Form or Platform?

Beneath the skin of the ‘Vlogsphere’

By Mitchell Miller

(Excerpts taken from an online interview with Charlene Rule on the Scratch Video website ( HYPERLINK "http://www.scratchvideo.tv" www.scratchvideo.tv)

'It is difficult for some to put on that mask so abruptly as the lens turns to them.'

OK, you can't just go around posting interesting things like that without talking about it some more...as they say in the school exam 'discuss'...

******Posted by Mitch, July 7 2005

Impression management my friend.

A term I learned about from Erving Goffman. I find that adaptation that people make when they find the lens turned to them to be fascinating.

How a lens causes so much to come to the surface in a split second. There is this apprehension as to how one will be perceived. Some really fear it, others embrace it. I find myself doing both at times.

*******Posted by Charlene, July 9 2005

From lens to viewfinder

Current debates over the implications of digital technology have largely centred on its implication for mainstream, commercial filmmaking, but recent achievements in digital technologies also have meaning for video practitioners. Because digital places high quality resolution within the reach of non-professionals, it blurs the traditional format-based distinctions (8mm for amateur, 16mm for television, 35mm for the cinema…) that have long sustained a putative hierarchy of the moving image. This in turn, made the choice by independent filmmakers and to use video something of an idealistic or political, as much as a technical choice.

The move to digital does no necessarily equate with a ‘year zero’ for these distinctions or the purpose of video as a riposte to cinema; but it does invite us to reconsider video’s radical roots. Even as video has kept pace, even driven, developments in interactive technology – moving to DVD, to interactive displays and increased use of the web – its has also struggled, and sought to drive the changing political hardware of the past thirty years. Video activism is an established aspect of the ‘new left’, a focal point and catalyst for anti-globalisation and recently, anti-war activity. But as with the ‘new left’ the activism is post-modern in character – decentralised, relativist and suspicious of any attempts at synthesis. The work of Aaron Valdez, an ‘experimental documentary’ maker based in Iowa is an excellent example of the ethic, ranging from cleverly edited pranks such as Big Screen Version (2004) (a humorous re-edit of Fox News footage) and God Bless America (200) (a precise and elegant vignette of the confluence between advertising, militarism and religion in America).

The face of video art or activism today, is frequently ironic, or at least, self-aware. One such faces smiles at us from Charlene Rule’s short video Captured, downloadable at  HYPERLINK "http://www.scratchvideo.tv" www.scratchvideo.tv. It contrasts sharply (if arbitrarily)  with the photograph of an unidentified woman published in the 1970s magazine Radical Software. Both women are in the process of filming, yet their attitude to their practice seems entirely different – as if modernism and post-modernism are staring each other down. Despite being in the middle of filming, Rule’s face has relaxed into a wide, infectious grin. We can see this because she has flipped her viewfinder so she can see (and include) herself in the film as she makes it. We can only see half of her 1970s predecessor, a living cliché whose face is bisected (McLuhan might say ‘amputated’ or extended) by a Sony Camcorder pointed directly at us. Although she is smoking  (an activity that in film usually happens in between takes) her concentration is absolute, focused outwards to her environment and surroundings, on the photographer and ultimately, us. Her outward stare, the cyborg features, seem to state a belief that the function she is performing at this moment is much more important to her than who she is.

It should be noted that Rule is a film professional, an editor by trade who works out of New York’s Mulberry Street. Her 70s predecessor was almost certainly an amateur. In our arbitrary, pseudo-ironical contrast, the professional and the amateur thus swap personas – one is assured, the other earnest. From lens to viewfinder -post-modernity and modernism staring each other down....

The unnamed amateur was an associate of the Raindance Corporation, (later the Raindance Foundation) a group of thinkers and artists drawn mostly from the radical campus of the late 1960s. They largely welcomed video as a tool of liberation, of devolution from a moribund and corrupt centre and as a redistribution of the means of (media) production. Influenced by thinkers such as Marcuse and McLuhan, and showing many significant correlations with the European Situationists, Raindance continued the radical campus debates through the magazine Radical (Software (1970-1974), their aim to establish new rules and ideas (software) that would harness the potential of new technologies (hardware), yet minimise any harmful or de-humanising effects. ‘Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones’ argues its inaugural editorial ‘other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.’ Put another way, it sought to break down the ‘autonomous realm of artifice’ described by Debord, that ‘necessarily entailed a falsification of life.’

Even this cursory audit of video’s early origins leads to some fairly sobering conclusions over the success of radical art in counteracting ‘existing processes’.  The growth and prosperity of today’s ‘information structures’ or  ‘the realm of artifice would make for interesting and extended reading, particularly if we were to apply Marcuse to today’s highly commodified mainstream art world.  Certainly, ‘existing processes’ have proved remarkably successful in co-opting their apparent antithesis in the shape of video art. The effort to move away from an autonomous, artificial realm towards an engagement with the conditions under which people live is laudable but is employed under conditions of rapid technical change. In many respects, the Raindance ethos was always in danger of being outpaced.

One criticism that may nevertheless be levelled at much video art is that it remains confined to the gallery, art centre or highly specialist space. Video is, after all, intended for the domestic rather than public sphere. When Raindance contributor Gene Youngblood (in an essay some regard as the founding text of video art) dreamt of the videosphere, an aesthetically charged space for the free exchange of ideas, information and expressions, he imagined it would interface directly with the home. It would establish a direct connection between the collective and the individual. Video would create ‘new types of communities’ and emphasise the autonomy of the individual rather than the media itself. Video was a democratic format that allowed anyone to record or re-record as they pleased. The buttons on a VCR put the audience in control of playback, the very conditions under which work would be viewed. The ‘videosphere’ was predicated on shared, common technologies, so that the audience could itself, pick up a camcorder and produce material – in short, the divide between artist and audience (or consumer) would cease to be.

The utopianism of Youngblood’s vision may seem unrealistic, but his description of the videosphere does seem, superficially at least, to match a broad definition of the Internet. The fit is not exact, but there is what Wittgenstein would term ‘a family resemblance’ between Youngblood’s imagined infospace and the many facets of a burgeoning online culture.  Visit sites such as Rule’s Scratch Video and there is the opportunity to upload and download films. Captured can be dragged to a computer desktop, watched in a quiet moment and revisited at the viewer’s convenience. The viewer can even poach the footage, remix it and upload it to the site. Scratch Video is Rule’s video blog (or vlog), consisting of experimental documentaries, mock (and mocking) soap operas, and abstract diary pieces. Like the videosphere, the vlog is a group effort, an individual statement and a personal record. Each film is introduced by a diary entry that in a few lines, explains something of its where and why (Rule has an admirable gift for getting to the point), followed by a list of responses to the piece from other browsers, expanding the entry from a recorded thought to something approaching a virtual conversation. The vlog is only a vlog so long as there is text to accompany the film, explaining it, expanding on it – and judging it.

The texts and hypertexts of the internet, in particular e-mails and bulletin boards have already been explored as art in their own right. In Internet Art Rachael Greene details the development of ‘e-mail art’, a collaborative form of expression that breaks down the traditional barriers between the ‘critical’ and the ‘generative’. Put another way, e-mail art harnesses the energy of critical exchanges between correspondents, to generate something that can be understood in artistic terms. 

Incorporating the base technology of e-mail and internet discussion boards, blogs and vlogs further the parameters of internet art through their engagement with an artist’s personal as well as professional output. This is not, however, a new development. Valie Export’s Touch Cinema (1968) ‘expanded’ film and television’s emergent culture by walking the streets of Vienna and inviting passers-by to touch her breasts (through a set of curtains). This exposure of the relationship between film and voyeuristic consumption has been taken up in the age of net porn. Greene, sees the work of 0100101110101101.ORG’s Life_Sharing (2001) as a direct descendant of Export’s devil’s advocacy. Life_Sharing set the benchmark for transgression of privacy by making its hard drive – including private files and e-mails – freely available.

Themes of public and private have continued to characterise internet art, reflecting the wider ongoing political and social debates over the future of the net. Scratch Video offers its own highly comic and irreverent take on private/public; categories and subjects Rule uses to organise the site radiate from her daily preoccupations, even her ambitions, categories that recall a hybrid between a University prospectus and a resume - ‘Anthropology’, ‘Environmental Studies’, ‘Food and Drink’, ‘Career Development’. Each captures a moment when Rule’s idle moments found an artistic hook - the frustrations of a waiting, amusement at the behaviour of tourists in a museum or the joys of a big belt.

Entering this personal, intimate world is akin to taking control of someone’s own self-awareness, their perception of reality. In Captured we intrude upon a moment where Rule’s attempts to frame the world with her camera rebound on her. In Ways of Seeing, this theme is again explored in an art gallery where visitors spend more time trying to get a famous picture into camera-shot than actually looking at it. This sardonic, bittersweet humour is typical of Scratch Video and is directed at herself as much as at others. Her vlogging is nocturnal; separate from her professional work, which explains to some degree its playfulness. During the day she must control the frame, but by night, she can adopt a critical, spontaneous attitude to its place within the film - behaviour arguably counter-intuitive to the consummate editor. Scratch Video is almost a deliberate offence against her sensibilities, celebrating the messy, homespun and loosely sketched. Scratch Video is a writer’s notebook, an artist’s sketchpad or Samuel Pepys’s foolscap; what is made is posted; there is remixing, but no recall to the cutting room -

So is there any damned footage - films you made and decided you simply couldn't include?

*****Posted by Mitch, July 7 2005

no. no damned footage to speak of. I force myself to follow thru. make the work. write something...and then bite on my nail a little as I hit "Post." then walk away.

*****Posted by  charlene, July 9., 2005.

Through what she terms ‘the exaggeration of…[her] ideas and…life’, Scratch Video hooks its browsers into an exoticism derived from the apparently banal. One is reminded of the stealthy surrealism of some of the earliest documentarians, such as England’s Humphrey Jennings and his colleagues in the 1930s mass observation movement. They looked so hard at the minutiae of ‘working class life’, from pint glasses to lampshades that what they saw became both absurd and ultimately, surreal. To some of the observers, this was surprising, but for Jennings such incidents were entirely expected, as genuine poetry could only come from a direct engagement with the real, ‘…the exercise of imagination is an indispensable function of man like work, eating, sleeping, loving.’ Rule does something very similar in her recording of the everyday, so that waiting for a conference call is Waiting for Godot, going to brunch has all the pomp of a Japanese tea ceremony or fingering the flesh out of fish cheeks becomes strangely emblematic. So wide ranging across the gamut of everyday life are these films that the browser (who almost inevitably, becomes a compulsive visitor) gets the impression that Rule is superglued to her camera. This is not so much the amputation spoken of by McLuhan (and illustrated in the Radical Software photograph), or the creepy surveillance in Foucault, but hardware that sits alongside the makeup compact and nail-file as just another personal effect. This is integration rather than amputation, surveillance by the individual of the collective. A party-going Rule stalks the similarly compulsive German filmmaker Ernst Hirsch across the hors de oeuvres in Captured until she is discovered – hence the sheepish but amused grin when he swings his camera straight at her. The moment is cathartic – being ‘busted’ as she puts it, changes the situation from the simply playful to one of  (good humoured) confrontation. We are invited to experience, and appreciate her moment of self-confrontation - or adaptation, as Rule herself would put it.

Impression Management

Self-confrontation – or examination - in a public and open space, is the stuff of weblogs or ‘blogs’. The blog is both loved and loathed; an exercise in self-publishing that elevates navel-gazing to a public entertainment, banal lives to apparently compelling narratives they can appear the most hubristic outgrowth of net culture. Bloggers range from the postgrad baring their angst over a skew-whiff thesis, to the insta-pundits who made the last Presidential Election more interesting than it probably deserved. The blogger bares their soul but the onus of trust is on the browser who must trust that the blogger can be taken at their word – that they are who they say they are. Bloggers affect a persona based on the assumption they are indeed, interesting (which may or may not be the case) and that reflects an idealised ‘online self’.

The addition of video to a blog (a vlog) adds new dimensions to both its capacity for self-promotion and incidental voyeurism. Vlogs come in ready made and adaptable web templates and do not require any special expertise in coding or video streaming – which makes them an enticing format for artists and no/low budget filmmakers. The vlogger becomes a potted film industry of their own – shooting the film, cutting it, digitising, uploading, promoting and through the web, distributing.

Rule does at least make it clear that her online persona is no less an artifice than the ‘backstage’ Madonna who humiliated the unfortunate Kevin Costner in In Bed With Madonna, and her own referencing of Erving Goffman, the arch theorist of  ‘self-promotion’ is a telling one. The intimacies in Scratch are turned into performances, although the diarist, real-time context of these do not allow us to draw easy lines between them. While getting into bed with Rule, she is at least honest in her attempts at ‘impression management’, determining our initial impressions through introducing us to the character of ‘Scratch’;

Scratch developed as a character that stems from a nervous habit I have. I have this strange thing where my skin itches sometimes when I'm nerved up. I then scratch it without being very aware of it. Then. These HUGE welts form for a little while. It's harmless and related to allergies or something. Dermographia = drawing on the skin…I decided to embrace it.

Do we need to know about these welts that develop on her skin? Well, no - Rule herself describes it as ‘an absurd little thing’ but speaks nevertheless, of the sense of support and creative freedom ‘Scratch’ gives her, in exploring her surroundings through such apparently small things. Small need not of course, mean petty – as Jennings describes in his Pandaemonium; ‘I mean that they contain in little a whole world – they are the knots in a great net of tangled time and space – the moments at which the situation of humanity is clear- even if only for the flash time of the photographer or the lightning.’  Her welts. Her big belt, her frustrations, her guiltier pleasures, are all deconstructions of herself, expressions her ticks (or itches) that acquire some decorum because she has established a degree of distance in which to do so. Yet although Rule is a willing muse, there are voyeuristic tendencies at play here. A blog/vlog is a pact between its owner and its browser that agrees upon a certain degree of controlled exposure, simultaneously satisfying the most casual nosey-parker curiosity of the latter and the most compulsive ‘exhibitionism’ of the former. If we are rifling through a diary then we are also contributing our own marginalia that the diarist is eager to see, and if ‘Scratch’ is Rule’s remedy for her need to share her preoccupations, then the itch is clearly insistent.

But a far from solitary one; follow the links and postings in Scratch Video and one soons happens upon Rule’s ‘mentor’, Mica Scalin, one of the earlier vloggers and the person who introduced Rule to the practice. In the beginning was the word, and that word was Hello?, her vlog which specialises in short, experimental films that interrogate the urban (New York) environment. A good example of these is Change Trains, a study of shadows and lights on a train platform, or Honesty Weak where Scalin attempts to ‘accumulate’ a narrative rather than plot it out. Likewise in the group collaborations between Rule, Scalin and other vloggers, narratives accumulate, radiate and bud from each other. Soap Exquisite Corpse and Squeeze are threads of work that developed from films posted by Scalin, prompting responding films from Rule and other browsers.  Squeeze is a ‘game’ based on the trick of keeping a remix of an original film within a specific file size – the software equivalent of haiku.

Squeeze says much on how hardware and software affects the ‘form’ (if such it is) as it develops; bandwidth considerations require manageable files, which leads, perhaps to smaller films more inclined to the poetic, jokey and playful, a lo-fi, lo-res ethic amenable to the early roots of video and the amateur film movement. This interest in the absurdity of the commonplace (belt buckles, riffling some books on a shelf, taking a toy out of its packaging in a coffee shop) resembles the playfulness of video artists such as John Smith or Margaret Tait, for whom time was a plastic, substantial phenomenon.  So it goes for Rule;

I feel that I am suspending a moment. I am manoeuvring through an experience in a different way. Forcing myself to see differently as well.

Looking through the threads in Scratch Video, there are many fellow travellers attempting a similar feat. Jay (Momentshowing), Eli, Duncan (29 Days) Aaron (The Voiz) Rusty, Leslye (Phatalspin) – Christian names that do not always know each other outside the vlog, but come together to remix each other\s work, share ideas and kick off new ‘threads’. Most seem to come from a film or public broadcasting background, others seem to be gifted amateurs – amidst the shared energy and enthusiasms there are the roots of a shared aesthetic sensibility; filling the frame with faces and close ups and an interest in time, repetitions and simply the idea of vlogging itself. Rule is very clear that what counts most here is the process and the resultant patterns. The ‘threads’ that grow out of each posting are representative of this, for there is no necessary or expected end to any of them. They are suspended in time, can be revived as long as the site remains, and the mark of success is activity, rather than catharsis.

A telling post on Scalin’s site gives some indication as to where this embryonic vlog aesthetic is coming from. Her aim in starting her site was to develop a ‘modular’ approach to documentary video– shooting and cutting self-contained ‘micro-documentaries’ that, as units, fitted into a cohesive whole. As she explains; ‘The idea is to share creative process…show what goes into making a work of art, theatre, dance and show it in 'real time' via RSS (or whatever syndication) while creating a document of the process that can function on it's own as a work of art…Hopefully, whatever reflection and dialogue that the web component creates will in some way effect or shape the actual piece as it being created.’

It seems that the understanding of the art of vlogging extends beyond the role of the filmmaker to the format itself and the responses of the audience. The text of a vlog represents another level on which the overall piece functions, as a connector between ‘modules’ of video, the basis of its infrastructure. One could say that the film is installed within the vlog as part of its architecture, rather than an object simply hung or projected – it belongs there. Rule has shown some of the films in a New York gallery, which she describes as ’fascinating’ although quality, naturally, suffered. It is an architecture, furthermore, mapped closely to Rule’s mind and mental processes – almost a map of how her thoughts affect and are effected by other people – or a Mackworth camera that traces a synaptic route-map; I do form ideas by making links and connections. Sometimes trying to grab the most extreme opposites and finding a unifying component to thread them together.

As a psycho-architecture it is further subject to the random whims of artist-audience interaction – a few choice comments posted on the site can immediately send Rule off on another tack, and the infrastructure of the site shifts accordingly. The base material of this essay is in itself an example, an interview carried out online (somewhat necessary given the cost of phone-calls from Glasgow to New York) through the vlog itself. Questions were posted in the comments sections under various headings, each starting a different line of inquiry. The result was eight different threads, proceeding at different speeds and along different tangents that have since been collated into a distinct site category, alongside the ‘special’ Mystery Corpse and Squeeze sections. True to form, the interview also prompted a finale, Interpretative Dance, where she lovingly crushes an egg in a repeating loop.

Which leads to potentially interesting debates over whether a format (such as the Vlog) can also be as a form in itself, or as to how extensive a pedigree ‘vlog art’ might claim. Greene traces the links between early Internet art and Dada, both of which made particular virtues of the random and questioned the role of the ‘object’ in art. Early internet art was also implicitly collaborative, making audience response and unexpected developments integral to the piece, or incorporating strong interactive elements, as in Jenny Holzer’s 1995 project ‘Please Change Beliefs’ or Douglas Kirk’s ‘The World’s First Collaborative Sentence’, which merges audience and artist. Similarly, Hans Richter’s description of Cabaret Voltaire (both a venue and a publication) and its successor Dada prefigure vlogs such as Hello? and Scratch Video in their playful provocations and crucially, the integration of audience reaction into the ‘art’ itself. Visits to vlogs such as TheVoiz (on the subject of Hell) offers the prospect of yet another dimension with the incorporation of related podcasts.

Rule(s)?

My dream responses are the ones when people make videos or write something, or link to something. (as I did with my URL in this response to you).

The process of invention and counter-invention can be somewhat chaotic and Rule makes few predictions about where sites such as Scratch Video or Hello? are headed; there is no definite goal or manifesto at work here. The prime concern is immediacy; of the films, and the new filmic language being evolved, including its syntax and grammar. The vloggers have already turned their minds to this matter through a series of lively online debates, which have evolved to the extent that satire is possible. In Callin In, Rule lampoons the idea of establishing the ‘rules’ of what a ‘vlog’ film should be. Her suggestion of a set of Vlog commandments is entirely tongue in cheek, yet the vloggers quickly divided between those who welcome the formation of some sort of structure and conventions, and those resistant to any moves to start codifying their practice;

(from the video soundtrack)

it needs to have video in it

it needs to be fast, short, concise, funny (or not)

there should be a lot of rules

they should all look the same

there should be peanut butter

make it have a structure so that there's nothing unusual about it, therefore it's boring

and people should do it often

If the qualifying ‘should’ is not enough to warn us of her equivocal tack, Rule is quite clear that she is not setting out to set down a grammar for vlogs, although she acknowledges the process will develop this. As Rule explained

This was done in November, 2004. At that time, there was a small group of us doing this. There is a discussion group outside of the actual videoblogs. On this group, the topic of what a videoblog is and should be started to develop. The debate continues now.

And it is not an insignificant one. The intense forward stare of the 1970s has necessarily, reversed direction in search of a view, over how media works once it escapes the confines of any one technology, and how we as individuals respond to it. The reactions of the vlog browsers to Rule’s provocations demonstrate aptly the unpredictable and wide-ranging nature of such a debate.

At the moment, vlogging exists outside either the media or art mainstream, free to anyone with the bandwidth and is so far, collegiate and generous in its nature. As vlogging matures, it will run the risk of being consumed by a mainstream culture known for devouring ‘subcultures’. Other cultures spawned of both video and its digital phase are instructive in this regard. It is arguable that activist filmmaking has already had much of its sting removed with the rise of celebrity agit-proppers such as Moore and Morgan Spurlock, while media-jamming is an angry, invigorating practice that often struggles to escape the puerile. Vloggers are more oblique and circumspect, their approach much more collegiate but where will their experiments lead? Will we wonder in 30 years time, whatever happened to the vlogsphere? 

The vlog interview with Charlene Rule begins at  HYPERLINK "http://www.scratchvideo.tv/scratch/2005/06/conference_call.html" www.scratchvideo.tv/scratch/2005/06/conference_call.html

Vlogs:

Scratch Video:  HYPERLINK "http://www.scratchvideo.tv" www.scratchvideo.tv

Hello?:  HYPERLINK "http://publicaddress.typepad.com/" http://publicaddress.typepad.com/

TheVoiz HYPERLINK "http://thevoiz.typepad.com" http://thevoiz.typepad.com

momentshowing:  HYPERLINK "http://www.momentshowing.net/" www.momentshowing.net/

etherworks:  HYPERLINK "http://www.etherworks.ca/journal.shtml" www.etherworks.ca/journal.shtml

byte me:  HYPERLINK "http://8bitme.blogspot.com" http://8bitme.blogspot.com

Phatalspin:  HYPERLINK "http://www.phatalspin.com" www.phatalspin.com

karmagrrrl:  HYPERLINK "http://www.smashface.com/vlog/" www.smashface.com/vlog/

Michael Verdi  HYPERLINK "http://michaelverdi.com/" http://michaelverdi.com/

Ryanedit:  HYPERLINK "http://ryanedit.blogspot.com/" http://ryanedit.blogspot.com/

Bibliography

Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, (1967), Buchet-Chastel, Paris.

Fricke, Christine, ‘The Seventies: A Reservoir of Ideas’ in Art of the 20th Century, edited by Ruhrberg et al, (2000) Taschen, Koln, pp 604 –610

Fricke, Christine, ‘The Nineties: Interaction in Virtual Space’ in Art of the 20th Century, edited by Ruhrberg et al, (2000) Taschen, Koln pp 616 –619

Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (1969) Allen Lane.

Greene, Rachael, Internet Art, Thames and Hudson, 2003

Jennings, Humphrey, Pandaemonium – The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, (1985), Picador, London,

Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, (1964) Beacon, Boston.

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, (1964) McGraw Hill, New York

McLuhan, Marshall, War and Peace in the Global Village, (1968) Bantam Books, New York.

Richter, Hans, Dada – art and anti-art, (1964) reprinted by Thames & Hudson, 

Various, Radical Software Vols 1-2, 1970-

Hart, Adam, ‘Notes from Underground: Experimental Documentary’s Unsung Heroes’, Res magazine, (2005) Res Publishing, New York.

 It should be noted that artists have been ahead of their counterparts in mainstream film in making use of digital, especially interactive, forms of media since the nineties (see Fricke, Christiane, (The Nineties: Interaction in Virtual Space’ in Art of the 20th Century, (2000) Taschen, Koln pp 616-619. Nevertheless, the changes in hardware will affect all parties, although not equally.

 Radical Software, Issue One (1970), pg 17. The complete set of issues can be downloaded free from www.radicalsoftware.org

 Expressed most famously in McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, (1964) McGraw Hill, New York, and more apocalyptically in War and Peace in the Global Village, (1968) Bantam Books, New York. McLuhan’s analysis of television in the former (based heavily upon the Mackworth head camera which tracked the aye movements of its juvenile subjects) was  a precursor to many of the concerns that Raindance would explore at length.

 Her skills are on show in Henry Corra’s Frames (2004) and Same Sex America (2005).

 Founded by Frank Gilette, the ‘corporation’ set itself up as doppelganger to the establishment-funded Rand Corporation. Gilette’s experimentation with video was aided by his collaboration with Paul Ryan, McLuhan’s research assistant and Alan Krebs.

 In many respect a reiteration of the opening paragraphs of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, (1964) Beacon, Boston.

 Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, (1967), Buchet-Chastel, Paris.

 ibid Fricke, pg 616.

 Greene, Rachael, Internet Art, (2004), Thames and Hudson, London.

 ibid Greene, pp 132-134.

 Mass observation was a socially progressive British movement spanning photography, sociology and journalism, a 12-year project that studied the habits of the working classes from the 1930s – 50s. ‘Observers’ would be sent into working class situations (usually pubs) and record everything they saw and did – including beer consumption. The diversity – and downright oddity of what they saw gave rise to British surrealism. The link between absolute documentary scrutiny and surrealism is admirably demonstrated in Jennings later wartime film, Fires Were Started (1943). The leap from realism to surrealism is short…

 Jennings, Humphrey, Pandaemonium – The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, (1985), Picador, London, pg xxxix

 It need hardly be said that adopting personas on the web is something of a ‘tradition’  -the online avatar or simple username is the intermediary in chat-rooms and discussion boards. The degree to which bloggers confess their identities seems to vary from site to site and of course, there is a hardly a requirement to disclosure.

 Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (1969), Pelican, London. This slim book is one of the major texts on how individuals create their own social ‘self’, including the idea of ‘front’ and ‘backstage’ personalities.

 ibid, pg xxxvi.

 Greene’s timeline of internet art begins with the emergence of Dada in 1916.

 The best account of Dada is arguably first hand – Hans Richter’s occasionally bitchy, always opinionated Dada – Art and Anti Art (1964) reprinted by Thames and Hudson, 2001

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