Critical Information Conference 2012

Excerpts from a panel on street art, hacktivism, and subversive inspiration at the Critical Information Conference 2012, held at the School of Visual Arts. The paper I presented, titled “We Do it for the Lulz: Graffiti as a Metaphor for Digital Defacement,” emerged out of research I am conducting regarding the political viability of DDoS actions as hacktivism. As they are so often accompanied by cyber-graffiti, I thought I’d take a shot at addressing their role and significance in hacktivist practice.

Materials from the entire conference can be found here.

Upcoming projects include a conference paper on the convergence of comics, animation, and gaming in the webcomic Homestuck, a conference paper on lurking as a methodology for studying 4chan, an optional random paper on polemology, art, and The Dark Knight Rises, and uploading textfile versions of current and pending publications.

Still waiting with bated breath to receive edits on a piece on the logics of misogyny on 4chan, still thrilled by being included in Black Clock 16, and still keeping busy, as always.

Attaining the ninth square

Attaining the ninth square

In Cortazar’s Hopscotch, an early print cybertext, the narrator constantly returns to the titular metaphor.  Attaining the ninth square, which is equivalent to Heaven, is a game that is significant in the exploration of a tiny map between earth and heaven, and the effort that must be put forth to travel it.

All of which is to say, my article on 4chan, cybertext, gamification, and institutional memory—titled (surprise) “Attaining the Ninth Square: Cybertextuality, Gamification, and Institutional Memory on 4chan”—is now live at Enculturation.

And that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

Sometimes images do suffice.

24 hours to go.  Expectations high.  Review pending.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Current priorities: 1) Organize image folders and blog about the process of said organization, 2) prep for HOPE No. 9, 3) apply for a transfer of credits, 4) continue reading and assembling a lit review, and 5) turn around edits on a book chapter on lulzy tactics and the Joker.  You’ll notice that “ragequit over Before Watchmen” is not mentioned in this list at all.  And yet, given the fact that angrily producing scholarship on the failings of the 2009 film adaptation of Watchmen spurred me to pursue a Ph.D. program in the first place, it seems fitting that I privilege a similar anger about Before Watchmen.

Before proceeding any further, I offer this disclaimer: I acknowledge that I have a reputation for being a bit of a purist, and mildly inclined to hate almost everything; however, I did my best to dispel my preformed assumptions and, two weeks after Minutemen #1 was released, I began purchasing and perusing with an open mind.  I just finished Ozymandias #1.  And I find myself as angry as I was 2009.  I may have been unable to argue with Snyder’s (albeit ineptly executed) passion for Watchmen and his adaptation of it, but—as was anticipated by a community of fans—Before Watchmen indeed reeks of the attempt to capitalize on the success of Moore’s graphic novel and the (questionable) success of Snyder’s 2009 film.

If you’ve been living in a hole in the ground for the past twenty-six years, Watchmen was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons in a 12-issue limited series in 1986.  Moore, renowned for his deftness as a writer and proficiency with the comics medium, upped the ante by producing a groundbreaking story that deconstructed and satirized the superhero genre itself.  In its most basic sense, Watchmen (1986) transpires in an alternate-timeline 1980s universe where America won Vietnam with the aid of masked crime-fighting heroes and Nixon remains president.  The world is on the brink of nuclear crisis, with the Doomsday Clock fast approaching midnight; and in New York, an unbridled cesspool of corruption and debauchery, The Comedian is murdered, launching an unofficial investigation by other costumed heroes, who have since been deemed vigilantes in the eyes of the law.

The novel is creative in a technical manner as well, as revealed in its use of reflexivity, recurring signifiers that accrue various meanings, and the interplay between juxtaposed imagery and dialogue.  The layout consists of a nine-panel grid on most pages, and chapters such as Fearful Symmetry (Ch. V, 1-28) are arranged in a “supersymmetrical” reading, where every row or panel literally and/or thematically mirrors its counterpart on the other side of the centerfold.  This chapter stands in for the center of the novel, albeit a center that arrives too soon, earlier than the mathematical center, which as Moulthrop suggests, is not the actual center.  Moore supplements the primary narrative with intertextual elements: epistolary fragments, psychological case files, excerpts from an expose “book-within-the-book” and a “comic-within-a-comic,” either shedding light on the main characters or symbolically indicating where they lie on the unequivocal spectrum from human to monstrous.

What follows is a story too brilliantly and tightly woven for me to sum up in a handful of sentences.  There are the characters themselves, inverting or challenging superhero stereotypes.  There is the layout.  There are the intertextual elements, the inclusion of song lyrics, or the drowning Doomsday Clock, the iconic smiley face, the paralysis of past-present-future like the crossing of two streams like an X, the number of issues it takes to reach the end of Rorschach’s journal, and what Moulthrop suggests could be the geometric map of Watchmen, just as “V,” a single convergence point, may be read the symbolic map of V for Vendetta.  There is the absurdist if exceedingly macabre plot to ensure world peace.  The ease with which nearly every character relinquishes their integrity, save the one who is seemingly the most conservative and bigoted, the one who at no point tries to impose his beliefs on anyone else.  Watchmen is about crossover, convergence and continuance, though that continuance may or may not be for the better.  This was not a series that one picked up at the comics store, idly flipped through, and deemed read.  It required close, careful, repeat readings, and the nature of the narrative encouraged such an approach.

Then, in 2009, the un-filmable graphic novel was adapted and released, polarizing fans.  Arguably, it is possible to evaluate a person’s tastes based on whether or not they liked the film, a positive response being mitigated—maybe—by a particularly insightful and (self-)critical rationale.

So the fears of fans were fairly transparent concerning the release of Before Watchmen starting this summer.  DC was going to produce a series of travesties that would fall far short of Moore’s genius.  The characters would be flattened rather than fleshed out further.  The layout would be simplistic.  They would hire all-star writer/artist teams, and it would still suck.  Alan Moore would still spit venom all over it for months to come.  My critique is, surprisingly, not based on these fears, or fears expressed by others that Before Watchmen would “just be another comics series” with none of the landmark brilliance of the source material.  It’s based on the fact that, by and large, the series is lacking in narrative depth and originality.

Digital Graffiti for the Lulz

Bedridden as I’ve been with pain, I’m stuck with a view of my cluttered room to my right and apartment buildings directly in front and to the right.  The buildings to the right, however, have been augmented with graffiti.  Most of it is written in white spray paint: initials, names, the bubble- and jagged-letter signatures of writers who somehow managed to reach these heights or write upside down.  The building owners probably think of it as an eyesore, but I think it’s a gorgeous way .  The writing, the positioning, and the size and style reveal aesthetic and political choices.  Why these buildings?  Why these locations?  Why predominantly names?

Is it enough of an answer to say that my neighborhood has been a prime location for gentrification?  That young people actively resent the closing of local mom-and-pop shops and what they perceive as the irrevocable alteration of quintessential Harlem?  That the chosen placement of the tags heightens their visibility?

tl;dr, ITT I attempt to forge my scattered brain cells into a single unit capable of cogent thought, thereby relate graffiti and graffiti-writing practices as a metaphor for online defacement, and consider the ramifications of such an analogy.

What you think of pain is a shadow. Pain has a face. Allow me to show it to you.

In my life as it was prior to my diagnosis, in the course of my usual exploration of the Internet, I came across the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.  It is an imprecise but admirable attempt to catalogue and describe the pain caused by Hymenopteran stings.  I possess an amateur fascination with entomology and herpetology and with Schmidt’s original paper, which assigned a perhaps inexact number to each sting but accompanied each with a refreshingly creative description of the pain.  An entomologist, Jason O. Schmidt was inadvertently stung by several members of Hymenoptera in the course of his research and realized the the potential uses of quantifying pain.  Though it wasn’t his primary research, he didn’t waste the data; instead, he created a five-point scale from 0-4 to classify the kinds of pain one receives from being stung (The Straight Dope).  Archetypal representatives are listed below:

0: Imperceptible.  The stinger doesn’t penetrate the skin.
1-range: Sweat bees (light, ephemeral, almost fruity); fire ants (sharp, sudden, mildly alarming); or the bullhorn acacia ant (someone has fired a staple into your cheek).
2-range: The bald-faced hornet (mashing your hand in a revolving door); or the yellow-jacket (hot and smoky, like W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue).
3-range: The red harvester ant (bold and unrelenting, like someone is drilling your ingrown toenail); or the paper wasp (caustic and burning, with a distinctly bitter aftertaste: like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a papercut).
4-range and higher: the tarantula hawk (blinding, fierce, shockingly electric, like a running hair dryer dropped in your bubble bath); or the bullet ant (pure, intense, brilliant pain, like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail grinding in your heel).

In my life post-diagnosis, this scale has taken on new meaning.

Fibromyalgia (FM), a chronic systemic pain condition that is especially heightened by pressure, can range from a 1 to a 4+ on Schmidt’s scale but rarely, if ever, is it a 0.  The symptoms are unique to each sufferer, but in my experience the pain has ranged from acute and persistent, like clasping a lit electric bulb between your bare hands, like blades sunk deep in a flexing muscle, like pricking, itching needles, noisy on the skin, like a sweaty fist working your heart, like vivisection, no sleep agent, no anesthesia.

This piece is for those medical professionals who wrote me off as healthy because I was professionally dressed, “I looked too good to be unwell,” or who asked me, point-blank, “And you’re sure it’s not all in your head?”  It is for the people who tell me, with a tired, tolerant patience they don’t deserve to have, that “pain is largely psychosomatic, you know?  Just stop thinking about it and it’ll go away.”  It is for the countless, awkward Schmidt 4.0+ days I’ve had to dodge a well-meant hug, or flinched at a touch I couldn’t avoid.  It is for Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, which has conferred upon itself the godlike ability to decide whose pain is deserving of extended outpatient treatment.  (Hint: mine no longer is.)  It is for the people who sympathize but do not or cannot understand because I appear more or less functional.  It is for the Schmidt 0.0 days, when I lull you into thinking I’m “better,” or the predominant and tolerable 2.0-3.0 days, when controlling my outward response can be performed through sheer will.

Mostly, though, it is for all the times you have not seen me break down and cry, on the subway, in line for a bus, on the NJ Transit stairs, on the walk from the train station to campus or from one classroom to another or in the bathroom during class breaks.  It is for all the times I couldn’t take it, and you never knew.

Anonymity as Control Mechanism: The Secret Censors of the MPAA.

Let me begin with an anecdote.  I have recently been obsessing over the 1997 film Event Horizon, a sci-fi/horror flick described by its director as “The Shining in space.”  For those who haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that the Event Horizon, a spaceship capable of “jumping” through space simply vanished and then reappeared seven years later; thus, a salvage crew, led by Laurence Fishburne and aided by engineer Sam Neill, are sent to rescue any surviving crew members as well as the Event Horizon.  The ship, however, has come back unspeakably alive.  The film unfolds slowly and then blossoms into a veritable Hellraiser homage, replete with a chaotic entity, extremely fleeting sadomasochistic imagery, and notions of pain, nothingness, and hell.

I often work best to the soothing sounds of tortured screaming, so I looped this film in the background while revising final papers and conference presentations last month.  After the semester ended, I idly checked YouTube for extra footage and discovered that whole sequences had been deleted.  Paul Andersen removed segments that actually helped the narrative make sense and restricted the gore to frames lasting 1-2 seconds each, in addition to radically trimming the orgiastic distress call video that motivates the salvage mission.

So then I looked at the original script.  The changes made from script to screen were fairly radical.  Images such as a son cannibalizing his still-breathing mother and violent, cannibalistic sex were omitted or heavily, heavily modified.  A sex scene between the hallucinating Dr. Weir (Neill) and his dead wife Claire, during which he overcomes his loneliness and she tears out his eyes at climax, is also omitted.  These scenes did not seem overly long or gratuitous, instead contributing to the development of a character on the brink of madness.  Similar scenes made the cut in 1970s and 1980s horror films.  So why this film, and why these scenes?

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you the arbitrariness of the MPAA.

Too little coffee, even less time.

This was my overarching impression of my first year as a Ph.D. student: too much reading, too much coursework, too much busy work, for any real reflection outside of class sessions.  Forget integration with preexisting or current research, or time spent with the subject of research.  There was too much insistence on fast turnaround and constant production, the same old reliance on the inescapable “publish-or-perish” adage, with the added pressure to present at conferences, seek out internships and future funding opportunities, collaborate, research, endure.

This is what I found so startling, this emphasis on endurance over enjoyment, on gritting your teeth through coursework to reach the relief of quals and the dissertation process, what should ostensibly be the most depressing, isolating portion of the Ph.D. experience.  But the most repeated (and dare I say soundest) piece of advice I received all semester was the vague encouragement that “it does get better.”  I’m still not convinced.

Reflections on Censorship, Occupy Wall Street, and the 99%

By now I’m sure we’ve all heard about Union Square, Washington Square Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, and other city sites that have been marched on; we’ve all seen the video clips circulating on the Internet, read about the original July call put out by AdBusters, and the supposedly unintentional or accidental censorship of emails and Tweets with the Occupy Wall Street phrase or hashtag.  It does seem ridiculous that with the Occupy movement spreading to Washington D.C., the White House lawn, Los Angeles, Detroit, and banks and other corporate institutions everywhere, Twitter is currently trending #PeopleWhoAreOverrated and #moviebands.

Vibe, on the other hand, is overrrun with messages from Anonymous, the hive mind, bagpiper, and other similarly (un)identified individuals updating each other on Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements springing up around the country and worldwide.

Greetings, Anonymous: We Are Anonymous.

In a rare public show of reflexivity and self-assessment, Anonymous addresses the in-fighting that has unfortunately been characterizing it lately.  @Anon_Central posted the above video along with the transcription (after the jump).