#// the topic of artist exploitation by the entertainment industry comes up on this blog and this is a really good breakdown

[jonathantaylorthomas]

Diary entries, as a rule, don’t constitute art. Songs do.

That’s what drew me in to Taylor Swift and her music upon the release of her 2006 debut album, “Taylor Swift,” and that’s what has kept me closely tracking the remarkable arc of her career since then, up to and including today’s release of her sixth album, “Reputation.”

From the beginning, Swift — then a precocious, uncommonly smart, gifted and ambitious teenager — has written deeply personal songs that often sound like they’re ripped directly from the pages of a diary.

That hallmark of her songwriting has nurtured an especially close bond between Swift and her fans, along with her savvy use of social media from the outset. It’s also given her detractors no shortage of ammunition with which to attack her for everything from a new hairdo to her choices of dates to the logistics of selling tickets to her concerts.

The double-edged sword of success — and the fame and fortune that have accompanied it to stratospheric levels for her — inform many of the songs on “Reputation,” possibly the most anticipated album of the always-intensive fall season.

As one of a small handful of music writers offered an early listen to the new collection, I’ll venture to call it her most focused, most cohesive album yet.

In large part that reflects her dramatic narrowing of collaborators compared with her previous two outings: Nine of the 15 new songs written and produced for the most part by Swift with superstar producers Max Martin and Shellback, the other six in tandem with indie rock band Fun front man Jack Antonoff.

They conjure a sense of foreboding to illuminate her songs of betrayal, heartbreak and disappointment. There also are plenty of bright spots celebrating new love and new maturity in her outlook, most framed in dance-floor-conscious beats and employing inventive sonic textures that expand on or outright defy conventions of contemporary pop-R&B music production.

I’d also say that in many ways “Reputation” echoes one of Bob Dylan’s greatest lines of the last two decades: “I used to care…but things have changed.”

'Reputation' echoes one of Bob Dylan’s greatest lines of the last two decades: 'I used to care…but things have changed.' — -- Randy Lewis I say that based on many hours I’ve spent with her since first traveling to Nashville to interview her early in 2007, not long after her debut album put her on the map in country music circles.

Case in point: “Reputation” is the first album for which she’s given no interviews in advance. (I had sat down with her for extended talks about each of her previous four albums, “1989,” “Red,” “Speak Now” and “Fearless.”)

Additionally, only a small handful of music critics were invited to hear this album in advance (The Times’ pop music critic Mikael Wood was not).

She did once again hold several playback sessions for fans in recent months, as she did when “1989” was being readied for release three years ago. But no reporters were allowed to look in on those as a few did for “1989.”

Things have changed, indeed.

What struck me initially about Swift’s music was the refreshing viewpoint she brought to her songs, which sounded, for a change, like what real teenagers might think, feel and say.

That was a big part of what prompted me to single her out at the end of 2006 as one of the artists most worth watching in the year ahead, and to travel to Nashville a few months later to interview her about her ambitions.

So many other young pop and country acts spent most of their time attempting to pass themselves off as preternaturally mature, often singing of experiences well beyond their years.

That initially sparked my respect for her as a young artist—not just a pretty face and perky personality who’d been handed a batch of songs written by others and instructed by her handlers on what to say, how to dress and where to stand.

Clearly that resonated with a lot of listeners as well, and launched her on a meteoric rise: first in country music, and then to her place today as arguably the biggest pop star on the planet.

Along the way she has held tight to the innate understanding of social media platforms she expressed to me in 2008, shortly before her sophomore album, “Fearless,” was released.

“Blogging has been really fun because I like to let people into my life as much as possible,” she said back when MySpace was still the dominant social media outlet for most musicians, well before Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and, her new favorite outlet, Tumblr, took over. "I think it's important for the people who keep you going and support you and have your back out there in the world to know that you're thinking of them all the time.”

She quickly learned, however, that it’s not a big leap from having someone’s back to stabbing it, a harsh reality Swift has faced through intensely public Twitter feuds in recent years with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, among others.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms magnify vulnerability and hypersensitivity with snarky comments and images, making adolescence and young adulthood seem more perilous than ever.

She acknowledged the vipers in the room directly on her third album, “Speak Now,” with “Mean,” a song in which she transformed one blogger’s nasty comments about her into a hit song. That’s one tool with which she’s avoided the “Don’t get mad; get even” path of revenge, instead drawing illumination and creative inspiration out of the many barbs tossed her way.

Yet the more famous she’s become, and the more followers she’s cultivated, the more the world at large apparently feels entitled to pass judgment not only on her art but on her life, topics she takes on in several of the new songs on “Reputation.”

That’s a fact of contemporary life Swift recognizes in “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” In fact, it may well become an anthem for the Twitter generation, for whom every fleeting thought seems worthy of sharing with the world at large: “Did you think I wouldn’t hear all the things you said about me? And here’s to you… ‘cause forgiveness is a nice thing to do/ (laughter) I can’t even say it with straight face!”

I’ll go as far as to suggest that the whole “Reputation” theme of the album isn’t solely about Taylor Swift and her place in the world, but examines the extent to which most of us now live out our lives in public thanks to the omnipresence of social media, and the multiplicity of ways that plays out.

Indeed, in each of two elaborate 72-page magazines she has created for an exclusive deluxe edition of the album (available in the U.S. at Target stores), she includes an open letter noting, “This is the first generation that will be able to look back on their entire life story documented in pictures on the internet, and together we will all discover the after-effects of that.”

Another facet of Swift’s career that’s impressed me is the way she has respected her place as a role model for young women in general, and other female musicians in particular.

Among the many ways that’s manifested are her personal donation of $500,000 to disaster relief efforts when Nashville, and much of Tennessee, was flooded in 2010 — before she reached her 21st birthday. She ponied up an additional $1 million last year for flood victims in Louisiana after launching her “1989” tour there.

She wielded her industry clout to politely but firmly chastise Apple for initially placing some of the financial burden of a free trial period for its new streaming service in 2015 on songwriters with a plan that would have withheld their royalty payments — an idea the tech giant abandoned in response to her open letter.

Even when she briefly succumbed to the temptation to respond to a perceived diss from Nicki Minaj over yet another VMA Awards show in 2015, Swift quickly apologized and held out an olive branch rather than continuing to ratchet up a war of tweets.

As recently as August, she turned the tables on a lawsuit filed against her by a Denver radio host who claimed he was unfairly dismissed from his job after she complained that he had groped her during a post-concert meet-and-greet. She filed a countersuit in which she asked for, and won, a token $1 jury award after she took to the witness stand to speak out not only in her own defense, but on behalf of other sexual harassment victims.

Yet bloggers galore still seem determined to take her down for any number of issues, lately many of them revolving around the way she has set the stage for today’s release of “Reputation.”

A plan to create an incentive that would give priority for buying concert tickets to fans who most enthusiastically click away to watch her latest videos or place advance orders for the album was blasted as exploitative.

She’s also come under fire for not being vocal enough about alt-right demonstrators who have attempted to co-opt her music into endorsements of their positions, reminiscent of Charles Manson’s bizarre misinterpretation nearly 50 years ago of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” which he insisted was a coded message to him to start a race war.

Then there was the much publicized dissing of her last year from Kanye West in his song “Famous” in which he rapped that she owed him sex because he made her famous by snatching the spotlight from her at the infamous MTV Video Music Awards in 2009 — despite the fact she had scored multiple hit singles and sold millions of albums well before that incident.

She kept a relatively low profile last year when West and his wife, Kim Kardashian, spoke and tweeted ad infinitum that she had given him her consent about the way he portrayed her in “Famous,” offering only a terse denial that that had been the case.

When she released “Look What You Made Me Do” as the leadoff single from “Reputation,” she took flak in many quarters for a perceived belated response and for keeping a feud going long past its natural shelf life.

But based on how I’ve watched her process other life events, what I hear in the song is a woman who recognizes the hurt an ugly life situation has thrust upon her, and who owns the consequences of how it that has played out for her, emotionally and psychologically.

“I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me,” is how the sadder-but-wiser Swift portrays herself in this scenario. “Look What You Made Me Do” isn’t an exercise in the blame game; it’s an acknowledgment of loss over defenses one has been forced to erect out of self-preservation.

In a broader sense, the payoff I’m after in “Reputation” has nothing to do with any shade she’s throwing at West and Kardashian, or whether in other songs she’s leaving any clues on her breakups with Tom Hiddleston or Calvin Harris.

Many eyes, of course, also will be focused on whether “Reputation” extends her streak of albums that have sold more than 1 million copies in the first week. She’s the only artist to do so with three consecutive releases.

The only thing that matters in the long run is how she’s evolving as a songwriter, a singer and a record producer.

Will anyone care in 10, 20 or 50 years — heck, in five, even — who the “him” is in “Getaway Car,” when she confesses, “I wanted to leave him / I needed a reason”? What’s much more likely to stand the test of time is the whip-smart form the song’s expression of romantic betrayal delivers: “It was the best of times / The worst of crimes / The ties were black / the lies were white / In shades of gray and candlelight.”

Her commitment to growth as an artist is something I sensed more than a decade ago, when we first met in the bunker-like basement of her then-fledgling record company, Big Machine.

And it’s still why I fully expect to be as interested at what Swift writes at 37 and 47 as what she’s delivered at 27. In my book, that’s the only reputation that matters.

[jovandawkins]

Music, Economics, and Beyond

"The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing" --Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow, Canadian journalist together with co-editor and of the off-beat blog Boing Boing, is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent in the Creative Commons nonprofit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon lawfully and to share. Doctorow and others continue to write prolifically about the apocalyptic changes facing Intellectual Property in general along with the music industry in specific. In this article, we will explore the cataclysm facing U. S. industry in the portal example of the music industry, a simple industry in comparison to those of automotive or energy. However , within the simplicity of this example we may uncover some lessons that apply to all industries. In his web-article, "The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free, " Michael Arrington tells us that music DVD sales continue to plummet alarmingly. "Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their brands and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it... Radiohead, which is not any longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for no matter what price people want to pay for it. " As many others have iterated in recent years, Arrington reminds us that with regard to effective legal, technical, or other artificial impediments to production can be created, "simple economic theory dictates that the price of music [must] fall to zero as more 'competitors' (in the following case, listeners who copy) enter the market. " Unless sovereign governments that subscribe to the Universal Copyright laws Convention take drastic measures, such as the proposed mandatory music tax to prop up the industry, there pretty much exist no economic or legal barriers to keep the price of recorded music from falling toward zero. With response, artists and labels will probably return to focusing on other revenue streams that can, and will, be exploited. Especially, these include live music, merchandise, and limited edition physical copies of their music. According to author Stephen M. Dubner, "The smartest thing about the Rolling Stones under Jagger's leadership is the band's workmanlike, corporate method to touring. The economics of pop music include two main revenue streams: record sales and traveling profits. Record sales are a) unpredictable; and b) divided up among many parties. If you figure out how to tour efficiently, meanwhile, the profits--including not only ticket sales but also corporate sponsorship, t-shirt sales, etc ., --can be staggering. You can essentially control how much you earn by adding more dates, whereas it's hard to overpower how many records you sell. " ("Mick Jagger, Profit Maximizer, " Freakonomics Blog, 26 July 2007). In order to get a handle on the problems brought about by digital media in the music industry, we turn to the data the majority relied upon by the industry. This data comes through Neilsen SoundScan which operates a system for gathering information and tracking sales. Most relevant to the topic of this column, SoundScan provides the official method for tracking gross sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada. The company collects data on a every week basis and makes it available every Wednesday to subscribers from all facets of the music industry. Like for example , executives of record companies, publishing firms, music retailers, independent promoters, film entertainment producers and their distributors, and artist management companies. Because SoundScan provides the sales data used by Billboard, the leading trade magazine, for any creation of its music charts, this role effectively makes SoundScan the official source of sales records inside the music industry. Quo vadis? According to Neilsen Soundscan, "In a fragmented media world where technology is usually reshaping consumer habits, music continues to be the soundtrack of our daily lives. According to Music 360 2014, Nielsen's third annual in-depth study of the tastes, habits and preferences of U. S. music listeners, 93% of the country's population listens to music, spending more than 25 hours each week tuning into their favorite songs. " For most Americans, music is the top form of entertainment. In a 2014 survey, 75% of respondents claimed that they actively chose to listen to music over other media entertainment. Music is part of our lives across all times of the day. One fourth of music listening takes place while driving or riding in autos. Another 15% of our weekly music time takes place at work or while doing household chores. It has end up no surprise over the past five years that CD sales have diminished while download listening and sales get increased. Bob Runett of Poynter Online comments, "Start waving the cigarette lighters and swaying aspect to side--the love affair between music fans and their cell phones is getting more intense. Phones with audio capabilities will account for 54 percent of handset sales globally in five years, according to a report talking to firm Strategy Analytics Inc. The report suggests that we keep watching the growth of cellular tunes decks (CMDs), devices that deliver excellent sound quality and focus on music more than images. " ("A Few Notes About Music and Convergence, " 25 November 2014) Stephen J. Dubner summed in the mess quite well almost a decade ago. "It strikes me as ironic that a new technology (digital music) can have accidentally forced record labels to abandon the status quo (releasing albums) and return to the past (selling singles). I sometimes think that the biggest mistake the record industry ever made was abandoning the pop sole in the first place. Customers were forced to buy albums to get the one or two songs they loved; how many albums can you claim that you truly love, or love even 50% of the songs--10? 20? But now the people have talked: they want one song at a time, digitally please, maybe even free. " ("What's the Future of the Music Sector? A Freakonomics Quorum, " 20 September 2007). Like many of us, I (Dr. Sase) also have worked for a musician/producer/engineer/indie label owner releasing esoterica since the 1960s. While occasionally made an adequate living off my movies, I also developed my talents as an economist, earning a doctorate in that field. Therefore , I thought from this dual perspective of an economist/musician. The post-future, as many music pundits call it, does not really change that much from the past. How and why folks obtain their music continues to reflect at least three linked decision drivers. We can summarize the three most relevant as 1) Content, 2) Durability, and 3) Time-Cost. Let us explain further. 1) Content When I started to record music in the early 1960s, the market has been filled with "one-hit wonders. " It was the age of AM (amplitude modulation), DJ radio. It was also the age of this 45 RPM record with the hit on the A Side and usually some filler cut on the M Side. It was not uncommon for anyone with a 2-track reel-to-reel to "download" the one hit desired from their favorite broadcast station. There were few groups that offered entire twelve-inch LPs with mostly great songs. The first these LP that I purchased was Meet the Beatles by those four lads from Liverpool. Click here Jovan Dawkins During the late nineteen sixties, the industry turned more to "Greatest Hit" collections by groups that had previously turned out a archipelago of AM hits and to "concept" albums. During this golden age of LP sales, the Beatles, your Stones, the Grateful Dead, Yes, King Crimson, and numerous other groups released albums filled with sound content. Bottom line: consumers don't mind paying for product if they feel that they are receiving value. 2) Durability How come would someone buy a twelve-inch LP when they could borrow a copy and tape record the tunes to a reel-to-reel or, later on, to a compact cassette? The answers at that time were simple. First, it was "cool" to have a great album collection, especially one that a member of the opposite gender could thumb through in your dorm room. Let us simply say that one's album collection could inform another party about people's tastes and possible sub-culture and personality. Therefore , an attractive collection provided a certain degree of social currency. May well this account for the resurgence of vinyl in recent years? The second part of the equation came in the form of actual product flexibility. Like current downloads, self-recorded reel-to-reel and cassette tapes generally suffered from some loss of fidelity in the change. More importantly, the integrity and permanence of the media also left something to be desired. Thirty to $ 40 . 00 years ago, tape would flake, break, and tangle around the capston. Unless one backed up their collection for a second-generation tape, many of one's favorite tunes could be lost. Today, computer hard drives crash. Without the expense of additional hard drive and the time involved to make the transfer, the same durability issues ensue. What about CDs? Since several of us who use CD-Rs for multiple purposes know, the technology that instantly burns an image actually leaves a product that remains more delicate and subject to damage in comparison to a commercially fabricated CD, stamped with a metal master. Will the Internet clouds provide the same level of comfort for music producers and listeners? We might just have to wait and see. 3) Time-Cost This third element basically reflects the old "tape is running/time-is-money" economic argument and may explain why younger music-listeners prefer to download songs either legally or illegally. The idea echoes the same economics that led listeners in the 1960s to record their favorite hits off of the radio. That substance of the argument has to do with how an individual values his/her time. If music-lovers works for a low per hour wage (or often no income at all), they will value the time spent downloading, backing up, and switching cuts in terms of what they could be earning during the same time. Let us consider the following example. Assuming that twelve packages or a comparable CD costs $12. 00, a baby-sitter earning $6 per hour could afford to spend even though two hours of time ripping music to achieve the same value. However , someone with a skilled trade or a degree may be earning $24. 00 or more per hour. Spending more than one half hour at ripping would exceed the worth derived. The counter-argument of the time-cost of travelling to a brick-and-mortar music store gets offset by a persons ability to log-on to Amazon or elsewhere in less than a minute and possibly receive free shipping. The market will constantly change as the primary market demographic ages. It happened with the Baby-Boomers of the 1960s and 1970s therefore will happen with Generation X, Y and Z in the current century. The bottom line of all of this debate rests on the fact that a consumer will choose the mode of deliverable that optimizes his/her bundle of values. The following bundle includes quality and quantity of content, durability, and time-cost effectiveness. These remain the lessons that will music makers and music deliverers must understand to survive. The more things change, the more they continue to be the same. "When I'm drivin' in my car, And that man comes on the radio, He's tellin' me more and more, Approximately some useless information, Supposed to fire my imagination, I can't get no, oh no, no, no . inch -Michael Philip Jagger, British Economist, London School of Economics In conclusion, we recognize that certain values inspire consumers as well as businesses. These values include content, durability, and time cost. It does not matter whether the good and service under consideration exists in the form of real, personal, or intellectual property. The premise remains the same for making favorite songs, building automobiles, teaching economics, and providing legal services.

[birgilboykin-blog]

The Top 5 Myths About Making It In The Music Business

"The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing"

--Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow, Canadian journalist and co-editor and of the off-beat blog Boing Boing, is an activist in favor  Pop Musician of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. Doctorow and others continue to write prolifically about the apocalyptic changes facing Intellectual Property in general and the music industry in specific.

In this article, we will explore the cataclysm facing U.S. industry through the portal example of the music industry, a simple industry in comparison to those of automotive or energy. However, in the simplicity of this example we may uncover some lessons that apply to all industries.

In his web-article, "The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free," Michael Arrington tells us that music CD sales continue to plummet alarmingly. "Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it... Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it." As many others have iterated in recent years, Arrington reminds us that unless effective legal, technical, or other artificial impediments to production can be created, "simple economic theory dictates that the price of music [must] fall to zero as more 'competitors' (in this case, listeners who copy) enter the market."

Unless sovereign governments that subscribe to the Universal Copyright Convention take drastic measures, such as the proposed mandatory music tax to prop up the industry, there virtually exist no economic or legal barriers to keep the price of recorded music from falling toward zero. In response, artists and labels will probably return to focusing on other revenue streams that can, and will, be exploited. Specifically, these include live music, merchandise, and limited edition physical copies of their music.

According to author Stephen J. Dubner, "The smartest thing about the Rolling Stones under Jagger's leadership is the band's workmanlike, corporate approach to touring. The economics of pop music include two main revenue streams: record sales and touring profits. Record sales are a) unpredictable; and b) divided up among many parties. If you learn how to tour efficiently, meanwhile, the profits--including not only ticket sales but also corporate sponsorship, t-shirt sales, etc.,--can be staggering. You can essentially control how much you earn by adding more dates, whereas it's hard to control how many records you sell." ("Mick Jagger, Profit Maximizer," Freakonomics Blog, 26 July 2007).

In order to get a handle on the problems brought about by digital media in the music industry, we turn to the data most relied upon by the industry. This data comes through Neilsen SoundScan which operates a system for collecting information and tracking sales. Most relevant to the topic of this column, SoundScan provides the official method for tracking sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada. The company collects data on a weekly basis and makes it available every Wednesday to subscribers from all facets of the music industry. These include executives of record companies, publishing firms, music retailers, independent promoters, film entertainment producers and distributors, and artist management companies. Because SoundScan provides the sales data used by Billboard, the leading trade magazine, for the creation of its music charts, this role effectively makes SoundScan the official source of sales records in the music industry.

Quo vadis? According to Neilsen Soundscan, "In a fragmented media world where technology is reshaping consumer habits, music continues to be the soundtrack of our daily lives. According to Music 360 2014, Nielsen's third annual in-depth study of the tastes, habits and preferences of U.S. music listeners, 93% of the country's population listens to music, spending more than 25 hours each week tuning into their favorite tunes."

For most Americans, music is the top form of entertainment. In a 2014 survey, 75% of respondents stated that they actively chose to listen to music over other media entertainment. Music is part of our lives throughout all times of the day. One fourth of music listening takes place while driving or riding in vehicles. Another 15% of our weekly music time takes place at work or while doing household chores.

It has become no surprise over the past five years that CD sales have diminished while download listening and sales have increased. Bob Runett of Poynter Online comments, "Start waving the cigarette lighters and swaying side to side--the love affair between music fans and their cell phones is getting more intense. Phones with music capabilities will account for 54 percent of handset sales globally in five years, according to a report consulting firm Strategy Analytics Inc. The report suggests that we keep watching the growth of cellular music decks (CMDs), devices that deliver excellent sound quality and focus on music more than images." ("A Few Notes About Music and Convergence," 25 November 2014)

Stephen J. Dubner summed up the mess quite well almost a decade ago. "It strikes me as ironic that a new technology (digital music) may have accidentally forced record labels to Pop Musician   abandon the status quo (releasing albums) and return to the past (selling singles). I sometimes think that the biggest mistake the record industry ever made was abandoning the pop single in the first place. Customers were forced to buy albums to get the one or two songs they loved; how many albums can you say that you truly love, or love even 50% of the songs--10? 20? But now the people have spoken: they want one song at a time, digitally please, maybe even free." 

[photoforumpasquart]

Hester Keijser – A few notes on Bank of America, posthuman embodiment and the curious absence of the viewer in the mind of the contemporary photography critic

A rather baffling article in the British newspaper “The Independent” informed its readers on Wednesday 14 September 2016, that “analysts at Bank of America have reportedly suggested there is a 20 to 50 per cent chance our world is a Matrix-style virtual reality and everything we experience is just a simulation.” What is baffling, is not the suggestion that the entire universe might, in a sense, be said not to exist as such, might be immaterial, might be someone else’s dream. Philosophers and scientists have been postulating this for centuries. What is baffling, is that this is communicated by a big commercial bank seated in one of the most powerful nations in the world. What reason can a bank have for sharing this ‘news’ with their clients? What kind of vital implications do they expect this to have for their and their clients’ business activities? Is virtuality something they will now start to calculate with in their own computational models of future risks, strategies and opportunities?

The ramifications of this step are not to be underestimated. It’s as if a rogue theory about the ontological foundation of our tangible reality has escaped from the confines of the lab, where until now it was contained by a handful of scientists. Set free into the wild, this new cosmogony will wreak havoc in the minds of ordinary citizens, who are wholly unprepared to entertain this notion as anything more than something from a science fiction movie. And now we are supposed to seriously engage with it? Just wow. Isn't there enough anxiety and paranoia in today’s world already? Neither is it very reassuring to be told that, even if we were to be simulated life forms, we would never know about it. Except they just told us so. I had half expected the article to conclude with helpline information for readers who were upset or distressed by the story.

The headline would probably not have caught my eye, had I not just been exposed to Katherine Hayles’ book “How we became posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics”, published back in 1999 (1). Hayles writes:

“The emergence of the posthuman as an informational-material entity is paralleled and reinforced by a corresponding reinterpretation of the deep structures of the physical world. Some theorists, notably Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, claim that reality is a program run on a cosmic computer. [...] living in a condition of virtuality implies we participate in the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct and that information is in some sense more essential, more important, and more fundamental than materiality. The preamble to ‘A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age’, a document coauthored by Alvin Tofler at the behest of Newt Gingrich, concisely sums up the matter by proclaiming, ‘the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter.’”

With her words on my mind, the communication of the central bank of America felt like the final act of this event. Matter has officially lost out against code, computations and information, which, as we have come to believe, are essentially bodiless. For Haynes, the central question is: “what happens to the embodied lifeworld of humans in this paradigm, [in which] embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman?”

Even though embodiment is widely discussed in cybernetic theories, it is not a topic that regularly crops up in the now – so – popular publications on the how, what and where of photography in the digital age. My own interest in the matter developed through my correspondences with Urs Stahel (2), published on the blog platform of Foto Colectania (3). After having participated for several years in various conversations on contemporary photography, the realization had crept up on me that the body (and in particular that of the viewer) is conspicuously absent in our readings of photographic work. “Embodiment, as I searched to explain to Urs Stahel rather clumsily, “is the word I use for the way an image doesn’t speak to the eyes only, but calls on our other senses like smell, hearing and touch, affects our breathing, our posture and our vestibular sense, which helps us orient ourselves in space, and ultimately addresses and transforms our way of being in the world.”

As is often the case, once you figure out what questions want asking, doors open, and you’ll soon happen upon others grappling with the same issue. I discovered that ‘embodiment’ is also a ‘thing’ in contemporary photography theory, even if efforts are still mainly concentrated in academic circles (4). For instance, Ellen Esrock’s research traces the neglect for the body as the primacy locus for the experience of art to the onset of modernism. While it was in line with scientific developments in the late nineteenth century for “humanists and scientists [to theorize] that spectators respond to art and architecture through their bodies, projecting themselves into material objects and animating them with their own bodily life”, this had become less acceptable just a few decades later.

Esrock: “...the influential art critic Wilhelm Worringer (1908) identified two fundamental principles of creative impulse: empathy and abstraction, arguing that ‘the urge to empathy’ was not an appropriate response to the emerging abstract art of the time. Influenced by Worringer’s ambitious argument, other artists and critics of the early twentieth century came to regard empathy as a comfortable, multisensory response to naturalistic depictions and to associate empathy with passive, feminine, imitative forms of art making (Koss 2006). Abstraction, on the other hand, was understood to be a sheerly optical response appropriate to avant-garde abstract art and was associated with experiences of estrangement and discomfort and with active, masculine modes of authentic creativity. Characterized in this way, empathy had little to offer proponents of the burgeoning modernism, with its abstractions and its ethos of alienation.”

In other words, the conspicuous absence of the embodied viewer that I had registered in the existing writing on photography was perhaps not accidental, but directly related to the history of artistic discourse, which had set limits on what can and cannot be talked about. Not surprisingly, these limits were set in a time when talking about the body and how one is aware of its inner sensations - our interoceptive sense - was frowned up. And still today, there is a lingering embarrassment and a sense of shame in talking about own’s own body, especially in public when strangers are present. We are encouraged to control and even to police our bodies, which we possess like masters possess a slave, to be punished at will, to be exploited in hard labor, to be worked out in exercise, or to be given a brief respite in spare time. What we know much less, is how to be a body, let alone having the language to express ourselves adequately when prompted to describe inner sensations (5).

Esrock’s arguments are more nuanced and far richer than I can convey within the short span of this article. At present it should suffice to point in the direction of her research, and also that of Katherine Hayles (6), or of people like Sarah Kember (7) and Ariella Azoulay (8). In their work lies a potential to break down and lay bare the conventions that rule our aesthetic and political appreciation of photographic images, and to explore what this absence of the body and the erasure of embodiment tells us about ourselves, our societies and our wicked dreams of escaping the material world by convincing ourselves that we are nothing but weightless, bodiless and potentially immortal data and code.

Finally, I want to Bank of America for reminding us once again that many of the boundaries and limits we struggle with or feel defined by, are wholly arbitrary, and can safely be suspended in wild acts of imagination.

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(1) Excerpts of her book can be accessed via: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Hayles-Posthuman-excerpts.pdf

(2) Urs Stahel was the co-founder of the Winterthur Fotomuseum, which he has been managing for the past 20 years. Since 2013, he has been the curator for the platform Paris Photo (2014), the new Institute for Industrial Culture (MAST) in Bologna, and the Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg Photo Festival (2015). He also works as an author, a consultant and a lecturer (at the Zurich University of the Arts, the University of Zurich, the Sammlung Bank Vontobel). He is the writer and editor of numerous books, for example, books about Paul Graham, Roni Horn, Rineke Dijkstra, Anders Petersen, Amar Kanwar, Ai Weiwei, Shirana Shahbazi, Boris Mikhailov as well as books on themes such as “Industriebild” (‘Pictures of Industry’), “Trade”, “Im Rausch der Dinge” (‘The Ecstasy of Things’) and “Darkside I + II”.

(3) Foto Colectania is a private non-profit organization created in Barcelona in 2002 with the objective of disseminating photography in the social, artistic and educational spheres. http://correspondencias.fotocolectania.org/en/

(4) This is not a bad thing, even if many photographers profess to have a dislike for discursive writing. I would argue that, in fact, many academics are currently more avant garde and future forward in their thinking than most of us who are writing on photography.

(5) For example, who hasn’t sat at the doctor’s office at a loss for words to describe what ails us?

(6) Hayle’s profile and a selection of her writing is available at: http://nkhayles.com/index.html

(7) See Sarah Kember’s profile at Goldsmith University London, where she is Professor of New Technologies of Communication https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/SKember.

(8) Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Independent curator and film maker. http://cargocollective.com/AriellaAzoulay