Alexandro Rojas Sanders
ARTD 4700 – Graduate Seminar
Molly Fredericks
Final Paper

0. Synopsis

In this paper, what I expect to achieve, first of all, is to find a coherent argument that will justify my involvement in this program of New Media, as a pro-environment activist artist.  Second, I expect to find a theme of research that will become the main subject for the development of both my final project for the MFA exhibition next end of Spring 2009, and for my thesis.
I also want to find artists and theorists who can provide me with strong conceptual elements, either theories, or art pieces on which I can build upon and mature my own intellectual concepts.  To provide an example of the different artists and theorists who have been groundbreakers in these areas of activist and environmental art, I shall mention, Paul Pfeiffer, James Turrel, Andrea Zittel, Krzysztof Wodiczko, plus a few filmmakers such as, Godfrey Reggio, and Ron Fricke.

I. Introduction

As the days pass and I keep going back and forth in some thoughts on how to approach this paper, I always think about professor Marshall McLuhan’s writings, specifically, The Medium is the Massage.  Although the title does not lack humor and sarcasm, it is clear that what McLuhan really means is ‘message.’  Thus, if the medium is the message, I also understand that the message is the medium.  My work, for example, which is based on digital video, tries to subvert the message that current standards of life are based on an unsustainable way of consuming that consequentially affect the environment.  The problem here is not just how much people consume, but what they consume.  People consume a number of products that derive from oil, which is a non-renewable resource. In addition, the manufacturing of most products in the market pollutes the air, the earth, and the water. Not to mention the amount of pollution that refining oil produces, and of course, the burning of it is perhaps the worst part of it, since it creates carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas that accumulates in the atmosphere.
I understand that the manufacturing of digital media has a big share on the pollution and the unsustainable usage of non-renewable, or slow-renewable resources, after all, that has been a big point of critique in my different presentations in which I talk about environmental/activist art.  Nonetheless, this is a New Media masters program –considering New Media all type of electronic media, which is created or supported by computers–and I have to use these media to convey my message.
What I expect to see, and I expect to contribute in life to humanity, is to change the way we produce and the way we consume any sort of goods. But as a New Media artist, I would like to collaborate with industrial designers, and with material developers to create environment-friendly materials; I want to see a world that is powered by renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy  .  Digital media can be very beneficial for the environment since it replaces the use of paper, inks, and all the different products involved in their manufacture, we just have to change the way we do some things to avoid using paper and other materials.  Ideally, I would like to see some day a computer system that is made out of non-toxic biodegradable materials.
However, there is still one more element that has a big carbon print on the environment, and that is energy. All New Media depends on energy, and although energy should be free, since it runs freely all along the planet, I am not expecting to see that for at least ten or twenty years, and perhaps never, and that is just fine as far as the energy comes from renewable resources.  But for now, it is no surprise to see that it has been the governments, and even worse, the big corporations –which manipulate such governments–, who have created crooked laws to make it “illegal” if anyone wants to capture his or her own electric energy.  As we know, electricity runs freely all along the planet; it just takes to dig two holes and put two metal bars joined by a metallic wire to make electric energy accessible to anyone. My point here is that there is a big entrepreneurial potential for the developing of renewable energy technology, and by consequence, of “green collar jobs”, which not only will help to overcome the current economic crisis that this country and the whole world are facing right now, but it will also help to restore the natural environment.

II. Law of Conservation of Mass/Matter

Thus, my hypothesis –which is simply a reinterpretation of the Law of Conservation of Mass/Matter, by Antoine Lavoisier-, which I have proposed for so long, even before I came to DU, is proving right.  Such reinterpretation I am proposing is that, since it is true that “matter cannot be created/destroyed, although it may be rearranged” , then it must be true that economics, which depends on natural resources, for without products (matter) there is no market (consumption).  Now, with an increasing global urban sprawl, which demands to cover not only its material and energetic needs, but its desires too –at least in the better-off capitalist countries–, it is obvious that we are getting to a point in which we are seeing a scarcity of natural resources, which include fossil fuels, from which we generate most of our energy needs.  As a result, we are entering a stage of economic depression like the one we saw in the 1930s. And that is why it is extremely important to create awareness about environmental issues constantly.

III. New Media as Environmental-Awareness Art

Now, by means of a continuous presence of environmental-awareness art in the cultural world, artists push the ideological concepts of society. By creating awareness, the collective mind is transformed; when the collective mind is transformed, action and change come along.  I do not care if environmental artist have been producing art since the 1960s or the 70s if governments and corporations have never taken them seriously. The latter ones are in control of communication media, and they have done a good job portraying those activists as idealist hippies.   However, thanks to the political climate that America has been living in the past few years, and specially in the last few months, the green movement has been gaining considerable territory, to the point that we have selected a black person as our next president; something that even few weeks ago, many people thought America was not ready for that.  Well, that black man, whose ideologies are shared with many people, has proved that it is now time to change environmental policies in this country, which is the biggest consumer in the planet.
Now, with New Media, New Media artists can reach virtually every corner of the planet, except for those remote places where mass media and all the influential elements from the “civilized” or cultural world as we know it, such as those peoples who live deep in the Amazonian jungle, or high in the desolated mountain ranges, whom may live without ever seeing a car. By reaching the masses, New Media artists create awareness, and eventually, environmental practices can become formalized.  In the past, we have seen a similar phenomenon when the Russian Avant Garde artists of the 1920s (mostly film-makers, since that was the New Medium of the time), funded by the government, were able to promote the, then appealing Socialist ideals, all over the Russian territory by means of advertising campaigns that were taken by different transportation mediums, such as the Agit-prop trains and buses –“the term Agit-prop is a contraction of the Russian words ‘agitatsiia’ and ‘propaganda’ in the title of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda set up in 1920 by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party” .  Today, with New Media of the early twenty-first century, which is easily propagated by means of a few mouse-clicks in some cases, promoting environmental practices should be much easier.

IV.    The Ice Caps as an Inspiration for Art

[“The effects of climate change have in fact already begun. In 2008,
the melting of the Arctic ice sheet almost matched the record set
on September 16, 2007. The fact that this has now happened two
years in a row reinforces the strong decreasing trend in the amount
of summertime ice observed over the past 30 years. “ (Energy Revolution Report; second edition, 2008) ]

Although Global Warming has happened before as a natural earthly cycle, never before has there been a living species contributing with so much toxic waste into the earth and the atmosphere.  The last time the earth overheated to such extent that it lost all its glaciers was during the age known as the Pliocene, 1.8 to 5 million years ago , and before that, 65 millions years ago , right after the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, when temperatures rocked for a short period of time and then dropped into another glacial period in which most of the life disappear from the planet due to the atmospheric darkening caused by dust and different gases that followed the meteorite impact. This time, human-made pollutants have increased in the atmosphere, like never before in human history, and the damage we have induced to the planet has no precedence.
As an individual who has spent many days of his life walking and climbing across glaciers around the world and has seen first-hand the increasing deterioration of such beautiful earthly features in the last twenty years, I have a strong inclination to focus my creative work on such natural elements.
Today, different artists are approaching the global warming subject, and their concern for the accelerated melting of the glaciers of the world in different ways. Geir Jenssen, James Balog, Andrea Polli, and DJ Spooky are just a few of them.
I understand that being “green” is now starting to become a “cliché”, but being green should not be a cliché, but a common ay of living.  If a few artists are already working to create awareness of this issue, that should not prevent anyone from working on the same subject, especially when the subject is of so much importance in these days.  Professor Marshall McLuhan mentioned in one of his writings assigned during this course, that there is nothing that has not been done in the realm of art. He states that everything is just a combination of other things that have been done in the past. If we take such statement as true in its literal meaning, that would leave us with nothing new to work on.  Fortunately, such statement is not absolute, for there are always new combinations of things to do, and new approaches. In addition, time and historical events give shape to life conditions as we know in any present time. First we had the alphabet and writing, and that shaped the world then; then we had painting and sculpture; then along came the print medium, which also changed the world; later we also had photography and film. Today, we have computers as the new medium with which to create art.

V. Why New Media

Professor McLuhan mentions in his book, The Medium is the Message that youth “instinctively understands the present environment (the electric drama.)” I almost agree with him; however, I would not say ‘instinctively’, since that is an over-statement, and to further elaborate on that point would be futile for the purpose of this paper.  Nonetheless, I understand that youth; this is, the newer generations are being born into a world in which computers, and all the electronic gimmicks populating the market, such as iPods, iPhones, and all the amazing lap-top computers, have become almost a granted thing for these new generations –at least in the middle and the high economic/cultural classes of society in probably any country. Thus, these kids are being familiarized with such technology since the moment they are born. They do not know the world without such technological gimmicks, just as the generations born after 1940s or 1950s do not know the world without radio or television, except for those, as I mentioned earlier, who are born in very remote places. With this I want to stress the importance of using electronic media as the means to convey the message that, it is time to change the way we produce energy; we have to find alternative (biodegradable) materials to create electronic media.  If we can go to space and to other asteroids, and we can send messages to communicate instantly with others anywhere in the world, why can we not do something good for the planet?
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman comments about McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message: “this book is an inquiry into the lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the age of Television.“ then he goes further by saying that “this change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate he same ideas.” And finally he concludes: “I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”  Now, I understand the term “conversation” as: “A […] communication by two or more people, or by one’s self. Conversations are the ideal form of communication in some respects, since they allow people with different views on a topic to learn from each other.”    For that matter, Television, then, is not a tool for conversation anymore, and perhaps it has never been, since information goes only in one direction.  But dislike Television, the Internet can be a tool for conversation, for anybody can create her own blogging page, or a Facebook account, or even a personal webpage, in which she can write whatever she wants, and not only that, but she can also post photographs, videos, slideshows, music, sounds, and anything that is created by means of the digital medium. In addition, this is a masters program on digital arts, and I cannot sit back and drop everything only because we, as human species, are still learning how to be in harmony with our natural world, instead of exploiting it for our (apparent) convenience.

VI. Conclusion
My first goal, as I established it in the synopsis for this research paper, was to find a coherent argument that could justify my involvement in this program as a pro-environment New Media artist.  My second goal was to find a theme of research that will become the main subject for the development of both my final project for the MFA exhibition next end of Spring 2009, and for my thesis.  I believe now that the first goal was achieved.  The second one, although I still do not have a clear concept for a final project, I do believe I have now a better and clearer vision of what I should pursue in the months ahead to accomplish successfully this degree.
I really will appreciate any contribution offered by the faculty of this program that could provide me with a better ground to consolidate my final project proposal.

The most important concept in this reading, in my opinion, is perhaps the issue of authenticity. As the author says in the beginning of section II: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. […] The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”
Later, the author goes on talking about photography, as if the print itself were the actual piece of art.  It is true that printing a well-done photographic print out of a negative is an art craft on its own right, and the auteur may be able to print, excellently, more than one copy. However, this may bring the main issue that the author tries to comment about, and that is, what I call value of exclusivity.  Nonetheless, how many perfect copies can the auteur, in this case, the photographer can possibly print before getting over it; and how many prints would that photographer would print if he or she considers that particular negative to be valuable?  In my personal experience, as a photographer myself, I would not inundate the market with nice prints, perfectly made under all the parameters to be considered a high-quality print for conservation. If I do so, I would devaluate that particular image.
In a more profound realm, though, I do not consider the actual print to be the ultimate piece of art, in the case of photography, but the negative itself.  After all, an expert darkroom printer may be the one who makes the final print. In a perfect world it should be the photographer himself, but not necessarily.  However, in my opinion, it is the person behind the camera who really should take credit for the image.  Virtually, that particular image could not be reproduced –shot by anyone else—because the unique space from where the image was taken, in conjunction with the actual camera settings, the lens’s unique qualities, the unique frame in that particular film, and the unique lapse of time during which the camera’s shutter opened up to expose the film are unquestionably impossible to reproduce.
In addition, art is not science, and there is no piece of art that utilize the scientific method to be reproduced. Science utilizes the scientific method purposefully to be recreated again and again.   Mechanical reproduction cannot be considered neither art nor science, but only a cheap way to reproduce an image in order to make it available to the masses, but that cannot be said to be the actual piece of art, but a reproduction –not a re-creation—of any piece of art.

I found this book incredibly ahead of its time. It has been a very interesting experience to “meet” professor Marshall McLuhan.  As I see him right now, twenty-eight years after his death, is as a visionary.  And I feel free to make such a statement because the entire book is so bizarre and sophisticated. But not just that; I am sure the content itself was not easy to be accepted or understood by the common public when this book was published the first time in 1967.
Professor McLuhan mentions in this book that youth “instinctively understands the present environment (the electric drama.)”  I was very young when he died, and I never saw a computer before I was eleven or twelve years old; that is, about three to four years later.  Yet, McLuhan foresees what until this twenty-first century was not a common thing even in the most technologically advanced countries, such as Japan, Germany, or the United States. This is, the Internet, the lap-top computer, and the cell phone, for example. Not to mention the i-phone, or the i-pod, or the vehicles equipped up with DVD player, LCD or plasma screen, and GPS.
The title of the book can be virtually summarized by this phrase: “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”  This is a very powerful statement, but it makes so much sense when he goes in further detail to describe how human societies lived primarily “in an acoustic space, in the dark[ness]… of the mind” before alphabets were invented. Then it was the print media, which according to McLuhan, it created the public, and later electronic media came to create the mass; a global mass that understands the world in a very similar way due to such media.
Today, thanks to the Internet and the Television, too many people know too much about each other. An excellent example is Facebook and other Internet-based communities, in which automatically you can learn a big deal of things about others just by login into your personal account.  As McLuhan says: “All media have persuasive consequences on people, either personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social.”   This is, in my opinion, inarguably correct, and McLuhan actually goes in further detail when he says: “TV completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing. […] In T.V. you are the screen –images are projected at you—[…] this creates a sort of inwardness.”   And we can see this today as new generations are losing certain skills such as writing, performing basic mathematic equations, and so on, due to their reliance on different electronic devices and computer software. Also, video games support such withdraw from society (and the natural world), as kids spend too many hours per day in front of the screen.
Over all, I enjoyed reading this book and learning about this interesting character, Marshall McLuhan.

I do not know how to react to this type of reading. It is almost like reading a synthesis of William Gibson’s Sci-Fi and an updated journal of medicine.   Perhaps I am very conservative in this issue, but I do not understand and do not support the fact that humans have to become almost cyborgs. And by saying cyborg do not mean to reject the use of prosthesis or contact lenses, which I do not consider actual prosthesis, but rather practical products created with our most sophisticated and advanced technology of the time being for the almost normal performance of the human or animal using such device.
The author also rejects the application of the term cyborg in regards to contact lenses and prostheses.  He uses this term when talking about implementations performed to the physical body to achieve beyond-human capabilities, and as I was reading these pages I thought about the cops during the Democratic National Convention, here in Denver, who were dressed somewhere between Robocop, Terminator, and a football player, in order to create an intimidating presence.  If you ever have the opportunity to talk to one of those guys, you will probably find that they really feel they are super-humans, as once I heard one of those cops saying that he really is a representative of the next step in the evolution of the human species.  He was a typical big white guy with the head shaved –a skin-head, perhaps?, a neo-nazi?
I agree with the author when he mentions that Technology is the new saint in the altar (he does not say that, but that is how I decoded it in my mind).  We are a society that worships technology, we are a society that lives around the spectacle, and technology is the one and only actor on the stage.  And we have come to a point in which we have agreed to accept being the slaves of our own product. We are sadomasochist beings who like to be subjected to the chains that we have created.  Today, even a homeless beggar can be seen in the streets of Denver talking on the cell phone (I saw one!).  People in the major cities of this country and certainly in the most important Asian, European, and Middle Eastern cities, it is common to find people who have agreed to be available for their jobs 24/7.  Wherever they go, they can always be localized by some sort of technological communication device.  And perhaps it is the mass media which has gradually been building the acceptance of that into our minds. But what was first, the egg or the chicken?  Again, it is us who fall slaves of our own creation, of our own rules and regulations, of our own marketing campaigns that bombard us from every direction, and we take it and give value to that. We can see it, we can touch it, is real.  Let’s worship that what is tangible; screw that what you cannot see.
We have committed ourselves to ourselves, we have granted omnipotent power to those who rule, the major corporations!  We let them into the privacy of our own homes by allowing them to spam us with their junk, they live in our computers, they spy on us and they know what we like and what we do not like. [If you want to see the rest of this article sign up first.]

Maquina Humana

1.    Collaboration of Different Individuals and/or Groups
2.    Interactivity as Miscommunication Between the Author and the User
3.    Authorship as Selection from a Menu
4.    Collaboration Between a Company and the Users
5.    Collaboration Between the Author and Software
6.    Remixing
7.    Sampling: New Collage?
8.    Open Source Model
9.    Brand as the Author

Although imperialist corporations keep creating short-lifespan software and hardware, there are always more and more hackers and virtual and non virtual communities working in the creation of tools with open code and hardware meant to be utilize by anyone without having to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the greedy profitable rates of those corporations’ CEOs and their shareholders.   With this, I don’t want to say that their products are bad or that such practice should not exist.  What I am saying, is that there should be more open options and less opportunities for those greedy people whose annual incomes have no ceiling.   D.J. Spooky is a great example of the type of artists who are working towards a more sustainable community in which sharing is the common language, and that does not take anything away from him.

In memory to that but trying to implement my own style I created this little piece that comments on certain point of view based on an unofficial research among some collegues.  The piece is a silent piece.

This is a very interesting article that offered me great descriptions or definitions of some concepts that I never thought about, or that I had a misconception of.  However, I also find certain point to be rather controversial and others that I would actually disagree, as it is with the concept of 3-D, which I would more appropriately call, virtual 3-D, since regardless the complexity and incredible definition and resolution of the cinematic graphics, it still happens within a two-dimensional screen, even when it may even cover all the view field.
Any way, appreciate the thorough research and analysis of the genealogy of technology, or media technologies–to be more specific-, and the profound insights into what should be call static or dynamic, or virtual reality or interactivity; as I appreciate the thoughtful point of view in regard to what interactivity is or is not.
It is clear, as well, that New Media represents all media that can be represented numerically, basically by 1s and 0s; in other words, through computers.  Furthermore, I find fascinating to look back into the 80s and 90s and realize that we all involved in this course, were not just alive, but some of us were already teenagers.  And even more fascinating –to me, at least- is the fact that I did not become acquainted with the World Wide Web until only twelve years ago, and barely touched a computer before that only to use the basic word processor.
Today, as a trying-to-be art-filmmaker I can appreciate this particular reading assignment because it demonstrates the invaluable importance of the cinematic language, including its history and development, to almost everything we do and depend on, in terms of technology.  We see its influence on computing operational systems, in communication devices, such as the Internet, cell phones, and all the variables of ordinary one to one communication devices, and computers (including conference calls built-in systems).  Also, it talks, not slightly, about cinematic language, and how it became New Media firstly by being the medium that offered motion graphics and the temporary element –just as theatre did long before film–, and furthermore, how it became to be from an analog, linear medium to digital non-linear, meaning that it can be accessed and processed arbitrarily.
The philosophical approach to every single element that involves art, cinema, and New Media, for this matter, is “painfully” academic, and I also appreciate that, for it opens my mind to new perspectives.  However, there was an issue I couldn’t really grasp, and that was the issue of Modularity versus Structured computer programming, and how Manovich attempts to make me understand the differences when applied to the different Media that constitute New Media. To me, his explanation of Modularity and Structured seemed very similar, and even when he decided to define how certain medium is structured (or modular), I was able to see it also as the opposite, either modular or structured, too.
Another point that I do not agree, is that cinema is dying. Perhaps I miss that futuristic forecasting, but I still see a long-life path for such a medium, simply by having an endless market that is eager to consume always more.