PBS and Digital Nation

I ran across this via Henry Jenkins’ blog (a seemingly unending source of info & critical insight…):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

The site is essentially a online documentary effort focused on youth involvement with online culture, and the ‘impact’ of the Internet/Web and communications technologies on our lives. The tagline of the site is “Life on the Virtual Frontier”—a bit sensationalist and predictable, but folks interviewed for the project are at the cutting edge of understanding and critiquing ways in which people (young and, um, old) are using emerging technologies and gaining adaptive skills.

Look here for Jenkins’ post.

Digital Media/Learning conference in San Diego

Announced on Henry Jenkins’ blog, this conference looks to be of interest to many in the AAD community:

FIRST ANNUAL DIGITAL MEDIA AND LEARNING CONFERENCE
CONFERENCE THEME: “DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION”

February 18 – 20, 2010

Cal IT2
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California

Go here for Jenkin’s post and more information (including a link to the conference site).

Launching an area of concentration….

What follows is the official (at least for now) description of the newest area of concentration within the Arts and Administration Master’s degree program here at the University of Oregon. The Media Management track will begin this Fall term (2009). Read on for the details:

The Media Management area of concentration within the Arts and Administration Program at the University of Oregon meets challenges posed by media technologies to workers in arts and culture sectors. Arts administrators manage not just programming and projects involving a range of media (both new and old), but the very communication tools, strategies, and content through which programming and projects come to be. As such, media management is a central strand of arts administration, one that can be seen as a speciality or track but that should also be recognized as part of everyday professional practice. Managing media comprises more than being tech-savvy. It involves understanding the limits and potential for media to serve as delivery vehicle and communication strategy, and comprises a set of creative, practical, and critical skills that enable such communication across an array of social and cultural contexts.

Media can be understood to include text, audio, graphics, animation, video, film, and interactivity, though it should not be considered to solely encompass the “new” and/or “high tech.” Shifts in media technologies have an historical arc, and for decades arts administrators have navigated these shifts alongside artists using “new” or emergent media and audiences or communities engaging their work. Digital culture, however, represents an increased pacing of change as well as a recalibration of the “architecture of participation” attached to media in general. The Media Management area of concentration seeks to span the historical and contemporary facets of media in artistic and creative settings, and students pursuing this area of  concentration will acquire knowledge and experience rapidly becoming central to leadership in arts and culture sectors across for-profit and nonprofit settings.

This area of concentration within the master’s program entails a focus on the role of media across arts and culture sectors—with an empahsis on knowledge and skills useful to administrators—that will enable students to wield media as both delivery technologies and social communications strategies.  Through critical investigation into key sites of communication and cultural convergence informing arts in the 21st century, students will merge theory with practice. Robustly exploring the mediascapes surrounding arts and culture sectors through coursework and directed research will impart critical thinking and practical experience skills that situate creativity at the nexus of art and daily life. As such, students pursuing the media management concentration area will assemble a balanced toolkit of technical, practical, and critical skills integral to arts administration.

Big Gay Fuzz, revisited…

A post back, I wrote about my acquisition of the Big Gay Fuzz. This pedal is a one-off clone/mod built specifically for the Pedals For Peace charity auction site launched by Devi Ever. Within a few days of winning the auction, but before the pedal showed up in my mailbox, I received an email from the builder, Tom Dalton (of Fuzzhugger). He had a few ideas for further mods to the circuit and was wondering if I was interested in what essentially would be a meta-customized pedal. How could I say no?

The BGF and its fancy packaging

The BGF, with fine pink packaging and custom manual

The pedal (as originally built) came two days later, and I immediately plugged it in—the volume swell mode was wild, and the piercing upper octave harmonics  above the twelfth fret added a simmering fuzzed-out shimmer. However, there was a significant volume drop at some settings, and overall the thing didn’t produce a lot of signal. I had the level knob pegged most of the time, and was surprised that my clean signal was often louder than the fuzzed. I emailed Tom and asked if the mods he proposed would add volume. “Yes,” was his enthusiastic answer, and he (over several emails) elucidated the nature of the mods he had dreamed up since the initial build (and after the eBay auction closed): a second circuit board, comprising a clean boost mode and a whole other fuzz circuit; an additional toggle switch; another volume pot—the details were juicy, and amounted to a wholly other pedal put inside the one I already had. Tom’s excitement was infectious, and I mailed the pedal to him the next day.

This brief vignette illustrates what I am interested in exploring through the ethnographic project I’ve pursued on and off over the past two years. I’ve been referring to it as “pedal culture,” and have circled around several aspects of the boutique pedal building industry: distribution, aesthetics (sonic & visual), building and creativity, and (finally) the emergence of communities within the online domain. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the project with a new name: fuzz folk. Maybe a bit corny, but the name adumbrates the directions I’ve begun to see this project going, especially with regard to the complex relationships between concepts of aesthetics, community, and communications. Elements of exchange and “gift economy”  in the fuzz folk world serve to extend aesthetics into social relationships (see here for how Henry Jenkins has employed the “gift economy” idea—in fact, read the whole 8-part piece); people buy, trade, argue about, and praise pedals or sounds that they share affinity for or aversion to, in the process forging relationships anchored in discussion threads, PMs, YouTube demo vids (something I’ll certainly address in another post), blogs, and myriad other “new media” components of communication. As such, community and aesthetics intertwine in dynamic (not causal) ways that provide what I’m seeing as a rich opportunity to examine the dialectic between analog & digital domains.

The BGF after Toms mods. The only visible change is the extra toggle on the right hand side...

The BGF after Tom's mods. The only visible change is the extra toggle on the right hand side…

But back to the Big Gay Fuzz. This singular example of material culture embodies the whole of what I have briefly described above, serving as a metonymic vehicle for the fuzz folk community. In a way, it is also a super-distilled example since it is the only one of its kind—illustrating yet another social-aesthetic element of fuzz folk/pedal culture: individuality or uniqueness. And as I noted in a previous post, this pedal also represents the ways that pedal building and the fuzz folk community is more than just a bunch of people rattling on about crazy sounds or obsessing over gear; there is political intent behind this pedal and the Pedals for Peace project launched by Devi Ever. Yet another aspect of the fuzz folk I’ll be tracking through this project…

Fuzz folk

Big Gay Fuzz, built by Tom Dalton (fuzzhugger.com) and funded by Devi Ever (deviever.com)

Big Gay Fuzz, built by Tom Dalton (fuzzhugger.com) and funded by Devi Ever (deviever.com)

I won this effects pedal the other day on eBay, and I should get it in the mail today! Built by Tom Dalton (of Fuzzhugger.com) as a clone of the Foxx Tone Machine (heavily modifed, however), it was sold as part of the Pedals for Peace project put into play by Devi Ever. The tagline for this collective of pedal builders is “Raising money for effective change,” and the emergence of this project over the past month or so has raised some intriguing questions for me about relationships between material culture as object-ive and politicized consciousness or social practice as subject-ive. No answers or nuancing of these questions yet, but I’m going to work though that soon…

I’ve been following the Pedals for Peace project, as well as the community of users and builders blossoming via Devi’s incredily active discussion boards/hosted blogs over at iLoveFuzz.com, for a bit over the past few years now as part of a research project into what I’m calling the culture of boutique pedal building. I’m hoping to pull together a publication of sorts on this during the summer, but will use this blog space to periodically sort out ideas. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic enagement with web-based communities, and my own gear-obsessed music making, I’m hoping that this project will contribute to a more nuanced analysis of intersections between musical technology, aesthetics, and creative practice.

The package…

Just the other day, Light In The Attic Records re-released Black Monk Time, along with a new disc of old recordings—demos to be exact (called The Early Years 1964–1965). A few weeks prior to that, the label reissued Serge Gainsborg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson—first time ever on compact disc for this one. All three of these discs have received reviews galore, so no need to replicate those (besides, who can top a 9.2 on Pitchfork?). Beyond noting that the music on each disc is well worth owning, I’m not even going to mention the sounds at all. Here, I’m more concerned with the stuff, the material aspects of this LITA reissue project.

Several weeks ago, I received a package in the mail. This is always an exciting moment for me, but this time around it was triply exciting for all three of the above mentioned discs snuggled together inside. I’m no music biz insider or record reviewer, just a subscriber to LITA’s cd-of-the-month club, the gift (to myself) that keeps on giving; I’m a sucker for these deals, where one pays up front for a year’s worth of releases. But getting the discs well ahead of actual release date (not that big of deal to me, since I have little time to actually enjoy listening to them before anyone else can) is almost unimportant to the promise of the package itself.The discs and the stuff

The CDs were not alone in that padded envelope, and I promptly I set them aside so as to poke through the other contents. I knew there would be more inside, as the label said as much in the subscription promotional materials. Constituting the second installment in my LITA subscription, this package offered a treasure trove parallel to the first (a reissue of a “lost” concept album by Canadian composer/arranger Doug Randle called Songs for the New Industrial State—great stuff!). Item by item, I withdrew from the envelope the trinkets assembled by a LITA staffer. Questions arose: who pulled this collection together? was it the same set of goodies for each subscriber? a material riddle, tied to particular songs on the discs or just to the overall ambiance? a random assortment of junk from the closest dollar store (or, more likely, Archie McPhee & Co.).detail_cigs-monks

Ultimately, opening the package was fun (as was taking the photos), and pondering what the objects inside “meant” in relation to the reissues (as objects) and/or the music therein (as sounds) was part of the ritual experience. While I had paid for the discs, the stuff that came with them comprised a gift, a gesture of “more” that might be interpreted in a range of ways, from the cynical (they’re just getting suckers like me to feel part of the “in” crowd) to the magical (the extra objects add something to the overall commercial process of rereleasing old records). That is to say, these things do something beyond clogging up junk drawers. Whether that something is positive, negative, or somewhere in between depends on your perspective (or habitus, I suppose). No grand statements or insights there, just an observation on some stuff.

As it turns out, I received the third package of the year from LITA today, and it looks to be a fine one. Nothing too semantically elaborate accompanying the disc (a reissue of Coming from Reality by Rodriguez; don’t know if this has been reviewed yet…)—a signed poster of young Rodriguez in the recording studio, and Issue One of the LITA Zine—so no big mysteries to unravel. But, it’s a package nonetheless—and one that I relished opening.

The money shirt from Sweden

At this point in time, the launch post for a blog is daunting. There are so many others out there already, maybe even covering the same territory, that I’m left with the question: why bother? This question is thrown into sharp relief since I’m putting this blog together purportedly so that I can dynamically explore (i.e. with readers) the world of material culture…artifacts…stuff…in a way that is intelligent and (ultimately) a feature of my scholarly career. In lieu of laying out a mission for this blog just yet, however, I’ll move on to the stuff at hand.

money as gift as art

money as gift as art

Here you see a picture of 20 KR note from Sweden, folded into what could be a facsimile of a shirt created during the lean years of men’s fashion circa Miami Vice (the TV show). I received this  piece from a fella by the name of Hans, in a Stockholm hotel bar near Old Town . He didn’t give it to me, however—I had to buy it. And I had to buy it at a price higher than the exchange rate at that time (Dec., 2002). I’m not bitter about this (though I haggled with him at the time), for it is art, and art adds value. Or does it create value? Or does it reframe the relationship between “object” and “value”? Here I’m at the heart of this post…

How do we value material objects, whether or not they carry the label “art”? Market-oriented perspectives, exchange value, social capital: all of these (and many more) concepts enable us to take different perspectives on the things we find around us all the time. Sometimes there is idiosyncratic value (the stuff in Found magazine, for example), sometimes there is monetary value, and sometimes there is nostalgic or personal affect value. There is historical value, trade value, and just-because-I-have-it value…Are these mutually exclusive categories or conceptualizations of value? They each come with different metrics—often implicit—and are not easily mapped onto each other, which pushes me to think about constellations of value that attach to objects. Circling bits of investment that have distinct yet intersecting trajectories of meaning and communication, through which we navigate material objects in the social world—that’s what I mean by constellations of value. I’ll flesh out the constellation connected to the money shirt.

The inscription...

The inscription…

As you may imagine, there is a story attached to this shirt that is more detailed than the monetary value of the actual note and the place I got it. I was in the hotel bar with my cousin, Tris, having a beer (memory value). We noticed a table holding a four-level pyramid of pint glasses; there were three people sitting around the table, one of whom was Hans. Small talk about the pyramid (which tottered dangerously, yet did not fall over) led to his demonstration of the money shirt craft. Obviously he’d pulled this one out in a bar before, as the performance was smooth (social/cultural capital value). Out of his wallet came the 20 KR note, and within a few minutes (three?) he had turned it into a short sleeve shirt complete with collar and tie. He neither tore nor cut the note. I immediately offered him the USD equivalent, but, alas, it had taken on value (about 5%, if I remember correctly). I bargained just for the sake of it, knowing full well that Hans had indeed inflated the value of the 20 KR note by turning it into something it was not (market value). After I paid, he inscribed it for me. However, he would not teach me how to fold a bill in just such a way that the head/neck of the goose becomes the tie. Instead, he offered that since I owned it, I was entitled to unfold it and figure it out myself. Needless to say, I still do not know how to make a money shirt.

Now it holds value for me, and I can extend that by telling the story (here!), bringing it into class as an example for discussion/critique, putting it up on eBay, or hanging it on my tree every Christmas (which I do). One object, a bunch of values: a constellation that is emergent, not completely mappable yet not inscrutable.