I am trying to make the news. As a ’struggling artist’, the potential national audience of millions should be able to boost my exhibition sales. The concept is not new. I am no avant-garde. Damien Hirst has featured prominently in the British press with his sliced up cows, shark tanks and diamond skull. Hirst has mastered his media.

The diamond skull made the front page of every London newspaper after it sold for £50 million to a mysterious consortium. It was the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living artist. Hirst himself was rumoured to be member of the mysterious consortium. He bought his own artwork. I don’t have the cash to take on his record, but I do have the time to spend a week watching television news to see what sort of stories make the cut.

The easiest route to make the ABC news at seven o’clock is to be elected to Federal Parliament.  Three out of the five lead stories that ran during the work week starting September 7 were focused on the Government. McGurk and a school bus crash were the other two.  I suspect getting into politics could take some work, although this hasn’t stopped Berlin artist Philipp Ruch from moving in on the scene, he established the Centre for Political Beauty and staged some press conferences outside the Reichstag that made headlines. That is another key to making the ABC news. Press conferences. A podium is essential. Press conferences also need showbags. There is not much zing in a lonely little press conference that doesn’t come with some sort of report.At the ABC you would be hard stuck to find a news bulletin that didn’t feature the phrase ‘a new report’.

The ABC featured a story on ‘a new report’ released by the oft-quoted KPMG Partner, columnist for the Australian and best selling author Bernard Salt. Although for news brevity he is a demographer. The ‘new report’ that the ABC featured from Mr Salt revealed that new technologies allow people to work from home. The research by Mr Salt was reduced to a couple of vox pops that included ‘you can check your Blackberry after dinner’, although the ABC has made it clear that Mr Salt did undertake research. He was shown near a podium and in… Read more

Ask any journalist what the most important section of text in a news story is and they will tell you it is ‘the lead’. Following the inverted pyramid style of news writing, the lead signposts almost all the information that will follow and allows the old-school reader to quickly scan the newspaper and decide whether to continue reading any particular article. As the old-school reader scans the newspaper, jumping between various headlines and leads, his eyes hover past advertisements, and the advertised products can successfully catch the attention of this old-school reader and consumer. The consumer then pays for a product, the product pays the newspaper and the newspaper pays the journalist.This is why news has financial value.

As the new-school reader scans Google News, jumping between various headlines and leads, his eyes could also hover past advertisements and these products can successfully attract the attention of the new-school consumer. The consumer then pays for a product, the product pays Google and somebody else can somehow pay the journalist. This is in a nutshell why newspapers are going broke despite more people reading the news than ever before. Newspapers no longer control the distribution of news content, Google does. Google might not advertise on Google News yet, and Google insists it isn’t violating any copyright, but the company seems to overlook the innate purpose of copyright. Copyright exists to provide a financial incentive for the creation of original content. Google News uses original news content created by journalists but does not provide any financial incentive for its creation. Google News generates an incredible income from that all-important lead the journalist composed, just as the newspapers of yesteryear did, but Google doesn’t pay anyone for it.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, recently spoke to a United States Senate hearing that was investigating ways the government could aid the failing newspaper industry. Mayer explained how Google News acted as a sort of conduit that channeled web traffic to the newspaper sites:

Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that web traffic to increase their traffic and generate additional revenue.

Google functions similarly to newspapers in that it channels information to end-users. The information that Google channels are the links or ‘directions’ to the… Read more

Postmodernism is so yesterday.

That was the response I received on Twitter from ApostrophePong when I tweeted  about writing something on the representation of postmodernism in the media. I quickly typed up a reply insisting that I knew that postmodernism was ’so yesterday’ and that was exactly what I was going to write about. I didn’t want to sound out of touch.

I didn’t know why it was so yesterday. I wasn’t too sure when today had begun and I wasn’t completely confident that I even knew what postmodernism was. I didn’t mention this of course. That would have been uncool. But how had postmodernism lost its cool?

I thought I would start on the autopsy table analysing the corpse. Postmodernism, when you cut it apart, literally means ‘after the modernist movement,’ while modernism itself was originally used to refer to things ‘of the present’. In that sense, postmodernism should mean ‘after the present’. Postmodernism should mean tomorrow. Not yesterday. This meaning must be a bit muddled. We didn’t start traveling through time.

In an effort to cement some kind of definition of postmodernism I scrounged around some postmodern texts about postmodernism that were written by postmodernists. Hal Foster wrote of a postmodernism that ’seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and poltical affiliations’ . Margaret Iversen wrote of a postmodernism borne of a postructuralism that is defined by its ‘resistance to meaning’ . My efforts revealed that the ghost of postmodernism past was having a great big belly laugh at my attempts to corner it into some sort of definition. I was only cornering it so I could discover how it died, but I soon discovered that the weapon I was wielding as I poked and prodded it into its corner, was in fact the weapon that had slayed it. A definition was used to murder postmodernism.

The failure of all the student authors to appreciate the significance of the distinction between language and the use of language (and the determinism that is produced) was also closely bound up with their conception of the meaning of words. Nearly always these students treated abstract nouns as if they were the names of curious sorts of hollow objects. And ‘doing theory’ therefore consists of looking at ’society’ (another object) from somewhere imaginatively outside ‘it’, and seeing how the people who, as it were, have to live inside these hollow spaces are constrained in their thoughts and actions as a result.

According to Gavin Kitching, the students at the School of Politics at the University of New South Wales have been allowing their Honours essays to be corrupted by postmodernism. The students were treating abstract nouns as ‘hollow objects’ devoid of meaning. By treating these words as such, the students had created a society of people living in hollow spaces where their thoughts and actions were constrained as a result. Generally I myself do… Read more

As I am unable to see you to give you one more last goodbye hug I have rushed back here to write you my goodbyes.
Dearest remember always no matter where you are and in what circumstances I am with you – closer than breathing – spirit with your spirit. I am so at one with you.

She is separated from him. Himeros: she desires his embrace. Yet she cannot. Instead she writes to him: Pothos. He is absent and she shapes the space between them with language. In this space she connects to her beloved. Only here in the mediated or virtual realm, created through language, can she be closer than breathing.

Villem Flusser writes that communication is an artificial construct. The words “I love you” that as a sixteen year old I first whispered into a girl’s ear are no more natural than the electric images glowing from a box in a lounge room.  Communication and the various systems of language constructed by man exist for the purpose of rendering the abstract tangible.  Allowing the unknown to exist in our daily discourses. Language can, through abstraction, create space for the imagining of meaning.

John Hanhardt writes that Gary Hill’s work is ironic in that it concerns itself with the threat of the erasure of language by the very technologies he uses in his art.  There is however no chasm between language and communication technologies such as video. Language is not limited to the written or spoken word. Language is by definition a system of communication and the written and spoken word is so often supplanted with the term “language” because it is a system that can be easily measured.

The English alphabet has a set of 26 symbols and these symbols are combined and collected into compilations called dictionaries that list how the symbols should be defined.  The written and spoken word therefore is very typical of a system if a system were to be defined as set of principles and guidelines similar to the rules of a game. If we were however to define a system as a set of things that are interconnected together into a network then new communication technologies such as the internet or television, which are focused primarily on creating connections, are as valid, if not more valid, than the written and spoken word as language. This definition of a system as an interconnecting network is more suitable as it is the very nature of communication to create connections.

As a media artist I create connections, or rather I mediate. I present a medium, be it a video, a sound or a website, be it hot or cool, it is a medium, and this is what differentiates the media artist from the traditional concept… Read more

This is Kitching’s reponse to students honours papers that he analysed for his book ‘The Trouble with Theory: The Educational Costs of Postmodernism’.

The failure of all the student authors to appreciate the significance of the distinction between language and the use of language (and the determinism that produced) was also closely bound up with their conception of the meaning of words. Nearly always these students treated abstract nouns as if they were the names of curious sorts of hollow objects. And “doing theory” therefore consists of looking at “society” (another object) from somewhere imaginatively outside “it”, and seeing how the people who, as it were, have to live inside these hollow spaces are constrained in their thoughts and actions as a result. (Kitching 2008)

I, a student who has been plagued by postmodern theory since it was first introduced to me in year 11 with the new Board of Studies English syllabus, have no ammunition but postmodern thought to retaliate against Kitching with, so I will begin by analysing his use of language.

Kitching writes that there is a significant distinction between language and the use of language. I am sure he is trying to illustrate something similar to the significant distinction between roads and the use of roads. There is a road outside my home that goes to Sydney University, actually the road passes Sydney University, it would really depend on my use of the road whether I went to Sydney University or not. I would have to turn off the road. I have thus illustrated how roads and the use of roads are different.

In the same regard I will use language to tell you how it is distinctively different from the use of language.

There is a language outside my home that goes to Sydney University, actually the language passes Sydney University, it would really depend on my use of the language whether I went to Sydney University or not. I would have to turn off the language. I have thus illustrated how language and the use of language are different.

I am unsure if I have made a point. I am unsure what point I wish to make. I will let Kitching make another point while I turn off my language:

The problems that result from not distinguishing the definition of words from their uses, and from always treating abstractions as the names of imprisoning objects, are further compounded when

… Read more