Tag: beliefs

• Trigger Warning Project / Playing with @mozilla Popcorn Maker

  It’s been about a month since I made my initial post on the Trigger Warning that appeared on Sociological Images.  Since then, they’ve posted another post with the exact same trigger warning and issue.  It has been very generative for me to experience this.  I am working through what it means to face oppression the way that we do.  I think I am almost comfortable with my thoughts on it, which is good because I have a final presentation/performance thing for my last performance studies course ever on December 7th and that is what I wrote/am writing on.  This is what I’ve come up with so far (aka iteration/draft 1) for my digital installation:

  I might play with it a bit more… I might even try to play with popcorn.js, but I am happy with where it is.  Popcorn Maker was easy to use.  Working through this  allowed me to let go of that second post.  I think I don’t need to comment on it. But I will add it to the list of things that make me shake my head and push me to do my project.

  Jade

  Nov 20, 2012

  digital, Human Zoo, my project, my work, web stuff

  (in)visibility, beliefs, identity, memory studies, mozilla, performance studies, reflections, soundcloud, whiteness

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• Trigger Warning: On a Photograph and a Blog Post

  

  In attempting to understand the origins of racism, it is important to avoid removing it to a historical past or displacing its sources onto the oppressed.  Any investigation or representations of [otherness], then, must take a critical look at Euro-American whiteness to understand the construction of race as a category.  As critic Coco Fusco has insisted, “To ignore white ethnicity is to reduce its hegemony by nautrualizing it”

  Brian Wallis, Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerrotypes, in “Only Skin Deep”, p. 179

  In the original quote, “otherness” was “african-american blackness”, but as we move out towards Euro-American ideals of seeing “types”, it becomes the other.  This is post is a reaction to a recent post that was featured on Sociological Images, Human Zoos at the Turn of the 20th Century.  The post featured this mans quotes and appeared to be in response to a Speigel Online article on remains being returned home.  The article featured a small photogallery.  Instead of using the image of the man behind the terror/horror, the only images that accompanied the article, and article that led with the trigger warning on the image above, only featured images of the “victims”, not the man.  I think the trigger warning should sit with the man holding the gun.  If we are going to face it, we should see the proper faces of the violence. Not the metaphorical remains of their inhumane actions. That strips those people and their descendants of their humanity, over, and over, and over again.  The new term I learned this weekend from my psychoanalysis reading was “soul murder”.  I’m starting to think that is what the displacement of oppression does.

  The image above is my attempt at properly facing the trigger warning, because he was not one of the ones who stayed so behind the scenes of the people and the photographs that we do not have his name or quotes or (hi)story, and because his name is still spoken, anytime someone wants to go to his zoo, the one that bears his name.

  Jade

  Oct 21, 2012

  digital, Digital History, Human Zoo, web stuff

  (in)visibility, beliefs, blackness, germany, memory studies, news, other people’s blogs, the past, whiteness

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• My Temporal Configuration

  Currently reading Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz (Ha! he has a wikipedia page). It made me think of the image Your fictions become history (a current side obsession).  It is reminding me that I have a very specific temporal position I work from.  I think that it is something I need to… not get over… but be mindful of as I approach people working in different temporal frameworks.  How/where we see the importance of time changing so much about how we approach the world. Truly.  Also, I feel really dirty for having a temporal framework.

  My Basic Temporal Configuration

  

  I believe the now is transient at best.

  (really, it is fleeting.)

  I believe the past is about the future.

  (as such, we create both the past and the future)

  I believe that this means that the past is the key to the future.

  (and the now is a combination of both the past and the future)

  I believe memory is how we remember the past.

  (it is also the key to how we imagine the future)

  I believe that what we remember is faulty.

  (and the past determines how we fill in the gaps in the future)

  I believe the Digital fundamentally changes how we conceptualize & interact with Memory.

  (and this is a big part of what I’m exploring in my dissertation)

   

   

  Jade

  Oct 13, 2012

  digital, History, reading, Uncategorized

  beliefs, books, images, memory studies, obesessions, reflections, thoughts

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