Travels & Travails in Digital Media: From Blog 2 Page to Screen 2 Santa Cruz

I begin with a video (where I say among other things that I’ve been working for two years on a project about teaching, writing about, and publishing/presenting in the digital humanities and this raises contradictions about vernacular, audience, duration, translation and more) all to be demonstrated in this post where I perform and re-present and preserve what will be at talk on November 23:

But YouTube cut me off, darn it! (as it so often does when you record from your monitor), so I will finish my intro verbally, in the room, face-to-face, there our flesh connected:

“…Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-IML NEH Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship and supported by ‘a planning grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop a proposal for a multi-university digital hub in support of work in visual culture. She will be working with scholars from Brown, NYU, Rochester and UC-San Diego.’

And in part 3 of this talk, I will conclude with a discussion of the implications of my project for teaching, research and publishing in the ‘digital humanities.’”

THE TALK: Part 1: Teaching and Writing about Learning from YouTube

Example of my blog writing which, of course, includes video writing.

READ: “I am teaching an experimental class on/about YouTube this semester,” (continue while video plays). Show press coverage.

And then 3 attempts to structure and control our class.

Then provide examples of how to control/with video.

End with examples of my attempts to write it out.

PART 2: The “book” (under wraps, under construction, coming soon…)

Here I discuss the September 24, 2009 blog, On publishing my YouTube “book” on-line.

III. Conclusion re “Digital Humanities”

A video (where YouTube messed up my synch, but I don’t mind, I support bad video):

I conclude by discussing my July 17, 2009 blog, Digital Humanities.

I make nouveau art video on YouTube: Mommy’s Marriage

I have been criticizing YouTube for a few years now. Easy enough to do given its perplexing gaps in capability—all the things it won’t let you do: find things, surround them with meaningful stuff and people—not to mention all the crap video. Could I re-purpose the site to succeed at functions I require for video art? This is my goal with my project, Mommy’s Marriage, currently in active pre-production.

To prepare for this nouveau art video project (one of curating more than of art production), I first considered what might comprise YouTube’s strengths and unique powers for documentary: the capability to update and version; to allow the audience (or users) to participate and even for the subjects (of a traditional doc) to become producers of their own stories; and to create communities within media, including children, who can speak for themselves and to each other.

Then, I thought about what I don’t like about YouTube: how strong feelings, voices, and ideas remain siloed, individuated, unlinked, going nowhere powerfully alone. I wanted to see if I could construct, instead, a YouTube page as a collaborative, interactive, communal work, with a singular and defined set of purposes, a commitment to hard ideas, and a sense of safety and intimacy that is definitive of community and allows for the kind of video art that matters to me: personal, intellectual, political, and artistic.

Then, I returned to consider my completed old-school (video art) documentary, Dear Gabe (2003) that had told the stories of feminist family of my closest friends and myself. Whenever I screen it, people say, “You’ve got to do a 7Up: revisit these people in the future and see how they’re doing.” What they really mean and want, of course, is to investigate whether the many children in the piece made it out okay (at the time it was made they were quite young) given the non-traditional, experimental, highly ideological (feminist) homes in which they were being raised (lesbians moms, working moms, multi-racial families, adoption, divorce).

I figured, I could use YouTube to let these families, including the kids, answer for themselves rather than have me edit them, turning them into narrative and rhetorical functions of my own design. Granted, I had allowed all of my friends “final cut” on my past versions of who they are, but I really had turned them each into one strong note for a composition that worked to express my vision of feminist family in 2003.

Of course, I am also getting married in July 2010 (!), and my friend Deb has recently announced her engagement (to a Man). And Hali and Margie married in California last year while this was still legal. Why were all these feminists (and once-lesbians) engaging in such conventional acts in our feminist middle age, and how did our choices, once again, represent larger trends for our generation?

Mommy’s Marriage, my attempt at nouveau video art on YouTube, will go live in 2010 and live for about six months there, perhaps addressing or answering these questions (if my friends, their partners and children are interested). The characters (now producers or nouveau video artists themselves) will re-visit the old video, make new work of their own, and ask each other leading questions from which interactive video will be made. Viewers can also  join the conversation (with some monitoring at entry). Whereas the last piece focused upon work, gender roles, familial and personal choices and their consequences, particularly in regard to the shape of family, I imagine the new one will also include divorce as well as marriage, race, aging, and then, of course, whatever the children add to the picture, as well as our partners…

The most fundamental and difficult question that arises from this new kind of art video is about children and privacy. This continues to be a work in progress, a dialogue amongst my friends and the kids themselves. So our answers are unfolding. But, my current plan is to allow the kids to make whatever work they like, but to re-edit their video to protect their privacy and that of their friends (covering faces with other sorts of related images, for instance). While most of them (teens and pre-teens all) are already beginning to engage in a public life on-line (through their own incursions into YouTube and Facebook, for instance), their own images of themselves undoubtedly stay relatively private, found and viewed by the small number of intimates who would know these kids and care to see their mundane if personal representations of self, otherwise lost in NicheTube. However, when their work is part of my work it will most likely be seen by people all over the world who neither personally know or care about us nor necessarily support the piece’s founding commitments to anti-racism, feminism, anti-homophobia, and families of choice.

Of course the question of authorial control is also paramount. I’ve given this up to a large extent (although of course I still frame the piece by setting up its founding structure and themes as well as through some editing and curating, as well as blogging). What if my friends’ work is bad, mundane, unwatchable? What if there’s just too much stuff produced that is only of interest to us, like real home videos of yore? These are all problems that define YouTube generally. Thus, my intervention will be new: to take some control within all the uncontrolled video out there and produce structure within what is usually an undifferentiated, unvetted sea of stuff: to insure some quality, some vision, some clear goals within a space of real community and love.

Laura Wexler, Chinese Photo, and Forced Forgetting

Laura Wexler, the Chair of Women’s Studies at Yale and also an esteemed professor of American Studies and photo history, presented an amazing paper on Chinese photography this weekend at the ASA. She is also the beloved undergraduate teacher who turned me on to women’s studies, feminist film theory, and visual culture and also politicized me to the misogyny of academia when she was brutally denied tenure for reasons personal and familial. She must certainly be enjoying that last laugh at Yale…

While teaching at Peking University, she asked her students the verboden: would they share their family photos with her. It seems within the intellectual context she produced they were happy to oblige: exposing the usually hidden shape, class, possessions and other details of their private lives. However, Wexler learned that her students could only share photo albums of their own lives, as their parent’s (and grandparent’s) albums had been expunged, for fear of retaliation regarding the politics of personal life during the cultural revolution.

She shared her findings about the “staging of inaccessibility” in places like contemporary China where forgetting is what sustains people (in part, Wexler thinks, because of the absence of a human right’s discourse to create a framework for remembering). She learned that continuous telling, and continuity between telling, is often the function of our (ever growing and easily sharable archive of) home images of self and family.

It was painful and perplexing to think about the gaps between (visuality of) Chinese generations (also being discussed this week around different generations of Germans ), but I’ve been thinking about such gaps myself (ones that actually occur outside of systems of the state sanctioning of ongoing forgetting and within a society where human rights discourse prevails), in relation to gaps across feminist generations, as well as my father’s forced forgetting and remembering of his own Holocaust trauma.

Along this vein, it was truly interesting to learn that while (after twenty-five years!), neither of remembered the other’s face, the other’s voice, intellect, and shared feminist ethos were as vivid as they had been in the 1980s, photos to record or no.

Dear Gabe: My Old Video Art

Loving the Archive; Controlling the Archive

The archivist brings work to visibility by seeing it, knowing it in her way, and connecting it to other video and viewers that will frame and hold it: giving context, making friends, building arguments, forming associations. Unruly archives need curators. Their holdings nothing but inconsequential detritus until loved and re-purposed.

I have proposed a video archive love fest. I want to take the dead work of the L.A. Woman’s Building (recently archived at the Getty’s Research Institute) and re-purpose it on-line. Bring it back to life. Make it relevant. Make if visible and re-usable. Put it on YouTube.

A proposed (pending funding) continuation of my work with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Project, I hope to move old tapes on-line linking this inspiring (and too invisible) retro-video-vision to the hyper-mediated now. I am eager to re-purpose YouTube as a productive archive of video art that addresses some of the contradictions engendered by this unique process archive. Women’s Building video was made and saved by countless (often anonymous) women who were mutually developing and enjoying a uniquely feminist theory and practice of video fundamentally informed by a consciousness raising that was itself conversant with contemporary art and primarily engaged with video at its inception. Throughout feminist art education at the Building (video) process was valued, and itself documented as well as being document, and all of this was meant to be made public (often through video), and then saved for history (as video), even, counter-intuitively, as it was also, most critically, marking something entirely internal and ephemeral.

In videos from the Building, there is a consistent and self-aware project that evocatively links video across this archive to both feminist process and preservation. I would continue this past project, by selecting videos from the archive, with the artists’ permissions put them on-line, and produce prompts, frameworks, and tools for their contemporary use. In so doing, I would be attempting to making this archive newly usable for present-day digital (video) processes, thus unmooring it from its obscure, frozen, and misunderstood place as feminist history, and encouraging it to better engage with our feminist present (which was once its under-theorized future), in the meantime allowing past work to remain relevant, become active, and embark in dialogue with the present.

I will speak on this Saturday at the ASA Conference.

Video Art: Does Access Matter?

“The promise held by video, that it could create ‘personal media,’ that normal people could control the production of video imagery and bypass the tightly controlled corporate structure of commercial media, seemed like a revolutionary and democratic advance. Video was seen as a potentially radical political tool that could subvert the relationship between dominant media structures and audience , eventually allowing artists and anyone else to directly address the public without the need of a support structure of broadcast television, museums, galleries, or other forms of distribution. -”Introduction: California Videos, Artists and Histories,” Glenn Phillips

While a certain strand of video art was made with the distinct purpose of reaching an audience so as to express opinions, ideas, analyses, images, or ways of being unexpressed through dominant media, it seems important to note that only a small portion of this has since been posted onto YouTube, making use of this newly available tool to expand audience, using video and YouTube as a “radically political tool…to directly address the public,”  by using this (new) tool to allow for expanded exposure to these (old) radical ideas and images.

Why?

As a “video artist” myself who has often used the medium to expand the reach of my voice (or my community’s: see my work on AIDS activist video, for example) in the name of a cause, I’ve only chosen to put one of my videos on YouTube (RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Prison; while SCALE, about my sister Antonia, was loaded by the corporation that distributes it against my better wishes). The reason(s) are clear: activist videos are made to be shown within organized settings, where context, dialogue, community, and continuing actions (see my sister Antonia Juhasz’s recent “Marching on Chevron” organized with the screening of the Yes Men’s new film) need to be as carefully engineered or constructed as is the video text itself. In fact, radical screenings are often understood to be as much a part of activist video (art) as is the video. Since this is impossible on YouTube, the lack of context and community trumps the power of access and old-school video activists choose to stay home (or march without help of YouTube).

Looking for Video Artists

Perhaps the easiest way to find (established) video art on YouTube is to search the site using the name of an already famous video artist. What you will find, then, is one of three possibilities:

1) Their work is not on YouTube.

2) An interview with the artist is on YouTube.

3) Their work has been (badly) scanned and anonymously and probably illegally posted, in fragments and probably not with the artist’s permission.

These three truisms have some associated corollaries.

Most established video artists do not put their art on YouTube because it undermines what are already highly tentative (and quickly collapsing) underpinnings of the (dying) form: it is (was) at least partially financed by sales; it is (was) confirmed through institutional sanction(s); it needs to be viewed in and through controlled contexts and formats (in a white room, with a specified duration on a black box, without ads and surrounding text).

While the interview of the artist does contribute some sort of (positive) sanctioning function, its appearance on YouTube (as is true of everything there) follows much the same distorted logic of sanction already in place in the real world and the YouTube that records it: the more famous you are, the better chance you’ve actually been interviewed, that your interview can be found, or that some people would think that they might want to watch it.

Video Art(ists) of the YouTube Archive

“The many types of video art have been made with a variety of intentions, ideas, working styles, and structures. Some address pure aesthetic concerns, where others prioritize content in less formal but still original and more deeply personal ways.” Kate Horsfield, “Introduction to the Video Data Bank Collections,” Feedback, 2006.

(Here you should see Kate Horsfield interviewed in the 1970s about video, but Google video won’t let me embed. You can also see my interview with her for the 1990s Women of Vision, here.)

If everything on YouTube is video art (at least the stuff made by individuals and not corporations), but very little of this art can be ever finally understood as such because it wasn’t really made to be art and won’t be recognized as such either, even if it was (unless it goes off YouTube gaining sanction, context, and community along the way), then it is the archivist (the curator, the choreographer, the tour guide) who becomes the final, visible, verifiable YouTube artist by herself making visible the links (to other forms, communities, ideas) that the artist alone might once have made (off-line in a place on a box for an audience). See the work of Natalie Bookchin, for example:

Everything off YouTube is Video Art

I recently refuted Virgina Heffernan’s euphoric claim about YouTube’s aesthetic gold (everything is…). Even more recently I speculated that: “(Traditional)  video art carries assumptions about method, form, and audience. The term refers to uses of the medium that demonstrate 1) some awareness of previous forms (of art, media, or evidence) and an attendant attention to craft and 2) non-industrial funding, production, and distribution models often in clear defiance to those organizing industrial television, advertising, and film. Authorization needs to occur via display or consumption. Video becomes art when it is vetted, circulated or consumed as such.” What happens to video art seen on YouTube hidden within the mayhem:

So there’s the rub. Video on YouTube (that made by people and not corporations) easily succeeds in criteria 1 and 2. 1) Video on YouTube speaks to the traditions of video on YouTube which mostly speak to conventions of dominant media. And whether it’s “good” or “bad,” people construct it using the craft at their disposal. 2) It is made outside (but eerily congruent to) dominant modes Including video art).

But sitting as it does on YouTube, and thus only authorizable by numbers (of hits) itself a mark of populist mediocrity, and never understood as “art” in the first place, but coming to construction more through a logic of everyday practice, home-production, and consumer-fun, it can only be art if it moves off YouTube.

Ad-Hoc Piece-Meal Video-Art

“Towards the end of the middle decade of the twentieth century, a perplexing and complex form emerged in Europe and the United States. Variously called video art, artists’ video, experimental video, artists’ television, ‘the new television,’ even ‘Guerrilla TV,’ the genre drew on a diverse range of art movements, theoretical ideas, and technological advances, as well as political and social activism. In this period of dynamic social, economical and cultural change, much new art was formally and politically radical.” – Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 2006

(Traditional) video art on YouTube is:

hard to find,

ad-hoc in its inclusion,

made more accessible because it’s there,

not made for and is thus ill-suited for this forum.

(Nouveau) video art on YouTube is made for (and probably therefore about) on-line people-made corporate-hosted media.