1. #Ev-Ent-Anglement 1 Noise Seminar Utrecht University August, 2014 2. To Perform a Theory of Feminist Digital Praxis: Cutting through the Noise of the Digital Self 3. To Cut A causal procedure and act of decision Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska Life After New Media (MIT Press: 2012) 4. To Paste A causal procedure and act of decision Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska Life After New Media (MIT Press: 2012) 5. To Cut Cuts are part of the phenomena they help produce. Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway 6. Loop! 7. Loop Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriated for the computer age? It is relevant to recall that the loop gave birth not only to cinema but also to computer programing. Programming involved altering the linear flow of data through control structures such as if/then and repeat/while. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (MIT: 2001) 8. Assemblage 9. A. Juhasz, Digital AIDS Documentary: Webs, Rooms, Viruses & Quilts, Blackwell Anthology of Documentary, Juhasz and Lebow, eds. 10. little parts of me 11. just for the man 12. fragments of myself 13. Cut myself back together with Knowledge/context/analysis Depth/community/politics 14. #Ev-ent-anglement Imperatives 1-3 To Cut well: #cut/paste+bleed To Break Past Binaries: #create/assemble+seep To Use Objects that Matter: #find/link+entangle 15. Your Script As I talk, please #cut/paste+bleed into the #ev-ent-anglement from the archive of yourself. Go to http://ev-ent-anglement.com and watch the ev-ent-anglement unfold. Better yet, build yourself in: Find or make images, links, words, video or gifs that express your responses, connections, ideas, and questions. Everything you paste needs this hashtag to be seen: #ev-ent-anglement On Twitter: #ev-ent-anglement On Instagram: #ev-ent-anglement On YouTube: Eve Entanglement: youtube.com/channel/UCpwZbMp3VFT5i2qlTYVgbFA Feel free to share #emotion-al-entaglements. Or pieces of your #em-body. Gone full circle, mark the #ev-ent-loop. Remember, youll be distracted. But the talk isnt going anywhere. Please try to entangle at minimum twice during the talk. 16. To Cut Well The photographic act, both as technique and ethical imperative, serves as an active practice of cutting through the flow of mediation. Time is indivisible, continuous and unknowable, at least to the intellect. In order to know it, we must cut. Kember and Zylinska 17. What does it mean to cut well? Todays #ev-ent-anglement: links a distinctly feminist armature to Kember and Zylinskas more minimal or abstract framework of photography as a form of differentiation and life making 18. K & Zs Imperative to get outside oneself and to be technical, that is, to bring things forth, to create, is perhaps also an ethical injunction to create well, even if not a condition of ethical behavior. 19. Cut, Link & Assemble! 20. #Cut/Paste+Bleed Please refer to your script. I request that you join the #ev-ent-anglement at least twice during this talk. I hope we might do media studies in a form that is not only analysis but is simultaneously critical and creative. (K & Z, xvii) 21. Editing straddles the line between art and craft Valerie Orpen, Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive 22. The first advertising silent film Lumiere Brothers (1896): Washing Up 23. Every stop is linked to another go 24. Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive Where the cut allows for pruning, curtailing, rejecting, removing the join permits adding and accreting. (Valerie Orpen, Film Editing) 25. The art of cinema is in the shot 26. To Edit gives the director an almost limitless freedom of movement once he can split up action into small, manageable units while also conveying a sense of time to the spectator. The Technique of Film Editing, Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar 27. Dialectical Montage We have now only to mention a large number of other dialectics that are quite difficult to categorize: those concerning dialogue, the style of acting, the decor, make-up, and costumeseverything, in short, relating to the explicit content of images and sounds. For structures almost always seem to occur in dialectical formthat is to say, a structure necessarily evolves within a parameter defined by one or more pairs of clearly delineated poles. Noel Burch: Theory of Film Practice 28. This dissonance, this formal affront, this attack on spatio-temporal coherence hypermediacy the collage of effect of media forms and styles (K & Z, 8) 29. "Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me" (2013), a poster designed for posterVIRUS by Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin 30. Spatial Montage The avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as the cut-and-paste command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data. Lev Manovich 31. Chris Vargass green-screens himself onto backgrounds from Liberaces private life, Liberacen (2011) 32. The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin Cut ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. William S. Burroughs 33. Hyperlinking The acceptance of hyperlinking in the 1980s can be correlated with contemporary cultures suspicion of all hierarchies, and preference for the aesthetics of collage in which radically different sources are brought together within a singular cultural object. (Manovich, 76) 34. All writing is in fact cut-ups Burroughs 35. Circles & Lines 36. Man with a Movie Camera Women with her Editing Scissors 37. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Esfir Shub, 1927) 38. Cutting 39. Ab-jecting Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting. Julia Kristeva, 1980 40. Link Me As a substance that flows from the bodily depths out, menstrual blood is carefully managed, concealed, contained and increasingly suppressed through the use of hormonal contraceptives. We can read the management of this flow of blood as a means of working on the bodys boundaries, that is, of demarcating the bodys inside from its outside. Emilia Sanabria, The Body Inside Out: Menstrual Management and Gynaecological Practices in Brazil 41. Metaphoric Glue forces, intensities, and energies not substances, effecting the complex, random processes not predictable states Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Introduction New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics 42. #Ev-ent-anglement, Imperative 4 What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effectiveand, ironically, socialist-feminist? Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto 43. An argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction, Donna Haraway 44. For #Ev-ent-anglement 1 We cut/paste+bleed binaries Art/Craft Long take/Montage On/Off screen Invisible/Visible Dull matter/Vibrant life Loop/Line Hierarchy/Flat Politics/Feelings Past/Present Present/Future Cut up/Happening Time/Space Virality/Duration Critique/Create 45. Intra-action There is no between as such, human and non- human organisms and machines emerge only through their mutual co-constitution. Karen Barad 46. Loops & Lines A line both divides things and creates spaces that we can imagine we can be in. Collectives seem to have lines in the sense of being modes of following: to inhabit a collective might mean to follow a line. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 47. Circles and Loops The circle of consciousness-raising and the videos it inspired directly contest the patriarchal, linear project of industrial production with its predictable plots (and products). In First Day FSW, 1980, that years body of students introduce themselves to each other, and us, by passing the camera around the circle. Julie James. I am seed. I am heart. I am healing. I am power. I am smooth. I am alive. I am dark red. I am pulsing. I am magic. I am clearing. I am self. And so on. After the tape ends with the group joining together in a rousing class portrait culminating with a chant, Feminist Studio Workshop, 1979-80, and a loud YEAH! a quick fade to black bumps us against an unanticipated snippet of yet another circle. We accidentally fall into the last five minutes of a consciousness-raising meeting of a group of deaf women (perhaps the other tape was taped over this), who speak together (we hear through an interpreter while they sign) about the role of affection in their lives, and end their meeting (and tape) with a group (circle) hug. Juhasz, Views of the Feminist Archive 48. Circles and Loops, Looped The loop and the sequential progression, do not have to be considered mutually exclusive. A computer program progresses from start to end by executing a series of loops. Lev Manovich 49. photos 50. tweets 51. Blog posts 52. videos 53. essays 54. purchases 55. Thumbs up 56. Composting the Net Shu Lea Cheang, 2012 57. The dump of the Internet 58. #Ev-ent-anglement, Directive 5, Cut Our Feminist Objects Well Evoke the possibility of doing justice to and with objects of study. The disciplinarity of Womens and Gender Studies proceeds precisely from its formalization of the political as the value that differentiates it from traditional fields of study. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons 59. Obscure Feminist Archive The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1995) 60. Beyond Self-Expression once such self-visualization and expression is widely available, how do we strategize our activism around the new forms, links, and actions that said expression takes up? And, most critically, what else might be needed beyond speaking and spreading our ideas through digital realist representations? Juhasz, Ceding the Activist Digital Documentary, in Nash, Hight and Summerhayes, eds., New Documentary Ecologies 61. Cut into Art Lowly bits of evidencelike our tweets, reposts, thumbs up, photographs, and cat gifsdo not become a digital documentary, do not have enough meaninguntil they are edited, by a documentarian, and thereby organized into an argument; until they are aestheticized by being made into art. Juhasz, Ceding the Digital Documentary 62. Conclusion In what ways can digital practices participate in the distribution of affects and feelings as a strategy of resistance and subversion? How can emotions, once shared, facilitate political action, recognition, and dialogue, and bring about social change? 63. Conclusion, Again For now and into the future, I am committed to experimenting with #ev-ent-anglements, made by cutting/pasting+bleeding ourselves, co- produced with purpose and commitment, in shared spaces and times both on and off line. Together, today, and always also later on the Internet, we might make things that could inspire change, but might themselves be the thing that is change in the making.