WAC | Gallery9 | WebWalker Daily | cook : EAT digest #1

issue #7
02.18.00

WebWalker DAILY 02_11_00-04_30_00
from steve dietz guest editor: sarah cook
gallery 9, walker art center, the internet, and digital culture
ART ENTERTAINMENT NETWORK

1. sara diamond 2. carl disalvo 3. patrick lichty 4. louis mazza 5. sara diamond		EAT: ENTERTAINMENT, ART, TECHNOLOGY http://www.walkerart.org/salons/eat/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Week One: Choice 1. Sara Diamond 2. Carl DiSalvo 3. Patrick Lichty 4. Louis Mazza 5. Sara Diamond +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ To subscribe to EAT: http://www.walkerart.org/salons/eat/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ________________________________________
1. sara diamond		>From Sara_Diamond@BanffCentre.AB.CA Fri, 11 Feb 2000 17:16:51 -0700 Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 17:16:51 -0700 From: Diamond, Sara Sara_Diamond@BanffCentre.AB.CA Subject: [Eat-raw] The Subject is gridlocked Here I am recording on a device that I have desired for a long time, a VOX Voice Zoom recorder, sensitive, non-digital, tiny hand held device capable of picking up my voice as I drive, walk, whisper, conspiratorial with you. I am on my way to teach a class about gaming, games theory and design and the compulsive structure of play. I have Sin and Sim with me, two games, quite distinct linked as a structure of punning. My voice is low and sexy on it. I start recording on Sunset, continue on Silver Lake, the 110 South, continue on the 101 and then the 10 West, on to the 405. I am about to spend some time frozen, locked up in traffic, a perfect moment to zen out on choice. Now I will transcribe Kharmagedon. Choice--I think about President's Choice, which is a Canadian generic brand of edibles. So who gets to decide what we buy anyhow? A big fight in LA right now cause a health food store wants to sell magazines and other stuff outside of the organic. Who decides product lines, who escapes from the buyer within that is all of us, to get to be the taste setter, quantifier/qualifier. The President has eclectic taste. He signs all his containers. From macadamia chocolate chips to olive oil. His signature is an attempt to change language, to shift the current association of choice with poor quality and mass production, back to the authentic, a state of possibility bounded only by abundance and discretion. Back in childhood "choice" was all about taste, bad taste in fact. "Choice" products barely slipped through the net. Choice was the big no choice, choice was about having to take the goods at the bottom of the barrel. Choice was all about limits. In America, poverty was described as lifestyle, choice. Choice is one of the great double talks of consumer verbiage. I remember having to choose "choice". We ate choice food when I was a kid because we could not afford to choose not choice, bologna, canned tomatoes, tomato soup, canned peaches. Choice meant lack. Don't you think that deciding who and what to flirt with, in part has to do with allowing curiosity to reign. You need to let it go so that in almost any situation you can think about the implications of what that particular choice could be. Consumer society cuts us off at the pass of fantasy by stuffing our mouths, even boys these days are taught to take those desires and put it inside. I have been reading about how women shop on the Internet. So the idea of push delivery for "consumer choice" was first placed onto women consumers. The usual product profile to buying pattern.Very simple. It turns out that women really hate to have Stuff pushed at them, so that even if they end up buying the same thing, the shopping is far more important than the money shot of buying. "Born to shop" still rules over any desire for convenience. All around us possibilities are narrowed in terms of choices within capitalist society, more sameness and then rebellion via the specialty store and the organic product. Class defines the realm of choice. Now when you get to the guys on the net, they in fact apparently DO want to have choices narrowed for them. Somehow, I keep relating this to sexual curiosity. I guess the point that I am making here is that curiosity is constantly repelled and shaped, but it's linked to choice, and perhaps there is something about curiosity which has the potential to be anti-capitalist or at least critical about the illusion of choice. Desire sure feeds/is fed by capitalism; maybe curiosity is a bit anti capitalist because it pushes us to discover things that are not always available in commodity form. Now. Do I believe this? Not sure, capitalism has been capable of socializing every realm. Can curiosity drive a radical consumption? How and why does the "choice" and its deployment, hover between democracy and authority/compulsion in consumer society? If you could design a technology, a mechanism for making decisions about key things in your life, what criteria would you embed in that technology, how would you design it and who would you allow it to change. What would you do if your agent made choices for you that you did not like? Might it not be most interesting to live in a time of plenitude rather than lack? What constitutes a radical practice? Where is compulsion, where is choice? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ________________________________________
2. carl disalvo		>From disalvo@earthlink.net Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:46:50 -0800 Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 16:46:50 -0800 From: Carl DiSalvo disalvo@earthlink.net Subject: [Eat-raw] The Subject is gridlocked At 5:16 PM -0700 2/11/00, Diamond, Sara wrote: >What constitutes a radical practice? What constitutes a radical practice?: * Do nothing * Do something useful interestingly, I'm not sure if art or entertainment could be classified as either. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ________________________________________
3. patrick lichty		Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 13:54:12 -0500 From: Patrick Lichty voyd@raex.com Subject: [Eat-raw] Gridlocked in Choice I live in the suburbs of post-industrial Midwest America; you hear endless advertisements about 'choice' Recently, I even heard a carpet retailer even be so bold to expound on the 'constitutional RIGHT to choice!". Choice is a common buzzword of American politicians as it is often conflated with Liberty and the 'pursuit of happiness'. The social contract of choice gives us comfort as it gives us a sense of control. Coice of our government, food, clothing, place of residence - it's all part of the American heritage of personal initiative and libertarianism that is one of our prime exports. The problem of choice is that it obscures the agendas of control that are created a priori in assuming the agreement of choice. It's like trying to decide whether you are going to eat at McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, or Rally's. Sure, you want a hamburger, but what are you really buying? Are you buying a hamburger, the name, or are you buying anything at all? What is so amusing about choice in the age of the hypercapitalistic consumer culture is that we are offered a plethora of options, but most of them are the same product in different brand-name wrappers. As Jameson posits, the 'free' market is inscribed with the structures of the oligarchic systems of control that define the system of rules that we are free to choose from. Therefore, you are free to choose from anything that's on the menu, and if you 'choose' to go to another restaurant, they give you another menu. The problem is, the other restaurant probably gets its food from the same place the other one did. Choice is inertial in nature. It is a tactic of misdirection in that when we are presented with plentiful options, our noses are nailed to the coffee table of desire. The question of what gas provider, insurance company or fast food restaurant to choose frequently looms so large in one's life that the larger issues are lost through looking at the endless bifurcative trees of decision in the forest of choice. In fact, when I pose open-ended questions in my writing, am I not luring you into that very same trap? Am I not leaving your mind to ponder what agendas of control of which I might be speaking, rather than free you from the trouble of speculation by locating myself in a firm position statement? Choice enslaves us to the curiousity of possibility. Perhaps Americans were more free when there were only three television channels and AT&T monopolized the phone systems. At least there was less question about choice, and subsequently more freedom of time, emotional energy, etc. But am I merely inferring a continuum in which we draw points along the scale while inverting the control/choice - choice/control relation? Not exactly, but in in establishing social limits, certain freedoms are gained while under that control, but in widening freedom of choice, a new control matrix reasserts itself. In this way choice and freedom present their own paradoxical relation. My question is not as to whether we can escape the agendas of control that choice presents us with. Sure we can simply choose not to buy, but then that creates its own polemic of having chosen to place oneself in opposition to the power matrix of control (which leads us back intot he same old trap). What interests me more is to consider the terrain of social/cultural narratives that choice places upon us, as we choose whether to watch ABC, the Disney Channel, or ESPN 2. Or, perhaps we could watch UPN, CBS, Nicelodeom, or MTV. So much choice, so little time. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ________________________________________
4. louis mazza		>From louis.mazza@walkerart.org Thu, 17 Feb 00 16:20:50 -0600 Date: Thu, 17 Feb 00 16:20:50 -0600 From: louis.mazza louis.mazza@walkerart.org Subject: [Eat-raw] hello (is there an echo in here?) what is up with this list? are you exercising your choice of non-participation? >If you could design a technology, a mechanism for making decisions about key >things in your life, what criteria would you embed in that technology, how >would you design it and who would you allow it to change. when i stopped to answer this question i hesitated at the idea of having something (some-thing) make "key" decisions for me because often decisions i make are based on my personal previous experiences with similar situations, for better or worse. on the other hand, the question also bumps up against the idea of programming something to filter information for you which might be a thing that can be utilized against the barrage of media-noise thrown at us daily. if we reverse the flow--if we go out and get what we want instead of being spoon-fed... are filters bad? would we be giving machines too much responsibility to censor our information? and while we bitch about pop culture and consumer society and the media limiting our choices (which i did in my last post--hey, it's ok to contradict yourself...) the alternative is to choose to block everything out. don't watch t.v., cancel your subscriptions and turn off the radio. but can one ever really tune it all out? without the options we are given (limited as we may think they are) what would we do without them? so it comes down to filters again. is "choice" ultimately our choice? if we don't exercise our choice in what we buy isn't it because we're really too ignorant or too lazy to find out what else is out there? ( unless our means prevents us from obtaining a better product-- like President's Choice ) no one's keeping us from researching what we buy or finding out what's better. is there any excuse for complacency? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ________________________________________
5. sara diamond		>From Sara_Diamond@BanffCentre.AB.CA Fri, 18 Feb 2000 09:28:27 -0700 Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 09:28:27 -0700 From: Diamond, Sara Sara_Diamond@BanffCentre.AB.CA Subject: [Eat-raw] Stuck to the Surface Now here is a question for you out there about choice. Through the 1930s people fought for, chose very consciously (rationally and emotionally) to fight for this safety net that I describe, and to fight for a publicly funded culture, education system etc. It took some blood in the streets. All those elements of social security. Canada through the militant fights of people, through government and street action created through choice. People voted for programs. They understood politics and what they were creating. What does it mean when you Unconsciously dismantle these systems, yes, through choice of government, but without program and with an unconscious desire just to have more for themselves, that is the promise after all. I want to understand this better. The way to think about it here in America is to think about the ways that the NEA was defunded. This whole issue of the choice to have a public sector, to have programs that are tied to democracy in the classic revolutionary sense. To create a space or spaces, including through the state where the body of discourse is protected as well as the citizen's body, where this is shielded and effects choice, including cultural choice. Note to self: think and write about pleasure, find that sexy little bar the Formosa. Signs, lost on Sunset in slow crawl, all about this place. Here is the pleasure I sought, silhouetted girl images from the l950s on the side of buildings, a strip lunch club without windows, yum, girls, girls, girls. Here are huge billboards and tons of signage that rips itself between electronic video walls of the most flashy extreme (and I mean Flash, the new animation aesthetic, its ubi(quitous)) and old funky lettering from the 1930s. Yum. Since we are always frozen in traffic and signage, advertising pleasure is very important here to seduce our sense of choice. In fact, there is a billboard style of small slabs of totemed or high rise of information - twelve stories--that you need to be in traffic stopped to see Signage turns me on more than products often. ________________________________________
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