Our Visceral Opiate

 My undergraduate thesis investigated the use of photography in the creation of surrealist images which react against modern themes exhausted by the mass media.  In tandem with research on presenting still imagery in a alterable, kinetic reality using prisms and projection equipment.  The work was entitled Our Visceral Opiate: A Photographic Re-take on the Media.  Below is the paper's abstract and a link to the full thesis.

Our Visceral Opiate: A Photographic Re-take on the Media

Throughout the ages, communication has had a substantial influence on society. From Prehistoric cave paintings to online weblogs, various forms of correspondence have been used to convey information, maintain archives, and entertain. Unfortunately, today’s unnecessarily abundant forms of interaction can exhaust society and strain cultural relations through overly repeated broadcasts. While expression, through imagery or language, is a vital component of communities, tiring the public with repeated newscasts can cause emotional petulance. I will investigate the sociological drawbacks of the press in culture as a barrier to emotional capacity, independent thought, and the importance of society as a collective. 

Imagery has emerged as one of the most effective ways to articulate ideas. Therefore, utilizing digital photography, I respond to the issues habitually exhausted by mass media. Using surrealist technique, visual symbols, and Roland Barthes’ concept of the studium and punctum, photographs will be presented to the viewer through digital projection.  By transmitting a photograph onto a wall, viewers are given control over the presentation.  Visitors can physically alter the image source by stepping into the projection’s light path and warp the transmission or by altering the output with external mechanics, a kinetic ability in stark contrast to the media’s power which excludes the viewer.  

At its foundation, photography is a study of light, and how through the use of instruments one can alter the viewer’s perception of luminosity.  By projecting images with digital slide equipment, I create a self referential world that deals in terms of illumination.  Since photographic images are generated by capturing light, it seems natural to display the product with light, as well.  This move to project an image is a re-evaluation of the fundamentals of photography.  By taking a step back from modernity, and focusing on light—the purest form of a photograph—I am visually representing the most basic ethereal quality of photography.

If we all have the same punchline, then why the fuck NOT try?

I had a tumultuous final semester as an undergrad at JU.  Tumultuous because I took two opposing classes: one was a sociology course which essentially argued that the entertainment industry was a danger to the adult imagination and exhausted one's appraisal facility to render a non-fantastical life unattainable and the second was a historical film review class, which put films on the golden pedestal for artistic expression.  At times, it was exhausting to reconcile the dichotomies offered by these classes - but I made a few conclusions that I think attempts to bridge the gap.

Early films were concept driven.  Cool Hand Luke or Pulp Fiction or anything penned by George Lucas were vehicles for a director's vision.  Audiences had their consciousnesses stirred collectively through the careful plot lines and nuances of a film with substance.  Today, however, film is a medium for a producer.  It's cheaper, more efficient, and capitalistically sound to make a movie celebrity driven.  Producers make films constructed with the human element on the back burner in favor of an endless episodic saga of collective action sequences or romantic nonsense.  Films in the 1960s and 1970s, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or even later films like Reservoir Dogs, are examples of portrayals of the present future: or, the sort of cultural movements that are sociologically relevent.  These movies spoke of social evolution, packaged in the form of psychological complexity.  Essentially people like Kubrick were introducing our modern American reality: counterculture as the transcendent culture. 

But this doesn't hold up in 2010 - because more than ever, reality fluctuates between the obvious and the esoteric.  A film can't define culture because culture has fractured and spawned into endless variations of itself.  Characters like the "the intellectual", "the rougue", or "the antihero" are impossible to portray because there's not one distinct way to present their meanings - such that we can't really portray any real meanings, but we try nonetheless. So, for the average person the pursuit for meaning is found in the meaningless.  But, in truth, this isn't even close to being enough. And so, contemporary movies can't artistically articulate a future relevance because they can't even articulate a current one.  As a result, for a modern plot line to be culturally important it has to reduce modernity down to one fundamental question: what is reality?

So we get movies like Vanilla Sky, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, and Fight Club which, to an extent, are groundbreaking and fantastic films - but they are still created out of our culture's abstract notion of reality, to the point where they are still trying to tell you what that reality is not aesthetically portray that we don't know. Ultimately in Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise has to decide between a fake world that feels real and a real world that feels like torture, and he chooses the second.  In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves makes a comparable choice when he chooses to reside in a dismal, yet genuine world.  Both of these movies rest on the fact that everything thought and experienced are computer-created illusions.  But isn't this sort of true?  These are the issues that films were created to express debates about. 

Think of Amacord, The Seventh Seal, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dr. Strangelove - this were movies designed to express methodology behind real human issues.  They were springboards for greater thought.  But now we have Twilight, Avatar, and ridiculously feeble romantic comedies that allow people to circumvent reality in favor of collective dreams that no one actually lives but keeps people from being aware that they aren't living these plots. And THAT is the problem - that reality has become this insurmountable issue and the entertainment industry exploits it to generate revenue.  The few transcended films we get these days, like Vanilla Sky and even The Matrix, are dwindling because movies aren't for visually portraying ideas anymore - but rather just for monotonous entertainment.  If you don't want to acknowledge that your life has no script then, watch a movie with characters who don't have that issue. 

Think about it, on a long enough time line the survival rate of everything drops to zero.  So what is the reality of reality? That real life is spontaneous and yet rigid. Objective reality isn't situational.  It's not that we all create our own realities - we really can't. And it's not that there is no hard reality - there is.  Reality can't be altered BUT reality's existence relies entirely on it's acknowledgment.  There must be a symbiotic relationship, right? I mean, essentially and boiled down, were all in this together?  So how do we live our reality?  I want to believe you can but, I fear that's not only idealistic but also naive. Reality can't be controlled but to an extent culture can, so why add to the mess with entertainment that merely hides reality - control culture to let reality be.  Construct culture like Darren Aronofsky or Richard Kelley so that reality is actually approached and the possible can be attained, sensibly.  The best answer I can find is borrowed from my favorite modern revolutionist:

"The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."  PALAHNIUK

A rockabilly manifesto

The genius of Johnny Cash lies entirely in his ability to come to great social conclusions within the paradigm of a melody.  And then sell it to not only faint-hearted bimbos and lion-hearted men, but also those of us with regular hearts.

Cash sings from the perspective of a convicted murderer in the song, Folsom Prison Blues: he is "..stuck in Folsom Prison, And time keeps draggin' on.." He is overcome with a deep seated regret when he hears a train whistle from his lonely cell, "When I hear that whistle blowin', I hang my head and cry.."

He attributes his guilt to the fact that people on the train are "probably drinkin' coffee, And smokin' big cigars.." This is why Cash is the greatest musical sociologist of our time: He doesn't sing about wanting freedom or love or Jesus or to kill again, he just wants some coffee and a cigar.  Cash has brilliantly acknowledged that within the mental manifold of a killer, complex emotions are creepily simple.  Which is why killers can shoot people in the Biggest Little City of the World just to watch them die and the remainder of us usually stop at extreme dislike.

Johnny Cash: Folsom Prison Blues

The epistemic use of belief

I need to do my laundry. Dirty clothes are piled in the washer, the floor, the dryer, the basket, the bathroom - all because I am in dire need of detergent.  But, getting detergent doesn't rank high on my list of things to do because purchasing laundry soap isn't really fun.  It's just necessary.  Only, the need to actually wash my clothes is getting not only ridiculous but also perilous.  As my cat has taken to fishing things out of the washer and then strew them about the house.  I have literally missing socks - not because of the historically mysterious 'laundry black hole', but because a feline charlatan is stowing my knickers in undisclosed areas.  For me, laundry has become a fight against the animal kingdom - not a matter of having nothing to wear.

Although my rant is not relevant to much of anything, it provided a springboard to a philosophically-cant question: how much of our beliefs are upheld because it is useful to do so?  I suppose in order to break this question down, we have to consider the varying degrees of usefulness:

1. serviceable usefulness - that is, use derived from serving some purpose; i.e. a useful pot for cooking
2. practical usefulness - in regards to a producible province; i.e. the useful arts

It's easy to see how belief could be maintained by the serviceable or practical usefulness of something.  The belief that food will cook on a stove is supported by the usefulness of the pot to hold it.  The belief of aesthetic pleasure derived from a sculpture or a garden is confirmed by the useful arts. But what about other, less tangible facets of usefulness?

for time's sake we'll lump all personal intrinsic human usefulness into one category:

3. psychological usefulness - human use for all internal needs; i.e. religion, education, culture, whatever

So where does usefulness fit in to an epistemic rationality of belief? I tend to think that all belief is upheld due to usefulness, and for, really, no other conceivable reason.  Additionally, all knowledge has to be a belief.  There fore, all knowledge serves some useful purpose or else it is not valid.  (Oh - I stumbled upon something there, am I saying that all validity is derived from usefulness? - I think this would make an for interesting discussion BUT I am striving to stay on topic.)  Mechanistic and vitalistic thinkers would concede that all belief is parallel to usefulness - because they approach human needs and the universe dualistically.  In that, humans are subjects, and for the purpose of this argument, beliefs are objects - they are relational.  In a chicken vs. egg argument, humans come before beliefs, therefore assuming survival is perfunctory - how could belief NOT be solely derived for human usefulness?

human issue > the creation of a belief > reconciliation of issue > derived usefulness

This is to say a belief is created from inside culture, not outside of it.  Which is, essentially, an example of how culture's psychology gets trapped in that culture's thinking and, therefore, cannot see it's own psychology.  Can it be said that psychology is created because of societies problems NOT in reaction to the problem?  In other words, the problem is not maintained by psychology but rather psychology maintains the problem.  A psychological solution is unattainable, in a sense.  

Otto Rank saw that psychoanalysis inhibits the emotional life of the patient. Man goes to an analyst to alleviate an internal issue.  The analyst reduces the problem down to a foible in the Man's early conditioning, simultaneously layering the problem with subjectivity and relativity.  The analyst uses psychology (created out of the same culture which led the Man to the analyst to start with) to clinically explain the Man's faulted psychology.  (Does this only look like a loop to me?)  The analyst describes the existential mystery to the Man.  Now, for the Man, the only divine omnipotence left is the man who explained it all away.  Taken in this direction: the Man now needs the analyst like the priest needs God.  OR, the belief of the analyst has all encompassing use to the Man, like the belief of God has all encompassing use to the priest - without one the other could not exist.  And isn't that the very definition of the activity of use? To provide a purpose or effect or supply a need?  

So that belief really does seem to be epistemically supported by usefulness. Descartes created proof of his own existence by assuming the fact that he was conscience of doubt to support that consciousnesses is beyond reason of doubt.  I am arguing that there is proof that belief is created for usefulness because humans believe things that serve them purpose.  Belief is not purposeful but rather created by people for a purpose.  So, then - psychology, religion, democracy, etc.. is only valuable as a belief in as much as it is useful?  I could see this being true although without further research I am hesitant to just rationalize away all belief as a purely reductive construction. 

Now, I REALLY have to go get some detergent. 

A web of complex relations

Thumper had it right when he cautioned: "If you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all," however he failed to expand his theory to include that if you're drunk then you shouldn't say anything as well.

Anyone who has gone to a concert, wedding, a Sullivan funeral, or any college campus whatsoever, knows that there is an exponential function to drinking so that the following is true:

f (beer) = (beer) ^ x; where x = level of assholery

where beer > 0, beer cannot equal 1, and x is any real number

(it's interesting to not that "assholery" is not a real word, in as much as a word can be real according to acceptable standards - and that Firefox suggested I change this non-word to "grasshopper")

So that if we push this equation further we get the decline in knowledge as well, indicated as:

f (beer) = 1 / (beer) ^ x; where x = knowledge

of course, where beer > 0, beer cannot equal 1, and x is any real number

And if we combine the two, we understand beer to positively affect assholery (not grasshoppers) and negatively affect knowledge, so that we get a Pfaffian function:

f (beer) = P assholery, knowledge ( beer, f assholery [1 / f knowledge] )

(I assume a mathematician is disinterested in my meager cultural blog therefore, I am hoping the holes in my algebraic argument are taken at face value. I am, after all, an art major - but I tried)

The practical application comes to fruition when one attends an event with the free flowing of alcoholic substance.  As a relatively independent early twenties graduate, I am habitually placed in these circumstances.  It should be said that drunken stupors are hardly ever interesting. However, on the rare occasion an inebriated foe can surprise even the most discerning mind.

Last night, such a person materialized.  A 29 year old gay man (who, apparently, stifled the urge to cum while his friend was playing on the terrace) attempted to explain to me the merits of drug use.  Now, it should be said that I am a Hunter S. Thompson fan and if drugs can enhance your ability to write or socialize or be interesting, then so be it; however my argument is that most people are unlike Thompson.  And if such a person was like Thompson, I doubt they would hail from Jacksonville Beach or be listening to this shitty band, or have a tie wrapped around their head.

Anyhow, this guy was careful to separate himself from the habitual drug user (and thus ruin his credibility) but elevate himself above the weed user (infantile, he explained).  The hardest thing he had ever done was cocaine (because it was free) and the most frequent thing he did was weed (but he hated it) - he dabbled in mescaline, acid, and shrooms.  

Although he was an electrical engineer (and offered to build me a robot) he was acutely aware of sociology and meticulously explained "the novelty effect". Brilliantly he concluded that this is the component of your fore-brain which reacts to things which occur in the background of real life - his example was that when you hear a plate drop in a restaurant corner, you realize it happened a distance from you due to the novelty effect. And this is why you just shouldn't talk when drinking - because with a beer anyone is an expert. 

I suppose I can give him props for being aware that a novelty effect exists but he isn't even pretending to know what it is truly defined as.  He went on to explain that drugs affect your novelty response by sustaining stimulation of this part of the brain and maintaining that initial level of nervous excitement.  Which, by definition, is completely asinine. The novelty effect is the tendency for a person to have the strongest response at the first occurrence, and over time as the novelty wears off, the anxious stress response decreases so that normal activity can resume.  He had it partially right,  in that when the plate drops we are surprised the first time but that over our lifetime subsequent plate droppings do not relegate us to cowering under tables BUT his correlation to drugs as the medium for which we can prolong this exciting experience is fallible.  Essentially, the novelty effect is one of the biggest reasons why you shouldn't take drugs at all. The danger of narcotics is that they exhaust the novelty effect, not promote it.  

And to a certain point, I think this guy understood that. Hence why he went to great lengths to validate himself to me, a stranger. 

However, the most compelling aspect of his argument was that he explained he wasn't a frequent user because he was afraid of what his mind was capable of. Not because of this novelty effect.  He considered himself intelligent but apparently, only an abstract thinker under the influence - and, I suppose, abstraction scared him.

I believe that the opposite was true but proclaiming this would make him not only look like a hypocrite but also a gutless loser and drug addict. Cocaine, for him, was a way to shrink his universe into something he could manage - that he liked drugs because it defended his mind from his mind - in that he could relinquish control and no longer be responsible for his own thoughts.  In my opinion, he is already afraid of his mind and drugs are the way he suppresses that - his fear of what his mind is capable of is the reason why he got into drugs in the first place.

He takes drugs to feel in control but really he uses in order to give up control because he can't handle possessing an infinite mind. The worst part is that he then fools himself into thinking he refrains from opiates to remain in control - a complex web of relational fallacy.  And this is why culture is so fucked up.  People contribute to the very things that enslave them.  You can't talk about control or freedom or whatever in the same breath that you willingly give it up.  Society is so hard headed about reality and possibility and the temporary and meanings and escaping it all that being neurotic is a state of resistance - not existence.

Kierkegaard says it best: In a theater it happened that a fire started off-stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed - amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

From the Archives: Just A Girl - Vol. 2

This is an excerpt from an older journal I had kept about five years ago. The title of the journal was So he said, shut your mouth girl and the theme was "Just A Girl" - entries that personified a typical high school senior.

February 20th, 2006 - 2:00AM

As a side note I have that I was content listening to new music, oddly reassured by the cynical book I was reading, and that I hated online journals, but that I hated my hypocrisy more. 

This historical post should be of particular interest to those who enjoyed The Greatest Equalizer since this pertained to the creation of that post, and to a lesser degree my B.F.A. thesis. 

Is it wrong I'm excited over curtains?

ANYWAY, I've been thinking about this for a while. When a conversaton starts with, "So, I had this dream last night" you have no other choice to listen. Believe me, I've tried the, "Well, that's nice" (EXIT STAGE LEFT)... it only made my Mom mad. When a person tells you a dream, they're generally trying to tell you something about themselves, they wouldn't otherwise share in normal conversation. Which is why you have to listen, for education's sake.

Which leads me to a theory. I'm sure you've had a dream that feels like it's spanned over a few years yet, you've only been asleep for a couple of hours. Logic tells us that, dreams don't last for years, so we somehow understand accelerated passage of time whilst dreaming. We can tell the difference between "dream time" and "real time". Follow me? OK kids, it's time for a question: Are we able to understand this through movies, books, and TV? Because, it doesn't seem to be something that is graspable naturally. Did TV teach us how to have longer dreams? Consider a movie: we observed Forrest Gump's ENTIRE life in, what 3 hours? We understand it didn't take Forrest only 3 hours to go from running avec his crutches to... screwing Jenny. Thus, we understand (and quite easily) this unspoken encroachment of time.

Now... the conundrum. How did people dream before the onset of TV? Did cavemen dream in real time? How did they grasp the idea? More importantly, how did they differentiate between real life and dreams? (I'm assuming they were remarkable similar.)

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My opinions regarding this now:

a) It stands to suffice that I didn't learn anything in HS because I apparently never slept. Which explains my current state of stupidity.

b) I still hate journals (and now I can add blogs).

c) I'm still a fledgling hypocrite. 

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(Photo by Banksy)

Everything I know about sex, I learned from playing The Sims

There are a lot of movies about mankind engaging in war with machines. (Terminator, Westworld, A.I., among others..) This always struck me as a cheap shot for a cinematic plot line considering, as far as I can tell, machines have been nothing but absolutely civil to us. Nevertheless, if electronics do indeed turn for the worse, they will surely fail.  Since my experience with simulated intelligence indicates that computers are the most gutless cowards you will ever encounter.

 Since my parents decided to fill their spare bedroom with a cumbersome gun safe instead of an additional sibling, my playmates growing up were usually things my Mom and Dad could purchase.  As such, I received my first video game, The Sims, at an impressionable age. I did not hesitate to create my first Sim character as myself, no doubt a feeble attempt to live the life my pre-adolescent self envisioned I was missing.  My Sim-April was vectorized into existence - burdened with a decade of failed expectations.

Quickly into the game, I realized that Sim-April was not the prodigy I had imagined.  She spent the greater part of her day complaining about hunger and boredom. She spent vast amount of time combating her depression by sitting on the couch, staring at the trash-can and occasionally peeing on the floor and then emphatically crying.  After a few days of setting the despondent Sim-April on fire so that I could reinstate her via the Grim Reaper, I figured that socialization would cure much of her psychosis.

 The genius of The Sims is how EA was ahead of their time by almost a decade. The most unsatisfying component of the game is the startling correlation of the Sim's happiness with the shit you buy them.  As far as I could tell, the only thing Sim-April found psychologically stimulating was the brand of stuff I elected to buy her.

Evidently, EA was already privy to this notion since the catalog of available Sim-goods was extensive and detailed.  I mean this is the kind of thing that puts Ikea to shame or would cause Tyler Durden to embark on a massive cultural coup. The circular reasoning involved in the consumerism of a Sim is astonishing.  If a Sim is supposed to be a representation of a real human being and said human is entertained by enhancing their Sims happiness meter by purchasing a fake plasma TV then it stands to be reasoned that watching the TV would also bring the Sim increased pleasure.  Unfortunately, this isn't true: the Sim only recieves increased happiness points at the initial purchase.  By this logic, it would be safe to assume that purchasing goods in real life is used to supplant one's misery with the illusion of pleasure derived from purchasing.  The scary thing is not that this happens but that a game wherein you, supposedly, derive strategy from purchasing could reach the fame level as The Sims.  And to a lesser degree, that a parent would give this game to a child. 

Luckily for me, The Sims came pre-loaded with friends: Bella and Mortimer Goth.  When Sim-April invited the Goths over for a mixer, regular April was struck by the immediate ability to "give Mortimer a kiss." This seemed like just the pick me up for my depressed reincarnation. Unfortunately, upon the passionate undertaking, Bella became (obviously) jealous and Sim-April only ended up back to peeing, crying, and staring at rubberized plants.

I only seek to share this to confirm that my first encounter with the opposite sex as a walking-high-school-hormone was not wholly unlike Sim-April's.  Sociologists and juvenile criminologists may be jumping the gun (pun intended) to say that Halo leads to delinquency but I know firsthand that The Sims definitely doesn't lead to bladder strengthening.

It was when my parents came home with the Hot Date Expansion Pack that I realized I was never going to get "the" talk, and that like "hot coffee" in Grand Theft Auto, my sexual knowledge was to come from the carnal urges of artificial intelligence.

It's a stereotype to assume that someone who plays The Sims doesn't get much action but the game motive almost irrefutably proves this. How someone who spends hours in front of a computer playing a game about real life gets much sex is beyond me. Obviously the notion of engaging in normal activity is so far removed from gamers that such a plot is novel and entertaining in a cyber realm. Why actually go out for socialization when you can drive to town in Hot Date? Eventually, EA came out with an integrated Unleashed Expansion Pack - negating the need for even a pet. 

Meeting fellow Sims in Hot Date proved to be futile.  I would embark upon a more-than-friends relationship with someone and it would lead nowhere.  I would get to the hardcore make out level but was unable to go further. It wasn't that any party was unwilling but I just didn't know how.  I would stand next to the bed and call over the friend but we would only end up talking about volleyball or the weather.  Sim-April would purchase an expensive stove to impress a prospective date but the receiver would only idly clap. No matter how hard I tried, sex was never an option.

As a kid, the physicality wasn't the issue. I learned early on that a baby couldn't be purchased.  There was no Russian Orphanage or Chinese Baby Girl Expansion Pack.  The Sims was entirely realistic in the need to have sex to get pregnant to have a family.  For me, pre-creating the future I wanted was the goal of the game and not only did I fail but, I couldn't stop peeing on the floor.

I ended up losing the install disk to The Sims in a room make over but the education inherent to the game continues to stay with me:

1. You can manufacture happiness. Ikea does it every day.
2. My early foibles with relationships will continue to endure until I find someone as un-knowledgeable as I.
3. I will (probably) never end up procreating.  If Sim-April is indicative of the life I am to lead, then I should..
4. Tile my house with toilets.