toward a post presidential world

I don't know that this is the most coherent argument, and I'd like to update it following the discussion in class, but time won't permit.

THanks, all. The class was great fun and very stimulating.

Rich





Open Source AMerica

There was a time in my life when I thought I might like to be president. Thought I might be a good one, even. President Rich. I liked the sound of it. I would lead the world to peaceful resolution of its conflicts. Prosperity would reign supreme equally among americans. People would respect my wisdom and perspective. My understanding of difference would help bring the nation together.

As adolescent fantasies go, it probably isn’t all that uncommon a theme. Reality is such a messy thing, all that interaction among different people with different ideas of how life should be. It’s easy to believe that life would be so much simpler if only one could be in charge... Our president heartily beat the drum of leadership throughout his 2000 campaign, thumping on stump after stump, again and again insisting that what this country needs now is leadership. I’m sure he’s experienced some regret more than once about making such claims.

Adulthood brings with it awareness of the great hallmark of leadership... responsibility. One quickly discovers that almost every decision has ramifications that extend beyond one’s own experience. Making decisions for oneself often impacts those around you. Leading any group - be it a bridge club or a country - means one’s decisions bear significantly more direct and greater impact upon those you lead. The strength of leadership lies in the leader’s ability to understand that impact and make decisions weighed against that understanding.

Power used to be popularly viewed as the burden of responsibility before we became so jaded. Our view of our leaders, rightly or wrongly, is that they are in it for their own interests, but one has only to look at pictures of any modern president before and after his term to see the toll such a responsibility takes on the person. It would be a foolish thing indeed to view that position as nothing more than serving the office holder’s own interests, just as the fantasy I began with can’t stand up to reality’s harsh light.

Fortunately, our system was created with measures to counter the possibility of misuse of the office. Just as society on the neighborhood level uses the social filters of opinion (read “gossip”) to weed out foolish and destructive behavior, the people of this country can use our voices to weed out what we see as foolish and destructive in our government. We, the people have a chance to use our voice and make our own choices about our leadership, in the instance of the president, every four years. While a strong argument can certainly be made that the powers that be have been working hard to thwart that system technology has been working just as hard to increase the voice of the people.

But life in the global village for the voice of us little people is pretty good, right? Television, Satellite Radio, the Internet with all its varied means of communication have brought us in touch with the world. Culture is at our fingertips, and we suck it up, mix it up and spit it out mingled with a bit of our own flavor in a modern play of the largess of the Roman Empire. In the west, we enjoy advantages in information access and authorship that truly are unprecedented. Our ability now to find and use our voices is beyond the wildest dreams of those that created the system more than two hundred years ago.

I think we cannot give too much credit to the humble blog. William Randolph Hearst was credited with starting the Spanish - American War. Though certainly an individual, Hearst was just as certainly not common. While he was able to use the power of his money, by way of his presses, to expand the range of his voice (and, not insignificantly, to his own interests), blogging gives voice to anyone in possession of a computer and access to the internet: a significantly more accessible megaphone in terms of both wealth and knowledge.

Bring it on! The more voices, the better the system works. Except that this is a different kind of community. A part of a neighborhood is the physical existence of the neighborhood, itself, and the physical presence of its members. One cannot escape the fact of having to return to one’s home: there is a certain level of committment to physical existence. Community is not merely the comfort of having something to be a part of. Perhaps the most important role of community is its ability to keep our individual idiocies in check. That’s the social filter at work again. With a blog, as with Hearst, it’s difficult to determine whether an opinion is that of an individual or reflects the ideas of a community

This is the interesting thing to me about the power of this new collection of media: not its ability to bring people together, but rather its ability to create an idea, an illusion of consensus. Where in the past the lunatic ravings of an individual who has had some pet peeve trodden upon might have more or less dispersed into the ether by an uncommitted, unreceptive and potentially threatening audience, the modern lunatic need only broadcast his rant in the ether to find some sort of consensus. Even if there are no more the three people in the world who believe one’s particular version of stupidity (and lets face it, we all have our take on it), those three people can happily find each other through the magic of google and can then reassure themselves that they are merely the crest of the iceberg beneath which the silent masses huddle in agreement.

While this is true for the active act of blogging in particular, it is also true for the more passive forms of media. Television news used to be dominated by the idea that there is an objective reality. Now the viewer can channel surf the various news outlets to find the subjective interpretation of events that he finds most appealing to him. This is of course assuming the existence of “News” on TV. This sort of subjectivity is probably more appropriately characterized as entertainment, as it often is.

THe effects of this have already been felt as it changes the very structure of our society. The ability to choose one’s ‘community’, one’s news, indeed one’s very concept of reality a function of personal ideology has created the political and cultural polarization of our nation. Media has given the individual unprecedented power over reality without having to understand the results of that power. That is, we have put the individual in charge while allowing the physical and intellectual separation of the individual from the results of her decisions.

A case in point comes to us in the form of Nuestro Himno”, a spanish-language version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” . Right wing bloggers immediately took up the chant of cultural protectionism, raging against this perceived heresy.

What’s a president to do?

Nuestro Himno was released publicly only this past Friday, but before the end of the day the president had commented on it , saying "Creo que el himno nacional debe cantarse en inglés" Wait, that was the spanish translation of what he said. If only he could address the rest of the country’s issues with such immediacy, but Things are so complicated in this brave new world...

THe president had so many possible responses to this. He could have expressed appreciation for another in the long line of efforts to integrate cultures. He could have used the song to push his own policy drive to allow ‘guest workers’ access to the benefits of our system (or perhaps, the importance of allowing the system access to ‘guest workers’). He could have admired a clearly heart-felt rendition of the American Anthem. He could have comented upon how much interest there still is in gaining citzenship to ‘this great nation’, but he instead said “I believe the National Anthem should be sung in English.” This binary response to a minor but complex cultural issue is indicative of the larger, growing polarity of the culture, itself.

In truth, Its is likely more telling that there is a significant response to this song than stupidity of the response, itself. This is a pop song. While the issues behind it are surely enduring, the song is not. The new additions to the lyrics read on face value as the adolescent appropriation of symbology that they are, but the song on the whole should probably be taken as an appeal for respect for the contribution of hispanics to the prosperity of the United States. This would seem to agree with the sentiment of the president’s own words as he expressed himself just two years ago, saying “One of the primary reasons America became a great power in the 20th century is because we welcomed the talent and the character and the patriotism of immigrant families.” What the bloggers have focussed upon, however, is not the content of the song, but have instead made an issue of having an american icon expressed in an unfamiliar voice.

Regardless of the larger, ideological picture however, for the president of the United States to officially comment upon a pop song illustrates the unprecedented ability of the blog-doers to add pounds to otherwise waifish incidents this would likely have been given little notice at all. In fact, it calls into question the very leadership of the country that the president felt so adamant about several years ago. Just who is running this thing? Who bears the responsibility?

Our world is changing and the ideas that have worked for us for so long can no longer apply. Reality is not an absolute, it is an expression of a complex whole. No longer can we operate under the idea of a Commander in Chief. We don’t need a leader, we need a community voice: the filtration of ideas through the media of the larger interest and the expression of a corus of different voices. We need something more amorphous that can change with the growth of our society.

The more we try to seal the culture in an unchanging bubble, the more tightly we seal the lid on its casket. Change is here. Embrace it.

As for being president? I’m glad it’s not my job.
Nuestro Himno

Published April 26, 2006

Verse 1

Oh say can you see, a la luz de la aurora/Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer? Sus estrellas, sus franjas flotaban ayer/En el fiero combate en senal de victoria,/Fulgor de lucha, al paso de la libertada,/Por la noche decian: "Se va defendiendo!"

Coro: Oh, decid! Despliega aun su hermosura estrellada,/Sobre tierra de libres, la bandera sagrada?

Chant:

It's time to make a difference the kids, men and the women/Let's stand for our beliefs, let's stand for our vision/What about the children los ninos como P-Star

These kids have no parents, cause all of these mean laws.

See this can't happen, not only about the Latins.

Asians, blacks and whites and all they do is adding

more and more, let's not start a war

with all these hard workers,

they can't help where they were born.

Verse 2

Sus estrellas, sus franjas, la libertad, somos iguales

Somos hermanos, es nuestro himno.

En el fiero combate en senal de victoria,/Fulgor de lucha, al paso de la libertada,/Por la noche decian: "Se va defendiendo!"

Coro: Oh, decid! Despliega aun su hermosura estrellada,/Sobre tierra de libres, la bandera sagrada?






Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Theoretical Perspectacles

The Spiritualization of Electricity:
An Argument for the Use of Computer and Electronic Technologies as a Medium in the Plastic Arts
or: Why All Art Today Should Conduct Electricity.

By Rich Miller


My wife, my daughter and I share a house in Queens with another couple. It’s a row house, attached to the house on the left and three feet from the next house on the right. Being Queens, telephone, television and power cables crisscross our street in a manner that would give a spider nightmares.

Our house is small, but it has a small yard, a basement and just enough room to give us each a little space to call our own. All in all I think we’re quite happy with it and like how it has come to reflect each of our characters. My housemate and I share the basement as studio space (he’s a painter), and it’s there that I do most of my work, including designing and building circuits. It’s not uncommon to find prototypes of circuits and other electrical apparatus on my workbench, and my studio mate has taken to asking casually as he passes by, “How’s the bomb coming?”

He’s joking, of course, mostly – it’s just not kosher to build bombs these days – and while I should preface this by saying that as such things go my good friend has more than his share of technological anxieties, it’s also true that he’s expressing what I feel is a common, if fading, suspicion of all things electrical. This can hardly be taken as a groundless suspicion; our world is charged with stories of house fires caused by faulty wiring, idiots finding out the hard way that the drying of one’s hair is best left as a post-bath experience, and recently, a dog losing its life from “stray voltage” on a New York City sidewalk.

And yes, we do now have to worry about crazed idiots building bombs in their basements.

Most of us are fortunate enough (or smart enough) not to have such direct experience with electricity’s deadly potential, but everyone is given a regular, direct and dramatic illustration of its destructive force with each bolt of lightening we see. This is not to say that I believe that anyone worries that her iPod will strike her a fatal blow Zeus would be proud of, but that knowledge of electricity’s ability to take life lends to its personification in our minds - and by extension, anything that harnesses its power - becomes on a level our equal. I would argue that anything capable of killing us is transformed in our minds into a predator seeking to do just that. We elevate such forces of nature to a spiritual level as our ‘other’; thus lightening becomes Zeus to the Greeks, fearsome storms become the work of Hurucan, god to the Taino.

It is amazing how easily one can spark this sense of the electrical other. I have heard many people, when first learning to work with circuits, worry that the relatively innocuous charge of a low-current, 12-volt power supply would hurt them. While reason and a bit of knowledge prevent us from worshipping the Wall Wart, many treat it with a level of suspicion worthy of one’s opponent. Any sense that there is activity in a circuit, that something is happening, that, as we say, it is “live” brings it immediately into the viewer’s timeframe: it exists as we exist. Something so simple as being plugged into a wall outlet (regardless of whether the outlet is real) turns an exposed circuit into Death incarnate. Give me a blinking light and I’ll think I’ve found a friend.
Our internalization of our interaction with all things electrical increases with each passing year and our fears of the technologies are ebbing away (at least so long it’s safely boxed away). Our culture’s interest in, our dependence upon, and our lust for the latest electronic gadget show no sign of weakening. It now seems natural that ear buds should sprout from human ears, it’s almost unthinkable that anyone would live without a computer in his home and medical equipment and even RFID chips are routinely implanted in our bodies for any number of reasons. Well, Maybe the RFID implant isn’t ‘routine’ yet (though if my father had his way my daughter would have one). We are becoming steadily more comfortable with the idea that the “other” we interact with is a machine - whether it be desktop computer, television or pacemaker - it’s now only a matter of time before we become comfortable with becoming the machine. We already identify with it.

Of course, though artists have been taking advantage of this for generations, such an artistically advantageous path is not without its potholes. I often think about a warning a classmate of mine in art school received from one of our sculpture instructors about his work in glass. Badly paraphrased, the teacher said something like, “some materials are so engaging in and of themselves that it’s difficult to rise above the material”. I’ve seen many attempts at electronic art that seemed to be not so much the use of electronics as a medium with which to convey meaning as a sort of graphic infatuation with the medium and it’s astounding abilities. Making art is hard, regardless of the medium.

While electricity and electronics have been used and commented upon in art throughout the last century or so, we’re at a point now in our society where its use is particularly valuable. These technologies have an ever-greater impact on our lives even as they become less obvious to the eye. The closer we get, and the more indistinguishable we get from our technology the more powerful the re-appropriation and re-contextualization of these technologies becomes as an artistic reference to the human experience. Our technology is becoming even more significant to our spiritual identity – our sense of self -than our homes and even our bodies. It is the artist’s responsibility to comment upon this relationship.

3/6/06