Creativity, blogging and solipsism

My indecision regarding how to respond to the Creative Commons copyright assignment, wide open as it is, has caused me some consternation. Strangely, my reaction to the directive to copyright something on the one hand, and to create something using the tools presented by Web Team 4 on the other, have been completely different. The creative "spirit" in which I use a certain technique like animation or drop down menus (i.e., mostly practical web-design tools) is very different from the creative spirit with which I play the piano or take a picture on a whim. And in fact I find a third case, in which I deliberately present and claim a work as my own -- i.e., by copyrighting it.

In the first case, that of using web tools in Fireworks, my reaction is that of the boy who thinks airplanes and firetrucks are cool -- the latter because it has moving parts (a ladder). I want to make an animation that "looks cool." For this assignment I fixated on the idea of photographing a flag repeatedly from the same angle so as to use the separate pictures as frames in the animation. A simple and (now that I think of it) often-used gimmick on the web. Simple animated GIF files alternating two images to give a simplistic impression of movement are not at all uncommon. When I actually tried this, -- well, first of all I was disappointed that the enormous flag I photographed in the previous post (and the Discount Flooring Supermart Warehouse alongside of which it stands) had been taken down--apparently for the winter.

But secondly, when I did it with an ordinary-sized flag, I found the resulting background more interesting than the flag itself: i.e., the passing clouds (it was a very windy day). And then, since it was just an ordinary American flag, I felt it was very "un-PC" (I confess), since, although I can say I am proud of what the flag represents (to me), it was so almost abused in the days, weeks and months after 9-11 that it feels like it expresses something I don't want to say. In that time after 9-11, the flag began to represent bigotry to me. Mindless rage against the "other". Now, of course that's just my own personal impression, and I don't want the political to totally overtake this post (or this blog), so I'll leave it at that and move on.

But to get back to my narrative, there is a difference between this kind of creative spirit (which I might describe as the spirit of innovation) and creativity in the sense of an artistic spirit. And this creative spirit is something pure in itself that I believe is tainted by self-consciousness -- hence the third category. Blogging feels extremely narcissistic in this way. In other words, as soon as I think of copyrighting something, I begin to think reflectively (reflexively?) about how my work (and therefore myself) will be perceived by others. Creative work tends to have this intensely personal quality to it, with which we identify wholly (as artists or authors). I have mixed feelings about all of this.

For one thing, I don't think the ultimate aim of art is to "express oneself". Art is about Beauty. I know Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and so should be democratically a lowercase, rather than a proper noun), and more so than ever in this postmodern age, but I have a weakness for the old-fashioned view that says it's an objective truth. There must be a middle ground here. I could go on about the creative spirit being the wellspring of life and all, but the main thing I want to express here is that I am not my art, and my art is not an expression of myself. Of course in some way it does reflect and result from who I am, but the relation is not an identity or an equivalency. It's much more complex than that, and -- most importantly -- it's irrelevant to the work of art. The life of the artist is irrelevant to the value of her art.

I could say that Art serves Life (life being more important). Oscar Wilde would of course reverse that and say that Life exists to serve Art, or Beauty at any rate. But that's just his way of being clever and obstinate. I think if we take a philosopher's a pragmatist's look at it, we can see that the relation is symbiotic, and neither is true. Here's a formulation for you -- let's put in quotes to distance my self from it, pretend that it's something I read in a book -- pretend Oscar Wilde said it: "Life is Beauty, and Art is the statement of the identity." Or whatever.


All this to say that copyrighting a visual creation for me just amplifies all my perfectionism. A copyright is a stamp of ownership -- even though the whole point of this Creative Commons licensing is that it is not outright proprietariness, but a grayer world of ownership where sharing is encouraged. -- Still, my impulse is to be conservative in choosing a license, in part because of all this baggage of ":MY art is an expression of my deepest soul" which is somehow ingrained in me even though I don't really believe it.

So in the end, I made the flag animation but was dissatisfied with that as an expression of myself (I know, I'm contradicting what I just said, see?). And so I had to add a whole photo gallery thing with Fireworks. (And I literally stayed up all night to do it too -- I must be losing it, I can't keep this up!) In any case I'm kind of enjoying it -- I seem to thrive on deadlines in a perverse sort of way. Deadlines seem to spur on my creativity. Here's original first photo of the animation, which is also a link to my page 6, the "Panorama and Side Show" of Image Remora. You want to say slide show, don't you? Me too. But it's a side show. See for yourself.

I posterized the images of the flag to make them smaller for loading (this reduces the number of colors used, I believe -- and I used GIMP rather than Photoshop, for which my trial has expired). I ended up doing a gallery of images like another assignment. An exercise in self-aggrandizement. And at the end, I used one of the most restrictive licenses on the Creative Commons site, because I don't really like the idea of someone using my images for their own purposes. I mean altering them. Not very generous, eh? Of course I wouldn't want anyone to use them for commercial purposes. That was a no-brainer. But still the "some rights reserved" does allow people to use the images, "as is," as long as they're attributed. The Buddha would say "vanity of vanities, all is vanity" I bet, if he knew Ecclesiastes.

Dicount Flooring of America

The first establishes the setting. The second gives a sense of the scale. The tent beneath it is apparently a smoking area.

"Time Capsule" photos

Here are some pictures I took for the Time Capsule project for this week, which I didn't use in the assignment.


This one is fairly self-explanatory.

The next one is a detail from the view from my living room window. The flag on the right is probably a quarter of a mile away. It's a very large flag, perhaps 30 ft long.

I mentioned it in my previous post. I went over there last night and took some night photos of it along with the Discount Carpet/Flooring Supermart alongside of which it stands...

Blogging for the Future

This week's assignment, to create something for the Yahoo Time Capsule project, I must say I was not too excited about. Most of the time capsule submissions I looked at at the site were not very different from heading to heading (Beauty, Hope, Anger, etc.), and nearly all reminded me of signatures in a high school yearbook. "Shout out to my man Jerome." (I totally made that up)... "I love my kids." "Out for drinks with my best friend." Ok so none of these were not actual submissions, but they do give you their flavor.

I don't disapprove in any way, it's just not something I feel compelled to join in on. (Maybe for Jerome's sake?...) Anyway, I had no idea what to do, except to take more pictures. I ended up using some obvious, easy choices for "slices of life" in my world. One was an altered picture of the view outside my living room window, from which I can see two American flags. (One of them is enormous, outside of the Discount Flooring Supermart Outlet near the highway, which you can also see from my window.) The other pictures I used were of my cat. Then it seemed really lame, so I wrote a few lines to incorporate some text, and made a brief statement about the flag and about being an American. Very short and simple, and inevitably political. You can see the result here:

Time Capsule 2006

I spent most of my time the last couple days preparing for a tutorial my team has to give in class tomorrow on using the Fireworks software we've been learning to create some of the fancier effects in these last couple assignments, so I confess I just wanted to get this done. It came out ok though.

I came across a different yet similar project just this week, in a library blog.

(I've been trying to add more blogs to my blogroll in the sidebar...and incidentally I changed templates for this blog because the other one was not displaying well in Internet Explorer -- the sidebar was showing up at the very bottom of the blog, after the last post. I don't like this one as well stylistically, but it gives more room for pictures....)

I will try to find the link in a minute, but it was a British project asking people over there to blog about their day "a day in the life of Britain" or something.

Here is a BBC News story about it. It's called One Day in History, and its being called the "biggest blog in history." October 17 was the day, but they're still accepting submissions. They seem to just want "Britons" for it though. Sponsored by the History Matters campaign.

One thing interesting about this stuff for me is that we've been reading in my archives and manuscripts class about archiving policies and procedures (theory). In the 80s and 90s they developed an approach called Documentation Strategy which involved collaborating between many organizations to decide what ought to be preserved and then figuring out how to do it. With electronic media, issues of preservation have a whole new kettle of fish to clean.

Will my blog be available to historians in the 22nd century? Will they care to read it if it is? (Will they have time? If every 5th person alive between now and then writes a blog once a week, how many gigabytes or terabytes of storage will be needed per year to update and maintain it over the next century, taken into account the population growth which we've been warned about again recently?)

Here's a pertinent quote from the BBC article about the "Blog of Britain" I mentioned above:

The wonderful thing about these records is we don't yet know what it is about them that will be interesting in the future.

It may be that historians in the future will be amazed that on 17 October 2006 we were still eating meat or driving privately owned cars.

Or maybe they'll be amazed that someone thought a blog was good place to store information -- if they have the time...

How many cable channels, chill from his rippling rest,
The bloggers wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of malware, posting high
Over the spammed bay waters Liberty--

Sorry, that was a bit of farcical parody. Hart Crane deserves better. The beauty of his own lines will not mind this inconsequential misappropriation. Read the original, To Brooklyn Bridge, immediately if you haven't heard of it before! It's about a seagull, not a blogger, silly. But really, how many cable channels will there be in 2106, and will the historians really care what we were blogging about back now-a-days? I guess a historian would...

Well, that was a bit of a ramble. I'll post some pictures like a good photo blogger in the next post.

FREE image editing software (article)

I'm seriously considering NOT purchasing Photoshop. A simple search for "photo editing open source" led to the following article on About.com:

Top 8 Free Photo Editors for Windows

Eight -- count 'em. The first one, GIMP, is apparently
often lauded as the "free photoshop."
I'm gonna try it.

As for Dreamweaver and Fireworks, I think I like them too well not to buy them. Assuming I need to create web pages. Who doesn't? I guess you can get away without doing so, but I'm becoming a professional person, and I have to "market myself" and stuff. Scary.

HTML Kit is great, but the CSS and Javascript features (rollovers and such) on Dreamweaver are pretty appealing... Fireworks I've decided I want, for sure. I could probably get away without Dreamweaver. Any library I work for will likely already have it or something like it. If I do anything on my own, I can get away with HTML Kit and Fireworks. But converting to XHTML, what about that feature of Dreamweaver?

I must confess my tendency is to want to buy everything. I am an American, damnit, and I want it all! Budget be damned! Ha ha. Very funny. Not very professional -- but being professional sure is a good rationalization for spending the money!

empty string error css validation [Google search]

This search string on Google eventually got me to the following words of wisdom on a newsgroup:

Validators report where the problem becomes noticable, not where the
problem is.

Aha! It's always something simple...

No time for good talk

Pehaps I should have gone to Hampshire. I learn best when at my leisure, which doesn't exist in graduate school. I think Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf said it best (who said which? I leave it to you to distinguish):

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

Amen. Eating well = having leisure time (my own paraphrase). Woolf was talking here (in A Room of One's Own) about after-dinner conversation -- i.e., intellectual discussion. The previous sentence is another wonderful gem:

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk.

Maybe Oxford is where I should have gone. Do they have a "library school"?...

By the by, I found the quote online, not using Google Book Search (as might have been more appropriate considering our reading this week) but nevertheless from a digitized version of Woolf's famous essay, linked above as well as here.

Library of the Future: Alphaville 2016

For our current assignment, we had to create the web portal for the Library of the Future (at least that was the option I chose). The page was to be a visual response to the "Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects on Libraries and Information Policy." An article by Trudi Bellardo Hahn with this title summarizes the issues we were to address.

My fictitious Alphaville Public Library is in effect a gallery of Library 2.0 features which link to real sites, most of them actual libraries which have begin to transform their sites to offer more and more "virtual" library services using web 2.0 technologies. [What the heck is this "2.0" business?]

The first two features on my page ("Search the Virtual Library" and "Virtual Reference" - on the upper left side of the navigation bar) highlight the futuristic possibilities which mass digitization of the libraries of the world could bring us. Google Book Search holds the place of the Virtual Library of the future, while an MIT Artificial Intelligence project holds the place of the virtual reference librarian. The latter is, as I understand it, the actual technological basis of what used to be AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com), which answers questions in natural language like "How high is Mount Everest?" Researcgh continues in this are and it is just a matter of time until voice recognition software combined with this sort of natural language processing are able to replace employees at information desks, both real and virtual, the world over...

Meanwhile, the "Googlized" library of the future , the NextGen Library, the "Library 2.0," is already upon us. OPACs (online catalogs) which look and act like (and perhaps even improve upon?!) interfaces like Google and Amazon.com are already being developed.

One of the most impressive of these to me is the Lamson Library experiment with an OPAC interfaced embedded in blog software (WordPress, specifically) -- what Casey Bisson (its architect) has dubbed (for lack of a better name) the WPopac.

Casey Bisson's blog post explanation about this is well worth reading for anyone interested in becoming a systems librarian, and fascinating for the rest of us (I guess I'm not in that latter category--yet?...we'll see...). It does not replace the ILS (Integrated Library System), but provides an interface with it.

Wow. There's just so much to blog about on this topic, I can't help but agree with my classmate on the frustrations of being a grad student in this program. Perhaps all grad students everywhere can empathize too. More on this in the next post... and yet more...!

Fair use and the very idea of a public library

I think Lessig has it right. What Google is doing, when spelled out so clearly, as Lessig does in his href="http://www2.cali.org/screencasts/lessig-google/lessig-google.html">30-min multimedia presentation, seems very much like "fair use". Pverall his analysis is very illuminating. And very alarming. The phrase "IP extremism" (Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol) is a sobering one. This suggestion that what is going on is a kind of intellectual property "land grab" for control over our cultural heritage is frightening. But it fits all too well with so many other trends of the times.

It occurred to me that what libraries do and have always done is not so different from what Google is doing in a virtual environment. "You mean they actually let people use books without paying for them, including the ideas inside?" Luckily there is a strong counter movement, if you will (not to be too partisan, "us" vs. "them" about it...). Open source and the like.

And for authors of content on and off the web interested in protecting their work without as Lessig says "stifling creativity" there is something called a Creative Commons License -- actually several different kinds. What they say about it:

We have built upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach. We're a nonprofit organization. All of our tools are free.

Pretty cool, eh?

As I was beginning this class, I was wondering about the images people put up on Flickr, the image-sharing social-networking site which uses tags and comments for organizing, sharing, and searching photos: Can anyone download them? What protections are available?

It's basically the same question which comes with every increase of convenience and accessibility offered by technology: Is it secure? As for Flickr, you can control the degree of access to the photos you put up, making them public or only available to those you've invited. (There may be still more subtleties; I haven;t really used it -- yet...) And they make clear that in order to use a photo found on Flickr, you have to ask permission of the person who uploaded or took it. If you have an account (it's all free), you can easily send a message to whoever posted the image you're interested in. (By the way here's an interview with Flickr I found on the Creative Commons website, from July 2004)



The Creative Commons licenses are a great compromise for authors who want to protect themselves and encourage others to engage with their work in a creative way. There's some quote about the best form of flattery I can't remember precisely, but it's usually applied to jazz musicians. Copying (was it?) is the best form of flattery. Anyhow, as I understand it these licenses are real legal entities, though I can't say that I understand the legal side of it very well myself.

OH yeah -- one other thing. I'm working on a poster session for the upcoming NYLA conference on Library 2.0, and I summarize the applications of the "2.0" concept (social computing if you want the 2-word summary) as follows:

Social Networking
Community Building
Grass Roots Organization
Marketing
Surveillance

That last one gives you a double-take, right? Well, technology is a double-edged sword, as they say, and for me, the "2.0" thing is all about the technology, and let's face it: if you can network more easily, they can watch you more easily. Not that I plan to do anything differently because of it. I think the new tools are great. But just as you don't leave your car unlocked in a gigantic parking lot -- just in case! -- don't broadcast personal info on the web. Watch your back...and have fun!

Images for 10-11-06

I forgot to upload images for today! For my photo blog. (If a picture is worth 1000 words, how many gigabytes is a photo blog worth?) Ok that wasn't funny especially.

I was writing a bit about patterns in nature and architecture. Silhouettes of human-made things against the sky is one of the simplest examples of this, if you want to see it that way. Here are two "powerlines" shots. Parallel lines against the sky -- simple yet pleasing to the eye, kind of, sort of, maybe, no?





And another example of intersecting patterns is George Rickey's sculpture at the Empire State Plaza, "Two Lines Oblique", against one of the four similar State office buildings, at night. It's a bit pixelated/grainy, thanks to my Kodak Easyshare, though I've adjusted the shadow/highlight, hue/saturation (slightly), and, most importantly, the contrast/brightness. This set of adjustments has become standard for me since using photoshop.



There are apparently other instances of this Two Lines Oblique sculpture by Rickey throughout the country, such as at the University of Kentucky Art Museum as seen in this link: http://www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/luce/Top50/50/pages/Rickey_jpg.htm. Theirs looks smaller.

Using the contrast and brightness adjustment in photoshop is very similar to what one does in the darkroom, though obviously it's much easier. I don't really have pretensions of creating something "genuine" or "authentic" like a film purist -- I mean, I do, but I don't put much stock in it. As a mild proponent of Oscar Wilde's ideas of Art and the role of the Artist, I could hardly object to the manipulation of the image by any means whatsoever. I imagine the author of "The Decay of Lying" would approve of the power of Photoshop to "alter reality." Indeed, he argues that life and nature imitate art rather than the other way around. The artist is the creator of truth. "Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be completely relied upon." (Some would argue this last point.) Of course, aesthetic truth is all that matters to Wilde, and I really think his position is more than just sophistry, wit, and intelligent fluff. "The arts are the beginning and the end of [the hu-]man, of civilization as we know it." Someone said that once, I'll bet, and if they didn't, well, I just did...

Web Page 3, my Cityscape Gallery, is up

Here is my Cityscape Gallery. I wanted to do rollovers, but this was the path of least resistance, and besides, it allowed me to spend more time actually taking pictures. There will be time for these "rollovers" later.

I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the city through the lens of my Kodak Easyshare camera. Someday I will get a real camera, but in the meantime, I can live with "grainy" night shots. Pixilated is perhaps more accurate, graininess being more appropriately applied to film, as I understand it-- Not to put too fine a point on it....

Last week's foray into theory was both exciting and frustrating for me. I love that stuff, and could go on forever about it. I was inspired to look up some things I read awhile back in college:

Oscar Wilde wrote some interesting essay-type things in the form of dialogues (Platonic, I might say, but they're always smoking cigarettes and laying about divans and such -- maybe not so un-Platonic, actually), one of which is the Decay of Lying. In it he complains about the growth of the tendency towards realism in the literature of his time. It was published in 1891. He sings the praises of art and artifice as opposed to the joys of nature:

My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

In examining architecture through photography, I have always been drawn to the ways in which it interacts with nature. Ivy on a building, trees in a courtyard, the silhouette of a statue against a sunset sky. These seem rather trite examples, but the theme has been an interesting one to me since I took photography class in college. I took a lot of pictures back then that I didn't do much with, of Chicago. Perhaps I will scan some and use them in this class eventually...

For the current page, I made a point of going to the Empire State Plaza at night. The enormous lights they use to light up all the buildings there make for some interesting play of light and shadow. A great building like the State Capitol looks especially impressive at night when it's lit up like a movie set.

Another theme along similar lines I find especially compelling is that of construction and scaffolding. Also the interplay of patterns. The pattern of a scaffold superimposed on the facade of a building. There seems to be a kind of visual irony in the covering of a building with scaffolding. The summer I took my photography class, there was a church in Hyde Park the steeple of which was surrounded by scaffolding. I never took any pictures of it (unfortunately), but I always thought it was an ominous image if interpreted symbolically: The church is in need of repair....

So I find Wilde's sophistry quite intoxicating and persuasive. In the same volume in which "The Decay of Lying" was published (Intentions) is another piece called "The Critic as Artist, with some remarks on the importance of doing nothing." In it he contradicts "the gross popular error" that it is easier to talk about a thing than to do it:

It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it....

The idea is that the critical faculty is integral to creating art, and that much great art is a form of criticism. The critic uses the material being criticised as raw material for a new form. And finding the right words for a poetic description of a deed is harder than the deed itself. It is not difficult because it must be true -- it is difficult because it must be beautiful. As the "The Deacy of Lying" explains, truth has no place in Art. As Wilde puts it, :"Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."

The Decay of Lying: Wilde claims from Oscar and other frustrated lines of thinking

I forgot to post this draft! -- good grief, this blogging is still so new!.... I wrote it last week in regard to the whatsit exercise...

Oscar Wilde wrote some interesting essay-type things in the form of dialogues (Platonic, I might say, but they're always smoking cigarettes and laying about divans and such), one of which is the Decay of Lying. In it he complains about the growth of the tendency towards realism in the literature of his time. It was published in 1891. In it he also sings the praises of artifice as opposed to the "pleasures of nature":

My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction suggests (if I remember correctly) that the changes made to the nature of Art by photography were underway even before photography was invented, or made much of an impression -- which makes sense if you realism as a movement predated teh invention of photography. [I withdrew from my art history class as an undergrad (though that didn't stop the prof from including the grade I had at the time I withdrew with the "W": "W-F"), so I'm not really sure, but my impression is that the movement from Romanticism to Modernism included some overlapping of realism on both sides...]

In any case I find Wilde's sophistry quite intoxicating and persuasive. In the same volume in which "The Decay of Lying" was published (Intentions) is another piece called "The Critic as Artist, with some remarks on the importance of doing nothing." In it he contradicts "the gross popular error" that it is easier to talk about a thing than to do it:

It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it....

Some trouble with Blogger

Comments don't show at the bottom of the posts, but they are there if you click on "0 Comments".
My latest post for class is not showing up yet. I dunno.

The link to my "Web Page 2" for IST 659:

http://www.albany.edu/~br399294/ist659/Page2/Page2.htm

Enjoy.

Blogging about Benjamin (say Ben-Yah Meeen) --Walter, that is.

Walter Benjamin was a pretty impressive writer, at least that much is clear. Not much else is, except I like him -- mostly.

This piece we read, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," is a classic, but I think you have to be a full-on Marxist philosopher yourself if you're going to a) fully understand his argument and, therefore, b) have any hope of knowing how close to being right he is. I think he's got something, by Jove, but haven't a clue as to what it is! Or put it this way. I think he's mostly right, but whether and how all the advanced Marxist theory really fits in or helps his argument (never mind his little foray into Freudian theory), I couldn't say myself. Well, let me think about it a minute.... No, no, I really couldn't say, not this time, anyway.

Luckily, in this digital age of ours, you can cut and paste the things you don't understand into another document and file it away for some late night when you're having trouble sleeping. And you're left with all the gems, which are sprinkled throughout, generously, especially at the beginnings and endings of paragraphs, which to me is a sign that he's an excellent writer. Anyone who knows to put his best stuff at the beginning or the end of a paragraph is alright in my book. Either that or he's a politician. --Ok, but enough with the comedy! Let's have some pictures, or at least a few quotes!...

Ok, here's a smattering, with which I will try to summarize his argument (I'll put a smiley after the real gems and a frowner after the ones that are sort of confusing but I can kind of see where he's going if I squint really hard with my head upside down on a clear day.

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one thing: its presence in time and space..."

In other words,

"The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity."

:Q

OK, and then he ties that to the concept of the "aura" of a work, which he defines conveniently as "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction."

[Incidentally I wish the translators had updated his usage. He's always talking about "the film" is this and "the film" is that -- it's hard not to read it with a heavy German accent: "Ze filum, ze filum, zat vill be ze end."]

"By making reproductions, [this process] substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence."

Here's one where he loses me:

"The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition."

Then he goes on for a while with some historical analysis about the difference between a cult value and an exhibitionist value of art through history, and some other stuff which is REALLY interesting (I don't mean to be sarcastic this time), but is too much for here and now. Later he gets to some good bits with

"...Much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question -- whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art -- was not raised."

"For the first time -- and this is the effect of [the] film -- man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura."

"The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera...is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one's own image in the mirror."

And here's where he becomes downright prophetic in his vision of the impact of technology on the arts and society -- in reference to the ease of 'self-publishing':

"Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.... Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property."

(like blogging, maybe?... --but he was wrting in 1934!)

Then he goes on again about "the film" and how it's changed EVERYTHING! And one of my favorite phrases here (dutifully at the end of a paragraph):

"The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology."

Then he starts talking about "the masses" again in a way that makes it rough going. But he works in some Freudian stuff -- and more than just name-dropping (Sigmund was quite popular then among "ze intellectuellz")--this in regard to the documentary possibilities of "the film"(and the technique of "slow motion"):

"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."

:-/

Now that one kind of falls flat as I type it into my blog, but the very next sentence (the beginning of the next paragraph, of course) is a doozy:

"One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later." (Or perhaps never? --one is tempted to add) And then he proceeds to talk about Dadaism with great intelligence:

"The dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion." Now that's revolutionary!...What a turn of phrase too...

Then he brings his argument back to the idea of the "aura" he raised earlier (now in respect to the Dadaists' paintings):

"What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production."

I am running out of steam, if not material. Benjamin ends his manifesto, if one might call it that, with a rousing bit of Marxist demagoguery not unsuited to our own times:

"The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life....
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."

Some frightening quotes of Marinetti, the Futurist, and his aesthetics of war, followed by a suitable finish:

"[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience it's own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

And both are wrong? perhaps.

But does all that follow from what came before it? I certainly don't have the skill or patience to find out just now.

Here's a picture: