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L'Histoire de Jean Médecin

The above photos are the result of my response to the work 'created' (I use this term with a pinch of salt, it's more generative than creative in my opinion) by Kenneth Goldsmith and his unoriginal writing. 

I was reading his lecture titled Being Boring, where he talks about setting his students the task of re-writing any 5 pages of text they could find. They talk about the process as being a durational performance that generates a piece of art. 

I set myself this same task, but took my text from a stretch a street in Nice. I followed the same rules Goldsmith had mentioned in his Day project (which I've posted about previously) reading the page (in my case images I took) from the top left down to the bottom, following the rules of the page rather than the rules of that particular layout.

I'm not sure how I feel about the process. It was draining, like a durational performance, but with no audience. The outcome is boring, as I expected. Goldsmith talks about things being 'unboring boring' and 'boring boring', and to me this is definitely boring boring. It's nice to look at, and the idea that this 'novel' is 'telling the story' of the context the original text was taken from is interesting, almost like a translation between contexts rather than languages. 

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MUST DO SOME WORDZ

I've set my last two weeks aside to create work in response to what I've been researching. I want to create work that allows the words to perform for themselves, in the same way as Kruger's does, interacting with her images. At the same time, I want to set myself the durational task of translating words between contexts, a task that Goldsmith set his students. I want to perform translation. How, I have no idea as of yet. This is the part where I've actually got to think and stuff. Brilliant. 

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Thoughts on African American vernacular(@zellieimani)

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http://internationalvisual.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/joseph-kosuth-capc-museum-of-contemporary-art-bordeaux.jpg

'HAT' Joseph Kosuth

Kosuth is an american conceptual artist whose work is based around the use of words. 

In a series of installations, he took various objects and created an installation with the object, a photograph of the object, and dictionary or thesaurus definitions of the things that denoted the object. 

In this one, I particularly like the fact the definition includes translation. There a cross-cultural bridge here where the translation provides another set of understandings for this selected object, another set of semantics for another audience to receive. 

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http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/dontbeajerkkruger.jpg

Don't be a jerk. 

Barbara Kruger

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CASE: BARBARA KRUGER - AGIT-POP-ART?

The lady I’m living with in France is an art lecturer at the university here, and I was telling her about my project being some sort of artistic exploration of words, and she gave me a list of artists I might be interested in. Barbara Kruger was at the top of that list, and I’ve come across her before whilst doing GCSE Art, and initially didn’t think much of her, until I re-looked through images of her work. 

(Image source: http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbsiniwc761qej7uao1_400.jpg)

Originally a graphic designer and publicist, Kruger is famed for her rather bold images. Again, like Goldsmith, Kruger uses borrowed work, in her case iconic black and white images, and she layers them with bold, often aggressive text on a red background (in the same style as The Sun or The Mirror). The wording used is always strong and instantly recognisable. It creates a tension between itself and the image that go against any preconceptions that the image may already have contained from being a part of mainstream media. 

On her website, it’s described as this:

She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. (barbarakruger.com, 2013)

What else I love about her work is that it reminds me of the propaganda that would have been circulated in the war, that was formulated to make us think differently about ourselves through a selective use of words and imagery. This is exactly what Kruger is doing, but by using appropriated images in a uniquely uniform way that intend to make us think differently about other issues that affect society today. It could be considered as pop-art-propaganda, agit-pop-art, when you include the artistic movement she was involved in and the intentions of the art itself.

I also like her work because I feel it provides a bridge between my prior research and my current, providing more examples of appropriated work that addresses issues looked at in my first few weeks.

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CASE: KENNETH GOLDSMITH: 'DAY'

Kenneth Goldsmith is currently my favourite person. After Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart (joint first, I can’t decide). He’s described himself as ‘the most boring writer that has ever lived’ (Goldsmith, 2004). His work is so original in the fact it’s so openly plagiarizing and unoriginal, appropriating everything into something new. 

I’m going to talk about his book Day. I have not read this book, and that’s okay, because Goldsmith himself has said I do not need to, because he will tell us/me about it. Day is a complete retyping of one issue of The New York Times, that was eventually published (after about a year) as a 900 page book. He wrote a novel of someone else’s words by simply following a set of self-given rules that changed the context in which these pre-owned words were to be received. 

In his essay/speech Being Boring, Goldsmith describes the process he went through:

I would take a page of the newspaper, start at the upper left hand corner and work my way through, following the articles as they were laid out on the page. If an article, for example, continued on another page, I wouldn't go there. Instead, I would finish retyping the page I was on in full before proceeding to the next one. I allowed myself no creative liberties with the text. The object of the project was to be as uncreative in the process as possible. It was one of the hardest constraints a writer can muster, particularly on a project of this scale; with every keystroke came the temptation to "fudge," "cut-and-paste," and "skew" the mundane language. But to do so would be to foil my exercise. (Goldsmith, 2004).

I can imagine this being so draining. At the same time, I want to create my own cersion of this book. I’m fascinated by how such a regimented routine and a newspaper can be such a creative process. The blurb of the book (as described on geoffreyyoung.com) even describes the processes as ‘uncreativity as a creative practice’. I love that. Why are we trying so hard?

This book is also interesting, however, in the sense that it’s taken something already given a worthiness as ‘news’ and recreates it as something with a different newsworthiness. 

It takes what is to be yesterday’s news and binds it in something much more permanent than a lot of news is. The book contains both copy and adverts, disregarding the graphics of the page and the instructions to ‘turn to page x’. This extraction filters out the semantics in colour and images and allows the words to perform in new ways, to be received as a piece of art rather than a blunt news story or advert ridden with semiotics. 

People might consider this to no longer be news, or newsworthy, but the book itself is newsworthy, seeing as it was so outrageously created and by someone of esteem in the literary world. The news becomes news in a new way. It itself is news, not just its contents. In a way, it is double-y newsworthy. And that’s cool.

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Here is where I re-found the transcribers' codes. 

I might attempt to reverse the process. Write a 'transcript-score' and  perform it. If I remember correctly from A level, it will be fucking difficult. 

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My attempt at transcribing. It was a lot easier in A level, I guess because I knew what I was doing. 

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SPEECH = WORDS?

Recently I’ve been indulging in translation - this has been great because an English kid has just moved into the house I’m living in and doesn’t speak a word of French, so I’m having to translate between him and the lady I’m living with. It’s great. The lost looks on each face when hearing their particular foreign language is great, and when they both try to speak in said language, their bodies come to life and they start shouting and tone and all the things happen and it’s hilarious. 

On top of this, I’ve been reading some Venuti things about translation, in which he’s said a lot about translating being a process of translating meaning, not translating words. The concept is translation is also challenged, with questions being asked of ‘what do we want to translate’. This particular question (that I’ve paraphrased because he uses so many words and I get lost) tickled me, and I’ve thought about what I’ve said before about effectively translating the news. I’m still playing with this. 

I did, however, become reminded (I almost wrote rimmed, and that would have made this a whole bunch more interesting) about A level English Language, where we did a whole thing on transcripts and I was reminded that at some point, my tutor had mentioned it as a form of translating speech to words - as someone who has studied performance for quite a while, we’re always looking at how possible it is to translate meaning effectively from the page of a script (if that’s the kind of performer you wanna be (no offense jus sayin’)). Transcripts offer a way to translate speech to words, and in a way that allows the reader to re-perform the speech exactly how it happened: this is particularly helpful if you’re forensic psychologist, as the speech is given in a palpable format with the exact markings of what happened in a conversation. 

I love them. They are almost like someone had smashed a keyboard or got excited about discovering punctuation, yet they are meticulously detailed, bounded by a pre-decided set of coding that allows a reader to see exactly how the conversation played out. It manages to write down laughter, tone, interruptions, exact pauses. 

So, I thought I’d give it a go. 

I recorded a short conversation of some kids behind me on the bus. What I find interesting about my particular transcript is that it also contains a translation of the french that was spoken, and my understanding of that. It’s been filtered by my foreign ear and so is bound to be wrong.

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I explain what the fuck is going on with everything and stuff. 

And some wordz. 

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Yesterday I sat on the beach.

I wanted to listen to people talking a different language and see how well I received it. I can speak French to a standard level, but at times, I have issues with listening to it. It gets lost somewhere between their mouth and my brain (probably the ear, would make sense) and I’m left staring at the person with a blank face. Also a lot of people speak Italian here, and my knowledge of that is pretty rusty (by ‘rusty’, I mean ‘shit’). 

What I wanted to look at was how I received information. By this, I mean how well I, myself, am able to understand something that is given to me (or in this case that I am stealing from other people because I’m lonely *sad face*).

This follows on from my research about semantics and interpretation of the masses, where words filled with semantic meaning are carefully placed to provoke emotions. In the current context I’ve put myself in, there is none of that. I have to provide my own semantics, like a BYOB party (BYOS?). 

I’m interested in what Ferdinand de Saussure has said about linguistics - he was the guy who talked about words being made up of a ‘signified’ and a ‘signifier’. He talks about languages not sharing common signifieds (ideas), and that is what makes translation difficult. 

I found that was the case yesterday. As I was listening to people, I would recognise a word or a phrase and then get lost translating that into what I understand to be the English equivalent, except I was transliterating, so it didn’t make sense and by the time I’d got that far, I’d lost the rest of what had been uttered.  

I wasn’t hearing the signifiers in the way they were, and I wasn’t receiving the signifieds from the words being thrown at me. I was processing them, and injecting my own semantic understanding and significance from English onto the French sounds, tying them to a ‘signified meaning’ that I’m familiar with; however this familiarity is just from what i’ve been told - “that ‘this’ means ‘this’ in English, understand that”. 

The whole situation amused me. I attempted some sort of ‘exhausting the space’ exercise we’d done with Bob last year, however I only managed to write a few words, and even then I’m not confident in my ability to know that’s what they were even saying (I don’t suppose there’s a problem with that, I just don’t like it). 

I want to spend the next two weeks looking at the translation of information - I’ve spent too much time looking at propaganda and the power of words that I’ve not allowed these new French words to have any power over me. I’m also interested in Lawrence Venuti’s work, where he describes translation as 

“investing the foreign language text with a domestic significance” (Venuti, 482:2000).

The ‘domestic significance’ can be translated, I suppose, as ‘newsworthiness’ in the context of my project. I’m (attempting to and probably failing at) investing foreign language speech and text with newsworthiness in my performance of words. I’m gonna see where this takes me now.

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Doing the Wordz (again): 5?

  Telephone Engine: From one language to another to another and back to original language. (French - English - Lithuanian - Greek - Icelandic - Chinese - English) (I got too excited by translating. I'm a sad person).

Russia and China refused to better protection of the Antarctic.

A new round of Antarctic marine protected areas, as of Friday, November 1 installation, Australia has not been established to fail. China and Russia in the Southern Ocean, to prevent water source protection.

This is the third efforts in 2012, wildlife, plants and marine life in Antarctica Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an organization founded in 1982, the management of marine resources frozen continent, including 24 members of the European Parliament.

Southern Ocean Antarctic waters mainly from human activity preserved unique ecosystem, but now the threat of fisheries and marine development.

At least 16,000 Cash.

Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources held in Hobart, Australia, a member of Tasmania on two projects to create marine protected areas, large reserves - bigger potential area of the world in India living in a big whale, marine mammals and penguins are at least 16,000 kinds .

The United States and New Zealand, the United States has a sacred million 1.25 square kilometers Ross Sea, a huge bay from the Pacific side, according to the New Zealand jurisdiction.

In turn, France, Australia, Germany, the recommended seven marine protected areas (MPA) in the Indian Ocean side of the house, through artificial 1,600,000 square kilometers.

However, Russia and China's opposition to push in 2014 for further consultation in the autumn. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources meet once a year, all decisions by consensus.

Interests of Russia.

July exclusive meeting in Germany stalled because of opposition from Russia. Moscow, which covet mineral resources and hydrocarbons white continent, fearing fishing was also significantly decreased.

(Source:http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2013/11/01/la-russie-et-la-chine-refusent-de-mieux-proteger-l-antarctique_3506865_3244.html).

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CASE: 'Torches of Freedom' - The use of semiology to change women's rights.

I came across this beauty in the first episode of The Century of the Self, where they’re talking about the work of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. This particular project of his is interesting when thinking about semiology and symbolism in communication. 

Basically, in the 1920’s, women’s rights were at the forefront of media coverage, with suffragettes winning ladies the right to vote and more female applicants to colleges and universities, etc. Despite this, women were still socially unequal. Smoking was huge during this time, however certain legislative and social laws disallowed women from smoking in public - in 1922, a woman was arrested for smoking in New York City. 

The president of the American Tobacco Company knew that his sales would soar if he could get women to smoke in public. He employed Bernays, who used techniques similar to psychoanalysis to break the taboo. His new campaign would use the current empowerment women had gained and put it to use for the tobacco company. Working with Dr A.A. Brill, they figured that cigarettes currently held an association with men, with smoking being a masculine act, and cigarettes being a phallic symbol. He took this imagery, replaced the men with the suffragettes (at the time symbol of equality and women’s rights) and said that cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’. Women everywhere took this ideology for themselves and starting lighting up in public. The performative act of a woman smoking become an icon for women’s rights. This small act was a media sensation and resulted in changing the way people thought about smoking.

(Image source: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2012/02/TorchesFreedom2.jpeg)

This fascinates me. What was used to help capitalists gain income ended up changing a societies ideas towards a particular act. The performance of a women lighting up a cigarette held such a powerful stigma that it was forceful enough to eradicate the social taboo held against women. It asks the question of how powerful can this be? 

I’m reminded that this act would again change in the coming years when the health risks come to light, with the act of smoking adopting a different stigma. 

This quote from Bernays’ Propaganda highlights the power that he and his colleagues had in changing the way society thought

Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, (...) we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

(Bernays, 9/10:1928)

He’s talked about in the documentary as saying that our emotional responses can be linked to an object or symbol, so that symbol will always provoke some sort of feeling within us - by manufacturing the link between our irrational emotion and a symbol (whether that’s a product, an ideology or a person), it can be used to change our way of thinking towards the particular subject. Powerful. 

Looking at this linguistically, their use of the phrase ‘Torches of freedom’ is an early example of a slogan. This is the main emotion-invoker, if you like. In today’s world, an example might be Apple’s ‘Forward Thinking’ for the new iPhone 5S: in a society where everyone wants the latest thing, simply describing something as ‘forward thinking’ asserts the idea that this is the newest thing, and our ‘irrational forces’, as Freud and Bernays use, want the newest thing. A link is made between our want of the newest technology with this brand or particular product. So we buy it. In the example, the use of ‘freedom’, which has powerful, standalone connotations, is the weapon used to effect us emotionally. This response is made worse when it’s directed to a group who’s currently fighting for freedom, and in an American society where they live in ‘the land of the free’. As in my checklist, the more significant something is to someone, the more newsworthy it is to them.

(Image source: http://timenerdworld.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/iphone-5s-forward-thinking.jpg?w=480&h=320&crop=1)

There are many similar incidents in today’s world that try to effect us emotionally to make us change our ways of thinking, most notably are the Kony 2012 campaign and the current issue in Russia about LGBT rights. Both are forcing ideas upon us with lexical choices carrying heavy semantic meaning with the hope that it will be enough to get us involved and change how we think about something. 

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All I've done so far, pretty much, on this project of mine is read. I've read quite a lot, and done a little bit of writing. I've also had a lot of ideas of things to make and do, but I've not yet done them. I'm gonna start doing them now. It's a good time to do that. 

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The Century of the Self, by Adam Curtis.

This is probably the best documentary I've seen a long time. I love it. Here's a link to vimeo. 

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Semiology and stuff

‘Semiology is (...) based on the assumption that insofar as human actions or productions convey meaning, insofar as they function as signs, there must be an underlying system of conventions and distinctions which make this meaning possible’. (Culler, 91:1976 (1985)). 

I’ve been reading quite a bit about semiology and the psychology of words in humans. Initially, I was reminded of two earlier posts of mine: the Chomsky and Herman (2002) quote, and my post on Breakin (up) da Newz. The Chomsky and Herman quote sums up quite nicely what a lot the reading is pointing to, that in the media systems, words are used as symbols with the intention of amusing, entertaining, informing and “inculcat[ing] individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into (...) [the] larger society” (Chomsky and Herman, 1998). The use of the term 'symbol' here is what's interesting, itself denoting something deep with meaning, and similar words have been used to describe language in a lot of what I've come across this week. In my post about my feelings on the Writing Experiments, I talked about how it felt that the article no longer carried a ‘true’ meaning: by 'true', I guess I’m referring to it’s lack of emotion or semantics. It’s a bit difficult to describe, but it makes sense when you consider the amount of meaning that a word can carry.

Semiology in theatre has been studied for less time than in linguistics, but follows the same principles set out by Ferdinand de Saussure, a french linguist famous for his theories on language forms and semiology. In theatre and performance, this is symbolism of what a character is wearing, the way their speaking, the music. This all carries meaning that helps translate what's being said by the actor. Words do, however, carry a lot more meaning that we might first think, which may be why it's obvious to consider extraneous symbolism to an actor to accentuate meaning from his act. Saussure's theory on semiology of language details a clearer understanding of the distinction between the sign and the meaning, where other signs, such as images, and their meaning feel more natural because they are harder to differentiate between: ‘Linguistics may serve as a model for semiology, Saussure argued, because in the case of language the arbitrary and conventional mature of the sign is especially clear’ (Culler, 91:1976 (1985)).

Johnathan Culler, who wrote a book detailing Saussure’s linguistic theories says in response to the writings that ‘language is a system of signs’ (Culler, 19:1976 (1985)). Saussure talks about words being made up of a signifiant (signifier) and a signifié (signified). The signifier is the phonetic sign, the word itself that we see and hear. The signified is the meaning or understanding that we relate to the particular signified: for example, ‘cat’ in english refers to a four legged animal with pointy ears that isn’t what we know as being ‘dog’ or ‘mouse’. Our understanding of the link between that animal being ‘cat’ and not ‘dog’ is how language has formed, and without this prior understanding, we would not know what to think when given that particular audible.

We can all see that these signifieds, the are used to the advantage of journalists in newspapers, especially the tabloids: the front page of the Mail Online starting with ‘Brace yourself’ (before continuing about the storm about to hit england) gives a feeling of impending doom and pain before you've got into what it's actually about, rather than just simply talking about a lot of rain, which this storm could just be. It makes an emotional link to its reader in order for them to be interested. 

It’s similar stuff like this that Chomsky is referring to in his quote, that this system of symbols or ‘signs’,as Saussure refers to them as, that can, and has been used by the media to make us feel certain ways about issues. This is something talked about in detail in Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self, in which various examples are given about how the people have been almost brainwashed by selective use of words and imagery (this is something I’ll talk more on later, as there’s an amazing section about our interpretation and the effects of such). It discusses heavily the idea of psychoanalysis and Freudian ideas that helped presidents win elections and women buy cigarettes through creative use of language and symbolism. 

I’ve had another think about the question of something being a newsworthy and taken into consideration the use of semiology in media writings. In order to meet the criteria of the checklist, it’s possible that something can be made newsworthy by using well thought out language and paralinguistic features (imagery, punctuation: I want to look at this a bit further in the next few days) as exemplified in Curtis’ documentary. I worry less about whether or not my stuff is newsworthy by itself. In theory, then, I can just make it.