Lifelogging the Living Canvas: Dylan to YouTube
The above YouTube clip, from Minneapolis artist Phil Hansen, doesn’t appear to be all that 3pointD, at first, but appearances can be deceiving. It’s a full five minutes of some really nice action painting with a unique twist (which I won’t give away; hit the Play button already!). In an unbelievably fortuitous moment of technological serendipity, I happened to be listening to Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues on iTunes when I was watching this, and had the YouTube soundtrack turned down. All of which engendered a small epiphany about the history of lifelogging and the origins of the mixed(-up) media we enjoy today. Read on, if you dare.
The video is pieced together from what appears to be stop-motion photography of Hansen painting 30 pictures on his torso, one after another. He spent 20 hours in the actual painting, with a 10-hour break in the middle — including sleeping with the piece still stuck to his chest. This is a very nifty use of the technologies at our disposal these days, new and old, including paint, camera, video editor, Internet, and Web 2.0 (not to mention pillows) — and check out what he does with it at the end. Stop-motion photography, of course, has been around for ages. But being able to share your work so immediately via something like YouTube is a recent development (though even that is not all that new, given the accelerating pace of change).
One thing about this clip that’s special to me is that I discovered it in a twisting path from browsing Twitter, which lets you post little one-liners about what you’re up to from the Web or a mobile phone. Though Prok seems to have missed it in his excellent account of last night’s metaverse meetup, this was part of my answer as to the value of lifelogging. One of the great things about having people lifelogging is that it allows a great deal of discovery. This was the original value of blogs, which started out as collections of cool links that people were interested in sharing with friends or the public (before blogs became about what I had for breakfast). Spread this discovery out into the 3D connectivity of the metaverse, and you start to approach some really cool possibilities. Even on the flat Web, in the few days that I’ve been playing with Twitter and looking at the Twingly screensaver, I’ve already come across several things that were valuable for me to know about in a 3pointD way.
At the end of this post,I’ve blogged the entire discovery chain (coinage?) of how I found Hansen’s YouTube video, but right now I want to get back to Bob Dylan and Subterranean Homesick Blues. If I hadn’t been listening to that song when I was watching that video (made possible by the many miracles of modern technology, of course), I wouldn’t have been put in mind of the 1967 D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don’t Look Back, which follows a young, smooth Dylan on a short tour of the U.K. The clip that came to mind was, of course, the one that accompanies the song I was listening to. Check it out below and see if you can spot what excited me about it.
The clip shows Dylan with a bunch of cue cards containing snippets of lyrics from the song. As the lyrics pass, he drops the next card. It’s a totally informal shot, with Allen Ginsberg talking to someone in the background. It’s also one of those clips that’s always been incredibly compelling, for reasons it’s hard to put a finger on.
It might be a slight stretch, but I see so much of the future (i.e., today) in that clip — and not just because Subterranean Homesick Blues is really a proto-rap song. More to the point, what’s happening in the clip is that Dylan is giving what’s essentially a digitized performance of the song. He isn’t singing, or even lip-synching. He’s “performing” each lyric by displaying an emblematized version of it in a less analog medium than the original song (though a medium — stylized writing — that’s not quite digital, of course).
What’s cool about this is that it’s exactly the same thing Hansen’s doing in the YouTube video at the top of this post, only Hansen’s using more up-to-date lifelogging tools. The 30 pictures he paints on himself are 30 people or works that have influenced his own work and his thinking about art. He could have made a Web-based slide show of the originals, but instead he chose to paint emblematized versions of those images (on his torso!), and to display them in a medium (stop-motion photography) somewhere between the analog and the digital.
I’m really interested in the way these two pieces of film match up, and the fact that lifelogging, in various forms, has been around for ages. The Dylan clip is also interesting for the faux informality of it, which to me is one of the effects that lifelogging is increasingly having these days. One of the misconceptions about what we’ve been calling lifelogging is that it is limited to the quotidian moments of breakfast-eating and going to the store. To my eye, it’s more of a set of tools we can use for anything from diarizing to creating various kinds of works of art. Back when Jerry and Arin and Susan I gave our little talk after a screening of Four Eyed Monsters, one of the points I raised was that the cave paintings at Lascaux could easily be thought of as proto-lifelogging; they were just a record of what a few creative cavemen had been up to recently, recorded with the tools at their disposal. If they’d lived today, they’d probably have Twittered it.
Call me crazy.
Discovery chain:
• browsing the public timeline on Twitter
• spotted Twitter user kroosh, thought she was cute, clicked through to her profile
• clicked through kroosh’s profile to her blog
• read down her blog until I found the post with the Hansen clip
• clicked through to the Wooster Collective site, where kroosh originally spotted the clip
• read down their blog until I found the post with the clip
• clicked over to the YouTube page containing the clip
• clicked through that to Hansen’s page describing the project
• blogged it up on 3pointD
Feeds
Awesome. The word palimpsest” comes to mind.
ooh, good call, Hugo. With Dylan’s being a kind of reverse palimpsest of some sort, or an undoing of a palimpsest. Or I wonder if Pennebaker thought that up.
Sigh. I didn’t “miss it,” I just didn’t agree with it, and I was waiting for you to explain it more, because your answer, that “it enabled you to find out all these neat things that people are doing” doesn’t quite track without a lot of filtering and time. That is, if I go and find your friends, add Robert Scoble and Joi Ito, and I find out Robert Scoble hasn’t had dinner yet and is driving up north to some conference, and Joi’s hands are cold before he meditates, I’m not sure that I have an epiphany here, Walker. What I have is a series of many possible developing epiphanies and stagesets-for-epiphanies that might either produce insights when scrambled enough, or aggregated enough (let’s say if we find out that all males in the developed worlds tend to have cold hands we may be on to a health alert) or proximated enough (that person who always wanted to meet Robert Scoble is driving up North too etc.) — but the time spent and the filtering to get to those epiphanies is probably going to be too expensive. Especially because twitter makes it very hard to even figure out how to find friends at first (hint: look for your own profile’s stats, at the bottom of all the stuff about Spontaneous Me, look for an icon of a magnifying glass, THAT is where your friends may be hiding — but don’t put in search terms it only looks up names).
I’m liking Vox better to achieve the purpose of spontaneous epiphanies.
Now as to your comparison of Dylan and Hansen.
Dylan is not lifelogging. He’s chanting a poem about a life that is edited and created to say something about a life. The cue cards contain not only the poem’s words, they enable him to get the reader to go off an free-associate to the funny things he’s done with them like SUCKCESS where you have to suck up to people or MAN WHOLE, where falling down a man hole, a tragic accident, in fact might be what makes you whole in some life-changing fashion, and so on.
He leads the reader to follow him and wait anxiously for each new word because once you hear there’s a rhyme, you wait for the next word to rhyme, too. It’s literature and its engaging.
With Hansen, after the first minute where you got the gag that he was drawing paintings on his chest that looked like silkscreens, you are done. At least, I’m done, waiting for it to end, it’s boring and repetitive. Unlike Dylan, who draws you into a work of art where he himself is stepping out of the frame, or is the frame, and is not putting himself in the picture, Hansen most emphatically puts himself in the picture because he didn’t have to draw on his chest, he could draw on a wall.
Unlike Dylan’s text, that tells the sad ballad of a young man growing up in the modern world controlled by all kinds of forces he can’t affect, Hansen just keeps making silkscreens of people with the story somehow not connected. Did the man in the one silkscreen get shot and end up in a wheelchair? Is it his baby asleep? or whatever. You could make it up like Rohrschach blots, but there isn’t a shared meaning. When Dylan writes SUCKCESS, he doesn’t have to tell you twice.
I mean, Dylan’s cards are crude and not even synced right in time with the song (or perhaps, very cleverly, are deliberately NOT synced in order to make you think), but Hansen is just an endless paint job, where you say, oh, that guy is talented, some people can curl their tongues or swallow fire, but he can paint upside down on his own chest.
The act of removing the painting from his chest, then turning it into a delicate silhouette is actually the best scene in the film, where he retires from doing a sort of “don’t try this at home, kids!” stunt to get attention on YouTube, but then shows us his real art.
The song was cool though, glad to have discovered it.
agree, Prok, that he’s not really lifelogging. I just like the match-up of formats and analogous tools. The painter isn’t really lifelogging either, except in a small way. Again, though, it’s the tools. I’m just throwing stuff out there with this post and hoping to get some opinions back, even if — or especially if — they’re dissenting, which often equates to thought-broadening on my part, which is ultimately what I’m after.
Well maybe you could tell me if you perceived the guy’s paintings on his chest as a lifelog, a story, or just a kind of graphic clip-art kind of extravagandza, you know, he just did the kind of graphics he knew, and ran through a random repetoire. Maybe he IS lifelogging. I have to go trace back all through your links and see does it tell what he’s thinking.
Prok, I think Hansen is documenting his influences by using the tools of lifelogging. He is using lifelogging to make art. I don’t see lifelogging as necessarily limited to “what I did today” but just as a term for the constellation of tools now at our disposal, or coming soon. But, to tell you the truth, my thinking is still evolving on this, and that might reach too far.