This is a horrible entry. Hack it and make it better!

“To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate.”

When we create a piece of art, we repeat a motion to create something. When we reproduce it, we repeat those motions in which we created it. When we hack into something we take something that existed and made it useful in a different way. This can be viewed in terms of art, music, literature, but more importantly technology.

It’s an interesting theory in relation to class because you can have someone take over someone’s property and control it or make it theirs. The world of the virtual is what they own, they can own what’s unreal. Even better they can take something that’s real and make it their, add their stamp or signature to it but making it different.

But it’s a bout competition too, the checks and balances of the Hacking world is created by doing new and innovative hacks, they then have the power. You see it on Youtube all the time. When the Nintendo Wii came out, Wii remote this, wii remote that. I remember seeing weekly the newest video of who could make the Wii play on the smallest screen possible.

Then there is the incident recently with the kid who hacked into the iPhone, he grabbed the country by storm for a few days. But I still am kind of confused at the question asked by Jason Pine. I couldn’t figure out really what this Virtual tie in to the etc was. Perhaps someone could elaborate.

An Imitation of a blog...plus thoughts on imitation.

When we create art we are “encoding” our ideas, we think this color will represent this, this looks nice here, and this space should be filled with that. Our art will take on a meaning as we do this, however once it becomes legitimized, that is to say looked at by other people, they interpret it differently; this is “decoding.” We create something that is perceived as something else. Hall goes on to discuss this in relation to television.

His article reminded me of The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte. He painted a Pipe, and wrote in French underneath this image of a pipe, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” The translation to that means, “This is not a pipe.” At first this tends to confuse the onlooker, clearly it looks like a pipe. The image is shaped like a pipe, it reminds them of a pipe, so you look at that image and say, “That is a nice pipe,” or even, “I don’t like that pipe, it doesn’t make sense.” But it’s not a pipe; it’s an image of a pipe. It’s a pipe that you cannot touch, without dimensions, no smell, and no interaction. It’s a reminder to the art world that what we are looking at is imitation but not the real thing. It’s the sacrifice of art, an imitation.

Hall discusses this in terms of cows and violence, it reminds me of my Culture and Society in the West II class, Professor Anne Kern discussed to us that when we see a table, we know it’s a table, but all tables look different. It’s fascinating just by the knowledge of something having certain qualities we can recognize it as the same thing yet they are entirely different. It’s the idea of mass culture really, we all create something with a similar use and because it’s used in a similar way we all consider it to be the same, and yet when something looks or steers away from those boundaries of normality we no longer understand what to think of it. Oftentimes we become afraid of it and dismiss it as having the ability to be a table because it only has three legs, that’s when it becomes “modern,” because it’s no longer “traditional.”

Art roots itself into tradition, we see the same….similar things over and over and then we recognize it as this or that. And then once it’s established as this or that, someone changes it and everyone imitates it once again.

How does all of this relate itself to television? It’s simple. Television once again, is an imitation. Look at the sitcom, we all know its formula, the soap opera, the same thing. We create a recognizable situation, however that situation isn’t there, that cow isn’t there, that violence isn’t there. It’s an imitation of that cow, that situation, that violence. It’s a message about that situation, that cow, and that violence; a commentary. This is also in due part because of the input of the director. He thinks a cow looks like this, or violence looks like that so this is how he frames it, then we as the audience, output it by agreeing, this cow looks like that and this is what violence is like and we make our conclusions based off of this very idea. Violence and cows aren’t something we see everyday so in a way this encoding/decoding commentary on an imitation can actually shape our ideology of how we see things. It’s even sometimes a scary thought.

Yo! It's an Article Response OR This is Also Art.

The article Art as a Cultural System not only asks what art is but delves into the situations of cultural differences as art. Profoundly enough, I’m not sure I agree with the first part’s message; that in many non-western cultures they create art without really a background or an objectivity to it.
Does art really need a purpose, or an analysis for it to be considered art? Sure it may be a great thing when art can combine a community together and actually get them discussing amongst themselves as to what the deep rooted meaning behind a brushstroke really is. But art can be practical as well.
The second section goes on to describe art as a religious vehicle to paint scenes into people’s heads. Quite literally, art was a potential bias for today’s modern day beliefs. If people were inspired by some questionable paintings of punished bodies for sins, perhaps it may have molded more minds then thought. Art has such an effect, sometimes it becomes a pop-cultural icon. When this happens, nowadays especially it becomes something commercial and it brings one to wonder, is it still art when its created in mass quantities? Afterall, one of the special things about art is just that, its usually rare and can only be created once.
But art really, even as its wrapped up in the end needs to be broken down from its Western assumptions, or its non-western practicality. Perhaps both communities could learn from each other so one can see why one is art and why the other can see its practical use. But in the end I could just be babbling and not really got anything of what the article was discussing.