Digital Worries...

The digital world worries me a little bit because people are spending increasingly more time talking to a box instead of other real human beings. I think it's manipulative and it's going to eventually have us all on a digital leash. People are losing touch with reality.

Blending Intellect and Creativity

Blending Intellect and Creativity is essential for creating art. Creation comes from our ability to understand and reason objectively. I've blended the two for numerous school projects in the past and on the guitar as well. Now I am doing this in Digital Media class.

Manning's Mind

My video uses my sound collage and text for guidelines. I recorded my voice reading main parts of the text and used audio effects to distort the sound. I placed flashes in the video of articles related to Wikileaks and Manning. The optical illusions are there to distort your perception. Everything is in place to give you an idea of what is going through Manning's mind while he is in solitary confinement. 

Image for Sound

This is Bradley Manning in solitary confinement. I chose to have his head and a washing machine as one manifestation. This was to show that his brain was being washed. The brighter colors on the sides and around the brain are there because they make me think of electricity and power. I wanted to express that Manning was being controlled by man against his will and nature. It is for this reason that I contrasted the bright colors against the dark green leaves that I painted over his face. The overall idea that I created is a conflict between Manning's right mind, where he desires to be free, and the controlled mind that could be trying to use his natural desires to achieve a false understanding about how he and Julian Assange are connected.

The Sound

For my sound project I read some of the important parts of my text into a microphone and distorted my voice a view different ways. I took four different songs and made them transition in an order that represented the layout of the overall text from beginning to end. I layered one of these songs three times to again distort the sound and also to make it sound looney. You'll notice that the Alice in Wonderland tune comes in on another track two additional times after the initial entrance of the song. The two Bun-Ching Lam compositions played at the end mesh really interestingly and strangely together and this was done randomly. I chose a spot for the second composition of extremely different character to start playing and went with it. The two sounds worked and made for an interesting portrayal of what my overall intent was. The goal of the whole piece was to show my words in sound and make the sound from Bradley Manning's perspective. What you hear is therefore how I imagine Manning's mind in solitary confinement. Gradually becoming loonier and loonier running the shattered and distorted remains of a belief that he is slowly losing touch with. My sound emulates his brainwashing by the government.

Boundary Dissolution

Digital Media Revolution is a crazy concept. If it is changing our reality then our perceptions are being altered. While we are accustom to changes in perspective through personal experiences, changes in how we perceive things, as a result of media, seems manipulative. 

In my own life I've seen things like social networking and cell phone use keep me from interacting with real people. In this situation, the boundary that was once drawn between family time and digital time has vanished. 

Hypermusic Prologue was cool because it showed how music and the arts are being influenced by the digital world. An opera that uses voice transformation through the mics takes away from the artist dignity. A classically trained singer should feel concerned about the day that her voice isn't even needed anymore due to computers. The same kinds of things happen in pop music all the time. The interview with the Old Spice guy on NPR showed how controlling Digital media can be because people actually tried asking this Old Spice model, whom they do not know, all kinds of random questions through the web. Interacting with somebody that you've never met and never will meet seems kind of pointless to me because the interaction is with a digital box.

Until Next Time,

-Jeff

Wikileaks has officially broken the dam of confidential and secret government documents, flooding the internet with classified information as we speak. As more and more bits of truth reveal themselves through Julian Assange’s online creation, we will become more informed of what our government is doing. Security and control keep us blind of the truth and higher powers want to keep it that way, for whatever reason. Wikileaks challenges this government attempt to conceal information from the common people. In the case of Bradley Manning, a whistleblower who was put in solitary confinement for releasing government files to wikileaks, there are some really compelling phsycological questions to ask. To what extent will our Government go to keep secrets from us and why?

 Solitary confinement is quite a harsh environment to live in while waiting for trial. There are many different effects that this kind of imprisonment may have on a person’s mind. One student, Carley Fritner, wrote in a research paper that said "depression, despair, anxiety, rage, claustrophobia, hallucinations, problems with impulse control, and/or an impaired ability to think, concentrate, or remember” (1) were all possible outcomes. Fritner also noted an instance In 2003 when a complaint to the Connecticut Department of Correction revealed that solitary confinement caused prisoners to "lash out by swallowing razors, smashing their heads into walls or cutting their flesh." (1) The only reason I can associate with needing to hold someone in these conditions before their trial is having a necessity to change something. Bradley Manning is not just a prisoner; he is a political prisoner. He is awaiting his trial, while the government essentially tortures him and we have to ask why? They obviously want this pre-punishment in solitary confinement to have an effect on him before his trial. Is it that they are trying to make an example out of him for society, to show that the crimes he committed are absolutely unacceptable? Or is it that they are brainwashing him in order to somehow create a direct link

between Manning and Assange to get him as well?

What higher powers in our world perceive as necessary to keep secret is in many cases probably not what we want hidden from us. Recognizing the ambiguity between what we don’t know and what we fear, some people would just rather not know what’s really going on. However, regardless of the fear factor, I believe that everyone has a deeper desire for the truth even if it scares them. Why do Governments want so desperately to keep this information from us and like the case with Bradley Manning, is this the extend they will go to protect it.   

 Works Cited:

(1)        

Fritner, Carly. "Lonely Madness: The Effects of Solitary Confinement and Social Isolation on Mental and Emotional Health." Serendip. N.p., Spring 2005. Web. 3 Feb. 2011.