graduatepractise

[graduatepractise]

[graduatepractise]

“The Catholic iconography brought to the US by immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Cuba is displayed in places where the predominant attitude toward Latino culture is one of amused fascination....The new sense of time and space generated by telecommunications--in the substitution of continuity and distance with instantaneousness and ubiquity--has transformed the perception of things so that they are no longer lived directly but through their representations. Experience is mainly available through signs: things are not lived directly but rather through the agency of a medium, in the consumption of images and objects that replace what they stand for. Such rootlessness accounts for the high volatility and ultimate transferability of culture in postmodern times.” - Celeste Olalquiaga

[graduatepractise]

information representation

media(you) gathers and categorizes information in compulsory and controlling procedures.

FRAGMENTATION: mutilating information so that it fits a code.

HOMOGENIZATION: of information into a predictable code or narrative.  

REPETITION: difference is reduced to variations on the same theme.

[graduatepractise]

“In the same contradictory manner that advertisements promote the reality and unreality of a referent, bodies have become the locus of a fierce battle between permanence and evanescence.” 

[graduatepractise]

Isolated place. Obsessive repetition is at the core of the process of simulation.

Bruno Barbey. Tunisia. Near Douz. A desert landscape. 1990.

[graduatepractise]

SIMULATION

1st degree references (objects, events) are simulated as representations of them (images, texts) for verisimilitude. The conventional reference and simulacra are equally real, since they are so perceived in contemporary culture. 

[graduatepractise]

Bruno Barbey. Tunisia. Djerba island. 1990. Sailboats in the water.

[graduatepractise]

Advertisements: Perception is bombarded with reality intensive campaigns. If place is a commodity, as desired object for fast commerce. To what extent does this shape our collective identification of a place? Does it affect the native just as well as the outsider?

Kamil Mullashev – Over the White Desert, from the triptych Earth and Time, 1978

[graduatepractise]

design experiment

Extract the referents and have the viewer piece them together. The viewer determines their formulations based on their own biased processes. This way of collage forms meaning. The point isn’t to get a 1:1 communication--the curiosity lies in the varied formulations of meaning that are extracted through untethered referents. 

[graduatepractise]

Hegemony requires that ideological assertions become self-evident cultural assumptions. Its effectiveness depends on the subordinated peoples accepting the dominant ideology as ‘normal reality or common sense.’

James Lull 

[graduatepractise]

Rather than an organisms inability to distinguish itself from its surroundings, this state can be read as the organism's skillfulness in fusing with those surroundings. Defined thus, psychastenia would replace rigid hierarchies with easy transitions, representing an altogether new cultural condition.

celeste olalquiaga

[graduatepractise]

Is psychestenia a defense mechanism? 

Wow the new Animorphs looks great!

[graduatepractise]

A border region as interstice. 

[graduatepractise]

Hans Richter, Film Studies 1925

[graduatepractise]

Marfa, TX. Why do people keep bringing it up? It found its way into media > positive media > art news media > cultural relevancy 

[graduatepractise]

[graduatepractise]

The outsider looking in: formed prejudice in order to favor conventions