Notes on Cinétract project

....cinema can be made through other means, not only through moving
images or sound but through photographs, music, voices, poetry, texts,
performances. And second, the format of the cinétract emerges from
filmmakers in Paris May'68, determined to create a public response or
statement to political crisis in the form of what they called a
cinétract. A cinétract is formulated through the montage of any kind
of visual material including graphics, handwriting, books, postcards,
found footage, quotes, archival documents, black screen. It is
produced with the minimal means post-production. It focuses on the
details or the overlooked margins of an event. It is distributed via
mass-media channels. It directly addresses the viewer and listener. It
is produced anonymously. It resembles a pamphlet. It is made with
no-budget. It is made with affordable or available technology. It is
not a news report. It reveals the position of the author. To make a
cinétract is to find a form that speaks to a sense of necessity. A
cinetract emerges from a concrete situation. It is an act of public
utterance that demands a questioning of the positions of the speaker,
the figure of the addressee, and the question of the right to speak
for whom?'

Source:http://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/6064/roaming-academy---doreen-mende-and-the-otolith-group-present--cinetracts-by-othe

Note from Dark Matter. Introduction: The Missing Mass

P.1 - Dark Matter - an invisible mass predicted by the big bang theory, which 96% of universe consists of. Creative dark matter: makes up the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society (amateurs, hobbyists, 'failed' artists, educators) P.4 - Illumination in self-organized dark matter, a part of a greater shift taking place within the broader cultural paradigm. p.5 - W.Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer': cultural workers to become producers transforming the very means of their artistic production. Groups: PAD (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), 1980-88; REPOhistory, 1989-2000 - both informally structured groups, marginal. P.6 - there is perhaps no current problem of greater importance to cultural radicals than that of 'dark matter'.

The oversupply of artistic labour is an inherent and commnplace feature of artistic production. ... there is no getting around the fact that an increasing number of individuals are choosing to become artists.

p.7 - Boris Groys: no one sits in the audience any longer, everyone is on stage.

P.9 - 'Other' archive of critical, surplus cultural activity ... a mark or bruise within the body of high art. The system must wear this mark of difference in order to legitimate its very dominance.

The 1990s - NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani, REPOhistory: site-specific DIY public art projects.

P.11 - 'Temporary Services', Illinois-based artist collective, urban intervention. Tactical Media (TM): a form of interventionist cultural activism that typically borrows new media technology made accessible by global capitalism in order to turn it against state and corporaet authority (media pranks, culture jamming, digital swarming, hacking corporate websites, hit-and-run electronic guerilla tactics.

TM: Critical Art Ensemble, RTMark, The Yes Men, Institute for Applied Autonomy, Bureau of Inverse Technology, 0100101110101101.org

After WW2, Western state sought to legitimate its power by aligning itself with secular democratic society and even modern experimental forms of art. Adorno: such art is a sham.

P. 13 - New pedagogical structures: mock-institutionalism, architecture is discontinuous and contradictory, with elements of not-for-profit organizations, temporary commercial structures, semi-nomadic band or tribe.

P. 14 - Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe: anti-Marxist Leftists: any universal economic explanation of society is merely a fetish or myth dreamed up by Marx... A post-structuralist take on Antonio Gramsci's hegemony concept: 'social agents lack any essence'.

P.15 Collapse of Eastern Bloc -> market's final triumph -> raison d'etre of the Left is abandoned together with class conflict -> emergence of capitalism as the totalizing world system.

P. 16 - Now a new generation of intellectuals, media activists, and interventionist artists, spurred by 2008-9 financila adjustment, are beginning to re-examine the role of labor in the so-called creative economy.

P.19 - Capitalism has always secretly depended upon certian forms of production: women's non-wages chores or 'housework', sexual procreation that literally reproduces the workforce; semi-waged work of students, children and slaves. Brecht: who builds the digital networks?

Brian Holmes: art as the linchpin of hte workfare system, in the financialized era of image sign production.

P.20 - Berlin-based Kleines Postfordistisches Drama (KPD) P.22 - the missing mass is the 'revenge of the surplus' that will ultimately re-narrate politics in an age of enterprise culture.

Notes from Sharon MacDonald, Chapter 1. Exhibitions of Power and powers of exhibition

From: MacDonald, S. (2001). /The politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture/. Routledge: London

p.2 - ...[exhibitions are] unequivocal statements rather than the outcome of particular processes and contexts. ...objects are there to be gazed upon, admired, and understood only in relation to themselves. Research, however, must seek to move beyond this.

MUSEUMS, KNOWLEDGE AND POWER

Museums...not simply putting science on display; they are also creating particular kinds of science to the public... being science that an educated public ought to know about.

P.3 - Foucault: power and knowledge are thoroughly mutually implicated... power=construction of truths. knowledge = implications for power... The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge are always political in this sense.

Politics is... a matter of competing knowledges, intentions and interests.

P.4 - Who authors the exhibitions? - How much agency does an exhibition-maker have? - What state political or economic interests impinge? - How is the audience imagined? - Who is excluded? - To what extent do visitors to an exhibition define it in their own terms? - How do certain exhibitionary forms/techniques enable certain kinds of readings?

.. the nature of appeals to authority, in art museums may well be different from those in museums of science.

... morality and trustworthiness of those who speak about science;..

P. 5 - Roger Silverstone: how different media articulate time and space (1992).. thematic, poetic and rhetoric strategies (1989).

Poetics (aesthetics, pleasure) -><- rhetoric (mechanics, instruction)

A SCHEMATIC HISTORY OF MUSEUMS OF SCIENCE

Museums of science - cultural technologies which define (1) certain kinds of knowledge and (2) certain kinds of publics.

Periods: 1. Renaissance -> XVIIc. - Early modern museums of science; 2. XVIII-XIXc. -> Public Museums, World Fairs; 3. 1960s -> onwards - Change of Display, Growth of Industrial Heritage and Science Centres.

1. Curiosity Cabinets: material not accountable by the Bible. Foucault (1970): knowledge was based upon notions of /similitude/ and /resemblance/. XVIIc. - instead of those two, comes /comparison/: science of order. XVIIc. - beginnings of taxonomic knowledge, late XVIIIc. - 'opening up' museums to broader public.

2. Modern museums: 1) Formation of nation-states; 2) Colonialist expansion; 3) Development of scientific 'museological' ways of seeing the world.

      P. 9: Museum: site for diplaying the narratives of modern

developments + thechnology through which modernity is constituted. P. 10: - French Revolution -> public museums; - Crystal Palace 1851; - Musee d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 1793; - Academy of sciences, Petrograd, 1836; - Leiden (1837), Oxford (1885)

         P. 11 - John Pickstone (1994):
         - Classical science: explains deductively according to

particular natural philosophies (e.g. vitalism, mechanism); - New 'analytical' or 'museological' sciences: objects as /compounds/, analysable into /elements/, these elements are /domain specific/. - > explanation and prediction. P. 12 - Sophie Forgan: planning of the layout in XIXc. museums. Natural History Museum in London. Making exhibitions educative for and legible to, the new mass public.

                     Ideas of improvement and progress:
                     - Expansive level: progress of human kind;
                     - National level: country's self-betterment and

positive influence to the rest of the world; - Individual level: citizen's personal journey towards knowledge.

         P. 13. Continued specialization of scientific knowledge...

science has developed a mystique of being beyond lay understanding... XXc. moves away from the dominant XIXc. analogy of the museum as a library.

3. Contexts, interactivity and consumers. P.14 - 1960s, 'Cuture Wars', /Enola Gay/ episode, 'Science Wars', fierce debate over the epistemological status of science. P. 15 - Politics of industrial heritage and the extent to which presenting science as part of particular places, times and social relations may enable the public to better understand the importance and/or the dangers of science.

         Exploratorium, San Fransisco, 1969 (F. Oppenheimer): scant

commentary on their political motivations and effects. Also, Oppenheimer worked on the atomic bomb: public fear of the potential of science. Individual creative element of science rather than its social or political contexts.

         P. 17 - National cultural semantics: Britain

(individualized choice-making consumers and ative learners); France (citizenship, celebration of human-machine interrelations.

         XXc. museums:
         1) Past-focused industrial heritage;
         2) Forward-looking interactive and multimedia display

technologies; + 3) Relativization or questioning scientific authority; 4) Reflection on the process of exhibiting itself.

Notes from "9 Hans Haake (b.1936) Statement; Institutions and Objections

p. 930 - Products that are considered 'works of art' have been singled outas culturally significant objects by those who at any given time and social stratum wield the power to confer predicate 'work of art' unto them;....

State-funded and private museums.

Any public museum receiving private donations may find itself in a conflict of interests.

p. 931 - Bertold Brecht, /Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth/, 1934 'the courage to write the truth, although it is being suppressed; the intelligence to recognize it, although it is being covered up; the judgement to choose those in whose hands it becomes effective; the cunning to spread it among them.'

...'artist' and 'work of art' are predicates with evaluative connotations deriving their currency from the relative ideological frame of a given cultural power group.

They participate jointly in the maintenance and/or development of the ideological make-up of their society.

They work within that frame, set the frame and are being framed.

Notes from J. Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies. Chapter 9: Ideology and Meanings

p.164 - Meanings are produced in the interactions between text and audience. Meaning production is a dynamic act in which both elements contribute equally.

p. 165 - The reader and the text together produce the preferred meaning.... this is ideology at work.

p. 165 - Definitions of ideology by Raymond Williams (1977):

• A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group.
• A system of illusory beliefs - false ideas or false consciousness - which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge.
• the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

p. 165 - Brockreide: 'attitudes have homes in ideologies'.

p. 165 - ... for Marxists, the social fact that determines ideology is class, the division of labour.

p. 166 - Intertextuality: the meanings generated by any one text are determined partly by the meanings of other texts to which it appears similar.

p.167 - the assumption that [ideological] values are so basic... so natural, that they do not need referring to is what Barthes (1973) calls 'exomination', and is ideology at work.

p.170 - Barthesian myth  ... [that] science is the human ability to understand and dominate nature. ... Counter-myth is amogst ecology/conservationist subculture.

Dominant ideology, history as progress is confronted by a myths that sees history as cyclical, not a progressive development (tradiition).

p. 171 - Signs give myths and values concrete form and in so doing both endorse them and make them public.

p.172 - Ideology in its third meaning is not a static set of values and ways of seeing, but a practice.

Science helps to maintain the current power structure: the highly-educated not only become the dominant class; they come from it, too.

p. 173 - According to Marx, the ideology of the bourgeoise kept the workers, or proletariat, in the state of false consciousness. They were led to understand their social experience by a set of ideas that were not theirs, were opposed to them.

p. 174 - Althusser (1971): ideology is much more effective than Marx gave it credit for because it works fro, within rather than without - it is deeply inscribed in the ways of thinking and ways of living of all classes (e.g., wearing of high heels by women).

p. 176 -  Communication is a social process and therefore be ideological; interpellation is a key part of its ideological practice.

p. 176 - Gramsci: hegemony, ideology as struggle.  Dominant ideology constantly meets resistances it has to overcome in order to win people's consent to the social order that it is promoting.

p 177 - 'Common sense': the common sense that criminality is a function of a wicked individual rather than the unfairsociety is .. a part of bourgeois ideology

All ideological theories agree that ideology works to maintain class dominationm their differences lie in the ways in which this domination is exercised, the degree of its effectiveness, and the extent of hte resistances it meets.

p. 178 - Gramsci's theory makes social change appear possible, Marx's makes it inevitable, and Althusse's improbable.

p. 181 - 'Displacement': a term that ideological theorists have borrowed from Freudian dream theory: when a topic or anxiety is repressed, either psychologically or ideologically, the concern for it can only be expressed by being displaced on to a legitimate, socially acceptavle topic.

Ideological analysis terms: incorporation ('0don't worry be hippie' - making alternaitve culture a part of mainstream ideology) and commodification (you need commodities produced by current ideology to overcome the troubles).

p. 182 - Capitalism is the system.. that produced commodities, so making commodities seem natural is at the heart of much ideological practice.

Women's bodies and their lives are constructed as a set of problems for which there are commodities to provide solutions.

p. 183 - Barthes' myth of femininity and family work: turning history and society into nature.

Girls 'naturally' become women who 'naturally' become housewives - ruling out the question what sort of women do they become and whose interests are served by this.

Women's magazines: by recognizing herself as the addressee, she is helping to win the consent of herself and other like her to a system that only middle-class men can benefit from in the long run.

p. 184 - Ideological analysis... focuses on the coherence of texts, whether they are telling the coherent story of white, patriarchal capitalism. The theory of hegemony, no the contrary, looks at the weaknesses in texts and argues that some traces of resistance will necessarily remain.

The 'no-make up' look is a strategy to incorporate the resistance of many young women to the ideological practice of painting their faces.

Wearing jeans: 1) symbol of hard work/hard leisure; 2) Symbol of American West - freedom, naturalness, ruggedness, informality, self-sufficiency, tradition; 3) Americanness and social consensus (they are US contribution to the international fashion scene).

Notes from Linda Colley, Rank and file

• engraving of the "great chain of being" from the Rhetorica Christiana of 1579
• frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651)
• One reason why print-makers and engravers were often interested in depicting the social hierarchy, it is suggested, is because - as artists who were also craftsmen - they were obliged to occupy an ambiguous position within it. 
• William Powell Frith's painting Derby Day (1856-58)
• "an unacknowledged conspiracy" since the 1970s on the part of both Labour and the Conservatives  "to pretend [that] the mighty inherited social differences of previous ages are dead and gone".
•  
•  London as the "Great Wen"
• the split between north and south has been widening at a faster rate since the 1970s, not just because of de-industrialisation and the drain of money and talent southwards, but also because mass awareness of these things seems to have deepened
• extreme economic disparities that exist between different parts of the UK
• ownsfolk in Scotland and the north of England were disproportionately likely to see themselves as "happy". 
• The Full Monty (1997)
•  
• Yet perhaps what is most and unavoidably missing from Rank is the politics of it all. 
• The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.

Notes from B.Anderson, Imagined Communitites

Page 3. Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance, i.e., nationalist
Page 4. the 'end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight.
Page 4. Hugh Seton-Watson
Page 4. No "scientific definition" of the nation can be devised;
Page 5: ‘nation-ness’ and ‘nationalism’ are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.
Page 5: Hans Kohn and Carleton Hayes,'founding fathers'
Page 6: easier if one treated [nationalism] as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with 'liberalism' or fascism'.or
Page 7: nation is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
Page 7. Gellner: 'Nationalism invents nations where they do not exist’.
Page 7: all communities are imagined.
Page 7: nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.'
Page 8: The nation is imagined as limited
Page 8: It is imagined as sovereign
Page 8: It is imagined as a community,
Page 8: reasons for sacrifices lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.

Clement Greenberg on kitsch

"Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time." (Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review. 6:5 (1939) 34–49)

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative

- p1 - 2006 film Children of men, 2005, V for Vendetta

- p2 - It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism

- p3 - the new defines itself in response to what's already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new

- p7 - postmodernism=capitalist realism.

- p8 - the horror about the ways that capitalism has seeped into the very unconscious

- p9 - Kurt Cobain and his struggling with realisation that he is a part of mainstream

- p2 - the film performes our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity

- p10 - Simon Reynolds, 1996, The Wire

- p.15 - what needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. 

 - p.16 - Michael Schudson, Advertising, the uneasy persuasion, 1984

- p.17 - Badiou, modernisation;Zizek

 Zupancic: the rally principle is... ideologically mediated

- For Lacan, the Real is what any 'reality' must suppress

- p.18 - green issues, capitalism destroys the environment

- p.19 - privatisation of stress. Bureaucracy changed its form, didn't disappear

- 20. - education is the dominating imperative in capitalist realism

- p 21 - reflexive impotence, knowing that things are bad, but we can't do anything about it

- p22 - inability to pursue anything but pleasure, hedonism

- p22 - Kafka's The Trial, Ostensible acquittal and Indefinite postponement

 Working from home, homing from work.

 - 24 students: Post-literate 'new flesh' that is 'too wired' to concentrate

Page 33 - If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict

Page 33 - The attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Page 33 -C apitalism is profoundly illiterate

Page 34 - Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians

Page 34 - Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure;

Page 35 - combine rapacious pursuit of profit with the rhetoric of ecological concern and social responsi- bility

Page 35 - Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralized bureaucracy

Page 36 - The persistent association of neoliberalism with the term ‘Restoration'

Page 39 - Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat, ’

- p32 - R.Sennet. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

- p33 - the situation of family in post-Fordist capitalism is contradictory. It requires the family, even as it undermines it.

Notes from The Book Trust Prospectus, 2010

P79 - L. V. Deursen: I also don't like it when publishing is meant to just satisfy a small group. Book publishing is interesting because a book can travel easily, because it can be purchased cheaply, and because it's actually the best device to distribute thoughts and ideas.

P84 - you can talk about the book and you can make dummies, but to all of a sudden have it back from the printer is often quite a shock. Especially the way this book came back - sort of purposefully casual, not very expensive-looking or particularly beautiful.

P86 - I quite like when there are some restrictions in a given project; I think that's actually quite healthy.

P88 - I can imagine a lot of people study graphic design because they have an interest in books and their content; in that sense, maybe it's not to weird that this field is now somehow new and more inhabited by designers.

Why do people want to look alike? Why do they want to do the same thing? 

P90 - I can't really say that every graphic designer is a good publisher. Not every graphic designer is a good writer, far from it. Not every graphic designer is a good designer, even! [laughs]

-p91 - creating your own content is a good exercise and it can be really helpful when you have to make work for clients.

 - p.98 - Goods allegedly exchange for a single bulb [of tulip]: two lasts of wheat, for lasts of rye, for fat oxen, wit day swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogshead of wine, for tuns of beer, two tons of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, a silver drinking cup.

One fragment from Drawing Unlimited

Pen and ink, cut-out shapes, ruler, compasses, typography. 7X8cm, 2015

Notes from De Duve, When Form Has Become Attitude

LP. 21 - creativity= ability to perceive + imagination (gestalt). Allows art to be taught, not only the technical skill

Pedagogues: Froebel, Montessori, Decroly. School reformers, Rudolf Steiner, John Dewey. Great modern theorists of art: Herbert Read, E.H.Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim.

- p.22 The difference between talent and creativity is that the former is unequally distributed and the latter universally. 

- p.23 - the difference between metier and medium is that the former has a historical existence and the latter a transhistorical existence.

- p.24 - the difference between imitation and invention goes without saying. Whereas imitation reproduces, invention produces; whereas imitation generates sameness, invention generates otherness; whereas imitation seeks continuity, invention seeks novelty.

AA: process photos

Working on AA, a series of drawings instructed by random numbers. Spray paint, pen and ink, chalk, charcoal, collage.

Miscontinuum: two drawings

Drawings done during Miscontinuum opera at Barbican, February 2015. Biro pen, A4 paper sheets.

Salto dance drawings

Drawings from Salto gig in Moscow, February 2015. Biro pen in 10X15cm pocket sketchbook.

A study with light

Bicycle torch, mirror, A3 white paper sheet, four matchsticks, photography.

Apathy: an animation project

A few gifs bits from an animatic work. Ballpoint pen, markers.

A letter to Contently about infographics and prices

 Hi,

Again, thank you for sending this over!

Strictly speaking, there are seven parameters from which a quote for infographics is constructed:

1. What is the usage?  (Unpromoted blog post of a smaller client is priced differently from the publication on the front page of a major media portal).

2. Area of Use or Territory (I'm still looking to understand how this applies to web distribution)

3. Duration of License (digital licenses are offered on a 1,3,5 years and on Perpetuity. I think it was mentioned before that most work done on Contently is done as a work-for-hire, but in cases where it's not, it's best to build quotes based on the length of time the work is seen on client's website).

4. Client’s Profile (life dictates that it works both ways: big companies have bigger budgets, and especially advertising (!). On the other hand, elite clients who are a prestige to work with, often pay little because there are too many high profile designers willing to work for them, even pro bono).

5. Client's Budget (connected to previous one).

6. Deadline (urgent jobs cost more than the normal priority ones. Also, different clients see urgency very differently, so it's worth considering something fixed, like number of days per amount of work?).

7. Expenses (travel and accommodation obviously do not apply to online freelance work, but there might be some - in your examples, there are costs for photography, where it is used).

Apart from that, are of course the very reasonable considerations that you listed - complexity of data, number of visuals to be created/number of entries, how prepared the data is (how much additional research is needed).

I agree that for most cases the quotes you list in the pdf are quite realistic, but it is hard to assess them because we don't know much about their production. Illustration on page 4 is easy to do visually and probably wouldn't require much research, but we don't know what were the deadlines and how much the photographer charged for his picture. Besides, usage rights for this image by now should be sky high, because it is so well-known! Authors who came up with such a brilliant idea should have quoted a lot, despite of visual simplicity.

- The categorization is another potential threat, because not all timelines are the same, and the prices for them vary greatly - the same goes for maps, comparisons, and other genres - some of them take weeks to do, others are very easy.

- The other important point with regards to the pricing is that the boundary between the writer, the producer and the designer in the infographics are very vague. The writer creates the text, and does research for that, but the production of the visual story is a completely different thing. Text for the infographic has to be cut down to a few dozen words (that's editor's work, which is often done by designers), and there has to be an approved wireframe in place before any design work starts. Producers often do the wireframes, but in those cases where they only manage and research, the fees for design work has to compensate for creation of wireframes. Often designers have to do research, too.

Hope this helps - wanted to thank you again for working on this! Very much appreciated your efforts!

Best regards,
Zhenia