G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
I've just put up some Quicktimes on my Faux Conceptual Art page. You
need to have Netscape Navigator 3.0 with a quicktime plug-in to view the
embedded movies. The files total 1274k and take about 7 minutes to load
with a 28.8 modem. I'm also using the fast start feature so you can view
part of the movie before its finished loading. The URL is:
http://artnetweb.com/projects/fauxcon/vid_aff.html Let me know what you
think.
Nino Rodriguez wrote:
I'd be curious to see some "GH"-style self-criticism of your QTime
movies and the concept described on the "process" page.
G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
I have a million really esoteric reasons why my work is, as "important
as Picasso's" to quote Julian Schnabel. The challenge is to make a
short clip of 500k. that is fairly interesting and deals with the
potential for a new type of web-centric rather than filmic aesthetic.
For a more in depth view check out my review of Quicktimes on
("http://www.thing.net/ttreview)
Nino Rodriguez wrote:
I'm intrigued by the fact that you say you "try
not to direct" your subjects.
G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
By direct I mean in the classic sense of film director. You know, sit
there, look petulent, raise your voice and etc.
Nino Rodriguez wrote:
Yet the whole situation, having their faces painted, being asked to pick
from a list of statments you presumable wrote and etc., would seem to be
very directed.
G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
Not really it's more of an accumulative situation that produces a
product, Something like free form Jazz/Blues.
Nino Rodriguez wrote:
What are you trying to affirm with these "video affirmations"?
G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
I'm not. It's about language, especially media,
newspeak language as a form or a special language. Something on the
level of a Wittgenstein special language. I assume this sort of New Age
pseudo-religious happy talk to be in that special language category.
It goes a lot deeper. Imagine a world transformed in such a way that all
our signs and signifiers, those that order our sense of the world and
society, are mutated and made vaguely recognizable – the meanings are
totally different.
Which reminds us: it seems YouTube has, does, and will suffer less linkrot than __________ … a troubling thought.
Instrumental reason is the objective form of action which treats objects as a means as opposed to ends. I guess one could say that it's a cognitive mode masking desire, which is fundamentally destructive (desire has an object, then when desire is realized in action, the object of desire is "used up," materially or otherwise).
Adorno, Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School, etc., I think it was, set up the category or at least put a new name on an old notion. They saw instrumental reason as the dominant form of Reason within modern capitalist society, leading to the destruction of Nature, the rise of Fascism and bureaucratic capitalism, the reduction of human beings to objects of manipulation, from which only Art offered a way out. Habermas was the main proponent of Communicative Reason as a fundamental form of social action counterposed to instrumental reason.
But it seems that several older religious texts, like the Book of Genesis or the Rg Veda set up this dichotomy of man/nature: the world and its creatures as *for* man … ? Maybe that was a fantasy of ancient peoples that lived in a harsh world of famine, disease, and violence – a world that reminded them every day that it did not exist *for* them. Maybe, conversely, our current fantasies of environmentalism, social liberalism, or postmodernism are our fantasies of the world/collective existing for no one when it seems that the world is increasingly defined/inscribed/instrumentalized by the same few informationally and technologically dominant indiduals …?
I don't know.