Inference and Reference

In 1981 during a public presentation in Paris at La Cinémathèque Française, Jean Rouch said the following:

“I am an ethnographer and a filmmaker. I have discovered that there is no difference between documentary films and fiction films. The cinema, which is already an art of the double, which presents us with a constant movement from reality to the imaginary, could best be characterized as a cultural configuration which balances between various conceptual universes. In all of this the last thing to worry about is whether reality as such has been lost in the process of creation.” [i]

Lest Rouch be misinterpreted by purists of the documentary genre he went on to say that as a filmmaker he creates the realities he films. He sees himself as a ‘metteur en scène’ as well as someone who has to improvise everything from camera angle to camera movement during the shooting of a film. This process is inspired by the kind of personal choices which inevitably rely upon the imagination of the filmmaker. The key to Rouch's approach here is the role which he sees artifice playing in the construction of any image or as he put it, the way the filmmaking process irrespective of genre is ultimately a sharing of dreams at the level of production and performance. Rouch's statement can be seen as a counterpoint to efforts on the part of documentary filmmakers to overinvest in the realist enterprise. It could also point the way to an examination of why images which “look” real have such a seductive appeal. Most importantly what Rouch suggested is that the image doesn't play as important a role in the production of meaning as filmmakers would like to believe. In much the same manner as Chris Marker in “Sans Soleil,” Rouch's statement questions the place of referentiality within the documentary form and to some degree looks outside of the image for an understanding not only of the message but of its relationship to performance and projection. 

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[i]From documents presented at the celebrations for the 50ieth anniversary of the National Film Board in June of 1989.

Museum in a Hat

(*Museum in a Hat refers to a performance by the artist Robert Filliou during which he would pull things out of a hat and give the objects to other performers or onlookers. The objects were in constant transition as was the museum. Filliou had a profound influence on the avant-garde movement in Canada during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Filliou’s performance was described to me by Hank Bull, one of the founders of  The Western Front an alternative artist-run centre in Vancouver, Canada which will be celebrating its 38th anniversary in 2011. 

“I am interested in performance as a double-jointed anti-genre in perpetual crisis.”[1] The speaker is Judy Radul.  

“…these voices [with reference to a performance at The Western Front entitled, One Fine Evening] spoke to  as much as they spoke through  the performers. Pre-recorded voices ordered them about, slogans sprouted from their mouths incongruously, speech was accented, patriarchal, computer generated, motivationally enhanced, theoretically implanted, and, in general, authorially skewed.”[2]

Vancouver and its Cultural Landscape

a

sustaining vision of

the intricate palimpsest-of-relationships

supporting every living/dying

thing ought to inform an enlightened polis;

to imagine oneself interacting

with everything (imaginable) at a strategic

moment: pen, brush, spear to hand

is simply what it’s always been about [3]

This poem by Roy Kiyooka exemplifies many of the themes which have been at the heart of the extraordinary artistic output of The Western Front (hereafter referred to as WF) over the last twenty-four years. Kiyooka plays with the idea of the palimpsest both as a metaphor of erasure and as a way of keeping history present through the traces of our culture’s work with ‘pen, brush and spear’. Nothing ever disappears in this processing of events and of history. Cultural activity builds on the past, even as that past changes with every artistic interpretation of it. Kiyooka was part of a large group of artists, performers, poets and intellectuals who shaped the modernist movement in Vancouver in the 1960's and early 1970's. It was out of this activity that the Western Front was created in 1973. In addition to Kiyooka, Robert Filliou and Ray Johnson were formative influences on the WF. “Ray Johnson visited Vancouver once briefly in 1969 as a guest of the UBC Fine Arts Gallery for an international exhibition of visual/verbal concrete poetry and correspondance art, entitled, Concrete Poetry — an exhibition in four parts which also included contributions by Robert Filliou and the internatiional Fluxus community. Filliou’s first visit was in the summer of 1973 when he came as a guest of the newly founded Western Front Society. The work of both artists, often deliberately ephemeral, used puns, riddles, events and performances to convey ideas….For Filliou, research was the door through which anyone could enter and participate in the creative process. Artists could think of themselves as researchers influencing the culture.”[4]

History and art, the ability to imagine the impossible, to make the real and the imaginary mix, to make the everyday a work of art and to make art a part of the everyday were not just thematic explorations for Kiyooka, Filliou and the many other major artists and performers who came to the WF in the early days. They were at the heart of their sensibilities as artists. The transformation of art from an object-oriented enterprise to a lived experience for artist and community alike is what has defined the WF throughout its history. In some respects, the WF was developed as a community centre with both a service and an artistic mandate. To this day, its facilities are open to booking from members of the community and its festivals and events are attended by a diverse and largely heterogeneous group of people. The WF has a strong sense of the local with an equally profound understanding of the international art scene and a connection into worldwide activities which it has imported into Vancouver on a regular basis. 

If you are interested in reading the rest of this essay, please contact me at r bur nett at ecuad dot ca  

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[1]Judy Radul, “You Don’t Say: Voices from the Incongruous Outside,” Catalogue for the Exhibition/Performance, One Fine Evening, Curator, Eric Metcalfe, The Western Front, Vancouver (1996), n.p.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Roy Kiyooka, “Notes Toward a Book of Photoglyphs,” Capilano Review , Second Series: 2 (Spring 1990): 80 quoted in The Verbal and the Visual, Collapse  #2, Vancouver Art Forum Society (1996): 55.

[4] Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov, “Letter from Berlin,” in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, Exhibition catalogue, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1994, pp.72-73.

Virtual/Real/Virtual (3)

(This is the third and final part of a presentation to DIGIFEST in Toronto in late October of 2011)

"An Ad Hoc Committee of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching
(NARST) stated in 2003 that there are three “important characteristics of learning… First, learning is a personal process, second, it is contextualized, and third, it takes time…Learning occurs when people reconstruct meaning and understanding; a different way of thinking, perhaps, or a different way of responding to an idea or event. Learning that occurs today depends on yesterday’s learning and is the foundation for tomorrow’s learning. The cumulative, iterative process of learning emphasizes the importance of time.”. Our own research in this area reinforces the importance of iteration." (Susan Stocklmayer, Public awareness of science and informal learning - a perspective on the role of science museums, published by the National Academies in the US)

Learning takes time and follows many pathways. A good teacher can create a map with destinations, but the routes have to be developed by the students. Those routes may meander for a while because the iterative process is not the same for everyone. Knowledge and information can be shared along the way. Wisdoms can be imparted through discussion and interaction, but these travels will always be characterized by the richness of the unexpected sometimes colliding with the expectations of teachers and other times producing engaged and engaging dialogue.

The tyranny of schedules in schools is that they artificially 'locate' learning at a time and place that may not be convenient for everyone. The schedule cannot account for iterative processes because it generates a linear type of learning that goes against the essence of learning experiences. We have created schools where the mapping from experience to learning is not fluid enough to match the needs of a new generation.

Iteration, non-linearity, informal learning. These are all characteristics of networked environments which by their very nature encourage what has been achieved by the Khan Academy for example. Here is one individual without any resources other than his own skills and intelligence, who decided to create a learning environment through video demonstrations. He has 2600 hundred courses up at this site and receives thousands of learners every day. Students use the site to move at their own pace. Khan is pointing to something very important. Courses and their contents can now be customized to the needs of learners and learners can choose when and where to learn. 

"To summarise: learning rarely, if ever, occurs and develops from a single experience. It is cumulative, emerging through diverse experiences. It is a dynamic, never-ending, and holistic phenomenon of constructing personal meaning. Much of what people come to know about the world, including the world of science content and process, derives from real world experiences within a diversity of appropriate physical and social contexts, motivated by an intrinsic desire to learn." (Susan Stocklmayer, Public awareness of science and informal learning - a perspective on the role of science museums, published by the National Academies in the US)

So, it seems clear to me that the digital age is emphatically about informality — learning through multiple means in multiple ways and in many different contexts. A key question remains. Can all of this informality be structured? Should it be? How can the dots be connected between learning that is driven by personal concerns and areas like mathematics and writing that need some formality in order to be mastered? Must all learning be governed by choice? Or are there certain basic subjects that require mastery through more formal strategies?

I made the point earlier that digital experiences encourage and support the creation of imaginary environments and imaginary connections. This is not a pejorative comment. Rather, what is exciting about these informal spaces for learning is that they are so imaginative, so full and rich with many choices and many possible avenues of exploration. Informal learning then combines with imaginative projection to allow learners and the public to engage with their ideas in many different ways. The challenge for schools is how to frame and harness these various and sometimes different learning strategies. Teachers need to be as adept as learners in a new and engaged multi-disciplinary ecosystem.

Epilogue (The 21^st Century Student)

I will call him Anthony. He arrived in Vancouver with a trunk full of DVD's. He uses SMS and a variety of social networking tools from Twitter to Facebook to communicate with friends and family. He uses a small video camera to record his everyday life and edits the output on a laptop and then uploads the material onto YouTube.

He is adept at video games, though they are not an obsession. Smart phones are expensive, but he finds the money and uses his phone constantly. This sounds familiar; an entire generation working creatively with Facebook and Vimeo and Youtube and Flckr. He loves old movies, hence the DVD's. He knows more about films from the 1970's and 1980's than most film historians. He can quote dialogue from many films and reference specific shots with ease. He uses his expertise in editing to comment on the world and would prefer to show you a short video response to events than just talk about them.

Cultural analysts tend to examine Anthony's activities and use of technology as phenomena, as moving targets which change all the time, just as they saw pop music in the 1960's as a momentary phase or like their early comments on personal computers which did not generally anticipate their present ubiquity.

However, what Anthony is doing is building and creating a new language that combines many of the features of conventional languages but is more of a hybrid of many different modes of expression. Just as we don't really talk about language as a phenomenon, (because it is inherent to everything that we do) we can't deal with this explosion of new languages as if they are simply a phase or a cultural anomaly.

What if this is the new form and shape of writing? What if all of these fragments, verbal, non-verbal, images and sounds are inherent to an entire generation and is their mode of expression?

Language, verbal and written is at the core of what humans do everyday. But, language has always been very supple, capable of incorporating not only new words, but also new modalities of expression. Music for example became a formalized notational system through the adaptation and incorporation of some of the principles of language. Films use narrative, but then move beyond conventional language structure into a hybrid of voice, speech, sounds and images.

As long as Anthony's incorporation of technology and new forms of expression is viewed as a phenomenon it is unlikely that we will understand the degree to which he is changing the fundamental notions of communications and learning to which we have become accustomed over the last century.

Anthony however has many problems with writing. He is uncomfortable with words on a page. He wants to use graphics and other media to make his points. He is more comfortable with the fragment, with the poetic than he is with the whole sentence.

He is prepared to communicate, but only on his own terms.

It is my own feeling that the ubiquity of computers and digital technologies means that all cultural phenomena are now available for use by Anthony and his generation and they are producing a new framework of communications within which writing is only a piece and not the whole.

Some may view this as a disaster. I see Anthony as a harbinger of the future. He will not take traditional composition classes to learn how to write. Instead, he will communicate with the tools that he finds comfortable to use and he will persist in making himself heard or read. But, reading will not only be text-based. Text on a page is as much design as it is media. The elliptical nature of the verbal will have to be accommodated within the traditions of writing, but writing and even grammar will have to change.

I have been talking about a new world of writing that our culture is experimenting with in which conventional notions of texts, literacy and coherence are being replaced with multiples, many media used as much for experience as expression. Within this world, a camera, or mobile phone becomes a vehicle for writing. It is not enough to say that this means the end of literacy as we know it. It simply means that language is evolving to meet the needs of far more complex expectations around communications.

So, the use of a short form like Twitter hints at the importance of the poetic. And the poetic is more connected to Rap music than it is to conventional notions of discursive exchange. In other words, bursts of communications, fragments and sounds combined with images constitute more than just another phase of cultural activity. They are at the heart of something far richer, a phantasmagoria of intersecting modes of communications that in part or in sum will lead to connectivity and interaction and to new forms of learning and knowledge acquisition.

Part 1

Part 2

On The Topic of Culture (2)

(This the second part of a reedited presentation to the Arts Umbrella community from September 7, 2011. The first part can be found here.)

Digital cultures are hugely democratizing because they encourage many different forms of creative output, but this does not mean that the works being produced will find a significant place in our society. In fact, we now need more and more sophisticated curatorial strategies to even understand the range of what is being produced. So much is being created that we are inverting and dissolving conventional notions of high and low culture and this is leading to what I will describe as a series of micro-cultures. Micro cultures are both an exciting development and also full of pitfalls. They reflect the increasing fragmentation of cultural activity into interest groups often driven by very narrow concerns. At the same time, they represent a profound change in the conditions which drive the production of creative work.   

How is that the creation of cultural artifacts that are so essential to our sense of community and nation exist in such a fragile relationship with the population and government? If there is a consensus that the arts are important why do most cultural organizations struggle and in many instances rely on government funding and public philanthropy for their survival? The only conclusion that can be drawn from these contradictions is that cultural creativity is not that essential, which is why cultural organizations are always the first to feel the sting of government cutbacks. I will return to this point in a moment.

Third, the move to identify the arts in particular as functional parts of a cultural economy carries with it many dangers. One of the most serious is that we conflate the deeply felt desire on the part of a significant number of people in our communities to satisfy their yearning to create with the outcomes of that creativity. It is so important to understand that creativity does not necessarily mean that there will be identifiable and valuable outcomes to the process. The key word here is process. It is the same with learning. If all we are aiming for are outcomes, then we will end up with a linear process, one that is predetermined by what we anticipate from it. Part of the joy of creativity and learning how to be creative particularly in the arts is that we don’t know exactly where we will end up nor do we often know why we even began.

The joy here comes from the quest. And if the final object, process or event reflects our deepest sense of what we want to say and why, then that should be enough. As we know, in the present context, it is not.

We need to sharpen our understanding of this contradiction. In the 18^th century culture meant something very specific, usually related to crafts and to guilds. Although many of the arts were practiced in elite contexts and produced for the elite, the distinctions between creativity and everyday life were neither sharp nor seen as necessary. In other words, the boundaries between the arts and other activities were permeable.

Over the last fifty years or so that permeability has decreased to the point where creative practices are now classified as one of many professions. In fact, from a policy perspective the systems of classification that we have in place are very convenient. However, and quite ironically, if creators are engaged with their work, they are likely to make a mockery of the classifications largely because the voyage of creative engagement often has no clear purpose. This is in fact the opposite of what traditional professions are designed to accomplish which is why the most current word used to explain how people enter various professions is training. Purpose of course has many meanings as well as outcomes. The same issue haunts research. If it is too directed towards outcomes then there will be few surprises and innovation will be stifled.

Part Three is here   

The Boomers (NOT)

I don't know about you, but I am tired of the clichés surrounding the boomer generation. I am pretty sure that aside from the demographics (born at a certain time) there is not much that either unites or divides the boomers or even makes them worthy of a generational designation. The label is convenient for marketers and advertisers and even some demographers who relish the simplified and often reductive generalizations that come with transforming a large group of distinctly different people into a relatively homogeneous crowd. 

There is something historically interesting however, about the process of designation, about how a small cluster of statisticians and social scientists found a way of describing people more as a consequence of their birth date than as a result of any serious ethnographic enquiry into the daily lives of people from many different backgrounds.

For the most part, generations are defined by framing a twenty year period with certain characteristics that range from what people are interested in, to what they do, to what kinds of jobs they get and so on. In this approach, every period of time has certain characteristics, for example, the Eisenhower years are described as a time of conservatism or the generation X years as a time of complacency. These are of course intuitions about history and everyday life, and while there are always patterns that can be extrapolated from any historical period, the question is why box time, events and people’s experiences into labels? Little it seems to me is gained by this approach which is driven by nomenclature more than by any verifiable research. (As my readers can tell, I am not a fan of surveys.)

History is of course very cyclical and events likes wars define the experiences of those who go through them. The issue here is that any serious event will have its impact and will define those who have been part of the event or contributors to its creation. The challenge is that it is difficult to generalize from events to the people who have been at the centre of the activities they have shared. 

This is an issue of history and the ways in which we approach time. It is also a public policy issue because as different generations age and in the case of the demographic bulge that was created in the fifties and sixties size matters, public policy is overtaken by actuarial models of analysis. Put it this way, if you are over 65 today, you will pay a great deal more for travel insurance because actuarial tables show that the risks are higher. This may have nothing to do with the actual state of your health and you will not be permitted to argue about what is taken to be the gospel truth.

The broader issues here are actually centred on the need to create boundaries between different age groups, and to provide research that justifies market based models that become absolute. Ironically, customization which is really what social media portend, may be a way out of this conundrum.  

Vancouver’s Streets

This is an age of conflict and paranoia brought on to some degree by 9/11 and the wars of the last ten years, but also by a breakdown in our definitions of civility and shared norms. I base this assertion on my own reading of contemporary culture through the artifacts that are being produced and via the social response to those artifacts.

The Vancouver riots of June 15th are just the tip of the iceberg. At a recent showing of films by Emily Carr University students in animation and film/video, I watched many films of chases, violence and just plain paranoia. Creative students  are the canaries in the mine. They are pointing towards something much more profound, centred on a breakdown in some core beliefs about democracy, change and the general impact that individuals can have on the social contexts they share.

 

The Real Vancouver: Graffitti on Walls of the Bay in Downtown Vancouver

Part of the problem is rooted in a shift in the ways in which politicians in Western democracies exercise their rather precious mandate. In Canada, fewer and fewer people in the 20-40 age group vote. I spend a great deal of time talking to students in my job, and the general response to this evacuation of personal and public responsibility is based on the belief that their voices don’t actually count. This loss of voice does not mean they have nothing to say. Rather, they don’t believe their opinions are understood and have no real sense that their viewpoints will be respected and acted upon. This is an issues that our elected representatives need to be sensitive to and act upon.

Yet, with social media at their disposal, this age group are able to share their beliefs, argue about their differences and often come to some sense of common purpose within the networks they build. However, translating all of that discussion into action is a major step and not one that is easy or made easier by the conventional feedback processes we have in our society. And, remember, most of what social media provide are discourse based relationships; words and sometimes images are the mediators that both screen and define relationships within networked worlds.

The Vancouver riots, for all of their sheer stupidity and senseless violence, are an eruption of the real, an explosion of energy because so much of what our mediated cultural spaces create are shared convictions as well as fictions, but reality does not follow a straight line. It certainly has no clear beginning, middle and end. It is unfortunate that violence was seen to be a solution to this conundrum by those who perpetrated it.

A fAceBook (this is not a typo…but a way of pointing out the contradictions of the term) conversation is not a real conversation, it is somewhere in between real and distant, mediated and connected. Exchanges on Twitter are not equivalent to intense conversations over a cup of coffee between two people gazing at each other’s eyes and intensely watching each other’s body movements. Viewing a hockey game cannot make your favourite players better or even winners. Screaming does not improve the game. Fantasizing about victory is just that, a fantasy. 

A collective of 100,000 people assembled to exercise their will to win a hockey game. They projected so much of who they were onto the screens that mediated their experiences of the game, that failure and loss cracked the glass windows separating them from controlling the outcome. They then turned on each other and with each act of violence confirmed their need to feel in control of the reality they were in.

The issue is not whether a minority or majority of people got involved in breaking down the norms that govern our everyday lives. The issue is that some sort of violence is ever present in our society, represented at its apogee by the constant threats we have been living with since 9/11. And remember, it is not only the threats from terrorists but also the threats of environmental catastrophe, depletion of food sources and the crumbling financial and physical infrastructure of Western economies.

Notwithstanding the many thousands of people who turned up to clean the Vancouver we all love, the riots of the 15^th of June must be examined for their deeper origins otherwise we will lose the opportunity to solve their root causes.