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"34/50" by Jeffrey Kolar

"The Ecstasy of Influence" by Jonathan Lethem

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.."
- John Donne (?)

I feel it is necessary to re-state this quotation which begins the essay, for my own (digital) record and to the game Lethem describes as 'Give All'.

Lethem addresses our historical and cultural framework of personal creativity. In that, the contemporary construction of personal or private ownership reveals "an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised and imperfect in its every incarnation." Through laws and regulation, copyright has successful altered intellectual property while simultaneously closing the connection between inspiration and legality. In "You can't steal a gift," Lethem evaluates how the value, or emotion attachment of some copyright property cannot be bought, sold or produced. Rather, our subjective worth we place into situations and environments "conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration." The absolute of such 'property' as All Rights Reserved or Copyright seems absurd, in that it halts the exploration of exploration itself.

In the digital age, our culture is constantly being remixed. Remix is a part of the consumer/producer model currently at play in culture. We live within a cut/copy/paste society dating back through all of history, which is itself an issue of re-appropriation. Some examples of how we view the word Copyright:

http://www.copyright.gov/
http://del.icio.us/tag/copyright
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

If these all mean or relate to the understanding of Copyright, then which is right, or which is copyright, or which is the copyright of copyright? The paradox of progression as a human race lies within issues like Copyright, which limits collective public information and creativity. All valuable 'original ideas and concepts' call upon the remediation or plagiarism of a prior historically old 'original idea and concept'. This unity we need to share in order to facilitate a healthy, strong community builds upon the model of the past. Therefore, history is constantly re-writing itself, assuming our roles (intellectually and physically) as a necessary part of history's existence.

"Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing." - Jonathan Lethem (?)

Reaction to "Ararat" by Atom Egoyan

The film used narrative to hypermediate the audience, in that a film was shown within the film. The use of image as a narrative is shown within the perspective of Gorky's introduction into the film as an "added character". Gorky was placed into the storyline because his painting (and image) of the genocide from his perspective. The photograph and painting take on the role as a character within the narration. The codes of the photo progress into a storyline, revealing Gorky as a real person and subsequently telling the "true" story of the massacre. His presence within the Hollywood-drama film is not an attempt to use these first hand descriptions or narrations of the event but rather to exploit his position as a painter, drawing "truth" through image and code. Therefore, I feel as though the film as a whole develops around Gorky's image of the massacre as a painting. Contrast to the photo, the painting begins to speak of the genocide in ways the photograph never could, in that Gorky's emotional input as an artist elevated the image into a primary historical hierarchy. The blurring of the figures hands, the brush strokes and Gorky's intimacy with the event itself act as codes revealing the image as a narrative that cannot be told within a movie of the event or even a movie of a movie of the event.

Reation to "The Body and the Archive" by Allan Sekula

"Photography continued to serve the sciences, but in a less grandiose and exalted fashion, and consequently with more modest - and frequently more casual - truth claims, especially on the periphery of the social sciences."

In it's early use, photography served as a measure of hierarchy in terms of the social, physical, scientific, moral, natural and utilitarian. Every photographic represented a public moment of the individual, which objectified stereotypes through 'realistic' aesthetics. Thereafter, photographs were used as an archival tool of the bureaucrats through a system of True intelligence.

This concept of universality revealed that "photography promised more than a wealth of detail; it promised to reduce nature to its geometrical essence." The capacity of the Absolute photographic image revealed a universality previous media could not: written language of mathematics. Previous media was unable to replicate reality through it's physical medium, such as paint, bronze or plaster. Photography as an 'advanced' technology promised this mathematical concreteness through its process of capturing the image. Rather than human's interpretation of the physical world, a mechanical machine actualized the image. Thus, the use of social hierarchy through image was justified through these mathematical and True representations of the human body.

Thus Galton exclaimed in an essay on the "generic image" that mental images "consisted of blended images and the genera produced by his optical process." This rationalizes the human as an inadequate medium for processing and assigning social hierarchies, racial stereotypes and biological truth based solely on observational knowledge. Conversely, early photographic depiction of the physical world did, through mathematics and it's utilitarian universality. Furthermore, the photographic image as a new media "attempted to preserve the value of an older, optical model of truth in a historical context in which abstract, statistical procedures seemed to offer the high road to social truth and social control."

Reaction to "Pictures for Rent" by Abbott Miller

Miller's perception of stock photography can "offer a way of studying images as a form of currency that funds advertising." Between 1974-75 the mass media adopted photography as a control method, in that photography was recognized as an emotional and physiological function. The input of data and information within a photograph served a direct connection with the development of consumer to business relationship throughout the world. Thus, followed such corporate ideals such as branding, which looked at the consumer market as a form of a growing, marketable currency. Therefore, stock photographers were told to "shoot for 'concept' rather than 'content,' to think in terms of 'word pictures." This rise of new artistic meaning forced the photographer to produce work for an audience, market, society, boss, media, young, old, ugly, pretty, and all other stereotypes. These stereotypes were then used to control and manipulate the mass media and persuade the public into buying an image of themselves. Individuality and uniqueness were no longer valued in the realm of stock photography. Therefore, the ideology of corporations and mass media were to generalize societal structures through semiotic-rich images and resell the new 'image' of self back to the consumer. Thus creating a modern culture dependent on mass media to control and construct there visions of them'selves'.

Reaction to "Chapter of Codes, Semiotics for Beginners" by Daniel Chandler

Chandler introduces a new vocabulary of reading and understanding the workings of semiotics. Primarily, he introduces the concept of semiotic codes, which "require familiarity with appropriate sets of conventions." Through the concepts of iconography, signs are used to generalize certain visual experiences and relate them to masses of people, in hopes of a utopian understanding of the icon. Codes, on the other hand, begin to inscribe meaning from the standpoints of logic, aesthetics and social. Our sense of reality is governed by these codes, building an environment of existence through a series of learned, nurtured actualizations. Codes declare that "all perceptual systems are already languages in their own right," and that, "perception depends on coding the world into iconic signs that can re-present it within our mind." Therefore, the code becomes the medium or media in which our 'vision' of reality is perceived, using tools such as iconography as a method of retrieving data through this shield of existence.

Visually, Chandler believes that organization of perception is based upon universal principles such as proximity, similarity, good continuation, closure, smallness, surroundedness, symmetry and pragnanz. These 'laws' of visual organization pose questions of human interaction with each-other and our built environment. If humanity has shifted towards visual stimulus as the main sensory response of learning, these codes therefore "help to simplify phenomena in order to make it easier to communicate experiences." Social codes then become an organized method of interaction via the verbal, the body, the commodities, and the behavioral. I believe these social codes shape our reality, both objectively and subjectively, thus making our perception of our existence an absurdity. In that, 'our' codes must and always correspond to "knowledge of: the world (social knowledge), the medium and the genre (textural knowledge), and the relationship between the (world) and the (medium)."

Semiotics can no longer be looked at as an objectified visual experience, in that of iconography and iconology. Rather, one must recognize that our perceptual reality is "a system of signs organized according to code and subcodes which reflect certain values, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions and practices." Thus, one must not recognize this reality described as a sort of determinism, but rather a socially-induced guideline or methodology to our species as humans. Every animal will develop similar practices in order to function as a biotic organism, rather I would like to recognize our system as a complexity, influenced by our humanity or living as a whole. Our choices as individuals are guided through these dynamic codes, in constant flux and reorganization. This movement represents your subjective relationship and influence to semiotic codes. Your part of building these codes determines our existence as a species.