ThruYOU by Kutiman.
Welcome to the online version of my college Great Ideas capstone paper, “Art and the Internet: A study of new technology and creative culture.” For your convenience, the different sections are in the blog posts linked below.
I hope you enjoy!
"Green Hair" by Lisa N. Jones
For the vast majority of human history, we have been bound by geography. Human society was based on proximity. As societies percolated, we saw the rise of towns, cities, and nations. Eventually, cities became the heart of human society. In 1954, Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer divided the cities of the world into four categories. The most ancient category includes the cities which “carry forward, develop, elaborate a long-established local culture or civilization. These are the cities that convert folk-culture into its civilized dimension.” [1]
However, we are on the verge of a major change. It is not the end of cities, as many writers at the turn of the millennium claimed. The internet has not destroyed the basic fabric of human society. Rather, it has been what Frances Cairncross calls “the death of distance.”[2] We are able to communicate instantly around the world, as Kelly Turnbull and I were able to do across 800 or so miles. We are able to access information any time from almost anywhere. We’re even able to get information out from almost anywhere, as Twitter demonstrated during the 2009 post-election protests in Tehran.
The access to information, though, is only half of it. The real coup of the internet, as Cairncross points out, is that “there is no gatekeeper, no waiting list, no membership requirement…the single most important reason for the internet’s success is its open standard for transmitted digitized data – voice, video, or text – from one computer to another.” [3] It is a truly open medium, the very definition of open source. Now, if someone so desired, they could go buy a tee shirt from a small company in Texas, or perhaps chat with people who have similar interests but happen to live in India, or read about gossip in New York City, all while sitting in their apartment in North Carolina. They could even make a new website and try to sell something: if the idea is good enough, it might take off. After all, we all start out equal on the internet, at least economically.
What about culturally? We can look at the great indicator of culture, art. Art and the associated world around it have achieved an almost stereotypically dreamlike status in the collective memory of our society. Perhaps that fantasy is of the painter working in a studio, or the tale of the visionary artist who only finds fame after death like Van Gogh. Then there’s a romantic, perhaps made-up memory of the artists’ collective, the bohemian lifestyle of Montmartre or Greenwich Village or San Francisco where artists live and work in close proximity. Are these fantasies, these very romantic and appealing rumors about the art world true? Can they even be true now, in the age of the internet? In this paper we will be looking at the art world, both of today and of the past to find the answers: how is the internet changing that dream? And perhaps more importantly: does that dream even exist?
[2] (Cairncross, 2001)
[3] (Cairncross, 2001, p. 77)
“Probably the biggest thing that changed the art world, ever, was the camera,” the young artist says. Her name is Lisa N. Jones, she’s a Durham based waitress and mixed-media artist, and we’re sitting in the living room of her rented house near downtown. The house has the same sort of emptiness of a typical dorm or apartment – there’s very little furniture and the walls are all the same bland white – except for her paintings. “Once you could take a perfect image, of like a photorealistic image with a camera, people didn’t want to paint that way so much anymore.”
She’s correct. When photography first came about in the mid 1800s, there was much debate over whether or not the new medium even counted as an art form. The Imperial Court of France put this question to the test and held a trial to see if photography would have the same legal distinction as art. The question was raised: do photographers count as actual artists, or is it the workings of a machine? Is taking a photograph, as realist painter Jean Auguste Domique Ingres wrote, “a series of manual operations… [that] does not require the intelligence or study of art”?[1] Eventually, the Imperial Court ruled that “Truth and beauty were the same for the photographer as they are for the painter or sculptor.”[2]
Painters, especially the realists, were outraged. Some, such as François Bonvin, refused to have their photograph taken for the rest of their lives.[3] The rise of photography as an art form in 19th century France shadows the rise of mediums that came both before and after it. For most of the medieval period, churches served as the primary canvases of art – their walls were frescoes, their windows stained glass, their tapestries ornate… even the architecture itself was designed to tell a story. Architects thought that the churches “would inspire parishioners to meditation and belief.”[4] Before that, it was the very concept of paint itself. Before that, it was pottery and sculpture.
"Circles House" by Lisa N. Jones. This is indicative of her style - multiple mediums brought together on the canvas to form one image.
“Do you think the internet is doing that to art now?” I ask. A cat rubs against a canvas that Jones had been mounting fabric on for later. The room itself is littered with leftovers, art supplied and bits of canvas and Elmer’s Glue. Most of the paintings around us emerged from the mess the same way that dust clouds form stars. They’re fabric, paint, canvas, all pulled out of chaos and molded into art. “Yeah,” she says, grabbing the cat into her lap, “probably.”[5]
Lisa’s been an artist for several years. Her career began in high school and continued with a BFA from Eastern Carolina University. She’s had several shows, at least twenty-five, in cafes or schools or spaces around the state. There’s also an online gallery that is made up of photographs of her work. The pictures don’t do much justice – her work is in the third dimension, and you’re meant to see the different fabrics and textures. Online, they’re flattened. All the texture is gone.
There are those like Lisa who only post their artwork on the internet, or try to sell it. There are, however, also the people out there who are using the internet itself as a unique form of expression. The internet brings some very different things to the table as a medium; the most important, in my opinion, is interactivity with a wide audience. How well they integrate this varies from artist to artist.
On the more traditional end of the scale is 99Rooms. At its most basic level, 99Rooms is a gallery of Berlin artist Kim Köster’s work in industrial ruins. With the help of Richard Schumann and Stephan Schulz, the artwork actually responds to the actions of the viewer, making it into a game. Your task is to get through to the next room by finding the trigger that allows you to move on. It’s the same central structure of several flash-based games on the internet, but the quality of the work makes it stand out. Instead of the typical midi-based soundtrack, we have a creepy industrial ambience (courtesy of Johannes Buenemann). Instead of the typical cartoony or blocky art, we have high quality photographs.[6] When it first came out in 2004, it rose as something special, something different. It combined the best of flash games with high art. It allowed the four million people who visited the site[7] to actually interact with Köter’s work.
Room 2 of the 99 Rooms. Photography and Flash mix into a haunting game.
99Rooms is more of the older approach to the internet, very Web 1.0. The game only has one very linear track. Playing it, it’s very obvious that the game is meant to show off the work of the artist. In other words, it’s a very top down approach, reminiscent to many early internet sites. 99Rooms came out the end of an era, right before the dawn of YouTube and Facebook. As we try to find more interactive work, we come to newer projects that both play out to and attempt to interact with a wide audience.
In B Flat 2.0, the brainchild of musician Darren Solomon, is a musical experiment using YouTube’s embedded video option. Solomon made six videos of himself playing B flat on a variety of different instruments – piano, guitar, mallets – alongside a clip of an old British documentary. He then posted them side by side in a post on his blog and invited readers to start playing the videos whenever they pleased.[8] The result is a very strange, calming, ethereal experience. The videos all fit together without clashing. The music itself was a soothing abstract.
It became popular enough that other artists wanted to participate. Soon, musicians submitted themselves playing their own instruments which Solomon happily added. What was once a very basic collection became larger and more complex: a violin, a banjo, a clarinet, a muted trumpet, three more guitars, a quartet of electronic gadgets (including a Nintendo DS). Solomon expanded the project out to its own domain at inbflat.net with 20 different sounds ready to be mixed at leisure. [9] [10]
The homepage of InBFlat. Browsers are invited to mix their own songs using a series of YouTube videos.
In the same vein is ThruYOU, another musical mash up. Afro-Funk artist Kutiman (alias of Israeli Ophir Kutiel)[11] went in the opposite direction. Instead of allowing people to interact with his works, he took various videos from YouTube and mixed them into a cacophony of funky sound. The videos weren’t commissioned. If anything, the whole musical experience is similar to found art. “What I did here is I collected all kind of different unrelated YouTube movies,” he says in his “About” film in the same style. “It was really amazing to see how movies matched together without me even touching it.”[12]
Solomon and Kutiman have similar projects, but represent opposite approaches to interactivity. Both are musical endeavors; both are pseudo-mash ups that take advantage of YouTube. This is where the similarities end. Each takes their own approach to the inevitable crowd that is lurking out there on the internet. Darren Solomon plays to the crowd, allowing them to become the artist themselves. Kutiman, on the other hand, remains as the artist – like the 99Rooms, YouTHRU is all about his creativity and product – but instead pulls his material out from the greater population and uses it to form his own work.
In a way, Kutiman and Solomon both share something in common with Lisa N Jones. All three use a potpourri of fabrics to form their canvases. For Jones, of course, this is literal. But for Kutiman and Solomon, their fabric is the part of the social fabric of the internet itself. By using YouTube, they connect themselves to the greater worldwide social network. More importantly, by getting their audience involved, they are expanding their expression to the wider world.
[2] (Scharf, 1963, p. 217)
[3] (Scharf, 1963, p. 218)
[4] (Boswell & Strickland, 1992, p. 29)
[5] (Jones, 2009)
[6] (Rostlaub Collective)
[7] (Rostlaub Collective)
[8] (Solomon)
[9] (Solomon)
[10] (Donahoo)
[11] (Abend, et al., 2009)
[12] (Kutiel, 2009)
"Free Horrible Valentines" by Kelly Turnbull. An example of the types of work that have spread throughout the internet.
“I actually have a book on underground ‘zine making…and the amount of effort it takes to get comics and magazines, to get people to see them back in the 90s when it was on a Xerox machine in someone’s basement, it was insane.” Now I’m speaking to Kelly Turnbull, an animator and comic artist from Toronto. We’re voice chatting through Skype and while we talk, I look at her online gallery. It’s a shrine to things awesome, like action stars and zombies and superheroes and video games. Much like Lisa’s paintings, the gallery is a wild mix of different fabrics – animation loops, comics, sketches, digital paintings, anatomy tutorials. One of the featured pieces is a three minute animated short about two Conanesque barbarians sharing an apartment in a modern city. It was animated almost entirely by hand. Her gallery has over 350,000 views. She’s one of those artists where, in her own words, “people have seen my work but don’t know that I’m the one who did it.”[1]
“You’d sneak into airports and you’d put your magazine beneath the stacks of stuff they have there. You could drop them all over the place. Maybe see if you can strike a deal with the person from the post office to stuff flyers in people’s boxes. It was kind of like viral marketing, trying to get it out there,” she continues. “But when it’s on the internet, you just need to make some friends, drop some links… get some notoriety that way. There’s a huge potential for audience worldwide you wouldn’t get if you weren’t trying to do this offline.”[2]
Turnbull currently works as one of an army of in-between animator for the upcoming Comedy Central animated series Ugly Americans. The show takes
A screenshot of Devin Clark's "5 On" web series (left) and the television series it inspired, Ugly Americans (right).
place is an alternate version of New York where every type of fictional monster lives alongside people, which is perfectly suited to her sensibilities. The show is an interesting case study unto itself. The concept originally appeared as 5 On, a web series by Devin Clark. It was commissioned by Atom Films (Comedy Central’s web branch) where a reporter asks “anything about everything”[3] – five aliens on the end of the Sopranos, for example, or five zombies on the 2008 presidential election, or five demons on the environment. A year ago the network ordered a full half-hour series. This is the same track as some of their recent shows like Michael and Michael Have Issues and Secret Girlfriend – starting out as a web short before moving to primetime. The show is set to premiere in March 2010.[4]
Although Ugly Americans is more of a backdoor pilot than a true jump from the internet to other media, it is actually only one of the latest examples of this trend. In 2007, comedy troupes The Whitest Kids U’Know and Human Giant were both picked up from their Internet skits to major cable networks (Fuse and MTV, respectively).[5] Both credit the internet to their popularity, especially with the younger generation that is unable or unwilling to pay. “People our age, they don’t have money, and you feel kind of guilty if they’re paying to get in,” Trevor Moore of the Whitest Kids U’Know said in a profile in the New York Times. “We’re the Colt 45 and ramen generation.”[6]
The cover of the Harper Collins edition of John Dies at the End by David Wong (aka Jason Pargrin).
In the literary realm, dozens of books have started out as online writing projects before jumping onto actual paper. A prominent, recent example is John Dies at the End by David Wong (pseudonym of Cracked.com editor Jason Pargrin)[7], the horror-comedy novel that was posted entirely online before being picked up by indie press Thomas Dunn Books and later by the more prestigious St. Martin’s Press.[8] [9] Within the last month or so, Justin Halpern turned his incredibly popular Twitter account Shit My Dad Says into both a book deal with Harper Collins and a sitcom pitch for CBS.[10] The two men are painfully aware of how lucky they are. Halpern, true to the style of his tweets, claims to be the “luckiest motherfucker in the world.”[11] Wong emphasizes the book’s roots and warns his audience to “buy a copy of the book so I can take the cash and run to Mexico before the world catches on.”[12]
Those examples, though, could be minimized – they’re commercial developments, not what some would call ‘true art’ – but the same principles are applied to artistic pieces. For example, Shepard Fairey is a master of viral street art. He started his career in graphic design in the late 80s and quickly distinguished himself with his André the Giant has a Posse sticker campaign (later reworked as OBEY) which spread before the Internet turned viral trends from a spark to an inferno practically overnight.[13] [14] Today, he’s mostly known for the famous (or infamous) Obama Hope poster. It’s a print in red, white, and blue of Obama’s face looking towards the heavens, the words PROGRESS or HOPE printed in block letters below.[15] Fairey’s image “rendered Obama iconic.”[16]
Fairey originally made 350 posters to sell on his website with 4000 more that would be handed out during rallies. The website posters sold out quickly; copies were being resold on eBay for thousands. His web traffic spiked up. People began taking the image and finding their own uses for it: “[it] became their Facebook image or email signature or something they use on their MySpace page. Or they printed out the image and made their own little sign that they taped up in their office.”[17] The HOPE poster became the unofficial image of the Obama campaign. Fairey was commissioned by Time magazine to make a new portrait of the president when they named him Person of the Year. Today, the original painting is in the National Portrait Gallery.[18]
On the opposite side of the political fence sits Firas Alkhateeb, a Palestinian-American history student. Alkhateeb stumbled into his political fame unwittingly. Last winter, he came across a tutorial online on how to “Jokerize” an image (in other words, make a person look like Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in the 2008 film The Dark Knight). Excited, he tested the technique on a previous Time cover of Obama and uploaded it to his Flickr account. An anonymous browser downloaded the image and superimposed the word socialism below, where it became infamous.[19] [20] The Obama Joker poster has become a major symbol of the Tea Party Movement and even attracted attention from his compatriot Fairey, who despite disagreeing with the politics said the image “gets the point across really quickly. The Joker is a sinister, evil character that can’t be trusted. And if they want to make that parallel with Obama – bam.”[21]
The Two Obamas - the "Obama HOPE" poster by Shepard Fairey and the "Obama Joker" poster originally done by Firas Alkhateeb.
The two Obama posters found their own audiences and proved that pieces of art can find widespread appeal on the internet. Perhaps both are enhanced by their subject matter, a president who came into the White House on the backs of social networks and the youth vote. In any case, though, the two pieces of art found widespread popularity without being attached to a commercial interest. Both are pieces of politically inspired art that eventually got picked up by the greater audience. It’s not only that – both are inspired by the fair use, the everything-belongs-to-everybody type of art that Futiman and Darren Solomon embrace. The two Obamas are prime examples of the spirit of the internet.
“What do you know now in your time posting art on the internet?” I ask Kelly Turnbull during our interview. She pauses for a second, then answers: “Now I know that if you put something online, you’ll find an audience… if you post it, they will come.”[22]
[2] (Turnbull, 2009)
[3] (Clark, 2007)
[4] (Hustvedt, 2009)
[5] (Itzkoff, 2007)
[6] (Itzkoff, 2007)
[7] (Wong, David Wong, 2008)
[8] (Publishers’ Weekly, 2008)
[9] (Wong, The Book, 2008)
[10] (Riemer, 2009)
[11] (Riemer, 2009)
[12] (Wong, The Book, 2008)
[13] (Bearman, 2008, p. 69)
[14] (Arnon, 2008)
[15] (Fairey)
[16] (Bearman, 2008, p. 70)
[17] (Arnon, 2008)
[18] (National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian Institution, 2009)
[19] (Milan, Obama Joker artist unmasked: a fellow Chicagoan, 2009)
[20] (Booth, 2009)
[21] (Milan, Shepard Fairey has ‘doubts’ about intelligence of Obama Joker artist, 2009)
[22] (Turnbull, 2009)
Three gargoyles look at the sunrise in the photography-based webcomic "Sinister Bedfellows" by Larry Holderfield.
“I had moved back to North Carolina after being away for about 10 years in Berkley, California and Paris, France and wanted to rebuild my social network.” Larry Holderfield, the artists behind the webcomic Sinister Bedfellows, is talking with Frank Stasio on the WUNC radio show The State of Things. “I had been doing the webcomic for about a year, so I thought that would be a good hook. So I googled ‘North Carolina webcomics,’ emailed all of them that I could find, and invited them out for coffee.”[1] The result is the North Carolina Webcomic Coffee Clatch, a monthly meeting of North Carolinian webcomic artists and writers. The comics are a diverse rainbow of genres: fantasy, history, slice-of-life, horror, high art, even a Catgirl Island or two. What started out as coffee became three comic anthologies.[2]
“Larry, how important is it that artists actually get together and actually meet and get coffee?” Frank Stasio asks.
“Actually, I think it’s really important,” Holderfield responds. “We are prone to a solitary lifestyle. We’re chained to our computers and sketchpads and drafting tables.”
“Every now and then, we’ll all get together and we’ll all just be talking about something and somebody will go ‘Oh my God, I have to use that.” That’s Ursula Vernon, the creative force behind Digger and one of the original members of the group. “Or someone will say something, they’ll be a pause, and three or four people will go for their notebooks and start writing things down… but I think a lot of it is like Larry said – getting out of our hermit-like lifestyles and hanging out with other people who understand what it’s like to be an artist.”
“And you can do that,” Statsio interrupts. “That was part of the café culture that we’ve come to romanticize as sort of the artists’ life.” [3] Stasio sound nostalgic for a time where Van Gogh and Matisse lived and worked together. It’s a cultural phenomenon, one that Stasio rightfully describes as ‘romanticized.” What is the appeal of this? Are groups like the NCWCCC carrying the tradition on?
Sylvia Beach outside of Shakespeare and Company, her bookstore. This store was the center of activity for many of the "Lost Generation."
To understand these artist collectives, we must first look at the examples of the past. The so-called Lost Generation of 1920s Paris is one of these. After the Great War, Paris was the beating, throbbing heart of the artistic world and like the great American writers of the past, the aspiring literary scene made their own trips there. Most, according Noel Riley Fitch, only stayed a few weeks, but “[Ezra] Pound came in 1920 and stayed four years; Hemmingway came at the end of 1922 and stayed five.”[4] The ones who stayed percolated around the lives of Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, the guardians and symbolic leaders of the group. They were, in the words of Beach, “literary pilgrims… consecrated to the cult of Art which was their uncommon bond of faith.”[5] The work produced was a particular bright spot between two terrible wars.
But for the collective, it was just as much about being within the artistic group as it was the merits of the individuals. Paris is a romanticized place; as Van Wyck Brooks pointed out, “writing in Paris is one of the oldest American customs.”[6] By the twenties, cheap travel and the end of American isolationism following the Great War made spending time in Paris a very feasible option. The close knit support community that developed along the Left Bank was an additional plus for the expatriate Americans.[7] As Fitch asserts, “communication and support functioned in their favor… here they were challenged, stimulated, reviewed and – above all – read by a community of literati.”[8]
Today, artists don’t need to travel halfway around the world to get that same community atmosphere. Instead of gathering in a cheap neighborhood – like Montmartre at the end of the 19th century or Greenwich Village during the middle of the 20th – or travelling to an artistic Mecca, the aspiring creative class instead gather online. This is where the “death of distance” comes into play again. Artists no longer need to be in the same neighborhood, or the same city, or even the same country. These support networks, powered by critique, challenge, and praise, are forming over the internet.
The North Carolina Webcomic Coffee Clatch is not by far the only such collective that has formed, although it is unusual in that it eventually manifestied itself in the real world. Lisa N Jones “met a lot of artists over MySpace”[9] and other pre-existing social networks. “I’d add people just because I like their art,” she told me. “Then a couple of them, we’d talk and go ‘oh hey, I really like your stuff.’ I’d talk to a couple of guys that didn’t know how to get their art business going… MySpace is the place I did the most talking about art, more than Flickr (a photostream site) or Etsy (an art commerce site).”[10] The people she talked to came from all over the country. These relationships with other artists are important to her like they are to the artists of the Coffee Clatch; she recently participated in SparkCon, a local arts festival in Raleigh, and will be soon joining the Rock & Shop event at the urging of an artist friend.[11]
Kelly Turnbull has a similar journey when she first started posting her art on the internet. “Elfwood was probably the first one I was on, way back in the day,” she reminisced. “Then I hung around anime boards, whatever I was into when I was a teenager. But I think the first place I really got involved with –” here she starts to laugh “– was Y!Gallery, which you know I’m kind of ashamed to admit because it’s basically a male gay porn site.”[12] To explain: the letter ‘y’ in Y!Gallery stands for yaoi, a Japanese word that means “boy love or homosexuality” as defined by slang dispensary UrbanDictionary.[13]
“Back when I was on there it must have been just starting out because it was a pretty small community,” Turnbull recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow, these are people who professionally make a living drawing gay cartoon porn! It’s not what I want to do, but it’s flattering that they’re paying attention to me and talking to me!”[14] One could make note of the similarities between this website and the often seedy neighborhoods where artists tend to gather due to cheap rents. They’re often the dens of vice, of sin, of the poor. These artists still gather in these places today. We can tell Frank Stasio yes, the romantic “café culture” still does exist. It has simply expanded beyond the café, past the limitations of distance and into the digital realm.
[2] (Robertson, 2009)
[3] (Holderfield, Vernon, & Feese, 2008)
[4] (Fitch, 1985, p. 162)
[5] (Fitch, 1985, p. 12)
[6] (Fitch, 1985, p. 163)
[7] (Fitch, 1985, pp. 163-164)
[8] (Fitch, 1985, p. 164)
[9] (Jones, 2009)
[10] (Jones, 2009)
[11] (Jones, 2009)
[12] (Turnbull, 2009)
[13] (‘Francesca’, 2003)
[14] (Turnbull, 2009)
"Snow House" by Lisa N. Jones
By looking at those three areas we can draw conclusions about the interactions between the internet and the art world at large. Yes, the art world is changing; culture is a constantly evolving beast. What’s more important than a literal change in the world of art (a change in medium or style or taste) pales in comparison to the psychological one. What are most exciting about this time are the shifts in the collective mind of the art world.
Artists are redefining what it means to be an artist. Not only are they finding a way to express themselves with a new technology, but they’re redefining the role of the artist itself. Traditionally, artists were static creators – they created their work and displayed it. Today, more and more daring artists are tiptoeing along the wall between audience and crowd. Some are breaking through and making the fabric of the crowd itself their canvas; others are merely asking their audience to play the part of the artist.
Others are using the rise of the internet to change the traditional paths to success. Commercially, this means that a potential artist doesn’t necessarily have to toil in obscurity, travel through the right channels and hope that they get discovered. Instead, commercial artists, comedians, musicians, animators, and graphic designers can work outside the system and create their own fame on their own terms: if the project becomes popular enough, it might be picked up or it might be better to simply stay on the internet. When it comes to fine art, however, the same principals apply. Art can be viral. A piece can become famous with little more than an obscure post on a photo hosting site.
Still others are creating their own collectives and art societies. Social networking sites are becoming the new Parisian cafés, the new salons, the new artist colonies. Unlike the past, however, nearly anyone from anywhere can join in. These sites are overcoming the last great obstacle for human connectivity – distance. Now, literally anyone with an internet connection can post their art and take part in a community and enjoy the experience of an artistic culture.
This leads us to an obvious question: are all of these changes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing? The terms themselves are arbitrary, and like all absolutes the answer may be a little of both. Naysayers may claim that this democratization of art is ultimately a bad thing, and will (as Frank Statiso phrases it) “water things down.”[1] In this case, they may be taking the role of the realists during the trial of photography: threatened and scared by a new art form. But what do the artists think?
“I think that people who aren’t technologically adept are going to be left behind,” Lisa Jones says when asked the question. “There is a bit of a concern that since [Adobe] Photoshop is so good that a lot of this stuff will become outdated.”[2]
“I forget the name of the corollary,” Ursula Vernon replies, “but 90% of everything is crap. But because there is no publishing bar, you can find a lot of stuff out there that’s really cool and innovative that you wouldn’t find otherwise.”[3]
“I think it’s good,” Kelly Turnbull answers, “and I think if you say it’s bad you’re just being stubborn about it… that potential for audience is such a huge advantage. You still need to work.”[4]
Right now, it may be safe to conclude that these changes are a good thing. But what of the future? We won’t know until we get there. Like culture, the future is vague and constantly changing just beyond our grasps. Who knows what pieces of fabric we may find? Who knows what the next canvas will be? The only certainty is that it will change; until then, we can enjoy the way this current technology is rocking the boat.
[2] (Jones, 2009)
[3] (Holderfield, Vernon, & Feese, 2008)
[4] (Turnbull, 2009)
Works Cited
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Arnon, B. (2008, October 13). How the Obama “Hope” Poster Reached a Tipping Point and Became a Cultural Phenomenon: An Interview With the Artist Shepard Fairey. Retrieved November 20, 2009, from The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-arnon/how-the-obama-hope-poster_b_133874.html
Bearman, J. (2008, October). Street Cred. Modern Painter , pp. 68-73.
Booth, J. (2009, August 18). Author of ‘shocking, racist’ Obama Joker image unveiled – as a bored history student. The Times of London .
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Clark, D. (2007, June 27). 5 On: 5 Aliens On Life without the Sopranos. Retrieved 17 November, 2009, from Atom Films: http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/five_on_1/
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Fitch, N. R. (1985). Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
‘Francesca’. (2003, December 20). Yaoi. Retrieved November 22, 2009, from Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yaoi
Holderfield, L., Vernon, U., & Feese, S. (2008, May 8). The State of Things. (F. Stasio, Interviewer)
Hustvedt, M. (2009, November 21). ‘Ugly Americans’ Sneak Peak Shows ’5 On’ Web Roots. Retrieved November 21, 2009, from Tubefilter News: http://news.tubefilter.tv/2009/11/21/ugly-americans-sneak-peek-shows-5-on-web-roots/
Itzkoff, D. (2007, March 27). Online Yesterday, on Cable Today. The New York Times .
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