kyle mckinley
danm 249: faculty seminar
Prof. Sharon Daniel
"Participatory Culture," within the confines of our little program (our highly 'interdisciplinary' discipline), may appear as a self-obvious field of study; investigating the ways in which individuals from other, more, shall we say, disciplined disciplines encounter similar questions to those that we ask has usefully complicated that obviousness for me. The work of Irene Gustafson and the work of Iain Boal may or may not be of formal or theoretical interest to other DANM students, but the complex relationships that each of them has to categories that we all to often take for granted is, I think, helpful and challenging for everyone in our program.
Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of science and technics, associated with Retort, a group of antinomian writers, artisans and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is one of the authors of Retort's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2nd edn, Verso, 2006). Boal achived some minor notoriety in the late nineties as the resident intellectual of 'neo-luddite' tendencies in radical thought; he was co-editor in 1995 of Resisting the virtual life : the culture and politics of information, which, as the title suggests, includes some rather critical perspectives on the cybernetic/ prosthetic relationships to technology that we, today(some 14 years later), tend to take for granted.
Boal's work on the bicycle as an "antique modern," his histories of counter cultures, the curtailing of the commons, and his skepticism about the social value of new technologies are all applicable to my work thesis work and interests in participatory culture. He has several forthcoming books about the social history of the bicycle considered in global terms (in particular the role of the bicycle in China and Indonesia). It is worth noting that unlike most anyone else writing about bicycling, Boal treats the bicycle to the same rigorous social and environmental critique as he might any other technology. Boal is a lecturer with the Community Studies Dept.
My conversations thus far with Iain Boal have centered, as you might expect, on the bicycle, but also on the "digital commons", the burgeoning possibilities of what we might term 'green fascism', and the continuing prevalence of Malthusian tendencies amongst capitalists and radical environmentalists alike (for Boal's take on Malthus read this short article in Mute magazine). We will be continuing these conversations during a visit to the Rick Perlinger's (non-digiatal) archive this weekend (3/15/09) as well as down the road (I have recruited Boal as an "interview subject" for my thesis work Bicalogues).
Irene Gustafson makes experimental documentaries. Some of these focus on the subjective experiences of marginalized social identities (such as gender queer/ trans folk). Others have explored the potential of video/ new media to change the (narrative) meaning of older films. Much of Gustafson's recent work deals with relationships between histories, technologies, and the histories of technologies with an eye to how those relationships form and are formed by subjectivities. She is particularly fascinated by the concept of "testing" as a way to generate/ construct "truth"; as a filmmaker that that has led her to a highly ideosincratic use of screen-tests as a genre and as a formal element. Gustafson's complex and highly problematized relationship to notions of truth, epistemology and authenticity prove useful to me in thinking about the possible value of Participatory Culture, but are doubtless of equal value to anyone who is interested in the concept of knowledge making across all disciplines.
Jeff Gorsky (sic) and I sat down for a conversation with Prof. Gustafson last week (3/4/09) which you can listen to an excerpt of here. Our discussion focused on the role of the screen test in her recent film Portrait of Turner, which is a sort of re-staging of the 1967 film Portrait of Jason. In that conversation, Gustafson outlined her formal and theoretical interest in screen tests, discussed the history of "experimental film," and spoke at some length of the relationship of each to scientific study.
Both of these professors maintain regular office hours here at UCSC, and both are inspiring, affable, and intellectually generous people. I highly recommend contacting either of them if you have research questions that might overlap with their fields of study.
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