Steve’s Stuff

This is another review for Amazon.com under my usual nom de plume “Steward Willons”.

This is a frustrating DVD. I love Steven Schick, Roger Reynolds, contemporary music, and the work itself. The DVD itself is severely disappointing.

First the good news. Watereshed IV is a wonderful addition to the ever expanding body of multi percussion literature. As usual, Steven Schick turns in a masterful performance, clearly demonstrating why he is *the* final word in contemporary (non-keyboard) solo percussion. His performance of Watershed is amazing to watch. One interesting note: he appears to be following the score during the performance. This is highly unusual for him - I’m not sure what’s up with that. If he can memorize a 60+ minute work like John Luther Adams’s Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, I’m not sure why he’s using the score for this performance. Regardless, I can find no fault with the performance whatsoever.

I’m not as familiar with Roger Reynolds’s work having only heard a handful for his pieces. Watershed is interesting to watch, but you definitely get more out of it having the score to follow along. The scope of the 25 minute work is so large that it’s difficult to keep the ideas in mind. From looking at the score, I can see thematic material, developments, and variations, but from simply listening, it’s not nearly as clear. If you don’t have access to the score, this is will require a number of listenings before things come into focus. The good news is that it’s worth your time.

There are some interesting interviews with Reynolds, Schick and the sound engineer offering some very interesting insights not just to Watershed, but to sound spatialization and music in general. The spatialization definitely adds a lot to the work. If you don’t have a 5.1 system, headphones are the next best thing. The DVD includes a 5.1 and stereo mix, both of which sound good.

Now the bad news. The image quality is abysmal. You might think I’m exaggerating when I compare the picture to what you’d expect from Real player or Windows Media. I promise you - it looks that bad. The image is blocky, pixilated, dark, and flat. This is totally inexcusable when there are some many great looking DVDs out there. Additionally, there is an annoying “W” in the lower right hand corner for the duration of the work. W for Watershed??? I have no idea why it’s there. Just a pointless distraction.

While I can recommend the music, I can’t recommend this DVD at all. I’d be very suspicious of any Mode Records DVDs. I do know that this was their first and (if what their website claims is true) the first “art music” DVD ever produced. Maybe they have figured out how to make a decent product in the six years since this came out.

Of course, watching Steven Schick is always a treat and, as I always say, a crappy Watershed DVD is better than no Watershed DVD at all. Just make sure you know what you’re getting before you buy this.

The makers of GEM had the foresight to allow the user to deactivate the border (title and scroll bars), which is great. That still leaves the OS control bar at the top of the screen. In the off chance that anyone is reading this, here’s my workaround. I’m using a projector for this project, so I can tell my Mac that it’s a second display, as opposed to a mirrored display. This will give the projector its own desktop without a control bar.

To set this option . . .

Open System Preferences
Click the display icon
Click the “arrangement” tab
Unclick the “mirror displays” option

Easy.

I’m doing a bit of video work for J.C. Combs’ final percussion ensemble concert. He’s created a tribute to Harry Partch, one of the most prominent microtonal composers. Partch was a renegade free-thinker who broke the bonds of Western tonality and equal temperament (the common tuning practice of the West) by creating a unique 43-note scale and an array of original instruments. My task is to play some video clips from a Harry Partch documentary along with editing and a few other tasks. All the clips were preprocessed so by the time Pd is involved, it doesn’t have to do any stressful video work.

I’m used to using PDP and PiDiP, two Pd externals that are fairly decent at image-based processing of live video. They’re not so great with pre-recorded video. I may have just mentioned this in a previous blog post, but allow me to repeat how annoying it is that the software designers decided to only support some obscure Quicktime codec that is now long gone. PDP supports .avi, if I remember correctly. Huh. That’s funny. .avi is a Windows format, but PDP isn’t even ported to Windows. Who came up with that great idea?

Fortunately, GEM (Graphics Environment for Multimedia) is a much better Pd external complete with a little documentation and some tutorials. Building a video player was mostly a matter of looking through the help files, reading a couple tutorials, and putting it all together.

The first step is to download Pd-Extended. It’s got all the major Pd externals included. I’ve included my patch below, although you might as well just go through some of the help files to make your own.

As you can see from the Pd code below, everything is straightforward. The [gemwin] object creates the window and accepts a number of messages including dimensions, border on/off, cursor on/off, and rendering on/off. Make sure you send dimension and border messages before creating the window. It’s easiest to stop rendering while you’re not actively watching a video. I didn’t run into CPU problems, but you never know.

The [pix_film] object played my QT files without and problems. Just send it a message with the file name and path. You can go frame-by-frame, auto-play, and see the total number of frames in the movie. I added a gain control [pix_gain] so that I can do nice smooth fades. Finally, you supply the dimensions of the video output. It’s a little confusing because you create the GEM window, but then you also have to specify the size of the video output within the GEM window. It would be nice if GEM automatically scaled the window so that you could use an object like [rectangle 4 3] and it would keep the same aspect ratio without you having to figure out a size that’s close.

There are a few objects left over, so just ignore those. I should have just deleted them. I found GEM video playback to be very high quality, but easy on the processor. I recommend it for anyone wanting to play video in Pd.

Lets hope BluRay and HD-DVD are forgotten as quickly as the mid-90s Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). There’s nothing we need less than over-priced “premium” formats that offer such a small advantage over existing formats. The difference between LPs and CDs is pretty great: size, portability, longevity, price, etc. The difference between high def DVDs is . . . storage capacity??? Sure, this allows better video quality, but not *drastically* better video quality. Why should anyone start rebuilding their DVD collection just for an increase in video quality on a TV they probably can’t afford?

And don’t think for a minute that the larger storage capacity will change anything about extra features. There are still plenty of DVDs released with nothing but trailers and hilariously stupid DVD recommendations (e.g. Did you enjoy Titanic? You might also enjoy The Abyss, Evil Dead, Last Action Hero, and many other titles that happen to be from the same DVD studio!).

The worst aspect that nobody seems to be talking about is the DRM involved. If you try to play a BluRay or HD-DVD in a conventional play, it automatically downgrades its quality to “worse than broadcast”. This isn’t even about copy protection anymore - this is about forcing pointless hardware sales. What a shame. But, I would expect no less from the greedy entertainment industry.

This is an interesting piece on why HD formats have already failed.

Gever continues Bovenschen’s search for a feminine aesthetic in The Feminism Factor with a survey of feminist video works. After pages of lengthy description of video works by Chenzira, Millner, Mendieta, Rosler, and Braderman, Gever concludes that there is, in fact, no discernable feminist aesthetic. I believe this is for the best. In my admittedly limited exposure to feminist discourse, I have seen two themes that frequently seem to be in opposition: feminists vying for equality with men, and feminists attempting to distinguish themselves from men, to present themselves as fundamentally different beings. Within the limited scope of a single article, I would like to explore the implications of a feminist aesthetic myself.

A feminist aesthetic would seem to indicate something disparate from the masculine aesthetic, unless I am interpreting the idea of a feminist aesthetic too literally. What is the “masculine aesthetic” if not all aesthetics throughout history? Gever’s search, like Bovenschen before her, implies that there is currently no feminist aesthetic, which further implies that all other aesthetics must be masculine. With the infrequency of female artists until the mid-to-late twentieth century, this seems reasonable, save for the fact that no one ever attempted to define aesthetics as inherently masculine.

What is to be gained from a feminist aesthetic? A separate feminist aesthetic is an invitation to the very marginalization of which feminism seeks to free itself. It seems counterproductive to try to invent something new rather than joining something existing. Don’t feminists want to participate in the same artistic movements as men? If they invent their own aesthetic theory, they will remain fundamentally different from the rest of art and will be easily restricted to an independent position of negligible importance and visibility.

This brings me back to the question of feminist goals. It appears that if women want equality, they shouldn’t attempt to drastically differentiate themselves from men. Their work should hang side-by-side with that of men, but if their works are described as “feminist”, critics will be able to apply a standard critique without truly seeing the work itself. If feminist art is easily classifiable, one can critique it with a one-size-fits-all formula. If, on the other hand, feminist art doesn’t differentiate itself with a pointless label, critics will be forced to judge each work on its own terms without gender providing an already available critical methodology. To be fair, this isn’t a criticism of a hypothetical feminist aesthetic per se, but of any artistic movement, that accepts any sort of label.

From the examples that Gever provides, it seems that the feminist video works aren’t necessarily feminine, but are simply excellent video art. Maybe a feminist aesthetic isn’t necessary—maybe women of the twenty-first century are free to create works, display them, and receive critiques based on the work alone. If they desire to isolate themselves from the rest of the artistic community, they have the opportunity. However, I feel that it is much more interesting if they are seamlessly integrated without rigid gender distinctions.

Thanks to Kevin for this amazing car chase. This driver is insane. Check it out.

I found this hilarious video on YouTube. It’s basically a fake commentary for the trailer to Matthew Barney’s film “Drawing Restraint 9″. It’s unbelievably funny if you know Barney at all, but it’s still probably pretty hilarious if you don’t. Enjoy.

Emerging from Jameson’s dense prose, I find the message: video art provides a “total flow” of meaning (meaning in a very qualified, postmodern sense) where signifiers are constantly in flux, constantly redefined, constantly re-contextualized, and where the only referent possible is that of indisputable historical fact, or in other words, the Lacanian Real. Thus, video is, as Jameson concludes, the ideal medium of transmission of postmodern thought. Over the course of the article, Jameson uses a particular video work, AlienNATION , to demonstrate his points. Jameson refrains from offering any sort of aesthetic judgment, preferring to describe video as a medium, to analyze interesting features, and to explore a variety of interpretive methodologies.

Jameson makes an important phenomenological distinction between video and film because where film (even art film) has a lengthy history of concept and technique, video is (at the time of his essay) slightly over twenty years old and thus doesn’t have the same foundations or expectations.

Although Jameson seems as neutral as possible, he has what appears to be a pessimistic view of the possibilities of postmodern textual manipulation. When he writes, “we are left with that pure and random play of signifiers . . . which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production”, he is presenting the situation as if postmodern works are doomed to randomly repeat segments of the past without any sort of intelligent design. While it’s true that, as Derrida shows us, we cannot reasonably assume any sort of logocentricity, if there was no possibility of, say, ironic juxtaposition, there would be no point in making postmodern works—they would just be meaningless jumbles of infinitely meaningful (and thus meaningless) signifiers.

In Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading, Eco shows how he uses this freedom of signification to generate a surplus of meaning within his literature. Similarly, Tarantino’s cinema is filled with intertextual elements such as the briefcase scene in Pulp Fiction, where the viewer is reminded of the myth of Pandora’s box, the final scene in Repo Man, as well as Raiders of the Lost Arc. The briefcase scene generates at least three specific and purposeful meanings, hardly the random jumble that Jameson describes.

While Jameson may have a dim view of postmodernity in art, he does an excellent job explaining why other forms of interpretation fail to say anything useful about postmodern works. He writes that if the “ephemeral” and “disposable” text is the building block of postmodern art, then there can be little gleaned from an analysis of any one fragment. Similarly, no video work can be viewed in isolation from the whole of the video art world. He goes on to contend that though one may attempt to “sort the material out into thematic blocks and rhythms and repunctuate it with beginnings and endings, with graphs of rising and falling emotivity, climaxes, dead passages, transitions, recapitulations, and the like”, the result will be different upon every viewing.

Insofar as that is a true statement, is it necessarily a positive or negative characteristic of postmodern art? There must be a certain value to a work that allows one to return over and over again for a completely new experience. Again, Jameson language is telling: phrases such as “____ is reduced to” indicate that he doesn’t see this potential for varied readings as a positive characteristic because if the author cannot control the message, there must be no message and therefore no art in creation. I see the potential for multiple and diverse readings as an intriguing characteristic of postmodern art. Furthermore, this whole notion of interpretive impossibility is specious. Again referring to Eco, the author creatively engages multiple levels of signification and though there are always already infinite readings, certain readings make a lot more sense. Even if one cannot definitively state the “correct” reading of a text, one can find a range of readings that generate the most coherent and meaningful interpretation. Jameson is correct to poke fun at the standard interpretive question—“what does it mean?”—because this assumes a single “correct” reading, but just because there is no definitive reading, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no readings that are better than others.

The scope of Jameson’s article is, perhaps, its best feature. It’s fascinating how he manages to describe such a wide range of postmodernity in art while talking only about video art. If I take issue with certain points, it doesn’t mean that the article on the whole is flawed. Simply, everyone will approach the concepts of postmodernism from a different perspective and now I’ve presented mine.

Film art and video art - apparent, the moving picture world is not big enough for the both of them. A survey of important studies of motion picture arts finds one excluding the other, as if it did not exist. In it’s 550+ pages David Bordwell’s “Film History” manages to mention seminal video artist, theorist, and aesthetician, Nam June Paik only once.

Similarly, Illuminating Video, a collection of important source readings on video art, fails to mention experimental film makes in its “history”. One article traces technology in the arts starting with the industrial revolution and continuing through still photography to the half-inch portapak video recorders of the sixties, but it completely ignores the rich history of experimental filmmakers such as Maya Deren.

The distinction between narrative and non-narrative is weak because many filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage have no narrative traces while many video artists working in the underground documentary style feature many narrative elements.

Some will also make a distinction between video artists who are seen as more concerned with experimenting with the medium itself (again, Nam June Paik), while filmmakers are more concerned with mise-en-scene and editing. Again, there are sufficient exceptions to those generalizations to make them effectively worthless.

Why is there this divide? Is it simply over the medium and/or production technique? Filmmakers use 35mm stock while video artists use half-inch tape (or miniDV today)? This seems to be a rather arbitrary distinction. What if pianists failed to recognize percussion instruments simply because one sits to play the piano while one stands to play percussion?

Who knows.