[Frameworks] UbuWeb...HACKED!

[Anna Biller]

I would also add that I think the concept of revenue is not nearly as  
relevant here as the concept of the human right to privacy and control  
over one's own creative emissions.


On Oct 15, 2010, at 3:57 AM, David Tetzlaff wrote:

> Anna Biller wrote:
>
>> The internet creates a sense of flattened relativism in which
>> everything loses its context and sense of scale and history.
>
> As an example she cites:
>
>> the way [people] use YouTube and Facebook to select works and share
>> them, almost as if their selection of the work is the same as making
>> the work.
>
> This is the sort of critique of postmodern culture that comes out of
> Fred Jameson's 'Culture of Late Capitalism' essay, or Baudrillard's
> 'Ecstacy of Communication.' I think this does occur, and I do find it
> worrisome. I have seen video blogs consisting of nothing but
> selections of other clips from around the web that I think qualify as
> works of art because of the genuine creativity, amount of work, and
> the effective aesthetic results of the choices made in pulling clips
> together and establishing connections/collisions between them. But
> such examples are rare and I do see a lot of the Jamesonian flattening
> Anna notes.
>
> But...
>
> This is not what people mean when they say 'viewing a work is as
> creative as making one.' First of all, that's phrased as hyperbole.
> The 'is' is too definitive and universal, and 'as creative as'
> indicates a false equality. It would be more accurate to say 'Viewing
> is usually an act that involves a significant exercise of creativity
> on the part of the viewer.' This is basically the 'active audience'
> thesis that drives Cultural Studies. My own conclusion is that this
> sort of active engagement, the affectless pomo reflecting screen, and
> a more Frankfurt School ideological transmission all occur in our
> culture side by side.
>
> The active audience thesis stems from basic principles of semiotics.
> The work of art is an object, with elements that act as symbols. These
> symbols have no intrinsic meaning. They must be assembled, interpreted
> and engaged by whoever perceives them. There is a lot of wiggle-room
> in this process. So the mute object only becomes a meaningful work of
> art once someone 'reads' it, and invests meaning into it, which is
> inevitably a sort of indirect dialogic process. Academic studies like
> Henry Jenkins' 'Textual Poachers' may overstate the case, but there's
> too much evidence for the basic thesis to dismiss it entirely.
>
> And certainly, experimental film is a form that engenders active
> engagements. I'd guess for most folks on this list, early encounters
> with experimental work yielded a good share of 'WTF?' reactions,
> followed by struggles to parse the text, leading to a variety of
> interpretations rooted in part in each viewer's unique life  
> experiences.
>
> Perhaps some UbuWeb users wind up engaging the clips there in the
> worst sort of YouTube reflecting-screen pomo fascination. But that's
> hardly Ubu's fault. Ubu has clearly been a portal by which a
> significant number of people who would not otherwise been exposed to
> avant garde work have found their way to some knowledge/interest/
> appreciation. As Jeanne Liotta noted, in the long run that benefits
> our 'community' as a whole, and we all can benefit individually from
> the health in that community.
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