Early Access: The Artist is Absent
Added 2016-07-25 04:11:10 +0000 UTCHey whoa what's up!
The big ol' video I've been working on seemingly forever is now live for all you early-access backers. It's called The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden & the Beginner's Guide. Hope you've got some free time, because it's a bit over 32 minutes long.
The video will go public on Tuesday. I may do some tiny tweaks to this edit before then; I might want to lengthen some pauses by a half second or so to make things flow a little better. I'll also give things a glance to see if I've missed any typos.
This squares us up for March and April! Keep your eye on this space, because I have something small and a little weird that may come out in the next week or so. :D
Comments
@Ian What I find frustrating, is people's acculturated assumption seems to be that a reply in a comment is prioritizing the, erhmm, user, who made the comment, over the thousands or millions or more of people who will read the comment. The format is a "forum," just like in congress, where speakers speak past each other. It's a little confused when we say "comments," you expect a peanut gallery, but people use comments as if they are forums, since forums are all but disappearing thanks to the "Internet 2.0" corporate -hell-landscape. Please, -No Comment- It's very good to encourage online discussion. I cringe when people say: comments be damned. That's ceding ground to old-media, and refusing to flex this new muscle. Go sit on the couch then, and shut up I say. EDITED: 8 is a lot of things to just find out about Jupiter.
Michael
2016-07-28 14:38:38 +0000 UTCPatreon comments are schizophrenic! It seems to let you do sub-threads on the feed page, or at least reply with email notification. But the text box is no larger than a booger, and it doesn't auto-scroll! Patreon comments are always shifting. They seem to want to limit longform comments, but you can't tell if they are just inept is all! I think it's easiest to feel like you "know" recording artists. Hard to know writers, because I don't think anyone really has time to read, unless you are hunting for scripts to adapt to screenplays, I don't know who reads all of these new books. Films are more accessible, but fewer and hard to come by. I don't feel like I know anything about directors, and I just adore certain actors' features is all. I don't feel like I know anything about musicians really either. There's a saying that you can never really know another person, even your lover. I wonder if you can even know yourself. This idea of knowing, maybe is a dangerous illusion, and nothing more :) But I never pass on a Kate Bush, or Lou Reed interview.
Michael
2016-07-28 14:26:26 +0000 UTCSuspending disbelief, and trying to think in terms of what the author is getting at and expecting of "you" are two different things, and I think they are actually at odds with each other. I sometimes think it's folly to develop art theory. I think it's better to chart a course based on instincts. It's the opposite of an exact science, and I think guiding the ball with our fingertips is as good as it gets. If you grab the ball, it disappears with a pop, like taking the steering wheel in a dream. This "suspension" operates on different levels. The most basic level is, "this is a cartoon," or, "this is a video-game: so people can cling to walls like a spiderman, in the rain, and that's not weird at all." On the other level, it's asking us to overlook foibles, or to play along, in order to enhance our own enjoyment. I think that's more akin to "performance." The flowchart diagram seemed to take this one step further. Suggesting that the "players" were almost psychoanalyzing the narrator, but first and foremost the author themself, and that in the case of TBG they'd conflated the two. And then going further, the author themself, is also a private-fiction, so there's basically a trinity: the narrator-the private author-the actual author/person. It's easy to see how the topic is fraught. Anyway, I "hypothesize," that performing for the author, is something akin to performing in a social situation, and that the same drives are probably involved, and that it's probably involuntary. I don't think that's so crazy. God, I wish the folks at Patreon could figure out how to make the comment features on the feed and fullscreen screen the same experience, just in different boxes. How hard can that really be! (I do web design, so I know it's not hard at all. But god bless Patreon.)
Michael
2016-07-28 14:00:18 +0000 UTCPatreon why u no allow subthreads Michael - It's always interesting the relationship you develop with an artist when you consume a lot of their work. You obviously CAN know a person through their art... to a degree. But you can also be VERY WRONG and really short of meeting them and getting to know them yourself, or perhaps public showings that really fly in the face of the image you have constructed of them, you really never know what you do or don't know. But I think mostly what is curious to me is that I never STOP wanting to pretend like I know a person through their art. IE: I love the metal gear franchise deeply, and certainly each game is Very Kojima, and you can tell when he has touched something, put a lot of himself into it. It's easy to joke about knowing him (and indeed, as a result many things he does do not surprise me any more). But honestly I'll never actually jack about the guy. None the less, a weird sort of mythos is built up around him, by me and other fans, each of pretending we know the artist. I think that must be the most bizarre thing to be on the receiving end of. Ian - No prob! Honestly, it looks like a really interesting game so I'm kind of glad you aren't spoiling yourself. I suspect when you get a chance to play it you'll want to talk about it.
AV
2016-07-28 06:25:53 +0000 UTCAw shucks, I'm flattered that you saw/liked my piece! Yeah, I think it's going to be very interesting to see where communication goes from here as people who were alive before the internet die; those of us who were kinda on the cusp (I was born in '91, so I grew up as the internet was really "starting") get older; the generations of "internet natives" grow up and mature; and the NEXT generation starts. I feel like some of those comments on my article fall under the "wait... i LITERALLY don't understand what you wrote" category, and is that because they aren't tech savvy enough to get it, or are they just choosing to be obtuse? If it's the latter, then well, we'll see if new technology can alleviate that (maybe) but if it's a sincere lack of compatibility with this technology, then it's going to be interesting to see how that issue resolves itself. The reality is, of course, there will always be people who "don't get it" and won't get that you're talking to a person, but also to everyone (or whatever new, space-age obstacle is), but I think it'll be interesting to see what is going to trip us up next. Which is, I guess, kinda a "glass half empty" perspective on things; "Oh wow! We're all now just lasers!" "Yeeeeah, but somebody is gonna use their lasers to make dicks. trust me."
Cameron Petti
2016-07-28 01:26:09 +0000 UTCAh. Hmm. I'm not really arguing for (or against) an additional layer of meta when we immerse ourselves in a story. I definitely don't think people should stop assuming the role of the Audience. But I do think it's valuable to understand what that role is, and to be able to think about it after you're done consuming the story. It is, at times, actually morally imperative to do so, because sometimes the way the Audience is "supposed" to react might be something quite problematic. This is partly why I made videos like We Don't Talk About Kenny, because even if we enjoy the game while we're playing it, we need to be able to think about it critically afterwards, and recognize the patterns of abuse that were not made explicit in the text itself. But, yeah, I'm definitely not saying we should stop performing as Audience. That would basically be saying we should never suspend our disbelief! As I say in the video, I think TBG is about both the necessity and inherent limitations of hypothesizing about the author. I don't really relate that to social personae, I'm afraid. I'm talking pretty explicitly about how we interpret art and narrative.
Ian Danskin
2016-07-28 01:19:36 +0000 UTCHey Krisanne! I'll have to skip the one on The Witness, because I do still hope to play that game if it ever comes out on my OS, but I'll check out the one on 24! And thanks for the kind words. :)
Ian Danskin
2016-07-28 01:11:12 +0000 UTCHey Cameron! Funny enough, I've seen BOTH of your links! I actually quote Jay Smooth's talk in Part 6 of Why Are You So Angry? And, hey hey, I saw your (quite hilarious) article on Paste as well! Floated by me on Twitter or Facebook, I don't remember which. Proud to day *I* got the joke. There's a really interesting speech by Douglas Adams collected in The Salmon of Doubt where he talks about how communication has changed due to technology throughout history. Speech allows one-to-one communication, the printing press allows one-to-many communication, voting and polls allow many-to-one communication, and now the internet is allowing, for the first time in history at this scale, many-to-many communication. I feel like internet commenters are this weird new mode of communication that not everyone has their head wrapped around; how it can feel like your talking to a person and also performing in front of a group, but people don't often feel like it's both at the same time, which it kind of is. The internet is a very weird place. Also, yeah, dunno what was up with that single frame of Twitter, but I saw it on my end as well. Didn't happen in the second export, so I guess it was just a rendering glitch.
Ian Danskin
2016-07-28 01:05:46 +0000 UTCI'd have to go over that section again to be certain. Perhaps you can comment on what's changed in the final post-production version. In short, in your diagram, in the smaller part, as if there is a second level of mental reflection happening, how I remembered it, is in this part the audience is imagining (mentally modeling) their imagined role vis-a-vis their imagined author. Here you're arguing for an additional level of meta. It's just my intuition that IF people do this (I think the argument of the piece may be, that you should recognize you are doing this, and stop doing it--but maybe I've misunderstood) then it strikes me as analogous to how people "assume personae" to smooth over social interactions. The old idea that we are all multiple "people" depending on the social context. I think it's the same mental machinery taking over, and not necessarily a conscious act. It's just a hypothesis. I think a more mature audience member (one with experience assimilating artistic works) doesn't do this, and may even forget that they ever had. (My memory goes back about 3 months, and then it's a blank.) I think after you've critically taken in thousands of works of art in a mode where you are very conscious about what you are doing and why you are doing it, I am guessing that you'll no longer do this; whether that's something you decided consciously, or it's just something that art appreciation erodes in time . It seems like a naive (maybe egocentric?) thing to do in other words. This probably didn't help. I've always thought the idea of "social personae" is probably a sign of social work that needs to happen. Something that will seem anachronistic at some future checkpoint.
Michael
2016-07-26 20:11:01 +0000 UTC2. I think this was your computer malfunctioning :) There is a scene with a Patreon profile I think. It's long though. And humorous. Not a flash. (Or it's possible Ian fixed it. You never know.) 1. I have to admit. I don't know what this video is saying honestly. I do know that A) it explains TBG well enough to me, that I don't feel like I am missing out on it, and know more about what the hubbub is all about; B) I think it unmasks communication and story well, in a matter-of-fact way, that seems unusual but also completely appropriate. But I feel like it's trying to say more about "our" relationship to (not-in-the-abstract) the person who made TBG. I don't feel like it rang my bell in this respect, and we commenters all seem to have taken away something different from this aspect of it--I am left unsure which was the focus. No offense to Ian. It was good. But the "super meta" stuff seems to not have a clear view. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, since its "super meta." :)
Michael
2016-07-26 19:47:16 +0000 UTCWhen you are taking art in just because of the artist(s) whom made it (for instance when the critics all swear this is their absolute creative nadir) then I think this is a healthy relationship with the artist. You're interest has shifted from the individual pieces to the person, or the version of the person/artistic-font that lives in your brain. I tend to return to artists that somehow managed to produce impossibly sprawling catalogues of work, where most of it is miraculously considered to be consistently excellent. Usually these artist are the who's-who of critical darlings. That's very boring, but if anyone ever calls you a muscian's-musician, or a writer's-writer, then I think (by my judgement anyway) that you're probably really something else. These kinds of singular artists tend to be more interesting as a whole than as taken by their individual outputs. I think on the other hand when your relationship is how I think this piece is describing it, then I think this is an unhealthy relationship with the artist, and probably it does a disservice to, or clouds their work. I can't completely commit to this though, because I know how people like to "read into things" and that sometimes that actually leads to insights of sorts; usually mundane. I think it goes back to basic social psychology. Many people want to know they know something, more than they want to know something, if you know what I mean. Some things we can never know, and are better off not wanting to even want to know.
Michael
2016-07-26 19:37:44 +0000 UTCHey! Can you expand a bit on what you mean by assuming the qualities of the ideal? Didn't follow that bit.
Ian Danskin
2016-07-26 12:18:46 +0000 UTCAgain -- it's always good to get an IV drip of a notable, contemporary game of questionable authorship, via a trusted outlet! I try to limit myself to one "forever" project per year. PS: The part in the story flowchart diagram where the reader models the author/authors-ideal-reader, and I think you say-or-imply that the reader assumes the qualities of their imagined "ideal" (the smaller part that is added further in.) Anyway, I don't think that activity is part of my own thought processes. I think maybe it's something that people who adopt social roles fluidly just do automatically; whereas people who are/can-only-be "just-themself" probably don't have this equipment operating upstairs. (I can't recall where, and I have it on no authority, but a program of some kind, that I recall, asserted/opined that looking back, the icons who selflessly/tirelessly revolutionized the social order, many of them displayed mental abnormalities that precluded deception. I don't know, but I expect that these qualities are related. If readers are curious, I think this kind of personality is probably because of an overdeveloped/domineering prefrontal cortex. It's not about deception per se, but more the idea that it leads to no good. When there is a reverse power dynamic, I think these people have no issue deceiving authorities; for example, lying to a man intent on murder to save a life, is not a dilemma if your mind works like this. In fact it's funny that anyone would think that it could be.) EDITED: In order to make this read better, I think I chopped out some important bits. The parenthetical tail became almost a non sequitur! Sorry. By "just-themself" I mean a personality type that isn't preoccupied with performance (think Hilary Clinton maybe?) or overly-conscious about what others think about them or might be up to as it relates to them. So "just-themself" implies that a con-man cannot be just-a-con-man, because by definition they aren't themself. I hope that helps. I am surprised someone Hearted this, because it feels like one of those off-the-cuff things I wrote on the Internet one day that if I had a self-critical bone in my body I'd be mildly-ashamed of ;)
Michael
2016-07-25 11:38:52 +0000 UTCI'm watching the video now, but I just had to pause for a moment and say that: Oh my god, this is great, I'm really enjoying it. This is exactly the kind of stuff that makes me super happy to be your supporter. So yeah, wow, thank you.
Valentyn
2016-07-25 08:48:05 +0000 UTCTo me The Beginner's Guide was an exercise is recognizing how deeply I try to read into who the author is and then learning to feel real bad about it. I still do this, I don't know how to stop (I did it with you, watching your video!) But I feel like it was a. Well. A good parable for the danger of that. I think this was a great breakdown on the nature of fandom, which is how I personally relate to it. By my point in fandom most of us has a solid grip on death of the author, because god forbid we let the authors ruin our fantasies by trying to tell us what we made of their work isn't legitimate, but there is still the constant struggle to not think you know a person via their work. Made, I think, all the more difficult by know you COULD know SOMETHING of the person who created something that touched you deeply. And that temptation is REAL real. ANYWAY I don't actually have much to add, it's a good video for providing a way to talk about something that I think bears talking about with just about all media. BTW I watched two videos lately in the Critically Analyzing Media And Drawing Interesting Correlations Area that made me think you might enjoy them, so in case you have missed these somehow: This first one is an interesting read on the Witness, but it thoroughly spoils the game so be warned: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOJC62t4JfA" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOJC62t4JfA</a> This one is about 24, the television show. It... ALSO spoils the show? but.. I dont' think that conceptually has any meaning when talking about 24 : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P52G4Kyq5M&index=3&list=LLHcogCLCtn8JcHQi1lI4X5w" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P52G4Kyq5M&index=3&list=LLHcogCLCtn8JcHQi1lI4X5w</a>
AV
2016-07-25 07:02:04 +0000 UTC1. Super fascinating. As a writer and someone who ruminates of pop culture regularly, this definitely food for thought. There were two things that this made me think of, so I will arrogant enough to present them to you unsolicited: -<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbdxeFcQtaU" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbdxeFcQtaU</a> This TED talk from Jay Smooth is about to talk to someone about how what they did was racist, and it's interesting because Jay's advice is to separate the person's actions from their self. To say "what you DID was racist" not "you ARE a racist", and I think that that's a really interesting perspective that dovetails with your point that a person's content cannot reliably describe that person. Unfortunately, when it comes to decisive topics such as race, the "authorial intent" IS often hate based and what you DID equals what you ARE, but especially when it gets away from the anecdotal and into the written word or recorded video, it becomes harder and harder to truly parse out a person's "soul" just from a single tweet or whatever. -Another example of audience attempting to define an author by their content that I think is really clear is internet commenting (an irony I, a commenter, do not miss). I mentioned I'm a writer, and I recently wrote an article about Juno getting to Jupiter that was an absurdist comedy piece, but in a hilarious turn of events, Yahoo linked to it in it's Science section, so I got **250** comments on an otherwise flash-in-the-pan article, and they were ALL variations on "The person who wrote this is obviously dumb and should kill himself", as if this article that they veeerrry clearly misinterpreted gave them enough evidence to deem me worthless. It's really interesting that internet culture provides the illusion of intimacy by providing spaces for feedback like comment sections, or platforms for direct communication like Twitter, because that intimacy is rarely ACTUALLY there. As much as you can tweet at a famous person and "actually get a response back!", that person doesn't know you, won't know you, and might just be some intern. This strays a little away from YOUR musings on storytelling, but the dynamics of communication is a really intriguing topic, so thank you for this video My article, and all the glorious hate mail attached:<a href="https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/07/8-unexpected-things-we-just-found-out-about-jupite.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/07/8-unexpected-things-we-just-found-out-about-jupite.html</a> 2. No idea if you're looking for proof reading feedback, but at about 30:57-8 there's an accidental flash of what I THINK is your twitter profile that you use a minute later. Unless you're trying to subliminally Incept something into our brains. In which case....I uh, didn't see anything.
Cameron Petti
2016-07-25 04:58:52 +0000 UTC
