On micro-celebrity culture.

NPR's Kojo Nnamdi sits down with Hal Niedzviecki, author of "The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and our Neighbors (City Lights, San Francisco) and founder of the Broken Pencil Magazine to examine the transition of pop culture into peep culture. Facebook, bloggging and twitter, here we go.

I happen to hate the term, but the observation is on point and something I have been mulling over lately, as any self-respecting element of the synchronicity should be doing.

For the first time in nine years of life in America I feel in tune with it's culture: facebook addiction, voyerism, cybersex, google and wiki over institutionalized learning; all creation digital... self as a brand, self unmentioned, self partitioned for the public eye. Everyone's in the yellow papers now, but IS privacy a commodity to be exchanged for attention, as Hal states? And by the way, what a great name...

I believe there is a place in this whirlpool for a person to preserve their dignity and live in line with the honor of their life and the REAL. For myself, I must formulate a rule in order to stay sane in the pull of this mass addiction:

No digital act shall be taken as an end in itself. Only as a means to create the REAL.

Not vice versa. I will not join the obsession with publicizing one's own life out of the sheer kick of the quasi underground celebrity. What I will give is art. Work. Creation. Yes it may be personal, as any human being is limited by their person, but do not for a second fall into the false assumption that you know me. And I will respect you in return in not assuming that your blog and facebook posts sum up even such a small part of you, as your character.

Creation of the REAL is what justifies it all for me. Under this falls the original premise of facebook: bringing connection to family and friends that are far away. Clearly, it has gone beyond that, into the realm of micro-journalism, micro-celebrity. Simply said, we got our village back, and we must learn to live in it, without detaching from the notion of full life, full emotion and full connection. It is exquisitely satisfying to be a part of a movement, a collective if you will, but at the end of the day it will drive you crazy if your society is only accessible by sitting for hours, in front of a screen, in an isolated room, alone. Might as well start plugging hoses in our necks.

Maybe not everyone goes online in such isolation, of course. Hey maybe I'm behind on this, since I ain't got no hand-held, but the idea of people sitting TOGETHER each on their own computer absolutely disconnected, when they could turn around and... talk is even more frightening. And so, the only plausible way to maintain one's humanity, humility, and honor Life is to treat the damned gadgets as gadgets?

It's tougher than that... Microblogging does create real responses. The sense of knowing a person from their actions and responses to events publicly visible to everyone comes naturally, like in class or at work, and is experienced with fantastic authenticity. But it is NOT who the person is, no matter how revealing their web presence may be. In addition to that, there are minor and absolutely informal, undocumented, sub-groups that form solely around a style of using micro-blogging. Some insist on detached sarcasm, some on emotional honesty, some on religious piety, and others still... spam their way into sex. The more people you have friended the more judgement you may get based on your style of sharing, let alone the things in your life you make public.

What we must remember is that even if people are adopting the ideas of marketing and branding in their web presence, they are not a company, they are not a household product, they are not a character in a book, they are not merchandise attached to a reality series. They are a human being. If you find yourself incapable of feeling compassion for them, think twice before assuming anything else their web presence makes you feel is authentic.

And so, returning to the idea of creation of the REAL. What has been the story of mass media up until now? The printing press, book binding, calligraphy, literacy... It was a process of democratization of an originally elite privilege: to have a voice. In writing, as in lithography, printing has gone hand in hand with the spread of literacy (verbal or visual), but it has never been an end in itself. Even within the art form of printmaking, the idea of a print as a final product is superimposed on its original function and maintained artificially through limiting a number of copies. To jack up the price. And subsequently make the work inaccessible to anyone who can't afford it. The intrinsic power of print, however, has always been in mass communication and mass availability. And that power has been used in facilitating transformation in the realm of the real. From manifestos to newspapers to ad campaigns, a voice is not a trivial ability to posses. It is certainly not a mere vocal chord to satisfy selfish whims of hysteria with attention grabbing fits.

Perhaps, as a society, as a synchronicity, we are experiencing transformation from this choral howl, but as individuals, we are at risk of drowning in it. Perhaps being less obsessed with individuality is not all that bad, and about time (you know... the Age of Aquarius and all that), but there is nothing good in a mass indulging in a lobotomizing and debasing addiction. No matter what cyber life offers, it is a removal from Reality. A tool. If used towards Reality it is of great value, as an end in itself... well, it's the Matrix.

Artist’s Statement

Looking back at the last year in the Communication Arts department and comparing what then was the edge of my interest in subject matter and intent for the act of making art at all, I can see things come into clarity and that edge advancing. In the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom in life and in the study of art as meditation thereon, that growth is the source of satisfaction and harmony. That growth is the root of confidence that any young person needs in order to abandon the view of oneself as an isolated object of the world’s ways, at whose discretion there is only art as some self-instantiating expression-form, that is in essence nothing but outsourcing of frustrations with such a reactive role. Through growth that reveals the interplay of change and of the constants, one can finally know—and not merely muse about—leadership.

A year ago describing what inspired me and the issues that have had the most impact on my work I wrote of the subtleties of moments in everyday life: feelings left unspoken, intentions not mentioned, people’s postures, their faces as records of their emotional lives. I wrote that I was very drawn to vague suggestions of something that was important to the point of being fateful, yet remained indistinct, not captured, and for that reason sublime. I drew reverent records of the moments that contained such revelation, but always seemingly against some kind of uncertainty of the worth of such an approach, because the result would so often present itself as a nice drawing, charged with intense internalization and important at least within the school, probably, only to me.

I believe it was that development that was always tightly entwined with my affair with the immigrant Latin American culture. Besides the haven it offered me as an immigrant and its inseverable connection to my earliest lessons in music, that I still draw from in visual communication, (a study of classical guitar in a Russian music school was seeped in the Latin influences as they were understood by Russian musicality, and perhaps imported through the peculiar political friendship between the Soviet Union and Cuba), immersion into a culture of immigrant Peruvian youth, clashed with the immigrant Russian, Bolivian, Italian and Jewish contingents, gave me a world within which my drawings, or writings for that matter, were inseparable from the reality it was their aim to describe.

Somehow, either ignored or written off as too mystical in the prevalent young pragmatic Anglo-Saxon America, it is the nature of communication in so many cultural groups to maintain and wholly recognize the level of intent underneath the spoken. This level is integral to creation of art that is worthwhile. It is a level that yields to form just like material paint and expressible idea. It is the very carrier of Magic Realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Ernesto Barreda. Barreda’s images of South America are no mere peculiarities of his choice of descriptive form, inexistent outside of the semantics of his imaginings. They have a presence in reality, and relevance. They are made of the same substance that was woven into the presence of the young immigrant men that had grown up in the regions he painted.

I seek to travel to Peru to distill my understanding of this phenomenon from any misinterpretation of that country’s culture that may be convenient for me to imagine now. I no longer doubt the importance of painting revelatory work and no longer view it as a self-centered act, as long as one is observant of the outside world and conscious of the nature of observation. I want to paint Peru, as it is, remembering all I’ve learned of it, remembering nothing but what’s in front of me.

I do not want to paint my idea of Peru and its culture, as I do not want to paint a life of a traveler uninformed by travel. My intention is to keep a visual record of my journey through Peruvian land as directly as it is possible through the act of drawing. Upon return I intend to produce a series of paintings informed by what I will learn of Peru, Latin America, the people and the land, myself, the paint, and the carrying power of intent inscribed in a work of art, capable of giving so much more to the viewer than just something to look at. For, though a work of art might not describe or explain reality as a static objective extraction of truths, it can reaffirm what we within that reality are capable of doing by being a result of such an act.