Another One of Those Other Ones

KB's hosting another trivia night, this time in scenic and historic White Boy Lake.

Disparate Design Deals

For Kevyn's upcoming trivia event:


For Richard Dawkins:


For Betsy Munro:


I've got a trunk full of paint but photoshop won't shut the fuck up.

Identity as Simulacrum.

Simulacrum then...



...and now.

1. Michel Foucault (paraphrase) - Is ones "true self" (identity) really derived from ones sexuality? If so, to what degree? What other factors inform ones identity?

2. Douglas Kellner - "...Identity has been increasingly linked to style, to produce an image, to how one looks. It is as if everyone must have their own look, style, and image to have their own identity, though, paradoxically, many of the models of style and look come from consumer culture, thus individuality is highly mediated in the consumor society of the present."

3. Question - a. Where do images of identity within "consumer culture" originate? b. What is consumer culture?

4. Answer to a: Foucault - "...Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse."

5. Meaning - "We" - individuals within a population - willingly submit the intimate details of our lives to the institutions of power (AKA "... Sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology [ect.]..." - Guy Debord). 6. Answer to b: Guy Debord - Consumer culture is the culture of the commodity AKA The Society of the Spectacle.
"...The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its development is identical to people’s estrangement from each other and from everything they produce."

7. Clarification - 1. "The Society of the Spectacle" is image/consumer culture within the economic system of global or late capitalism. 2. Identity, like everything else The Society of the Spectacle produces, is a commodity.

8. Application to Kellner - Kellner differentiates between the modern identity, "...An innate essence which determines what I am..." and postmodern identity, "...that identity is constructed not given, that it is a matter of choice, style, and behavior rather than intrinsic moral or psychological qualities... ...Postmodern identity, then, is constituted theatrically through role playing and image construction..."

9. Question - c.How do these two forms of identity relate to each-other?
Support for c. -Charlie Rose (to David Foster Wallace (41:53)) - "Quit worrying about how you are going to look and just be."
David Foster Wallace (45:16) - "I think postmodernism has run its course... A lot of the schticks of postmodernism - irony, cynicism, irreverence - are now part of whatever it is that's enervating in the culture itself. Burger-King now sells hamburgers with, "You've got to break the rules...""

10. Question (rhetorical) - How can one "just be" when one lives within The Society of the Spectacle?

11. Clarification - Postmodern identity is an image or role that one constructs and preforms. It is based on images or images of roles that one consumes within culture.

12. Jonathan Crary - "... the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a 'real,' optically perceived world...".
12a. What is Crary talking about? - The proliferation of digitally created imagery and environments that have never - and could never -exist in the real world (outside of an image).
12b. Why is this relevant?

13. Jean Baudrillard (from Simulacra and Simulation) - "...Today's abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that preceded the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory..."

14. If the digital images - advertising, photographs, movies, news, television, etc - that have become ubiquitous within our culture (AKA The society of the Spectacle) are overwhelmingly hyperreal (simulacra) and we construct our identities from images taken from culture, are our constructed identities simulacra as well?
14a. What does this mean?
14b. What is the consequence of this?

15. Answer to a and b: Foucault - explains biopower as, "... An explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations..."
15a. Interpretation - The postmodern identity as simulacrum is a a technique of power (here power is synonymous with "The spectacle") for achieving control of populations.

16. Is an identity simulacrum desirable?

I submit that it is not.

16a. To avoid the consumption of simulacrum - ergo, the creation of a simulacrum identity - one must consume imagery that is factual, original, and objective (or self critical). 16b. Rhetorical - How does the consumption of an image relate to an actual experience?

17. Question - What defines imagery that meets the above criteria?
17a. How does one create imagery that is factual, original, and objective (or self critical)?

18. Potential formulae - 1. Lars von Trier - Dogme 98. 2. Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida. 3. Peter Beste - Literary photojournalism.

New Land of Milk and Honey: Segue Action Photographs

This is a preview.

Show at the Soap Factory opens February 22nd.

.DNG + Lab Color: A Simulacrum of Nature?

Some potential submissions to Ubuntu for desktop background art in the upcoming Lucid release?
Could be.

Today's the Day...

...That this goes out on the internet:

Commissiooooon, Commission. (repetition of melodic/percussive light-motif) Commission!
Yes, that was a Fiddler on the Roof reference.

Reb Tevye = Dr. Zarkov, bitches.

The Tenacity of the Formative Tendency

Trout's One Man Band. October, 2009.


Sam Kramer, nackt drinnen Küche im Organ-Haus. Oktober, 2009.

Yep, once you get good at doing something it's hard to stop. Do I consider this kind of thing "serious" photography? I don't know.
I know that the process of shooting and editing is one which I enjoy.
I also know that the method which allows me to make photographs like these is one that I am highly critical of. There is separation that still exists between the ethics that inform the imagery I am producing and the actual images themselves. This is probably because I still do not fully grasp the meanings within the texts I am looking to in creating my own ethical framework for making photographs.
Should my photographic practice fully and exclusively adhere to one ethical method? I am curious as to the effect that a full realization of the spectrum of objectivity will have on my persisting desire to create formative imagery.
At present I am concerned that my interest making formative images will persist and that the ethical model I desire to construct will end up assuming the function that many of Michel Foucaults theories do. Foucault viewed the breadth of his work as a toolbox that philosophers, academics, students, etc. could pick and choose from in service of future development of ideas.
I see the value in having an ethical or metaphysical set of prefabricated thoughts or ideology to run specific content through, but I am unsure if this is a cultural practice that I want to emulate in my own development of Ideas.
In theory, if the stipulations of an objective ethic is sound enough, it should satisfy my entire desire for creative output. Right?
Looking at artists who have already dealt with similar systems of rules and ethics that modulate and govern their creative process will undoubtedly benefit me in answering this question.
Specific examples that immediately come to mind:
1. Lars von Trier - the development of the Dogme95 film style/genre.
2. Ingmar Bergman - looking at history, technology, subjective reality, human interactions, etc.
3. Robert Mapplethorpe - Specifically the differential that exists between Mapplethorpe's different bodies of work. How is X Portfolio different from Black Book? How is Y Portfolio different from his "architectural" photographs of the human body? Why is this shit different? why does it matter?
4. News photography. Images taken by photojournalists that receive a sanction of objectivity by the Associated Press. What makes these images objective? What makes them powerful? Are they either of these things? How is the objectivity/power/meaning of an image subverted by pundits and commentators that work for "theatrical" news corporations - MSNBC, FOX News, CNN, etc.

The saga must continue.

Conflict: Resolution

Sometimes Dumb Crimes Blow My mind.
Christopher Hitchens is droppin' some serious science.
Hitchens submits that not just the religious right, but any formal religion, practiced to any degree, is a farce and hell bent on the destruction of non-believers.
Fuckin' yeah.

Spit that shit.

Good Night, Sir.

Pulp Culture Knee-Jerk I

This is the first of a recurring segment I hereby dub: "Pulp Culture Knee-Jerk". The idea is to take two pulpy,useless, annoying pieces of reality and smoosch them together into a bizarro-gestalt that means even less than than the two original ideas. Round one: I was on vbs.tv and saw this then I saw this and it reminded me of when I saw this.
Imagine a kid with Down's Syndrome and a northern english accent thick as fuckin' prime rib that can flow over the worst/fastest/Donkest beats and then imagine how much more watchable "What Is It" would have been if the soundtrack was a Donked-out version of the Benny Hill theme song (yakkity-sax?) with that Down's MC kid spittin' some unintelligible shit over top of it. Just food for thought here. Mooshy, soupy, Puréed, old-folks-home-style food for thought. Also, could this be the next Grey Album? That is a whole 'nuther can of conceptual shit.

Sherlock