Tag Archives: Lists

Lists as Art

In order to compliment this week’s Media 1 reading, I looked into the art of lists, or lists as art. As mentioned in a previous reading, lists are considered naïve compared to traditional literature because they lack narrative and story. However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable or beautiful.

I read this article about artists and their lists, unrelated to their art

And this list of artists who use lists in their art

It was interesting because the lists say so much about the people who write them, and in my opinion are more personal even than a story written by these artists might be. This because they are true, they are not fiction. Lists are compiled by what is chosen to display and what is chosen not to display. You can tell a lot about a person, or an artist by what they choose to list and what they do not.

Integrated Media Reading 4

I really agree with Bogost’s discussion about the way lists use, or don’t use, the language of literature. I think it is a refreshing break from the extensive and self-indulgent use of language in literature. Succinct and masterful use of language is necessary to form an eloquent and beautiful narrative though, to tell a story and to create the identification that was discussed in the reading. Lists are not better than traditional literature, though I’m sure they’re older and are perhaps used more commonly, but not for literary purposes.

I didn’t really understand where the Ryan reading fell into this though, as it merely explained what narrative and therefore gave us a clear idea of narrative is not. From this I am still not able to tell if lists would be classed as a narrative or not, because it contains some of those elements which Ryan proposed narratives must have, and it didn’t contain many more.

What I can take from these readings is how to write about the Korsakow readings. If I look at each clip in a project as a list, I can see how the lack of literature, or connecting language, makes these a representation and how they work together and what they do.

First Kiss

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This video intrigues me because (other than the fact that I’m a hopeless romantic) as far as the content goes, it’s kind of like a list. There isn’t really a story there, the creator has taken twenty strangers and asked them to pash, and recorded it.

There you have a list of twenty identical situations using different subjects, with no hierarchy- as is the nature of lists as we discussed in yesterdays Media class.

The  different elements on the list, the videos, the chunks of media, have been cut up and structured, so that they do have a narrative.

There’s a clear beginning, middle and end.  Nervous introductions, a build up of anticipation, the climax: the kiss, multiple of them, and the resolution, breaking up and remembering that the intimate kissers are total strangers.

So here we have a list that has been given a linear narrative.

It’s interesting because it works so well, of course because visually it’s beautiful (the guy at the start please marry me) and also it is emotionally engaging and it appeals to people’s genitalia, and things that do always win.

This is a method that could be applied to other movie making. Documenting actions, events etc, in a list like manner, creating a database, and creating a narrative from this.

Lava’d it.

Lover of lists

For a long time, I have loved lists.

When I was little I kept books of lists, lists of my favourite things mostly, and my least favourite, and things I wanted and places I wanted to go etc. I kept them updated and I did stuff with them.

When I got a bit older I wrote zines which asked people to write their own lists about things they wouldn’t usually think of.

Then I started to become interested in art and film and photography and junk, and I began to think that lists were artless and primitive.

Now I only use them for productivity, writing To Do lists every day and watching my effectivity like a hawk. It works really well for me.

Then last semester in Networked Media we looked at databases, and the way that they act almost as a type of list, or a list as a kind of type of database, and how this in itself was kind of an art and something that modern artists were exploring. The different ways of exploring databases and user experience etc.

And today I ready this, an interview with Umberto Eco, about his exhibition that is preoccupied with lists. He explores lists in modern culture. It’s an interesting read and worth coming back to later if I ever need to justify my list writing to myself.

If Homer did it then why can’t I?