Click Opera Interview: Bjoern Karnebogen
Apr. 2nd, 2005 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusRewriting history is a favourite hobby of mine, whether it's imagining the 18th century with electronics or picturing a 21st century Japanese aristocrat indulging sordid appetites in London 1888. So I was delighted to come across the Flash illustration kits of Bjoern Karnebogen, a man after my own heart.
Bjoern has made two "parallel universe construction kits" available on the web; he groups them under the title Rewrite History because that's what both of them allow you to do. When I discovered the Hokusai Manga Construction Kit a couple of weeks ago I thought it must be a Japanese project, but in fact Bjoern (a 28 year-old based in Cologne, Germany) made it while he was artist in residence in Sapporo, Hokkaido at the end of 2004. (Spooky co-incidence: a month later I was also an artist in residence in Hokkaido.) When I mentioned the Hokusai game on Design Observer Bjoern wrote to thank me, adding:
"I suggest that you are a Scotsman, so maybe this tool is also interesting for you! Do your own medieval embroidery with the tapestry of Bayeux-based Historic Tale Construction Kit."
Accepting Bjoern's suggestion that I be a Scotsman, I clicked the link and found a digital machine for making instant anachronistic tapestries. Something out of H.G. Wells (and also well outside the pop video cliches of much Flash work)! Suitably impressed, I thought I'd ask Bjoern how he came to make this work. He replied:
"In my diploma thesis Type and Image I was dealing with - well - the relationship between type and image. So in these studies I came across comic-like creations like the Tapestry of Bayeux. But have a look here..."
I looked and found Bjoern's immaculately-presented diploma thesis outline, which makes playful links between type and image. The thesis page is full of Flash toys you can play with: I particularly loved A Historic Tale, with its medieval music and computer voice. The whole thesis is available to download (in German only) as a pdf, but there's also a short precis in English. In it, Bjoern explains that he wanted to "give the alphabet or respectively the latin letters a more pictorial and emotional impression. It is done in an abstract, associative way, with motion and animation, or more obviously with sugar cubes and french fries."
Now, what I find really interesting about the mission Bjoern has settled on is that it doesn't just connect the present to the past, it also makes a link between reason and emotion and between Europe and Asia. Chinese and Japanese scripts are based on pictograms; they are images, not abstractions. As Godard said, "Il n'y a pas une juste image, il y a juste une image" — "There are no just images, there are just images." Our Western tendency to abstraction of text from texture, and truth from images of the world, leads to Platonic assumptions that truth lies in some inaccessible realm of "the universal". It leaches out of the soil of the particular the rooted, situated mini-truths that reside in each thing. Platonism's mistrust of the present and the visible combined with Christianity's destruction of the animistic traditions which linked gods with rocks, trees, rivers... specific things. In Asia, the persistence of pictographic scripts and animistic religions like Shinto preserved respect for the particular, and for the rootedness or situatedness of truth. But by thinking, like Asians, in images instead of abstract symbols perhaps we can cure ourselves of this habit of abstraction, and reconnect reason with emotion.
In his book Picturing Japaneseness (Columbia UP, 1995) Darrell William Davis describes the ideas of Barrie Greenbie, a professor of landscape architecture and urban design:
"Western rationalist epistemology elevates reason over feeling, says Greenbie, and this initiates a kind of mental schism that banishes affect from our concepts and abstractions. Since abstractions like money, prestige and morality disregard particularities in favor of generalities, Western thinking evacuates feelings from our public life. But according to Greenbie,
"It seems that the Japanese do not abstract at the expense of feeling, at least not to the extent that modern Westerners do. The Japanese appear to acknowledge in their own behaviour and in the arrangement of their habitat the contradictions inherent in the divided brain, whereas Westerners tend to deny those contradictions. With an acceptance of contradictions between affect and concept, particular and general, there is an opportunity to perceive, integrate, and express them in objects and behaviour through the performance of an "imaginative unification/synthesis." This bridges the gap between the affective self and the potentially alien qualities of inanimate objects and concepts alike. These are humanized by clearly bounding them according to a modular logic that controls proxemic domestic relations.""
(Davis is quoting from Barrie B. Greenbie's Space and Spirit in Modern Japan, Yale University Press, 1988.)
Well, excuse that diversion! But do you see where I'm going with this? Bjoern Karnebogen's work is an attempt by a Westerner to "heal" our cerebral wounds, our tendency to detach the particular from the universal, and emotion from reason. He's helping us recover from Plato! And this mission comes directly from his exposure to Japan. Bjoern again:
"When I was invited to Japan I thought about the long graphical and calligraphical tradition of Japan and saw the works of Hokusai, especially the Hokusai Manga, which fit perfectly well in doing a Hokusai Manga Construction Kit. So I created this tool completely in Japanese with hiragana writing (with lots of help from kind Japanese people). There is even now a fanblog, Hokusai Blog (full of screenshots), and these guys tortured the HTCK!"
Something else strikes me about Bjoern's work. It's Flash used for its own sake, rather than Flash used to make an ersatz website interface, or emulate a pop video. Flash used as website interface is one of my pet hates; the Platonist in me wants to whole of the web to have a common interface, to be text-based, searchable, familiar, universal. But Flash particularizes the browser, wresting control from me, making me learn a new interface each time I arrive at a site, excluding the site from universal searches and direct links. Flash sites can be entertaining, but they can also be the most tedious thing in the world.
But—don't you see?—this question of Flash versus HTML is central to the schisms outlined by Davis and Greenbie above. It resembles the struggles between particular and universal, art and knowledge, analogue and digital, emotion and reason, female and male, East and West, pictogram and alphabet. And Bjoern Karnebogen is right there in the battlezone, making digital tapestries of the action. If Greenbie is right, there are no "winners" in these battles. But there are cultures which stage them more elegantly and harmoniously than others, and build their inherent contradictions safely and successfully into the fabric of public life.
Bjoern has made two "parallel universe construction kits" available on the web; he groups them under the title Rewrite History because that's what both of them allow you to do. When I discovered the Hokusai Manga Construction Kit a couple of weeks ago I thought it must be a Japanese project, but in fact Bjoern (a 28 year-old based in Cologne, Germany) made it while he was artist in residence in Sapporo, Hokkaido at the end of 2004. (Spooky co-incidence: a month later I was also an artist in residence in Hokkaido.) When I mentioned the Hokusai game on Design Observer Bjoern wrote to thank me, adding:
"I suggest that you are a Scotsman, so maybe this tool is also interesting for you! Do your own medieval embroidery with the tapestry of Bayeux-based Historic Tale Construction Kit."
Accepting Bjoern's suggestion that I be a Scotsman, I clicked the link and found a digital machine for making instant anachronistic tapestries. Something out of H.G. Wells (and also well outside the pop video cliches of much Flash work)! Suitably impressed, I thought I'd ask Bjoern how he came to make this work. He replied:
"In my diploma thesis Type and Image I was dealing with - well - the relationship between type and image. So in these studies I came across comic-like creations like the Tapestry of Bayeux. But have a look here..."
I looked and found Bjoern's immaculately-presented diploma thesis outline, which makes playful links between type and image. The thesis page is full of Flash toys you can play with: I particularly loved A Historic Tale, with its medieval music and computer voice. The whole thesis is available to download (in German only) as a pdf, but there's also a short precis in English. In it, Bjoern explains that he wanted to "give the alphabet or respectively the latin letters a more pictorial and emotional impression. It is done in an abstract, associative way, with motion and animation, or more obviously with sugar cubes and french fries."
Now, what I find really interesting about the mission Bjoern has settled on is that it doesn't just connect the present to the past, it also makes a link between reason and emotion and between Europe and Asia. Chinese and Japanese scripts are based on pictograms; they are images, not abstractions. As Godard said, "Il n'y a pas une juste image, il y a juste une image" — "There are no just images, there are just images." Our Western tendency to abstraction of text from texture, and truth from images of the world, leads to Platonic assumptions that truth lies in some inaccessible realm of "the universal". It leaches out of the soil of the particular the rooted, situated mini-truths that reside in each thing. Platonism's mistrust of the present and the visible combined with Christianity's destruction of the animistic traditions which linked gods with rocks, trees, rivers... specific things. In Asia, the persistence of pictographic scripts and animistic religions like Shinto preserved respect for the particular, and for the rootedness or situatedness of truth. But by thinking, like Asians, in images instead of abstract symbols perhaps we can cure ourselves of this habit of abstraction, and reconnect reason with emotion.In his book Picturing Japaneseness (Columbia UP, 1995) Darrell William Davis describes the ideas of Barrie Greenbie, a professor of landscape architecture and urban design:
"Western rationalist epistemology elevates reason over feeling, says Greenbie, and this initiates a kind of mental schism that banishes affect from our concepts and abstractions. Since abstractions like money, prestige and morality disregard particularities in favor of generalities, Western thinking evacuates feelings from our public life. But according to Greenbie,
"It seems that the Japanese do not abstract at the expense of feeling, at least not to the extent that modern Westerners do. The Japanese appear to acknowledge in their own behaviour and in the arrangement of their habitat the contradictions inherent in the divided brain, whereas Westerners tend to deny those contradictions. With an acceptance of contradictions between affect and concept, particular and general, there is an opportunity to perceive, integrate, and express them in objects and behaviour through the performance of an "imaginative unification/synthesis." This bridges the gap between the affective self and the potentially alien qualities of inanimate objects and concepts alike. These are humanized by clearly bounding them according to a modular logic that controls proxemic domestic relations.""
(Davis is quoting from Barrie B. Greenbie's Space and Spirit in Modern Japan, Yale University Press, 1988.)
Well, excuse that diversion! But do you see where I'm going with this? Bjoern Karnebogen's work is an attempt by a Westerner to "heal" our cerebral wounds, our tendency to detach the particular from the universal, and emotion from reason. He's helping us recover from Plato! And this mission comes directly from his exposure to Japan. Bjoern again:
"When I was invited to Japan I thought about the long graphical and calligraphical tradition of Japan and saw the works of Hokusai, especially the Hokusai Manga, which fit perfectly well in doing a Hokusai Manga Construction Kit. So I created this tool completely in Japanese with hiragana writing (with lots of help from kind Japanese people). There is even now a fanblog, Hokusai Blog (full of screenshots), and these guys tortured the HTCK!"
Something else strikes me about Bjoern's work. It's Flash used for its own sake, rather than Flash used to make an ersatz website interface, or emulate a pop video. Flash used as website interface is one of my pet hates; the Platonist in me wants to whole of the web to have a common interface, to be text-based, searchable, familiar, universal. But Flash particularizes the browser, wresting control from me, making me learn a new interface each time I arrive at a site, excluding the site from universal searches and direct links. Flash sites can be entertaining, but they can also be the most tedious thing in the world.
But—don't you see?—this question of Flash versus HTML is central to the schisms outlined by Davis and Greenbie above. It resembles the struggles between particular and universal, art and knowledge, analogue and digital, emotion and reason, female and male, East and West, pictogram and alphabet. And Bjoern Karnebogen is right there in the battlezone, making digital tapestries of the action. If Greenbie is right, there are no "winners" in these battles. But there are cultures which stage them more elegantly and harmoniously than others, and build their inherent contradictions safely and successfully into the fabric of public life.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-02 09:41 am (UTC)I know that others would see these 'inaccuracies' as flaws, but these are precisely the elements I love most about the book. Personally I think the idea of realism in fiction is a dead-end. Many so-called realists do not seem to take their ideas to their logical conclusion, which is to simply be reporters, since, ultimately, anything that has not actually happened in the chain of cause and effect that is history, is not only improbable, but impossible, unless we posit parallel universes. But since I suggest that no one alive has the computing power to trace cause and effect within a complex system, such as an entire planet, we must assume emergence within fiction - which is the task of the imagination.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-02 11:29 am (UTC)On another level, one problem with eschewing so-called rational methods of identification is that we lose the ability to form new identifications, post-break. Along the lines of thinking these ideas to the natural conclusions, ejecting symbolic language from the game leaves us without a playing field (e.g., Click Opera and it's English language, HTML encoding).
Momus writes lyrics, right? He scoffed in a comment a while back when I suggested some language might be created, or come into existence, without intentionality. I would submit that this is exactly what he's looking for here, promoting, yearning for, even.
I realize these are just fanciful ideas, and perhaps Momus doesn't actually intend (pun intended)(and so on, recursively) to pursue them to their logical conclusions.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-02 12:45 pm (UTC)Do you mean that we then forfeit the ability to claim our own arguments as rational and therefore have to provide some other authority for them? Well, this is a difficult question. Obviously, I was using logic in constructing the ideas I expressed above. But perhaps, after all, this is to do with what Momus was saying in terms of these opposites not having to be quite so mutually exclusive within an Eastern mindset. Perhaps the problem lies exactly in taking anything to its logical conclusion.
To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure where I was going with my remarks, they were simply thoughts I've been having recently. But I'm sure a study of philosophy shows that any system of thought that one builds up eventually reveals its own loopholes. This seems to me similar to Burroughs' idea of many gods being superior to a One God Universe. One god can only get you so far in your journey before you have to start praying to a different god. Therefore, any of these ideas that I might pursue may have a logic that takes me a certain distance, but I would probably be foolish to think it will be all the logic I ever need.
I hope I'm not talking to cross-purposes here.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-02 02:27 pm (UTC)On one level, yes. And on another, perhaps allowing just any jack-handy that comes along to commandeer the label of rationality is relinquishing control of the terminology too easily. Simply claiming to be a champion of reason doesn't make one so. I would agree with Momus' recent anti-reason treatise insofar as I don't think what he's describing (as being undesirable) is really all that.. well, reasonable to being with. This may be a problem of rhetoric rather than a real problem of philosophy, as Momus admits in another post that he does in fact want his dentist to be rational. Maybe we're using difficult words where others would suffice.
'But perhaps, after all, this is to do with what Momus was saying in terms of these opposites not having to be quite so mutually exclusive within an Eastern mindset. Perhaps the problem lies exactly in taking anything to its logical conclusion.'
Obviously this can be traced back all the way to Descartes and before, and argued all the way there and back, but to me I just see closet dualism reasserting itself with every new binary that's presented ('America' vs. 'Japan,' etc. [yes, I think the quotes are appropriate here]). I think the reason I keep responding to these posts is that I'm disappointed I don't see a really reason-disconnected mode of thinking emerging. I want Momus to live up to his own hype! If Momus means to simply expose the limitations of various sets of binaries, perhaps artfully ridiculing these rigid ways of perceiving, then I can put forward no complaint, as this moves him into closer proximity with my own place on the -- purely sub-rational, I assure you with only the barest trace of sarcasm! -- map. However, I sense sometimes that much in these post-modern promotional essays is being put forth as an obtuse shortcut to justifying typical old binaries and prejudices (the blanket demonizations and diefications of supposedly monolithic cultures, etc.) which hardly require such baroque phrasing to posit.
'But I'm sure a study of philosophy shows that any system of thought that one builds up eventually reveals its own loopholes. This seems to me similar to Burroughs' idea of many gods being superior to a One God Universe. One god can only get you so far in your journey before you have to start praying to a different god. Therefore, any of these ideas that I might pursue may have a logic that takes me a certain distance, but I would probably be foolish to think it will be all the logic I ever need.'
This is perhaps closest to my own view, but somewhat conflicts with the blunt anthropology often applied by this blog. My problem with any positive statement is that it invariably does violence to some other, perhaps equally flawed, though equally valid, epistimology. All fine and good as we nibble chocolates in the salon, but as Momus points out, when Americans make the mistake of pushing a tautalogy into literal policy, consequences be damned, the outcome can be very solid, concrete, felt dentally by the rest of the world.
How to reconcile the longing to escape boundaries with the urge to draw them around others?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-02 10:08 am (UTC)Comics are potentially the most perfect modernist/cubist narrative form, but I guess it's not surprising that those possibilities are not often acknowledged in your average issue of Archie or whatever...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-02 11:33 am (UTC)thanks !
The Philosopher as Cultural Physician
Date: 2005-04-02 05:49 pm (UTC)This essay has made my morning! It struck me as quite similar to what i have been feeling as i read the book "Wagner & Nietzsche" written by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau & Joachim Neugroschel this week.
Speaking of which, have you seen Roujin Z by Katsuhiro Otomo? It's an animated movie about an experiment artificially intelligent automated nurse/hospital bed that develops the personality of the deceased wife of the senior it is taking care of. The ending of the movie struck me as only being possible in a Japanese cartoon.
s.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-02 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-03 03:38 am (UTC)Not in any way an expert on Japan myself, but if what Kerr says is true (60 percent of Japan's coastline is concreted, and 40 percent of the Japanese national budget goes to new construction, a figure that dwarfs America's eight percent) then there is cause for some meaure of concern, at least environmentally.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-03 11:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-04 10:49 am (UTC)Friday's entry was a spoof, although I do think Europe is the model for the future: a liberal bloc, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, dominating through stability and economic magnetism rather than war.
As for Japan, I think everything revolves around the double meaning of this term Japanize. There's an import version and an export version of Japanizing. The import version is that Japan has always Japanized foreign imports, and that's something we can all learn from (hybridism, customization, a local response to global trading conditions). But the other more radical meaning of Japanize is what I just did when I said "That's something we can all learn from": to propose Japan as a model for every country in the world. And I think Japan really can be that kind of model, because its postmodernism is more radical and more advanced than any which yet exists in the West or in other Asian countries. Just as Marx went to England to get glimpses of what might come after industrial age capitalism, so a latter-day Marx would have to go to Japan to get glimpses of what comes after postmodern consumer culture.
Bjoern Karnebogen is, like me, a non-Japanese artist whose whole way of thinking and creating has been given direction and impetus by exposure to Japanese art, and to the country itself.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-04 11:06 am (UTC)I could rip this Alex Kerr interview a dozen new assholes, from the internal inconsistencies ("I don't recommend any changes to Japan, but if I did...") to the implausible assertions that the Japanese don't know how to run hospitals (well, they seem to know better than the Americans, considering the lower cancer mortality rates, higher life expectancy, etc), are behind in technology (really?), the conspiracy theory element in the idea that everything wrong is connected to everything else wrong, his capitalist-individualist wish to see charismatic politicians rather than bureaucrats determining national direction (Japan too communist-collectivist for ya?), his equation of concretisation programmes with "urban sprawl" (not the same thing at all), and above all his overall assertion that Japan is a country where modernisation has simply failed (wow, a "failed state" is the second richest in the world, and paying for your state's budget deficit, Mr Kerr! Scary!)... But I won't bother. You know, it's just Alex Kerr.