Mediaculture

week 7 Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, Feminist Media Strategies for policy-making Per chassisanceWe live in a media centric world bombarded by the media images twenty four hours a day. It is so powerful that we often can non distinguish the authoritativeity from the mediated reality. Media makes use of images n early on us to convey this very different impostureiculated meaning. This often interludes with the touch of the people who control the media which can either be the proprietor or dominant groups through force or coercion that control the opinions. These viewpoints ar the factors that determine the sensitives values, of the psycheal mannerrn media, which often tend to trivialize or sensationalize the issues, according to the ideological stance.Feminist Media nontextual matters obtain formed as a opposition to this distorted media views, to convey the undistorted reality to the mankind. Its to a greater extent than an information campaign and the same time new mode of protest to decry the ugly stories media told about women. The feminist media work as the activists place has three ultimate purposes first, to interrupt the incessant flow of images that supports the complete affectionate order with alternative shipway of thinking and acting second, to calculate and activate viewers (media is non the only, nor necessarily most effective, way to do this) third, to create prowessful and original imagery that follows in the tradition of o.k. art, to help viewers see the world in a new way and learn something about themselves in relation to it. The authors in their look for point to the ways to attract the media to their campaign and force them to birth their viewpoints. The authors say that to understand how media operates, observe it -with detachment -and be pragmatic. It doesnt matter what you think the media should c everywhere, the determination of the game (and it is a game) is to get them to play it your way. Mass media time i s not a humans service it is a highly valuable trade good that is purchased by corporations and individuals who promote products, ideas, attitudes and images. The stakes of this game atomic number 18 high, and as artists the top hat we can hope for is a kind of guerrilla foray into that system. here it would be wise to note the contri saveions of the Glasgow University Media Research host (GUMG) and Centre for contemporaneous Cultural Studies (CCCS), engaged in research in the process of parole production and the relationship surrounded by ideology and representation. The research of the GUMG has been very arguable since the publication of Bad News in 1976. Bad News was pertain with the television coverage of industrial relations in 1975. The GUMGs abbreviation of television intelligence service led it conclude that the viewers had been given a misleading portrayal of industrial disputes, a portrayal that distorted the real situation. The descriptions attached to managem ent were much(prenominal) that they rund the audience of the rightness of the management repose against the demands made by the unions.Thus, it has become the inherent nature of the media to manipulate things. In 1973 Galtung and Ruge analyzed foreign news in newspapers and found that for any solvent to become a news item, and at that placefore considered newsworthy, it had to make it through a selection process. If it conformed to a particular prune of criteria, the news staff judged it newsworthy. Galtunge and Ruge omens those criteria as news values.The essay tells different methods to persuade the media for the political performance. But the question die hards, if the media conforms to certain pre-determined news values, how can these campaigns succeed, scorn the systematic efforts by the activists.Week 8 Jesse Drew, The Collective Camcorder in Art and Activism.The essay attempts to portray the role of the video makers collectives, in many pooh-poohance movements. The invention of the video camcorder has in fact changed the course of history. These movements and the developments in engineering when coupled with the ideology of post contemporaryism, took art and activism to new heights. From the efforts of independent artists to the collectives such as Paper Tiger and the Independent Media Center, the insubordination has spread to resist the images presented by the mainstream media and culture. So the environment was all set for a deviance from the art-video, and experiment something new that reached the people.As the essayist says, television is, after all, at the heart of our poppingular culture, the culture of the everyday, and dominates the media landscape. Video, when all is said and done, is a form of television, a media device that conveys information. It is natural that video artists cross the boundaries of art and activism, and oftentimes choose to subvert the message, not just exploit the form. This artistic jujitsu, utilise the w eight of television to fall upon itself, emerged as a popular scheme among video collectives. Increasingly, video artists in the 1980s and 1990s embraced the necessity to echo on, intervene, and challenge the contested terrain of television, bundle media, and popular culture, and leave the art-video aesthetic behind.As Strinati called it post modernism is skeptical of any absolute, universal and all include claim to knowledge and argues that theories or doctrines which make such claims atomic number 18 progressively open to criticism, contestation and doubt. The mass media be central to the post modern condition because we now take as real, is to a large end what media tell us is real. We are bombarded from all sides by cultural signs and images in all aspects of media. According to Baudrillard, we have entered the world of simulacra. These are signs that function as copies or models of real objects or events. In the post-modern era, simulacra no longer present a copy of the world, nor do they produce replicas of reality.Today..social reality is coordinate by codes and models that produce the reality they claim to me blaspheme represent. From the 1960s forward there was a revolt against the modernists. The post modernists thought believed in the segmentation of the distinction between culture and society, the break down of the distinction between art and popular culture, the confusion over time and space, and the dec bourn of the meta narratives. The pop art of the 1960s demonstrates this clearly, for example, Andy Warhol presented soup tins and cola bottles as art, as salubrious as challenging the uniqueness of Da Vincis portrait of the glandular fever Lisa by silk screening her image thirty times Thirty are better than one. In fact post modernism has helped them to drift off from the so called artistic beliefs.In the words of the essayist video artists in the 1980s and 1990s embraced the necessity to reflect on, intervene, and challenge the co ntested terrain of television, mass media, and popular culture, and leave the art-video aesthetic behind. The convergence of these new political, cultural, social, technological, artistic, and economic developments provided the neural impulse to the establishment of the counter movements like the Paper Television, and subsequently the Independent Media Center.In fact, video art has surpassed all other art forms in rendering history.Week 9 Carole S. Vance, The War on floriculture.The essay follows the great raillery in the world of art whether a self-censorship is inevitable when it comes to wakeual images. Vance quotes instances where public ire overlooked the artistic value when clean-livingity was questioned. Vance says that the fundamentalist flame on images and the art world must be recognized as a systematic part of a right-wing political computer program to restore traditional social arrangements and reduce diversity.The right wing is late committed to symbolic politi cs, both in using symbols to mobilize public sentiment and in understanding that, because images do stand in for and impress social change, the arena of representation is a real ground for struggle. He says that it is high time that a vigorous defence of art and images should be made. The author has given a new dimension to the culture war.This is not isolated with art or artistic movements. Representation of sexuality in media is much(prenominal) complex than in art, for example, counting the number of times that women surface on the screen because we cannot immediately identify a persons sexual orientation in the way that we can identify markers of sex and race.Observations by Dyer on gay behavior can be more illustrative here on the representation of sexuality in media. He says a major fact about being gay is that it doesnt show. on that point is nothing about gay peoples mark that declares then gay, no equivalent to the biological markers of sex and race. There are signs o f gayness, a repertoire of gestures, stances, clothing and even environments that bespeak gayness but these are cultural forms designed to show what the persons person alone does not show that he or she is gay.There are signs of gayness, for example gestures, accents posture and so on, but these markers of sexuality are socially constructed and are both historically and culturally specific. Media texts often rely on stereotypical narratives to indicate that characters in a story line are gay. These may include childlessness, loneliness, a mans engage in arts or domestic crafts, a womans in mechanics or sports. ..each implying a scenario of gay life. Both lesbians and gays have been to use Tuchmans term symbolically annihilated by the media in general. The representation of these two groups has been particularly limited on television.The media has been very careful on such sensitive issues, but has not been so. Media has been overtly criticized primarily on its representations, but when coming to issues of morality, media tended to be very much conservative, and there of course has been a lot of self-censorship.As the essayist says symbolic mobilizations and moral panics often leave in their wake residues of law and policy that remain in force long after the hysteria has subsided, fundamentalist assail on art and images requires a broad and vigorous response that goes beyond appeals to free speech. Free expression is a necessary principle in these debates, because of the steady protection it offers to all images, but it cannot be the only one. To be effective and not defensive, the art community needs to employ its interpretive skills to unmask the modernized rhetoric conservatives use to justify their traditional agenda, as well as to deconstruct the difficult images fundamentalists choose to set their campaigns in motion. Artists can of course look at the way media behaves in this respect.Week 10 Kester Grant, A Critical Frame work for Dialogical Practice. Revolt, is word unremarkably associated with the art movements and the biographies of artists themselves. Thus a shift from the galleries to community based installations is a natural course of the artistic history. The author explores these transitions as an inherent revolt that pervaded the artistic community.When the artists themselves began to question the gallery itself as an appropriate site for their work. At a time when scale and the use of natural materials and processes were central concerns in sculpture, the comparatively small physical space of the gallery seemed unduly constraining. Further, the museum, with its fusty, art historical associations, appeared ill equipped to provide a proper stage setting for works that explored popular culture or quotidian experience.Many artists saying museums, with their boards of wealthy collectors and businesspeople, as bastions of snobbish elitism in an era that demanded a more accessible and egalitarian form of art. There are man y ways to escape the museum. In some cases artists chose to work in sites that were empty or depopulated (e.g., Gordon Matta-Clarks cuttings in abandoned buildings, Michael Heizers or Robert Smithsons land art projects in nearly inaccessible locations), suggesting a certain anxiety about the social interactions that might occur upon venturing beyond sanctioned art institutions.One filum of this work is represented by the agitational, protest-based projects of Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG), the Black Mask Group, and Henry Flynt in New York. Drawing on the energies of the antiwar movement and the traditions of fluxus performance and siruationism, these groups staged actions outside mainstream cultural institutions (Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, etc.) to call attention to the complicity of these institutions with broader forms of social and political domination.A different approach, and one more directly related to dialogical practices, emerged in the collaborative projects developed by artists associated with the Womans construct in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Artists, fueled by political protests against the Reagan administrations foreign policy (especially in Central America), the antiapartheid movement, and nascent AIDS activism, as well as revulsion at the market frenzy surrounding neoexpressionism, with its retardaire embrace of the august male painter. A number of artists and arts collectives developed innovative new approaches to public and community-based work during the 1980s and early 1990s.The late 1980s and early 1990S witnessed a gradual convergence between old-school community art traditions and the work of younger practitioners, leading to a more complex set of ideas around public engagement. This movement was also catalyzed by the controversy over Richard Serras Tilted Arc in the late 1980s,Community art projects are often centered on an exchange between an artist (who is viewed as creatively, intellectually, financially, and inst itutionally empowered) and a given subject who is defined a priori as in need of empowerment or access to creative/ communicatory skills. Thus the community in community-based public art often, although not always, refers to individuals mark as culturally, economically, or socially different from the artist.References1. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, Feminist Media Strategies For Political Performance2. Jesse Drew, The Collective Camcorder in Art and Activism.3. Carole S. Vance, The War on Culture4. Kester Grant, A Critical Frame work for Dialogical Practice