MPme: Variant of a Manifesta: August 27, 2007
NOTES: Origins & Context | See Also
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Origins of this content
This 2007 blog is the third of four manifestos that I penned (which referred to the earlier political/film manifestos of soviet filmmaker/theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, also thinking through the radical potentials of the new medium of their epoch within that medium) to commence my blog, Media Praxis. I tried to resolutely set forth my operating ideals, goals, orientation, and inclinations for thinking about radical media within radical media, including YouTube. Confusing, I know, www.mediapraxis.org is also the name of an earlier on-line "publication" that I produced for and with another Media Studies class that sets forth ten chronological moments where media is theorized, by someone who is making it, and as a vital component of political struggle. That site archives and integrates revolutionary theoretical writing, video clips, and related web-based activity.
Contextualization
"The Art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect." See more manifestos.
Dziga Vertov "proclaimed the primacy of the camera itself (the 'Kino-Eye') over the human eye...He called the 23 newreels he directed between 1922 and 1925 Kino-Pravda, 'pravda' being not only the Russian word for the truth but also the title of the official party newspaper. Almost a century later Vertov's films still look revolutionary. And a contemporary digital video clip screened alongside them might not look so modern (or post-modern) after all. Created from documentary footage, Vertov's films represented an intricate blend of art and political and poetic rhetoric."
Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" (1929) is a "stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't just recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the camera's "kino-glaz" (cinema eye). Vertov's rich imagery transcends the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing."
SCALE (2008) is my feature documentary about how "divisions and connections between and within the left mark the contradictions of individual action, collaboration, media attention, and grassroots movements for social justice." I often use it as an example of how my documentary video practice is diametrically opposed to much of what defines YouTube (even as the documentary sits on YouTube...)
One of my ten founding terms for this project is MARX. Those who make and control ideas make and control history. Cultural revolution is integral for social, political and material transformation.
Dziga Vertov "proclaimed the primacy of the camera itself (the 'Kino-Eye') over the human eye...He called the 23 newreels he directed between 1922 and 1925 Kino-Pravda, 'pravda' being not only the Russian word for the truth but also the title of the official party newspaper. Almost a century later Vertov's films still look revolutionary. And a contemporary digital video clip screened alongside them might not look so modern (or post-modern) after all. Created from documentary footage, Vertov's films represented an intricate blend of art and political and poetic rhetoric."
Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" (1929) is a "stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't just recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the camera's "kino-glaz" (cinema eye). Vertov's rich imagery transcends the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing."
SCALE (2008) is my feature documentary about how "divisions and connections between and within the left mark the contradictions of individual action, collaboration, media attention, and grassroots movements for social justice." I often use it as an example of how my documentary video practice is diametrically opposed to much of what defines YouTube (even as the documentary sits on YouTube...)
One of my ten founding terms for this project is MARX. Those who make and control ideas make and control history. Cultural revolution is integral for social, political and material transformation.
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More videos related to the content of this page
(After "WE: Variant of a Manifesto," Dziga Vertov, 1922, I write a manifesta about radical media, " ThirdTube," on YouTube))
I call myself MP:me (Media Praxis : Alexandra Juhasz)--as opposed to "cinematographer," one of a herd of machomen doing rather well peddling slick clean wares.
I see no connection between true femi-digi-praxis (the integration of media theory, digital practice, and feminist politics in an historical context) and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.
I consider expensive corporate reality television--weighed down with music and narrative and childhood games-- an absurdity.
To the American victim documentary with its shown dynamism and power disparities and to YouTube's direct-to-camera dramatizations of so many individuals' personal pain or pleasure this femi-digi-practitioner says thanks for the return to real people, the hand-held look, and the close-ups. Good, but disorderly, not based on a precise study of Media Praxis (the hundred year history of theoretical writing and related political media production). A cut above the psychological drama, but still lacking in foundation. A Cliche. A copy of a copy.
I proclaim the stuff of YouTube, all based on the slogan (pithy, precise, rousing calls to action or consumption, or action as consumption), to be leprous.
-Keep your mouse from them!
-Keep your eyes off those bite-sized wonders!
-They're morally dangerous!
-Contagious!
I affirm the future of digital art by denying its present and learning from its past.
I am MP:me. I build connections to history and theory and inter-relations between individuals and committed communities. With my small cheap camcorder, my laptop, and internet connection, I make messy, irregular feminist video committed to depth and complexity.
"Cinematography," the earliest male tradition of sizeable machines, stylish form, and solo cine-adventures must die so that the communal art of femi-digi-praxis may live. I call for its death to be hastened.
I protest against the smooth operator and call for a rough synthesis of history, politics, theory, real people and their chaotic, mundane desires and knowledge.
I invite you:
-to flee...
the sweet embrace of America's Next Top Model,
the poison of the commercial send-up,
the clutches of technophilia,
the allure of boy-toys,
to turn your back on music, effects, gizmos,
-to flee...
out into the open with camcorder in hand, into four dimensions (history, politics, theory + practice), in search of our own material, from our experiences, relationships and commitments to social justice. Mp:me is made visible through a camcorder femi-digi-praxis: a small, hand-held, retro video aesthetic connected to a lengthy history of communal, low-budget, political and theoretical media production, Media Praxis, begun by truly great cinematographers, men with movie cameras, politics and big ideas.
Mp:me simply (post)-modernizes and feminizes We's foundational praxis.
I call myself MP:me (Media Praxis : Alexandra Juhasz)--as opposed to "cinematographer," one of a herd of machomen doing rather well peddling slick clean wares.
I see no connection between true femi-digi-praxis (the integration of media theory, digital practice, and feminist politics in an historical context) and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.
I consider expensive corporate reality television--weighed down with music and narrative and childhood games-- an absurdity.
To the American victim documentary with its shown dynamism and power disparities and to YouTube's direct-to-camera dramatizations of so many individuals' personal pain or pleasure this femi-digi-practitioner says thanks for the return to real people, the hand-held look, and the close-ups. Good, but disorderly, not based on a precise study of Media Praxis (the hundred year history of theoretical writing and related political media production). A cut above the psychological drama, but still lacking in foundation. A Cliche. A copy of a copy.
I proclaim the stuff of YouTube, all based on the slogan (pithy, precise, rousing calls to action or consumption, or action as consumption), to be leprous.
-Keep your mouse from them!
-Keep your eyes off those bite-sized wonders!
-They're morally dangerous!
-Contagious!
I affirm the future of digital art by denying its present and learning from its past.
I am MP:me. I build connections to history and theory and inter-relations between individuals and committed communities. With my small cheap camcorder, my laptop, and internet connection, I make messy, irregular feminist video committed to depth and complexity.
"Cinematography," the earliest male tradition of sizeable machines, stylish form, and solo cine-adventures must die so that the communal art of femi-digi-praxis may live. I call for its death to be hastened.
I protest against the smooth operator and call for a rough synthesis of history, politics, theory, real people and their chaotic, mundane desires and knowledge.
I invite you:
-to flee...
the sweet embrace of America's Next Top Model,
the poison of the commercial send-up,
the clutches of technophilia,
the allure of boy-toys,
to turn your back on music, effects, gizmos,
-to flee...
out into the open with camcorder in hand, into four dimensions (history, politics, theory + practice), in search of our own material, from our experiences, relationships and commitments to social justice. Mp:me is made visible through a camcorder femi-digi-praxis: a small, hand-held, retro video aesthetic connected to a lengthy history of communal, low-budget, political and theoretical media production, Media Praxis, begun by truly great cinematographers, men with movie cameras, politics and big ideas.
Mp:me simply (post)-modernizes and feminizes We's foundational praxis.