RYNSA: WORDS

They’re at it again, god bless ‘em! Those rascally Yes Men, masters of the fine art that is ‘culture jamming’, have hoaxed the American media. This time their ruse involved printing and distributing a fake version of the New York Times, predated to July 4th of next year, and chock-full of unlikely, progressive ‘if only’ scenarios otherwise uncommon to corporate news outlets. The headline of this imposture edition, for example, simply reads, “Iraq War Ends,” a short three-word sentence that seems to sum up the hopes and dreams of many concerned citizens around the country (maybe the world?) in the post-election, Obama era of American politics.

(See Rocketboom, Boing Boing, The Huffington Post, or the NY Times online Arts section for more details and imagery.)

I am particularly fond of the fictitious editorial, presumably written by NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, brilliantly titled “The End of the Experts?”  In it the phony Friedman declares, “I will keep my opinions to myself.”  He goes on to aks:

“…why are newspapers like the New York Times letting people like me make fools of themselves, mislead the American people, and, worst of all, give their wives a lifetime of ammunition? To err is human, but to print, reprint, and re-reprint error-mad humans like me is a criminally moronic editorial policy.”

Here, here, faux Thomas Friedman!  For once, I couldn’t agree with you more.  Let’s hope the publishers of the fake New York Times can inspire the publishers of the real New York Times to get real for a change.

I can’t decide if this Lego photography series (with gratitude to Make Magazine for the link) is really clever and insightful, or perhaps a little dismissive of history. Maybe all of the above? I don’t know.

The artist is a British guy named Mike Stimpson, and on his redbubble profile page he has published (and apparently adopted) this telling quote attributed to American ’street photographer’ Garry Winogrand:

“I photograph to see what something will look like photographed” 

Not to whine too much about it, but my initial response is annoyance. Admittedly, I’m a little sore on all these ironic ‘art projects’ that rely on retroactive repurposing of an original form. Didn’t Warhol kill that metaphor a few decades ago?  I mean, is this high art, or just more posturing witticism from my iconoclastic, millennial cohorts?

That being said, I appreciate Stimpson’s interest in so-called ‘macro lighting.’ He really did put quite a bit of effort into setting up and reproducing these tiny snippets of global culture. I admire the dedication to an aesthetic… even if that’s all that’s there.

I ran across this odd widget the other day (via Rocketboom), and I had to share:

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

What makes this fun little web button even more interesting is that it comes from a free online dating website called One Plus You. I don’t know if they’re making some subtle comment on the modern romantic experience, but this San Franciso-based start-up nonetheless has adopted an interesting marketing strategy: humorous widgetry.

Normally, I would find this stuff a little tedious. The infamous ironic sensibilities of my generation, deconstructed to no end in academia and beyond, has left me with an untold number of psychological scars. But lately, under the intellectual framework of “Vernacular Creativity” (Jean Burgess), I’ve had to quell my initial sense of distrust and look a little deeper.

It’s possible that these widgets and other webpage add-ons, now hugely popular on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc., are indeed expressions of cultural creativity. They might actually represent a uniquely democratic form of digital creativity, as seen through the filter of pop technology and pop media.

Right now, I’m still researching this phenomenon. My sense is that these small, coded visual forms (entirely free, mind you) are frequently created and distributed through an unmediated process separate from traditional systems of media control. The tools for producing widgets of this kind, like most new media, are readily accessible by average, everyday people. Thus, the mainstream and marginal are on a more level playing ground. Marketing and design departments of major corporations around the world share, essentially, the same cultural leverage as a kid in his garage with Photoshop and an FTP client.

One concern I have, however, is the process of cultural mimicry. To what extent do/will these webpage bells-and-whistles serve mainstream values and reinstate traditional hierarchies of power? If the creation of online widgets merely copies old advertising techniques–ie, misrepresentation or manipulation for financial gain–then the creativity of visual artifacts on the internet is somewhat less ‘vernacular’. Basically, it’d be a new form with an old function.

Questions:

Is there a ‘third space’ of widget-making?
What would radical widgetry look like?