Here are abstracts for several research projects I've written. Some are still in progress. If you would like to chat about them, get a full text .pdf, get a bibliography, publish them, or have me come to where you are to talk about them don't hesitiate to contact me: chazevans(at)gmail(dot)com.
The Hacker as Artist/Critic:
Recovering the Mutability of Virtual Space
Eminent theorists such as Lev Manovich and Donna Harraway describe technology as dynamic and in constant flux, yet commercial software design aims to present itself as an immutable entity in order to maintain the authority of permanence. The conventions of this sedentary software style are constructed by a oligopoly of commercial technologists who do not participate in a dialogue with the culture their products affect. In order to transpose art historical methods of criticism into the emerging field of software studies, this project creates an analogy between the building cuts of Gordon Matta-Clark and the software-altering practices of the hacker. I compare the warehouse space appropriated by Matta-Clark in his famous building cut Day's End to the virtual spaces of consumer-grade software. In both cases, the space is defined by the needs of the modern industrialist: an inert space designed for work and not lived experience. I align Matta-Clark's cutting gesture, which creates dynamic space through appropriation and alteration, to the practice of hacking, which can alter the signs of consumer software and expose the code it is based on as mutable and dynamic. This use of hacking to both critique and expose the inherent mutablity of software is highly evident in the work of artist duo Jodi. Their installation MY%DESKTOP illustrates the practical artistic use of "metaphor shear," a term coined by author Neil Stephenson to describe the moment of anxiety caused by software error which both software designer and user constantly battle against. I argue that the constant presence of metaphor shear is a expression of software's inherent dynamic ability and can be exploited by the software artist, or hacker, to reformulate a large-scale software hegemony which can potentially effect every aspect of human experience. Metaphor shear is the virtual equivalent to the Matta-Clark's hack and can be viewed as an artistic genre dedicated to critique of software and its effect on cultural identity.
The Brechtian Video Game
(and Other Theatrical Conceptions of Software-based Experience)
This project centers around the analogy between computers and theatre made by theorist Brenda Laurel in 1991. She asserts that software, especially the video game, is more like theatre than any other artistic medium in that software requires an illusory stage where virtual actors are supported by a great deal of invisible technology. Laurel's original analysis is insufficient in that her conception of software is only analogous to classical Aristotelian illusory space and doesn't allow for critical or experimental forms in software art. I append Laurel's observation with other critical theatrical models, in particular Bertolt Brecht's concept of Verfremdungseffekt, the technique for interrupting immersive illusion in order to create a critical distance between viewer and object. The video games Call of Duty and Katamari Damacy are offered as central examples illustrating these contrasting critical models of performative software. In Call of Duty the viewer/user is enveloped in a consistent verisimilitude creating empathy for the game's protagonists, whereas in Katamari inconsistencies are built in time, scale and content creating the possibility of observational critique. By injecting Brecht's theory, as well as other critical models of theatre such as the Theatre of the Absurd and Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre, into theories of software practice, a "pre-digital" history of interactivity is expanded and the possibility of a software art or video game avant-garde is engendered.
Mapping the Mediascape:
The Politics of Chinese Software Art
This project contrasts two Chinese artists working in software in order to ascertain the relationship between the global and local in both Chinese art and New Media Art practice in general. In particular Feng Mengbo's altered video game performance Q4U (2002) is compared to Cao Fei's sprawling virtual metropolis RMB City (2009) based in Second Life. I contextualize both artists and their works in terms of Arjun Appadurai's "scapes," illustrating how the work of both have elements signifying specific qualities of Chinese identity as well as elements signifying a vast global cultural flow. In this way Feng and Cao's work refuse the delimitation of either global or local, offering an astute portrait of the variable and ambivalent character of contemporary Chinese cultural identity. In addition, the methods in which each artist treats the formal conditions of software art, and how they each approach the problem of "implied aesthetics", place the individual works on different points in a spectrum between the global and the local. By appropriating and altering an American video game in Q4U Feng traffics in the global while remaining oppositional to both global influences and software itself. On the other hand, Cao's embrace of the tools available in Second Life reveals a certain eagerness to combine and mix elements of Chinese culture with the rest of the globe.
Notes Toward a Techne Theory
This project aims to develop a framework for a critical theory that can effectively parse issues that affect the realms of both culture and technology. I compare the call for a "humanistic techne-oriented methodology" made by Chief Scientist of Invention Arts Marc Davis with Edward Shanken's suggestion of a new art, science and technology (AST) centered critical theory in order to show the similarity of interdisciplinary momentum on both sides of the sciences/humanities dichotomy. Using the similarities in the work of both of these figures and Donna Harraway's cyborg theory, I propose the term Techne Theory as a critical yet non-didactic methodology dedicated to the pragmatic application of hybrid art/technology discourse.
The Consumer Princess:
Adorno, Barthes, Althusser and Disney's Enchanted
This project illustrates how three particular concepts of cultural criticism: the culture industry, mythology, and ideological state apparatuses, theorized by Adorno, Barthes and Althusser respectively, enable each other within the Walt Disney film Enchanted, an effective confluence in contemporary consumerism. Enchanted is a recent example in a long standing tradition of cultural production, princess films, which are at the center of the equally long standing cycle of consumption around princess goods and merchandise. By analyzing the institution of the princess film in terms of the culture industry, myth and ideological state apparatuses, Enchanted can be viewed as an evolved device of the princess consumer cycle, rather than another episode in this cultural tradition. The film is designed to expand the efficacy of princess-oriented consumer behavior especially for an audience skeptical of princess mythology and its potential negative effects. As a feature which shrewdly places the princess archetype within a real world context, but in the end represents the real world capitulating to the values of the princess myth, Enchanted reifies not only the cultural values of the princess model but also ensures the distribution of a consumerist ideology for a new and only briefly critical generation. By transposing the princess myth from themes of femininity to the act of consumption itself (a mythologizing technique referred to by Barthes as "the Innoculation") Enchanted effectively persuades a generation equipped with tools of feminist and consumer critique to accept the princess narrative and the consumer cycles it supports.
Carnivorous Vulgaris: Chuck Jones, Postwar Animation and Consumer Critique
This essay analyses the critical function of parody found in animated short films made between 1938 and 1958, particularly works directed by Chuck Jones. As marginalized artists in Hollywood, Warner Bros. animators like Jones made films that served as both entertainment and commentary on modern consumerism. Jones' films employ the act of parody to distance the viewer from modern subject matter which allows for scrutiny on consumer trends as well jokes. Shorts such as Dog Gone Modern, House Hunting Mice and the "Road Runner" films as well others illustrate a subversive attitude exhibited by postwar animation, where both emerging products and consumer behavior are openly criticized. This is most clearly seen in the depiction of emerging household technology as fallible, and in Jones' famous Coyote character who serves as a metaphor for the desperate and incompetent consumer. The critical parody in the films contributed to a mass-skepticism toward topical modern themes and continued the tradition of subversive short form animation.