Media Ecology Association: University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, CA
Date: 23-26 June 2011
Conference Theme: Space, Place and the McLuhan Legacy
Conference Session: 6C - New Medias [sic]
Presentation Title: Cultural Farming – Extensions of McLuhan / Farewell Address
*******************************
Good afternoon, I’m Holland Wilde. Thank you all for coming today. I appreciate this opportunity to speak to Media Ecology Association.
The nature of my presentation today has changed, because I originally submitted two separate videos for screening during this conference: one 24 minutes in length, and one 54 minutes:
http://www.culturalfarming.com/Ethnography/Canada.html
http://www.culturalfarming.com/Ethnography/Extensions_of_McLuhan.html
I did not submit a typical paper proposal. But the conference committee (Adria & Adams) was apparently incapable of reading my submission. I received official acceptance for a paper (which curiously was for the longer 54 minute video submission). I wrote the committee back, thanking them, and restating that I submitted a video screening not a paper. There was obviously some confusion and I asked them for clarification. MEA replied that I would not be allowed to screen a video but that I could talk to you … and that I must not exceed 15 minutes. So I will read a new text to you today instead of screening the video that was actually selected by this organization. OK? And just so you know, this presentation will be exactly 22 minutes long! Ha.
...Well to begin, the most important question to ask any conference presenter is this: “By what authority do you stand before us?” And so, in response, I’ve decided to sketch my personal, 35 year story as a visual rhetorician… and I’ll do it in the form of a final farewell address…
I received my first terminal degree in 1983, an MFA. I was trained as a Broadway stage-designer and I spent 15 years designing scenery and costumes, before I gravitated to television, where I worked for twenty more years in the US and around the globe. Indeed, I freelanced for most every major TV network in every major media market. I received numerous awards including 10 Emmy’s from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for my designs, particularly for TV news.
However, all hell broke loose in U.S. media once President Bill Clinton signed the telecommunications act in 1996 allowing unrestricted media ownership through deregulation. Almost overnight my newest TV clients grew increasingly younger, inexperienced, and distracted. They were the new number-crunchers. They moved up the corporate ranks quickly but their careers were short-lived. Journalism was rarely mentioned anymore during design presentations. I was no longer hired on expertise but pressured to participate in vapid competitions where the only designs bought were the prettiest, the most seductive, the most carnavalesque.
Long-standing principles of visual media communication were ignored in favor of sexy, eye-grabbing, grotesque imagery. The term I coined for this new visual turn was “techno-rococo”. What was happening to visual media? If professional theatre had failed me, and the craft of TV news journalism was withering before my eyes, what would be my next move? Maybe a second terminal degree would be the answer. So, I closed my design shop, dismissed my design assistants, and I walked away from a very lucrative, high profile television career.
And, it was during that transition period -- in 2004 -- well before FaceBook, before video-blogging, before YouTube – AND, while I was receiving a string of cold rejections from nine different U.S. PhD programs -- that I sat down and forced myself to watch television news all over again with new critical eyes looking beyond mere practice in order to examine exactly how media combines aspects of production, text, performance and ideology. Well, I was flabbergasted. TV news was changing so fast; I had blinked for just one season and I was missing it already. Was I the only one watching this moving target?
Wondering how could I pause this endless spectacle long enough to study it, I went out and bought three personal video recorders and simply began to archive whatever struck me as I watched it on TV. As my archives quickly grew I began to mix a few clips together… and soon became addicted to something I had never known before: MAKING MOVING IMAGES. I culled exemplary clips from my archives and made hundreds of small Quicktime, mash-up movies on my computer every day in sheer unadulterated ethnographic fashion -- creating little curiously surreal observational media stories.
Immediately I could see the potential and the problem. Would I make my little movies in the mannerisms of big media? Would I jack up each video with silly vacuous content? Would I use every special effect offered? Would I go for the quick and easy punch line to keep my friends entertained? Would I simply make more cynical parody?
So, I set a few restrictions to scaffold my initial approach. Each mash-up could only be 60 seconds long in order to sharpen my skills through the confines of brevity. And, I could only use free and simple video tools readily available to most of us in the western world to construct the content like Apple’s iMovie software. Looking back now it was clear that I was mastering every facet of mise en scene without even knowing the term. I experimented with every kind of video technique imaginable as I remixed my TV archives, yet oddly, I discovered each technique infused a strange, secondary kind of implicit political commentary.
Indeed, I was collecting, recording and organizing media’s traits, recognizing and interpreting patterns, rhythms, and essences as the pre-text to writing culture with television. I was practicing vital classical forms of visual ethnography while I was playing… while I was slowing down, distilling, concentrating, re-editing, and remediating content, which is so profoundly familiar to us today I fear we can no longer even see it anymore. I was finding a new visual voice and I was teaching that voice to communicate beyond mere rhetoric and towards a new kind of surreal, CRITICAL and theoretical practice.
Immediately a pathway was opening to me. Could I build from this approach a methodology to compare and contrast the critical theories of the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Walter Benjamin; to the culturally situated Birmingham School of Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams; to the visually pragmatic Chicago School of John Dewey and Howard Becker; to the technological biases of the Toronto School of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan; while perfuming it all with diaphanous French philosophy cut-up and pasted into something reminiscent of ready-made DJ scratch collage?
If so... then importantly, what about surreal practitioners like Breton, Duchamp, Man Ray, Magritte? What about the critical performance theories employed by Bertolt Brecht? And what about early Russian montage theorized by Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein? Was it possible to weave these stunning similarities with all I had seen and experienced during my TV news-production career? In other words: Could I reflexively write contemporary media theory with existing media? And, could I do it all following the untapped potentials of ethnographic surrealism invoked within visual anthropology by James Clifford and George Marcus?
It was a very tall order, but as I began to make compilations of my strongest mash-ups, I soon realized YES, I could actually montage my own critical-theory stories using TV content alone. It was a revelation. Throughout my entire life I had watched TV… now finally I could talk back to it didactically, dialogically, dialectically. I could provoke a kind of critical-exchange by refunctioning TV’s own language and technique.
Today, my seven-year-long media project -- Cultural Farming dot Com -- contains hundreds of hours of free-to-use, uncopyrighted research, including over 75 video essays and two dozen media ethnography projects. For instance, it includes a video blog database with 2,500 videos uploaded for comparison. It includes a self-writing montage machine containing 12,000 video-clips appropriated from the news-coverage of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.
Other Cultural Farming projects, include topics like pornography, digital visuality, Hurricane Katrina, the school shootings on the college campus of Virginia Tech, the BP Oil Spill… and TV’s recent horrific news coverage of the assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Many of these videos challenge a wide array of intellectual thinkers, others critique everyday media production practices, and all challenge existing media theory. I encourage everyone to go to Cultural Farming. Look around. It is a free-to-use gold mine filled with hours of teachable moments… all built by me alone, by hand, from everyday TV... viewed in real-time in my home.
Ok. Is everyone with me so far?
Well, even though none of us can predict the future, and contrary to recent obituaries, television is not going away anytime soon. Despite technological advancement, TV remains the fattest visual and rhetorical ‘pipe’ into most western homes today, and so its potential for learning and teaching are almost boundless. Television’s influence is increasing not decreasing, providing the richest resource for media data-mining we have today. However, too many media scholars marginalize television. It is dismissed as old-school and seen as considerably less sexy than “new media”, the internet, or virtualites like Second Life. Today, writing about television is horse-and-buggy – “been there, done that”. What more is there possibly to learn from television?
Well, I see it another way. From my point of view most all forms of media communication today are struggling mightily to become a kind of television. Because it is the Holy Grail: The convergence of instantaneous synchronized-sound with moving images, plus the compression of time and space. Everybody wants to monetize a piece of this action. Indeed, whether it is analog, digital, cable, internet, gaming consoles, cell phones, iPads… all of it is a kind of television… and so it offers huge potential for purposefully interrogating our constantly morphing mediated worlds. And this is exactly what I’ve tried to do 16 hours every day for the last seven years.
My research is meant to provoke both big and little media production and presentation -- particularly my ex-clients and ex-cohort in TV news and journalism. Likewise, I hope to also provoke my comrades in the academy. And there lies the rub. No one, particularly smart people, and particularly academicians… nobody welcomes provocation. We are all commanded to know the world, to make meaning, to provide fixed answers, to claim truth. And so, too much of our research functions as a negotiation to get the final say. This was Marshall McLuhan’s modus operandi, too. McLuhan wrapped his provocation with ego and obfuscation -- and his reward was world-wide celebrity. But then this recipe is as old as it is dangerous. McLuhan inspired awe, bewilderment, stupefaction and derision with his intellectual gymnastics and showmanship. We often forget how McLuhan, after rocketing to celebrity status, was politically cut down to ‘pariah status’ within petty intellectual circles over the last 3 decades. Today, however, the McLuhan ‘recipe’ is merely the tacit prerequisite to contemporary celebrity scholarship, which, in turn, is helping to stoke a McLuhan ‘comeback’.
My project, Cultural Farming, however, to use George Marcus’s phrase is a “messy” project. It is intertextual, multi-voiced, open ended, resistant to theoretical holism, yet committed to invigorating contestable complexities of cultural criticism; and all while folding my own personal story into the mix -- auto ethnographically -- to produce a meaningful, performative, critical media discourse about the crazy worlds we all inhabit. Cultural Farming is deep, simple, personal, longitudinal, experimental ethnography. It is for provoking taken-for-granted methods and for challenging “fixed” meanings. And so, I would like to think Cultural Farming is a necessary antidote to media praxis infantilism.
And it is exactly here, where my doctoral research resides, in the critical cross-pollination of commonsense media practice and communication theory. I want to test and extend theory with existing media content as much as to write experimentally with moving images.
However, from my perspective -- and parallel to McLuhan -- much of the academy continues to resist alternative media scholarship. And so, I stand here confused and disempowered. In my particular case, after those 9 rejections in the U.S., I eventually ended up just down the road at a university in Calgary. But alas, I was prohibited from writing my television research with television … and so I transferred my studies to a ‘practice-based’ PhD program in Brisbane Australia… but even there my videos continued to be ignored. Apparently video just isn’t recognizable as viable scholarship.
Still, at every turn, I was told to abide the PhD quest, to obey academic tradition, to play the academic game, to push my round work through the academy’s square hole and get the PhD union card at any cost. But I began to ask: A union card for what? Can there be such a thing as “peer-review” within institutions so steeped in logocentrism and so untrained in production theory?
And so today, here I sit, a 58 year old, white, opinionated, American male doing exciting, necessary media scholarship. Except for the fact, that my work is often provocative, political and polemical. Except for the fact my work is often made with very difficult, exploitive images purposefully refunctioned without ownership or copyright and publicly given away for free on the internet. Except for the fact, my work not only focuses on that tired, banal genre called television, but it is utterly unpublishable on paper, which is your coin of the realm. In short Cultural Farming is poorly valued. And so, I find myself in a pickle.
To the casual academic observer, I’m much-too-much a visual maverick and my video work is much-too shocking, un-entertaining, impenetrable. Thus, Cultural Farming is often viewed as unruly, vulgar, suspicious, narcissistic, ill-conceived. Marshall McLuhan would get a good chuckle over these kinds of accusations, wouldn’t he?
Meanwhile, for good and for bad, television remains the most ubiquitous media ethics teacher ever devised. As a universal docent, TV teaches all of us by example, at every turn, around-the-clock whether we choose to acknowledge its lessons or not.
Yes, throughout my professional career I worked side-by-side with many of the most talented visual media artists working today. Yet, as my Cultural Farming projects demonstrate, television remains a vast wasteland. Why? From my point of view the answer is two-fold. First, today’s very talented TV makers -- from anthropological documentary to FOX News – have received too little if any ethical, reflexive, and theoretical training. Their daily job is quite simple: To constantly create newer and better seductions. Indeed, there can be few other options in this world of late-capitalism. Seduction and self-promotion are paramount and fueled as much by production ignorance as by spectacular skill. And the academy, broadly conceived, must learn this as well… or else…
But the academy resists change. It clings to the past while limply exerting stale theory and formulaic practice onto new means of communication. Indeed, after six decades of constant research, media theory continues to disrespect most production practice… and most all practice is utterly unaware of critical theory. I learnt this at a very high cost. After excelling in coursework, passing my candidacy, completing my research, and writing my dissertation… my hand was forced. I recused myself from the PhD process on ethical grounds and have now abandoned my quest for a second terminal degree. Apparently I have no place in your academy.
Yes, I was duly warned before I began, but I truly thought my expertise could be of greater service. However, in order to receive a doctorate one must first swallow the indoctrination. There must always be systemic compliance. No alternate route is acceptable. Everybody in this room knows it. The academy is in self-perpetuating deep-shit. But how could it be otherwise, I suppose? Equal to the benefit it provides, the educational academy is a bloated, top-heavy institution in need of revolution equal to our political, military, medical and financial institutions. And of course this will eventually happen. But as organizational theory reminds, it is often the members of these institutions who first see the problems, yet often the last to respond to the call for personal change.
BUT… just to make sure, last November I applied for 12 different faculty positions in a variety of U.S. academic programs. -- all with stated minimum requirements of a Master of Fine Arts degree. To date, 8 months after applying, I have yet to even receive replies from 9 of 12 schools. Nothing… no response, not even a courtesy no-thank-you email. (Of course, I quickly came to see this as a blessing in disguise.) Regardless, is this the state of today’s academy? An experienced theoretical practitioner holds no worth inside today’s expanding media ecology?
And so, I’ll end this farewell presentation now with one rather harsh yet simple piece of advice. Please… leave media theory alone unless you understand and have mastered critical communication production theory. Simply yammering over interpretation, or worse, feigning expertise out-of-context are but two of the clumsy, egregious ineptitudes erupting throughout today’s new rush to garner McLuhanesque celebrity.
Beyond that, we must remember that media communication is a sensible language, meaning OF-THE-SENSES, and thus, it is a most ambiguous language -- an epistemology unto itself, equally important to other languages. And so, it is the combination of theory and practice, which is the first step to inoculation against craven expert commentary and malpractice. Yet, it is the propensity of too many scholars to treat all media texts as if they had no other purpose than to be decoded, thus choking-off the methodological potential of media like television. If James Joyce were here today, he would happily eat all of us for lunch.
Just as I would be utterly dismissed by you if I mishandled media theory and methodology; so, too, should your work be dismissed when you fumble critical proficiency. Media scholarship means twice the work… and thus a doubling of complications… because it demands equal amounts of intensive ‘bi-lingual’ mastery… as well as a Trivium approach to logic, rhetoric and grammar. McLuhan would applaud this as well.
So I beg you, stay away from media theory if you have no idea how to make an ethical image. Stay away from media theory if you can’t critically master media software. Stay away from media theory if you do not understand the breathtaking aggressive power inherent in every camera. Stay away from media theory if you can’t even master PowerPoint presentations! Please, we have enough clumsy, reckless, seductive, media scholarship already.
And just in case you are STILL uncertain of my intention behind this farewell address, let me simply redirect you to issues much closer to home like the ‘all thumbs’ coordination of this conference; or the discourteous lack of any introductory address by the Chair to attendees; or the illegible design of the printed conference schedule; or that no audio connections were readily available in session rooms for sound presentations; or the incestuous and ill-judged MEA awards; or the high percentage of presenters gracelessly opposed to any form of intellectual provocation; or the preponderance of Media Ecologists proudly professing righteous indignation against even watching TV... yes, all this and more... ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN OF MEDIA ILLITERACY I’VE WITNESSED HERE AT MEA. (MEA as exclusive social club simply doesn’t interest me.)
But no worries, you can rest assured, for now I can pronounce after presenting to 30 academic conferences over the last 60 months, MEA is not the exception. Thank you very much and good luck to you all, you’re gonna need it. Adios.