The Art of Sleep: Kinetic Typography and Speed

February 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

We’ve already had quite a few posts on Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, ranging from a comparison with punk aesthetics to an assertion that YHCHI could be viewed as neo-Beat.  Both of these touch on what I was most fascinated by in DAK0TA: the speed of the text, moving so fast that the viewer can hardly keep a fast enough reading pace.  As punk, the speed recall’s the movements fast-tempo music; as Beat, it recalls Kerouac’s spontaneous prose (or even, I would argue, some of Ginsberg’s more rambling poetry).  However you look at, the speed of the words in DAK0TA, set to their quick jazz rhythm, seems to overtake the piece.  We are not as concerned with content, because the text moves so quickly that we may not even be able to comprehend it all, and are left instead with vague, peripheral impressions.

So how might kinetic typography use a different kind of rhythm, a different pace?  What might this difference in speed do to the way I approach the works of YHCHI?  These questions brought me to another work by YHCHI — THE ART 0F SLEEP, a piece commissioned by the Tate Gallery.

The premise is this: the narrator cannot sleep, and while wondering why, takes us through a long (18 minutes or so) thought-monologue on the nature of art.   Is art futile?  Can art solve world problems?  Can everything be art?  The narrator answers with a resounding: “ART IS EVERYTHING.” THE ART 0F SLEEP contrasts well with DAK0TA; in comparison, the former is downright ponderous and meditative.  It goes by slowly enough that the viewer has enough time to read it fully at a comfortable pace, and sometimes slow enough that there are small (very small, I’m talking seconds; this isn’t painfully slow) moments to begin to reflect on the statements. There is a sprinkling of restlessness — appropriate to an insomniac narrator — primarily conveyed through the speed of the text flashing by.  Near the end of the piece, the narrator lists begins to list off, alphabetically, everything that could be considered art, and there is an increase in speed here too. The slower pace still plays with a sense of spontaneity and seems primarily meant to reflect the rambling kind of syntax that feels natural for an interior monologue.

 

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C0ntemp0rary Ic0n0clastic Beat

February 9, 2012 by 1 Comment

As someone who is a fanatic of Jazz music and is absolutely fascinated by the Beat Generation, Dak0ta was a no-brainer instant love for me. (The fact that i may have done a 20 minute research presentation on the Beats may have helped but, well, you know… .)

Now thinking in terms of the originality of the text of Dak0ta there is nothing particularly new about it. It is a story of friends packing up a car with drugs, alcohol, and their free spirits ready to hit the road. They take in the landscape and geography, they get drunk and angry and fall down, they talk about Jazz music and swinging-soul, and make references to stars like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Reading a story about how a group of friends on a road trip which at one point describes them eating food is not a major step forward in artful progress.

But.

The manner this story is told, consumed, and experienced digitally and sensually makes all the difference in the world.

Young Hae-Chang has made the old and used been-there-done-that and brought Beat style to the digital age.

Dak0ta very much so hearkens to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Dakota accomplishes this by utilizing some prominent storytelling techniques and traits of Beat works.

  • Inability To Waver in the Face of Explicit Realistic Details and Language

Right off the bat we have a loud “FUCKING” thrown right in our face which truly does set a mood and mindset for the story. These Korean travelers are most likely young, defiant, and freewheelin’ no-holds-barred thrill-seekers going on a bender trip seeking fun in life and life in fun.

This sort of language is very reminiscent of how the Beats used their literature to break down specific barriers of society in the 1940s and 1950s. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch both saw obscenity trials which were eventually overcome (albeit the “freedom” of speech may have taken several years for the works to be fully expressed to the public). These 2 works encapsulated the Beat movement–especially Howl–and wanted to break down conventionally and traditionally held beliefs. Especially back in the Beat heyday, the word “fuck,” unlike today, was a very heavy hitting word that, as George Carlin put it, “was the word you saved for the end of the argument.”

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Now “fuck” is used i think a total of 3 or 4 times in Dak0ta. The word is not overused but is used just enough to instill that Beat vibe, that feel of attacking the language and its barriers in proper public discourse. Another truly nasty word of the original Dirty Seven rears its head as well, and that is the term “cunt.” Even today, that word is not flung around very much and in a lot of ways has taken the place of the word “fuck” in the sense that “fuck” does not hold much weight–well, relatively speaking of today compared to decades ago. But Hae-Chang is channeling that Beat spirit in his explicit language.

Not only in the language, but with his details. Take the moment when it is described how one of the travelers has been drinking and is now vomiting. Drunk and cursing his boss, his wife, and those around him making accusations of infidelity and then discussing sexual experiences of genital stimulation (“BUT IT WAS A G00D HANDJ0B, TH0UGH!”). The original Beats were known for bucking the status quo for just about every facet of then-American life, but explicit descriptions of sexual experiences and directly challenging the reserved nature of proper upstanding Americans was a hit for them. Sexual libertinism for themselves and the rest of the country, whether it be heterosexual, homosexual, or just several partners simultaneously. Sex and drugs and drink are all here in full force.

  • The Story of the Here and Now

If you ever want to be blown away by a new-age bible scroll, have a look at Kerouac’s On the Road scroll at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum located in Lowell, Masschussetts.

Jack Kerouac did not write his fiction solely out of his imagination, most of the stories are comprised of real life experiences with names changed (what is stranger than life?!). What Kerouac would do while traveling across America was write all his experiences down as they happened in journals. He would write constantly and in the moment attempting to retain every passing moment as they happened. He then went on a 3 week typing process of the entire transcript into this one gigantic scroll. Taking a cue from Neal  Cassady and a long-winded rant of a letter, Kerouac typed up the novel in letter form to capture the Jazz nature he fought so hard to bring to written word. Kerouac called it “Spontaneous Prose.”

To capture the realism of life and life in the moment is no easy feat. Hae-Chang is recreating that style with Dak0ta talking of each event as they happen coupled with internal thoughts as they come and go with the current circumstances of the story. It would not be surprising to hear that Hae-Chang and some friends drove around much in the manner of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and just…had experiences across (what i am assuming is) Korea while keeping some sort of journal of the main events of their happenings as they occurred. Hae-Chang does it with strong relentlessness to recreate that prose feel.

Hae-Chang also incorporates music and does so in a way that Jack Kerouac could only have possibly imagined; and with that, comes the next major concept:

  • Jazz and its Improvisational Power

It is no secret that the Beats were infatuated with Jazz music and its players.
The improvisational expression of music and of the player in a moment of time; the swinging grooves that people could genuinely feel and dance and “get down” to; the challenge of racial standards in America and the direction music was going; even the way the musicians dressed had an influence (black turtlenecks and pants all thanks to Dizzy Gillespie [and where do you think the Beats of then and the hipsters of today got their thick-rimmed black glass? Thanks, Dizzy!]); and not to mention the drug use of all these cats playing the music…the Beats loved it, the Beats really dug it, man, and Kerouac was no exception.

Kerouac had one player in mind who really turned heads and pushed Jazz in the intellectual contemporary direction into what it is today: an intellectual and expressive art. There were 3 key players of Jazz in the mid-to-late 1940s and 1950s that really had Jazz moving: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and the ever-important Charlie Parker.

Charlie "Bird" Parker

Parker approached Jazz with a new face to Jazz. His explosive improvisational power caught the ear of many; he revolutionized the Bebop sound; his speed and power were unmatched for the day; he took rhythm, harmonies, and melodies to a new level; he spawned a large set of standards still championed today; and Kerouac would be damned if he couldn’t translate that musical ability to written word.

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Another key importance of Charlie Parker was his drug use. Parker was a heroin addict, in fact it inevitably led to his declining health and vagrancy, selling his instruments to get a quick fix. Everybody, EVERYBODY, had to play just like Bird and thus they had to shoot up just like Bird. To become, emulation is the first move. And as such, drug experimentation was strong with the Beats.

Now what Hae-Chang has done with music and Beat literature is something that would most definitely make Kerouac’s eyes pop. Absolutely does Hae-Chang reference Jazz musician greats such as Art Blakey, Ray Bryant, and Donald Bird, but his incorporation of music into this digital storytelling is an impeccable transposition and translation of musical power and written word working together as a combo (that’s a Jazz joke right there).

The music playing for Dak0ta is…well, it’s most certainly not straight-ahead Jazz, but its explosive power aids the work incredibly with its tribal sound (an aural environment which helps the whole defiant and young primitive nature these kids are exuding). Each word and statement has been synced up with the music and reinforces that ever-present mindset of the currently happening events going on. The music is loud, in your face, and a veritable bombardment,
and if this ain’t tyin’ in to everything i’ve brought up ’til now…well, if i’m lyin’ i’m dyin’.

These brash individuals are in the now, getting down with the Jazz, drinking and druggin’ it up and cursin’ and fightin’  making Ken Kesey’s Randle Patrick McMurphy proud. They’re traveling and soaking life in and experiencing everything the Beats would have wanted them to and how they would have wanted them to.

And Young Hae-Chang translates everything the Beats did and made so popular and caustically defiant into something truly special in our digital age. A neo-Beat work in our computer and technologically driven age.

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: Young Hae-Chang and his Dak0ta would make Jack Kerouac proud.

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“I cannot make it cohere.” – Ezra Pound and Dakota

February 9, 2012 by 1 Comment

During the modernist era, Ezra Pound (who Dr. Scanlon affectionately refers to as “the Evil Godfather of Modernism”) called for the modern poets to “MAKE IT NEW,” a phrase that became a sort of slogan for what the modernists attempted to accomplish. A term widely associated with modernism is “the crisis of language,” a belief by writers at the time that words had failed them, and that something innovative and new must be done in order to preserve our ability to express ourselves with accuracy and intelligence. The work of Pound in particular exhibits this crisis of language and the dramatic transitions that literature went through as a result of it. The Cantos is famously long and difficult to read, but it is also famously brilliant. Pound spent most of his life completing it, but perhaps the most famous line in the work comes toward the end in Canto CXVI, when Pound states, “I cannot make it cohere.” This line expresses not only Pound’s inability to make words work the way he wanted them to, but also the feeling that most of us had upon finishing Dakota.

We talked briefly in class about how Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries have said that Dakota is based on The Cantos and how Jessica Pressman wrote an article about this connection. I, like most people, have not read The Cantos. It is a notoriously long, difficult, and brilliant work, the lifelong efforts of an extremely dislikable and arguably crazy man (he spent time in an asylum after being charged with treason for his support of fascism). I have read excerpts, though, I read Pressman’s article, titled “The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Dakota.”

Here are some of the main reasons she provides for believing that Dakota is based on The Cantos:

1)    YHCHI tell us it is. Pressman offers a substantial investigation of the conclusions one can come to if one chooses to ignore what YHCHI tell us. Specifically, she addresses the glaring connection to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The ties between Dakota and the themes of sexual incompetence, homosociality, and the beaten down nature of the Beat Generation are undeniable. However, she argues that we should read through the lens of Pound because that’s what YHCHI invite us to do. (Her argument is actually much more sophisticated than this, but for the sake of space, I’m not dwelling on it).

2)    They follow the same storylines. Most of us felt the same sense of “What just happened?” when we finished Dakota, and it’s because the story comes from Pound, who took it from Homer’s The Odyssey. I have not read all of the first and second parts of  The Cantos, but Pressman tells us that “Dakota’s plot carefully overlays book 11 of the Odyssey and Pound’s revision of it, and the comparisons are extensive and ripe” (309). To name a few, Elvis is Tiresius, Marilyn is Aphrodite, and Art Blakey is Robert Downing.

3)    YHCHI use Pound’s name toward the end of the work, in the series of fragments that reads, “Fuck you Ellmann, that’s right, Richard Ellmann Norton, New York, 1973, on Pound” (319).

Reasons why this is really cool and significant:

1)    Pressman argues that by claiming that Dakota is based The Cantos Parts 1 and 2, YHCHI invite us to read the work through the lens of modernism. She says that in doing so, they “defy categorization as high or low, modern or postmodern” (303), and instead adopt a strategy of digital modernism. Digital modernism is, in a sense, a means of rebelling against mainstream electronic literature. By aligning themselves with THE high modern poet, YHCHI “use central aspects of modernism to highlight their literariness” (302) and to draw the attention back to the words and the literature they present. In other words, YHCHI fight back against the interactivity of most e-lit by connecting their work with one of the most incredible poets ever.

2)    By aligning themselves with Pound, YHCHI also defy categorization, since he “viewed genre distinctions as ‘rubber-bag categories’ that academics use to ‘limit their reference and interest’” (310). This really speaks to the difficulties we had in class with defining Dakota.

3)    Dakota is meant to be difficult to follow and understand. Pressman argues throughout her article about how YHCHI both invite and deny a close reading. They say that a close reading will reveal a relationship to The Cantos, but they also say that the aesthetic of the work is purposeful and that transcription waters down its effect. Both works want to be inaccessible and extremely difficult to understand. Pressman explains that “[t]he use of difficulty as an aesthetic strategy bonds Dakota to modernism and the kind of reading practices its literature fostered” (317). In other words, the high modernists were kind of stuck up about literature. They were devastated by the increased production of the novel and the fact that all of a sudden, anyone who was literate could claim to understand literariness. YHCHI do the same thing by making their work hard to understand and therefore calling for a more advanced audience and for more literary work in the world of electronic literature.

Citation:

Jessica Pressman, and Jessica Pressman. “The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Dakota.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008) : 302-326. 9 Feb. 2012.

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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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