal, and segments of that writing are included along with the images.  Do I, being who I am, have the right to make a project like this?  What are the moral implications?  Is it possible for someone in my demographic to view an image or read text like that in a non-sexual way?  They’re folds of skin and folds of text, all intertwining in a project that was designed to hopefully rile people up.

Writing:

• broken: chapter four: heiligenschein.
• http://www.silverthought.com/broken05.html
• I don’t expect you to read through this whole thing or give me any kind of intense literary criticism, but I thought I should include a link to my latest writing because a lot of the text has been bleeding over into various other projects I’ve been doing, such as the voiceover for “consumed” and the text used in “folds.”  The comments about the morality of certain of my projects and the great discussion we had during the G3 presentations along the same line were a big inspiration for this latest chapter of my book, which is about as much of a departure from the preceding chapters as I could make.  Whereas the first three chapters and proem of the book were non-linear narrative that shifted for the most part between five or so third-person narrators, I wrote this chapter as if the reader were asking a search engine about various aspects of this book and the first two books of my silver series.  If we want to look at transgressive writing and moral relativism, this is the chapter through which to discuss it.  broken combines creative non-fiction and speculative fiction in that I’m the main character who, at age 27, is taken out of this timeline to correct the broken universes that my prior two books created.  As the main character in a book set outside of time and space, I have to combine a completely fictional storyline with a subjective narrative about that part of my life that I’ve already lived.  Chapter four, Heiligenschein (German word for the lighting effect that occurs around a shadow with the sun directly behind it; a “halo” effect) is the chapter that would most likely cause lawsuits.  I’ve named names, I’ve put words in the mouths of people who actually exist, and I’ve extrapolated presents and futures of people with whom I never again expect to have contact.  I’ve used emails and chat transcripts that would have been considered confidential.  I’ve titled Chip Delany’s next novel and written part of it for him.  My interest here is not in being a total dick to people who’ve left my life, but in exploring the “what could have beens.”  The moral dilemma only arises if I presuppose that I’ll ever hear from these people again.  How would I feel if someone included me in a novel and gave me a new history and put words in my mouth?  This book deals with the concept of spectrums of existences.  If we consider the multiple worlds theory, then all of this will happen anyways.  Hence, in this book, I have to go attempt to repair the damage I’ve done.  It’s conceited, self-indulgent, self-referential, solipsistic, and I feel it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done.

Practicum:

• Finally able to start assembling the video documentation of my NOLA03 project.  I’ve also contacted those who attended and asked for any images, audio or text they’d like to contribute to the project.  I’d ideally like to have this project completed by the end of the semester, so I’ll be consistently working on it as I do other packet video work.

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

• Thought I’d break up the textbook monotony by starting Atwood’s latest speculative fiction novel.  I have no plans to do any intense study of sf this semester as I have in prior semesters (read: Delany obsession), but I think it’s good to see what’s out there as I continue to write my own latest novel.  What strikes me the most about Atwood’s writing, which I’d never realized before, was that she’s also written children’s books, and that straight-forward style shines through even in her “adult” books.  She has a way of handling some truly horrible things like biological warfare and child rape/slavery in what reads as a completely innocent manner.  Some might say it’s a form of condescension; I just feel that it’s an extremely effective stylistic choice on her part: simple words to describe heinous events.  So far, this book reminds me a lot of the second chapter of my second novel, in which I attempted to tell the story from the point of view of a five-year-old girl.  As such, I had to make conscious dialogue and semantic choices to give the chapter its believability.  It’s obvious from what I’ve read of this book so far that Atwood has the same love of playing with the words, dabbling, experimenting, that I do.

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. San Francisco: Harper, 2000.

• Al Gore might have invented the Internet, but Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.  As a researcher at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva, Berners-Lee became interested in developing a computer program that would allow CERN researchers to electronically publish and share their research internally.  The electronic network he envisioned would allow instant access within the CERN community to any research uploaded, and each piece of information, whether text-based or visual, would be cross-linked with every other pertinent piece of research in the network.  This system would facilitate collaboration between the researchers, because it was designed to run across various computer platforms, operating systems, and internal intranets.  Once Berners-Lee got the hesitant approval of CERN to begin assembling this internal network, he started writing a piece of software that he’d later name the World Wide Web.
• Told in B-L’s often humble, often humorous voice, I found this book to be an excellent history of the current world wide web, told from the perspective of the man who first envisioned it.  What amazes me is that he’s not a household name.  How can we possibly not know about this man?  He invented the driving force of technological and cultural shift from the late 1980s to the present.  I feel almost ashamed that I’ve been so involved with the online community for almost a decade now, but until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard the name Tim Berners-Lee.  I’ve been recommending this book to just about everyone I know who’s interested in the online world.
• After describing the initial experimentation of his WWW program at CERN, B-L delves into the way the program was distributed, how he contacted programmers on internet listservs and newsgroups to look at the code, alter it if they wanted, and set up their own WWW servers.  This history is fascinating: what started out as one man and a vision to link every intranet and the military/industrial/educational internet soon blossomed into hundreds of programmers tweaking his original code, operating their own servers, and establishing a unique, intuitive information resource that operated in true web fashion on a global scale.  The inception era of the WWW was so unlike the present state of the technology: it was a time of true open source, innovation driven by collaboration and mutual respect among the programmers and WWW enthusiasts.  This open era of development would turn around to bite B-L in the ass eventually: consider that no one knows who he is or what he’s done for connecting the world.  The golden children of web development are the billionaire entrepreneurs who figured out how to take B-L’s ideas and package them to consumers; it was never his intention to make money from the world wide web, nor did he expect it to become the hub of global commerce as it did.
• There is a lot of technical information in the book that it worth a skim, from the engineering of discreet packets of information for transfer across the web to the heavy borrowing of B-L’s code that a team of MIT researchers did that later became Netscape, and the buckets of cash they made from it.  Anecdotes like that are almost painful to read…  People exploited open source code not for the further development or improvement of the web, but to make a quick buck.  This history and tech information is at times dry, but B-L intersperses it with his own vast knowledge, which keeps it interesting.
• B-L now heads the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, an open-source development and web oversight committee that is determining the standards of software and hardware for the next generations of the web.  It is in this context that I feel B-L’s vision is now coming to fruition.  The W3C is comprised of members from business, education, tech groups, governments, etc., and it’s a forum for organizations to bring innovation and progress to the overall web in a richly collaborative environment, voting on the protocols and standardized soft/hardwares that will enable the development of B-L’s end goal, a revision of the web that he calls the “Semantic Web.”  The Semantic Web would be an always-on, instantly-accessible, ergonomic global information network using high artificial intelligence to tailor the online experience to the individual and answer questions or facilitate research through a constant learning process, all delivered to the end user through computer systems where operating system and browser are completely integrated (refer: Windows 98 pre-litigation).  It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but B-L’s first steps into the WWW at CERN must certainly have sounded the same to his peers.
• It was a valuable book to read because of the history lesson delivered by the man who wrote said history, and his explanation of his view of data space as a collaborative, open community operating for the good of everyone involved.

Fifer, Sally Jo and Hall, Doug. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. New York, N.Y.: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990.

• Is this the book you’ve been looking for, an American counterpart to Magnetic North?  I’m reading both at the same time; fun to compare and contrast.  Both books are presented in ways that could inspire my portfolio.  By that, I mean the incorporation of articles and essays and various text with stills from the videos, pictures of the installations, etc.  Non-linear feel, non-traditional presentation of text, playing with color and font.  Gives the book a texture.  I like the layout, but it does tend to wear down the eyes after a while.  Makes things blurry.  I can’t read this book for too long at a sitting; maybe I just need new glasses.
• So I’ve decided this semester to read about the history of video art.  This book has been most helpful in that so far, starting back with the early television broadcasts that spawned the first artists who worked in video to react to and subvert that emerging culture when the first practical portable video cameras came out (Sony Porta-pak?).
• An assortment of essays and literary impressions by critics and video artists.  There is so much here!  I’m finding it hard to pick and choose what to commit to text in this packet.  So many great anecdotes in this book that really demonstrate the creative atmosphere of the emerging technology: “museum” artists who showed video on monitors vs. “museum” artists who made installations vs. video artists who completely shunned the museum system, the volatility and impermanence of the medium, those early experimentations in pure video engineered from feedback and static, all technology, no reference to physical space, video synthesizers, those early artists who would shoot a whole hour of video just to fill up the tape, a la film reel, pre-editing days, emerging editing systems, non-linear, digital, projectors, smaller, better, more-portable technology, artists commenting on social issues, reacting against the television culture, reacting against the film culture.  Maybe further reading will help me to narrow down my interests in this book, but right now it’s this great big wave of information that I’m finding truly interesting and inspiring, because I’ve never really looked at video history before.

Lion, Jenny, ed. Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

• Pretty much ditto as what I wrote above, with the added advantage that this book is actually teaching me a lot about Canadian history, and I’m not just talking video history.  Hell, I’ve lived within two hours of the border my entire life, and I’m somewhat ashamed that I really don’t know anything about Canada.  Not to the extent of the people discussed in this book who appeared on “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” who were asked ridiculous questions about Canada to hilarious results.  I pretty much grew up watching CKWS out of Kingston; I’ve seen those segments on 22 Minutes and felt like I should apologize for having so many morons in my country.  What strikes me about this book is the fact that there’s this great big video community just to my north that deals with distinctly-Canadian issues as well as the global issues that I’m used to encountering.  I like that…  It’d be interesting to see how distinct video art communities across the globe approach local issues while also approaching global concerns.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

• In my G3 review letter, the faculty recommended that I read this book, because it was apparently really helpful to one of my G-level peers.  While I realize I’m only a third of the way into the book, so far, I’m not impressed at all.  I’m trying to read it from the pov of a 1996-era enthusiast in (or even newcomer to) digital technology, but it’s just not working for me.  1996, when the book was published, was the year that I built my first web page.  I can understand that a book written in the mid-90s might not yet realize the significance of the web, as it was still pre-dot-com boom.  It is interesting that again and again when I read older texts on digital technology and culture, mostly from the late-80s to mid-90s, the authors focus almost all of their speculative energies on developments such as 3D graphics, virtual reality, and HDTV, none of which ever truly took off in the way that the technology visionaries had foreseen.  I think this is in major part due to the emergence of the web out of left field.  I’ll continue to read this book, with the hope that Negroponte will at least touch upon web development and stop babbling on about HDTV standardization and his atom/bit metaphor, which is a misleading and poor conceptualization.

• I’ve heard the name Bill Viola before, probably from one of ____’s excessively condescending didactic forays into whom I should look at or read.  I realize my knowledge of video art history was pretty much nil coming into this semester.  I saw Bill Viola’s name on a list of video artists from a google search, so I bought his book.
• Things I never knew: Bill Viola got his BFA just blocks away from where I’m sitting right now, at Syracuse University.  Bill Viola had his first video exhibition at the Everson Museum, a few more blocks away.  Bill Viola got an honorary doctorate from SU a while back.  In essence, Syracuse was a fundamental part of this artist’s early video development, and I had no idea.  Ignorance is bliss!
• I read the whole book.  Couldn’t put it down.  Excellent inspiration for my portfolio, again with the juxtaposition of text and still and even scanned images from his journals, blueprints for installations, napkin-scrawled ideas for projects.  What is it about the inclusion of hand-written ideas that is so intriguing in a book?  Maybe it gives us more of a connection to the person than typed text, like an autograph.
• Passion: Bill Viola’s passion for the medium bleeds through every page.
• Concepts of interest: Viola points out that video as a medium is…  difficulty putting words to it…  It’s never all there.  To experience a video, the viewer has to watch the whole thing.  As such, the video is only ever active in the viewer’s mind.  Video is a memory.  Video as impermanence, both in the viewing process and the nature of the medium.  That fascinates me.  Film can be reduced to an individual frame.  Video can never be reduced like that.  Sure, you can pause it, but what you see is essentially an electronic echo.  What other medium exists only in the memory?  Viola: At night, when the museum closes, the paintings are still there, in a form of sleep, hanging in the dark, but still there.  When the projector or monitor is turned off, the video ceases to be.  Amazing!  Art as a process of remembering.  I need to work with this.