A Question

This is a quesition about ideology (acknowledgement/push back) and possibly film trolling…

In film scripts, we take the opportunity to expose the social normalcy with which  we abide by, fight, etc. Lines such as:  ”I thought the guy is supposed to rescue the girl” ,  ”isn’t the guy suppose to propose to the girl”, or “he’s not the average jock” (made these up but still relatively common). These lines project out of the screens  immediate scenario and attempt to respond to our beliefs in that moment–which might agree or conflict with what we are immediately seeing. These lines may be highlighting the influences of industrialized culture or our hermeneutics of suspision…But I still have this question:

How would you define lines such as these and are they similar to trolling? Granted, my only knowledge of trolling is from our class discussion.

A piece of Rdio’s “social” features & the sensuous, function, and feeling

“The soul of an [aesthetic] object has three aspects: A sensuous quality, and idea embodied in its function, and a feeling expressed in its form.” (Dufrenne, 1973, p.138)

Cupchik and Hilsher argue that Dufrenne “fails to appreciate the expressive potential of design products. In addition to instrumental value that is implicit in the structure of a ‘useful object’, there is also an expressive quality that is incorporated into the design.”

“When you examine a design object, the more meaningful the object is to you, the more carefully and slowly you will examine the object, with the result that the experience of the object in space will be more intimate.” In the visualization only the more popular musicians are named, while the rest require the user to hover over the circle to identify the artist.

First I’ll examine an element of a social interaction on Rdio, where users can look at the music habits of friends or strangers over time. The following image is from my own listening habits after a short period of use. The size of circles directly correlate with the amount of song listens.

Music or artists that are significant in a person’s life are likely to change over time. You might go through a phase in your life where you listen to a certain type of music heavily and upon looking back on your listening choices you laugh at yourself.

Sensuous quality:
Sensuous defined: “Relating to or affecting the senses rather than intellect.” So rather than just giving a user a quantitative excel list of song listens, Rdio transforms these listens into these circles. The circles are somewhat tangible, as they can be moved around the digital space. Other than the slight tangible nature and the variety in object size, there is not much else that is sensual about this feature. The circles are uniform, bland in color, and flat.

Function:
“An idea embodied in its function” the viewer gets a picture of perhaps the individual and their personality. Music preference has often been cited as being able to make reasonable predictions of individuals and their personality. The following research displays a strong correlation between music taste and the ability of complete strangers to make predictions on that individuals’ personality:
“In 2003, Sam Gosling and I conducted a few studies on music and personality and discovered several significant associations. For example, and as shown below in Figure 1, people with strong preferences for classical, jazz, and folk music (dubbed Reflective & Complex) tend to have personality traits associated with openness (e.g., creativity, imagination) and verbal ability, and people with strong preferences for popular styles of music (Upbeat & Conventional) tend to have traits associated with extraversion (sociability, talkativeness), agreeableness (friendliness, warmth), conscientiousness (reliability, dependability), and low levels of openness (conventionality, dogmatism), verbal, and analytic ability.”
“The results suggested that people are able to form accurate impressions of others solely on the basis of their music preferences. As depicted in the left set of blue bars in Figure 2, the participants formed reasonably accurate impressions about extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (emotional instability), and openness.”

http://web.mac.com/jrentfrow/Jason_Rentfrow/Music_%26_Personality.html

Feeling: still figuring this out.

Ebonics: When All Becomes a Sign

I was thinking about signs yesterday in our discussion and as soon as the signifier was “Dog” my mind jumped to the signified as the idea of a “homie” (lol). As I sat there my mind began to question how does Ebonics fit into this discussion of signs? In the words of Jeff I thought this could be a “Juicy” topic for discussion. In questioning if this is applicable to the class I thought this is definitely within the realm of culture and then I thought about how Ebonics puts a complex twist on ‘visual’ culture.   

I thought of movies where white guys, black nerds even, would attempt to use “Ebonics” and they were the wrong sign to use the sign language. So then the rules are broken. So this concept of Ebonics and people as a sign within the sign language made me see that  within that language Everything is a sign.

Do you all think that this is true in all languages? What do you all think about the process of becoming an acceptable sign (a movie that depicts that in the context of Ebonics would be Bulworth http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118798/ )?

Parsing

Monaco reminded me of a part of the title section of the book the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; this is pretty much just a cute video about a part of the book. Anyway, the book details an account of a musician who begins to “see things.” The specific intersection of the book and Monaco is that the musician’s problem was not in the mechanism of seeing (eyes still functioned properly in physiological terms and there was no severing of the connection between eye and brain) but instead it was the brain’s interpretation of those signals which was causing him to literally see his wife as a hat.

I’m not quite sure how, or even if, this fits into the idea of reading an image. While it does support the notion of interpretation of visual stimuli, this particular ailment has no ties to culture (unless there is some culture that I haven’t encountered where the trappings of 70s Western culture are entirely interchangeable).

Dreams and Saccades

I just read the first chapter from Murch, “Don’t Worry, It’s Only a Movie”. I disagreed with his assertion that cuts in a film work because they’re similar to how we dream. Dreams are fueled by emotion and  memories associated with those emotions. I don’t think of dream as having cuts, but rather a continuous oddity that only makes sense after the fact. Dreams are almost a rationalization of the emotions…the dreams are constructed so that the flow emotions and feelings make sense. In dreams, emotion creates imagery whereas in film, imagery creates emotion. I believe a BBC documentary about dreams led me to believe  all that…but you should probably just believe me so I can look smart.

On the other hand, if our dreams really do include cuts, couldn’t that be because we have learned the language of films as we’ve grown up with them and incorporated the cuts into our dreams? Yes.

Anyway, I was glad to see that he switched to saccadic movement because that’s what I was thinking about as I read the dream stuff (I hope I’m not coming off as being smug here…but I have work published related to saccadic eye movement…soooooo yeah…).  A few weeks ago, I saw another BBC special about saccadic movement on Bruce Hood’s blog. It might make the phenomenon more clear if you’re unfamiliar:

And Now for Something Completely Different

So, this is something that I am arguing has a value above its form. Here the form is NSFW, very racy, and has all of the subtlety and tact of an Adam Sandler album. Put more simply, if things of a base, crass, or unrefined nature offend you, then you will get the gist of it from just reading this post. Alternately, I link it because the nature of the video will be an important factor later.

http://www.cracked.com/video_18311_4-terrifying-psychology-lessons-behind-famous-movie-monsters.html?wa_user1=1&wa_user2=Movies+%26+TV&wa_user3=video&wa_user4=cracked_shows

So, focusing solely on the content of the arguments, this is an analysis of horror films based on 4 perspectives:

The first perspective is the internal, fear of the unknown, perspective. As H. P. Lovecraft put it: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” It hinges on that psychological perspective, and then draws an analogy between films of one type (horror movies) and films of another type (hardcore pornography – like I said, racy). Okay, moderately interesting.

The second perspective. This is about Alien (or actually Aliens, given the description). It posits the theory that fear arises from a combination of sexual inadequacy and fear of rape. Again, a psychological perspective. It continues to give a list of formal and narrative qualities of the films that support that idea.

The third perspective is that zombies are frightening because they are a debased version of ourselves. The fear is a self-fear, which then turns into hatred through the narcissism of small differences (Freud) in that they are just similar enough to make them all the more loathsome. Again, a focus on psychology with the addition of aspects of zombies as a concept.

The fourth, and final perspective is a counter-argument to the third. It poses that zombies are the “other” and that is why they are frightening / repulsive. It goes on to draw an analogy between political alignment and the most popular monsters. It does so by siting historical examples of popular movies, the political alignment of the presidents when those movies were released, and cultural ideas that were associated with those presidencies.

Okay, to sum up this analysis  – this is a conversation between adults dressed like Count Chocula, Malcolm Reynolds, Dr. Manhattan, and Taranga Leela. Maybe not precisely what you are thinking, but some aspect of the absurdity of the situation or the base level of its presentation was probably lingering in your mind. At the very least, while I would argue that these perspectives are defensible, the absence of authoritative positioning in presentation (with the exception of Sartre and Hegel at the end) might have undermined their efforts. Whatever the case, their is a certain mismatch between form an content. Albeit far less severe, this same phenomena is part of Devereaux’s analysis of Triumph of the Will, but reversed. In Triumph, the form is held in high regard, but the content is deemed “evil.” In this, the content argues some valid points, but the form is absurd, base, and flip.

Also, beyond the obvious Alien connection to class, the final argument is ended with a declaration that it has made horror movies boring. Could this be a small part of the concern over expertise reducing enjoyment – a fear that removing visceral immediacy will render films boring?

The Hero’s Journey Monomyth and Instinct Ideologies

I’m a fan of mythologist Joseph Campbell. Several of his lectures on mythology can be found on Netflix streaming. Campbell explains that there are myths from around the world that have survived for thousands of years that share the same structure, which his calls the “monomyth”.  He summarizes the “monomyth” in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces with this quote (which I found on the book’s Wikipedia article):

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

This structure can be seen in stories from many religions and in modern stories too, such as Star Wars. Geiger refers to the Hero’s Journey structure, without naming it, as a ideology in the last paragraph of page 25, where the author explains

Successful films, it might be argued, are those that are able to articulate prevailing cultural beliefs effectively, making them seem natural and universal, rather than culturally and historically determined. Thus, for example, we might not question why many films focus on an individual hero who, through decisive, often violent action, triumphantly overcomes villainous people or forces that seek to control or destroy him (or, occasionally her). It may, then, require a step back to recognize that this formula is based on an ideological belief in the power of the individual, in the ability of individual action to solve problems in short order, usually by overcoming an individual villain. The fact that we know many real-life problems cannot be attributed simply to an individual villain or solved by invidual heroic action does not change our belief in individualism, nor our satisfaction in seeing this belief affirmed. Thus, belief in individual action (as opposed to collective or societal action) appears simply to be a fact, rather than an ideological notion that can be questioned and analyzed.

Some scholars believe that the “monomyth” isn’t as pervasive though the world as Campbell claims. Still, I find it interesting that an ideology could either appear independently several times throughout the history of mankind or spread throughout the world’s cultures and last for so long. It seems to me that the “monomyth” could be hardwired into our brains in a way, almost like an instinct for a compelling story. Can instincts or cognitive illusions – not sure how to what to call or how to explain this idea, but an example would that we are very aware of faces. We are hardwired to recognize the pattern of a face, sometimes seeing it in clouds or burnt toast. If you don’t easily recognize faces, you have a disorder called prosopagnosia – be considered ideologies because they warp reality by forcing us to perceive the world in ways that we are generally unaware of?

designing the alpha-male cell phone

In Lowgren’s paper “Articulating the Use Qualities of Digital Designs”, he talked about the use quality “identity”, cell phone skins, and the “desire to project just the right image”, but what about a design that has an identity inside of it, a design that has the power to transform its user… rather than projecting an image, the design would have the power to influence how the user acts, behaves, and subjectively feels, it would in a sense transform their identity.

So instead of projecting just the right image or identity, I’m curious to see if it’s possible to design something in such a way that just by interacting with it the person changes how they act or behave.

Here is how I think I might go about designing such a thing. For this example, I will attempt to design a cell phone that has contained within it the general characteristics of the alpha-male identity.

First, I need to clearly define some general characteristics of the alpha-male:

- Bigger, visually arresting appearance

- Enjoys themselves and the moment

- Moves slowly as if in control of time itself

- Focuses on the world around them in a relaxed manner

- Are in control of themselves

- Able to take control of a situation and resolve it

- Strong, martial, skilled, intelligent, and a leader

- Their unfailing strength restores the strength of all

Next, I need to take these general characteristics and transfer them into a cell phone. Here are some considerations to take into account when designing the “alpha-male” cell phone.

- A little bigger (to help it stand out and appear stronger)

- A little heavier (to give it a feel of strength and control, and also to cause the user to move more slowly when they hold the phone and bring it up to their ears)

- A little more solid (once again to create a sense of durability, strength, and immovability)

- It has a visually arresting appearance (to give the phone a look of leadership and make it stand out)

- Is both soft and hard; its softness/hardness comes from being relaxed unto a powerful frame that possesses a beautiful gravity (to make the cell phone appear steady, powerful, and trustworthy)

- Its ring tone is deep, resonates, and is unhurried (this will push the user to interact with the phone in the manner of the alpha-male, when they go to answer the phone, they shouldn’t be in a hurry to do so, but rather they should answer the phone in a slow, aware, and controlled way similar to how an alpha-male would)

In this example, I wanted to design a phone that has an identity contained within it When the user interacts with that phone, that identity will “seep” into them and transform the way the user acts and appears, so that they gradually in time begin to resemble that object’s identity – in this case the identity of the alpha-male.

Identification in movies

I teach screenwriting in Telecom this semester where I am an adjunct professor. It’s interesting to read Gaut’s psychological analysis of audience identification, and compare that with how I teach the “narrative designers” to generate audience identification. First, you should know we call them “access characters” because using the word “identification” just brings up all the problems Gaut articulates. Two, “access” happens mostly in the beginning. If we get it right in the beginning, the audience will “go along for the ride” (as long as we make no value choices to ‘shove them out’ later).  So, it happens up front – you’re either on the bus, or you’re not on the bus.

One student is writing a story that opened with three “guy’s guys” friends convincing the main character to break up with his current girlfriend.  He turned in the opening pages two weeks back. In the opening, the friends fun of him for putting up with her antics. They make fun of her for her antics. By the end of it, he’s thinking he needs to break up with her.

Now, this may be the correct plot, but to read it is terrible. Because it just sounds like guys busting on a girlfriend. We don’t actually see her be bad – she’s not there. Not even to defend herself. And, we don’t know if she’s actually so bad or if it’s just “guys being guys.” Furthermore, the boyfriend doesn’t defend her – so you start liking the main character less! The experience of reading it feels like “these three guys want their friend back and are making up excuses for him to leave his girl.”  To read it, you actually begin to feel *for the girl* (who is not even there) and to not respect the hero, because he doesn’t stand up for her.  So, I told him this, and asked him to start instead on a situation where we see the hero and the girl interacting.

He turned it in last Monday – and it’s perfect. She *is* so unbearable. You can’t help but feel for the little guy who gets harangued in front of his friends. And it’s funny, and he still tries to stick up for her when people point out she’s being mean. And he’s so sweet. It’s the opposite of the first reaction – you start dying for him to get out of this relationship. And now I know when I read this week’s pages, I’ll be rooting for him to get out of this situation — scratch that, I’m already rooting for him, and I haven’t yet read the next pages.

That’s what the *purpose* of identification/access is. At least, from a constructors perspective.

Question about today’s lesson

I’m thinking of situations where someone may consider something art that was not (evidently) a deliberate product of an artistic process. For instance, someone viewing something like the Grand Canyon my gain deep meaning and insight from the experience, and many of the qualities we talked about today (play, festival, etc) exist there.

Would Gadamer say that this event is artistic? Does this seem like a fair application of the theory, or is this application a little too thin?