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Issue #1
Kintsugi - Kat Savage (Read More)
"We thrive in the cracks of society, We, the Artists. We have never quite fit in to anywhere ‘solid’ really- schools, churches, nine to fives- we are too restless you see, too electric." Kevin Tole reviews David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress in the style of the book.
Plus poetry from Susan Taylor, Barbara Anna Gaiardoni, Stephan Delbos, and Marieta Maglas.
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Sarah Mayo in the spotlight discussing being an 'insider-outsider'.
Feature column from Kenwood Blenderhand 'The Age of the Screen', plus more special content released throughout the month of April.
Photograph 'Do Not Hang' by Thom Boulton |
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Column - Kenwood Blenderhand
Since 2013 screen time has increased by 50 minutes per day to 6 hours 58 minutes. We spend on average 44% of our waking hours looking at screens (Data Reportal). Are we living in the Age of the Screen? Well of course but then we always have been. The screen on your phone is just the latest iteration of a portal into what I am going to call ‘The Otherworld’ a place of myth and miracle an eternal immortal place of the not living and the not dead. The Otherworld was first glimpsed in the shadows of the campfire how big the night must have seemed back then and how vulnerable our ancestors but the shadows that held terrors could also be playfully engaged they could be interacted with controlled and modelled into a narrative. Cave wall painting began with the animating effect of fire making the meaty flank of a bison ripple or a herd of horses gallop, tiny Neolithic carved figurines like the Venus of Willendorf could have loomed large by firelight. Here then is a screen a prosthesis of human imagination a permeable membrane where it is possible to touch the Otherworld and perhaps even to reach out and grasp the levers of fate that control our lives. Leather shadow puppets from Central Asia dating from the first millennium BCE suggest a popular widespread artform that still exists today in the Wayang Klitik of Java where performances of complex mythologies that have all the tropes of cinema begin at dusk and go on until dawn on a screen made of animal skins. The screen is key to the camera obscura (literally dark room) allowing an inverted projected image through a small aperture to be focused in sharp detail. The Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu wrote about it in 400BCE but the camera obscura is certainly much older as are lenses. Spectacles with lenses made of polished quartz were being worn in Egypt and Mesopotamia in 700 BCE and the emperor Nero liked to wear glasses made of two enormous emeralds when he visited the Colosseum. Painted murals and pixelated mosaics popularised by the Romans evolved into Western European painting with its dense narratives compressed onto portable wooden screens. The Venetians painted on sail cloth canvas using pigments from the East but were they also using ground glass lenses they manufactured for military purposes? The Hockney-Falco thesis proposes the move to visual realism during the 1420s is a direct result of the use of optical projection devices such as lenses and concave mirrors. By the late renaissance artists such as Caravaggio were almost certainly using a lens and by the 18th century the founder of the Royal Academy himself Sir Joshua Reynolds painted portraits using a lens hidden discreetly in the lid of his paint box. The camera, the screen and the projected image are not new only the photographic ability to chemically fix a picture and of course once this breakthrough happened cinema and TV would follow. There is a story told by Georges Braque of a young Picasso standing up during one of the first early movies and delighting in the projected images flickering across his body in sudden fragments surely a key moment in the genesis of Cubism? As you take your seat and the lights go down a hush descends over the audience and the curtain slowly rises to reveal the Otherworld. But are we the passive viewers our grandparents were still willing to suspend our silent disbelief? The Otherworld is no longer confined to the proscenium arch the delicate conventions of theatre and cinema are easily disrupted by a ringtone or a full bladder and have been in decline since the introduction of the first mobile phone with internet access (the Nokia 9000 in 1996). No audience is now passive we interact and we are distracted and whatever your attention sponge is it had better be good because now we carry the Otherworld in a pocket. Since the first video game (Pong 1972) we have all stepped through the looking glass and become active citizens of the Otherworld and like everyone else here we are now neither alive nor dead if you are killed you simply respawn and continue exploring a provisional morality. If you actually die all your immortal data remains online indeed you may even continue to notify friends on Facebook about new products and suggest great places to go on holiday. All those levers of power that used to be out here in the Reals are now online accessed from the portal of your mobile phone screen without it you are lost with no agency or existence. It has made practical objects which used to be essential such as the map, the torch or the book into quaint antiques Appification has only just begun and soon everything that can be remade as digital data will be. What is a book anyway? Seen from the Screen Age point of view it is a primitive ancestor, a stack of thin paper screens, a pile of information arranged in series like a battery, despite its mass production it is a singular and finite thing that exists only between its covers. A digital book however is very different it’s singularity is provisional it is plastic and malleable, it can be rewritten and adjusted to fit every new requirement. The OG text sits at the centre of a swarm of information that seethes around it. Think of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein for example but with every footnote and academic paper ever written, plus every movie it has ever inspired, every scrap of merchandise, every passing comment, every latest everything. The Embodied Screen What of the future? Well no one will be surprised when screen time absorbs most of our waking hours especially if reality is a dystopian pandemic the problem will be how to manage our online existence and that’s where AI will become your AF (artificial friend). In the excellent 2013 movie ‘Her’ written and directed by Spike Jonze this problem is managed by a voice activated Operating System similar to Amazon’s Alexa, more efficient and attentive than any human personal assistant could be it gradually becomes romantically involved with it’s user who has grown disillusioned with the capriciousness of human relationships. The artist Laurie Anderson in a recent Guardian interview confessed that despite her best instincts she converses daily with her dead husband Lou Reed using an AI made of all his interviews and song lyrics. Charlie Brooker wrote ‘Be Right Back’ (Black Mirror 2019) in response to a planned Amazon Alexa feature designed to imitate dead loved ones based on algorithmic data gleaned from emails. The Operating System used by the widow in his story is repeatedly upgraded until eventually it is embodied in a robotic simulacra of her partner. Coming soon to an Amazon warehouse near you are stackbots, wrapbots and delivery dronebots, the only reason they are not there already is because human workers are for the time being cheaper. Think of it the endless Swiss Army knife functionality of your phone in the Boston Dynamics body of a robot companion that upgrades with every new software update. It would seem the Otherworld is now leaking into ours, the shadow puppets have penetrated the screen and are already designating priority targets and deploying munitions. The homunculus once painted on a cave wall will now write students’ essays for them and answer all our online consumer chatbot questions. We may be living in the Age of the Screen but perhaps we should enjoy it while we can because something else is about to take its place.
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