Taffe choreo-graphed what she refers to as “canoe patterns,” where Aeriosa’s formations and motions emulatedthe movement of waves as they roll in and out along the shoreline
performing this dance as a canoe going down the water, except it's on the side of an office building, displays the destruction of Native lands by Western colonialization, with only some Native people remaining
Butwhen you have something new to say, you need to make something new
this is interesting, that originality is not just in the content of what you're saying but if you've come up with an original way / medium to express it
ancestralizes the present
i wonder what the author means by this phrase
made sure that we did ourhomework for about six months before we left our shores. By that I mean, everyonewas required to research their family names, what songs we could use, how to usethe songs, and where they can be used. . ..
this in-depth research on "their family names" is really important to be able to accurately convey their own culture
, our teaching is that it’s the canoes that makes thejourney. The people are the ones who make the canoes go round but it’s the canoesthat are remembered.
this also connects to The Mushroom at the End of the World, where Tsing emphasized the role of the forests and the mushrooms just as much as the stories of the pickers
his Hawaiian name
i think it's interesting how someone's name can be attached to different cultures and parts of your life -- he has three different names, his native name, his english given name, and his Hawaiian name
audiences have become so habituated to normative visual cultural paradigms that even when restrictions on touch are explicitly lifted, and guidance is provided on ways to touch, it is a struggle in a one-off event to persuade audiences to break the codes of ocularnormative civility.
i think one of the reasons they may have failed is because the setup of the event is so formal. The event begins with a long lecture, and (based off the image I saw before) the rooms they are displayed in are very white and blank, like the inside of a museum. Their audience is also very selective, with mostly artists, writers, art curators, etc, who are used to thinking of art as something precious / intellectual. I think the authors made a mistake in this audience and this design. By making it an exclusive, private event, you also have an audience who is more afraid of interaction.
I don't think ordinary people are reluctant to touch / interact at all. One of the authors shows at the beginning of the article that people at museums who witness the touch tours want to touch as well, especially children. A few years ago i also went to a gallery thing in seaport where anyone who walked in was encouraged to draw on the walls. this is different from the touch tour described here, but it had the same theme of physical interaction with an artwork. because the gallery was open to the public, it ended up being really successful and fun.
perversely devolved into spectatorship of the blind.
this might be because the audience feels as if touching artwork is just a substitute / alternative for seeing it. this "spectatorship of the blind" means they think this touching is a method only the blind need to / should use, ignoring that they could also learn from it
have internalised touch as transgressive
usually we think of art, especially the "high" art displayed in museums and galleries, to be something precious that we can only watch from a distance. this distance is very different from art in public settings - such as sculptures in a park or graffiti / murals - and is also removed from the production of art itself, which is very tactile and sometimes destructive. although this distance is important for preservation i feel like it creates a kind of emotional distance between the viewer and the artwork
focus on recognizing the objects depicted rather than on their individual haptic features.
lack of understanding about the differences between a blind person's experience of an artwork and a seeing person's: some tours are structured like they would be for a seeing person with a focus on visual attributes, even if these might not have as much significance to a blind person's as the physical quality / texture of the object
charged with edifying and enlightening the masses
touching and interacting with artwork is a privilege that the "masses" aren't supposed to have. for museums now, there's a separation between the mass audience who are there for "civic education" and those who can actually handle the artwork (buyers, sellers, collectors) that's usually a class difference
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work ofart, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is alreadythere. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works ofart-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us.
this is interesting especially in connection to a film. in the internet / social media we are exposed to a mass of different images which we go through very quickly. a movie or a tv series forces us to slow down and follow one plot line for several hours - there is "less" content in the sense that a movie's scope is limited to its own characters and story for a long period of time. yet a movie can be more memorable and more "real" than for example our TikTok feed, or any kind of "feed" which is just rapid unrelated images. this slowing down maybe helps us "see" better as Sontag writes
a wish toreplace it by something else
this makes me think of the difference between interpretation and simply relating to the piece or if there is one. for example when you listen to a song, you can relate to it and even assign it to / associate it with a moment your own life or a particular person -- it's impossible not to. in a way your own life "replaces" the art - is that interpretation, and if it is, is interpretation inevitable?
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in anyother art.
i think maybe this is because of the difficulty of reading compared to watching a movie, listening to a song, or looking at a work of art. because reading is so time-consuming, we imagine that there has to be a hidden meaning or a greater purpose to all the work we put into reading the text. it's harder to accept that we should just enjoy the text for what it is
artknew no need to justify itself
many critics talk about the "purpose" of art -- art has to communicate a "message" / represent some sort of concept or idea. but this ignores a different purpose an artist might have, which could be simply to enjoy the process of making art. as an artist you're always encouraged to have a larger meaning to your artwork, and "i enjoyed making this" or "this is pretty" is not a good enough explanation. art has to be something very formal: the only thing that matters with art is the final product, and the audience's perception of that final product.
it's interesting because we don't have this same self-consciousness when it comes to music, maybe because music creates more of an emotional connection than maybe a painting would. people still argue about what is "good" music and "bad" music, but a song that is just nice to listen to with no greater purpose is not criticized as strongly as an artwork in a museum with no meaning
it is a form of therapy.
art can also be therapy not just creating it but looking at it. beautiful architecture / decoration can create spaces that we are happy to be in. music is another form of art that is very therapeutic
that viewers who arenot black females find it hard to empathize with the central charactersin the movie. They are adrift without a white presence in the film.
white viewers can tolerate the presence of minorities as side / supporting characters, but to have a minority as a lead makes it difficult for them to even enjoy the film because of an inability to empathize (as well as an inability to imagine that they are not the target audience.)
this makes me think of video games and how people view white male protagonists as a a default and are very opposed to characters that don't look like them. for example many people were offended when Grand Theft Auto announced they would have a female protagonist for GTA 6, and many described it as the game developers trying to be "PC" and somehow taking away from the game itself. i think this comes from an inability to imagine that a "central character" could be a non-white male or that there is even an audience that exists that could empathize / identify with a different protagonist
een to enter that world from “jump” as a critical spectator whose gazehad been formed in opposition.
the audience and the subject of many of these early Hollywood movies has been white women. the movies loves this image of the white woman, and thus a "film culture whose roots rest on a founding relationship of adoration and love" is created. however, minority groups who watch film do not have that same nostalgic connection to old American films because the racism and exclusion in those films that created this "oppositional gaze"
The concept “Woman” effaces the difference between women inspecific socio-historical context
by generalizing all depictions of a "Woman" in film, film critics ignore that stereotypical depictions of women can contradict each other -- white women are depicted in a very different way from black women in film
constructs our presence as absence
this made me think about other underrepresented groups in film, and how you can be "present" but absent. it makes me think of how a lot Asian-American representation in film is very white-washed. Asian characters are occasionally included in popular films but differences in culture and language are not really depicted unless it's a gag - they are kind of written as if they were white (example Glenn in Walking Dead)
The error is not to conceptualizethis ‘presence’ in terms of power, but to locate that power as whollyexternal to us— as extrinsic force, whose influence can be thrown offlike the serpent sheds its skin.
stereotypes / other people's perceptions of us are not completely external. they don't disappear once we look away / stop thinking of them, they become integral to our own identity and condition the way we act
eading Michel Foucault
connection to Foucault: slaves were constantly surveilled and "looked" at / examined, but were themselves denied the ability to look at or examine / critique the slaveowners
were such that the slaves weredenied their right to gaze.
the idea that the oppressed can't even look at their oppressors is another way to stop any kind of revolution
we allow the management of our bodies, ourideas, our entertainment, and all our imaginary needs to beexternally imposed
because of technology we have non-stop exposure to others' opinions on how we should live our lives / what should entertain us / what we need. it's all "externally" provided and it reduces the responsibility of having to think for ourselves or entertain ourselves
Insteadof a formulaic sequence of places and events associated withfamily, work, and relationships, the main thread of one's lifestory now is the electronic commodities and media servicesthrough which all experience has been filtered, recorded, or
i feel like the author's point here is exaggerated / overly cynical
Any act of viewing is l ayered withoptions of simultaneous and interruptive actions, choices, and
the assignment that we are doing right now is "layered" because of technology. we're reading this text and simultaneously can see all the comments of all our classmates, when obviously in real life this wouldn't be possible. this makes me think of how all these "options of simultaneous and interruptive actions" and the layering of different people's ideas and different mediums can be a positive and contribute to learning or our experience of things
that, in their intrinsic archiveability, end up never beingdiscarded, contributing to an ever more congealed and futu reless present.
i can't annotate this entire sentence for some reason but this was really interesting to me. the idea that images have become "depleted and disposable" makes me of the news cycle and how quickly it moves. oftentimes, a story gets a lot of attention in the news for a few days or a few weeks before disappearing again, which might be the "mass amnesia" that the author is talking about. we can quickly move on from one story to the next, and we can also create new images / new media so quickly that our old media becomes irrelevant.
it's also interesting how the speed at which we can create new images contrasts against the fact that it never really disappears (their "intrinsic archivability") meaning we have a mass of images we can't get rid of but don't care about
how to eliminate the uselesstime of reflection and contemplation. Th is is the form ofcontemporary progress - the relentless capture and control oftime and experience.
this makes me think of how technological advancements (like the ones mentioned previously in the paragraph) all have the same goal of making our lives just slightly easier or slightly more convenient -- like each new iPhone that comes out is meant to be slightly faster than the previous one, or the camera quality is meant to be slightly better, or other minor meaningless changes that are meant to make using technology even more accessible and addicting
24n disables vision throughprocesses of homogenization, redundancy, and acceleration.
i think here the author is trying to say that a "24/7 world" where we are constantly seeing things has made us incapable of seeing anything, because of an over-saturation of the media we consume (and the redundancy of what we consume)
in the discrepancybetween a hu man l ife-wo rld and the evocation of a switchedon universe for which no off-switch exists.
a world where we exist 24/7 or work 24/7 is considered to be some impossible, alternate universe that contradicts the "human life-world." this makes me think that maybe the existence of an "off-switch" (like the existence of a weekend) is supposed to be what makes us human, as both a marking of the passage of time and a needed break in our lives
However, since no moment,place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop,consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentlessincursion of the no n-time of 24n into every aspect of socialor personal l ife
this makes me think of how because of the internet, we can look at anything at any time and from any time, which is maybe what the author means by "24/7" time. we can re-experience moments from the past as many times as we want through videos. in class we talked about online school, and the different between pre-recorded lessons online and the live lessons we would usually have. it made me think of how the internet has kind of ruined our sense of linear time, since the past (or other "moment, place, or situation) is so easily accessible