Seven Lions

For those of you unaware of Ani DiFranco, she’s the authentic version of Alanis Morissette or, shoot, my musical knowledge fell to pieces during the Y2K disaster and I can’t even make a hip Joan Jett reference because she’s coming back into the limelight and, frankly, once I’ve exhausted Ani, Joan and Alanis, I’m stuck.  Anyway, I was bouncing around through the horrendous music available on YouTube (Is there some kind of requirement that all music videos on YouTube not officially sanctioned and promoted by McDonalds should consist of crumby live shows with too much crowd noise?  Can’t a guy listen to the Five Stairsteps without being subjected to 70s-era variety shows?) and I came upon Ani giving a well-thought out and reasoned reply to the question of intellectual property rights infringement:

If you’re not familiar with the artist, you’ll probably expect some Metallica-style anger/anguish (Angeruish?  We’ve already so butchered this language, why not take it to another level?) and you’ll be disappointed, because she acknowledges that the revenue streams, especially in her own career, are malleable and often take into account the free distribution of music to attract an audience to a live show.  It seems like there’s a glut of content creators and a contraction of paying audience throughout every creative sector and while that’s not exactly news, it’s less and less clear who the artists are and who the audience is.  Whether you’re a quasi-amateur YouTube star or selling giclee prints on-demand (Or novels, for that matter) it seems, at least unofficially, that America is experiencing a massive explosion in the arts.

Sure, you have to wade into the question of whether digital photography and Scrubs episodes set to emo music are art, but even if you disregard the mashups and the countless pictures of cute kittens, you can still wander around DeviantArt and Etsy and YouTube (and even 4Chan) and see an enormous amount of artists out there.  They’re not all American, but the majority are, and I don’t think the explosion of artistic impulse was ever part of the projected trajectory of the Internet, which is a good sign (I haven’t bemoaned the Semantic Web recently, so I’ll take this moment to look around and… nope, still not here).  If that’s the case, then the growing sector of Struggling Artists would do well to look up Ani and her history and her business model.  Maybe Righteous Babe Records is Web 3.0…  I’ll have to ask the 4th graders.

Recon by fire

For those of you curious as to how the game is played, it was summed up like this:

ALL OF YOUR CHARACTERS WILL BE SLAUGHTERED LIKE CATTLE.  Don’t expect anyone you roll up in the first week to remain alive for more than twenty four hours.  Remember Wierzbowski in Aliens?  Of course you don’t.  You’re Wierzbowski.  Or that guy who takes off his helmet on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan.  Expect to have the lifespan of an extra in a John Woo film.  Most likely within two seconds of your first contact, you’ll be reduced to bloody chunks.  Learn to love it.  Don’t get too attached – after all, you don’t have to write letters to their mothers/queen.  Learn the ropes, and someday you’ll be able to do the same to the next batch of lambs led to the slaughter.

For those of you trying to figure out the theme of this blog…  Well, I’ve got no answers.

An artistic representation of the action in Bughunter

In my ongoing attempts to spurn accepted wisdom and create a blog with no niche, which is sometimes about non-traditional publishing, sometimes about Islamic Art–or was it the Digital Humanities and Environmental History, or is it just constant Wikipedia meta-criticism–I present this amazing artistic rendition of a game that normally looks like this:

Not nearly as dynamic, don't you think?

Bughunter is a php-based game based on all the best action movies of the 80s, played by maybe thirty people over the entire course of its history.  It’s almost like a digital version of kids games back when all kids didn’t play the same highly-engineered and produced media.  Cowboys and Indians must have had countless variants with countless different “magic circle” rules, and Bughunter is just like this.  Astounding, once you think about it.  The game has been ongoing for a couple years now, in various iterations, and while the gameplay is solid, it really only exists as a playspace for a small subset of a long-standing on-line community.  One day, it will disappear, and the digital archivists won’t even know it was around to bemoan its loss.  I wonder how many of these games actually exist in the world, and what motivates the people who create and maintain them, as well as the people who play them.  Somehow, its substandard graphics and interface (When compared to that created for games that cost millions) don’t seem to bother the handful of people who grumble and mutter, like old AD&D players, “I think we should start a new game of Bughunter” every three or five months.  Made for free and never marketed, it contains elements based on whimsy and group consensus, and its longevity reflects that strange dynamic.  Unlike traditional games, it never even enters into the cost-analysis aspect of design.  But it will also never have an audience of millions, or even thousands or hundreds.

I suppose that somehow my blog maintains its niche, as this is a game that will be played and appreciated by a few, like books that are read and appreciated not by the entire audience of Oprah but by only the smallest nano-percentage of the world-connected population.  Deep but not pretentious, these small pieces of media hearken back to an older time, of the creation of games and books that never made it outside their small borough, and no author or designer thought anything of it.  Despite the ever-growing sameness of experience across the world, there still exist these smallest of communities and their smallest of projects–emerging, abiding, and then swaying out of existence like a wise man in a village with no ledger.  And yet, somehow, they affect us, and not self-consciously with hipster dramatis, and are reflected in our own creation of art, knowledge and techne.

This Mughal-inspired, mixed media piece is one of the works to be displayed during Michelle's visit.

The university library has confirmed that Hajra will get a wall to exhibit her art during the First Lady’s visit to UC Merced.  It’ll be located on the third floor of Kolligian library and the exhibit will remain up throughout the summer.  While Hajra’s work includes many secular pieces, notably those used in the posters for Son of the Great River, she also produces beautiful calligraphy and art inspired by the techniques of the Islamic Golden Age.  If you feel a limited edition, signed giclee print is a little too pricey, you can pick up a less expensive print at RedBubble.  There’s really no way to make a print of the mixed media pieces, but if you have $5000 burning a hole in your pocket or you recognize that it’s a paltry sum given the rising popularity of Islamic art, you can own an original.

A while back I put together a site to display some beautiful artwork, hand-built in php with css and all the bells and whistles.  Then I found out that even though my work was standards-compliant, Internet Explorer sadly isn’t.  Now, through the joys of WordPress and its limitless plugins, I’ve begun the process of folding Hajra’s work into Seven Lions.  Hajra created the cover and interior illustrations for Son of the Great River–the cover is inspired by the cave paintings at Lascaux and her pen-and-ink illustrations, though reduced in quality due to the black-and-white printing and small size necessary for interior illustrations, are equally stunning.  Her classical and modern-style calligraphy is just another example of the growing vibrancy of modern Islamic art.  But the most beautiful work is reserved for Hajra’s own literary product, a picture book set in the Golden Age of Islam, to which I’m not allowed to even mention that much.  If I’m lucky I’ll even cajole her into explaining some of her techniques and inspirations.

Bigger than Andre, badder than the entire WWF

Remember back when Knife Party was just a tag on a San Francisco sidewalk (or maybe that was Monkey Knife Fight…  you always forget to document the street art until years later…) and not an awesome piece of digital media deriding the Neocon war machine with a British accent?  Giant Media had its roots in the same subversiveness and now it’s spawned into an entire industry suitable for philately, sovietology and, um, trying to figure out just how much of Andre the Giant’s face can be shown and still be considered original work.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole Obey thing.  But Shepard Fairey has come a long way from quoting Heidegger (without mentioning phusis, which in my mind is a sign of a rank amateur) to critique conspicuous consumption, and now wrangles with the arbiter of all news factoids for his modification of a press photo of Obama into an emblem of the proletariat’s addiction to propaganda, or maybe it’s hope.

A quick perusal of der Wiki shows the morass of trying to distinguish what constitutes derivative work from copyrighted sources using laws written before modern methods of transformation existed.  Somehow, the illuminati over at Google got it right, along with Duchamp.  Of course, Duchamp did it before you could sell Mona Lisa skateboards, so maybe the courts would look differently at the issue today, but first Duchamp would have to give up being an artist and start being the second-most ironic capitalist of the post-modern era.

I’ve been struggling lately trying to figure out what I mean by animation and how it relates to cartoons, games, diagrams and Edward Tufte.  There is, I think, a thread that links strategy gaming to the representation of people (or their bubble-enshrouded thoughts) as abstracted collections of lines and filled spaces that focus on process.  That’s the whole point of my theoretical Animated Clearinghouse of Verbs and Processes that you can see in all its Youtube glory at  Animated Ancient China II.  But if we’re just talking about filled spaces and lines, well there should be no difference between these two princesses:

Queen Kristie from Sveden

But we inherently know that the princess on the left is somehow different from the princess on the right.  We have all manner of details of the princess on the left, most notably that she was tricky from day one and that she had a proclivity for killing famous French philosophers, and know very little about the one on the right.  But beyond that intuitive sense of difference and to some scheme for describing how cartoons like Sleeping Beauty are media for the relaying of particular types of knowledge and somehow including within that media the video games that make up so much of modern life requires serious analysis.  I’m not a media studies kind of person, but I am a fan of MacLuhan and his concept of the tetrad, wherein one attempts to define the basic characteristics of a particular medium and its suitability for knowledge transmission.  To whit, I propose the Animation Tetrad:

So, Aurora, like a doughty space marine from Bughunter,  isn’t so interesting and valuable on its own, but as part of a non-lingual process for relaying knowledge.   Now, the knowledge being passed along in Bughunter isn’t as complex as the process for refining uranium for use in a nuclear reactor to create electricity, but it does share the same abstraction regarding details of individual objects with a focus on the system itself.  Ultimately, as we grow more comfortable with the creation of animations, we move away, according to this tetrad, from those pesky words, and move toward complex non-lingual communication of knowledge.  Imagine if Einstein had been exposed to that simple, 45-second Areva commercial (Probably a better scenario than exposure to Bughunter, we can all be sure) and I think the possibilities for complex theory and practice (known as praxis) relayed with little or no actual text becomes more and more possible.  As a historian, I recognize that this has happened before, especially in the use of art to relay religious truths to a laity illiterate in Latin.  Wikipedia boasts of articles in dozens of languages, but animation allows for an escape from the constraints of the vernacular (Possibly, with an institution of a new vernacular based on symbology that may one day become so complex that it constitutes a language that would need just as much training to understand as those that it replaces, hence the reversing characteristic in the tetrad).  So the next time you’re playing Rome: Total War, maybe you should think of it as Rossetta Stone for learning the animated language of knowledge transfer.  How’s that for ruining your gaming experience?

If you’ve stumbled upon this site and you don’t document your code in Middle High German, then you’ll probably be confused.  I hope to have everything together in a week or so, and then I’ll start putting out more text than interesting pictures.