Feminism, Interactivity, Reality TV

This week Maia & I read about and (tried to) watch feminist and interactive video art. We couldn’t get a hold of any interactive video art, but were a slightly more successful in regards to what might be considered past and current incarnations of feminist sentiment in video art. I’m a little disappointed that after reading Hershman’s article that was all about interactivity, we only got to watch one of her non-interactive videos. I got the impression that this video had more to do with cybernetics than it did feminism, but the subject in the video was a woman and the description on her website says “The premise of this digital video is that technology can infect the body through manipulated computer chips and invisibly seduce women into cyborghood.” In terms of feminism, the video shows the male-dominated control of information technologies, the use of information to control people, and in turn another incarnation of male-female power structures.

Joan Braderman on the other hand interrogates pop culture in her video Joan Does Dynasty. In the video, she assumes the position of a “stand up theorist” in front of a green screen showing clips from the 80’s soap Dynasty, using art and feminist theory to deconstruct the show. Joan’s video is wild, hilarious, but also informed. Joan Does Dynasty is a Mystery Science Theatre with serious undertone that reveals itself in parts in comments like “I confess my unreconstructed Dynasty delectation, though I have the intellectual tools to deconstruct its odious subtext. Does this tell you anything? Is deconstructing it merely a new way to love it? … This is what we want to know as feminists in the eighties.” Throughout the video, Braderman lies on the green screen, cuts holes in it to use it as a mask, stutters the clips, and uses intense optical zooming in and out to make her presence as disruptive as possible. Her disruptive presence makes both disengages us from simply falling into watching the show as well as being as visually agitating as she means to be intellectually engaging.

By being so agitating, Braderman points out how while neither Dynasty nor Joan Does Dynasty are interactive in the sense of viewer manipulation of the images, they can and should be interactive in respect to intellectual interactivity. Televisual passivity is a huge component of her critique in JDD, and gets pointed out by Martha Gever’s comment “By performing on-screen, variegated interpretation of Dynasty, Braderman both enacts and embodies the participation of the spectator in producing meaning, the specatators role as consumer of media representations, and the ability of the spectator to think critically about what’s on the screen.” In this sense, all of the videos that Maia and I watched this week, and every week for that matter, were interactive. A video is only interactive if the viewer engages with it, and likewise a medium is only passive if the viewer takes all given meaning at face value.

Braderman’s video is also an example of video art that presents both a female spectacle and speaker—her comedy and agitating effects create the spectacle, while intellectually hammering Dynasty as an active speaker. Anne Hirsch is another video artist who uses this same duality in her videos. A couple years ago Anne created an online persona named Caroline, sort of how Lynn Hershman created Roberta, but Caroline was an investigation what she calls the phenomena of the “fame whore” or “cam whore”. I got the chance to interview her last week (which I’ll post on here as soon as I get a copy of it) and she described the same Dichotomy between speaker and spectacle that Gever writes about and Braderman deconstructs. I don’t have a copy of the exact wording, but Hirsh described how when she was looking the videos that women post on youtube, they almost always were either shaking their butt and singing or talking to the camera/internet audience. So in an attempt to bridge the two as well as study this phenomenon, she built a persona by creating over a hundred videos in which she dances to pop songs and occasionally addresses the audience about the theory of what she’s doing under the veil of a naïve voice.

In pursuing her interest in the Famewhore, Camwhore, and viewer/audience interactivity Hirsh used her Caroline persona audition for and get onto the reality show Frank the Entertainer. Like I said above, I’ll post our discussion in which she talks about her experience on the show; she also wrote three articles for Bust magazine about her experience which I’ve linked on the bottom. While Hirsh’s work is mainly youtube and reality TV, it’s not only interactive, but a new type of interactivity. As Caroline, Hirsh would get the interactive element of fan-mail from people who thought they were just watching a girl dancing and keeping a vlog; these emails came both in the form of girls saying they want to be like her along with horny high school boys sending her pictures of their penises. In this way, the internet audience is interacting with her directly, while those watching as it as “art” can both interact with her work intellectually as well as sending “fan mail”.

Frank the Entertainer on the other hand represents a very different kind of interaction. Hirsh discussed how in reality tv the producers neither fabricate a fantasy nor do they stand back and let what happens happen—they use cajoling and charismatic suggestion to get cast members to create a sort of scripted reality. I never thought I would compare reality TV to Neo-realism, but it reminds me in a sense of Zavettini’s dismissal of both high fiction along with straight documentary. I’m not saying that Zavettini would endorse MTV reality shows, but they do both in this space between fiction and documentary, albeit anyone who sees reality TV as documentary is kidding themselves. To come back to interactivity though, reality TV presents an interesting case for passivity because it claims to be showing “reality”, which makes its viewers more apt to passively absorbing its meaning, which as Hirsh points out is a meaning fraught with sexist and racist stereotypes.

The last set of videos Maia and I watched were by Ryan Trecartin, another younger video artist and sculptor. Hirsh recommended him to me a while back, but Maia and I are still having a hard time wrapping our heads around him, so I can’t really say he is or isn’t a feminist video artist. His videos are a sort of neo-surrealist-alien-view-hyperbole of American culture, and while they can be hard to watch at times, I also find myself unable to stop.

Read:

Martha Gever – The Feminism Factor

Lynn Hershman – The Fantasy Beyond Control

Watched:

Lynn Hershman

Seduction of a Cyborg --

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc9efa0j8O4

Joan Braderman

Joan Does Dynasty -- http://blip.tv/file/2962054 --

Anne Hirsch

http://www.youtube.com/user/scandalishious

http://bust.com/boob-tube/shaming-famewhores-part-i-on-becoming-a-famewhore.html

http://bust.com/boob-tube/shaming-famewhores-part-ii-on-being-a-failed-famewhore.html

http://bust.com/boob-tube/shaming-famewhores-part-iii-and-the-winning-famewhore-is….html

Ryan Trecartin

Sibling Topics - http://vimeo.com/5793454 --

I-Be AREA (Craig Ricky)

--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzlSEpk0AGs&feature=related

I BE AREA (Pasta & Wendy M Peggy)

--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR4sHDR-1XE

I-BE AREA (Pasta & Mayflower) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fij0LIWgY&NR=1