PracticeasResearchJournalofProcessWHTHX–1138
29 June, 2011: receive an email from Claire Light, a friend I know from
Asian–Am arts days with Kearny St. Workshop (KSW) asks me to do a
movietelling piece for Litcrawl, 2011 as part of the San Francisco’s Literary
Festival, LitQuake, 2011, presented by the Carl Brandon Society. As Claire
and Carl ask for speculative fiction from POC’s and I’d been wanting for
years to use George Lucas’ first feature: THX-1138, a decision gets made
easily for once. Also, this feels likEasier place in POC venue to find more
natural support for a work looking at invisible white privilege.
9 Sept. 2011: Email Julie Wyman & John Zibell to query how I might rip dvd
copy down into an editable form on Final Cut eXpress, which I’d purchased
for Julie’s course in Spring, 2011 and thought with small bit of experience in
editing film for her course, wouldn’t it be a great step toward independence
or DIY not having to depend on a video tech person as I had in my previous
movietelling piece.
ONgoing, 2011: in literal notebook, collect “white” language and language of
white privilege such as “Do Not Write on White surFACES” from overhead
projector in Rossini’s Drama 1 class and my own poem “21 0ctober, 2002”.
As film THX-1138 is visually mostly white actors in white outfits with mostly
white backdrop, so interested in language that replicates this white on white
invisibiliTy of white normativiTy as white power so symbolic emulates
content and how white ideology/hegemony/discourse work in the world.
Sept. 2011: screen film again, scan film for scenes to fit into eight minutes
that might have some general potential symbolic power in the invisibiliTy of
white privilege, supremaCy. Scenes where vast whiteness diminishes
characters size symbolically reveal institutional/structural size of white
hegemony/ideology resulting in the inabiliTy of white subjects to
see/question their normativiTy/power.
5th Oct. 2011: after attempt/ripping dvd on my own with no success, solicit
help from Don Yee, tech person over in Art Annex. Spend afternoon
attempting to rip DVD with free program gotten online called Handbrake and
converting it into an editable form in Final Cut Express. Although my
computer is newer and should be powerful enough to rip DVD, after a few
splotchy tries, Don tries older UCD computers and we are able to rip and
convert (through Final Cut Pro) an editable version of THX-1138. He states
another program other than Handbrake would be better, faster. Though I’m
obviously so dependent here, is it moreMpowering that another Asian
man/POC helps me in this piece?
8-9 Oct. 2011: Using Final Cut eXpres,scan film and edit down to 24
minutes. “Shower” scene symbolically represents daily “washing” of
accountabiliTy white ideoloGy doesn’t allow individual whites to see in their
lives. Wondering now what language or dialogue might do this better and a
patience beget by being in PhD. program (no time to wait for inspiration)
and acknowledgment of how previous movietelling piece allowed for
severalayers, additions coming in continued reiterative performance and
rehearsals over years something differenthan artist doing an
idea/concept/piece once and being through with it and more of a repetitive
writingesture.
10-11 Oct. 2011: in attempting to write/find language supportiveXposing
white privilege, collectext primary language from online reading of Zeus
Leonardo essays a UCB student in Theories of Pop. Media course suggests
particularly “The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white
privilege’”, which I quote freely using the experimental poetic license of
collage, pastiche, etc. Though most of this quoted text is a brown man’s,
the academic language as language of white discourse works to act as white
noise backdrop to characters in film as well as language more substantive
and objective (researched and academic) than POC personal experience.
Still, because it is a lot for an audience to take in in one sitting/viewing, had
idea to incorporate subtitles in particular scenes and through AfterEffects
program from “Type in Motion” class, run text I’m reading visually through
first section maybeNd as well. I would play with the opaciTy of text again
doing in the structure of the editing what the discourse does in society
sometimes making itself visible but often disappearing in the white backdrop
of normativiTy. Also, use Peggy McIntosh’s work found through Leonardo
essay, which was more personal but by a white person thus more
substantive in a white hegemony . Find beating scene in THX would
coordinate well with Rodney King beating so find language in Deveare–
Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles to use as historically resonant as white on
black violence through Rodney King, discrimination, slavery, the middle
passagetc…in an attempt to approachelp audience approach violence on few
juxtapositionalevels of visual, language, aural, oral, poetic repetition (i.e.
“thwack”). There is something compelling about watching the white
character eNjoying(eNjoin) watch the beating that hopefully has audience
see Beyond the spectacle and its systematic normativiTy as well as sitting
with the dissonance of this resonance longer, hopefully. other language bits
written and collected…
12 Oct. 2011: edit 24 minutes of film down to just over 11 minutes in a
more random bit of decision-making, which is part of my personal poetics,
allowing title to help decide where to stop editing (i.e. 11 minutes 38
seconds) though this varies later with furtherefining edits.
13 Oct. 2011: fit language to film, where text or language explicatEach other
using both synchronizing meaning of language with film’s action or
movement in a language sound and meaning dance with the visual as a
couple scenes, for examples, that fade out synchronized with the language I
narrate about white “mystification” of their normativiTy as a place of power.
14 Oct. 2011: finalizing text for performance; attempt run-through with two
computers-one video edit and one language. In the attempt at
synchronization, I am hoping audiences somewhat suspend their disbelief
and sit longer with the difficult to look at or face about USo(ur)cieTy.
15 Oct. 2011: burn dvd copy of edit, print-up script and run-through;
perform at Lost Weekend Video in San Francisco with much less (less
expected predominantly white) audience response or more tension as friend
attending states afterwORds due to difficulTy/lack of safeTy for
predominantly white audience. Friendocuments performance with low
resolution digital still camera video mode.
16 Oct. 2011: better text toward end of piece comes during meditation,
“Just because you didn’t do anything, doesn’t mean you can’t do anything”
Withouthis text, the piece didn’t hold white viewers as accountable as much
and to do something: this text attempts to hold “dissonance” longer.
24 Oct. 2011: Hear from Keith and Jess in line at Delta of Venus of
symposium for Social Change and think WHTHX–1138 would work as an
attempt at social change through (filmic experience) and in
(academiconference) white ISA (Ideological State Apparatuses).
29 Oct. 2011: Submit abstract & bio to Lynette Hunter.
11 Nov. 2011: ReceivEmail from Lynette Hunter acceptance into symposium
with request for paper evaluating attempt at social change in
creation/performance of WHTHX–1138.
28 Nov. 2011: Submit evaluative paper to Lynette Hunter.
29 Nov. 2011: Submit work cited in paper.
2 Dec. 2011: At Performance for Social Change symposium, in small group
session, receive feedback for evaluative paper tending toward writing
methodology where I might include wild language in one section as set-up
juxtaposition/relief to normativersion from Dylan Bolles and the idea of
holding an audience in “dissonance” from Lynette Hunter or why I attempt
suspension of disbelief through syncronization for example. Perform
WHTHX–1138 with Hillary doing video documentation and post-performance
questions tend toward creative process, textualanguage sources, poe10tial
collaborations (i.e. musical w/Dylan Bolles). Neither feedback session for
paper or performance broach content, which I believe occurs because there
is both a denial of white privilege’s eXistence (similar to individual male [my
own in moment of revealing by a woman] denial of male privilege), as
asserted in Leonardo paper (used for performance), the tendency is to
deflect white poweracism to some more ignorant whites (or males in my
case) and from the Leonardo/Porter paper (used in paper not performance)
the wanting a sense of “safeTy” before openly discussing the issue. Since
there is a denial of white privilege, then the use of filmovietelling as stated
in paper is attempt to eXpose it; since deflection occurs to avoid blame,
guilt, shame, then the darkness of the filmic eXperience as paper purports is
“safe” place whites might be able to find accountabiliTy instead of deflection,
which is whatends to occur in an open discussion.
continuesection 6
KSW40thAnniversarypreperformance
10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
10 May, 2012
Lisa Leong lisa@kearnystreet.org
May 10
to me
Hi Dennis,
This year is the big 40th anniversary of Kearny Street Workshop. In celebration,
we are curating artists representing the three "generations" (Baby Boomer, GenX, Millenials) to reconnect with our past and imagine our future. Special
anniversary programs will include a performance showcase, visual exhibit, and
literary reading.
Would you be interested in performing ~15 minutes of neo-benshi at our 40th
Anniversary Performance Showcase?
When: May 22, 7-9pm event time
Venue: Bindlestiff Theater
We are offering a minimum artist fee of $200 per ensemble.
The theme is looking back to KSW's history and looking forward to the future of
APA arts. What would you like to do that best reflects this theme, your
relationship to KSW, and where you want to go as an artist?
Looking forward to hearing from you. Let me know if you any questions!
receive email from Lisa Leong eXecutive director of Kearny Street Workshop (KSW), Asianam arts group based in SF, requesting my performing presence at their 40th anniversary
Performance Showcase on 5/22/12. Not much time to prepare but there's nary a "no" in
sight as they're workshoperformance venues have been integral in the growth of my
work...it didn't hurthathis time they were paying $200. (methinks a grant came through or
had to spend $ before the time to spend it was up; either way, I'm in no position to turn
down money to do my work). Could there be a critique here of the Neoliberal influence
being more overt here in my work? I suppose it is possible with the busy-ness of the Ph.D,
I might have let the opportuniTy pass had I been swampt and no cash carrothere was.
Although, because I've not been able to perform it in a "friendly" POCrowd, I do think I
was looking for a better "HOM(Nancy Hom was KSW director when I started with them)e"
for me to eXhale the piece into.
Oh another "hook" for me to do the show though I'm trying to hunker down
amidstenweekwarterPh.2nDyear 2eminarSpanisheveryday was the anniversary show is
being held at Bindlestiff Theater, the PilipinoAm theater in SF'SOMA district (whichas large
PilipinoPopulation). I simultaneously did commUniTy PilAm theater with whilst working my
individual 'pokin'wordsplayw/pinch/punchofperformancearthtuffw/KSW. In addition to all
this, one of the biggest reasons I leftheater at Bindlestiff was we lostheater to I believe the
city of San Franciso way back in the early 2000s. Yeah, it was a little Black Box theater that
a Canadian woman ChristinELLS who taught us physical theater techniques built under a
transient hotel and then collaborated withe Alan Manalo and many PilipinoAm performers
to eStablish as the "Epicenter for PilipinoAm performing aRts on the WEstcoast(hinkso)"
bringing theater, comeDy and PilipIndependent bands to festival called PinoisePop year
after year. After a shortough fighthe owners or the ciTy didn't give us the money or aid or
time to earthquake/retrofitheater so the originalone was torn down, sadly. I moved on to
pursue my own writing craft CCAC and Mills College MFA Creative Writing programs and
the PilAm theater never stopped I believe but moved acrosstreet to another space
underneath another transient hotel, buthispace was leased or less invested than the first. I
saw maybe one or two shows athe newer what feltemporary space. Sadly, the passing of a
great guyou'd see at almost all the Bindlestiff Events, a roady-tech-dudEric who worked
with SOMA youth for years passed at a young 40something years last year and to
commemorate his impact on our Theater and musicommUniTy they had a fundraiser with
many of his favorite bands including mine: the Skyflakes. A temporary space was used and
after a hotel resident asked thathe loud music would stop by midnight, they decided to
move the show to the New Bindlestiff, which I'd seen glimpses of in emails, fundraising,
updatetc. Unfortunately, not all the band memberSkyflakes could wait around so since my
favorite band was not even playing (bummer), I left with my girlfriend without even seeing
the new Bindlestiff. Thustoryshort, if I do this performance, I would return to the new
modern theater structurebuiltenyearsafter I had not yet even visited yet meaning the
firstime I would return to see it was to perform in it not in a commUniTy PilipinoAm theater
context but an AsianAmovietelling context.
10 May, 2012
Hello Lisa,
I would love to perform; thanks for thinking/asking me. And I do have a
few questions to make sure what I can do in the amount of time is apt:
-Is this May 22nd, 2012 coming up in less than two weeks?
-If the performance is upcoming this month, then because I am in a Ph.D
program at UCDavis and don't have time to write/create aNything new, I
can't say what I've to perform necessarily works with the KSW themes of
history and looking forward (unlesScieNce Fiction [THX-1138 {George
Lucas's first feature}] or the movietelling/katsuben/pyonsa <<"neo-benshi"
was given/taken by white eXperimental poetry communiTy in sf>> form
could be seen as an Asian originary art form thus looking back).
At aNy rate of appropriation, let me know if its okay if the form I use is
distinctly Asian, Even if the content is not necessarily (although it's
contenthemes of critical race stuDies/white supremaCy/privilege is the
stronger type of aRt I'moving toward). I've only done the piece a few times
debuting it last fall w/Clare Light at Litquake. So she can give yoU some
insight; i'vedited it a bit since she saw it. Thanks again and let me know if
what i can do works for yoU. DeNNiS
after clarification, that I am able to use a slightly "older" piece and it was not necessary for
me to create something new in 12 days and in a Ph.D., I signed up so to write. There is
pressure that one person in particular but maybe much of aRt world seems to prioritize is
"New York, New Work, NeWork, Nework, Newark, NJ.", which feels like PRESSure
constricting my creative flow as Turnereminds us. Also, I do have a penchant for
repetition, practice, rehearsal being part and parcel of my praxis, where over the repetition
of performances of a piece like drafts of writing, I am able to add mostlylayers(sometimes
by mistakes/
happyackciDENts). Cannothink of theorists or someone to come to my aid in repetition,
palimpsesting, layering, long-term improv...etc.
Hi Dennis!
So happy you can perform at our 40th. Yes, May 22, 2012 as in two weeks. I
am really sorry for the short notice, I should have invited you sooner. Claire
had to reduce her days last month for health reasons, so I had a hard time
working on anything but our fundraiser. Now I can devote myself to the
performance showcase :)
It's no problem to perform work that isn't brand new. Some of our
performers have created new work but most have not. We consider neobenshi to be the Asian/American element. Racial criticism is exactly the kind
of themes KSW supports. Can you tell me about your Litquake piece? It
sounds very fitting... I'll ask Claire for her impression as well.
Lastly, what kind of tech do you need?
Thanks so much,
Lisa
Great Lisa,
The piece is again a clip from George Lucas' first feature THX-1138:
visually primarily white characters in white outfits on white
backgroundystopia which symbolizes the naturalizing, mystifying invisible (to
them/those in power) of white normativiTy/privilenge/supremaCy in socieTy
and I speak academic language, dialogue, poetry, tiny bit of singing in
conversation with the white on whiteXcerpts. 'Tis not as fun as me
WEst.siDEsTroy piece buthey're different pieces in different registers; this
one is certainly more overtly political/didactic/militantrying to visiblize this
power...aNyway, let me know if you've aNy other questions.
In terms of tech: I need a dvd player or a place to plug-in my computer to
play the film clip (i've got a sound and visual adapter for the MacbookPro). I
need a music stand to use to rest my script upon. I need a mic and mic
stand so that my hands aRe free to handle the script. I'd prefer someonelse
to press play on the dvd and or turn on the clip on my computer. I've got a
music stand type lighthat I'll bring. I believe that would be all for
now. Thanksagain. DeNNiS
after more "Claire(the neXt eXec. dir. for KSWho alsolicited the original spec. fict. piece for
Litquake)"ification to Lisa(ctiveXec.dir.KSW) whether WHTHX-1138 would be apt for the
show, because KSWork is politicalinking art with Asian autonoMy/AgenCy and visibiliTy,
the political/racial poeticritique of the piece fitheir vision/purpose.
14 May, 2012
Hi Dennis,
Claire agrees you should perform your THX-1138 piece. How many minutes
long is it?
Please bring your Macbook Pro and adapter. Sam Chanse is also using
projection, would you be ok with sharing your equipment with her?
You need a projector screen, right?
I'll ask Bindlestiff if they have a music stand. Or do you know where we
could borrow one from?
We can have a volunteer press play for you.
Thanks! - Lisa
Hi Lisa,
the piece is 12 or so minutes. I'm fine with sharing with Sam. oh yes a
projector screen is necessary as well as a projector. I'm pretty sure
Bindlestiff has music stands as they've music and bands play
theiRegularly. is their a sound/tech check time? DeNNiS
Hi Dennis,
Could you send me your brief bio and website link (if you have one) to add
to the event page?
http://kearnystreet.org/2012/04/hand-me-down/
How should I type out your name?
Thanks!
Hey Lisa,
I've no website but me bio is attached. you can spell out my name
DeNNiS M. SOmeRa
biograDphy.doc
16K View Downlo
ad
You've been added!
If you're on facebook, please invite friends to the event for Hand-Me-Down:
https://www.facebook.com/events/299100080169542/
thanks! - Lisa
oh yes Lisa,
An idiosyncratic I know but a poetic political request:
Please (at least when associated with me) refer to what I do as "film
narration", "movietelling" or "katsuben", which is the actual Japanese name
for the artform (benshi [katsu{ben/shi}] was the name given to the
narrators, so is not actually accurate in its usage or coinage by the
whiteXperimental poetry crowd currently appropriating it. Thus in its current
misusage the name neo-benshi points to the new narrators or the people
doing the narrating not the form/genre itself. And I would rather the form
be pointed to when referring to me doing the narration than a name White
folks used in their continual appropriating and renaming. Sorry, just
needing to be clear and telling the truth as i know it. Hope there is minimal
impact on yoUr end. Thanks for your time and patience. DeNNiS
Duly noted. No, "neo-benshi."
Thanks for sharing and for the info. Let me check when sound check is... I'll
let you know as soon as I can!
Please let me know by Friday.
thanks! - Lisa
LogisticLLemaileXchange: my computer with adapter (to be borrowed by another former
KSWeXec.dir. writer/performer Sam Chanse, which is all part of the communiTy), projector,
microphone, music stand, my own music stand light to read scriptext in the dark
w/batteries and tech person to press play and stop on my DVD.
15 May, 2012
Hi Dennis,
What is the title of the piece you'll be performing? To be printed on the
program.
i call it WHTHX-1138. and I suppose unless me thinksomething better I'd be
fine with it as it is. DeNNiS
16 May, 2012
Got it! Thanks, Dennis.
LL requests name, bio, website. Twoutof3ain't bad. I use latest biOn UCDT&Dwebsite.
18 May, 2012
Dear artists!
We are really looking forward to Hand-Me-Down: Three Generations of KSW
Performance, this Tuesday (5/22) at Bindlestiff.
Info for Load-In and Tech Set-Up:
You can do a walk-thru the day before, Monday 5/21 at 6 pm. From
6:00-7:00 pm, Bindlestiff's Tech Director Darius is available test out
tech, lighting, and sound with you. You can also do your load-in on
Monday, if you like. Darius will be on site 7:00-10:00 pm in a staff meeting.
So you can load in and see the space from 7-10 pm, but Darius may not be
able to answer long questions.
Day-of set up begins at 5:30 pm. We have only 80 minutes of set up
time. If you are concerned about having ample time to set up, we strongly
recommend coming to the Monday walk-thru or on time Tuesday.
Let me know if you have any needs or questions, thanks!
I've a class Monday night but I can be therearly Tues. DeNNiS
Hello Lisa,
A sincere wish for your good health. I'm not sure I need any set-up or
load-in time. My portion of the program is just me in a chair with a guitar. I
have no sound cues, lighting, costumes, props, tech needs, make-up,
effects, or dietary restrictions. I just need two mikes, one for the guitar and
one for the voice. Worse case scenario, if the audience is under 100 people,
I can perform acoustically. All I really need is the audience's
attention. That's how we did it 40 years ago and I don't see any need to
change it.
Thanks,
Charlie Chin
Hey Lisa,
Is there an order of performance set for Tuesday? Since I can't make
the Monday for being in DaviSaClass, I'd like to tell Darius/tech al. when to
presstart around 5:30pm but know how much time I've got to get
foodressed etc. before going on. Thanks. Looking forward to
thEvening. DeNNiS
22 May, 2012
Despuéspañol y FilmStudies, I drive DaviSF. Luckily o r eflective of the still not so high
status of SOMA-Tenderloin corridor on 6th street, I find parking around the corner from
Bindlestiff Studios and have change fer meter. My girlfriend is alreaDy there. Alan Manalo,
the driving force behind Bindlestiff & "th e picenter for filipino aRts on the West Coast"
greets us and gives us a brief tour of the new space. I hate reading and writing setting so I
will work with shapeshere: it hashifted from a 2-floor long rectangular lobby, stage,
backstage above basement not so sturDy (hence the need for earthquake retrofitting)
Black Box theater to a 3-floor more vertically shaped modern updated theatre space you
walk downstairs or ride th e Levator down from the newfangled lobby to the performance
level and sound room, I believe there was another level for storage but I am focusing on
tech for the show in a couple of hours so don't pay attention to other parts of the space
not immediately necessary for my preperformance. It is amazing how far the theatre has
come from ye olde space to the fight to keep it Open to the closing and its moving across
the street to shared spaces to the fundraising to the theateraising phoenix filipino
theatrearing its BEaUtiful head... After the short intro to the space, Alan pulls out a
talladder and adjusts lights, my girlfriend finds a place to read a book, and I go into the
sound room to prepare my computer with the sound technician whom I know from
myearlyears with Bindlestiff.
There is a little difficulTy setting up my computer not to show the DVD player on the
screen but he figures it out. I place my script and music stand lighthat looks like insect
antennae on my clipboard. As I eNter the performance area, I see a white screen on the
right middle wall with chairs set up on two level risers on either side of the "stage". Sam
Chanse is doing last minute running througher solo piece. I set up my clipboard at the
music stand and microphone in the center toward the left of the room. The tech dude
follows me and sets up the microphone on a stand and connects the cords to the PA. I set
both stands to my height specifications and we mic anDVD test the beginning of my piece.
After tech, I chat with my girlfriend, Claire, Sam, Ed (long time Bindlestiff roadieDudetc.
OG AsianAm. folksinger Charlie Chin has a cantankeroUS conversation about Asian
American politics involving the AsianAmerican woman who's just married Facebookreator
Marc Zuckerburg. Justrying to keep nerves calmove around, have sips of water, eMpty
bladder, find a place to stretch in the lobby outside the performance space.
As is UsUal with preperformance performances, I cannot eNjoy or sithrough other
people's performances before my Own. Charlie Chin's crocheTy eNerGy seems to
heighten the facthathings aRe not necessarilly better in our current repressed UState.
Without knowing my piece he does make a reference to something we all have to worry
about well unless your white. I like the rageNerGy in hisongs and he doeseem to have that
not always aware of his impact on women. The storytelling couple after him were once
perspectiveMployers but I and a few friends found their work not so grounded in a strong
theatrical practice so I do not have much regret over it not working out withem. And I'd
never seen a showhole somehowhole by them and with my performance following theirs, I
needed to find a quieter place, to do my short qigongfu practice called "the Universal
form" which eNds up being the restroom and then meditate silently nexto my girlfriend in
the performance space loBby.
Finally, after MC Alan tells a few jokes, I walk out in all white to eMUlate the Uniforms of
the film characters as well a s how assimilation works/doesn't work. After I get situated
across from the screen, turn on my bug light/insect antenae, I begin the piece and the tech
guy turns on my THXeditimely. The piecEvokes moresponse and laughter withe mostly
AsianAmerican audience than the firstime withe mostly white crowd at Litquake. I feel
their eNerGy and it buoys me through the piece. I know that my scripTHXedits and just
morepetitions with the piece aid the audience in their involvement in the piece but I am
sure the visibilizing of white privilege is moresonantHERE with politicized AsianAmericans
than with whites in the SF Mission district.
I eNjoy the rest of the Evening's performances because they'reNjoyable and because
I'm relieved mine is finished for the night. Although I know I need to perform, I believe the
ecstatic state just after a performance is one of my favorites. I wonder what a biological
stuDy would/has found running through our (performers') bodies. I say goodbye and give
hugs to all ye Olde SF Asian American aRts heads
In addition, a reporter from Audrey magazine: The Asian American Women's Lifestyle
Magazine interviews me and the other performers(eparately) after the show.
24 May, 2012
Dear artists!
We really enjoyed your performances. Thanks for making KSW's 40th anniversary
special.
Please go ahead and invoice KSW for your artist fee. A sample invoice form is attached.
Also, there are a few photos of the show here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kearnystreet/sets/72157629866714886/
thanks,
31 May, 2012:

Dear Charlie, Kat, Sam, Eth-Noh-Tec, Dennis, and Lina -
Just wanted to share this article about Hand-Me-Down by Audrey Magazine.
http://audreymagazine.com/kearny-street-workshop-hand-me-down-show/
All the best,
The Audrey article comes out online and is sent to us by Lisa Leong.
Another older yet hidden gem of a storytelling form is Katsuben, a Japanese form of film
narration during the silent film era. This came from the Japanese audience’s need to know and
understand beyond the visuals, so people in costume would stand on a platform next to the
movie screen and tell stories relating to the action on screen. Dennis M. Somera showcased
Katsuben for a modern audience by speaking over George Lucas’ film THX-1138, renamed
WHTHX-1138 for this particular interpretation. Dressed in white just like the main characters,
Somera addressed issues like White privilege and racial inequality, in a film that is already all
about problems in a society.
“The underlying culture, the White hegemony still is pretty Euro-centric in the way it wants to tell
stories and fit [Asian-American] bodies into that,” said Somera about his presentation. “I think
it’s still the same yet things are better, but we still have to still stick to our roots in this country
and show people that we’ve been here for a long time and that we clearly have like all other
cultures as well.”
1 June, 2012
to Teresa
No time to read it now; let me kNOW. De
12 July, 2012
I felt much more aRticulate speaking to her (Audreportery) in person. The first sentence
quote is fine but the second one is jumbled. I do seem to recall having to repeat this or
thereporter not quite getting what I was getting at. Is it worse to be misquoted and look
evil or inarticulate?
To do this piece within KSW POC territory is a case of hidden transcripts
Domination and the Arts of Resistance
<speaking to audience response reporting from me, Savin, Praba, the one
person who filled out survey at UCB Theorizing Popular Media, and was
morecent KSW response as PoliticizedOCrowd or was the piece tighter or
both>
ConfAbstracts:SpecVisRaceTechSciSurvival10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
12Septwelve: GrandpaGreGregorio"Guying"CuevasMateo's was born in 1916
in the Philippines 96 years ago today. And as an eLder is wonto do for a
young person in the communiTy, another challenge for me and WHTEXT1138 as the third "assignment" or call to tighten the piece up even moreso
for and academic and POCrowd.
Call for Conference Abstracts: Speculative Visions of Race, Technology,
Science, & Survival
Date:
Monday, November 5, 2012 - 11:45pm
CALL FOR CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
Deadline: November 5, 2012
Speculative Visions
of Race, Technology, Science, & Survival
Conference Date: March 15-16, 2013
UC Berkeley * Center for Race & Gender
What will survival entail in near and far futures? In light of racialized
violence and social control, massive technological innovation, and rapid
transformations in science and biomedicine, this conference will engage the
imperative to imagine, study, prepare for, and articulate future human
life. We are interested in how science and technology shape the material
and epistemological boundaries of existence, specifically how and whose
existence is valued, policed, corporealized, and corporatized. We will also
explore the capacity of embodied subjects to navigate these boundaries in
the context of dis/abled, gendered, sex/uality, and queer
formations. Recognizing that technology creates kinds of futures (both
anticipated and unforeseen), this conference will create a space to analyze
how technologies of the past and present contextualize and disclose future
realities, and identify opportunities for creating new possibilities.
We envision a limited number of presentations in order to allow enough time
for generative dialogue and crafting of questions for future research and
development. This conference will be multi/interdisciplinary and multimedia.
We invite conference abstracts. Examples of conference themes
include race in the context of:
gender & sexual transformations and horizons
biotechnological interventions (including reproductive
technologies) & genetic justice
environmental transformation & population displacement
Afrofuturisms, Indigenous visions, and alternative futurist
metaphysics and spacescapes
de/construction of the human and non-human: cyborgisms,
borderlands, assemblage, alien life, species relations
singularities and artificial intelligence
bio-surveillance, fatal inventions, and capitalism
disability/disabled imaginaries
medical experimentation, living laboratories, mission creep
cryogenics, radical life extension, and the politics of medicine,
aging, and existence
militarism, occupations, and final frontiers
speculative & science fiction: novels, film, music, performance,
etc, i.e. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Octavia Butler,
Sherman Alexie, Samuel Delany, AI, The Brother From Another Planet, Sun
Ra, etc.
Please send the following to specvisions@gmail.com by November 5,
2012:
name & affiliation
presentation title and abstract (~500 words)
brief
bio
contact info (address, e-mail, phone, fax)
102112: dig up most recent bio and adjust "art" to "performancearth":
DeNNiS M. SOmeRA practices illuminating the colonial, imperial, patriarchal
inscription on the body in performancearth, revisioning it through
movietelling/Katsuben (a Japanese form of film narration from the silent film
era) and archi“text”uralandscape poetics beyond the two-dimensional page.
This BIO feels particular to this WHTEXT-1138 anDavis frankly, the lack of
POC awareness in my department and on campus has me feeling stronger
abouthe need to be more solid.
102212: edit previously 250 word abstract to eXpand to 500 for CRG with
difficulty adding words and shifting this performance to an
academiconference as this piece lives as both research vehicle and
opportuniTy for change so difficult to quantify its usefulness as research
accept to state outrighthat surveys will be take after the piece?
102312: IDeadd "whit e lite" to backdrop text; worry about losing
AfterEffectsoon will have to lease or should I apply for CRG money to buy
program and continue my work.
102412: Lynette Hunter "gives me permission" to apply for CRG as
prioritizing performance over paper: collective sigh...
in describing my work for writing assignment, have realization that part of
doing reading in dark disallows the ever-inscribing white hegemonic WEstern
gaze to work its prejudicialanguage on my brown/Asian boDy before I can
turn the attention toward the screen, my voice, my re-script...avoiding the
hegemonic/ideoloGicalanguage conversation that comes at me, overrides,
overwhelms like a tidal wave, I can get my words, voice, re-script, song,
resistance, decoloniZing, etc. in before the usual hegemony can inscribe me
before i open my mouth.
102512: British white opium into Chinese ports to win trade and Opium
Wars then call them HEathensavages is the structure/hegemonic/original act
<find better aRticulations<
102812: a week &anday out from CRG app and after slowgradeay, wannat
least look at apple so knowhere to bite into itomorrowhen time to work on it.
102912: in sandbrainstorming paper for NASPoetry, i have realization
thathis is another way I tie the allowance for others into my work through
their own imaginations the wordsimages come alive inside them. thus there
must be space for the eNtrance of audience imaginings and not a
dictatorshiperformance....Momaday can supportheoretically here.
logically drawrite out the bridge we build to each others' eXperience from
listening HEARting imagining emPATHizing compassion easing suffering?
drawing from NAPaper and written for WHTHX-abstract:
as the stories I attemptoretell aRe mostly WhiteUro, WEstern civiliZing,
colonial, imperial in their ultimate purpose as I am working within its
structure so it is possible and necessary that I drawrite from
outsiDEcolonizing
imagiNAtion fills gapstories with our selves, gives IDentiTy,
autonoMy/AgenCy when power wants yoU to know Only theirs.
imagiNAtion fills gapstories with our selves, gives IDentiTy,
autonoMy/AgenCy when power wants yoU to know Only theirs. thus if
George Lucas's dystopic vision of the future is a WhitEONe, I imagine
through poetry and performance somethingreater or at least a galaxy not so
faraway in place not so different as thisOURs...
Momaday: "that experience of the mind which is legendary as well as
historical, personal as well as cultural."
metaphor of arrowmaker/shooter as poet the imagiNAtion is the target or
heartarget or what? "The arrowent straight to the enemy's heart."
 thistory as epigraph also because the peering eye is the White
WEstern cultural gaze that is also the
conversationeWhiteSideUroWestern peeringazing pinning inscribing
I try to loose myselfrom with an arrow to the heart of the heartless
toothful.

103112 reading&writing through the seemingly imminent Demise of our dog
Ella, I this individual am interpellated by Althusser's definition of IdeoloGy
and the ISAsagain (firstime last fall in Theorizing Popular MeDia in a cultural
stuDies reader so more second hand summation) knoWing/fearing the
imagiNAry that individualsubjecthemselves to to the IDeoloGy which
interpellates them daily may share something or at least in the realm of
IDeas i'm eXploring as grounds for and against my work is something at
least akin to the imagiNAry, Momaday's imagiNAtion of poetry I believe
allows, thatries to allow the individual to avoid subjecTurningaround (at least
everytime) maintaining her individual gait "walking on by" listening to the
beat of her own drum again finding some sort of autonoMY/AgenCy in a
place maintained in public or private as individual not subject because not
alwaysubjected to the hailinterpellation by the ISA, the IDeoloGy which the
individual can choose not to turn, hastrength to resist----the imagiNAtion to
write and read poeTRY builds that muscle that ISAnd IDeoloGy weakens it is
a truer form of rugged individualism if yoU ask me or aNy poet with a voice
of their own who can drown out the dindividualsubjected to ISAs IDeological
subjecthood Even in silence because the I'magiNAtion of poetry is beyond
the socially constructed, woMan-made ISAndIDeoloGy i'maginary
Through the NOrminal Public Transcript and the IDEoloGy as Althusser
defines it, White privilege, supremaCy, dominance
my gf just gave me a treat: One of the major characteristics of Science
Fiction is philosophical change shiftransformations which i used on CRGapple
110712: Submit CRGapple
abstract
Presentation Title: WHTHX–1138--- Film Blanc: In search of White
Privilege in the shadows; is White Privilege visible by the flickering
of a projection lamp?
Writer/language scriptext Collector/Performer: DeNNiS M. SOmeRa
Going to a go-go in a galaxy far far away....The white subject sees his/her
privilege and learns how to come to be[/at the] accounTable: fictional
speculative futures or hard science fictions? A major characteristic of
ScieNce Fiction is a shift in philosophical belief. When it comes to
WhiteUrOWEsternPrivilege, supremaCy, power, it's a step: to see through
the White Haze/Veil of normativiTy...beginning to even hope for change. In
tHis multimedia multinterdisciplinary didactic performance with eXcerpts of
George Lucas' dystopic first feature THX-ll38 and its white uniforms on white
skin against white environs is the ideal visual backdrop for poeticritically
collaging visual subtitles and live voiceover narration in attempt to visibilize
White IDeological discourse. This performanceManates from katsuben, a
popular Japanese form of film narration (as well as other silent-film era
nations), which became so popular in Japan that the
narrator/translator/improviser/poet eXceeded the popularity of the actors,
filmakers or films narrated. As mine is an attempted subversion of continual
White Colonial IDeoloGy, the artisticritical ancestralineage of my movietelling
goes a step further to the Korean pyonsa, endeavoring similar subversion of
Japanese colonial propaganda films of the era. As Althusser, in his vision of
it saw IDeoloGy interpellating individuals into subjects through Ideological
State Apparatuses (ISAs), so I use educational, communication and cultural
ISAs: Performance Studies Ph.D, film, video-editing, poetry, scholarly
research (from Leonardo, McIntosh, Wise, Fiske, and Smith), collage,
textypoloGy design, many of the master's MEDia tools to attempt reversal or
at least reveal the process of White IDeological interpellation and maybeven
fill in some affective gaps that a straight-ahead paper presentation may miss
in its intellectual strictures. I can very well presenthis multinterdisciplinary
and multimedia intervention as a paper; however, as a
poet/performer/scholarriving with manyears of performanceXperience (CV
attached), an integral function of this performance/practice as research is
eliciting feedback from the audience via (attached) post-performance
surveys (such as the one survey filled out in a "Theorizing Popular Media"
seminar at CAL, where the ethnic mix tended toward POC, and this mixedrace woman stated her understanding of white privilege was "expanded...
seeing how the artistic address could be as rigorous and traumatic as
traditional engagement"), or questions toward the group during post
presentation dialogue (whichever CRG finds most apt for this conference)
finding effects and affective consequences of thisuspension-of disbelieftyperformance to acknowledge in/effectivity and reception differences in
People of Color and White predominant audiences: making adjustments
toward futureffectiviTy in academicontent, didacticontent and
performanceNgagemeNt---and thus the p0etential for this piece and this
artform for social change.
worrieDid make additions of scholars whose language & ideas borroWEd and
collaged in scripTXT.
Surveysub:
First impressions (i.e. fewords/drawings/abstractions) after WHTHX–1138
experience:
In your eXperience of WHTHX–1138, hOw did the academic language and
film exerpts complement/distract from each other?
HoWas your level of “willful suspension of disbelief” compared to a normal
moviewing eXperience? Did you find yourself able to be more or less critical
vis a vis the filmic images?
After viewing WHTHX–1138, hAs your understanding/comprehension of
white privilege/supremaCy/dominance increased/decreased/stayed the
same? PleasElaborate a bit.
How about your level of safety in viewing the topic of white
privilege/supremaCy, dominance? How does this experience compare to
having this discussion in an academic setting? In a casual setting? Primarily
with people of color? Primarily with white people? An equally mixed group?
What is your ethnicity?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rhetorical questions to take with:
wHere have your ideas been shifted more/less/equally from academic
reading or presentations or artisticreativendeavors made by you or
experienced by you?
wHere is the line between poetic license and plagiarism you draw in the
sand? If you give credit, footnote, and someonelSeD it first and better why
not sample academic scholarly work in our remix(ed[ucation]) culture?
wHat if you were instructed to synchronize (figuratively) dance your
academic language paper with image maybe sound, movement for the paper
yer presenting today, or any other for that matter?
Would the images, sound, movement distract or enhance your ideas?
If the future of new mediacadeMy were nowhat would you be doing to
disseminate your ideas in the most creative fresh UseReader, audience,
friendly interface?
110512: unused for final CRGapple as i state this within 407 words I should
include here as well above
I've performed WHTHX-1138 four times: firstime at LitQuake/LitCrawl for
mostly white crowd in SF's Mission District, who mostly felt closedown to me
and my girlfriend; in a "Theorizing Popular Media" seminar at CAL, in an
ethnic mix tending toward POC, only a mixed-race woman filled-out a
survey, stating her understanding of white privilege was "expanded... seeing
how the artistic address could be as rigorous and traumatic as traditional
engagement", while a white student from the seminar nodded his head, with
a serious validating look on his face saying "I liked your presentation; that's
real"; next night at a "Performance & Social Change symposium" at UCDavis
of the primarily white students in my Performance StuDies graduate group,
one white woman appreciated finally seeing my work and another vouched
for the humour helping the "medicine go down"; MOrecently at a 40th
Anniversary Performance Showcase for an AsianAm arts group Kearny Street
Workshop (KSW), the primarily politicized AsianAmerican group openly
laughed and felt relaxeduring the performance.
110712: relief Obamallows US to have rOMnesia: beginning Iser for
PerfWriting w/Karmand I finally realize I've been functioning from a
phenomenologist perspective in knowing my text has a previoUS history and
thus always a certain amount of interaction the audienceNgages in an
interactivity, penetration a not so passive spoon-fedness I eXpect and allow
for in audiences predicated on predicting because of languages basicultural
sharing conceiting that because we me the audience and I share a common
language thathere will be a natural collaboration in many if not all the
wordsplays I set-up for an audience to insert, to eNter to co-create although
I eNjoy and thus create and can be the audience for my own work in
phenomelogical on both ends. Thus I can critique parts in WHTHX-1138
where I depend on the auDience to fill in the gaps; i've certainly done this in
the past with sound-based poetry. Will need to look at this in more Detail
when there's time again.
after Iser I recall plot vs. narrative from FMS1TAing: As the storytelling
mind makes up the gaps aNy moviediting plot as the points the directer
editor allows US of the audience to see there is a necessary filling-in of the
gaps by the storytelling mind connecting the dots of plot and adding their
own. such is true of the conceits I allow the audience to eNter in my poetic
performance or gestural performance aRt.
123012: Email from Speculative Visions

Dear Dennis,

Thank you for submitting a proposal to present at the conference,
Speculative Visions of Race, Technology, Science, and Survival at
UC Berkeley, March 15-16, 2013. We received a large number of
strong proposals and we wish we had time to hear them
all. Unfortunately, your proposal was not among those selected for
presentation. However, we'd still love to have your presence and
critical voice at the conference and hope you can still attend. We
are hoping to build a dialogical conference space with active
participation from attendees as well as presenters. If you are
interested in coming and have access to a source of funding
support, please let us know if we can assist, such as confirming
your participation as an active contributor to the conference. Also
please let us know if you are coming so we can support you with
logistical details.


does feelike this one rejection means there's less room in the
acadeMy fer me werk.
WHTHXtypoLoGeneaoloGy
10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
Fall, 2011: Pick and drop off TA keys whilst while walking through Walker
where walls of Design work from classes past present using textypoloGy
hasalivating me.
Winter, 2011: Pick up new keys in Walkeremindsalivating at wall
textypoloGy work again.
2911: Look-up instructor to basic/historical textypoloGy class and HavEmail
messageXchange with Susan Verba:
Professor Verba,
I'm an experimental poet in the Performance Studies program and am
very interested in your Letterforms&Typography course this Spring as a
place to learn how to better perform my (p)language through exploration of
typography and letterforms and hopefully eventually a type of "publishing"
beyond the page and book...What do I need to do to get in, where might my
lack of design experience make the class more difficult, if i don't have
prerequisites now what courses would I have to do to take this in the
future? Thanks for your time and consideration.
Hi Dennis,
You'll need DES 1 as well as DES 14, 15 and 16 in order to take Letterforms
& Typography. You should know, however, that this is not a course in
experimental typography (as much as I love that!). It is all about the
fundamentals of typographic understanding and use.
21011:
ThankS.Verba,
I probably would be interested in eXperimentypograpy Eventually, but I am
simply interested in "the fundamentals of typographic understanding and use" so
that I might get grounded in whatypography would work best for "showing"
differentextual ideas on the page, wall, textual art, etc. and get a chance to try
out some of my text ideas in design work. I suppose a linguistics or book arts
classomeday would work. Or could you recommend a book for me to start this
grounding in letterform/typoloGy. and just so I don't pine over what i'm missing,
could you possibly send me a copy of your syllabus when it's available/an old
would work too fer my purposes. thanks fer yer time and
consideration. DeNNiSOmeRA
21511: Finally, after she sent me a Type Bibliography, I respond with a long
email of which this eXcerpt appears most useful: What inspired me to look into
design at Davis was last quarter when I saw a great installation/show/sample of
what looked like a class' work on a wall in a Walker first floor hallway: there were
photos of text in different rendered/found settings; i believe it would extend me
belief in performative text to understand whatypoloGy/letterform evokes what and
place them/find them/render them in different settings as party/parcel to my
eMbodied performative work whichappens to be text-based as well.
3211: during meditation, Glenda Drew leaves message saying Professor
Verba had been approached by me and she'd heard of me from Bay
AreaRtist friend Praba Pilar (who led me to UCD's Performance Studies). I
call her back and we've good conversation where she lets me knowhich
courseshe's teaching in Fall, 2011: "History of Visual Communication" and
"Type in Motion". While both seem great for my purposes in a world where
there was time for thorough comprehensive learning, I lean toward the
latter.
3911:
Hey Dennis!
I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you!
I'm attaching the syllabi from my Fall courses, although I always update/change
between quarters.
I mentioned on the phone that Rhode Island School of Design offers summer
type classes: http://sigds.org/ but probably many Bay Area schools also offer
these. DES 115, Letterforms and Type, is taught in our Design Program at UCD
during both summer sessions, and you could likely get in during the summer. Let
me know if you are interested and I can talk with the instructor on your behalf.
52311:
Hey Glenda,
just invested in a computer and close to doing the less eXpensive final cut
and hoping this program will be sufficient enough to rock a rock video fer yer
class in the fall. Hope quarter's ending well.
Hi Dennis! We will b using AfterEffects CS5.5. I'll do my best to get u in the class.
{sent frum my smarty fone}
81711:
Hi Glenda,
Hope yer summer goes well; just checking if there was any news on me
getting into yer class in the fall. either way eNjoy the rest&relaxation of yer
summer. DeNNiS
82511:
Hi Dennis!
Do you have a laptop with AfterEffects 5.5?
// g L e N d a * d R e W * * *
i've just purchased MacBook Pro last qtr. but don't have AfterEffects 5.5. any
advice less expensive way to obtain this; if not class feels worth the
investment. D
Hi Dennis!
You can buy the student license at the bookstore. There is a free trial for 30 days
but that won't get you through the quarter. Can you send me some samples of
your work?
82811:
Hi Dennis!
How is 1.15 on Wednesday in Cruess 250A?
83111:
Glenda eNjoys my playw/language on the page.
Fall, 11: Sign up for "Type in Motion" on TuesThurs afternoons. After an
Elongated petitioning process to eNroll in a "Theorizing Popular Media" seminar
at UCB on Thursday afternoons ask allowance to miss "Type..." Thursday lab to
arrive on time for Berkeley seminar. Without any previoUS Design, Macomputer,
Adobe AfterEffects(Ae) (one quarter of FinalcuteXpress) experience and missing
labs where I should be getting some one on one attention from Glenda or the TA
Theron, I fall behind on assignments and never catch up. The assignments I do
work on aRe a 321 countdown (my girlfriend's birthday is 3/21) and a textualayer
addition to a piece of video (of my girlfriend tapdancing where each tap sets off a
t-a-p) I didn't use for Julie Wyman's documentary seminar.
The perspective and skills I acquire working with Ae feel similar in the way
that FinalcuteXpress is set-up down to the places things placed: screen with
video footage and/or typtextobedited, timeline, durationsettings. Have to admit
feelsoverwhelming withow many choices available for both, when I'm used to
MSWorD barely using the formatting choices available there. Understanding why
structure structrue fer me in artisticreati've process as I want to spend more
timeNerGy making "larger" creative decisions rather than the next position of a
foot: body or letter along a timeline. I feel my stamina to make decisions after
decisions can seem daunting. I realize the level of DEtail is also just something
I'm not used to unless it is with poetexthru WorD. I get overwhelmed with too
many choices in the marketplace and in these visual MEdia programs. Also,
talking to a jeweler friend, he states it took him a year playing with his jewelry
Design program took him a year. Don't feel i've the time with all the other work
more pressing. Sinking feeling I've bit off more than I can chew.
 One thing that is true is the abiliTy to use either the toolbar above or the
keys or the mouse pad to navigate the programs. My overeliance on
the mouse pad which seems to be showing up a s oreness in my right
wrist/ forearm. What adds to my frustration is how long even a
miniscule amount of changes in the movement of text/video in these
programs along the timeline take and how much timeNergetic focus this
requires. Not to mention the places/times with sometimes the most
basic things...because I lack theXperience withese
video/Textyprograms, I get stuck having to wait until the nexTuesday or
day to contact Glenda or Theron, eXtending the amountimeXpended for
again the tiniest progressions in my project(s). Again, with Ph.D
workload and my level of timeNerGy output into
FinalcuteXpressandAfterEffects, at some points I so greatly want to find
a ViDesign collaborator who eNjoys my IDeas looking to take my
artisticreativision furtherest....I'm unsure yet where this line is.
Sometimes trying show my work to others in the class my
ineptituDeNNiSOverwhelms me being so far BEhind the undergrads as
a graduate student (not to mention stereotype threat), tho' I know
they've been thinking the ways of these programs fer years, i cannot
shake my originalearning to read trauma w/me father when having to
present works in a process I feel such a novice at.
Finally by theNd of the quarter when I've progressed so slowly in
completion of assignments, I ask Glenda if she'll grant me an incomplete for 3
units. She is amenable if we make a plan for next quarter, Winter, 2012 with
other students from our class who aRe going on to do independent studies with
her.
Winter, 2012: I'miss first meeting w/ind.stud.sandthetimescheduleday they agree
to meet doesn't work fer me.
11412: Glenda Emails me, requesting a plan for the quarter.
11812: Thanks Glenda,
did have a great break. So sorry I've not been in touch. This quarter
started off with a bang again. So I do have Thursdays mostly free so can
plan to come in for an hour for your office hour before i've to get to a
1:10pm class. I eNvision creating a language textual backdrop to a piece I
narrate over using Lucas' THX-1138 that works opaciTy at this point and
maybe I could show the clip to you and you can help with ideas to push it
further. Certainly, I want to clean-up what i've alreaDy started: the birthday
countdown and the tap clip. I'm not sure what more would fulfill the tres
units so let me know. DeNNiS
I just have the THX edited clip but haven't begun figuring out how to eNter
text in it. I do know now I would like to add what look like regular subtitles
and also eMbed WHITExt language in the white backdrop that seeps in and
dissipates at times.
Yes I was/am taking your course for three units. DeN
Okay, please have a project treatment or creative brief ready with a
storyboard. Does that sound okay to you?
12612: I send her FinalProjecTHXment & scripTHX/WHTHX 11.4.docx:

 Final ProjecTITLE
o WHTHX–1138
o
o Synopsinister
o Using a poeti c ritical live film narration to clips from George
Lucas’ first feature THX–1138, movietelling, the Japanese
Katsuben, or Korean Pyonsa, the project attempts to use the
relative “safeTy” of film spectatorship to expose the subject of
white historical and societal privilege, supremaCy, dominance.
The script, text, language of the narration is collaged from the
film itself, Critical Race Theory papers by Zeus Leonardo and
Peggy McIntosh as well as Linguistic AnthropoloGy writings of
Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, found language, and my
own poetry and writing.
o
o
o
o
o
o
Script
see attached.
Media Assets
Though I am supplying most of the sound of the piece
through my live narration, editing of the excerpts of THX kept
diegetic (i.e. literal elevator music and dialogue) and
nondiegetic sound (track) to attempt to preserve the filmic
spectatorship experience for the audience. The moving
images are scenes from THX edited together to comprise
somewhat of an alternative narrative of just over 11 minutes.
As mentioned above, most of the language and sound of the
piece will be spoken by me in live film narration that
sometimes provides another non-diagetic sonic backdrop for
the film images and at other times synchronizes alternative
dialogues. Finally, using the whiteness of the THX visual
eNvironment, walls and space, the opaciTy as well as
movement and size of text, the whitext will seep in and out of
the walls, spaceNvironment of the film clips to act as both
visual aid to the audience (for my narration includes a lot of
language at high speeds) and visual poetic methodoloGy to
further portray the invisible normativiTy of the topic. Also, it
seems to make sense to create a few subtitles for appropriate
scenes.
o
o
o Background Information and Research
o I was introduced to this form in the experimental poetry
scene of the San FransicsOakland Bay aRea and when asked
to create a piece in 2006, found WESTsideSTORY, to be the
film I chose. According to movietelling scholar and poet
Walter K. Lew, the artistic form probably originates in all
silent film era cultures but reached its apex with Japan’s
Katsuben where the narrators called Benshi were celebrated
beyond the actual films, actors, or directors. As a poet and
performer seeking social justice, I draw my artisticreative
social justice inspiration from the Korean version Pyonsa as
anti-colonial, where Pyonsa poetically coded criticism instead
of praise of Japanese rule during documentaries the Japanese
forced on the Korean people. Similarly, it is my objective to
not only allow People of Color to experience recognition of a
societal and historical power dynamic but to alloWhites a less
conflictual setting to a direct conversation to begin to
understand their standing.
o
o aRtistic, eXperimental poetic license is takeN here in lieu of
copyright of both the film and language text as collage,
pastiche, and the eXperimental poetics that all language and
text (even that in our heads) is always alreaDy from
elsewhere and I will not profit financially from their use. Or
citations forthcoming…
o
o
o Reflection
o It was gratifying to finally be able to make this project
happen. However, because it occurred in the middle of a
quarter in a Ph.D program, the process was much more
rushed than I would have liked. That written, in my previous
movietelling piece using WESTsideSTORY excerpts, several
key language additions were “found” through many reiterant
rehearsal and performances over six years now so I accept
the patience necessary to allow the THX piece to work itself
out over time and repetitions where its praxis is its continued
process. In the rush, I did edit the film myself for the firstime
(using Final Cut Express) and need to call in “good” sound
and film editing technicians according to another professor.
When time to practice the editing tools or to collaborate with
a sound film editor, I would like to smooth out the abrupt
spots. However, first I need to decide whatext goes on what
wall within the film excerpts and use AfterEffects to enter the
text in and continue to edit, rehearse, synchronize my
narration, find dialogue to replace more of the
academese/mess.
o
o As mentioned above, the process was rushed, so maybe the
length of time it took just to rip a CD copy of the film was
normal. However, according to Don Yee, the program
Handbrake is far too slow for our purposes and another
program will need to be sought for the nextime. Don did find
that older lab computers were able to do it without the
splotchy attempts that my own newer laptop had, finally
converting the ripped CD copy (with Final Cut Pro) to an
editable form. I will seek other much more streamlined ways
to undertake this part of the process in the future.
o
o Although it is not nearly as tight and synchronized as my
WEst.siDEsTroy piece, I do believe as I’ve the time to
rehearse and perform it more, these aspects will clear up
o
o Project
o video piece to be linked
o
o 13112: Hi Dennis!
o
o I loved reading your proposal and script and think it is a great
project/goal for completion of your motion type units. There
is another software that might help you with video
conversion, Snapz Pro. I can show you when we meet next. I
also wondered if you know more about the history of "This
Land is Your Land" because Woodie Guthrie wrote that in
response to "God Bless America," and it represented his
socialist values...I think you might consider acknowledging
this and then make a connection between classism and
racism. Just something for you to consider.
 I appreciate what Glendand white peopleftists I know
intend and i've to find where class, race and colonialism
interesect and sorthat out sometime; however, what
I'm trying to eXpose in this piece is hoWhite settler
colonialism and its continued power today infects
allevels of class and race in "'merica" with nOwing to
RedlandBlacklabor it was/is all built upon... Regardless
of class and race, WE the PEople need to BE
accounTable to tHIStory or BE repressing, oppressing,
stuffing it down or in jails, attempting to
erase/genocidenial the anDNAnDNAnDNAnDNA blooDNA
MEmory of who was here first and who built it neither of
which were paid a penny of recompense.

o I cannot meet on the 9th because I have to cancel my office
hour that day. Do you have time to meet Tuesday, the 7th,
instead?
o
o Bye!
o
o
o
o // g L e N d a * d R e W * * *
o
2112: She wants to understand the movietelling form betterequesting video
recording of it. I don't have access to WHTHX footage and my previoUS
piece WEst.siDEsTrOy has been blocked by duhMAn or him and his
WARnerBROs. on yoUtuBE; however, irecall i'version isubmitted a copy to
the Headlands before coming to UCD. So I send the link to her. <when
doing an apple for CineSonika foundiscovered that yoUtuBE and/or the Man
and his WarnerBros. let WEst.si live free onceuponline again. Would love to
find out eXactly who/what granted its reprieve but notime during the
quarter. Maybe ask Gail DeKosnik who went to court to testify fer the legal
right for using film (soMEdia) as a teaching tool w/o having to get copyrights
every time>
Hey Glenda,

Here's link to application https://headlands.slideroom.com/ and was able
to see the uploaded version of WEst.siDEsTroy; i'm bringing my hardrive in
hopes of downloading? See yoU tomorrow. DeNNiS
2212: At her office hourse she helps me record the WEst.siDEsTrOY using a
visual recording program called SNAPZ. Another student is waiting outsider
office so I turn the volume down not realizing I'm turning the soundown in
the recording too. Fruck. Also, i Only record half or so of it and have to runt
o class without doing complete recording.
restofWinter,2012: andthen my schedule of two seminars and 5 days of eSpañol
sweep me away and i can do nothing but the work in front of me. I feel bad
about lettinGlendadown but I've gottakeepupandnotaddmoreincompletes.
Spring, 2012: dittowndown amazingly the two seminars and 5 dayeSpañol again,
really?!
Summer, 2012: Due to a line on a UCD form that states something to the
effecthat a gradstudent can Only TA one quarter withoutaking classes I have
hoPELP for Fall, 2012 to finish meincompletes and not BE dA complete
dummkopf. Thus, do a lot of reading at my girlfriend's in SF including 5 texts in a
week(amazing what a little time and space do foreading mine) for the ASA1class
I'm TAing in the Fall; unsure if it is the amount (i'm way over the 40 hours for the
summer) or if the drawing was actually random, but I win the SF library adult
summereading raffle, which is a $30 gift certificate for BOOksinc.
8112: Email Glenda to rEeStablish contact and find out how I might complete my
incomplete with her
8212: Shesponds that doesn'think she's much time due to heavy class load and
grant proposals but welcome to come to her 11am office hrs. Thurs. Her lack of
time worries me but I think my schedule allows me to go to her office hrs. just
before TASA1.
9412: Somehow I've my doubts about hoPELP in 10wkquarteredland. When I
check online, there is no sign of the line I was basing my hoPELP on, in fact it
states thathere is no TAing without being eNrolled in classes. Panic sets in. I
check-in with Mariand she officially bursts my hoPELP bubble completely during
a call to her contact at Mrak Hall. I walk through campus panickedepresst
w/nohoPELP: how can I gethrough a 10wkquartered to a fulload and incomplete
units due atheNdo of the quarter?
95-1212: While getting ready psychologically as well as logistically for the
phantom quartering me again, I alternate between panickedepresst regretting the
last year and second session where Glenda was teaching thisummer: AaRRRgh!
91312: after some anxieTyridden procrastiNation, and Prof. Lynette Hunter
advising me to finish up work with Glenda in the early weeks of the quarter so it
doesn't interfere with current quarter work, i finally pickup the AfterEffects (Ae)
books Glenda has lent me on the floor of my room and begin trying to find
sections that might help me to reboot.
916-2312: attempt to eXplore Ae program with text backing me up and some of
the things I had begun to have faciliTy in my shortime withe program last Fall
begin to come back
 like I must copy a version of my video eXcerpts from FinalCut and place
it in an Ae timeline so I can begin playing with whitextypoloGy on the
white walls of Lucas' first feature.
 I recall that I can play with font as I would in aNy of my "normal" poetry
writings but maybe after I've sat with the piece awhile, which I guess I
have (it BEing almost a year ago thathis piece began taking form)
 I scan my almost 11:38 video eXcerpt for the best scenes for adding
text acknowledging that part of the WhiteIDEal about using this film is
the eNclosed and White Open spaceso don't wanna go craZy filling
them up with WHITEXTYPE and don't wanna lose the dystopic
eMpTiness the originaLucasfilm so nicely Evokes.
 I want to have something to presentoGlendasasignofgoodfaithinceiwas
MIA fer so long so must make sometextype happen onscreen.
 I start near the BEginning on a blank white wall nexto the unmoving
eLevator. Afterealizing---through a lot of thinking&RAGing mindyoU--that cultural appropriation in NEOpenMarketliberaland is just subtler
IDeological colonial activiTy, I choose "COLONIAL" and "IMPERIAL" as
the firstexts at the bottop of the wall in blackapitals in Colonna MT
(sounding and sighting appropriately) font where the movement could
Evoke the up andown of the eLevator[ecall doesn't move in scene] Of
course, it makesense to put " COLONIAL " atop and "I'mperial" at the
bottom. However, it is the Imperial, the crown that sends Cristobal
Colon to SEArch foRichespicetc. so I place Imperial atop the pagearly
in the timeline. I choosEvoke the eNligteNmenthinking topdown
WhiteUrOWEstern bestowing it's crOWn the lowerbodies
firstNAtioNAtiveAmerindigenoUS 3rDevelopinGlobalSouth movement
and luckily the possibiliTy of this making the eLevator look like its
moving upwarDaswell, sending theNd of "IMPERIAL" "ial" (as its own
layer) down in a motion I drawith the mousepad more than plotting
eXactly wanting it to have a SEAlike pendulummy movement back and
forth slowly (if secondscaneverBEslow) making itswaydown until it
completed/met the "COLOn 'ial'" (maybe change the second O to little
o to eMphasize the Cristobal pronunciation as well as maybe
abbreviation for company as in business although I donthink I want a
small l), which I begin on another layer and play with its OpaciTy from
O% to whatever percentage
o again can play withis either using mousepad or changing
numbers in field to brigh/lighten brigh10/ligh10 texts opaciTy and
aNy other effect really.
 I eNter "COLOn" on another layer again and this time at the bottom of
the page its OpaciTy rising in % as the "ial" sails/s"ial"s down (and time
passeseconds of course), signifying the nina/pinta/santamaria in
tresletres adding the historical/metaphorical upon bothese texts'
arrivals.
 Simultaneously to the appearance of the small "ial" I add yet another
layer of "WHITE rror"(colored as well aspelling) blocked letters in
IMPACT font as I wanthis piece to show the IMPACThat White folkso
easily disregard. The "WHITE" xt comes from above the
screeN(lightenment) bestowing its grace upon "IMPERIAL"
simultaneously sliding and erasing as the system seems to
mystify/obfuscate its hegemony: as I play with position using bothe
mousepad and the &so I can keep this textrack straight down the
screen through the fading from view COLOn ial at the bottom where it
resides awaiting the similarly fonted "error" [that has been barely visible
from the top but becomes clearer {or i s upposed to} athe bottom of
screen] which spells WHITError summing up tHEir erroneous view of
the rest of the world leading them to Imperialism/Colonialism/Black
Slavery/Free&cheap labor is also what is repressed as the Terror of
POCs which continueseepage because of continued Denial, repression,
Oppression instead of not simple but at least out in the open
accountabiliTy. This would not be unlike/differenthan men finding ways
to be accountable for paytriarkey and its BEnefits. At aNy rate of
accountabiliTy, I scan think of at least another scene where the
WHITError would work well OpAcitizing to a higher % and revealing this
recurring discourseeping from the repressed unconscious at
inopportune MOments if not more unrepressable White discourse. Oh
and the effect of the "WHITE rror" coming down on the POCs of the
world is this adds not only the textualayer and possibly a visual
mimicking of one who digs the sand around them to make themselves
look/feel higher but it is a visual trick that whilsthe WHIText moves
down it should allow the originally stationary eLevator to look as if it
were going up...likeNlighteNment IDealisMOderniTy WEstern
Civilization making those on the eLevator believe they aRe the white
foam cream rising above the darkfray buthey---as evidenced by the
continued humanimal savageXpressions of
ColonialImperialCivilizationWar etc. have used the very BElief in higher
mindedness to release that which they/we tried/try so hard to repress...
 I OpaciTize "IMPERIAL" to 0% as the "WHITE" origins for
thiscourseems to so easily fade froMEmory and the connection to
disappear from sight. Capitalism/Profitheivery are nigh as well, huh,
whereabouts later in WHT?
 From there I realized I wanted "COLOnial" to do its version of discourse
disappearing at the wipe of "WHITE rror" so I ligh10 its 0%paciTy as
scene (few seconds mind yoU) begins to shiftonextone.
o
92312: I inform her of my progress via Email, asking her a few questions
and she responds " You can output a .mov file of the film sequence and then
just import into AE for layering."
92712: I attend Glenda's office hours to show her what I've accomplished as
mentioned above. She answers my basicwestions by showing me eXamples
of these basic actions on her computer:
 how to bring layer of video to work over in Ae that as if i was copying
from any other file such as WorD, I would then take the File by>Import.
 Can I turn on OpaciTy one letter at a time as in actual typing or writing?
She shows me how I can do it a feways again. I choose the toolbar this
time saving me time from working the OpaciTy on every letter
certainlynot worth the seconds it shows onscreen and still showing the
letters in WHITE to whiteN one letter at a time. Unsure if this is more a
kool effecthan something that adds to my intention/motivation/meaning.
Looking at it again, i can see where the spelling of the word HIT in
WHITE may literally add to the impact.
 How do I do other fadeouts? She shows me other White Fadeouts on
the effects part of the toolbar: Animator Group Opacity, which again is
less crafting of the letters but will save time at points.
 How do I Blur/fade/dust? She shows me again on the Effects Panel.
 She likes the progress as well as the content of what I have so far and
we save the following questions for later so that I can solidify what I'm
doing before moving on:
o Can I make a cross of a t move horizontally to literally make the
act of crossing it?
o How do I delete the Snapz prog. so I can grab another sample
and begin again?
o How do I keep text smooth? I recall a word akin to"
rasterization"?
o How to work OpaciTy & color better on timeline
o she gives me her # to call her for small questions that hold
me up but are aReasily answered; I do my best not to bother
her (scarciTy in/action worried about running out of question
answering resources), which does hold me up again.

928-10412: Run text up andown back and forth along timeline to
see how text synchronizes/dances with movement of four
characters entering eLevator pressing buttons but not going
anywhere. As the last character in makes a righturn, I brighten the
OpaciTy of "error" to connect to WHITError, but it doesn't brighten
as much as I like:
<a question for Glendabout OpaciTy here, what is holding back itsolidiTy?>
 Thisuch a tiny thing but love that [WHITE rr] shows while or is more
or less lost in the eLevator until the o in or syncs perfectly with one
of the figure's bald head revealing the err o r in the thinking the
philosophy of IDealism in the eNlightenment without the balance of
MAterialisM.


Finally, I play with the color finding a balance more toward white
than grey revealing the walls to be greyer than I thought on the
viDEO.
I also BEgin working on second scene which is another even wider
white wall where this time to the left (instead of rt whereLevator
positioned lastime) there is a group of young boys/bald children
(like the adults) surrounding the robocop as he allows them to
"fondle" his baton. Wow, didn't realize the phallic nature of the
scene until this "hear" writing. Surprised it wasn't sobvious 'til now.
10412: I wait for Glenda at her office hours but she forgot to leave a note
that she would not be there. I've been sitting on my questions like a
dumbutt so I can't resist writing her a long email:

 Missed yoU at your office hours yesterday and just wondering when
a good time to call yoU today or this weekend might be. Or I can ask
now and yoU can get back to me via email or phone (510.332.6536) at
your convenience: 1) How do I eXpand the workspace from the few scenes
yoU helped shrink to or both how do I eXpand or limit the
workspace-sorry, I just can't recall. 2) This one may have to wait for
next week but when I'm working with opaciTy in animation, I can't seem
to brighten it enough. 3)Is it better to type a whole phrase with the
texthat start off not showing having them at Zero the OpaciTy
(invisible coming in and out) while gradually increasing/playing
witheir OpaciTy or should each word or phrase (though eNjambed right
next to each other) that will have differing/varying(sometimesame at
times) OpaciTies typed on different layers and their OpaciTies played
withere? 4)Finally, I think I figured it out but I seemed to keep
making the same mistake over and over varying the OpaciTy in animation
(I believe) where when I would change it later in the sequence it
would change the whole OpaciTy from the Beginning. Was I not setting
OpaciTy correctly at the Beginning? I'll take a look at the book
again for this one too. Sorry for the long list. I could just call
yoU when yoU've time. Let me know. Hope this craZy first week for me
eNded well fer yoU.
10512: And just when I'm getting the hang and flow of it, I forget to turn off
my internet connection as I went to turn on Ae5.5 (old) and Adobe catches
me in me unawareness shutting down my unbought program. AARGH! I
haven't paid my girlfriend rent in months; there's no way I can afford to
purchase this program now; I contact the old TA who reminds me to Delete
the old 5.5 so I can use the 6.0 monthly trial; it doesn't work right away so I
bother the TA some more and after he doesn't contact me for awhile, the
program activates. So I'm back in business/back in school/back INcomplete.

I try to keep fromaking adjustments to every little thing but do

return a few times to the first scene and do justhat.
For the next scene, pick another eMblematic font Edwardian Script in


black that is thinner and cursive thus, more difficult to read
(although much larger than this example here) so no i mist/must
move it slower in its position along the timeline because again
thiscene is a merealtime seconds.
It takes longer to create this phrase as I want it to relate to the
symbolic act of the children "fondling" the weapons of their
forebears.
It begins as [Behol D escend ants!] again playing with the position
sliding in from the righthis time; i t ook me a long while to gethis
first phrase to fall one letter at a time and to do it slow eNough to
show up because again thiscene is seconds of the whole piece.
o [thee Whiting on the wall], which I play with as a solid line falling
like a wall where the curly cursiveNd of "The" seems to be
moving with the movement of the baton in the robots hands
as he goes to present it to the children. First, I set the pivot
pt. at the end of the. Then I play with the position of the
phrase, finally Opacitizing the wall with blur/fade/dust to see
if I can evoke the dust obfuscating the text for a bit before
settling. There were some pretty good choices but I'm not
sure I would be unhappy if ye olde trusTy mousepad and
%fields were my Only choices. It did feelike the in/visibilizing
of text did work from the other eNd of the control spectrum.
<I've lost Aegain so cannot verify what I am Only recalling,
not looking at, barely recounting these 2nd scene phrases,
and making an aRgument for basic notes necessary for aNy
performance preprocess>
o "is WEstern Civilization" WE as in speaKING for all of us but
limiting it to those Winner ENlighteNment upstanding and
upright citizens as well as thoserioustern fewho necessarily
view the world in severe serioUStrict methodoloGies.
Realized that there's a stern in EAstern but the video game
company initialsyllablEA preceding it don't happen to be as
useful as the pronoun WE the WhiteUros.
o Afterunning it back and forth to be seen much clearer visually
in the short few secondscene goes by across the screen as
"WEstern Civiliesation" with lies eMboldened to further
visibiliTy.
o
101112: I presen t wo completed scenes to Glenda and she feels
I have completed the work of "Type in MOtion". I am eXcited to see
wherelse the WHITE discourse can appear and disappear from WHTHX-1138
anDEcide that this accumulation of text over/layering on top of each other is
palimpZesty in its resilient abiliTy to keep influeNcing and seeping back
intOur daily even if it isn't eSpecially OvertaNymore. Thus, as White
hegemonc discourse has not disappeared just because of theNd of Colonial
rule, Overt disavowals or a black president, so the WhitextypoloGy I bring in
early should slip into the whitewalls Only to O%pacitize when the
action/space asks it to dance in WHTHX-1138.

103012: Not Long Ago, in Galaxy not far away.... I am noworried I should
have used more Star WAreferences like the sliding below subtitles...too
much to do nowe'll see howhen iturns out.
121112: Whilediting above, a typof COLONIAL spelt CLONial so maybe I
could incorporate some clone warrish text oreference and seep the
misspelling? aRe their aNy imagescenes in WHTHX OR iginal that precede
Lucas's Clone Warstuff, which could bespoken to in my script or Even just
shown as CLONal/CLONial? Let it percolate/marinate but damn if I wanna
run-off and watch even a bad movi(E)nthemiddle
ofinalsweekprojectsgrading...
11613: Find hIDEoloGy whilistening to Lynette helPerformance Studies make
more sense, a definition working I've to write for nextweek.
11713: Meet Glendagain at office hrs where whilst waiting her to finish with
one student another one arrives. Of courseems just another person to wait
for to finish w/Glendas the student doesn't have much to ask Glenda I ask
and find out. However as the other student awaiting Glenda to finish withe
student who preceded us both get to talking and I describe my work she
gets up and walks to the desk of who she calls D. R. Wagner where I'veen
reading the name plaque on the desk reading MR S Wagner thinking he was
a she. The student as she is walking toward the desk or is it just before she
got up to walk over to the desk she lets me know about a poetry class she
took with D. R. using design restrictiONs. I just recalled I'd seen his EE
Cummings antholoGy amongst other poets in the bookshelf BEhind me and
my ears and mind perked up. After the firstudent and the student who
pointed me towarD. R. aRe done, Glendaffirms D.R.'s helpotential, regretting
she'd been so focused on my textypoloGy onscreen, she didn't realize the
D.R. EE DS connection. No problem as in the next few minuteshe steers me
back toward Jesse (Lynette had firsteered me toward himaybe two years ago
now) and his upcoming book (out in May when I s/b QEing [a sign to wait?])
as well as a few politicized/resistant/subversive mEDia tech websites/org.s.
Finally, when I didn't knowhen to meet her again, she'd another great IDea
fer me to sit in on her beginning AfterEffects class for Even justo rEview(hich
after a parking dilemma) I arrived to learn thathe two adjustable
number/percentage are the beginning and end of a particular A & B
keyframes. This feels like basic helpful alreaDy and I believe I should try to
spend much of my hours going back to this class and workingraphics so
maybe I can askwestions in the setting...lab I missed when I firstook Type in
Motion w/Glenda the Fall before last.
 notes to AE that may or may not make sense:
o setting &
o scale up 3
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
12413 Glenda



scale up and rotate 2
RAM preview: building
v-move tool
once clock turned on forever
OpaciTy<>transparenCy
*- not saved
* -saved
File>[increment] & [saved]
ex1-001>2
File to Film. Composition
Exporting File>Film
Best Settings-Render Settings Timespan Length of Comp
Output: [Module Settings] change Quick Time?
Animation Compression? <simple>
<Have to check audio
3rd Output to Desktop>Fldr>last name.1st name ex/.mov
4 Render: builds movie on desktop on MOV.
mtg:
more AE terms:
o Shift layers
o Split layer
 Shift comman D
o 2 layers
o [motion blur] to help mystification
o [stretch] slow>fast: helps nesting compositions
o 30% time
o Make FINAL comp to nest all
o WheNest Background becomes transparent
o *lil' sun= continuous rastarize fixes pixels
 also unclips
o Black triangles: beg.<-> eNd nested comp.
Save New Proj.
Import Video: grab/dragrab
o File>import file 2 other ways
Create Comp: i.e. Rocket Karate
o Change color grey scale









Brought down timeline
o trim layers
Set 3D space
Rotation Shift R
Starturn all those clocks for layer
Orientation: set once D o not animate
Position,
Scale
x, y
2 Rotations









Kern & anchor pt.
scale
3 frames forward (page down)
Hold Key frame (hold in time>
when output file turn of video

She want/Mov.

New Comp "yo-yo" in & out pt. just below monitor?
Scale up
lock vid layer
2413 civilies or civiliesation = christian[ext frame w/robed line] pagan =
savage/heathen/barbarian/Other/
21613 christianiTy > paganotequal
WEstern > nOn-WEstern
Non-WEsterNOt = WEstern
WEstern e X
pa
n
s
christianity > pagan(imal)
 children

protestant
21713
i
o
n
WEsterneUropeanglosaxoNOrm
WASP ethnocentrism
conform AngloNOrm
white = free
 labor

 thus black = slave
 unwhite = unfreelabor

The White WEst
22713: hologramsection playing w/OpaciTy (and voice?): disappear as a
peer disappear as peer disappear as a peer disappear as a peer
disappearasapeerdisappearasapeer
peer er ever?
31113: white sUbjec t HIStory <where? duvallalone somewhere?
4313: Own AfterEffects CS6 after
 getting serial # from another student and it not working
 trying to use month trial again and it not working
 trying to eXplain to Glenda why purchasing AE is taking me so long
and she understands the unfairness and costs of programs that
eventually gObsolete. She suggests I buy the Creative Cloud as
she does to keep up with the industry standard. However, I Only
want to Use it for my aRt and noto keep up with the DEsigndustry.
AND I don't want to be stuck paying a subscription for the rest of
my aRtisticreati've life....I want to Own a copy (like
FinalCuteXpress) so that I can do the work I need to do on my
DVDedits at aNy point and not have to either keepaying forever or
start another year subscription when I might (never is also possible
[buthen there goes $500 down the drain...) need it again...










trying to find cheaper copy and my friend's copy brought back from
Thailand is the Only prog. he brought back that doesn't work.
trying to find another friend who has old one I'm sure my work with
CS6 would juset me back
trying to buy studenTeacher copy from Bay Area college where the
price is cheaper than at UCD
trying to get friend of friend above who teaches at Bay Area college
to purchase program for me but she avoidsaying no.
whilstrying to lowest AE prices on internet which I seem to have
trouble finding aNymore, stumbleonewstory that Adobe will be
updating CS6 to 7 soon; talk to my brother who states as programs
gobsolete their lower supply means higher demand and priceso
decide I must buy ASAP.
trying to purchase AECS.6 at UCD bookstore buthey aRe out of
MACS.6; MAClerk tells me they will reorder and takes my info to
call me when it arrives; manager doesn'tell me price because of
studenTeacher discount.
trying to be patient after a week or so waiting for call about
AfterEffects I call back and the manager has not gotten price from
distributor.
trying to be optimistic one day after class I decide to check in at
UCD bookstore: the manager is not in but a MACS.6 is in so another
clerk (who has AExperience and my be Open to helping me
out)gives me the lower price: $459.95. plus tax.
a week or so later the UCDMACmanager calls me quoting a price
almost a hunderedollars more
trying noto hate the UCDMacmanager, the Adobe distributor,
Adobe, neoliberalism, capitalism, profitHEiVERY,,,doesn't work but
do feelike I found some shelterefuge from Neoliberal tendrils
(Harvey) in at least saving that eXtra bit of someonelse's
profitHEiVery as wellaughing at the UCDMACmanager's unsuccessful
ruse under my (dragon's) breath.

92013
can't believe I wouldn't have not pastedis buthis is so good will agin:
The day the first snow fell I floated to my birth of feathers falling by
my window; touched earth and melted, touched again and left a little
touch of light and everywhere we touched till earth was white.
(Brathwaite 1975: 7)
10113
because the divulgence of failure for this writer aRtist of precarioUS
ubjectivity, missing passage for fear of such failure being attached to my
intellect, my person as essentially incapable, is taboo, I repressed the
learning and ifficulTy in learning After Effects and or my aversion to sinkinto
the work there for how long [think time sink] making small increments of
motion graphics segments on the filmic backdrop of FAde to blanco took.
With the workload of the Ph.D I'm sure Lynette attempted to communicate
the difficulTy in such an eNdeavor but the inspiredaRtistkNOwsnobounds,
huh. At aNy rate of learning new programs or acquiring new tools, it is
clearer to this PARticulaRtisthat learning a new skill primarily necessarily for
the completion of a PARticulaRt piece, needs to be objectively weighed for its
necessiTy or utiliTy towardocumenting the PAR or if this learning process
documentation contributes something Useful to the aRtpiece itself, I must
question the actual timeNerGy focus turned toward this new skill and the
other Ph.D course, teachinGrAtinGrAding load. Learning to draw one's
boundaries and acknowledging ones work methods is useful here.
 One of thereasons I took up writing as my primary
aRtisticreativeNdeavor is because of its previoUSly basic state in my
life. WorKing w/ords built on an undergirding alreaD. eStablished.
Writing is a poor woman's painting, maybe. Certainly
Adobe'sAfterEffects takes a commitment of funds and time, morese
toward a graphic design career than this writer aRtist. Nothat I am
giving up the AEghost but it will and has(orry Glenda) taken a back
burner to my chief concerns of writing, langugage, postcoloniality,
critical racetc.


Darrin had some good suggestions as he helpt me tie up the final
draft copy (certainly unfinisht) for the PAR of WHTHX's motion
graphics film edit that findinGraphic student who wants to build
their portfolio through Glenda might be useful. Also, the younguy
at the bookstore seemed to have the skill set though he was
turning his attentions eLsewhere.
o otherwise I'm unsure what this writer performer have to offer
motion graphics design person but some sort of collaboration
would be ideal

The plan is to do a recontextualizing of the current narrative within
the newer concepts I've acquired fairly recently mostly deriving
from the dissertation prospectussle to see if there is more language
to complicate the narrative situations in the scriptext as well as the
visual text level of WHTHX.


I bought the physical copy of AE 6. [thanks Perf.Stud.s] to avoid
the subscription ripoff and regardless of how far the industry
goestandard i have the poetential of worKing creative magic with
moving text to plug poetry in as well as create poeMs directly on
the program in future with purportedly more time in postdoc. or
writing/arts fellowships we'll seeXciting.
PerfStudFellowShipinternal
10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
111612 GraduateGrouPerformanceStudiesINternalFellowshipSubmission
ProjecTitle: WHTHX–1138--- Film Blanc: In search of White Privilege
in the shadows; is White Privilege visible by the flickering of a
projection lamp?
Abstract, Description, Significance
Writer/language scriptext Collector/Performer/File & Typeditor: DeNNiS M.
SOmeRa
Going to a go-go in a galaxy far far away....The white subject sees his/her
privilege and learns how to come to be[/at the] accounTable: fictional
speculative futures or hard science fictions? A major characteristic of
ScieNce Fiction is a shift in philosophical belief. When it comes to
WhiteUrOWEsternPrivilege, supremaCy, power, it's a step: to see through
the White Haze/Veil of normativiTy...beginning to even hope for change. In
tHis multimedia multinterdisciplinary didactic performance with eXcerpts of
George Lucas' dystopic first feature THX-ll38 and its white uniforms on white
skin against white environs is the ideal visual backdrop for poeticritically
collaging visual subtitles and live voiceover narration in attempt to visibilize
White IDeological discourse. This performanceManates from katsuben, a
popular Japanese form of film narration (as well as other silent-film era
nations), which became so popular in Japan that the
narrator/translator/improviser/poet eXceeded the popularity of the actors,
filmakers or films narrated. As mine is an attempted subversion of continual
White Colonial IDeoloGy, the artisticritical ancestralineage of my movietelling
goes a step further to the Korean pyonsa, endeavoring similar subversion of
Japanese colonial propaganda films of the era. As Althusser, in his vision of
it, saw IDeoloGy interpellating individuals into subjects through Ideological
State Apparatuses (ISAs), so I use educational, communication and cultural
ISAs: Performance Studies Ph.D, film, video-editing, poetry, scholarly
research (Critical Race from Leonardo & Porter, Hooks, Smith, McIntosh,
Wise and Fiske), collage, textypoloGy design, many of the master's MEDia
tools to attempt reversal or at least reveal the process of White IDeological
interpellation and maybeven fill in some affective gaps that a straight-ahead
paper presentation may miss in its intellectual strictures. I can very well
presenthis multinterdisciplinary and multimedia intervention as a paper;
however, as a poet/performer/scholarriving with manyears of
performanceXperience (CV attached), an integral function of this
performance/practice as research is eliciting feedback from the audience via
(available upon request) post-performance surveys (such as the one survey
filled out in a "Theorizing Popular Media" seminar at CAL, where the ethnic
mix tended toward POC, and one mixed-race woman stated her
understanding of white privilege was "expanded... seeing how the artistic
address could be as rigorous and traumatic as traditional engagement"), or
questions toward the group during post presentation dialogue finding effects
and affective consequences of thisuspension-of disbelief-typerformance to
acknowledge in/effectivity and reception differences in People of Color and
White predominant audiences: making adjustments toward futureffectiviTy
in academicontent, didacticontent and performanceNgagemeNt---and thus
the p0etential for this piece and this artform for social change within and
withouthe academy.
Reason for Request:
As reading is a visual act and my version/vision of this cinematic artform
relies on the visual act of reading by the audience: wherein the
whitextypoloGy on white backdrop reveals discourse(eeping) White IDeoloGy
into the whiteNvirons of WHTHX-1138, this pieceSpecially as well all of my
future film/textypoloGy edits (as visual backdrop to my narration) will
benefit from the PFS fellowship in my being able to purchase the Adobe After
Effects (Ae) Visual Effect/Motion Graphics computer program allowing me to
move textypoloGy in and out of my video edits. Unable to afford the Adobe
After Effects (Ae) program, sustaining work on the textypoloGy of WHTHX1138 by using monthly trials has been difficult.
In addition, I have applied recently to conferences with the Center for
Race Gender (CRG): Speculative Visions of Race, Technology, Science, &
Survival Conference: March 15-16, 2013 at UCBerkeley and CINESONIKA 3:
Celebrating the Soundtrack taking place a bit further away in
Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland: February, 2013. While the former
may only require gas and parking funds, the latter would certainly
necessitate travel and accommodation expenses. Thus, I am applying for
the maximum $1,000 to apply toward the Ae program and upcoming
conferences.
2pp Working Bibliography
Douglas, Susan. The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture took us
from Girl
Power to Girls Gone Wild, New York: St Martin’s Griffin (2010).
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks, trans. C. Markmann. New York,
Grove
Weidenfeld (1967).
Fiske, John. Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics. Minneapolis, U
of
Minnesota (1996).
Hill, Jane. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden MA/Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell (2008).
hooks, bell. Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press
(1992).
hooks, bell. introduction: making movie magic. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and
Class at the
Movies, By hooks. New York: Routledge (1996).
Leonardo, Zeus and Porter, Ronald K. “'Pedagogy of fear: toward a Fanonian
theory of 'safety' in race dialogue'”, Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2,
(2010):
139 — 157. Web:
gse.berkeley.edu/faculty/ZLeonardo/PedagogyofFear.pdf
Leonardo, Zeus. "The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the discourse of 'white
privilege'".
Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36 No.2, 2004.
Lew, Walter. “Poets of the UNREELED!–A CinePoetry & Performance
Extravaganza.”:
shadoWord Productions, Galapagos Art Space & Bowery Poetry Club.
New York,
NY: 1&2 Feb. 2008. Live Film Narration Performance: Opening
Remarks.
Lucas, George, dir. THX–1138. American Zoetrope, Warner Brothers, (1971)
DVD.
Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton, UP (2000).
McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of
Coming to
See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies." Wellesley,
MA:
Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, (1988).
Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard. Racial formation in the United States:
from
the 1960s to the 1990s, New York, NY: Routledge, (1994).
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness. New York: Verso (1991).
Sconce, Jeffrey. “‘Trashing’ the academy: Taste, excess and an emerging
politics of
cinematic style”, Screen, 36:4, Oxford University Press: (1995) 371393. The Cult
Film Reader: McGraw Hill, (2008): 100-118.
Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.
Yale
University Press, 1990.
Smith, Andrea Lee. "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White
Supremacy RethinkingWomen of Color Organizing." The Color of Violence:
The INCITE!
Anthology. Eds. B Andrea Lee Smith, Beth E. Richie, Julia
(Sudbury) Oparah.
Cambridge: South End Press (2006).
Storey, John. AN INTRODUCTION TO Cultural Theory and Popular Culture.
2nd ed.
Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, (1998).
Wah, Lee Mun, dir. The Color of Fear. Stir Fry Productions, (1994). Film.
Wilderson, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US
Antagonisms. Durham, Duke University Press (2006).
Wise, T. "Membership Has Its Privileges: Thoughts on acknowledging and
challenging whiteness" in: P. Rothenberg (ed.), White Privilege:
Essential readings
on the other side of racism. NewYork, Worth
Publishers (2002).
PerformanCV
MOVIETELLING/FILM NARRATION section
5/12 Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) 40th Anniversary Performance
Showcase: WHTHX-1138. Bindlestiff Studios: Epicenter for Pilipino-Am Arts.
San Francisco, CA: 22May12.
12/11Performance & Social Change: graduate and faculty symposium.
WHTHX-1138. Performance Studies graduate group, U-Club, UC Davis, CA:
2Dec.12.
12/11Theorizing Popular Media: Seminar symposium: WHTHX-1138. UC
Berkeley, CA: 1Dec.12.
10/11LitQuake, 2011: Litcrawl. Carl Brandon Society: POC Speculative
Fiction. WHTHX-1138. Lost Weekend Video, San Francisco, CA: 15Oct.11.
9/09 APAture, 2009: Closing Night. Kearny Street Workshop (KSW):
WEst.siDEsTroy. goforaloop gallery. San Francisco, CA: 26Sept.09.
12/08"Retrospective Literary Night." Kearny Street Workshop (KSW):
WEst.siDEsTroy. San Francisco, CA:3Dec.08
11/08"Transnationalism" Launch Party. Issue Two. Digital Artifact (online)
Magazine: WEst.siDEsTroy. San Francisco, CA:16Nov.08.
4/08 Movietelling WorkshoPerformance, University of Miami, FL: do
movietelling workshop; perform Linh Dinh's A Smooth Life & WEst.siDEsTroy
17-20Apr.08.
2/08 "Poets of the Unreeled: CINEpoetry & Performance Extravaganza,"
Galapagos Art Space & Bowery Poetry Club, New York City, NY: 1,2Feb.08.
11/07"Poets of the DARK: MOVIETELLING". WEst.siDEsTroy. The Miami
Beach Cinematheque, Miami FL.
9/07 Movietelling/Neo-Benshi: WEst.siDEsTroy. counterPULSE, San
Francisco, CA.
1/06-9/06
Small Press Traffic's Poet's Theater: Neo-Benshi Night.
WEst.siDEsTroy. 1/20/06, "Move Over Silver Screen" CCA, Adobe Books,
Local Creative Fyre - A night of local music, dance & movietelling: 8/18/06,
Encounter Studios, Fundraiser at Galeria De la Raza: 6/29/06, San
Francisco, CA.
PARJoProcesseNtriescontinues
10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
111512 submit Cinesonika 3 first offering to perform either WEst.siDEsTrOy
and WHTHX-1138 and omit WHTHX-1138 because unsure of
Cinesonikaudience in Ireland not eNjoying take on White privilege.
 send money $20rso through PayPal and turns out I needn'submit
payment and director is unable to refund through PayPal because of
someXchanglitch
111912 in writing4perf looking at Lynette's journal eXamples
 copies of journal pp.
 what is contingenCies for JOP?









shouldn't feelikeSsay
colloquial/persona/can't be done w/o use of "I"
what is the thing I'm getting at & what aRe the choices
notheory but what I'm doing w/ork...
remix of production
unedited?
blog/vlog
program that Organizes text: group writing can be collected live
writing in class polling tool...


just realized through Writing4Perf seminar could have used my
own links/online/video texts for bibliografee, which as I write this
realize I don't have much on WHTHX- anyway.

112312: looking up linguistic stuff to formulate question of
LinguisticAnthropologist Professor Janet Shibamoto-Smith (JSS) and stumble
on a title I like better than Savin's Film Blanc which is "Fade to Blanco"
which would have been Even better for Cinesonika'sound w/in film as a
deeper music reference beyond the Brian de Palma film/flick so maybe
change them on all my documents to remind me of the choice for future
applications. And realized I didn't actually submit WHTHX-1138 but
WEst.siDEsTrOy to Cinesonika so maybe I find a way to document WHTHX
for Cinesonika 4 next year and submit it under the Fade to Blanco title then.
112312: unsure whether the question for JSS has been asked before (been
so long since beginning of quarter and really last Winter in her seminar). A
reading from found free book from Hart Hall of Piaget's where he
useSaussure to speak to the difference between social conventional "signs"
as language distanced furtheRational, objective, reasonable, whichas been
understandable in the way for US/science/the acadeMy/research to present
clear unemotional perspectives/views back? to a use of symbolsignified
moresembling each other in the hieroglyph, pictogram,
iDeOgram...metaphor, poetic language that can also use language tools/
rhetorical devices/writing formstructures to aRgue didacticommunicateach
aRticulations that includeverything im/possible, ir/rational, un/reasonable,
su/objectivetc.... That I through connection to a larger spiritual ecological
realiTy/imagiNAtion ala 1st AMericaNatioNAtive 1st AMericaNAtive
IndigenoUS culture/views/contexts/ways of seeing/knowing
attempt to on this largest level as well as the smallest piece of sign/symbolic
level attempt to connect US through basic breath, through basic language,
through basic performanceach other humanimal, non-humanimal, other than
humanimal
 andoes this help discuss WHTHX to ground the writing of it, the way



and the what of its doing? I believe thishould be summarized in
introducing its context, because the same belief in bringing emotion
or poetry back into ways of seeing/sensing/knowing/knoWorlD is
eXhibited in the moments of writing/textcollecting asWellas
momentoes de performance and
changing/wordsplaying/shiftransforming the symbolsigns of the
mind signified may be seeds for the gaps we allow fo
Readeraudience to learn how to shiftransform their way of thinking
and thuseeing the world.
For JSS: I've asked if theresearch on autonoMy/AgenCy in language
and maybe what I need is less if there is but what language do I
need to help me speak/write toward thisWordplay changing my own
or those who read me and their minds'
of course I write to not repeat myself with JSS and wasteacherly
time. I suppose I can wait to bring up with Lynette though I don't
believe she wants to look at my motivation for wordsplaying as
much as I want to because it feels like a waste of time in the
academic scholarly grant proposal world.
o But for me to thoroughly Evaluate my work is to look at not
only the eXternally perfomative acts but also the urge within
to write to represent my thoughts/IDEas wordsplay,
DeNjambments, as she mentioned this week about how
Performance Studies looks at the things that occur previous
to becoming culture, the aRtisticreative/crafty notions before
becoming beculture, I want to not only show how my
language wants to leave gaps for audiencereader, which feels
like an interaction of culture alreaDy, but also previoUS to the
audience where I in my writing wordsplay in an autonoMOuse
Agentialurch urge, where is the language along with
Saussure, Bourdieu, Hill, in Linguistics/AnthropoloG y the 1st
NAtioNAti(ndigenoUS)'ve way this has always happened and
continues to happen asubversive resistant decolonizing,
grieving, graceful,,, process.
 bringing me to question(s) for Professor Ines
Hernandez-Avila



How have 1st...done it 1st, originally, sustain,
maintain and changed by colonial/imperial white
WEstern subverting/resisting/decolonizing and
then working with MAster's tools? Orally of
course, then how in poetry, how in WEstern
writing, how in academic whichas been one of the
mosTOOLS of colonizatiONAtive peoples
Prof.Hernandez-Avila: And I think I've worked out
a question toward furtheResearch if not the
beginnings of this quarters inquiry: Whatexts
should I prepare to connect my language
wordsplay/DeNjambment attempts at
autonoMy/AgenCy to 1stNAtioNAti(ndigenoUS)'ve
peoples and language: oral origins, written origins
(i.e. history of educational colonial tool),
subversions, resistances, DEcolonizing attempts

on every but mostly language, poetic, maybe
narrative levels with the MAster's tools (eNglish or
eUro languages/forms)? How can I
learn/research in 1stNAtioNAti(ndigenoUS)'ve
language dealings to find gap s pace gas p ace
where 1stNAtioNAti(ndigenoUS)'ve maintain,
sustain,
their connection to their origins, the land, their
culture, themselves through language usage, oral
or performed, writing and poetry as well as
maybe narrative and film? This questioning is still
in process so will seep into final project probably
but want to send this so that yoU maybetter
understand howhat my research is growing out of
working with yoU iNAtiveAMPoetree. Let me
know if there's aNything else yoU
neediscuss. DeNNiS

from Piaget p. 169:
metaphor: "is a symbol because there is a relationship between the image
used and the object to which it refers, a relationship which it not due to a
social convention but directly experienced by the mind of the individual."

intellectualanguage and impersonal thoughtoward "affective language to
eXpress feelings and concreteXperiences" by way of the symbol.
symbol: defined Identical as in psychoanalytic schools

"an image which has a meaning distinct from its immediate content,
and in which there is a more or less direct resemblance between
signifier and signified."
o two type s ymbols: metaphors (conscious) & cryptophors
(unconscious)
o symbolic thought (FreudJungOthers) independent of verbal
signs>>>Used by rational thought and thus opposed
structurally and functionally to
o symbolic
 "form of thought whose individual and even intimate
nature has been emphasised in contrast to socialised
thought, since it is mainly found in dreams an d ay
dreams: hence the idea of "autism." It is a form of
thought whose roots are esentially: 'unconscious.'"
 But the very eXistence of
o imaginative or make-believe play,
 which play s o important a part in the child's thought,
proves that
o "symbolic thought
 extends beyond the unconscious," and that is why we
have called this form of ludic activity
o "symbolic play."
o
RE appropriate these aRtforms to call attention to White HEgemony
120812: Wonder where I eNter the script in this eNlargeNing JOP: Oh duh
will do well to play with it as the basis for DOCUMENTATION: wow had
knowow IDea where to starthat and it is literally in front of me when I'm
reading it during performance or when I've IDeas to add to the script.
possibly
121812: Email to CultStud from FMSTAing: Subject line__Essential Hall &
Filmedia Profs who do IDentiTy
Hey Jinni,
Hope yer quarter eNded with somEase or if nothen hope yerevelinit
now. So please don't lethis add aNy stress to yerelaxing. Anyway, I seem to
recall that you're a bit of a Stuart Hall eXpert and I'm doing 270s next
quarter with Sarita See on Critical RAce, hoping yoU had a recommendation
of a book/chapters/aRticles that would help me establishis project and what
it contributes mine toward my media/film poeticritical film narrations
(WEst.siDesTroy & WHTHX-1138). Also, I've some leads on Professors
(Glenda Drew, Julie Wyman, Brett Snider in Mediand Darren Martin in Art)
who may be able to help me with Performance & Media/film, however was
wondering if you knew filmedia Professor(s) potentially amenable to my
concerns with didactic Critical RAce/gender/IDentiTy/Social Justice
issues. This is my primary focus but will also includeNvironmental and
colonial critiques in upcoming works/pieces. I suppose I am looking for
professors in general who might be able to help me couch my artisticreative
work as resistant/subversive/DEcolonizing reappropriation/intervention,
using some ISAs to attempthese previoUS and interfere with the
interpellation process or at least call attention to it, maybeven attempt
Habitussling if possible... Thanks for your time and mostly have a good
break. DeNNiS
No response from Jinni: so have to choose Hall soon.
On Jan 3, 2013, at 3:42 PM, dennis somera wrote:
Hello Professors,
Hope your breaks have been relaxing and thathis request doesn't come
terribly toolate.
First, if yoU know already yoU don't have 5 hours available in the
upcoming Winter, 2013 quarter then yoU can reply this to me now and read
no further.
Second, pleaseeXcerpt attached of the WEst.siDEsTrOy "movietelling"
performance I do as an eXample of the form I am working in in my
Performance Studies PhD.
Third, Glenda Drew has already consented to help me further with the
pragmatic textypoloGy (via AfterEffects) I've started in my visual
eXcerpt/edit of George Lucas' first feature THX-1138. Julie Wyman knows a
bit of my work I did for her in her documentary seminar. Lynette Hunter will
be completing the theoretical performance part of this 270C as I bring your
MEDiart/film/viDEo IDeas/etc. to her.
Fourth, if yoU do have time, here's a more detailed description of what I am
doing so that yoU may be able to consider my work to be of interest or not:
generally, I am looking to complete a 270B in Performance and MEDia in
preparation for Spring, 2013 QEs; the basis of my work is poetry/language
play I call "wordsplay" and "deNjambment" which dictates my performance
(and vice versa); I use this poetic license in an excerpted film narration
intervention called "movietelling" or the Japanese "katsuben" where the
narrators are called "benshi" or "pyonsa" in Korea; the performance itself
could be summed up as poeticritical Mystery Science Theater; I've excerpted
10 to 12 minutes of WEstSIDEstory as well as THX-1138 and edited the
scenes into my ownarrative visual (both withelp and the second edited with
Final Cut eXpress as well as AfterEffects with muchelp from Glenda); the
THX... excerpt is the current focus for my 270C (PAR); from this point in the
process, I gather/collage/write language together into a script further
shaping a sort of language narrative; finally, afterehearSing, I perform the
script synchronized to the film eXcerpt projection for a live audience. Thus,
I am looking for support in contextualizing this didacticreative work in
performance and mediaRt/film/viDEo theoretically as well as pragmatically
so that I might articulate what my work does through performance, media
studies, film theory, art, etc. lenses.
Fifth, if yoU somehow gothis far into my email andon't have the interestime,
but maybe something/one struck yoU as a possible textual/professorial
reference/resource, pleasend it along because any little bit could help in my
process.
Thanks for your time.
-Take@ir&PeacEase....DeNNiS
<boWErstsiDEsTroNyC.mov>
On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Darrin Martin <dtmartin@ucdavis.edu>
wrote:
Hi Dennis,
I enjoyed the WEst.siDEsTrOy "movietelling" performance excerpt you
submitted and would be curious to learn more about your request. I've
never done a 270B before but I am assuming from your email it entails 5
hours of my time in this Winter Quarter if I sign on? Are they individual
meetings or meetings with the rest of the committee or ?
I believe I would be up for that with one condition. I'm teaching Art114c
Intermediate Video: Performative Strategies class this quarter. Some of our
work will be focused on the commingling of live performance with
prerecorded material, especially towards the end of the quarter. I would be
delighted if you could spare some time to present your work to my class for
an hour. I will be teaching Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:10-8. Let me
know what you think.
I'm finalizing the syllabus tomorrow. At this point, I'd just like to know if
you could be available and willing. Let me know as soon as you can.
Best,
Darrin
1913 DarrinMtg 1stime suggests these video aRtists:
 Bruce Conner: found filmovies filmoving to the moodin music
 Aaron Valdez: prolific found video work & overlaying High Noon
w/Robert KenneDy[in] footage is haunting possibly case stuDy: Life
& Times of Robert Kennedy starring Gary Cooper
 Richard Konstalanitz: interesting conceptualizing especially to
publishing an "intellectual non-history"
 terms: reappropriation, offstage, subtext
11413 Said from "Cultural & Imperialism" quote
is thiscriptext matched too well to the whitextypoloG or is it simply a strong
support for the way the "ism" slides down from imperial ism to
 "colonial ism" which is almost always a consequence of imperialism
is the implanting of settlements on distan t erritory."

11713 Glenda mtg:
 suggests Jesse Drew (husband) a s omeone to help with filmEdia
interventions especially his upcoming book published in the Spring.

11813 Brathwaite quote of his own poeM (not unlike my "White Fog...") from
Other Exiles (1975) from his eSsay "Nation Language" for possible collage
into actual scriptexto read probably: "The day the first snow fell I floated to
my birth of feathers falling by my window; touched again and left a little
touch of light and everywhere we touched till earth was white."
12213 Cesaire quotes Reverend Father Tempels: "It would be really
outrageous...if the whit e ducator were to insist on destroying the black
man's own, particular human spirit, which is the only reality that prevents us
from considering him as an inferior being." in spoken script? <write this out
in meaning when time>
Cesaire quoting M.Mannoni: Through these ordeals" (reserved for the
Occidental), "one triumphs over the infantile fear of abandonment and
acquires freedom and autonomy, which are the most precious possessions
and also the burdens of the Occidental."
Cesaire quoting gobineau: "The only history is white. M. Callois in turn
observes: "The only ethnography is white."
white man's burden commentary when watching black holograms/mtg
blackharacter or pre/post
12413 day after great mtg w/D. R. Wagner, a poet, aRtisteacher who has
wielded language much further than i've dared, which means there's a lot i
can learn from him/tHEir's, as i'm again waiting for Glenda to finish
w/student (one of them a new MFA in the new interdisciplinary MFA), I
stumble/happen Upon a D.A. Levy book of poeMs and in the first page I
Open to I find something I believe I'll say but could possibly "write on the
walls" of WHT:
 p114 #9 d.a. levy Zen & concretetc. from Frontiers (Blind Man's
View From the Observation Tower)
o What is clear white are
o
are these tears
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
falling inside
illuminating
the interior
burning
burns white
blue
gold tears eyes
in the soft passageways [long hall walk w/red object]
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
of my mind
& i cry clear white [light shower scene]
at the sight of my own fears
i am afraid of this,
motion
i feel the trembling [against wall by toilet]
as my identity approaches... [cowled figure]
o
Glenda mtg:
 Discuss how documentation could work with PowerPt. or Keynote
(Mac's version)
 tells me about cowboy poetechnologist AnDy Jones writing across
media: REtort, PM Press
DarrinMtg:
 suggests Lucas Hildebrand's Inherent Vice which I read a bit of in




DeKosnik's "Theorizing Pop Media"
o eMpowering cult stud view of vhs video rev where the Sony
tech won over copyright mania.
Shana Moulton: video aRtist "Whispering Pines"
o Aspect Video Series: Image & Textext & Image?
 borrow this from Video Resource FaciliTy in Everson[ice
resource didn't know of previously]
 find nice use of text/language visually in a couple
of pieces and nice theoretical voiceunder for one
as well.
Laurie Anderson: "Home of the Brave"
surreal practice/automatic writing: who's tapping, diseMbodied,
typing tapping seen separately
"Sybiopsychotoxinplasy" late60s William Graves: film about making
film
o
12613 in reading CRTinTro the use of a existentialiTraditio"no eXit" where
"no scholarly perch outside the social dynamics of racial power from which to
merely to observe and analyze.: the white hawk hasharp eYES and
clawsharperched on branch above B.lies/B.lievesit sees allil
creaturescurrying about waiting to B.EateN But misses/forgets the <larger
context?<rain finds him a larger target/will oneday wet and weighis
feathersdown/won't miss feathers justa find fur/rain findropsink down
feathers like fur/there's no eScape

From Frances Lee Ansley thorough definition: White supremacy isn't just for
intentional hate groups anymore; systemic and institutional, participate w/o
eveneeding to know/ on the unconsciouSLY.
12713
Hi Dennis,
I don't know why I haven't pointed you in this direction earlier, but your
appropriation of film is in parallel with the Situationist International's notion
of détournement.
But perhaps you have already been researching this. If not, I'd advise that
you do and check out Guy Debord and Rene Vienet. Especially, Rene
Vienet's film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? which you can find here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet.html
Also, here is a tiny write up about one of the artist I spoke of doing live
video/performance stuff:
http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/see-peter-burrs-experiment-inlive-cinema-based-on-tarkovskys-istalkeri
And lastly (for now), an article that I think may be useful:
http://markdery.com/?page_id=154
Best,
Darrin
2113 epigraph to Cheryl Harris' "Whiteness as Property":

she walked into forbidden worlds
impaled on the weapon of her own pale skin
she was a sentinel
at impromptu planning sessions
of her own destruction. . . .
Cheryl I. Harris, poem for alma
2313 cultapt: who aRe yoU in unconscious conversation w/ when yoU make
work a conversation based in respect, recollection
black & white; slave & free. black = slave; white = free so what of Others
absent white = object of property
Whites Only...>next page/fade-in possess
when TEXT & PLEA see BLX? maybe they say found the Other/ our object
/somewhere to project our animal/savage/Barbarian/primitive/heathen
 compare our whites to those unwashed
 custer's civilization counterpt
 whitesettleMENt

The law's construction of whiteness defined and affirmed critical aspects of
identity (who is white); of privilege (what benefits accrue to that status);
and, of property (what legal entitlements arise form that status). Whiteness
at various times signifies and is deployed as identity, status, and property,
sometimes singularly, sometimes in tandem.
2413 merit = whitesTANdard
equal opportuniTy =
white = unblemished, pure thUS any drop of ancestral black blood renders
one black---hypodescent contaminAnt contamiNAtion
whiteness = reified racial privilege
racial purity, fre e Xclusive, valorizing, rareXclusive
whitenes s lavery, whitenes s ubordiNAtes

whitenes s ubordNAtioneeds free cheap labor not
POCitizens

 not slaves unslave not black unblack

2513 baselineutral: who gets this choice?/ neutral: who gets this choice?
2713 DarrinMtg.
o Having not found Hildebrand at Shields do stumble on all
white copy of Lawrence Lessig's REMIX which spells out the
copyright's neoliberal impact on creativiTy.
 Collaboration & communiTies sections under hybrid
econs [fer eons] & sharing econ.









Sorry Jesse,
Negativeland, Soderberg, Victor Stone, "AurA"
Benjamin, Cultural Reference
terms: remix, recombinant, collage, montagetc.
media producer<>consumer
 participants in culture
eNacting, reciting & appropriating from preXisting
stories
mEDia literaCy
 information advertising
 speed speech speed
 WWW=cultural commons
RW
hides the hiearchy
way of speaking, thinking, and most important an
ethos/ethic ?
Haven't been able to catch up with yoU early Tuesdays or
Thursdays. Maybe I should just clarify my reading/discussioneeds a little
here in the interim (of actually meeting yoU face to face) and yoU can let me
knowhen yoU have time or when I finally catch up to you.
I've just read the first part of Lawrence Lessig's Remix to contextualize my
work with Darrin Martin buthere is obviously some overlap. The
Lessig begins to give me some language around what I'm doing with
film/video and text for that matter. If what I'm doing with Darrin is
exploring video performance primarily, I believe what I'm looking for from
yoU is the resistant, subversive, political, decolonial, historical, theoretical,
contextual(?studies?) etc. of mediandTechnoloGy. Again, I'm sure there'll
be a bit of overlap w/Darrin but I'm sure that will work itself out.
In terms of meeting with yoU, I'd like to do something regular anyway this
late in the quarter, so what slot would you have available on Tuesdays
and/or Thursdays? I'm assuming 8:30AM is the beginning so with my
SF/Sacto. commutes wonder what would be the latest T,Th morning slots
yoU could work with. If the 8:30AM is the only, I will just have to get out of
the housearlier. Sorry again, thanks fer yer patience and hopefully seeyoU
sooner than later. DeNNiS
21213 JesseDrewmtg:
 Prof Drew figures annotated bibliography makesense giving me a
coPy of hisOwn he checks off useful texts fer me:
o James Carey
o Chomsky: mEDia filters
o ...Freedom of eXpression
o Mattleart: "How to ReaDonalDuck?"
 Disney critique
 Chilearly70s
o also mentions
 Craig Baldwin "Other CinemATA" Saturday nightSF
 Valerie Soe from SF coming to UCD 25th MOnday 57pm

Genny Lim: Baclutha ship (fishing, cannery factory on
ship)
 Luna New Yr. Black Water
 Chinese Am.
RadicaLight: summation/video
Illuminating video
FeedBack: video databank




21313 Where'd yoU come from? yoU brought me here? that wasn't me?
Oh not yoU personally, but the social construction yoU and yer kind benefit
from continues to proprivilege yoU buoyoU. <where the civilizing act
attracts and needslave/blackslave to build eNlightenment and US white
civilized fully human human <image as if black person is savage hologram to
make whites feel superior>
21713 WEsterneUropeanglosaxonorm protestant
eNglish to another tongue w/o translation or otras ways to exhibit WASP
norms?
22113 DarrenMtg:
 has loaned me "Illegal art" DVD w/ amongst some great stuff is the
"Karen Carpenter story" done in dolls by Todd Haynes and a
pieceNvious of by Eileen Maxson "untitled" or called Cinderella+++
elsewhere.
o the Maxson uses audio dubbed over Disney vignettes to tell a
moREalistic version of womyn.
 similar to my work usingender in the stead of race and

then audio from other media instead of live narration or
poeticollaged writing.
 do believe I've found a great case stuDy
I'meet Darrin in aRt bldg. basement #55 DigitaLab so that he can
help me burn and coPy both the "Illegal aRt" and
"Aspect[ext/visualanguage]" DVDso I can return IA to Darrin and
the Aspect one to the VRC.
o eXtracting D from DVD Mac the Ripper






Quit/Shut DVDown

player
 by title, ch.
eXporto quicktime
 compression: Apple D/DVC PRO-/NTSC
 QualiTy Best
720 x 480 (DV-NTSC
create new MOV. File
Make movie
extractitle sets i.e. 1, 4, 5
 drag VOB file to MPEG streamclip
o MPEG Streamclip
o carry...
o shift power
22513
Hi Darrin,
Gearing up fer tomorrow's presentation and realized although the lab's a
small space, my vocalizing is subtleNough and I'm facing the screen (to
sync) that I believe I could use a mic that I don't have to handle, so I can
hold my script (or turn it should there be a music stand available): a headset
mic or mic attached to a mic stand would work. At any rate of
amplification, will see yoU after 6pm at the lab. DeNNiS 510.332.6536 just
in case yoU need to contact me sooner than later. DeNNiS
Hi Dennis,
We don't actually have a full size mic stand though we have a table
stand. We might be able to hook you up with a lavaliere mic plugged into
the some amplification. I'll work on something with our technician (Jesse in the Cc) during my office hour before class. See you tomorrow.
22613
Lavaliere would be fine. And sorry just to be more precise (tho' i know Jesse
has these for borrowing), I'll also need the adapter to plug my computer in
to play my DVDcopy for performance, the thumb drive of Eileen Maxson, and
a copy of my WHTHX-1138 excerpt. ThankseeyoU in a few. DeNNiS
Hi Dennis,
Yes, you're right. We have a mic stand.
Do you not have the performance copy on DVD? Just curious because I was
going to set you up for the performance in the other room and then have
you do the rest of what you need to do in the lab. You are probably in class
now. I guess we will find out soon.
3813 Brecht from "Less Certainty!!!:
The cinema's potential is to be found in its capacity to collect documents.
To present som philosophy or another, or the images of life, by means of the
sad fate of a once interesting actor of the fantastic who has fallen victim
today to that noble, measured existence...
another version of "'talking back" to the screen" & other filmicinematic
subversions akin to my work
 possibell hooks about purple rose of cair o utelling by black
mammy: p123 I liked the representation of the black woman p124
character in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. In the film
within the film she plays the traditional part of the fat mammy maid
that wa s uch a stock character in presixties Hollywoo d ramas.
That moment when she walks off the screen to express her
dissatisfaction wither job, wither dominating white mistress, and
wither overall filmic role delighted me. It was a brief, pleasurable
moment of cinematic resistance. Her few seconds of "talking back"
to the screen required audiences to really take a good look at her--to stop rendering her image invisible by keeping their gaze always
and only fixed on the white female star. Allen'subversive moment
(an uncommon one in his films, which tend to give us witty versions
of old racist, sexist stereotypes when representing black
womanhood) felt like an experiment.

Japanese speaking black man in Mystery Train: <feels like nice
filmic addition to Prezi which would eXemplify not only race/black
representational interventions but also historical Japanese roots of
my form>
o defamiliarization
o
the Subject w/o properties/proper ties/individual/independence/
31213 DarrinMtg:
 Détournement Situationists



UBU Web
"When Dialectics Break Bricks" yeand those who've alreaDy written
on this work
V.O.B. > Toast <in applications>
o Play DVD player on File open DVD Med.
 Find media pt. to Video TS folder

o Post on video burn to DVD
o MPG stream clip
o
5913 Jessemtg.
 after I'd included Hooks, Hall and Fiske (wanting to address
racethniciTy content as well as filmEDia structures) in annotated
bibliography for Jesse, I had to eXplain how his research could be
useful to me. After some walking and talking in his great, large
office, I was Able to aRticulate that as my movi.e.telling work is an
eXample of a once spoon-fed r/Only TVaddict to an aRtist
attempting to speak back in spite of the

61713
multimEDiaconglomerEating interpellating me through the
multimEDiamaster's tools filmediand language. He then lent me his
brand new book A Social History of Contemporary Democratic
Mediand asked me to order it from the library.
after leaving his office went straight to the library and was told who
to contact Juri Stratford andidrop the ball until this email [whew!]
on









Dennis:
We have this volume
Author
Drew, Jesse,1955-author.
Title
A social history of contemporary democratic media / by
Jesse Drew.
Published
New York : Routledge, 2013.
Description
xii, 224 pages ; 24 cm.
Record format
BK Book
 Check Availability
All items
 Call no.
Shields Library PN4784.C615 D74 2013 Regular Loan

 It is currently available.

Juri Stratford

51413 mtg. w/ Darrin Martin and his further help mentioning
"Can Dialectics Break Bricks?"
thisubtitled film détourning
Peter Burr's live cinema eXperiment & aNy critiques?
Media Manifestos by Regis Debray
Mark Dery's "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire
of Signs
Jeff Koons
DisabiliTy Studies: Darrin's collaborativeXperiences
53013 Fanon's Ch5 BlackSkin,WhiteMasks: the poetics and the white
referencespecially "
 [scene where black man shows up speck than larger] p101
 'You have come too late, much too late. There will always be a
world––a white world––between you and us: that impossibility on
either side to obliterate the past once and for.'

 p108 "...'When the whites feel they have become too mechanized,
they turn to the Coloreds and request a little human sustenance.'"
61713 Whilst researching more support fer the PARListo support my work
with video and language fer that matter I read a bit more stringently into an
online version of debordétournement and was eXcited to be rewarded
withisuggestion about film, specifically Birth of a Nation, which Professor
Fisher did elaborate on similarly in FMS1 about its innovation/origiNation of
so maNy film techniques and its obvioUS racist propaganda:

It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its
greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its
greatest beauty.

The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of
those powers is so glaring, that virtually any film that is above the
miserable average can provide matter for endless polemics among
spectators or professional critics. Only the conformism of those people
prevents them from discovering equally appealing charms and equally
glaring faults even in the worst films. To cut through this absurd
confusion of values, we can observe that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is one
of the most important films in the history of the cinema because of its
wealth of innovations. On the other hand, it is a racist film and therefore
absolutely does not merit being shown in its present form. But its total
prohibition could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the
secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the cinema. It would be
better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the
montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of
the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan,
which are continuing in the United States even now.
o Again can't get over how this resounds as an invitation
directly to my movietelling work. In addition, I stumbled on a
DVDcopy of Birth of Nation awhile back and was pondering
letting it go...Gotta dig it up...
62113 as completing firstwo QE lists recall from conversation with Lynette
that I can and should create PAR list similar. Thus though worried Jesse
anDarrin won't feel represented in firstwo lists, I eXtracthose texts mostly
focused on the PAR or WHTHX, which does clarify the other firstwo. After
submitting them a week after theNd of Spring, 2013, I am a bitired so prep
but don't complete PARag. although list is mostly done.
7113 After trying to gear up for a first Dissertation Prospectussle, receive an
emails from Lynette wanting to pin down the PAR in the nextWOWeeks
before she leaves. So w/o reading one of her emails I finish a first draft of
the PARlist in one day.
 in process pdfindivert my eyes towarpdf BishoPDFarticipation
o Her compilation of eSsayspeaks too well to my consumer to



producer concerns
PDFBourrialso
PDFBourriand
PDFBourriaudience PDFJayRemixing POstproducing
PDFostproduction
o also eNjoying and finding almostaneMbarassment of riches in
the language I would use to remix of his writings and quotes
describing otraRtists which describe my PAR work too well.
my critical eSsay Using just his language which I suppose
could help me order my IDEas before I fill in the interstices
with my purportedfOwndf thoughts
o
7313 pdfinDery ReaPDFery his aRticle Culture Jamming getting a little
confused w/his mention of Baudrillardf and Eco as possible theorists to
support my work as well, or maybe the reason why my work worksagainst or
Only short references to them, Benjamin, Brechtet cetera. spending more
time on what my work does than why i'm doing it...
o cut & pasted part of PDFubray but the PDFrench theory isn't
so sexy this late in the QEPAR game.
o
7513 Looking over notes of work w/Saritand wonder how KidlaTahimik's
neocolonial films might work for the PAR or more likely the dissertation.

<do I eNter summation to Darrin also?/Jesse's annotated bibliography? or
then all his in separateNtriesection?>
7913 REalized got "PDFistracted" by anotheRanciére "Critical Art" pdfiece in
PDFBishoParticipation and pdfergothe more obvious
PDFRanciér"EmancipateDSpectator" which is a bit overwhelming not so
much in his IDEas (although they aRe nicely stretching what I somewhat
alreaDy know) likeMbarassment of riches above in howell he alreaDy
aRticulates what I thought I might be writing abouthe activation of the
audience. It feels as though I could just quote tHIS first part of theSsay and
then he makes/i t akes thEmancipated turn...which is denser and likely as
useful.
 Not Only i'mpressed by his aRticulation of my Own vision/version
but also in how maNy ways/wordseem to connect to other texts I'm
using. Will obviously helPAR in discussing how my PAR attempts to
eMancipateDSpectator but also towarDissertation how my language
performance also interacts with the readear/listener audience:
gaps, dominanthUS work alongside and through Scott's dominant
and subordinate
o oh shit isn't Scott's hidden transcripto public transcript a large
part of what I'm doing withe content of
whitenesSupremaScene going from hidden to public or
attempting to YES the lastrong part of the eSsay Ranciere will
be the undergirded
 What's frustrating here is I knew this a good long time
ago and with all I've been i'mpacted in I lost sight of it
so there'sense I keep having to reinvent my Own
wheel----aRgargantuangargargargargargargargargarage
is too fuckingargantuanful.

pdf = peer distract find
71013 finisht RancierEmancipateDSpectator and thoroughly edified as he
wrote/spoke the perfectalkeSsay describing not Only my limited
hoperformeraudience but performereaderUnlimited. I am unsure how to not
incorporate sample remix all of thiseSsay thisession as it is just so right on
with my larger project of everyoneaNyone finding their voice and he reminds
me thathey we all have one which is what i'm trying to do with my work in
the PAR & beyond...K gotta rest and lethissingsingesinklean the sinkstOven
before a housemate comes home from long trip...then to the Outline
samples collages of quotes to prePARe for the criticalPApeR.
71313
Lessig wasuch an Easy read and read pieces of it in early Winter, 2013 [so
long ago now] going over it for quotes [feREmix from REMIX] and as he
begins to discuss copyright realize I've no bandwith nor time to spend on
this capitalist, lawyerly venture, although Warner Bros. aRe blocking
WEst.siDEsTroy on yoUtUbe and because it is critical, I should be able to
display it but until I can afford a lawyer or ask Professor DeKosnik at
UCBerkeley (having testified for the usage of film/viDEO in classroom
settings for edUCational purposes) fer advice someday. and amAzed at how
maNy of these latexts to the PAR have been PDF'speakingwriting of
copyright and remix.
As Lessigoes into REMIX Uses in education I'm reminded thathis can be a
parallel and way to find more methodoloGies to include the PAR as PARallel
PARalleys toward pedagogical Uses of REMIX or aNy aRtistic practice working
toward the type of learner visual, auditory, kinestheticetc. as well as reading
writing.
"Hip Hop didn't invent aNything; it REinvented everything?"
 MC Caz?
 <recheck this quote >
 from aRt of Rap
Lessig suggests looking at Soderberg.tv online and his work is amazing
toward talking about my work. possible case stuDy?
71513
Hello Lynette,
As UsUal/me sUal, I am returning yourequest for the PARtfolio late.
Pleasee attached PARagraph, questions and bibliography first and
PARJournal of Process in a Notebook Layout document. It includes the
PARDocumentation eMbedded in Section 7 as a Prezi and/or PDF document.
I've a couple of motion graphicscenes done on my WHTHXedit and have to
figure out how to show those to you without you having the AfterEffects
program. And in my prePARation for the critical PApeR, I included a
PARemix of quotes in Section 8 of the Journal of Process, which is where I
would like to get feedback for how this might fit intoward/in lieu of my
critical Evaluation section. Thanks for your patience. DeNNiS
ps and if the PARagraph, questions, bibliography is good to go so I can send
it to the rest of the QE committee
72913
looking over Eshun aRticle and he states this <put Itunes on 4hero a
drumNbass crew from eNgland he refers to in the aRticle [nice driving {the
beat and probably the activity at fairly high speeds} beats tho' a bit
repetitive in their technofication> :
180
 "Then there's this whole thing I was reading by Michel Chion.
Chion is a really interesting guy, this student of Pierre Schaeffer
who started by composing musique concréte, who then became a
theorist. So he's the best person on film and sound ever."
181

"'Sampladelia is mandate to recombinate.'"/sampladelic generation
186
 writer = concept engineer
187-8
Postmodernism doesn't meanything
 Benjamin...doesnt' work anymore
 remix/ology
o one-off dublate
quotation & citation, the idea of ironic distance doesnt' work...
189
 I think the combination of the dj and the writer makes a lot of
sense. I think that both are different kinds of remixology at work,
and that all we're doing is bringing writing and putting it onto the
secon d eck and just accelerating it as much as a record.


'The whole series of things about accidents, about bugs, abouthe
producer being someton who ca n urture a bug, who can breed a
bug. Simultaneously most of the key musics have been accidents,
they've been formed through errors. They're softwar e rrors in the
machine's programming, and they form these sounds – and the
producer's taken these sounds and nurtured this error, builto on
this mistake, and if you grab a mistake you've got a new audio
lifeform. It's quite common: back w/Can in the 70s, Holger Czukay
was saying machines have a lifeform, repetition is the life of
machines. <for chaos/errors allowed in the creative work/humand
vs precise modern machine technology>

not Only Using him to integrate quotes in REspectorAte at theNd of this
JOPAR but his Outsider concepts for attempt/failure to assimilate on "that
you get the sense that most African-Americans owe nothing to the statUS of
the human."
 Why try to be hUman when it is defined as whit=quals hUman
<use in AE or script of WTHX< and then everyonelse Uses that
difference/inabiliTy to fit to mimic in against Blacks to prop
themselves Up.

Checking Lew's book Treadwinds and he has a poem entitled "The Pyonsa's
Complaint" here's first few linestanzas:
 I left Seoul in the winter of 1935,
 When the biggest show in town
 Was Greta Garbo in Queen Christina.

 Just a year before, it would have been me








And not some faceless, dubbed-in English major
Who made Garbo speak in Korean,
For I was still the reigning Pyonsa
In the grand Myongdong movie houses.
The talkies came in
And I fell silent. . . .
8213
something eLse, this time from Spivak to paste in the "remix" REspectate
atheNd of this JOPAR:
"I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of advanced disciplinary
training, that accident of birth and education has provided me with a sense
of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent languages that are
useful tools for a bricoleur, especially when armed withe Marxist skepticism
of concretexperience as the final aribiter and a critique of disciplinary
formations."
8613
another JOPARemix addition from Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the
Cinema:
"Probably the idea of montage was suggested by the photomontages of
Rodchenko, another of the Lef, group, and George Grosz and John Heartfield
in Berlin. Buthis would only take things back one step: Raoul Haussmann,
speaking of Berlin Dadaism, explained, 'We called this process
photomontage because it embodied ou r efusal to play the part of the artist.
We regarded ourselves as engineers and our work as construction: we
assembled [in French monter] our work, like a fitter.'
81913
1. On Collage
Collage brings to the work (here the ethnographic text) elements that
continually proclaim their foreigneness to the context of presentation. Thes
e lement––like a newspaper clipping or a feather––are marked as real, as
collected rather than invented by the artist-writer. The procedures of (a)
cutting out and (b) assemblage are of course basic to any semiotic message;
here they are the message. The cuts and sutures of the research process
are left visible; there is no smoothing over or blending of the work's raw
data into a homogenous representation. To write ethnographies on the
model of collage would be to avoide the portrayal of cultures as organic
wholes or as unified, realistic worlds subject to a continuous explanatory
discourse. . . . The ethnography as collage would leave manifest the
constructivist procedures of ethnographic knowledge; it would be and
assemblage containing voices other than the ethnographer's as well as
examples of "found" evidence, data not fully integrated within the work's
governing interpretation. Finally, it would not explain away those elements
in the foreign culture that render the investigator's own culture newly
incomprehensible.
––James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art in Everybody's Autonomy..., Juliana Spahr
142
Brennan quote for JOPAR:
It is very difficult and thankless to challenge bothe content of a social illusion
and a profession's argumentative codes at the same time. But consider a
question commonly raised by documentary filmmakers: Can a politically
challenging content produce a new consciousness when a film relies on the
"talking heads" format of mainstream television? Without a frontal assault
on form as well as ideas, there are built-in limits to transformations in
thought. The values under attack are only reinscribed, now from a more
moral or more widely informed vantage point. (79)
91613
I can see in my mind a change in the script where the black man's responds
thathe couple's comments that color is so not you" that its the only one in
stock or "everyday's White Mayflower day here, or haven't you noticed?
92213
Lynette's article describes my overallegorical project apparently:
"Studies of ideologies, whether they be nation-state, religious, or domestic,
and of the relations between ideology and the individual subject, led to
allegory being used to critique systems of power. Systems of power
that are perceived as all-pervasive and determining are impossible to
describe, so allegory enables a critique by sidestepping a realist
agenda and positioning writers to use strategies and techniques that
foreground the assumptions of the system so they can be questioned and
challenged. Certain devices are semiotically coded to do this, for example,
the dystopian genre, use of which in the mid twentieth century temporarily
gave 'allegory' the characteristics of genre. William Golding's Lord of the
Flies (1960), Orwell's Animal Farm (1946), Anthony Burgess' Clocwork
Orange (1962), have many generic features that disorient and generate
contradiction, yet place the text within a particular temporal and
socialocation that asked the then readers to re-think their own concurrent
settings " <this is my overall project and THX... as well as WHTHX-1138.>
10113
1stemail
Hello Lynette,
Thanksagain for an invigorating Oral portion to the QE partone
yesterday. Just wondering if I needed to bring the projector for nextweek's
PARfermance(Xcellence hopefully) and if so where in T&D do I find
one. Thanks and back to the PARiting.
2ndemail
Just recalled that yoU offered to send the committee all a copy of Hillary's
video of my performance at the Fall symposium a couple of years ago. I
would love to have a copy of this for my own documentation moving
[imagesound] forward as well so if/when you've the time could you send it
to me/us? Thanksagain for all yoU do. DeNNiS
10313
Dear QECommittee,
Pleasee attacht PARmaterials finally. Thank you for your patience and
flexibility in D.celeration. Just a few notes: the documentation comes in two
forms, the orignal Prezi, worth sampling their wares to play witheir features
and my work and the pdf. version, which gives you an IDEa but does not
have the filimicinematic zoom and pull back shot capabilities that make Prezi
an ideal platformovietelling documentation; the Journal of Process can
possibly be surveyed in any sectional order except for sections 8 and 9.
which together combine to become the critical paper; if you've the time
please read section 8 th e pigraphREmix to fathom its po[et]ential for
knowledge in the/yer interstices and it s way on yoU; and then eventually
read section 9; finally, I've included Quicktime copies of both the in process
PARfinal edit of the WHTHX video as well as a half copy of a WEst.siDEsTrOy
performance. Thanksagain all yoUr time and patience and looking forward
to finishing this QEPARcess Monday at 11. DeNNiS
DocumentatiONPrezi
10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
Professor HuntereminD[s]ocumentation is necessary as PARt of the PAR
portfolio PARtfolio and my stomach tightens because I've never d one
previoUSly and even though she showsand tells me I can documenthe
performaNyce way I findeem fit, the vastarray [program sends merror
message telling me it caNO longer informE of misspellingrammerrors which
mustry to place screenshot in thispot] [place breaking the
misspellingrammerrroar messag e re]
[must commenthat "vastarray" is a wonderful misspelling to have broken
through the misspellingrammerroar threshold on: DeNjambmentWins!] of
documentation examples, possibiliTies, pOetentials to documenthe
performance of WHTHX-1138 w/o actually performing it nor by just simply
showing a video of my performing it.
Eventually, I talk to Professor Hunter as well as my girlfriend about PowerPt.
pOeteNtial portential for documenting WHTHX... I like the IDEa of being able
to move from scriptext to viDEO clipsetc.
ProfessoRodriguez presents onearlyinthequarter day of clAsA2 Contemporary
AsianAmerican eXperience who/which I TAsA2 for and the movement as well
as the template of the program that is very visually eNgaging: zooming,
withdrawing and just moving to theNext or previouslideshowing a movement
I've not seen in PowerPt.
Before a meeting before clAsA2 with ProfessoRobyn, Professoraves ashe
works on it about a new program she's foundiscovered to helpresent her
lectures. I assume it is KeyNote, Mac's version, but she tells me it's this
program called Prezi her friends introduced her to; again her presentation is
intriguing to theye as aRest of the quarter's Prez i ntations...
My high school teachingirlfriend found her more sophisticated students
almost all of a sudden were making the better presentations in class with a
program called Prezi.
31413 One morning I check out Prezi and it doeseem to work well but I am
a biturned off by the Only way to purchase it isubscription [see AE purchase
above]. Still, I find a ghostly white room template in which I play withe
"disappear as peer" phrase and I am hookt knowing it can be a place to
compose poetree in the future the commitment doesn't appear as
problematic.
TheneXtomorrow dAy I finish the "disappear as peer" piece and begin
scouting the other parts of the white room for places to eNact/docUment
WHTHX....
Thenafter an i'mpacted Winter, 2013 quarteragain, after finishing up
otragain late work, I get to focus on the zoom-in of Prez i n the white roomy
scriptext, online stillimages from THX-1138, waiting to figure outhe video
eXcerpts fromy Own burns/dubs or yoUtube/online versions.
32613
SOrryagainGlenda,
fer the lateness and I know there aRe other ways I want to eNter viDEO
as filesoon to this documentation; however, i liked playing w/the
composition not to mention learning how to use the program: pleasee
attacht prezi file and if that's too many steps to open up there's a pdf.,
which doesn't fly around like the original but at least shows the work. I can
stop by yer office hrs. next qtr to show yoU the original if yoU don't see it
tHERe. Sorry again fer BEing so slow and aNy impact on yer break. Hope
yer havingreatimeither way! DeNNiS
2 attachments — Download all attachments
WHTHXT32613Glendasend.pez
3376K Download
WHTHXTpr326lendasend.pdf
6851K View Download
4113
Hi Dennis!
Thanks for sending the
files. Prezi seems like the
best choice for you! I hope
your Spring quarter starts
well!
> <WHTHXT32613Glendasend.pez><WHT
HXT-pr326lendasend.pdf>
// g L e N d a * d R e W * *
*
CriticalPApeRemixinquotes
"REspectate:aPerformance asREmixinquotes"10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
"The filmic dream is dreamed nocturnally..."
 RegisDebray froMEDiaManifestos

"'The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to
any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. [ . . . ] It is
the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity.'"
 ClaireBishoParticipation quoting GuyDebord
"the public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms -- wraithlike
images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the
observations of Neal Gabler:
Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven
out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction
between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization
of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century."

Marc Dery quotiNealGabler, "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing
and Sniping in the Empire of Signs"
"Their task was to eradicate, with tools borrowed from the modern lexicon,
the mediocrity of an alienated everyday life in which the artwork served as a
screen, or a consolation, representing nothing other than the materialization
of a lack."
 Nicolas BourriaudPostproduction
"A movie-watcher attends a public screening as if it were a ceremony or
staged spectacle..."
 Debray froMEDiaManifestos
Kelley writes: "Art must concern itself with the real, but it throws any notion
of the real into question. It always turns the real into a facade, a
representation, and a construction. But it also raises questions about the
motives of that construction."
 Bourriaud sampling Kelley, Postproduction
"Among other things such context can turn out to be the physical situation of
the viewer determining the psychological effects of the viewed object or
image. The context of cinematic viewing produces a reality effect [effet du
reel] unlike that of television viewing. Wrapped in the movie house's
darkened anonymIty that Roland Barthes characterized as "pre-hypnotic," I
am riveted to the screen's reflections. They swallow me up. You cannot tear
yourself away; the deception could hardly be more alluring, the promise of
ecstasy fuller. Even the body's own motive forces have been blocked. I can
of course turn my head away or close my eyes, yet such gestures of refusal
here are unnatural. This is so not only because I have paid to watch and am
seated in a row amIdst strangers, but because the projected sequences'
continuity will not sag, immersing me ne varietur in compelling successions
of images
independent of my will."
 Debray froMEDiaManifestos
"I shall then suggesthat ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it
'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms'
the individuals into subjects (i t ransforms them all) by that very precise
operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be
imagined along the lines of the most commonplac e veryday police (or other)
hailing: 'He y ou t here!'"
 LouisALLthusser from "IDEoloGy and the IDEoloGical State"
So film would be more akin to a deliberate dream, a voluntary but extreme
somnambulism..."
 Debray, MediaManifestos

"How to box with shadows?"
 Dery, "Culture Jamming..."
"Joseph is suggesting that we inhabit pre-existing narratives and unceasingly
refabricate the forms that suit us. Here the goal of the image is to introduce
playacting into systems of representation to keep them from becoming
frozen, to detach forms from the alienating background where they become
stuck if we take them for granted. A superficial reading of the characters
might lead one to believe that Joseph is an artist of the unreal, of popular
entertainments. Yet the fairy-tale figures, cartoon characters, and science
fiction heroes that populate this democracy do not call for a flight from
reality but urge us to experience our reality through fiction."
 NicolasBourriaud on PierreJoseph, Postproduction: Culture a s
creenplay: How aRt Reprograms the World
"Meanings are first produced by a social framework."
 BourriaudPostproduction
"Contrary to those who dismissed such work as being too 'social,'
proponents of video collectives countered that the seemingly 'spontaneous'
generation of art, as lionized in the art world, typically manifests the
internalization of social norms and culture, absorbed from the artists' social,
economic, and political position, and is thus ultimately a collective product as
well."
 JesseDrew, A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media
"This way of turning modernist forms against the ideologies that saw them
emerge - the modern ideologies of emancipation, of the sublime - as well as
against the art world and its beliefs, testifies more to Cattelan's caricatured
ferocity than to a so-called cynicism."
 Bourriaud on MaurizioCattelan, Postproduction
"If spectacle denotes a mode of passivity and subjugation that arrests
thought and prevents determination of one's reality, then it is precisely as an
injunction to activity that Debord advocated the construction of 'situations'."
 ClaireBishoParticipation with Debord
'IF A VIEWER SAYS, "THE FILM I SAW WAS BAD," I SAY, "IT'S YOUR FAULT;
WHAT DID YOU DO SO THAT THE DIALOGUE WOULD BE GOOD?" (JEAN-LUC
GODARD)' quoted by BourriaudPostproduction
"A troublemaker, the eternal bad student skulking at the back of the
classroom. We have the impression that Cattelan considers his formal
repertoire as piles of homework to be completed, a set of imposed figures, a
sort of detention which the artist/dunce takes pleasure in turning into a joke.
One of his earliest significant pieces, Edizioni dell'obligio, 1991, was
composed of schoolbooks whose covers and titles had been modified by
children, a sort of scornful revenge against any agenda."
 Bourriaud on Cattelan, Postproduction
"...culture jammers are Groucho Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had
in the joyful demolition of oppressive ideologies. As the inveterate prankster
and former Dead Kennedy singer Jello Biafra once observed, "There's a big
difference between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7-11, and 'creative crime'
as a form of expression...Creative crime is...uplifting to the soul...What
better way to survive our anthill society than by abusing the very mass
media that sedates the public?...A prank a day keeps the dog leash away!"
 Der y Jello, "Culture Jamming..."
"The film experience styles itself as a distraction that stands out against
my daily routine of time and local space..."
 Debray froMEDiaManifestos
"...by constructing a narrative space that captures quotidian tasks and
structures in script form..."
 BourriaudPostproduction
"A central question emerged: is independent video production Only
concerned with new forms and the self-conscioUse of the medium? Or can it
work to reintegrate media practice with daily life, challenge complacency and
cultural passivity, and confront the public's expectations and prejudices?"
 Drew, ...DemocraticMEDia
The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological guerrilla warfare" imagined by
Umberto Eco. "[T]he receiver of the message seems to have a residual
freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way...I am proposing an action
to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of
interpretation," he writes. "[O]ne medium can be employed to communicate
a series of opinions on another medium...The universe of Technological
Communication would then be patrolled by groups of communications
guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception."
 Der y Eco
"In its most general formula, critical art intends to raise consciousness of the
mechanisms of domination in order to turn the spectator into a conscious
agent in the transformation of the world."
 JacquesRanciére, ""Problems and Transformations in
o
Critical Art"
"'Video was going to change the world by and collapse the art world into
itself by posing a challenge 'to the sites of art production in society, to the
forms and 'channels' of delivery, and to passivity of reception built into
them.'"
 Drew, ...Democratic MEDia...
"The world that Huyghe describes is based on constraining narrative
structures, whose "soft" version is the sitcom; the function of artistic
practice is to make these structures function in order to reveal their coercive
logic and then to make them available to an audience likely to reappropriate
them. This vision of the world is not far removed from Michel Foucault's
theory of the organization of power: from top to bottom of the social scale, a
"micropolitics" reflects ideological fictions that prescribe ways of living and
tacitly organize a system of domination.
In 1996, Huyghe offered fragments of screenplays by Stanley Kubrick,
Jacques Tati, and Jean-Luc Godard to participants in his casting sessions
(Multiple Scenarios). An individual reading the screenplay for 2001: A Space
Odyssey on a stage only amplifies a process that traverses the entirety of
our social life: we recite a text written elsewhere. And this text is called an
ideology. The challenge, then, is to learn to become the critical interpreter of
this ideological scenario, by playing with other scenarios and by constructing
situation comedies that will eventually be superimposed on the narratives
imposed on us."
 Bourriaud on PierreHuyghe, Postproduction
"This reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new whole was one of the
tools that contributed to surpassing artistic activity based on the idea of
'separate' art executed by specialized producers. The Situationist
International applauded the detournement of existing works in the optic of
impassioning everyday life, favoring the construction of lived situations over
the fabrication of works that confirmed the division between actors and
spectators of existence."
 BourriaudPostproduction
"IN SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, DEBORD'S TRANSLATOR, DONALD
NICHOLSON-SMITH, LEAVES DÉTOURNEMENT IN FRENCH, OCCASIONALLY
INTERCHANGING IT WITH 'DIVERSION'.- DÉTOURNEMENT CAN ALSO MEAN
HIJACKING, EMBEZZLEMENT AND CORRUPTION
 Bourriaud footnote, Postproduction
"Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics, culture jammers, like Eco's
"communications guerrillas," introduce noise into the signal as it passes from
transmitter to receiver, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended
interpretations. Intruding on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and
other media artifacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they
decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent. Jammers offer irrefutable
evidence that the right has no copyright on war waged with incantations and
simulations. And, like Ewen's cultural cryptographers, they refuse the role of
passive shoppers, renewing the notion of a public discourse."
 Dery, "Culture Jamming..."
"This 'dialectical work in things' that renders them available to art and for
subversion - by breaking the uniform run of time, by introducing a
temporality within another, by changing the status of objects and the
relationship between exchange signs and art forms..."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the
eradication of the traditional distinction between production and
consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work.
 BourriaudPostproduction
"'...by merging art with socialife and making auDIEnce and producer
interchangeable'"
 Drew,...DemocraticMEDia
"DJ culture denies the binary opposition between the proposal of the
transmitter and the participation of the receiver at the heart of many
debates on modern art. The work of the DJ consists in conceiving linkages
through which the works flow into each other, representing at once a
product, a tool, and a medium. The producer is only a transmitter for the
following producer, and each artist from now on evolves in a network of
contiguous forms that dovetail endlessly. The product may serve to make
work, the work may once again become an object: a rotation is established,
determined by the use that one makes of forms."
 BourriaudPostproduction
"...active subject eMpowered by the experience of physical or symbolic
participation. The hope is that the newly-emancipated subjects of
participation will find themselves able to determine their own social and
political reality. An aesthetic of participation therefore derives legitimacy
from a (desired) causal relationship between the experience of a work of art
and individual/collective agency."
 BishoParticipation
"Postproduction is a technical term from the audiovisual vocabulary used in
television, film, and video. It refers to the set of processes applied to
recorded material: montage, the inclusion of other visual or audio sources,
subtitling, voice-overs, and special effects. As a set of activities linked to the
service industry and recycling, postproduction belongs to the tertiary sector,
as opposed to the industrial or agricultural sector, i.e., the production of raw
materials."
...
"The prefix "post" does not signal any negation or surpassing; it refers to a
zone of activity."
 BourriaudPostproduction
"PAPER TIGER TELEVISION IS A PUBLIC ACCESS TV SHOW.
IT LOOKS AT THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY VIA THE
MEDIA IN ALL OF THEIR FORMS.
THE POWER OF MASS CULTURE RESTS ON THE TRUST OF
THE PUBLIC. THIS LEGITIMACY IS A PAPER TIGER.
INVESTIGATION INTO THE CORPORATE STRUCTURES OF
THE MEDIA AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THEIR CONTENT IS
ONE WAY TO DEMYSTIFY THE INFORMATION INDUSTRY.
DEVELOPING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS ABOUT THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY IS A NECESSARY FIRST STEP TOWARDS
DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF INFORMATION RESOURCES."
 Drew quoting Paper Tiger Television

"The end of the modernist fe/os (the notions of progress and the avantgarde) opens a new space for thought: now what is at stake is to positivize
the remake, to articulate uses, to place forms in relation to each other,
rather than to embark on the heroic quest for the forbidden and the sublime
that characterized modernism."
 BourriaudPostproduction
"'The disruptive efforts of Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, intended to
transgress against not just the art world but conventional social reality and
thereby become an instrument of liberation.'"
 Drew quoting Martha Rosler, ...DemocraticMEDia
"The Black Panther films and other Newsreel films were created to be
participatory, advocacy media, not detached observations with the classic
omniscient voice of authority."

Drew, ...DemocraticMEDia
"The second argument concerns authorship. The gesture of ceding some or
all authorial control is conventionally regarded as more egalitarian and
democratic than the creation of a work by a single artist, while shared
production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of greater risk and
unpredictability. Collaborative creativity is therefore understood both to
emerge from, and to produce, a more positive and non-hierarchical social
model."
 BishoParticipation
"Practitioners and promoters of microcinema recognized that media making
and media viewing are symbiotic and should be considered as social
practice, as a collective, participatory act. Microcinema was a concrete,
positive answer to the solitary and isolated viewing practices that
surrounded the television set in the living room."
 Drew,...DemocraticMEDia
Indeed, it is striking that the tools most often used by artists today in order
to produce these relational models are preexisting works or formal
structures, as if the world of cultural products and artworks constituted an
autonomous strata that could provide tools of connection between
individuals; as if the establishment of new forms of sociality and a true
critique of contemporary forms of life involved a different attitude in relation
to artistic patrimony, through the production of new relationships to culture
in general and to the artwork in particular.

BourriaudPostproduction
o
One of the main impetuses behind participatory art has therefore been a
restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning.
 BishoParticipation

inventing protocols of use for all existing modes of representation and all
formal structures. It is a matter of seizing all the codes of the culture, all the
forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them
function. To learn how to use forms, as the artists in question invite us to
do, is above all to know how to make them one's own, to inhabit them.
 BourriaudPostproduction
IT'S SIMPLE, PEOPLE PRODUCE WORKS, AND WE DO WHAT WE CAN WITH
THEM, WE USE THEM FOR OURSELVES. (SERGE DANEY) quote by Bourriaud

In the language of today’s computer geeks, we could call the culture that
Sousa celebrated a “Read/Write” (“RW”) culture:* in Sousa’s world (a world
he’d insist included all of humanity from the beginning of human
civilization), ordinary citizens “read” their culture by listening to it or by
reading representations of it (e.g., musical scores). This reading, however, is
not enough. Instead, they (or at least the “young people of the day”) add to
the culture they read by creating and re-creating the culture around them.
 LessigREMIX
Sousa’s fear was that this RW culture would disappear, be displaced by—to
continue the geek-speak metaphor—an increasingly “Read/Only” (“RO”)
culture: a culture less practiced in performance, or amateur creativity, and
more comfortable (think: couch) with simple consumption.
 LessigREMIX
* The analogy is to the permissions that might attach to a particular file on a
computer. If the user has “RW” permissions, then he is allowed to both read
the file and make changes to it. If he has “Read/Only” permissions, he is
allowed only to read the file.

Lessig footnote, REMIX
Ben’s writing had a certain style. Were it music, we’d call it
sampling. Were it painting, it would be called collage. Were it digital, we’d
call it remix. Every paragraph was constructed through quotes. The essay
might be about Hemingway or Proust. But he built the argument by clipping
quotes from the authors he was dis- cussing. Their words made his
argument.
And he was rewarded for it. Indeed, in the circles for which he was writing,
the talent and care that his style evinced were a measure of his
understanding. He succeeded not simply by stringing quotes together. He
succeeded because the salience of the quotes, in context, made a point that
his words alone would not.
... Ben’s style is rewarded not just in English seminars. It is the essence of
good writing in the law. A great brief seems to say nothing on its own.
Everything is drawn from cases that went before, presented as if the
argument now presented is in fact nothing new. Here again, the words of
others are used to make a point the others didn’t directly make. Old cases
are remixed. The remix is meant to do something new. (Appropriately
enough, Ben is now a lawyer.)
 LessigREMIX
I think the combination of the dj and the writer makes a lot of sense. I think
that both are different kinds of remixology at work, and that all we're doing
is bringing writing and putting it onto the secon d eck and just accelerating it
as much as a record.
More Brillian T han The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction: Concept
Engineered by Kodwo Eshun
"slashing," or textual poaching, is another. (The term "slashing" derives from
the pornographic "K/S" -- short for "Kirk/Spock" -- stories written by female
Star Trek fans and published in underground fanzines. Spun from the
perceived homoerotic subtext in Star Trek narratives, K/S, or "slash," tales
are often animated by feminist impulses. I have appropriated the term for
general use, applying it to any form of jamming in which tales told for mass
consumption are perversely reworked.)
 Dery, "CultureJamming"
As Negativland’s Don Joyce described to me, what happens when technology
“democratiz[es] the technique and the attitude and the method [of creating]
in a way that we haven’t known before....[I]n terms of collage, [what
happens when] anybody can now be an artist”?2
 LessigREMIXing DonJoyce of Negativland
These RW media look very much like Ben’s writing with text. They remix, or
quote, a wide range of “texts” to produce something new. These quotes,
however, happen at different layers. Unlike text, where the quotes follow in
a single line—such as here, where the sentence explains, “and then a quote
gets added”—remixed media may quote sounds over images, or video over
text, or text over sounds. The quotes thus get mixed together. The mix
produces the new creative work—the “remix.”
These remixes can be simple or they can be insanely complex. At one
end, think about a home movie, splicing a scene from Superman into the
middle. At the other end, there are new forms of art being generated by
virtuosic remixing of images and video with found and remade audio.
 LessigREMIX
However complex, in its essence remix is, as Negativland’s Don Joyce
described to me, “just collage.” Collage, as he explained,
[e]merged with the invention of photography. Very shortly after it was
invented . . . you started seeing these sort of joking postcards that were
photo composites. There would be a horse-drawn wagon with a cucumber in
the back the size of a house. Things like that. Just little joking composite
photograph things. That impressed painters at the time right away.
 LessigREMIXing Joyce,
Perhaps the most well-known practitioner of this was the artist John
Heartfield, whose biting satirical collages attacked the rise of facism in
Germany. For example, in one of Heartfield's images, the slogan "millions
stand behind him" combines with and image of Hitler with his hand in the
fascist salute while bankers behind him place millions in his open palm.
 Drew,...Democratic MEDia
"Probably the idea of montage was suggested by the photomontages of
Rodchenko, another of the Lef, group, and George Grosz and John Heartfield
in Berlin. Buthis would only take things back one step: Raoul Haussmann,
speaking of Berlin Dadaism, explained, 'We called this process
photomontage because it embodied ou r efusal to play the part of the artist.
We regarded ourselves as engineers and our work as construction: we
assembled [in French monter] our work, like a fitter.'"
 Haussmann in Wollen'SignsandMeaningintheCinema
It's this negotiation between the forms of art and those of non-art that
permits the formation of combinations of elements capable of speaking
twice: from the readability and from their unreadability.
Therefore, the combination of these two forces necessarily takes the
form of a realignment of heterogeneous logics. If collage has been one of the
great techniques of modern art, it is because its technical forms obey a more
fundamental aesthetico-political logic. Collage, in the most general sense of
the term, is the principle of a 'third' aesthetic politics. Prior to mixing
paintings" newspapers, oilcloth or clock parts, it mixes the strangeness of
the aesthetic experience with the becoming-life of art and the becoming-art
of ordinary life. Collage can be carried out as a pure encounter of
heterogeneities, testifying wholesale to the incompatibility of two worlds. It's
the surrealist encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine, showing
the absolute power of desire and dreams against the reality of the everyday
world, but using its objects. Conversely, collage can be seen as evidence of
the hidden link between two apparently opposed worlds: thus do the
photomontages of John Heartfield, revealing the reality of capitalist gold in
the throat of Adolf Hitler, or those of Martha Rosier, mixing photographs of
the horror of Vietnam with advertising images of American comfort. In this
case, it's not any longer the heterogeneity of the two worlds that should
nourish a sense of the intolerable but, on the contrary, the making evident
of the causal connection that links one to the other.
But the politics of collage finds its balancing point where it can combine
the two relations and play on the line of indiscernability between the force of
readability of sense and the force of strangeness of non-sense.
 RanciéreCriticaRt
"In a universe of products for sale, preexisting forms, signals already
emitted, buildings already constructed, paths marked out by their
predecessors, artists no longer consider the artistic field (and here one could
add television, cinema, or literature) a museum containing works that must
be cited or "surpassed," as the modernist ideology of originality would have
it, but so many storehouses filled with tools that should be used, stockpiles
of data to manipulate and present."
 BourriaudPostproduction
This more common practice pushes “[Japanese]kids to develop more
persona lives, and remix-oriented pathways to the content.” Kids in the
second and third grades, for example, will all
carry around just a little sketchbook...with drawings of manga [cartoon] characters
in them. That’s what [Japanese] kids do. Then by fourth or fifth grade there are
certain kids that get known to be good at drawing and then they actually start
making their original stories. Then at some point there needs to be an induction
into the whole doujinshi scene, which is its own subculture. That usually happens
through knowing an older kid who’s involved in that.
American kids have it different. The focus is not: “Here’s something, do
something with it.” The focus is instead: “Here’s something, buy it.” “The
U.S. has a stronger cultural investment in the idea of childhood innocence,”
Ito explains, “and it also has a more protectionist view with respect to media
content.” And this 'protectionism' extends into schooling as well.
'Entertainment' is separate from “education.” So any skill learned in this
'remix culture' is 'constructed oppositionally to academic achievement.'
Thus, while 'remix culture' flourishes with adult-oriented media in the United
States, 'there’s still a lot of resistance to media that are coded as children’s
media being really fully [integrated] into that space.'"
...
"'A very high proportion of [US] kids who engage in remix culture,' for
example, 'have had experience with interactive gaming formats.' 'The AMV
scene is dominated by middle-class white men'—in contrast to the most
famous remixers in recent Japanese history, the 'working-class girls' who
produced doujinshi. Most 'have a day job or are full-time students but...have
an incredibly active amateur life. . . . [They] see themselves as producers
and participants in a culture and not just recipients of it.' That participation
happens with others. They form the community. That community supports
itself."
 LessigREMIXing Mimi Ito
"Their meaning comes not from the content of what they say; it comes from
the reference, which is expressible only if it is the original that gets used.
Images or sounds collected from real-world examples become 'paint on a
palette.' And it is this 'cultural reference,' as coder and remix artist Victor
Stone explained, that 'has emotional meaning to people. . . . When you hear
four notes of the Beatles’ ‘Revolution,’ it means something.'33 When you
'mix these symbolic things together' with something new, you create, as
Söderberg put it, 'something new that didn’t exist before.'"
 LessigREMIXing Stone & Soderberg,
"WolfVostell's blending of celebrity images and war images showed the dark
side of the American dream: Krzysztof Wodiczko's projections of homeless
figures onto American monuments denounced the expulsion of the poor from
public space:...
Heterogeneous collage generally takes the form of a shock, which reveals
one world hidden beneath another: capitalist violence behind the happiness
of consumption: market interests and violent class struggle behind the
apparent serenity of art. Art's self-criticism thus blended with criticism of the
mechanisms of state and market domination."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
o
...—soderberg.tv—that carries all his own work. That work stretches back
almost twenty years.
“Read My Lips” is a series Söderberg made for a Swedish company called
Atmo, in which famous people are lip-synched with music or other people’s
words. They all are extraordinarily funny (though you can’t see all of them
anymore because one, which mixed Hitler with the song “Born to Be Alive,”
resulted in a lawsuit) [found online just now & amazing].
The best of these (in my view at least) is a love song with Tony Blair and
George Bush. The sound track for the video is Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love.”
Remember the words “My love, there’s only you in my life.” The visuals are
images of Bush and Blair. Through careful editing, Söderberg lip-synchs
Bush singing the male part and Blair singing the female part. The execution
is almost perfect. The message couldn’t be more powerful: an emasculated
Britain, as captured in the puppy love of its leader for Bush.
The obvious point is that a remix like this can’t help but make its argument,
at least in our culture, far more effectively than could words. (By
“effectively,” I mean that it delivers its message success- fully to a wide
range of viewers.) For anyone who has lived in our era, a mix of images and
sounds makes its point far more power- fully than any eight-hundred-word
essay in the New York Times could. No one can deny the power of this clip,
even Bush and Blair supporters, again in part because it trades upon a truth
we all— including Bush and Blair supporters—recognize as true. It doesn’t
assert the truth. It shows it. And once it is shown, no one can escape its
mimetic effect. This video is a virus; once it enters your brain, you can’t
think about Bush and Blair in the same way again.

LessigREMIXing Soderberg
"Whether text or beyond text, remix is collage; it comes from combining
elements of RO culture; it succeeds by leveraging the meaning created by
the reference to build something new."
 LessigREMIX
"Martha Rosler's photomontages from the series Bringing the War Home
(1967-72), juxtaposing advertising images of domestic American happiness
with images of the war in Vietnam. Nearby was another work devoted to the
hidden side of American happiness."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
"Why did we have to use the actual original . . . the actual thing? Well, it’s
because the actual thing has a power about it. It has an aura. It has a magic
to it. And that’s what inspires the work."
 LessigREMIXing Mark Hosler
Gillick's works question the dividing line between fiction and fact by
redistributing these two notions via the concept of the scenario. This is seen
from a social point of view, as a set of discourses of forecasting and planning
by which the socioeconomic universe and the imagination factories of
Hollywood invent the present. The production of scenarios is one of the key
components in maintaining the level of mobility and reinvention required to
provide the dynamic aura of so-called free-market economies.
 Bourriaud about UamGillick, Postproduction
This five-minute movie is made from remixing the scores of movies made
throughout history about Jesus’ crucifixion. The audio behind these images is
a revivalist preacher who repeatedly says (during the first minute),
“Christianity is stupid.” The film then transitions at about a minute and a half when the preacher says, “Communism is good.”
 LessigREMIXing The Mashin’ of the Christ.
Huyghe's work aims to bring to light these implicit scenarios and to invent
others that would make us freer: citizens would gain autonomy and freedom
if they could participate in the construction of the "bible" of the social sitcom
instead of deciphering its lines.
 Bourriaud about Huyghe, Postproduction
Video and film clip manipulation and commentary, music mashups,
voiceover replacement, phony subtitling under television scenes, and much
much more comprise a large part of what is flowing through the
Internetoday. It could be truthfully stated that much of this material is just
for entertainment, but it would be hard to sorthat part out from the large
amount of media manipulation that is commentary, social activism, or
critique and criticism of commercialism, political hypocrisy, and our current
political and social situations, all of which––unlik e Ntertainment––would be
protected by the provisions of fair use, without facing copyright restrictions.
 Drew, DemocraticMEDia...
"Remix is also and often, as Mimi Ito describes, a strategy to excite
'interest-based learning.' As the name suggests, interest-based learning is
the learning driven by found interests. When kids get to do work that they
feel passionate about, kids (and, for that matter, adults) learn more and
learn more effectively."
 LessigREMIXing Ito
A sampler, a machine that reprocesses musical products, also implies
constant activity; to listen to records becomes work in itself, which
diminishes the dividing line between reception and practice, producing new
cartographies of knowledge. This recycling of sounds, images, and forms
implies incessant navigation within the meanderings of cultural history,
navigation which itself becomes the subject of artistic practice. Isn't art, as
Duchamp once said, 'a game among all men of all eras?' Postproduction is
the contemporary form of this game.
 BourriaudPostproduction
As Henry Jenkins notes, '[M]any adults worry that these kids are ‘copying’
preexisting media content rather than creating their own original works.' But
as Jenkins rightly responds, 'More and more literacy experts are recognizing
that enacting, reciting, and appropriating elements from preexisting stories
is a valuable and organic part of the process by which children develop
cultural literacy.' Parents should instead, Jenkins argues, 'think about their
[kids’] appropriations as a kind of apprenticeship.' They learn by remixing.
Indeed, they learn more about the form of expression they remix than if
they simply made that expression directly.
 LessigREMIXing Jenkins
...the sample no longer represents anything more than a salient point in a
shifting cartography. It is caught in a chain, and its meaning depends in part
on its position in this chain. In an online chat room, a message takes on
value the moment it is repeated and commented on by someone else.
Likewise, the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the
termination point of the "creative process" (a "finished product" to be
contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities.
We tinker with production, we surf on a network of signs, we insert our
forms on existing lines.
 BourriaudPostproduction
o
...the interesting part of remix isn’t something new. All that’s new is the
technique and the ease with which the product of that technique can be
shared. That ease invites a wider community to participate...
remix with 'media' is just the same sort of stuff that we’ve always done with
words. It is how Ben wrote. It is how lawyers argue. It is how we all talk all
the time. We don’t notice it as such, because this text-based remix,
whether in writing or conversation, is as common as dust. We take its
freedoms for granted. We all expect that we can quote, or incorporate, other
people’s words into what we write or say. And so we do quote, or
incorporate, or remix what others have said.

LessigREMIX
I left Seoul in the winter of 1935,
When the biggest show in town
Was Greta Garbo in Queen Christina.
Just a year before, it would have been me
And not some faceless, dubbed-in English major
Who made Garbo speak in Korean,
For I was still the reigning Pyonsa
In the grand Myongdong movie houses.
The talkies came in
And I fell silent. . . .
 Walter Lew, "The Pyonsa's Complaint"
In this spirit, Huyghe produced a film {Blanche Neige Lucie, 1997) about
Lucie Dolene, a French singer whose voice was used by the Disney studios
for the dubbed version of Snow White, in which Lucie tries to obtain the
rights to her voice. A similar process governs the artist's version of Sidney
Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon. in which the protagonist of the
original bank robbery (to which Lumet bought the rights) finally has the
opportunity to play his own role one that was confiscated by Al Pacino: in
both cases, individuals reappropriate their story and their work, and
reality takes revenge on fiction. All of Huyghe's work, for that matter,
resides in this interstice that separates reality from fiction and is sustained
by its activism in favor of a democracy of social sound tracks: dubbing
versus redubbing.
 Bourriaud on Huyghe, Postproduction
In Huyghe's work, delayed representation is the primary site of social
falsification: the issue is not only to restore speech to individuals but also to
show the invisible work of dubbing while it is being done. Dubbing, 1996, a
video in which actors dub a film in French, plainly illuminates this general
process of dispossession: the grain of the voice represents and manifests the
singularity of speech that the imperatives of globalized communication force
one to eradicate. It is the subtitle versus the original version, the global
standardization of codes.
 Bourriaud on Huyghe, Postproduction
At the Aperto at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Bulloch exhibited a video of
Solaris, the science fiction film by Andrei Tarkovsky, replacing its sound
track with her own dialogue.

Bourriaud about Angella Bulloch, Postproduction
The activities of DJs, Web surfers, and postproduction artists imply a similar
configuration of knowledge, which is characterized by the invention of paths
through culture. All three are "semionauts" who produce original pathways
through signs. Every work is issued from a script that the artist projects
onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects
new possible scripts, endlessly.
 BourriaudPostproduction
In short, will the electronic frontier be wormholed with "temporary
autonomous zones" -- Hakim Bey's term for pirate utopias, centrifuges in
which social gravity is artificially suspended -- or will it be subdivided and
overdeveloped by what cultural critic Andrew Ross calls "the militaryindustrial-media complex?
 Dery, Bey, Ross "CultureJamming..."
"Sometimes," Godard writes, "the class struggle is the struggle of one image
against another image and one sound against another sound."

Bourriaud sampling Godard, Postproduction
It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its
greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest
beauty.
The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of
those powers is so glaring, that virtually any film that is above the miserable
average can provide matter for endless polemics among spectators or
professional critics. Only the conformism of those people prevents them
from discovering equally appealing charms and equally glaring faults even in
the worst films. To cut through this absurd confusion of values, we can
observe that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in
the history of the cinema because of its wealth of innovations. On the other
hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being shown
in its present form. But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable from
the point of view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the
cinema. It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without
necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that
made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and
of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the
United States even now.
 WolmanDeborDétournement invitation for "Birth of a Nation"
"Postproduction artists invent new uses for works, including audio or visual
forms of the past, within their own constructions. But they also reedit
historical or ideological narratives, inserting the elements that compose
them into alternative scenarios."

BourriaudPostproduction
In this new form of culture, which one might call a culture of use or a culture
of activity, the artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network of
interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets
preceding narratives. Each exhibition encloses within it the script of another;
each work may be inserted into different programs and used for multiple
scenarios. The artwork is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an
infinite chain of contributions. This culture of use implies a profound
transformation of the status of the work of art: going beyond its traditional
role as a receptacle of the artist's vision, it now functions as an active agent,
a musical score, an unfolding scenario, a framework that possesses
autonomy and materiality to varying degrees, its form able to oscillate from
a simple idea to sculpture or canvas. In generating behaviors and potential
reuses, art challenges passive culture, composed of merchandise and
consumers. It makes the forms and cultural objects of our daily lives
function. What if artistic creation today could be compared to a collective
sport, far from the classical mythology of the solitary effort?
'It is the viewers who make the paintings,' Duchamp once said, an
incomprehensible remark unless we connect it to his keen sense of an
emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration and
negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view the
work.
Why wouldn't the meaning of a work have as much to do with
the use one makes of it as with the artist's intentions for it?"
 BourriauDuchamPostproduction
"These guerrilla semioticians are in pursuit of new myths stitched together
from the fabric of their own lives, a patchwork of experiences and
aspirations that has little to do with the depressive stories of an apolitical
intelligentsia or the repressive fictions of corporate media's Magic Kingdom.
"The images that bombard and oppose us must be reorganized,' insist Stuart
and Elizabeth Ewen. "If our critique of commodity culture points to better
alternatives, let us explore -- in our own billboards of the future -- what they
might be." Even now, hackers, slashers, and snipers -- culture jammers all - are rising to that challenge"
 Dery, & Stewart & Elizabeth Ewen, "CultureJamming"
"One of the main impetuses behind participatory art has therefore been a
restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning."
 BishoParticipation
"...critical art intends to raise consciousness of the mechanisms of
domination in order to turn the spectator into a conscious agent in the
transformation of the world. We know the dilemma that weighs upon this
project. On the one hand, understanding alone can do little to transform
consciousness and situations. The exploited have rarely had the need to
have the laws of exploitation explained to them. Because it's not a
misunderstanding of the existing state of affairs that nurtures the
submission of the oppressed, but a lack of confidence in their own capacity
to transform it."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
"These procedures of delegitimation, passed from a critical to a ludic
register, become, if pushed, indistinguishable from those produced by power
and the media, or by the market's own forms of presentation...
The only remaining subversion is, then, to play on this undecidability; to
suspend, in a society working towards the accelerated consumption of signs,
the meaning of the protocols of reading those signs."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
"Art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities and signs, but
to a lack of connections. As the principle theorist of this school writes: 'by
offering small services, the artist repairs the weaknesses in the social bond'.'
The loss of the 'social bond', and the duty incumbent on artists to work
to repair it, are the words on the agenda. But an acknowledgement of this
loss can be more ambitious. It's not only the forms of civility that we will
have lost, but the very sense of the co-presence of beings and things that
constitutes a world."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
"Gonzalez-Foerster uses psychoanalysis in numerous projects as a technique
that allows the emergence of a new scenario: faced with a blocked personal
reality, the analysand works to reconstruct the narrative of his or her life on
the unconscious level, allowing the mastery of images, behaviors, and forms
that, until then, have eluded him or her.
 Bourriaud about Gonzalez-Foerster, Postproduction
"I liked the representation of the black woman character in Woody Allen's
The Purple Rose of Cairo. In the film within the film she plays the traditional
part of the fat mammy maid that wa s uch a stock character in presixties
Hollywoo d ramas. That moment when she walks off the screen to express
her dissatisfaction wither job, wither dominating white mistress, and wither
overall filmic role delighted me. It was a brief, pleasurable moment of
cinematic resistance. Her few seconds of "talking back" to the
screen required audiences to really take a good look at her---to stop
rendering her image invisible by keeping their gaze always and only
fixed on the white female star. Allen'subversive moment (an
uncommon one in his films, which tend to give us witty versions of old
racist, sexist stereotypes when representing Black womanhood) felt like an
experiment."
 Bell Hooks about Woody Allen, Reel to Real

"A sense of the artwork as analytical of scenarios allows him to substitute
the historian's empirical succession ("this is what happened") with
narratives that propose alternative possibilities of thinking about the
current world, usable scenarios and courses of action. The real, to really be
thought, must be inserted into fictional narratives; the work of art, which
inserts social facts into the fiction of a coherent world, must in turn generate
potential uses of this world, a mental logistics that favors change."
 BourriaudPostproducinGillick
"In opposition to the dialectical practice that accentuates the heterogeneity
of elements to provoke a shock, bearing witness to a reality marked by
antagonisms, mystery emphasises the kinship of the heterogeneous.
It constructs a game of analogies in which they witness a common world,
where the most distant realities appear as if cut from the same sensible
fabric and can always be linked by what Godard calls the 'fraternity of
metaphors'."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
"Human society is structured by narratives, immaterial scenarios, which are
more or less claimed as such and are translated by lifestyles, relationships to
work or leisure, institutions, and ideologies. Economic decision-makers
project scenarios onto the world market. Political authorities devise plans
and discourses for the future. We live within these narratives. Thus, the
division of labor is the dominant employment scenario; the heterosexual
married couple, the dominant sexual scenario; television and tourism, the
favored leisure scenario. 'We are all caught within the scenario play of late
capitalism," writes Uam Gillick. 'Some artists manipulate the techniques of
'prevision' so as to let the motivation show."15 For artists today contributing
to the birth of a culture of activity, the forms that surround us are the
materializations of these narratives. Folded and hidden away in all cultural
products as well as in our everyday surroundings, these narratives
reproduce communal scenarios that are more or less implicit: a cell phone,
an article of clothing, the credits of a television show, and a company logo
all spur behaviors and promote collective values and visions of the world."
 BourriaudPostproducinGillick

"The contradictory attitudes shown by the main aesthetic paradigms
today express a more fundamental undecidability about the politics of art.
This undecidability is not the effect of a postmodern turn. It is constitutive:
aesthetic suspension lets itself be interpreted in two ways. The singularity of
art is linked to the identification of its autonomous forms with the forms of
life and with possible politics. These possible politics are only ever realized in
full at the price of abolishing the singularity of art, the singularity of politics,
or the two together. Being conscious of this undecidability today leads to
opposed feelings: in some, a melancholy with regard to the shared world
that art carried within itself, if this had not been betrayed by political
enrollment or commercial compromises; in others, an awareness of its
limits, the tendency to play on the limitation of its powers and the very
uncertainty of its effects. But the paradox of our present is perhaps that this
art, so uncertain of its politics, might be invited to a higher degree of
intervention by the very deficit of politics proper. It's as if the shrinking of
public space and the effacement of political inventiveness in a time of
consensus gave a substitutive political function to the mini-demonstrations
of artists, to their collections of objects and traces, to their mechanisms of
interaction, to their provocations in situ or elsewhere. Knowing if these
'substitutions' can recompose political spaces, or if they must be
content to parody them, is certainly one of the questions of today."
o RanciéreCriticaRt
"Huyghe fabricates structures that break the chain of interpretation in favor
of forms of activity: within these setups, exchange itself becomes the site of
use, and the script-form becomes a possibility of redefining the
division between leisure and work that the collective scenario
upholds. Huyghe works as a monteur, or film editor. And montage, writes
Godard, is a 'fundamental political notion. An image is never alone, it only
exists on a background (ideology) or in relation to those that precede or
follow it.' By producing images that are lacking in our comprehension of the
real, Huyghe carries out political work: contrary to the received idea, we
are not saturated with images, but subjected to the lack of certain
images, which must be produced to fill in the blanks of the official
image of the community."
 BourriaudPostproducinGodard and Huyghe
"In calling for spectators who are active as interpreters, Ranciere implies
that the politics of participation might best lie, not in anti-spectacular
stagings of community or in the claim that mere physical activity would
correspond to emancipation, but in putting to work the idea that we are all
equally capable of inventing our own translations." Unattached to a
privileged artistic medium, this principle would not divide audiences into
active and passive, capable and incapable, but instead would invite us all to
appropriate works for ourselves and make use of these in ways that their
authOrs might never have dreamed possible."
 BishoParticipation with Ranciére
"The images Joseph offers must be experienced: they must be appropriated
and reanimated and included in new arrangements. In other words,
meanings must be displaced. And tiny shifts create enormous
movements. Why do so many artists strive to remake, recopy,
dismantle, and reconstruct the components of our visual universe?...
To produce an alternative space and time, that is, to reintroduce the
multiple and the possible into the closed circuit of the social, and for
this, the artist must go back as far as possible in the collective
machinery."
 Bourriaud about Joseph, Postproduction
"We must stop interpreting the world, stop playing walk-on parts in
a script written by power. We must become its actors or co-writers.
The same goes for works of art: when Huyghe reshoots a film by Alfred
Hitchcock or Pier Paolo Pasolini shot by shot or juxtaposes a film by Warhol
with a recorded interview with John Giorno, it means that he considers
himself responsible for their work, that he restores their dimension as
scores to be replayed, tools allowing the comprehension of the current
world... restore works of the past to the world of activity...."
 BourriaudPostproduction

"Hip-Hop didn't invent anything; Hip-Hop reinvented everything."
 Grandmaster Caz
"'Even if it is illusory and Utopian,' Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster explains,
'what matters is introducing a sort of equality, assuming the same
capacities, the possibility of an equal relationship, between me - at the
origins of an arrangement, a system - and others, allowing them to
organize their own story in response to what they have just seen,
with their own references.'"
 Bourriad sampling Gonzalez-Foerster
"'Spectatorship is not the passivity that has to be turned into activity. It is
our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectators
who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and
dreamt. There is no privileged medium as there is no privileged starting
point.'"
 BishoParticipation quoting Ranciére
[eNteRanciéREspectator"EmancipateDSpectator" wholeSsay 'ere or if I had
Only oneSsay to make my point I would point athis one...then
Bourriaud(ience)'sPostproduction]
"The forms he produces always seem suspended; there is an ambiguity to
how "finished" or "unfinished" they are. The "incomplete" status of Gillick's
works raises the question: at what point in the development of the industrial
process did mechanization destroy the last traces of human intervention?
What role does modern art play in this process? Modes of mass production
destroy the object as scenario in order to assert its foreseeable, controllable,
routine character. We must reintroduce the unforeseeable, the
uncertainty, play..."
 BourriaudPostproducinGillick
"...play on the fluctuating border between critical provocation and
the undecidability of its meaning..."
 RanciéreCriticaRt
CriticadhesiveBrainstormintowriting
10/3/2013 7:22:00 PM
"Studies of ideologies, whether they be nation-state, religious, or domestic,
and of the relations between ideology and the individual subject, led to
allegory being used to critique systems of power. Systems of power that are
perceived as all-pervasive and determining are impossible to describe, so
allegory enables a critique by sidestepping a realist agenda and positioning
writers to use strategies and techniques that foreground the assumptions of
the system so they can be questioned and challenged. Certain devices are
semiotically coded to do this, for example, the dystopian genre, use of which
in the mid twentieth century temporarily gave 'allegory' the characteristics of
genre. William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1960), Orwell's Animal Farm
(1946), Anthony Burgess' Clocwork Orange (1962), have many generic
features that disorient and generate contradiction, yet place the text within a
particular temporal and socialocation that asked the then readers to re-think
their own concurrent settings "

Lynette Hunter, "Allegory happens: allegory and the arts post1960"
o This definition of allegory apparently describes not only
George originaLucas's dystopic THX-1138 (1971) but
memovietelling piece WHTHX/Film Blanco./Fade to Blanco
(2011)...
Who is my audience? 1st me, then my girlfriend, then anyone who'll slow
down Enough to read me.
 ultimately, the autonomy here comes in that there is a large part of
me that writes just to finish a poem, a thought and that's eNough
 maybecause writing is either in the moment or to the future
o i am more interested much of the time in what is happening
in the moment of writing; if someone wants to slow down and
read me read themselves read life then then are my ultimate
audience.
o as with crit race/ postcolonial I believe my works of imagining
and thinking theorizing and creating is knowing for change to
happen minds have to have time to sink into hearts.
 what is a good word fer slowing, slackening, stalling,
D.celerating





respite, reprieve, liberation, letup, lull, clearing
exculpation: show not guilty, stay,
audience comes and goes, interlocutors k
D.celerating a formoving toward ritual
D.celerating is necessary for interventionsuchas
Gotanda's "historical-race" to be eMployed
 businesspeedasUSual glosses over in
colorblind white fog seeing human shapes
missing distinct differences in historical
representations of dominant whiteness and


subordinate black, brown, yellow, etc. on
allevels of society.
generally, violence more likely to occur in
haste; whilstalling allows for a breadth of
acknowledgement of the intricacies and
complexiTies of historical processes.
TransparenCy tool of Capital Colonial
business as usual
o OpaciTy slows in its obstruction

o And this formovietelling is meant for larger audiences than a
poem solitaReader such as myself
 thus whatype of audience/reader?
 their Usual spoon-fed ness disrupted
 more as submersion in an aRt piece than total
film experience
 as US audiences less activated then say Japan per
quote on how children activated in their art early

section 8.
OpaciTools aRe D.celerating
o D.celeryAte: slowly while humming
S&G'slowdownyamovetoofastyagottamakethemomentlast...re
peathisphrase
 <Pheelin'GroovyToomuch?
o whilst humming same phrase over and over again:
o separate stalk of celery, wash each piece thoroughly, eat each
piece meditating on each bite, begin to try to peel the
linestringsribsveins running through and floss teeth,
 other options
 ask audience for floss
 add nut butter to really slow things down?


"Possessing little, dispenSABLE as paper, concerned with ostensibly
insignificant details in direct confrontation w/WEstern traditions of
accumulation, reason and UtiliTy,...
o Keving Concannon in review of YokOno's zen influenced work

Writing into the gaps of MEDia as ISER or Barthes or Lynette's ref. to earlier
artist expects readers intowriting
"...individuals reappropriate their story <their
voices/representatons how it relates to my larger proj.> and their
work
SimilaRto, parallel to my interestuDy in the
voice/language/speech/utterance the finding voice and representations in
new MEDia is a place of intervention I am looKing for myself as well for my
audience to see their way through the dark of THEatre, the white fog of tHEir
HEgmonic minds to their own voice/speech/utterance/language: on the page
or iNewMEDia. If I can speak to and re-project my own/anti-fTP on WEstern
HEgemony, then maybe, this will help "key" an audience member to her own
po[et]ential for speaKing to/writing into MEDia Iserly gaps, omissions,
mis/representations. It is likely the audiencespeciall y
oungergrowingUpmoreMEDiasubmerged already have surpassed what I want
to sanction through my movietelling work, [e.g. photoshopping celebrity
heads into mundane holiDay parTy and the infinite recombinants on the
internet], however, then for my Own practice it is taking the tools of cultural
imperialism (as the language and representations in the previous basic
portion of my project) and retelling, re-projecting, reeXposing the fTP and
complicating, subverting, D.celerating, D.colonizing in the process myself as
much as possible and then others who have the wherewithal to take up new
MEDia in neWays and complicate the post-neocolonial in its current military-
industrial-prison complex contemporaneouSLY distracting, assimilating,
obliterating––through its multimedia propaganda machine––any authentic
sense of self, community, autonoMY, AgenCy. Thus, my first intervention is
inserting my voice into MEDia if not so new filmic discourse as an eXtension
of the poeticritical on the page. My primary objective revealed in the
dissertation prospectussleXposing the fTP and all its analogs still holds true
and in some ways can be morEffective in its direct and obvious Use of
representation and the complicating of the representations most audiences
visually take too easily for granted.
 ForeXample, in WEst.siDEsTrOy worksagainst the normatiWEstern
perspective portrayals of brown people, POCs, PuertorRiqueneos by
first beginning witheir speaking, allowing them to speak critically,
intelligently aboutheir plight, even remaing somewhat opaque in
the non-sequitirisms of scientific and less contextualanguage, not to
mention the speed of this first half of the piece. As fTP analogs
within mainstreaMEDia television, film, video, internet production
unconsciou[on the]sly delete t/races of originalocal, appropriATE
language and accents as inappropriate representations of
humorousignorance, the Latinaccent/eSpanolanguage
appropriations (apts fer short) employed in WEst.si... combine with
th e Xtended Enunciation of letter s yllables and a frank if not nonsequitir discussion about Puerto Ricand Vieques plight to counter
that notion [humoroUSignorance]. Thus, the basiColonial tool of
appropriation can be eMployed as subversion of dominant hiccups
of fTP all over US again.
o The second half of WEst.siDEsTrOy begins with the Jets, the
white gang representing thevery[theivery] the very colonial
military thuggery MANifesting historicALLy. As with Gotanda's
historical[egal{itarianot}]race, white is
understooD[ominant]HIStorically and the
flyboystand/walkreap in as jets make thistatement about
White WEsterneUrocentricolonial military practice in a
different mode, an allegorical happening, with white bodies
and singing [foreboding] voices stripped of their exoskeleton
technologicaRmo[U]r, screaming jet eNgines and weapons of
mass destruction (their chief advantages over chiefs) to reveal

a truth usually erased in the second act of the root of
epistemic violence a S pivak reminds us...sWEEping the
shrapnel under the rug, the toupee, playing hide and seek in
Robert McNamara's white fog...
 Each segment brings a balance to
normatiWEsterepresentative tendenCies: well-spoken
brown people and antiheroicolonial whites.
In a similar fashion where white is the neWhite,
WHTHX/FilmBlanco./Fade to Blanco.... strips whiteness of its usual
self-constituting Other in the dystopic white skin against white
uniform against white light against white walls...that is, until the
hologram of a black male gyrating shows us Lucas's vision of the
ffTP, futuristic firsTransgressive Projection or hologranalog. I
suppose the hologram of a "savage dance" is a bit of the Brechtian
distancing that could allow a more savvy audience the distance to
see themselveseeawhitemanwatching a hologram of a black man
gyrating and not just a reification by hologram? I need more time
withis but needs must submithis so will continue to ponder as I
continue to perform and layer WHTHX. SimilaRtothe accents in

WEst.si...I see the choice as worth the fTP reminder than the
possible reification of the fTP especially as Lucastutely brings it
dystopically farther into the future, an audience should shudder at
the persisting analog to the fTP as opposed to "Yeah, they're stillike
that."
The objectifying of the color white as the last dystopicolor in a
mov[i]e not unlike FirstNations author Thomas King's writing short
story narratives where Native bodies are the objects flying and
crashing into a modern urban landscape or eXotic presents of a
white bourgeois present to expose allegorically both the limits to
white cognizance of Native anything as well as an incommensurate
Native culture "set against" concrete. Rather than metastasisti c
ontrast (Lloyd exposes to us as internalized), Film Blanco. shows
everything's indistinguishably WHITE or transparent (holographic
even), as in Lucas' dystopic vision, assimilation and annihilation for
that matter has worked, the erasure continuing as today through
pharmaceuticAL diffusions.
o
This media interventionist act is PARallel to the tropes of the first utterance,
speech, tongue, language, voice through language or writing. It is my Own
self-poeticonstitution self-consolidation action continuing through writing
with a filmicinematic backdrop as addeDimension. This does ironically
imitate fTP however, I stop short at the erasing t/races and obviously am
interested in the oppositeXposure full disclosurEveNationalisTraditionalist
misogynies on NoNWEstern HIStories within a context of Male military
violent culture and history and WHITEWEsterneUrocentricolonialimperial
assmilationist logics.

As mentioned atheNd of the AfterEffectsGEnEaoloGy in section 4 of
this Journal of Process, the newertome concepts will be employed
further throughout WHTHX/Film Blanco./Fade to Blanco... that is,
visually as well as within the script. Certainly, Glissant's terms
transparency and opacity as well as a larger perspective on
assimilationist logics will help to bring more cohesion to the overall
piece since that which I attempt to describe is essentially the
whitening or bleaching process of the mind that Cliff describes or
the face that White writesoaks. It makesense that text (i.e.
audiorvisual) in content refer to languagedUCation assimilation and
obliteration WoW just occurred to me here[Xample of how this
JOProcess actually contributes to the creative PARcess] as if
theseepages of Otra languageso thathey're
speaKing/hearing/[we're]seeingraphics as colonial memory
hiccuping in tongues asWell as the colonialI'mperial actseep
crimeseep [dastardlybastardly] into the speaking, the visual space,
the thoughts....
o This hearkens back to the beginning of the process when I
first needed to write the piece and put i t ogether for its
original performance for LitQuakeSF. Because of the aRtist's
location amidst his coursework/gradingrating, he did not [still
has not really] felt he could settle into the piece as fully as he
was Used to really sense and resonate with it fully. It was
also as if he did not quite know all he needed to know about
this Fade to Blanco....process. After writing the dissertation
prospectussle he certainly feels further along as well as
studying critical race theory, he feels he has the facts mostly
if that is ever true[perhaps all the folks in Film Blancould
consider themselves colorblind until they glimpse the Black
Man {maybe this inspiration is arising a day after the main
portion of the QEs overwith, there is some space at least les s
tress opening up the flow...possibly? or is it justhis writing.
I'm unsure but as I began withere I am sure I have not felt I
had the bandwith to really see the whole WHTHX picture as
well as feeling I had not gathered enough research on white
supremaCy and privilege yet}]. The seepage into the writing
here is a good sign and is just a matter of time.
In terms of audience, as mentioned in the QEOralexam proper, I write for
myselfirstandformost: for both movietelling pieces WEst.siDEsTrOy and
WHTHX-1138/Film Blanco./Fade to Blanco... there is a wide breadth of
gathering thatakes place before the aRtist begins to feel reaDy to compose
in essentially a collage of language. Up until then, the political had been a
difficultheme to tackle and still maintain the aesthetic. As Ranciere's quote
in the previouSection 8 [as well as to eNd eXamone not so ceremoniously]
most aptly describes the, methodoloGy of collage that allows Philip, mine
and maybe other writers of the missing passage to gather from a mouthful
of silence or foreign matter and utter, writeXpress that which cannot be said
is to juxtapose the aesthetic or unreadable with the readable, mundane such
as "No Writing on White Surfaces" apted from an overhead projector in an[y]
UCD classroom widens into the larger context of the Lloyd'subject without
properTies. At aNy rate of gathering language text, as my own audience,
when I am able to bring texts that work on a literal, factual, historical,
theoretical, critical, psychological, emotional, poetic mine and others
[EECummings in WEst.si...] and especially politicalevel, mostly placing them
nextoeach other [like a good mix tape] but also weaving language and song
when the opportuniTy arises, this MEmber of my audience can be mostly
satisfied. In my artisticreative history, as the political has been the most
difficult to use without losing the aesthetics because the urgenCy of the
political D.mands clariTy utmost and aesthetics relies often on "non-sense"
as Ranciere states, i a m o satisfied when i ncorporate the political without
sapping so much from the aesthetic. Collage has been the primary mode of
in these movietelling [Walter Lew's term] pieces but allegory also works in
the poetic refrain "white fog blankets US..." as well as the flexibility of
meaning between the images original cinematic narratives and the new
projections of complicating language.
 After the aRtist/writer i s atiated with the breadth and placement of
language, a brief history of the origins of my work and oh thishould
be summarized as I previously did in a summary for Darrin Martin.
o A s omeone who grew up TVComplacenTVComplacenCy, I am
always having to raise my watching self from the ROMalaise
COWch. My work/word/play w/riting and v/iDEo has become
an attemp to break the trance and makeNtrancesintothe work
that has worked me in the pasTVC. Although Lessig's text
gives me some basic language (or acronyms) with which to
write and articulate what I am doing with text and viDEO go
beyond the R/O read only to the R/W read and writing, this
was not my original intent when I began creating
WEst.siDEsTroy. It began as a way to incorporate a beautiful
harmonic arrangement of the song "Somewhere" from the
original WeSTSIDE SToRY I'd sung in an Oakland chorus and
the gathering, the collagediting, the aesthetico-politicalllowed
the rest to occur.
o
As an eXperimental poet, I was justhinking aNy place
beyond the two-dimensional page was a bonus. Narrating to
film fit the bill. According to Walter Lew, the foremost scholar
on this form of film narration, movietelling (his coined word)
was likely a practice---from Nigeria to Germany---in many if
not all cultures which eNjoyed silent films. However, the
place its popularity increased to such a heighthathe narrators
became morenowned than the actors, directors, or the films
themselves, was Japan. According to Lew, the form was
called katsuben and the narrators wereferred to as benshi. A
consequence of Japan's colonial conquests in Asia was the
spreading of the film narration form to such of Japanese
colonial reaches as Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwand, Korea. The
Koreanarrators wereferred to as pyonsa. This is the form I
believe best describes my resistant, subversiversion,
didacticontent (as well as form). The Japanese colonial
propaganda included filmscreenings in Korean movie theaters
where the pyonsa would use veiled poetic language to
disseminate Koreanationalist, and cultural IDEoloGy
concurrently. Similarly, I am interested in using the
representations, tropes and forms of WEsterneUromultiMEDia
or the ISA[lltusser']s (Ideological State Apparatuses) to
subvert, resist, Emerge from under white, patriaRchal,
neoliberal capitalisthumb: myself and hopefully audiences as
well. eXperimental poets in the Bay Area have appropriated
the form and call it neo-benshi through a video-editor Konrad
Steiner, who actually asked me to write my first film
narration. I chose WEST SIDE story as the film to base my
piece on, chose the scenes and ordered them for him to edit.
I added language in a week, rehearsed in another and
performed it for a Language Poetry beginning of the yearly
event called "Poet's Theatre", which usually feels like a bunch
of not so well rehearsed players reciting their asyntactical,
nonarrative, experimentalanguage lines in not so well blocked
places on a stage. However, this year, Poet's Theatre
apportioned an evening for what Steiner coined as neo-benshi
but is a bit of a misnomer. The scene still supports
expermentaLanguage poetSFOakland BAyareas doing
whathey call neo-benshi as far as I know, but I have not been
asked back since I did not respond to another Konrad request
in loyalTy to Walter Lew and our more political, historical
pyonsa/movietelling claim on it. Thus, the most obvious
audience for this is the eXperimentaLanguage poetry scene of
the SFOaklandBAyarea because this resurgence occurred and
I believe continues to occur there. Walter Lew might argue
that in his book, theatre, world, the form had never
disappeared, as with the appropriative mode of fTP, white
WEsterneuRocentricolonilimperial fog prevented Steiner et al.
and the eXperimentaLanguage communiTy seeing there were
figures (apparently not opaquenough even being of a
differentracethnicity) past and present doing film narration
previous to them. Withint o' D. celeration time for a
consultation occursinstead of a glossing over Once Upon a
time in the WEstagainarrative.... I know some of Walter's
associates such as a Pilipino-American poet Paolo Javier have
a while back done another movietelling showcase in New York
City. I've been too busy to keep tabs. The
experimentaLanguage community has a bit of a structure for
the movietelling form to continue to remain active. However,
the speed of the cultural imperial intellectual appropriationce
again has divided the form into movi.e.telling East with
Walter Lew's shadoWord productions and neo-benshi WEst




with Language poetSFOaklandBAyarea.
Another audience, an artsy Latino crowd at Galeria De La Raza
certainly gave me the most eNthusiastic feedback on the
WEstsiDEsTrOy piece. Similarly, a mostly AsianAmerican crowd at
KSW's 40th Anniversary [documented in Section 2] felt like insiders
to my commentary on white privilege in the performance of
WHTHX-1138.
I am excited to perform both pieces for my meditation center
[EBMC, my spiritual home] in Oakland probably for their
Dharmathonext year when I've less on my plate [coursework] or if
nothen maybe as part of some other EBMCommunity showcase. I
attend a Thursday night people of color sit and would primarily
perform for them but feel more comfortable about the white people
from the center attending there because of the leadershiPOC and
the tenets of the center, this type of critique is already a part of the
practice of this community.
Therefore, both pieces are meant to affirm the continued impact of
White WEsterneUrocentricolonialimperial past and present
persisting impact/affect and on People of Color by addressing
colonialimperial impacts and representative imbalances as well as
whiteness and its erasing t/races; obversely, both pieces are meant
to unsettle White WEsterneUrocentricolonialimperial assmilationist
logics in any audience to complicate normative discourse and
HEgemony.
In terms of putting the movietelling form out to a larger audience, I
would like to query the Asian American Film Festival put on in the
SF Bay Area by the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) to find
out if they would like to allow movietelling pieces to open up
different phases of the festival as most pieces run a short ten
minutes. I imagine to get a foot in the door CAAMight suggest we
curate our own segment of the festival (e.g. shorts, documentaries,
youth, animation, movietellings). However, thiseems like marginal
exposure andoes not allow for movietelling's complementary
possibiliTies to features not unlike an opening band. For instance,
as director's often introduce their films, requiring a PA, this would
be the minimal extra set-up necessary as a movie theatre would
obviously be equipped for film/video projection. Along with the
primarily white Language poetry community, the South Asian
community has buoyed some of their writer/artists in the
movietelling form in the Bay Area as well. I would certainly ask
those writers as well as invite Walter Lew and his Eastcoast crew to
join me in bringing movietelling to the AAFF at some point in the
near future.
o I have performed the WEst.si...piece at in San Franciscobased Artist Television Access, an "artist-run, non-profit
organization that cultivates and promotes culturally-aware,
underground media and experimental art" a few years ago so
this should certainly be a place to attempt another
movietelling presentation or again to complement ATAs
already nonormative complement of video art and
performances. From their video and film curatorial priorities
[incorporating and interviewing African American curators
curating "Black Radical Imagination" on their website
currently], I am hopeful thATA is D.celerating enough not to
preclude at least AfricanAmerican involvement in their work,
so there is a glimmer. In addition, this might actually be a
better place to offer a workshop in movietelling as they would
likely have artists within the community who could help keep
the computech film/video costs down.
 There are also venues: restaurants and bars who
certainly do video/filmic projections in theiregular
business hours. I am thinking of a high end restaurant
Foreign Cinema in San Francisco, which projects films
on a large high wall in the middle of the restaurant as
festival in itself or again to complement some other
feature the restaurant might show in not so
regularestaurant hours: once in while, a late Saturday
nightreat for late-night diners witheir after dinner
drinks? However, the politics of mi pieces may be too
much. I do recall years ago, Film Arts Foundation had a
reception there though so it would more likely have to
be a special event outside of business hours
[D.celerated?]
 In a totally different direction, although I have
done a successful workshoperformance within
Walter Lew's poetry students at the University of
Miami years ago now and also offered a workshop
to Kearny Street Workshop that if I'm recalling
correctly had no one sign-up, I am interested in
the performance montage worshopo[et]entials.
As Zibell [examone] used Jerzy Grotowski's
performance montage form to create performance
from a literary source and personal narratives, so
a movietelling version of performance montage
would bring the montage back to the
filmicinematic and the less or unconscious
psychological. Deriving from the Freudian idea of
the psychological projection, I am interested in
incorporating narratives around participants'
psychological projections to build movietelling
pieces that would work as a projection screen
instead of an intimate partner or family member,
et al. with which the particpants could bring a
shiftransformationegotiatable new narrative to
bear/bare. Maybe too ambitious, but the
workshop would ideally start with an arts
therapist doing creative group work, role-playing,
family constellation work [where the person doing
the work has others who do not know her family
member perform the other family memberoles to
see what can be worked out] to expose and
presence basic traumas, triggers, displacements,
or projections. If thiseems beyond the scope of
the workshop, maybe a more simplified version of
exercises [exorcises] what narrative a participant
is most running on, triggered by in the moment or
wants to shiftransform. Or to save time and
therapist, a participant might be asked to bring a
basic narrative in their life they want to
shiftransform. Participants should choose a film
to excerpt and edit by how analogous or literal it
is to their own narrative. From there, the
participants homework would be to find the
scenes in the chosen film that most speak to their
personal narrative. Once their scenes were
chosen, they would work with a video editor
(presumably there would be only one) to compile
a final edit. Whist waiting their turn, language
collection would be the task, certainly focusing as
the edits are finalized. After applying language to
the edit and writing in the gaps, rehearsals for a
week until a final workshoperformance as well as
a final debriefing would be the extent of the
workshop. Certainly, the
SFOaklandBerkeleyMarin BayAreaRtherapoetics
would be the setting for such a
workshoperformance. A condensed version might
also be possible in international festival settings.

"We are not saturated with images, but subjected to the lack of certain
images, which must be produced to fill in the blanks of the official image of
the community."
 BourriaudPostproducinGodard and Huyghe
"In calling for spectators who are active as interpreters, Ranciere implies
that the politics of participation might best lie, not in anti-spectacular
stagings of community or in the claim that mere physical activity would
correspond to emancipation, but in putting to work the idea that we are all
equally capable of inventing our own translations." Unattached to a
privileged artistic medium, this principle would not divide audiences into
active and passive, capable and incapable, but instead would invite us all to
appropriate works for ourselves and make use of these in ways that their
authOrs might never have dreamed possible."
 BishoParticipation with Ranciére
o The above Bourriaud[ience] and Bishop with Ranciére
quotepigraphs sum up in an Isereaderesponse methodology
as well as a large thrust of my work in both movietelling
pieces WEst.siDEsTrOy as well as WHTHX/Film Blanco./Fade
to Blanco..., not to mention much of my written creative and
critical work as well as postcolonial writers such as those from
the Caribbean.
Finally, Fade to Blanco....is the best choice for title of this here piece or
maybe WHTHX-Fade to Blanco... because WHTHX does still evoke whitext,
as in most if not all WEstern textstill resonate with the
firsTransgressiveProjection and WEstern self-constitution as well as any and
all who eNter must, Fade to Blanco.... ge t ransparent or eventually
assimilate themselves to get on in WEsterneUrocentriculture or BE
annihilated in someconomic, material, physical, intellectual, psycholgical,
Emotional form.
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