Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Hybridity Through Hyperbole: How The Webcomic Becomes Art
Using the definition of "hybrid art" as art that is both text and illustration or art that could only appear in digital form, a commonly viewed part of many every day web experiences could immediately satisfy at least one, if not both, of the criteria: blogging. This justification does depend on how one defines art itself, but upon inspection of the blog Hyberbole and a Half, a web comic based on real life experiences by a girl named Allie Brosh, there is no denying that artistic self-expression is tantamount in this kind of online viewer/creator experience.
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From the post titled "How a fish destroyed my childhood" to grammar lessons (what comes to mind when people incorrectly use the write "alot") and "7 Games You Can Play with a Brick," the purpose of the blog is to display humorous content at an accessible level. The funniness of the web comic is indeed as over-the-top as the name suggests, but less Hollywood-grotesque and rather genuine humorous sentiments from a (more or less) "regular" Idaho/Montana/Oregon girl.
Hyperbole and a Half depicts the world as Allie sees it - the creator's experiences and ideas are unique, but the humor has universal reception. For instance, in the post "Sneaky Hate Spiral," the comic chronicles a series of annoyances (bad music on the radio, waking up to a car alarm, paper cuts, squealing refrigerator, hidden wallet, broken toaster, in-the-face cat butts, etc.) that amount to an irrationally bad day. Everyone has become grumpy for inconsequential reasons at some point, but the absurd illustrations and calmly documenting remarks are what bring the experience to new level of expression. This is what makes Hyperbole and a Half art.
"Sneaky hate spirals begin simply enough. In fact, that is one of the hallmarks of sneaky hate spirals - they are merely the confluence of many unremarkable annoyances. Your day begins poorly."
"Eventually, the sum of the small annoyances begins to exceed your capacity for patience and rational thought. All it would take to send you over the edge into a bottomless pit of angry hysteria is just one more tiny, little thing..."
Despite looking at these marvelous pictures and thinking fondly of these titillating anecdotes, perhaps you're still questioning how Hyperbole and a Half actually counts as an artistic endeavor. If this is so, then the most important aspect of the analysis is to identify the comic genre as a whole (either online or in print) as a legitimate textual and artistic entity. Often dismissed as "just for children," the comic actually offers a level of flexibility and commentary that pictures or text alone cannot. The Hyperbole and a Half website gets approximately 1 to 2 million unique visitors per month and about 4 million total visitors, astonishing figures that shows sometimes numbers can speak for a level of artistic genius, both in pictures and words. Because of their multiplicity in origin and content, comics bring a dynamic element to literature and art. As University of Colorado comics professor William Kuskin says, "Comics are a virulent art. They get under our skin."
Web comics like Hyperbole and a Half do something that even most print comics do not; the blog format allows for the text to be a part of the punchline, and does not demand the limiting structure of the gird as in print. Printed collections of comics often have added textual commentary, but the text itself (as it is outside of the grid) is not essential to comic narrative. Conversely, Hyperbole and a Half often has posts that are almost entirely visual or written, with the fluid ability to be either picture or text in the same post or narrative arc.
Much like the blogging medium itself, Hyberbole and a Half is purposely low brow. The internet is host to the ideas of the world wide "Everyman," and in its easily approachable silliness, Hyperbole and a Half panders to the collective online society. The blog has displayed posts that chronicle Allie's accidental ingestion of pesticides, getting deliriously sick and searching feverishly in Texas for juice and getting stranded on a boat, sleeping in a tent in the backyard of meth addicts and burning down an island. It's fairly safe to say that most readers have not personally have not been in those exact situations, but Allie invokes a sense of good-humored sympathy. When critics point out that the creator's drawings "suck" and could be drawn by a five-year-old, Allie responds on the FAQ page by saying "I know. I do that on purpose because shitty drawings are funny." Interestingly, the deliberate "dumbing down" of the Hyperbole and a Half pictures only adds to the clever wit exposed by the textual content. The site appeals to childlike absurdity, but with a backward-thinking reflection on experiences that adds extra entertainment value.
--
All pictures and quoted content belong to Allie Brosh, creator of Hyperbole and a Half. Visit the site to enjoy and support the awesomeness!
From the post titled "How a fish destroyed my childhood" to grammar lessons (what comes to mind when people incorrectly use the write "alot") and "7 Games You Can Play with a Brick," the purpose of the blog is to display humorous content at an accessible level. The funniness of the web comic is indeed as over-the-top as the name suggests, but less Hollywood-grotesque and rather genuine humorous sentiments from a (more or less) "regular" Idaho/Montana/Oregon girl.
Hyperbole and a Half depicts the world as Allie sees it - the creator's experiences and ideas are unique, but the humor has universal reception. For instance, in the post "Sneaky Hate Spiral," the comic chronicles a series of annoyances (bad music on the radio, waking up to a car alarm, paper cuts, squealing refrigerator, hidden wallet, broken toaster, in-the-face cat butts, etc.) that amount to an irrationally bad day. Everyone has become grumpy for inconsequential reasons at some point, but the absurd illustrations and calmly documenting remarks are what bring the experience to new level of expression. This is what makes Hyperbole and a Half art.
"Sneaky hate spirals begin simply enough. In fact, that is one of the hallmarks of sneaky hate spirals - they are merely the confluence of many unremarkable annoyances. Your day begins poorly."
"Eventually, the sum of the small annoyances begins to exceed your capacity for patience and rational thought. All it would take to send you over the edge into a bottomless pit of angry hysteria is just one more tiny, little thing..."
Despite looking at these marvelous pictures and thinking fondly of these titillating anecdotes, perhaps you're still questioning how Hyperbole and a Half actually counts as an artistic endeavor. If this is so, then the most important aspect of the analysis is to identify the comic genre as a whole (either online or in print) as a legitimate textual and artistic entity. Often dismissed as "just for children," the comic actually offers a level of flexibility and commentary that pictures or text alone cannot. The Hyperbole and a Half website gets approximately 1 to 2 million unique visitors per month and about 4 million total visitors, astonishing figures that shows sometimes numbers can speak for a level of artistic genius, both in pictures and words. Because of their multiplicity in origin and content, comics bring a dynamic element to literature and art. As University of Colorado comics professor William Kuskin says, "Comics are a virulent art. They get under our skin."
Web comics like Hyperbole and a Half do something that even most print comics do not; the blog format allows for the text to be a part of the punchline, and does not demand the limiting structure of the gird as in print. Printed collections of comics often have added textual commentary, but the text itself (as it is outside of the grid) is not essential to comic narrative. Conversely, Hyperbole and a Half often has posts that are almost entirely visual or written, with the fluid ability to be either picture or text in the same post or narrative arc.
Much like the blogging medium itself, Hyberbole and a Half is purposely low brow. The internet is host to the ideas of the world wide "Everyman," and in its easily approachable silliness, Hyperbole and a Half panders to the collective online society. The blog has displayed posts that chronicle Allie's accidental ingestion of pesticides, getting deliriously sick and searching feverishly in Texas for juice and getting stranded on a boat, sleeping in a tent in the backyard of meth addicts and burning down an island. It's fairly safe to say that most readers have not personally have not been in those exact situations, but Allie invokes a sense of good-humored sympathy. When critics point out that the creator's drawings "suck" and could be drawn by a five-year-old, Allie responds on the FAQ page by saying "I know. I do that on purpose because shitty drawings are funny." Interestingly, the deliberate "dumbing down" of the Hyperbole and a Half pictures only adds to the clever wit exposed by the textual content. The site appeals to childlike absurdity, but with a backward-thinking reflection on experiences that adds extra entertainment value.
--
All pictures and quoted content belong to Allie Brosh, creator of Hyperbole and a Half. Visit the site to enjoy and support the awesomeness!
Friday, October 15, 2010
Elf Yourself, Ze Frank and StumbleUpon
The Assignment
Pick three online sites or activities for the class to immerse
themselves in or otherwise play with. Then find one critical reading
for each activity that helps us go "meta" -- to think about the meaning
of the activity -- for the class to read. (You might try JStor or
Project Muse, databases that can be reached via the library website
[http://libraries.colorado.edu/screens/findarticles.html].)The reading
should make the activity more meaningful in some way.
---
Activity #1
In the same vein as the 90s internet craze of e-cards, sites such as Elf Yourself and JibJab allow users to insert themselves and their friends into popular frames of reference, such as in movie spoofs, as dancers and as athletes. Around holiday time (the site is down until then) Facebook newsfeeds are full of videos of Buddy the Elf suits with friends’ faces, singing merry Christmas tunes. And the ever-popular Star Wars "remake" also allows one to put photos of friends in place of Luke, Princess Leia and more. This type of site is significant not only because it allows for escapism of the viewer, but it also blurs the line between audience and performer, since the performer is also the person watching. The creator and people the videos are sent to have the freedom of identity in this space, to be both who they are and someone they are not. It is easy and even funny to place one’s face on the body of a character of the opposite sex, for instance. In the essay “All the World Wide Web’s a Stage,” Erika Pearson highlights the ways in which individuals perform identity in social spaces on the web. These sendable meta-videos reflect the idea of self-conscious re-personification of the self in the other, as well as the fantasy illusions of theatricality that the internet allows us to pursue.
Pearson's "All the World Wide Web's a Stage"
Activity #2
As a free video podcast airing on iTunes from March 2006 to 2007, The Show by Ze Frank was a short daily clip on news and general blather that gained quite an internet following. Once again blurring the line between audience and performer, watchers sent in their own filmed intros for the show so they can watch themselves, and often Ze’s video responses deal with followers emails. In this way, The Show fostered a sense of inclusion, even globally, though most of the followers never met. Though The Show is no longer airing, popular episodes are still available for watching (I suggest “Scrabble”). Beyond The Show the website itself, zefrank.com, expands far beyond the video confines of the podcast, displaying all manner of self- and community created online absurdity: games, doodlers, parody dance lessons, examinations of his cat Annie, etc. Ze Frank calls his website and projects “online play spaces.” While the website is difficult to navigate and the links seem to be hardly more than ridiculous time wasters, Ze Frank offers up a greater sense of online community and pleasure-filled escapism. To connect Ze Frank’s exploits to a more academic sphere, reading Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy” seems appropriate in that the Dionysiac experience, one of pleasure and absolute chaos, brings forth a sense of order, contentment, and connectedness within a community much likes Ze Frank’s work.
e-text on Nietzsche's “The Birth of Tragedy”
Activity #3
In this internet era, sites such as StumbleUpon continually encourage a decrease in attention span as one focuses on material. StumbleUpon gives users the opportunity to curtail the information to their interests, potentially censoring more important or interesting websites. Then they click a “Stumble” icon, view the randomly generated site (which can deal with everything from high art to cute puppy pictures to motorcycles and world news) and click “Stumble” again when they are ready to view another website. The idea is a sort of internet lotto, filtering through sites with the ability to “like” and “dislike” articles and items in a potentially streamlined and fast space. In this way, the internet turns us (as said in the following BBC News article) into “digital goldfish,” always forgetting the last items we viewed and only moving onto the next.
BBC News: “Turning Into Digital Goldfish”
Pick three online sites or activities for the class to immerse
themselves in or otherwise play with. Then find one critical reading
for each activity that helps us go "meta" -- to think about the meaning
of the activity -- for the class to read. (You might try JStor or
Project Muse, databases that can be reached via the library website
[http://libraries.colorado.edu/screens/findarticles.html].)The reading
should make the activity more meaningful in some way.
---
Activity #1
In the same vein as the 90s internet craze of e-cards, sites such as Elf Yourself and JibJab allow users to insert themselves and their friends into popular frames of reference, such as in movie spoofs, as dancers and as athletes. Around holiday time (the site is down until then) Facebook newsfeeds are full of videos of Buddy the Elf suits with friends’ faces, singing merry Christmas tunes. And the ever-popular Star Wars "remake" also allows one to put photos of friends in place of Luke, Princess Leia and more. This type of site is significant not only because it allows for escapism of the viewer, but it also blurs the line between audience and performer, since the performer is also the person watching. The creator and people the videos are sent to have the freedom of identity in this space, to be both who they are and someone they are not. It is easy and even funny to place one’s face on the body of a character of the opposite sex, for instance. In the essay “All the World Wide Web’s a Stage,” Erika Pearson highlights the ways in which individuals perform identity in social spaces on the web. These sendable meta-videos reflect the idea of self-conscious re-personification of the self in the other, as well as the fantasy illusions of theatricality that the internet allows us to pursue.
Pearson's "All the World Wide Web's a Stage"
Activity #2
As a free video podcast airing on iTunes from March 2006 to 2007, The Show by Ze Frank was a short daily clip on news and general blather that gained quite an internet following. Once again blurring the line between audience and performer, watchers sent in their own filmed intros for the show so they can watch themselves, and often Ze’s video responses deal with followers emails. In this way, The Show fostered a sense of inclusion, even globally, though most of the followers never met. Though The Show is no longer airing, popular episodes are still available for watching (I suggest “Scrabble”). Beyond The Show the website itself, zefrank.com, expands far beyond the video confines of the podcast, displaying all manner of self- and community created online absurdity: games, doodlers, parody dance lessons, examinations of his cat Annie, etc. Ze Frank calls his website and projects “online play spaces.” While the website is difficult to navigate and the links seem to be hardly more than ridiculous time wasters, Ze Frank offers up a greater sense of online community and pleasure-filled escapism. To connect Ze Frank’s exploits to a more academic sphere, reading Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy” seems appropriate in that the Dionysiac experience, one of pleasure and absolute chaos, brings forth a sense of order, contentment, and connectedness within a community much likes Ze Frank’s work.
e-text on Nietzsche's “The Birth of Tragedy”
Activity #3
In this internet era, sites such as StumbleUpon continually encourage a decrease in attention span as one focuses on material. StumbleUpon gives users the opportunity to curtail the information to their interests, potentially censoring more important or interesting websites. Then they click a “Stumble” icon, view the randomly generated site (which can deal with everything from high art to cute puppy pictures to motorcycles and world news) and click “Stumble” again when they are ready to view another website. The idea is a sort of internet lotto, filtering through sites with the ability to “like” and “dislike” articles and items in a potentially streamlined and fast space. In this way, the internet turns us (as said in the following BBC News article) into “digital goldfish,” always forgetting the last items we viewed and only moving onto the next.
BBC News: “Turning Into Digital Goldfish”
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Me in Picture Form
Using the website Avatar Generator (which I just googled). I created an avatar of myself for an assignment for Digital Media class.
For the second part of this assignment, the aim was to find another avatar and compare and contrast it with my own, using a critic or theorist that we have discussed so far in the semester. Since the first assignment for this semester consisted of creating a blog and a Twitter account, I thought it more than fitting to check out an avatar of one of the people I follow on Twitter. Let's use Stephen Colbert's image on Twitter as an example.
Critical theorist David Bell would assert that both Stephen Colbert and I are presenting a reconstructed image of ourselves through these pictures in the public sphere of the internet. Rather than agreeing with typical notions of identity as a fixed and biologically determined entity, the way we represent ourselves according to Bell is manifold, complex and fluid. In other words, a social construction. Through the repetitive use of certain ways we represent our character, this character seems to be all the more definite over time. However, my image just shows a finite part of my character traits and personality, and the same can be said for Stephen Colbert. Our selves become so fragmented and pluralistic, especially as a result of our communication with others through so many scattered and diverse mediums with the acceleration of modern technology. Needing to consolidate some fiction of a unified self, both Stephen Colbert and I use an avatar as a “self conscious articulation of self-identity.”
Mr. Colbert has a very specific image to he uphold as a nationally (and globally) recognized public figure, which was why I was interested in using his avatar rather than that of a random user online. With the exaggerated expression and the use of the mask, the image in question very clearly presents Stephen Colbert as theatrical in nature and echoes his humorous public outlook. To supplement the picture his Twitter status says, "I've been known to tickle the ivories, which is why I'm not allowed near the elephants at the zoo," which only really furthers my point on his public persona. By reading Stephen Colbert’s avatar image as cultural text, something can be said for characterization of self on the internet. The public expects a certain recurrence of the identity that Stephen Colbert displays outwardly. But surely Stephen Colbert isn't always so fiercely jovial and funny. Surely there are multiple sides of him that we do not see because he chooses to keep them private either for general decency or because it would alter public perceptions in a way that may be detrimental to his online and television appearances.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to characterize all such avatars and public displays of self on the interwebs as theatrical; Stephen Colbert just happens to be a public figure and so his own images magnify what we might see in our own. Take my avatar, for example. It is still a picture of me, but obviously does not show every facet of my life. I don't even know every facet of my life. But the fact that I chose this particular picture of me sitting on a couch in a field wearing Ray-Bans means that there was a deliberate thought process on my part. Though different from Mr. Colbert's, my expression and body language denote theatricality as well. Posing for the camera. The high contrast and skewed colors may have been a desire to be represented as "cool," but the outside viewer may think otherwise, even if that was my original intent. But I know I'm not cool in all areas of my life. I don't spend all of my time sitting on living room furniture in rural settings in sunglasses. I don't even own Ray-Bans. Those weren't mine.
As Bell would say, I have created an enabling fiction of a unified self through the use of this photo as my avatar. The fact that I have now just publicized it for general scrutiny only further deconstructs this false sense of wholeness in identity. But unlike Stephen Colbert, I am not a worldwide media icon, so why should I distill myself into an image and have it correspond with my life as whole (even though it doesn't actually)? My only reply is, what else can we do, as humans? Whether online or off, our identities are always fragmented and therefore all we can impart on an observer is a partial image of self. The internet just speeds of that process of fragmentation. The internet as a whole is theatrical, and we feed into it. We'll never really know what is at the core of Stephen Colbert's being, and no one will ever really know what is at the core of mine, so in place of real identity, I think I'm okay with a mask and some sunglasses.
David Bell, An Introduction to Cybercultures (NY: Routledge, 2001).
For the second part of this assignment, the aim was to find another avatar and compare and contrast it with my own, using a critic or theorist that we have discussed so far in the semester. Since the first assignment for this semester consisted of creating a blog and a Twitter account, I thought it more than fitting to check out an avatar of one of the people I follow on Twitter. Let's use Stephen Colbert's image on Twitter as an example.
Critical theorist David Bell would assert that both Stephen Colbert and I are presenting a reconstructed image of ourselves through these pictures in the public sphere of the internet. Rather than agreeing with typical notions of identity as a fixed and biologically determined entity, the way we represent ourselves according to Bell is manifold, complex and fluid. In other words, a social construction. Through the repetitive use of certain ways we represent our character, this character seems to be all the more definite over time. However, my image just shows a finite part of my character traits and personality, and the same can be said for Stephen Colbert. Our selves become so fragmented and pluralistic, especially as a result of our communication with others through so many scattered and diverse mediums with the acceleration of modern technology. Needing to consolidate some fiction of a unified self, both Stephen Colbert and I use an avatar as a “self conscious articulation of self-identity.”
Mr. Colbert has a very specific image to he uphold as a nationally (and globally) recognized public figure, which was why I was interested in using his avatar rather than that of a random user online. With the exaggerated expression and the use of the mask, the image in question very clearly presents Stephen Colbert as theatrical in nature and echoes his humorous public outlook. To supplement the picture his Twitter status says, "I've been known to tickle the ivories, which is why I'm not allowed near the elephants at the zoo," which only really furthers my point on his public persona. By reading Stephen Colbert’s avatar image as cultural text, something can be said for characterization of self on the internet. The public expects a certain recurrence of the identity that Stephen Colbert displays outwardly. But surely Stephen Colbert isn't always so fiercely jovial and funny. Surely there are multiple sides of him that we do not see because he chooses to keep them private either for general decency or because it would alter public perceptions in a way that may be detrimental to his online and television appearances.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to characterize all such avatars and public displays of self on the interwebs as theatrical; Stephen Colbert just happens to be a public figure and so his own images magnify what we might see in our own. Take my avatar, for example. It is still a picture of me, but obviously does not show every facet of my life. I don't even know every facet of my life. But the fact that I chose this particular picture of me sitting on a couch in a field wearing Ray-Bans means that there was a deliberate thought process on my part. Though different from Mr. Colbert's, my expression and body language denote theatricality as well. Posing for the camera. The high contrast and skewed colors may have been a desire to be represented as "cool," but the outside viewer may think otherwise, even if that was my original intent. But I know I'm not cool in all areas of my life. I don't spend all of my time sitting on living room furniture in rural settings in sunglasses. I don't even own Ray-Bans. Those weren't mine.
As Bell would say, I have created an enabling fiction of a unified self through the use of this photo as my avatar. The fact that I have now just publicized it for general scrutiny only further deconstructs this false sense of wholeness in identity. But unlike Stephen Colbert, I am not a worldwide media icon, so why should I distill myself into an image and have it correspond with my life as whole (even though it doesn't actually)? My only reply is, what else can we do, as humans? Whether online or off, our identities are always fragmented and therefore all we can impart on an observer is a partial image of self. The internet just speeds of that process of fragmentation. The internet as a whole is theatrical, and we feed into it. We'll never really know what is at the core of Stephen Colbert's being, and no one will ever really know what is at the core of mine, so in place of real identity, I think I'm okay with a mask and some sunglasses.
David Bell, An Introduction to Cybercultures (NY: Routledge, 2001).
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Digital Media: Self-Reflexive Self Reflection
The other night I dreamed that I had to live on a street corner for a week for my Digital Media class in order to compare my social interactions with those of online social networking. There are two things to get from this: 1) this class is making me think in so many circles in my waking life that somehow it's made it into my subconscious (awesome), and 2) my dreams are getting way too intense.
Last fall when I transferred to CU I took Literary Theory and it blew my mind. The post structuralist and linguistic theories especially made me think constantly about the importance, or lack thereof, of being an English major. If the ultimate pursuit of the humanities is to search for personal and philosophical world truth, what does that matter if we agree with the post modern ideas of fragmented self and a lack of absolute Truth? What I mean is, why search for the truth if there isn't one? I expect that though an absolute truth maybe doesn't exist, there is certainly something to be said for our understandings and interpretations of humanity within text. Along that vein, the genre of texts to explore is rapidly expanding with the glut of information via relatively new media sources. Picking up the threads of thought that I encountered in Literary Theory, it seems that this Digital Media class will continue with this analysis of fragmented self as it goes through the public world of the internet. I'm really looking forward to how theoretical analysis can tease out notions of self from web personas.
Do I believe that Twitter and Facebook and Blogger can be read the same way as a (proper) physical manifestation of the written word on a page? No, not exactly, but they certainly are textual representations of self, just as books are. And I do love books.
Last fall when I transferred to CU I took Literary Theory and it blew my mind. The post structuralist and linguistic theories especially made me think constantly about the importance, or lack thereof, of being an English major. If the ultimate pursuit of the humanities is to search for personal and philosophical world truth, what does that matter if we agree with the post modern ideas of fragmented self and a lack of absolute Truth? What I mean is, why search for the truth if there isn't one? I expect that though an absolute truth maybe doesn't exist, there is certainly something to be said for our understandings and interpretations of humanity within text. Along that vein, the genre of texts to explore is rapidly expanding with the glut of information via relatively new media sources. Picking up the threads of thought that I encountered in Literary Theory, it seems that this Digital Media class will continue with this analysis of fragmented self as it goes through the public world of the internet. I'm really looking forward to how theoretical analysis can tease out notions of self from web personas.
Do I believe that Twitter and Facebook and Blogger can be read the same way as a (proper) physical manifestation of the written word on a page? No, not exactly, but they certainly are textual representations of self, just as books are. And I do love books.
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