Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets: monochrom.
Sock puppets (real, not metaphorical) deconstruct the symbolism of George Orwell's 1984 in the latest BBtv afterschool special from Austrian subversive art collective monochrom. Kiki and Bubu explore the age-old question of whether sexuality exists on the internet, and the soft-sculpture proletariat struggle continues.
Previously:
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig
the latest
the latest
You can find the director's uncut on
http://www.monochrom.at/kiki-and-bubu/
And of course on the Almighty YouTube.
I find it funny/ironic that after Bubu says, "They are manipulated" the ad for Verizon kicks in. Commentary or synchronicity?
I hope monochrome keeps doing these. I don't email everybody in my address book with garbage ever really, but I can't help letting everyone know Kiki and Bubu are out. Sock puppets really are the only way I learn anything.
I have to say though, Michael Bay looks a total dick when his ad comes on in the middle of a commentary about media. I hope he sees this, realises he isn't fooling anyone, and produces a full length Kiki and Bubu feature film. Really nothing he's done with millions of dollars compares to the awesomeness of sock puppets talking about marxism.
However, surveillance as a privilege? It's more complicated then that, surely. There's a narrow bridge between the middle class romanticising of the working class and the middle class disgust for the working class. At any rate, state interference is much more direct and less subtle.
Our fabric brethren haven't had this much fun with Michael Bay since Team America: World Police.
I find it ironic that after finishing the end of the story how with the line 'I conquered myself and learned to love big brother', he then turns to the camera and makes a case for why you to need to love big brother and that it is not so bad because it is a privilege.
And that is how I conquered myself and learned to love big brother.... thanks to sock puppets.
It is wonderful as always to see that monochrom is still hitting nails on heads (as painfully as that metaphor combines with sock puppets).
I love these, brilliant.
"However, surveillance as a privilege? It's more complicated then that, surely. There's a narrow bridge between the middle class romanticising of the working class and the middle class disgust for the working class."
There is a middle class? Not much longer I'd say. I also liked "I wonder if there is any sexuality on the internet?" I think we can answer that with a resounding "No".
BB! BB!
@License Farm: You will never know ;-)
@GRENZ (Johannes from monochrom, everyone), I just realized that BuBu sounds like the way an infant might try to pronounce "boing boing." Is there some deeper layer of meaning I'm missing?
Also, the music in this episode is stuck in my head IN A BAD WAY.
Also, Michael Bay is doing a VO for the next monochrom BBtv episode, guys. It will be AWESOME.
XJ
@xeni: Haha... no sorry. It's a reference to the Bouba-Kiki effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
The most awesome way to say "awesome" is my grandfather's (see: "Campfire At Will")
(I wonder if Michael Bay's online nick is michaelbayarea51)
I think the implication was that surveillance as an alternative to direct coercion (for example, being deprived of food, clothes, and shelter or being put in jail) was a privilege.
While the poorest among us are kept in line by armed enforcers who use violence routinely, the "middle class" is merely watched, and given the implicit threat that if they're seen doing the wrong things, they could suffer the same fate that the unfavored classes already do.
Basically, the reason institutions use surveillance to control us is because it's a softer, pleasanter version of control. One to use when you don't want to offend or upset the victim too much. So it's perfect for the middle class, because while the establishment does want to control us, it also needs us to feel happy and loyal to them, because we play a vital role in their continued oppression of the people who outright hate them.
I guess that makes sense, zikzak, but the BB post about the woman who got fired for shaving her head put me in mind of another story, of the Tim Horton's woman who got fired because cctv caught her giving a crying baby a mini-donut. The trade off in worker's rights law is that since mangers need a good reason to fire an employee, they have an excuse to introduce extra surveillance, you know, to catalogue every tiny mistake until they have a legitimate legal ability to fire someone. So you can't be fired for no reason, but you can't get away with the little things you used to that made the job tolerable: little bits from the register, slacking off, free merch, spitting in the coffee, whatever. There may not be many cameras in the South Bronx or Deptford or South Boston or wherever--there yeah, you have cops roaming the streets, ready for when you step out of line--but in the workplace it seems surveillance on the working class is alive and well.
ps--the bouba/kiki effect sounds cool, Grenz, I've heard something like that before. As a Lacanian I'm obliged to say: It's just social conditioning I tell you!, but still.
@grenz, indeed, your grandpa's pronunciation of AWESOME beats Michael Bay by a long shot:
http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/01/16/monochrom-campfire-a.html
@scottfree: ah, you're a lacanian! simpatico!
and yes: the kiki/bouba effect is more like an insider joke -- not a subtext.
Well that makes three of us then Grenz. I've been watching Žižek's "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" which is just fantastic. YouTube user Mariborchan has a lot of his videos on his channel.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Mariborchan
He has a lot of good stuff there.
I knew you were using the Lacanian/Kojevian dialectic in your arguments on religious threads, Noen. I don't agree with the dismissal of the aufheban, by the way.
Anyway, Zizek, internet sexuality, half decent interview in which he says what he always says [you know, the 'coffee without caffeine; soda without sugar; form without content' bit to question whether cybersex is 'sex without sex' or sex as it really is, since pornographic fantasy takes the place of a 'real' partner: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2492/1.html
fak u michael bay.
True, scottfree. And interestingly, surveillance in the workplace isn't considered as outrageous or inappropriate as surveillance in public. Maybe because of that class division? Surveillance in public affects everyone, whereas workplace surveillance only affects those who have to work for shitty, disrespectful employers?
Also, workplace surveillance hasn't generally been couched in terms of safety or benefit to the surveilled. It's a pretty straightforward tool to control the owner's investments. I guess what I mean is that in the workplace it's an openly hostile gesture and everyone knows it, and if you don't like it, you're fired. Whereas with public surveillance there has to be this attempt to sell it and convince the victims of its value to them. And even in a lot of cases, convince people to participate in it at all, since some systems are semi-voluntary (such as RFID subway cards).
It's definitely not black-and-white. I guess the important point is that people treat 1984-style pervasive surveillance as the worst-case nightmare situation, when in reality living in that kind of society would be pretty desirable to a huge number of people on the planet who are suffering and dying from lack of very basic needs. The real nightmare scenario is starving to death, and it's happening now. Just not to us.
#12 Well the thing they got wrong was that neither constant observation nor direct coercion are a privilege. The real privilege comes to those at the top who are trusted enough to not need constant observation or coercion to be members of society.
The idea in a liberal society is that all people are worthy of this trust... within moderation of course.
I guess in Orwell labour is considered as a totality: workers and managers function toward the same end, the health of the state, an abstract, and this health manifests in the affluence of top party members who despite their affluence maintain a managed role as custodians of the system. In Orwell, the high ranking party members are kept in line/have limited freedom because deviation from the state's code is a threat to their affluence. The surveillance is necessary on the lower party members because these people are necessary:vital cogs in the economic machine, they effectively produce the state for which the proles work, if that makes sense.
Here in real life, labour isn't a totality because there remain unglobalised aspects to it. So in the U.S. or U.K., traditional working class industrial jobs are moving to northern Mexico, central America, the South Pacific, and these jobs sucked, yeah, but they were also the highest paying jobs anyone was likely to get, and remain so where they are now. North Mexico is a relatively rich place, but it wouldn't take much for those jobs to move along to, say, Trinidad, if Mexicans started raising their heads. There remains an 'outside' to Capitalism [or is that the illusion?] to be used as a credible threat without necessitating Big Brother style surveillance. But surveillance is required in service economy jobs--McDonald's, Donut shop, whatever--because these jobs cannot be exported--they need to stay where people are rich enough to buy the stuff they sell. I suppose surveillance here is a symbol of power: the service industry doesn't need these specific employees, but it needs the job to get done because there's nowhere else it can go. So that could be a basis for organisation, maybe.
just to conclude: if globalisation reached the level of 1984, then surveillance would need to as well, since there would be no untapped people lying around to take the job the guys you had weren't doing.
"There remains an 'outside' to Capitalism"
There always has to be. For once it becomes total it can no longer sustain itself. Unless we can expand into space. Perhaps that's why Bush wanted to push for human settlements on Mars. He was thinking long term.
But, we've always been at war with Triton.
Don't forget that in 1984, the freedom of the ruling class is the ability to partake in resistant ideology (Goldsteinism) without being marked by them, by virtue of participating in its continual re-integration into the dominant ideology.
Lacan? Zizek? I'm really too drunk to comment any further in this thread.
Now I will have the Alla Turca Allegretto from Mozart's piano sonata K331 stuck in my head for DAYS and shall henceforth be unable to disassociate it with sock puppets. This is especially unfortunate because it's one of the few sonatas I can play from memory.
Drat.
You pose the interesting question of "whether sexuality exists on the internet". I venture to suggest that this item makes the answer quite clear. "Kiki", in the Philippines, is the slang term for the female genitalia.
Perhaps I'm missing a larger point, but the liberals are the bad guys here, or is this some type of spin on the demonization of liberals?
I'm new to Kiki and Bouba so maybe I'm missing the joke. Forgive me if that's the case.