A Deviant Undertaking

  By zawilsbj | April 9, 2012 - 6:51 pm | Uncategorized
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In the beginning of the social media revolution, a number of start-ups appeared on the scene that focused on occupying particular niche interests. LiveJournal and MySpace targeted themselves toward the average user, attempting to make blogging and posting go mainstream. Facebook quickly gobbled up the college crowd. Newgrounds tackled the flash-based creativity community, and Flickr, of course, looked toward pleasing photographers. Yet, while Flickr by no means limited itself to simply uploading photos –artistic creations such as digital and traditional paintings can be found there as well– it didn’t necessarily cater to the dedicated community of artists and graphic designers. For that task, another social platform was created, where artists could share their work, ask for feedback, learn from one another, and even place commissions to trade for platform services or physical gear.

 

And that specialized is community is why –for my analysis of a social media platform– I’ve chosen to delve into one of the currently most thriving artistic communities online: DeviantArt.

Whereas Flickr operates as a space to share (primarily) photographs among different users, DeviantArt positions itself in a slightly different manner. Collaboration is a key component of DeviantArt, and the site likes to view itself as a place for “cutting edge” artistic development. Along with photography, users of DeviantArt can peruse a variety of artistic media from within the site, including (but not limited to): Traditional Paintings (watercolor, oil, acrylic), pencil sketches, pastel compositions, charcoal drawings, digital paintings (created through Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, open source software, and any combination of the aforementioned), and 3d modeled graphics. A detailed categorized hierarchy allows for a nearly infinite kinds of artistic expression, and the site caters both to beginning artists and professionals within the field.

As the video above states, DeviantArt is a place for sharing and selling artwork. One of the most interesting features of the site involves the way it allows users to make commercial gains from their uploaded galleries. With a premium membership, users can choose the option of offering prints for sale to other DeviantArt users. These prints can be purchased via cash or exchanged for Deviant points, a monetary system designed for use within the site. Deviant points can be purchased by users and then donated to others for the completion of commissioned works. This interesting model allows for a unique economy of artistic commissioning, where virtually any patron can compensate another artist for creating a personalized piece of artwork. Indeed, many of the most prominent members on DeviantArt have entire bodies of work that was commissioned by other users. But, aside from using Deviant points to purchase prints of other works, they can also be used in purchasing other materials, such as art supplies and anything offered through DeviantArt’s rather extensive online store. But along with the monetary incentive, users can also enter into Art Exchanges, where artists exchange compositions with one another.

Selected users of DeviantArt (usually well-known/respected community members) also have the chance to sponsor Daily Deviations. Daily Deviations promote a piece of artwork to the front page of DeviantArt, where every user will have a chance to see it upon entering the site. This kind of exposure typically results in a great deal of attention and comments from members, particularly useful since a prominent use of the social aspects of the site is to give and receive constructive criticism on artistic pieces. Daily Deviations are intended to be an expression of excellence in an artistic medium, and suggestions can be nominated by individual users, and those suggestions will later be sorted and decided upon by senior community members.

Along with individual works of art, visitors to DeviantArt also have access to a wide variety of tutorials that are created by other site users. These tutorials can range in skill level from basic instruction on drawing to extremely detailed lessons on color usage, anatomy, photoshop techniques, and countless other topics. In short, DeviantArt is one of the largest repositories of freely available art lessons online.



Operating much like other social networks, users of DeviantArt can interact with other members through a variety of ways. Users can add contacts as friends, of course, but there is also the option of adding individuals to a Watchlist. With this functionality, you may not necessarily wish to interact with another artist, but you can easily follow their work and receive notices when they’ve added new work to their gallery. Similarly, groups exist as a place to collect artwork that centers around a particular theme. Many of the groups have a general topic, such as Digital Painting (which can encompass any number of different composition methods), but there are also others which cater to very specific compositional techniques or artistic genres.

Collaboration is another heavily emphasized area of DeviantArt. Whereas traditional collaborations may have been limited by physical location, DeviantArt provides a space for artists to gather together to undertake larger projects. And again, not all users of DeviantArt are considered to be amateurs. Many professionals make use of the site as a space to work with others on putting together larger-scale compositions. One common way of collaborating involves the user comics published to the site. Often an individual may produce lineart for a particular piece of art or comic layout. From that point, others may willingly step forward to color that line-art, together creating a finished and polished product. In terms of storyline creation, writers are also welcome to post written content to DeviantArt as well, allowing graphic artists to connect with authors to create comics, children’s books, or other related media.

Rewriting the Resemblances of Remix

  By zawilsbj | March 28, 2012 - 4:25 pm | Uncategorized
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I’ll let my friend, Kirby, kick off this blog post. We’re going to dig a little deeper into this issue of copyright and ownership in the age of digital composition.

Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

So, as we look back over the past few weeks, I think the big question we’ve quietly been addressing is: why is this issue important? In his series, Everything is  Remix (you should also watch the other 3 parts), Kirby Ferguson follows a line of reasoning that will be familiar to us from Rip: a Remix Manifesto, but it is in this final episode that he looks toward the results of an increasing stranglehold on the concepts of copyright and patenting.

We’ve consistently seen that creativity is born of copying and altering, or augmenting material. We are experts at repurposing content, and as Lessig and Ferguson argue, the idea of copyright was meant to inspire further creation and not to allow media conglomerates to dominate the public by holding almost everything out of the public domain. Disney is often held as the worst of the offenders, protecting its licenses and properties with draconian litigation strategies that ensure Mickey Mouse and friends remain firmly under mouse-eared key. They’re even experts at ripping themselves off!

Now, I know there is nothing particularly wrong about the re-usage of animated scenes such as these (at least nothing in a legal sense), yet even here we see the power of repurposing material. Why reinvent the wheel? Yet, increasingly this concept of intellectual property is growing wildly out of control. You need only look to the patent wars surrounding nearly every one of our patents to see the absurdity of owning intellectual property. Companies have expanded their reach to the point where they try to make claims over individual genes within life-forms. The Mon Santo corporation holds patents over genetic strains of crops, and if cross-pollination occurs (as it often does), farmers who do not purchase Mon Santo seeds, yet through no fault of their own end up with genetic variants of those plants, are liable to be sued out of existence.

While we tend to sit back and think of these issues merely as the way corporations entertain themselves, the consequences are becoming clearer for everyone. Rather than taking a Luddite stance toward genetically engineered crops and gene therapy practices, I think the truly harmful aspect of these practices are the concepts of ownership and control that we find alongside them. Aside from merely affecting the stability of social evolution, we may find the idea of ownership adversely affecting our quality of life, as in the case of pharmaceutical companies that patent drugs and then refuse to release them to external markets. It’s not only the health of our culture that we put at risk when we fail to acknowledge the ways in which true innovation spreads.

So the question remains: what should we do? Where should we go to rectify these problems?

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_25_a_borrowed.html

If only I had an answer. But that’s yet to come…in the next episode.

 

Convergence – Composition, Communication and Defining a Content

  By zawilsbj | March 1, 2012 - 12:35 am | Uncategorized
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As Jenkins exhibits in Convergence Culture, our media spaces are shifting as we explore the ways in which new media outlets such as the internet re-shape methods of distribution of old media and highlight a new form of multimodal creation taking place within pop culture. The Matrix serves as a powerful example of how a new conception of authorship and content creation across multiple modes can work to draw consumers into a more explicitly active form of participation, driving them to actively pursue a story across multiple semiotic channels. This convergence in turn strives to cause a more extensive awareness of all the methods of expression at our disposal, giving participants the opportunity to choose how to interact with various texts.

In turn, Gee focuses on another kind of convergence–one that seemingly is taking place within composition. By investigating the multimodal nature of video games and the literacies surrounding such texts, he seeks to do nothing else than reinvigorate education with principles that draw individuals to complete the often complex and difficult tasks experienced within the realm of video games. His composition, then, becomes a landscape that also explores other modes of expression and seeks to foster the always obscure and not-fully-understood realm of knowledge transfer–seemingly the holy grail of first-year composition or general writing instruction courses.

Yet what effect does this grasping have on the field of rhetoric and composition? As an interdisciplinary field, we constantly draw upon the work of scholars from other fields, attempting to bring meaning to the act of composing texts–both visual and alphabetic. We seek answers from video games, from design, from educational psychology, and blend together these perspectives. In truth, it’s one of the great strengths of the field, but possibly a growing weakness as well. Our theories are as disparate as the technologies we employ, and what we seem to yearn for is a convergence of communication knowledge, for that comprehensive direction seems to be where we are headed. As some of the discussions in class have suggested, we are trying to become everything to everyone, and as our academic expertise twists and winds along uncharted paths, should we ask: What is our goal? What do we teach? What is our aim?

Now doesn't this just evoke some Freirean concepts...

While I don’t believe that any of the authors we’ve read in this section are advocating a turn away from writing entirely, I wonder at the goals we are chasing. Yes, technological literacies and expression of different modes is a critical aspect of composition today. And yes, video games can serve as extremely accessible models for rhetorical strategies, but to what end are we employing these strategies? Is it in the pursuit of gaining a greater understanding of the multifaceted nature of composition and the ways in which we might employ multimodal composition to good effect? Or is it simply a matter of the lack of focus in writing studies, where courses are just as often centered around pop culture or sociological or literary topics that take us ever farther away from the academic expertise that exists within composition studies?

The “Battle” We All Face (A War Metaphor Too Far?)

  By zawilsbj | February 1, 2012 - 11:50 pm | Uncategorized
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The way we interact with knowledge has always reflected the tools at our disposal (whether they be concrete, physical devices–such as the pen–or abstract concepts). Our technologies shape the way we produce and spread knowledge, and even how we learn. And yet, we have surrounded ourselves with a narrative of resistance, one that places us in the position of either resisting technology, or resisting the opposition of technology. Baron highlighted the ways in which countless technologies that came before the “digital revolution” suffered from these same critiques. There will always be utopic and dystopic views surrounding the implementation of any new technology.

All too quickly we forget about inventions that weren’t accepted by society, and along with descriptions of the co-invention of technologies such as television, who is left to catalog the failed technologies? Examples such as Charles Babbage, whose innovation merely came too early, might be overlooked entirely. Yet this game of resistance and wild acclaim might be viewed more productively as part of a larger system of interaction with technology. Critics oppose the usage of new technologies, while proponents cite all the advantages, and in the end, the relationship forged between technology and culture becomes reciprocal.

Social pressures led to the adoption of Facebook and Twitter as platforms for cultural revolution, but beyond changing the way we used those technologies, those same pressures also identified a need and resulted in services such as Ushahidi–which in turn were further adapted to suit needs beyond those originally envisioned. As with any binary position, (pairing determinism against instrumentalism) the truth often lies somewhere near the middle of the spectrum.

So while I largely subscribe to the narrative of technology bettering our lives, I found myself identifying with Carr in his concerns over the way technology influences us, even while recognizing that “deep” and “hyper” attention aren’t new creations. Reading a novel for pleasure might be an act of “deep” attention, as defined by Hayles, but reading anything with layered meanings (a la Burke, Anzaldua, Trinh) requires something more than the passivity of a single, focused attention. Those texts require us to be in constant conversation, asking questions, deciphering/constructing/rearticulating meaning as we progress through the text in ways that bear no relation to the realm of the digital.

I don’t believe that hyper-attention itself that is a “bad” thing (any more than I see it leading us to utopia), but as Shirky discussed, we are (re)transitioning from a read-only culture into one that creates and “writes.”  In the midst of hyper-attention, I wonder: how often do cohesive movements, such as “Grobanites for Charity” come into existence? Is it unfocused hyper-attention that leads us away from organized movements into the “shallows” of lolcats? Or should we even consider such objects as “the shallows,” when remix and remediation have always been so prevalent in acts of creativity?

Yet, this debate does serve a purpose. It reminds us, in the end, to question our tools so that we don’t simply become blind extensions of our technology.