Import

10 -12

Psychoanalysis, Cognition, and Media

Text	Freud, "The Mystic Writing Pad" and "The Uncanny";	Garrison, "The Poetics of Ambivalence";	Liebman, "Un Chien Andalou: The Talking Cure"
Tier 1	Mystic writing pad = functioning of the perpetual apparatus of our mind It solves the problem of combining the two functions by dividing them between two separate but interrelated component parts of systems Perception > Short term memory > Permanent It’s like using RAM memory vs computer storage memory	Three forms of ambivalence: Affective, will, intellectual Freud: ambi as key to analysis Ambivalence transforms conflict and even ambiguity into opposition Opposition generates ambivalence Ambivalence compounds the values by setting each in opposition to the other = > 20 opposite pairings Ambivalence confuses, devours and tortures	Dream-work: Transformation of a latent verbal thought into manifest visual image Dream work must reformulate scandalous or morally repugnant thoughts in order to allow them to be represented in the dream You must listen and see It achieve the marvelous through complex transfer of language to image; semiotic transfer of language into visual forms
Tier 2	Uncanny = class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to use, once very familiar Unheimlich vs heimlich Involuntary return to the same situation but differs radically in other respects Uncanny fulfils the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic mental activity within us and bring us to expression		Anemic cinema - spiral of language and image into illusory depth. 3D dimensional image, illusion of meaning generated by grammatical structure Most of images are overdetermined, tied together in countless obvious or elusive ways by a series of phrases and concepts Freud: Each image is rebus
Conclusion	Duality / simultaneity / double generates the uncanny; the idea of familiarity yet it feels radically different. We live in world of bifurcation or polarities which makes the duality so difficult and alienating. But what does the uncanny do? What can we do with it? Why is deja-vu such an incredibly strange feeling for us? What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema? Why is cinema especially important from a psychoanalytic perspective? Horror in cinema - monsters to

Propaganda / Documentary / Realism

Text	Propaganda Appeals	Lotman, The Illusion of Reality Critique of Digital Capitalism Chapter 8
Tier 1	Manual for making propaganda: on the same team, convenience (Spotify), problem-solver (Mr Muscle), Taichi master shifting the blame, hating on something together, anxiety-inducing > urgency and security needed, admiration and envy, people’s need to do right / social justice warrior, amplifying people’s ideas A need to disassemble propaganda; which appeal, its audience, emotional or rational, its verity, reliability Devices: playing the victim, playing the hero, fallacies, slogans (puts an end to thinking and uses emotional appeal), referral/prestige/quotation/testimonials (dentists, celebrity endorsement), my way or the highway, taichi people’s belief into the propagandist's, identification (one of us), mainstreaming, jedi mind trick with distortion and false evidence	Cinema as reality; audience as witness and participant The better we a person, the less resemblance we find in photograph of him Non-artistic photography enforces a single, automatic dependency 60: the aim of art is not simply to render some object or other, but to make it a carrier of meaning Juxtaposition of real life and cinema life; underscored the artistic conventionality of the world he depicts and made us us forget about the conventionality Feeling of actuality, the sense of resemblance to life without = no art of the cinema, is not something elementary, provided by direct sense perception. / facilitated by associations with artistic and cultural experience of society
Tier 2	Lackey, Reflections on Cavells Ontology of Film Panofsky: processes of all earlier representational art start from an idealistic conception of the world Switch the camera on , and the process becomes automatic Bazin: objectivity of film results from the disassociation of the film image from the usual humanizing associations the filmed objected would have if seen with the naked eye
Conclusion	Types of propaganda + illusion of cinema as reality = propaganda manifesting in reality

Censorship & Production Codes

Text	Maltby, “A Brief Romantic Interlude”;	Pally, Sex and Sensibility, Chapters 1, 2, 3
Tier 1	Just because there is a censorship rule doesn’t not mean the story cannot be good; you can use this to your advantage By creating sequences that audiences can make paradoxical or ambiguous meaning, you let them write the story in between. It is very much like Scott McCloud idea of closure in which the reader is able to think of what happens in between gutter. This requires a sophisticated audience that can draw on relevant contextual knowledge to assist in meaning making ______ references: the role of the reader by Umberto eco and understanding comics	Who decides what needs to be censored Censorship = danger = deludes from thinking about / questioning the status quo, from finding faults with what is widely accepted = ignorance = society/individual having tunnel vision and cannot think for themselves As I was reading this, I thought to myself how terrible the past was when it was all censored but then I realized that the world today is very much censored. In America, there are some taboo words or subject you cannot bring up for risk of hostile feedback. For example, calling people by the Color of their skin, saying the right pronoun for transgender. There is an increased sensitivity to these matters.	In Singapore, the news is never interesting because I like to think it is safe and problem free but what if the media is just withholding the reality. If you do not see it, you do not recognize it. Ban the image and one is rid of the act. Eg. Korean movie Taxi Driver;Gwangju uprising 1980; large-scale civil uprising which was brutally suppressed by large-scale civil uprising which was brutally suppressed. “. The junta blamed “vicious rioters” and “communist agitators” for the casualties, saying the military had been there only to protect people. But Mr. Hinzpeter’s footage exposed those assertions as lies — not just to the world, but to South Koreans.” Chapter 3: Japanese less rape rate despite violent and abundance of pornographic materials than Singapore which banned these. People get off at these outlets instead of manifesting their depravity in reality
Conclusion

Appropriation, Tactical Media & Semiotic Disobedience

Text	Katayal, “Semiotic Disobedience”; Keywords: vandalism, guerilla semiotics, myth, Barthes		CAE, Electronic Civil Disobedience, chapter 1
Tier 1	Memes & parody as semiotic disobedience Spirit of semiotic disobedience reflects some of the same class goals and interests of traditional civil disobedience Offered the audience the chance to recode a national symbol 502: the dominant industry today is information, not products. For civil disobedience to have any meaningful effect, the resisters must appropriate something of value to the state. Once they have an object of value, the resisters have a platform from which they may bargain for change. 511: SD aims to create a dialogue where one is absent and tries to reclaim the inducement of passivity among modern consumers. … seek to reverse the privileged position of the speaker or author and make the audience an active participant instead of a generally passive spectator Culture jamming: introduce noise into the signal as it passes from the transmitter to receiver = unintended interpretations The goal is to interrupt, disrupt, and replace the speech of the corporate entity with of the disenfranchised consumer Debord: we do not want to work towards the spectacle of the end of the world but towards the end of the world of the spectacle	543: Part 1 verbal and visual signs within language are entirely arbitrary meanings can be unpacked, reframed, and pierced in new and inventive ways	For CD to have any meaningful effect, the resisters must appropriate something of value to the state. Once they have an object of value, the resisters have a platform from which they may bargain for change. But streets or city now of no value> change to information valorization instead? Money has no point of origin but is part of a circular or spiraling flow, the best we can expect to find is the flow itself. ECD - trespass and blockage Selective blockage must be considered Power has retreated to cyberspace
Tier 2	Case studies; Nike, Native American, Bhopal gas crisis and Yes Men
Conclusion	Semiotic disobedience is about having conversation using a universally or widely understood/familiar visual language/ platform The only way forward is through; fight fire with fire We need more Yes Men; maybe they should do one with SCAD on SCAD Day

The Contemporary

Text	Johnson, Modernity Without A Project, chapters 1, 2 and 5;	Keedy, "Zombie Modernism";	Geers, "Neo-Modern";
Tier 1	Entering the 21st century, the postmodern succession has given way to a doom-laden, apolitical orthodoxy. This book offers suggestive readings of “the contemporary” in light of high modernity, postwar modernity, and postmodernity, as framed by the influential institutions of modern art and the spectacles of millennial architecture. Modernity without a Project critiques and connects historical avant-garde currents as they are institutionally expressed or captured, and scrutinizes the remake of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Minoru Yamasaki’s vanished Utopias, the “anarchitecture” of Lebbeus Woods, recent work of Rem Koolhaas, delirious developments in Dubai, and the unexpected contribution to architectural debate by the late Hugo Chavez. What is contemporary	Zombie modernist - the living dead who design among us The message is the same: “I am the voice of clarity and reason, authority and progress, in charge of this family’s values.” > Bauhaus idealized and mythologized by designers… its ideal of universality was a myth and mirage, shattered by the war, politics and the demands of a consumer society Modernism is no longer as style, it’s an ideology: of conservatism Meaning is unstable and has to made by the reader. To impose a single text on the readers is authoritarian and oppressive We must allow ourselves to look at design in new and challenging ways, we must look for ourselves.	Renewed interest in abstraction, materiality, and process in ways that on the surface, recall the formal strategies of modernist art and its Minimalist offshoots Slow gravitational pull, in both production and reception towards a less reflexive and more nostalgic attitude, Today's artists, critics, and salespeople fall back on the old mantra of process because in the absence of the lofty discourse that fueled much modernism, there is so little to discuss except process. (book) Critique of Digital Capitalism Chapter 10 Digital capitalism deny physicality - 3d printer, crypto$$$, debitcard, no physical store, self-ordering system, work remotely Generate asset bubbles, followed by crashes precisely because the denial of physicality that is the aura of the digital — an illusion that denies the constraints imposed by physical materiality)
Tier 2			Qns: there are services without a physical location: banks, telco, Amazon. The thing you need to day is just a room and food and wifi. The only place that cannot be replaced is a restaurant, is food the only thing we cannot deny its physicality
Conclusion	What now? What is beyond this class in terms of theories; what have we not covered? How does this inform our practice? What does making a work based on a theory As we delve deeper into this knowledge, I find myself departing from just being a worker and rather tell people what to do instead.