I LOVE NEW YORK (final edition) from cindy wong on Vimeo.

I Love New York from cindy wong on Vimeo.

A short 40-second animation clip produced in After Effects. Artwork, design by Cindy Wong. Music by Art Tatum.

The Delivery from cindy wong on Vimeo.

What happens when you give 5 ITP students a camera to shoot in New York City? A complete mashup involving slasher horror, ninjas, film noir, and a giant Japanese TV mascot. Purely an exercise for our own enjoyment, I don’t expect Hollywood to come knocking anytime soon.
Equipment: with a Panasonic HD camera, edited in Final Cut Pro. Domo-kun costume made by Mindy Tchieu.

Here’s a compilation of different sounds of New York City melded together. Created in Audacity, recorded with M-Audio recorder.

Comm Lab Beats

In reading recent news articles about artists, their appropriation of Internet photos, and lawsuits filed against them by their original owners, I find McLuhan’s words to ring true. What does it say about our culture when content is no longer considered valuable or attributed to its original creators? Everything is seemingly free on the Internet — photos, music, video, et.c. — and all a user has to do is hit right-click, “Save Target As”, and possess a copy for themselves.

When is the issue about Fair Use and when is it a case of piracy? Fair Use, is the legal framework, that allows use of copyright work within a certain framework such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research.

According to Cornell law, the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

“The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors”

The New York Times documented Shepherd Fairey’s fight against the Associated Press about the origins of his infamous Obama “Hope” poster: Was Fairey’s use of an AP photographer’s photograph to create his illustration  fair use? Imagine if Fairey hadn’t lied about the original photograph he used in the first place.  According to a quoted source, “the significant issue in fair use cases is whether the image has been transformed from the original.” Was Shepherd’s artwork a major transformation of the original work, the photograph? Did he elevate his artwork beyond the original photograph as to make the connection between the two unrecognizable? The AP has questioned that Fairey has profited from the Obama “Hope” poster and its endless reproductions on merchandise (via Wired Magazine).

The same issue could be said in the Portfolio Magazine article, “On the rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the art of context” by Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas. An artist, Joy Garnett, had taken from the Internet a published photograph shot by Susan Meiselas to paint her own version of it. When confronted by Meiselas’s attorney, Garnett amended the work to credit Meiselas but refused to seek attribution from Meiselas for future reproductions, calling it unrealistic: “I would not, I said, agree to seek written approval from Susan anytime my painting might be reproduced some- .where. I thought this was too difficult a burden.” Garnett cited that Meiselas’s photograph had been bootlegged and recreated elsewhere — commercially and in public — and thus, felt, Garnett could co-opt the piece as it was in the public cultural realm. However, legally, Garnett and the other co-opters fall outside of Fair Use. Without Meiselas’s photojournalist contribution, there would have been no Molotov Man  to begin with. As an artist, Garnett had plans to exhibit her  Molotov Man painting in a commercial art gallery.

As a former graphic designer in the newspaper business, I have seen both perspectives of the original owner and the inspired artist and have faced this issue myself. In both cases above, I believe the inspired artworks weren’t transformative or a commentary on the original works that they became derived of. In art, the guidelines for Fair Use seems involved in making a comment or parody about another image or artwork. Also, Fair Use cases take into account the market value of copyrighted works and the intended use for the derived work. In both cases, Fairey and Garnett had intentions to make their artwork for-profit. In my line of work, if the artwork I create can still be pointed out and recognized to the original artwork, I always try to seek permission to include it or if not gained, remove it from my work.

Reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was a murky affair for me. Filled with comparisons of different time periods and art mediums, Benjamin’s essay touched on changing perspectives of art as exposed to technology. What defines art? What is the value of art and how has that shifted over time? At its heart, Benjamin’s essay questions how technology, mass production, and mainstream accessibility have transformed the art world. I question Walter Benjamin’s positioning of art values in his approach. Why can’t accessible technology, artistic expression, and commercialism coincide together? Why do they have to stay in separate camps if they don’t have to? It’s a very narrow world if works of art can only exist in one realm.

What makes a work of art unique? Does universal access to artwork (in reproduction mode or exhibit-readiness) devalue the artwork’s existence? Benjamin admits that outside factors – from the opinion of the masses to socioeconomic access – can affect the perception of art and it’s value, all of which are factors outside of an artist’s control. A better question to ask is whether an artist a sell-out for mass-producing their artwork?

In his essay, Benjamin cites photography and motion film as mediums that merited artistic expression after it gained popularity from the masses. However, what about present-day artwork like interactive media, graffiti, and graphic design, which can tiptoe the line between commercialism, art, and possess a zero transaction cost in their digital reproduction? What comes to my mind? Present day, influential artists like Shepherd Fairey and Takashi Murakami. Shepherd Fairey is an American street artist who became world-renown for his iconic “Hope” poster of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. The poster has been replicated many times over and was distributed to the public to disseminate. Has this lessened his appeal to art critics and the public? Hardly. Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist who is well known for his high and lowbrow art in mediums from fine-art (paintings) to digital (animations) and commercial artwork (illustrated handbags for Louis Vuitton). These are just a few examples of contemporary artists who straddle multiple arenas in creating and distributing their artwork to a global audience.

While visiting the Bronx’s Tree Museum, I came across the conundrums that must plague an exhibit designer: how do you pay tribute to a local landscape and make it accessible to people? Artist Katie Holten makes a valiant attempt to document the memories of residents’ and their connections to the trees residing along the historical Grand Concourse boulevard in the Bronx. One hundred trees are marked with small plaques indicating visitors to call a number, punch an extension, and listen to audio narratives of people reminiscing about the local tree they were standing in front of. Was it effective? I believe her design implementations fell short of her goal for: poor visibility, sound quality, and lack of effective storytelling.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

That classic question can apply to Katie Holten’s Tree Museum exhibit. The Tree Museum has no definitive, more importantly, visible start point that was seen along the Grand Concourse. From the 161^st/Yankee Stadium subway stop to the Bronx Museum itself, I encountered one lonely tree marked by the Tree Museum plaque. The outdoor exhibit signage is hidden inside Joyce Kilmer Park. While standing in front of the sign, I overheard a Bronx resident on her cellphone, muttering, “What’s this Tree Museum? I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of it.” Perhaps, a better way to direct folks would have been to include the Bronx Art Museum logo with the Tree Museum plaque so folks could visit the Bronx Art Museum or a website address for more information (including finding maps, brochures).

The lack of clustered audio-tagged trees meant that a visitor could wander for many meters without encountering an audio-tagged tree – leaving one to wonder if they were lost (a visitor on tour) or imaging things (pedestrian who was curious to look but lost interest). A few audio-tagged trees were marked by a yellow ribbon but more often not. So at a distance, a pedestrian couldn’t quickly scan the landscape to set off for the next audio-tagged tree.

See below:

Where’s the next one?

Make It Easy, People Will Come … Or Will They?

For easy accessibility, Holten designed the audio tour to be easily listenable to a device carried by many people: the cell phone. The shortcomings? The audio narrative was drowned out by street traffic and occasionally muffled. I resorted to using my iPhone’s headphones to better listen. Also, if a listener accidentally punched the numeric keypad during the audio narrative, they would be forced back to the main menu, losing their place in the storyline.

Lastly, I found the stories within the Tree Museum to be scattershot. Hoping to get a wide variety of participants, Holten gathered a diverse crowd. Some had interesting memories while others were vague and off topic. In my encounter, I listened to a high school student, the Bronx museum director, an urban farmer, etc. It was uncertain what a particular tree, Norway Maple, (#27) had to do with African drum/chant music (a few shouted lines, no story). A high schooler talked about the Amur Cork tree (#30), his memory of it during winter, and how it stood for 100 years in front of his school. Let’s face it — if you were a New Yorker pedestrian, your attention span is short — if you can’t capture my interest within 5-10 seconds, I’d hang up and not waste my precious cellphone minutes on that curious Tree Museum plaque. Why bother if it doesn’t sound interesting?  I don’t have time to listen to 2 minutes of nonsensical African drumming music. What does that have to do with the Bronx and with me? In effective storytelling, you have to engage the reader and more often then not, I found the stories to be “eh” inspiring a “so, what” reaction.

In the end, I think Katie Holten’s Tree Museum and it’s attempt to document a local eco-system and share it through an outdoor, public exhibit is admirable. Better signage, on the plaques and trees themselves, would help stimulate community interest and make it more visible to the passing pedestrian. Better audio would allow people to stay interested since they would hear the speakers over street noise and traffic. More importantly, perhaps, a better way to introduce the storytellers and their themes so that in a short amount of time, people get the gist of their stores rather then hang up in boredom.

In E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” the author delivers a subversive vision of a mechanized utopia, where mankind has been provided a constant life of comfort and pleasure by machinery. It seems like a good bargain – until the reader discovers how these future citizens live and what they’ve been deprived of. Here, Forster makes a bold statement in implying technology – used to it’s fullest, maximum potential – would be an opiate for the masses. If technology is invented to make life easier for humans, what happens if humans become completely dependent on these machines? As good science fiction should, Forster’s short story forces me to criticize the society depicted – not technology – to blame.

In Forster’s world, a series of unexplained events led this future mankind to choose a life ruled by technology. The machines aren’t the ones subjecting mankind to live indoors, eat pills for food, or become agoraphobic – it is the central government, Big Brother, who dictates how people should live their stifled lives. Through indoctrination, the humans depicted in Forster’s world have become so conditioned that to imagine a world of the unknown (nature) is more terrifying then the known (mechanized). Over generations of time, this utopian society never questions the government’s decision to permanently live underground and not attempt to restore the Earth’s surface by using technology.

The only challenger to this notion is Kuno, the son of Vashti, a scholar who is content with her lifestyle. Kuno, himself, is a dissatisfied citizen. Through her eyes, we witness Kuno’s defiance against his society’s conventional norms, his tale of escaping to the Earth’s surface, and his punishment when he is returned forcibly back underground. Despite hearing his story, Vashti is unmoved. She is a symbolic lemming in a society where nobody questions authority because they prefer the comfort that it doles out. To question otherwise is to face death by homelessness (i.e., being ejected to the Earth’s surface to suffocate in it’s poisoned atmosphere).

Vashti and Kuno are victims of a society where technology has been used to control and deny people the chance to move freely and make decisions independent of what their government allows. The machines are depicted as automatons that provide these humans everything – transportation, housing, entertainment, etc. How the humans choose to conduct themselves is left to them. In this case, people only interact over screens, they do not engage in bodily contact, and sex only comes as a result of perfunctory reproduction for the benefit of the human race.  The machinery, itself, is in the background. Ultimately, while the failure of the machinery led to the demise of this human colony, it was really their government’s decisions that led them to that path of destruction in the first place.

The differences in learning between oral culture and literate cultures were quite vast. Words equal power in oral cultures. Interaction among a community fostered a collective bond that helped keep knowledge alive and passed on word-by-word to the next generation. As a result, spoken language blossomed and in some cases, produced classic stories that are still told today; for example, Homer’s Odyssey and the Illiad are now acknowledged by academics to originate from Greece’s period of oral culture. Oral culture measured memory recall through endless repetition, formulaic phrases/expressions that allowed individuals to retain complex information. Stories were recalled through a person’s association with events, actions, and involvement with their communities rather then in literate cultures where an individual recalls knowledge from a text source.

In some ways, the advent of writing provoked anxiety among ancient traditionalists who preferred oral culture and its spoken word traditions. Socrates argued that the act of writing removed the individual from their actions and denied the audience from reacting to their statements in person. However, while Ong stated in 1982 that people applied that same argument against computers – let’s face it, the advent of the Internet and social networking have transformed that one-way relationship. Now, whether on blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, or in online news-voting portals like Digg, people can interact, comment, and provide nearly instant feedback to each other’s commentary. The Internet provides multiple channels of dialogue – whether you choose to leave a note on a blog, create a podcast, or tweet your reaction on Twitter. On YouTube, people are providing video comments and teaching each other with video tutorials that touch on Ong’s feedback about learning in oral cultures.

On a multicultural perspective, I found Ong’s summary of the academic study development of oral culture, how scholars overcame cultural/racial biases with new discoveries, and the global commonalities of oral culture to be fascinating. For example, cultures that are still rooted and influenced by oral learning exist in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and in North America’s indigenous tribes.

In the end, Ong’s distinction is that writing cannot exist without oral speech whereas the long-term preservation of oral culture cannot exist without written documentation by scholars and archivists. Technology can be a bridge to help preserve that. Not only that but intuitive technology (like the iPhone interface, touch-screen gaming, Nintendo Wii) is reactionary to wordy, overly technical interfaces that required a textbook to read in order to operate. In some ways, technology designers are open to elements of oral culture that make learning more accessible to individuals wanting more active engagement with technology. Just as an example, play Wii Fit. You will interact with a virtual avatar to learn new skills and fitness techniques.