Last post

I have been thinking about my last post and how I called my recent use of GIMP something I'd "devolved" to. OK. I did want to draw attention to my use of digital tools--specifically, how these tools augment what it is possible for me to do and be; how I can legally take someone else's creative commons image of Napoleon's hat and put it on an official image of myself (this is the one my employer uses, and frankly, I think it's one of the nicer portraits of me out there--which has everything to do with its excellent photographer whom I will leave here unnamed in the interest of privacy). I can wear this priceless hat in Paris in Plattsburgh without getting arrested. In fact, because this image's photographer chose to license this image in such a way that derivations are allowed--which is very generous--the invitation for other uses of this photograph and what it contains exist. What I have done is explored one of these uses.

Now, when I made this picture, I definitely was thinking about how I think it's funny. I have always thought these hats look great, yet I think I might never have the opportunity to actually put one on. They do sell souvenir versions of these and similar hats at places and events that re-enact earlier periods; I know, for example, that they do at colonial Williamsburg. A friend of mine once was videotaped wearing one of these in a shop there--and I can say that because his face is so expressive, and it's live, it's the funniest thing. There he is in summer vacation clothes, in a shop filled with kitsch, wearing kitsch, performing a version of himself-as-colonist. It's wonderful, and it was a moment of comic genius that in my mind will never--as an instance of wearing a hat for comic effect--be surpassed. (Or that's what I'm betting on.) My point, though, here, is that they do sell hats like this and that I've been inspired by that moment ever since I saw it on film.

Now, I wasn't there when they shot that footage. I know it only as a text, but because of that video, it's a memory for me--a memory of watching my friend wearing that hat. A possibility that wouldn't have existed had it not been for digital video--an aperture, thousands of images of him standing in that store, sequenced, passing before my eye at a blisteringly fast speed, creating an object that is a source of joy for me forever. It's a living thing. This is making me think of Marshall McLuhan on what the change from literacy to "electracy" (I think he says that, but I mean, communication enabled and mediated by digital tools) and how electracy recreates the now-ness of orality. And it does. I have never been to Williamsburg, but I have been there--at that moment of watching my friend wearing that hat--many, many times, and as a part of my memory, I always will be at that moment. It's a part of my expanding present, particularly now as I write this.

OK.

So I was as I said working on using GIMP to cut and paste images on images. And I was thinking of how digital tools don't make art in and of themselves. And I was thinking of how my image wasn't art but just me playing around.

I started to think of this: Could I convert this from light play into serious play? Could it actually come to mean something more? Could I manipulate the image further--with text, perhaps, by using "paths" (the tool one uses to create "from the ground up" images to embed into pre-existing ones)--to invite viewers to look for more in this thing?

Well, by itself, with the bicorne hat on my head, it'd be hard for me to have them see anything beyond "oh, he cut and pasted the hat onto his picture." So, at best, this brings up the idea of one function that a photoshopping program has. That's a valuable thing.

But I was interested in meaning something more than that, too. I became interested in a few things. These included

1. troping on some serious art from the past (as new media art often does this--taking something old and remixing it for a new purpose, while maintaining fidelity to some aspect of what it meant in its original context)--I started thinking about Rene Magritte's painting of a pipe that reads "Ce n'est pas un pipe").
2. playing with how an image can be used as a background for text.
3. in the dual reality of being a flesh-and-bone person and being augmented by digital tools--having a digital identity (digital identities--serious, comic, worker, traveler, pragmatic, dreamer of time-travel). (This is something I wanted to get at by showing myself "wearing" this hat that is in a highly guarded glass box. Am I wearing it? Who am I, a digital or flesh-and-bone self? Of course, I am both, but these are not the same and exist in some tension with one another. And I wanted to draw attention to that fact.)
4. how a digital identity is a specific thing and therefore somehow unlike my flesh-and-bone identities--and drawing attention to this fact.
5. playing with what seems trivial so that it's almost impossible to think of it as trivial anymore, yet remembering that I am wearing a hat that looks strange and makes me look starved for attention, vain, etc. at worst or funny at best.
6. showing that a difference between traditional US art and new media art is the possibility of making infinite copies (of a hat, of segments of text).

I would say numbers 5 and 6 are the most important ones for me.

So, with this preamble, let me amble along and post the again modified image of this picture: