In the spirit of continuing the conversation we have been having on Arcade about Stanley Fish, the recent axing of French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theatre at SUNY Albany, and the future of the humanities, I'd like to present this video (h/t Mark Vega).
This is a video created using "xtranormal," a service that allows one to choreograph computer generated figurines, creating primitive animated three dimensional storyboards, based on text inputs. While painful and funny -- especially for those of us who are on the job market this year -- xtranormal raises interesting questions about possible new directions in the development of narrative art, giving us a hint of what is to come, what critics will have to give consideration to.
The tools with which this video were created are relatively primitive, but should we expect narrative art of considerable sophistication to be created using tools such as this in the near future? It seems clear to me that the answer is yes -- we will in a not-too-near future be inundated by animated narrative in huge quantities. And, as I hope this video makes plain, such videos can be incredibly intelligent and engaging. Of course, anyone who has ever watched South Park -- or, as I have, taught episodes of South Park in a course -- already knows this.
The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...
In a future where anyone, working more or less alone, can construct films of (increasing) sophistication, will the ultimate promise of being a novelist -- sole, individual control over one's artistic output, at least in theory -- give way to a world of one-person moviemakers? Will all classic literature be mediated by a new layer of animated figures acting out plots and scenarios originally written in novelistic form? If so, is this a bad thing? Are there pedagogical opportunities such systems offer teachers willing to embed new media in the classroom?
I made some videos there last year, part of a possible web series I abandoned due to academic obligations:
For me it's less a development of new media but a fragmentation of mediums... yes, we'll have Xtranormal and its descendants, but we also have people using the Iphone application as a medium of narrative expression, or Twitter, or whatever else. I'm personally less interested in the content than what each medium does and doesn't allow you to do. I like video and have worked with it a bit, but I like being a solitary worker and don't enjoy paying tons of money to express myself, so I enjoy Xtranormal in that I don't have to engage in a ton of laborious and expensive collaboration. I love dealing with the limitations of these burgeoning forms, such as the fact that people can't leave scenes in Xtranormal. Somehow, I find that really hilarious.
Nice touch at the end there! I see what you mean about dealing with the limitations...
Both of these Xtranormal videos are hilarious (painfully so in the case of Lee's).
One thing I wonder, following up on your discussion, is whether our notions of authorship will shift at all in the wake of the new possibilities you mention. With film and television having become the main sources of the fiction Westerners consume on a daily basis, our default sense of authorship is (I imagine) no longer the solitary writer sitting Woolflike in a room of her own but rather a vast and partly interchangeable team of collaborators. If things like Xtranormal become big, will the default image switch back, I wonder?
I agree -- this isn't quite "new media," but a reconfiguration of various already existing media. The limitations of xtranormal are quite funny and interesting, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes possible to create off-the-shelf episodes of South Park within five years, if not sooner. The costs of labor and collaboration are going to rapidly decline, and there are already many interesting independent films that have been made for almost nothing. The great 2004 science fiction film Primer comes to mind, as do various so-called mumblecore productions.
At the 'high' end of individual possibility, Nina Paley did Sita Sings the Blues, a feature-length animation, almost by herself. She did all the visuals and wrote the script, but needed others to do the voices and music. It took her five years to do it, and she had a career of cartooning and short-form animation leading up to that. So what she did is by no means easily within reach of large numbers of people. But she couldn't have done it at all in, say, 1995 or earlier (she started working on it in 2003).
The 20th C. American Literature Survey class I TA-ed for long time ago read My Antonia. I remember reading, probably in the "Introduction" to the edition chosen for the class, that the novel represents "art's victory over Nebraska." And how it cracked me up. Never been there, not even heard about it much, still a short "art's victory over Nebraska" was enough to let me know what it must be like. A little later, in a composition class I taught, I chose a small piece from biologist Edward Wilson, where he talked about his struggle with faith while attending the University of Alabama, and I just had to introduce it as "science's victory over Alabama." And, for today, how about, "mind's victory over Texas": .... composing (yes, I'll have to say "useless") comments like this still does give me some comfort!
The video is amazing. Thank you and thank you again.
The only false note is the moment when we find that the student got a C in the professor's class. This is obviously just satirical going-over-the-top, but it allows us to excuse the whole scenario as due to the stupidity of the student. Whereas one has had very good students express (in one's salad days one may have oneself expressed) almost the very ideas the student in this video does. Those ideas are not only personal errors but a specific, widely disseminated ideology.
Serious-esque question on the media form for you, Lee, given your interest in hipsterdom and irony: am I right that the blankness, the affectlessness, of the video, combined with its intellectualism and of course the rage seething under the surface, screams hipster? This makes me wonder whether the deadpan, nothing-can-make-me-raise-my-eyebrow style of contemporary hipsterism isn't somehow tied to the heightened potential for deadpan irony afforded by putatively emotionless forms like email, IM, the text message... Are the geometrical cartoon heads here somehow the obverse of the emoticon?
I agree the C is a false note especially since the student claims to have gotten an A on a Shakespeare paper. I don't know if this video screams hipster, though Stuff White People Like reports that one thing "white people" (which I take as, fundamentally, a reference to hipsters) like is grad school.
One response might be that this video is pushing up against the limitations of the form xtranormal makes available -- after all, all xtranormal videos are equally blank in character -- or we might say that the author is taking advantage of xtranormal's affectless machine tone for comic effect. Either way, the blankness of the student and professor are important.
One writer I am growing more interested in, for precisely the reasons you discuss, is Tao Lin, who seems to have turned the flat despair of an IM conversation into a principle of literary design, with mixed success.
The student in the video might be hipster (despite her attire) but the video itself isn't hipster because it's clearly advocating an anti-grad school message, though that might be the current hipster thing to do, which just means that SWPL is out of date post-economic downturn. I've always loved the my field (Comp Lit) gets special mention.
...until a student came into my office with the same pitch. Then I sort of liked it. But I'm rather opposed to self-hating cynicism!
Wikipedia entry on Richard Rorty cites an essay he wrote shortly before his death, "The Fire of Life," where he regrets not having read more poetry. In these words:
With the the questions Lee raises in his post--Will all classic literature be mediated by a new layer of animated figures acting out plots and scenarios originally written in novelistic form? If so, is this a bad thing?--I keep thinking about Rorty's rattling off of old chestnuts. (To rattle off old chestnuts: this was at first only an unusual expression. Then it took me to the hills and chestnut trees of my childhood, how I loved them, etc., and I soon took to it.) I was surprised to find myself answering, "Probably not, not a bad thing at all," but then, I wonder, what will happen to the art of reading poetry? (And, writing it too, for that matter?)
The best first sentence I've read for the past years was Mann's, from Joseph and His Brothers:
The book is some 1,500 pages long in Everyman's Library hardcover edition, and itself, physically, somehow feels like a well with a bottomless depth. It's a forbidding book, and I've read only these two sentences so far. My point is: but what two first sentences! Don't they, how should I say it, come with a halo of LITERATURE? Don't they make you wish for a long, cold winter, during which you will stock your pantry with cartons of wine (and beer too), assortments of coffee, tea and refreshments, shut yourself in and read this book? As a prisoner of winter, in the magic of winter?
Perhaps I felt that way only because I happened to be at a stage in my life where suddenly the past feels like a deep, even bottomless, well. In any case, these two short sentences were such unexpected but tempting invitations to a long, uninterrupted, magical reading. So I also wonder, what will happen to the temptations of this sort? Will the Xtranormal be effective also in creating such temptations?