A Postmodern Interpretation of Jason Nelson

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This blog post promises to not be very coherent, but I’m going to attempt to throw some ideas out there about Jason Nelson’s work. First, everyone should know that Nelson, in spite of the initial “No, really, I think he’s on drugs” reaction we probably all had, is very prolific. His works go back for at least a decade (and are organized fairly chronologically on his website), and they all seem to display a similar aesthetic. However, I realized earlier today as I tried to explain to a friend why she should check out the games we looked at for class that Nelson’s aesthetic is sort of hard to define. Pkeily has started the discussion about how Nelson uses the glitch aesthetic combined with smoother images in order to criticize institutions and to subvert the video game genre. I think part of the reason he combines the glitch aesthetic with smoothness is to destabilize his readers/players and to create the exact issue I’m struggling with: what is his aesthetic?

I see postmodernism everywhere, so I’d like to assert that Nelson’s difficult to define aesthetic comes from his use of the postmodern technique of intertextuality, or the weaving of different types of texts. Nelson takes intertextuality to an extreme by merging many different types of media, forms of writing, and topics. He’s working within the digital medium overall, but he also includes videos, photography, drawings, songs, graphs (see videograph fictions), globes (see With love, from a failed planet), charts, and games. He writes both short fiction and digital poetry, and he covers history, pop culture, industry, business, classic literature, and politics (see, again, videograph fictions).

Perhaps most importantly, Nelson presents himself as an artist working with several different art forms. This all-encompassing artistic consciousness has allowed him to create an extremely distinct style, voice, and visual aesthetic. The glitchy-smoothness and intentional messiness of his work ensures that it is all characteristically his. In additional to this visual signature, Nelson’s voice in writing is also very recognizable in its strange combination of humor and cynicism (see, again, With love, from a failed planet).

As is common with postmodern works of literature, the form of Nelson’s work mirrors its content. In the games we played for class today, we can easily make the assumption that the visual elements of the game are meaningless and ignore them in favor of focusing on “winning.” Likewise, we see nonsensical text in the first level of the first game and then assume that the rest of the text will be pointless to read as well. These are both incorrect assumptions, as we later learn that the images and videos throughout the game provide insight (which pkeily explains in more depth than I do) and sections of the text make sense as well. This is just one other of several more ways that Nelson further destabilizes the reader/player’s experience.

TL;DR: Jason Nelson uses the classic postmodern technique of intertextuality to create his difficult-to-define personal aesthetic.

Also, this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen on the internet: sydney’s siberia. It’s “an infinitely zoomable digital poem created from 130 image/poetry tiles which generate an interactive mosaic” (by Jason Nelson, of course).

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Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries & Punk Aesthetics

February 8, 2012 By 4 Comments

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) is the duo of American Marc Voge and South Korean Young-hae Chang, operating in Seoul, South Korea. Most of their works can be considered kinetic poetry or digital poetry. All of their works I have viewed use flash animation to create the movement of words in the web browser and use the Monaco font. They also utilize a limited color palette, black, white, and red. As far as I understand, all of their browser-based work fits this form, which we saw in class with DAK0TA. The simplicity of this form allows Voge & Chang to convey direct, immediate, and critical political and social commentary. The aesthetic choices made by YHCHI bear many similarities to American punk visual aesthetics originating in late 70s and early 80s.

So, how do I define punk visual aesthetics? Simplicity, immediacy, and directness hallmarks of punk visual aesthetics. These qualities stem from the DIY (Do It Yourself) movement within punk, which stresses working outside traditional, hierarchical systems of releasing music and art and creating one’s own system for creating art and dealing with the audience directly. The DIY movement frees artists to pursue their creativity unhindered by corporate interests and challenges them to work with limited resources. The limitations of creating record covers, flyers, and other works with one’s own financial resources led to artists making statements simply and directly with striking immediacy. The goal is usually instant recognition with the smallest amount of visual data. The visual aesthetic is generally secondary to the content (in punk’s case the music). Here are some examples:

The Black Flag logo

 

The Misfits logo

This style has been influential on popular culture for decades for example, shudder, Green Day’s American Idiot album cover:

Please forgive me for this oh gods of punk

YHCHI’s works are also simple, direct, and immediate because they strip down form to very basic elements and barrage the reader with socio-politically conscious messages. Like punks, YHCHI eschew a complex form to focus on the content of their work. Also similar to punk the presentation of the content is often abrasive and unsettling. Punk achieved this through distorted guitars, fast tempos, and screaming. YHCHI achieves this through fast-flashing text capable of inducing seizures.

One YHCHI work particularly reminiscent of punk aesthetics is ”CUNNILINGUS IN N0RTH K0REA“. “CUNNILINGUS IN N0RTH K0REA” is a poem satirically championing communism and sexual equality and the resulting increase of sexual pleasure in North Korea. Mostly black and white text are utilized, although red pops up to emphasize certain sections. The poem reads like a piece of propaganda produced by the North Korean government (mimicking propaganda is a common trope in punk aesthetics) declaring how North Korean men are sexually superior to South Korean men in pleasuring women.  ”CUNNILINGUS IN N0RTH K0REA” uses satire to show how oppression in North Korea is often disguised as liberation and freedom. Similarly, punk is often critical of systems of power and how they perpetuate oppression and hinder freedom.

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