POPPING THE SEAMS

THIS COULD BE THE LAST TIME WE ARE HERE TOGETHER

performance with rope, guitar, voice, custom electronics, amplifier, public address system

July 20, 2008
Department of Safety, Anacortes, WA
(as part of What The Heck Fest)

Showing and Sharing on a Saturday Night

Al Larsen

published in The Squealer, volume 18, issue 1, Spring/Summer 2008
The young woman sitting at the microphone abruptly stops strumming her guitar. “Oh my god,” she says, “I forgot the words. I never play in front of people - I can’t do this.” Her friends in the audience call out their encouragement and after some hesitation she begins another song. This time she makes it all the way through, to applause from the small crowd. There’s a saying among musicians that, “you only have to play your first show once,” and now, significantly, she’s crossed that threshhold.

Uploading a photo, posting a blog entry or a comment or a list of your tastes in music, movies, people: these have become common ways of social participation. But people still like to go out in the evening, to be together in person at a show or other entertainment and a handful of event series - Not the Usual Suspects, Slideluck Potshow, All Caps, Pecha Kucka - taking place locally and around the world echo the participatory modes of Web 2.0 in physical space.

Last fall and spring, the attic of a house in Buffalo’s University Heights became the site of Not the Usual Suspects, a showcase for local musicians, poets, visual artists, video makers, performance artists and comedians, many of whom were taking their first tentative steps into public exhibition. Frustrated by the wine-and-cheese atmosphere at local art events and the lack of opportunities for young and less-established artists to present work in public, Aimee Buyea, a video maker and a UB Media Study student at the time, launched the series with some friends. Describing it as “a DIY variety art show,” she placed an emphasis on participation over professionalism or even artistic quality. She consciously worked to maintain an open, non-critical policy toward booking the event. “I just made a point of being like, ‘I don’t care if I’ve never heard you, I don’t care how cool you are, I don’t care what set-up you have, I don’t care about your demo, as long as you have a good attitude and you have a commitment to play, then you can play,’” Buyea explained.

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The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism

“DIY is changing our labor markets, and creativity is becoming our most valuable currency.” (p 31)

This book is like the evil twin brother of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Unmarketable. It too is about the relationship of underground culture to marketing, only rather than a critique it is more of an inspirational/motivational/how-to-compete-in-the-new-world manual. Sometimes he seems to be addressing “the kids,” other times it’s closer to a corporate consulting spiel.

Mason’s idea of “pirates” is broad and he brilliantly weaves together pirate radio, pirated DVDs, graffiti, open source software, illegal downloads, game modding, punk, and a game theory model called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” What his pirate examples have in common is that in each one a practice threatens the players in an existing market by doing business outside the rules of the market. This puts the existing companies in a “Pirate’s Dilemma.” Something like this… people pirate just-released movies, press them as DVDs and sell them on the street. The movie industry is threatened. But the fact that people buy these DVDs just proves that that there is a market for low-quality DVDs of brand new movies. The non-pirates have to decide whether to fight the pirates or start to compete like a pirate. If they fight the pirates - for instance, try to shut them down legally - the best the industry can hope for is a return to the market conditions they had before the pirates. But if the existing companies put on their pirate hats and start acting like pirates then they are competing in their old market (say the movie theaters) and in the new market opened up by the pirates (DVDs sold on the street the same week that the movie is released). The pirates look like a threat but actually they do everyone a favor by opening up a bigger market Read more

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity - Anne Elizabeth Moore

Unmarketable is about the intersection of corporate marketing and DIY/underground culture.
Moore gives examples of instances when advertising agencies have created campaigns using graffiti (both legal and illegal), appropriated imagery and phrases from punk bands, and hired underground artists/writers/zine makers to create work or run events.

It’s not as simple as pointing out the sell-outs… she acknowledges that the slippery slope is dotted with what seem like sensible trade-offs. She even writes about her own experiences running a zine-making workshop sponsored by Starbucks.

In contrast to corporately-produced culture she returns again and again to an idea of undergound/DIY cultural production as being defined by integrity and passion. To me, this is too simplistic. Blatant self-interest is also a driving force, for instance. People do things partly for cred… cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu) or subcultural capital (Sara Thornton). I don’t think this diminishes the importance of this kind of work. (I also don’t think it’s necessary to claim that the products of the DIY/undergound sphere are more entertaining, involving or of a higher artistic quality than the products of the mainstream culture industry.)

As part of the connection between marketing and underground culture she criticizes the Adbusters-type detournement of advertising. At its most simplistic, this takes the form of something like the “Joe Camel” ads remade as “Joe Chemo.” Her view is that as an anti-consumerist message this type of work is counterproductive: “Just Don’t Do It” fails as an anti-Nike statement because it reinforces the centrality of Nike and their slogans in our culture. In this way, corporations benefit from brand recognition regardless of whether the association is positive or negative.

She holds up Ian MacKaye and Dischord as examples of underground integrity, both for the usual reasons and also particularly for avoiding what she would consider the pitfall of responding to a major corporation’s appropriation of their imagery.

When a major athletic shoe company ran an ad campaing that blatantly appropriated the cover of the first Minor Threat 7″ Dischord got them to halt the campaign but did not sue or seek money damages.

A lawsuit or settlement would have meant that Dischord had a) set a price on xxxx’s use of the imagery, even if it was after the fact and b) allowed the US courts to decide the matter. It also would tie Minor Threat/Dischord to the shoe company in the public discourse. Following from the argument Moore builds about brand recognition - even when such recognition is not positive - being the top priority for corporations the athletic shoe company would benefit from their brand being tied to the name Minor Threat.

Dischord’s response - to just accept that the ad campaign was pulled and then drop the subject - is fascinating: in an economy based on participation, withdrawal becomes a form of resistance.

This has parallels to the idea of exodus discussed by Hardt and Negri in Empire, and the kind of anti-protocological actions discussed by Galloway in Protocol.

Moore doesn’t really go into online culture but the rise of the social networking sites is even more insidious in terms of how cultural resistance is exploited for corporate ends.

I am glad that this book exists, especially because Unmarketable comes from within the sphere that it speaks about: Moore is a fanzine maker and a former writer/editor/co-publisher of Punk Planet. I would like to see more serious attempts to understand and strategize independent/underground cultural production that come from and are directed at the participants.

part of a video-a-day series…

“Thriller” at the US/Canada border in Second Life… performed by the Collective Practice Research Group

This was the product of a class at UCSD called
Collective Art Practice.

This class has three main foci:
* to introduce students to collective practices
* to facilitate student understanding of social issues embodied in the san diego / tijuana borderlands
* to explore online space as public space, its limitations and possibilities

In the 1960s, when Heron first performed the song, it was clear that a narrow pipeline controlled by major media companies was unlikely to transmit ideas that ran counter to dominant interests. The counterculture communicated primarily through grassroots media - underground newspapers, folk songs.people’s radio, and comics. - Hnery Jenkins, Covergence Culture, p. 210

The term, participatory culture, contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations - and even individuals within corporate media - still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. Ans some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others.

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture p. 3