Personal Biography — August 31, 2022

Who are you? What does research mean to you? What are you passionate about? Who are your favorite artists and what are they passionate about? What type of art is deepest to you? What are you thinking about for your project?

My name is Cassie. I am an artist, a scientist, a researcher, a friend, a daughter, a queer, an optimist, and an enthusiast. I am so passionate about life. My own of course, but also others’. I work very hard to make sure I’m staying true to my interests and emotions. Right now I am intellectually and practically passionate about using immersive experiences for art therapy, as well as the relationships between science and spirituality — I tend to exploit my own emotions and memories or gather idiosyncrasies from others and visualize them in an effort to create empathy. In this way I consider my art practice research-driven. I love visualizing data. I love teaching people things. I love discovering new ways to help people understand themselves and the world and their relationships.

I realize a lot of my favorite visual artists I like because of the way their art looks, not for what it means. For example, Expanded Eye is one of my favorite visual artists because of their diversity of media and relation to Cubism. Oh — well one artist I really love both aesthetically and conceptually is Arjen Art. They make surreal painted portraits, usually of weird permutations of body parts, and I love the conversation they start about fetishization and sexuality. There’s definitely some Uncanny Valley thing going on with it too.

I think the art form that touches me the most is music. I think you could consider listening to music a research practice. Finding new music is super exciting and important to me. It brings me a lot of pleasure. It’s part of the autoethnography I do, looking inwards on myself in order to get myself to feel. I find that I listen to a lot of poetic music, either in lyrics or melody. Maybe narrative is a better word than poetic. I love lots of instrumental music that is so well constructed that it sounds like a story.

Photography is also a type of research that doesn’t start online. Documentation or collection of any kind is.

Ooh, there is potential for ExCap equipment to be used for this. Okay here let me list my project ideas.

• fourth dimension

• untitled abstract art

• memory garden

• spinal continuation

• neurafutures paper

Questions:

• Is it better to start something completely new? Will sticking with an already started project hinder me?

• How do I want this project to function in my practice? What purpose do I want it to serve?

• What newness can I bring to the idea of the fourth dimension in art? What does the research space look like already?

Update — September 4, 2022

Sitting in bed — finally got around to putting on my duvet cover and it feels so heavy and nice. AC blasting, it’s frigid in here, my fingers are cold enough that it’s hard to write. Little gnat flying around and bugging me. Wait is that where that phrase comes from? Bugging?

On the first day of class Kim gave me back the journal I had written in for Artist Writing — the project I titled “Death of a Busy Body” after the title of the gutted book it was made from. I reread most of it and it’s crazy how much I wrote in so little time. I was definitely riding a creative high that semester. I really hope that happens again this semester. I’m gonna need it if I intend to pull off everything I’m planning.

In an effort to accelerate that, I’m committed at the moment to being more introverted this semester. I want to spend more time getting to know myself and growing on my own, especially growing in my skills and hobbies. A lot of growth and happiness in the last year and a half has come from the relationships I’ve created with others, and now so many of those relationships have ended or been paused. While I love social connection I think I use it as a distraction from a lack of discipline. It’s become so easy for me to socialize that it often feels like less effort to be engaged with others than to pay attention to developing a new skill or expressing my curiosity on my own. Sometimes I think that that also has to do with the fact that my work (academic/professional) requires me to be creative all day, so I might not have that kind of energy left for more at the end of the day. I’m also just realizing that it might also be a matter of what impresses people or not.

One of the main themes I talked about in Death of a Busy Body was my understanding of the difference between public and private art practices, and how I feel like I don’t have much of a private practice. I think that extends to not much of a private life in general — I’m realizing now that a good portion of my existence and actions have to do with impressing others, with hoping to get a positive reaction out of people I seek acceptance from. I don’t engage in hobbies I want to do or used to enjoy because I’ve trained myself to prioritize and crave social validation over personal fulfillment. Or, well, it’s like social validation is my personal fulfillment.

I notice I’m getting tired of it though. Since I’ve started journaling and especially writing poetry this summer, I have felt my brain expanding so tangibly that I love being alone too. It’s so surreal seeing the shift in extraversion/introversion happen so consciously. Like the awareness I’ve gained about why I’ve grown the way I have, it makes me feel so much more than a body. Mind and body separation is in perpetual peak these days.

This makes me think about a comment a friend once made. They said they’d never felt truly seen by anyone, that their soul was so deep and complex that the sort of soul connection they craved felt so unachievable. I think it kinda confused and hurt me in the moment because I thought we were seeing each others’ souls. Well, it’s obvious to me now that maybe they were seeing mine but I definitely wasn’t seeing theirs. My soul was not nearly as complex back then than it is now, and that is all due to starting the process of healing and becoming more spiritual. This friend had been practicing these sorts of things for years before I met them — their self-awareness and dedication to growth was one of the things that drew me to them. I’ve come to a place now where I totally understand what they meant. I could not have seen them in their wholeness because I was so much less self-aware than I thought, and thus incapable of even conceiving of the spiritual distance between us.

I mean, one question could be can spiritualities and growth/progress even be compared between people? I’ve come to feel so unique in the way that I understand myself and the world that I don’t think it’s possible to find people who will understand me at that level. Like it’s my own level; everyone has one. No one else can experience my experiences and gain the exact same wisdom as me. And I’m not at all saying that my growth and wisdom is the correct or best growth and wisdom — I think the awareness of everybody’s differences is so important to the comfort of being spiritual alone. Or just alone period. It was my realization in the last week ish that I made this friend into an object of fantasy and that the person I thought I knew was actually an idealized version of the real them. This helped me to understand that I was fundamentally uncomfortable with myself during that period of the relationship and all the time prior. I used fantasy as a way to avoid my anxiety over a fear of abandonment that stemmed from lack of self-esteem.

Okay enough with the psychoanalysis. I was about to start explaining how I don’t experience vulnerability very often but that made me realize that literally all of this comes down to perfectionism. Social perfectionism. Intimacy perfectionism. Performance perfectionism. Now how does this relate to my art? lol

Actually I think how this translates to my art practice is I don’t take a lot of risks with my work. At least since using art as an emotional outlet has become normal and easy to me. I need to stop being perfect in my art.

What scares me now?

Update — September 5, 2022

In bed. Headache. AC whirring.

Not sure why I went into all of that yesterday. Was feeling particularly emotional and analytical. Not really having anything to do with this class or my project. I guess I was still explaining my goals beyond the project itself — contextualizing the thinking I will be doing here for the rest of the semester.

I read the readings Kim referenced from last class — Natalie Loveless’ “How to Make Art at the End of the World” — and WOW my brain was NOURISHED! I got so excited about the content that I legit teared up for a sec. She articulated everything that I’ve been trying to communicate about my fascination with atypical research methods. Like how we need this sort of interdisciplinary thinking and why it’s important. This made me feel so validated. Seen! That’s what I was writing about yesterday, feeling seen. But it’s a different kind of seeing, here is an intellectual seeing and yesterday it was a soul seeing. I guess I would say the intellectual seeing is part of the soul seeing — but anyway. I have so many thoughts.

First of all it kinda made me realize the key themes in my art practice are the public vs. the private and the post-futurism that I plan to explore for this project. Last fall I realized that there was such a difference between public and private art practices, but I never made the connection that a lot of my work is about the information that is created or shared between the artist, the audience and the art piece — the dissemination of knowledge. This means two things: 1) the art is alive, 2) interaction/interactive art is inherently research-based. Or well, these are actually questions. Is my art alive? Does interaction between art, artist and audience imply new knowledge? In fact, doesn’t any kind of art imply new knowledge, at least on a private level? New personal knowledge, knowledge of self. If art intends to be emotional, to be viewed, to be responded to — if one has never encountered it, this is new knowledge. New experiences. And what does it mean for art to be alive? What does it mean to be alive at all? To be alive is to feel, to have subjectivity. By that logic, traditional research is definitely not alive, it is objective. (By traditional research I mean science and communicating it through words.)

I’m rambling. My art has a theme of the public vs. private because I like to explore how the interaction of the viewer publicizes their subjectivity (private knowledge). Or maybe it’s more like the theme of objective vs. subjective. Objectivity vs. subjectivity. How patterns in data reveal uniqueness. It’s experimental capture? !!!

So then there is also the post-futurism thing, which I have been planning to explore in this class, but I honestly don’t know anymore. I find that I also make a lot of work about the relationships between science, spirituality, and perception — how art can be used to communicate/visualize that. See! Here is experimental capture again.

So the deal with futurism is it was a response to industrialization — everyone was making work about space and time.

. . .

Thirty minutes later and I have done a little bit of research. I totally forgot about futurism’s connection to fascism. I definitely don’t want to make this whole project about futurism without addressing that.

So my initial idea was to talk about how “post-futurism” is happening due to digitization, where space, time and perception is getting messed with using computational art. The “machine” has become creative code and AI. Taking fascism into consideration, I’m thinking about how computational art is affecting the American political climate right now…

How do I ethically talk about this?

Update — September 7, 2022

Update — September 8, 2022

Update — September 9, 2022

Fingers & toes cold. Very relaxed, just finished playing guitar for an hour and a half. Ears feel relaxed, like inside of my ears. Room smells like vanilla chai candle. AC whirring.

I deleted my social media a few days ago and all of a sudden with the passion I’ve found for my classes and projects, I am in a whole new headspace. I feel so motivated and disciplined and zen. Like I’m finally prioritizing myself and my habits and hobbies. I feel so burdenless. I’m washing dishes when I use them and making my bed in the morning. I’m excited to read my readings and pushing myself to make art out of my comfort zone. Tomorrow I’m gonna make a painting. I’m telling myself now. I wanna do it with some kinda randomness. Either drawing from a hat or even making some dice from my game. Life is so good. I feel like me.

Last night I stayed up too late because I was exciting myself over my research question. Like my life calling research question — what I want my life’s work to be. See photo above.

Update — September 10, 2022

Sitting at a high table at Condado Tacos. It’s pretty chilly in here, music playing softly. A few families and couples eating, staff bustling. Just put my headphones in, listening to my latest curated playlist. I am being stood up but I don’t care!

Yes, that’s correct. I was supposed to be meeting someone on a date here at noon, however it seems they have ghosted me since confirming the plans last night. Luckily this is the second time this has happened to me, so I came prepared with all my writing supplies and planned to have a nice day with myself. These tacos slap (my mouth is on fire) and I’m gonna work on my project!

Honestly there are a lot of projects I need to think about. There’s the futurism one. The CMU applied art lab. The untitled abstract art. Not completely sure which is right for this class still. Just gonna braindump.

Futurism

• in the past, futurism responded to industrialization and scientific advancement

• futurism talks about speed & motion & time

• closely tied with fascism

• artists are responding to digitization and subsequent scientific advancement right now

• could computational art be weaponized similarly? —> how is computational art playing a role in right wing ideology?

• U.S. falling into fascism

• computational art is really good at simulation —> art involved with using metaphor/imagery to reflect reality or changes to it = simulation

• conceptual/ideological perception is literal/physical perception

• how is/could artistic simulation be weaponized?

• talk to Versari

• read about fascism in art, space & time in art

Art-Based Research Lab

• How can CMU School of Art be More involved with research? More action-oriented?

• Names for labs?

  • Art, Nature and Discourse (AND)

  • Art and Action (Double A)

  • Art, Care and Traction (ACT)

  • Art, People and Pedagogy (APP)

  • Art, People and Theory (APT)

• see if there are profs on board

• what does the STUDIO research? stephanie & carrie & BXA? maybe make more opportunities there

• where do the crit theory profs publish?

• better art theory/history/research curriculum

• read the rest of Art at the End of the World

I don’t think I should continue the untitled abstract art project here. I want to do something new.

Reverse Engineered Proposal — September 13, 2022

Paintings by Arjen Art

I propose a series of large paintings that can communicate a sense of ”body” through the mixing of minimalism and surrealism. I am very fascinated by the way that cubist artists were able to balance fragmentation, motion, and wholeness. I love it when art makes us question our physical relationship to the world. While cubists achieved this complexity through the juxtaposition of flatter planes, I am interested in exploring how light, color, and volume in shapes can also communicate transcendental qualities of bodies. In this way, I will dip into surrealism, as the shapes I plan to depict will resemble the soft fleshiness of a three-dimensional human in a three-dimensional world, but will have much more complex geometry than humans and no identifiable assets (like limbs or facial features). As a result, the work is also a comment on sexuality and fetishization because the viewer will be projecting a sense of naked human body and their innate desire for social relationship with it onto a shape that is avoiding recognition. 

I will go about this work first by researching depictions of bodies in surrealist, cubist, and minimalist painting, and analyze them for similarities and differences. I will also spend time reading theory on the effect of viewing sexual images on the viewer. Next, I will play with clay forms to investigate how light interacts with three-dimensional shapes. Finally, I will use oil on canvas to create absurd body-shapes informed by this research.

Project Proposal — September 15, 2022

In the early 20th century, Italian artists responded to industrialization and scientific innovation through futurism. This artistic style essentialized space-time, speed, and violence — the intensity of reality — to reflect the rapid growth in knowledge and power that new technology was affording society at the time. Its foundation on war-related themes caused it to become a useful pipeline for fascist ideology; many futurist and fascist leaders bonded during wartime and took advantage of art’s ability to disguise ideology, thereby transforming art into supremacist currency. Futurism is now closely tied with fascist ideology because it was used in the aestheticization of politics and the control of the public through media consumption.

Fast forward to today, and undoubtedly there is a reflection between the effects of industrialization, the previous technological paradigm, and those of digitization, the present technological paradigm, on the relationship between media and society. Computational media are being used today to spread misinformation, depictions of violence, and complications of authenticity similarly to how new mechanical media were used in fascist states a century ago. We well understand that one of the most misused modern technologies is social media, but it is not the only computational medium that can communicate information and emotion. Given that art was taken advantage of during industrialization, as well as the fact that today’s society is descending into the same conditions that sparked the weaponization of art back then, it seems important to postulate, and perhaps prepare for, how 21st century artistic media could be taken advantage of. I fear that, in the wrong hands, computational art could become a mode through which fascist ideology is communicated because digitization has afforded us particularly effective strategies for the design of transformational immersive experiences. We therefore must focus our energy on protecting computational art and artists. I intend to investigate why and how we may go about this protection for my project.

My interest in this topic is based on a few patterns I’ve noticed through my own making practice. First, I have found that computational art is very successful at communicating futurist concepts (like space-time, intensity, and violence) not only because it enhances our ability to simulate and manipulate reality, but this enhancement creates better immersivity, which I predict relates the user to narrative in ways that interacting with traditional media cannot. I define immersive as using technology to engage the body physically, identically, or relationally. By being both a body in the physical world and a body which is needed for immersive art to affect as intended, it seems the viewer of an immersive artwork becomes both the dictator and the victim of narrative, creating an exceptionally powerful affective experience due to the paradox of having the illusion of choice through interactivity, yet also being forced to absorb the consequences of the resulting narrative pathway.

This also illuminates how computational art could afford artists the opportunity to strategically use choice-making and reactivity to transform their audiences. In fact, the strategic design of interactive experience is already a defined subfield within human-computer interaction called Persuasive Design. It is involved with the application of social psychology to interface design in order to implicitly change users’ affects, behaviors and cognitions of the social world. Experiences designed with these methods are currently framed as scientific interventions. But these experiences are inherently created and creative, making it easy to call them pieces of new media art. If camouflaged as art, I predict persuasive interfaces could dilute ideology that emphasizes coercion and censorship. This suggests that, while persuasion can be incredibly helpful to society if used for good, using it for evil would reflect the same media fascism that technology of the 20th century created. 

This has dangerous implications for the creation of art and the role of artists in a digitally interactive world. The same computational technology that can be used to create original artworks of beauty and positive change has also been used to algorithmically generate and/or appropriate art, images, and information. This has deeply complicated the current state of art production and ownership. Moreover, as computation becomes more powerful, the ability for computers to instantly generate work that mimics the technical and conceptual complexity and toil of art that people create may blur the role of artists. NFTs try to solve this, but it is clear that they too, a computational medium, are being used to perpetuate art as iconography and businessman as celebrity: tenets of fascism. It seems that in a world where art can be procedurally generated to serve a fascist state, it is contradictory to support the existence of human artists at all, as machines don’t need to be paid, don’t have an identity or emotions, are replaceable, and can be relied on to never resist. While I very much hope this won’t be true, I think the effort to control digital art with NFTs could symbolize a launching point for the use of computational art as a site for political propaganda, and even a systematic discouragement of becoming an artist — if we don’t take action. 

These observations on the modern relationship between art, technology, and politics, along with the US’s descent into political polarity, seem to reflect the state of society before the war began a century ago. In this project, I want to explore the scope of this reflection: how computational art has already been or could be weaponized to serve fascism, what we can do to mitigate it, and yet, at the same time, how we can protect the right to use computation for art.

I will write a report for this project that summarizes this research and proposes a “protection plan” for computational art and artists. This document is not intended to serve as a formal suggestion for policy change, as I have no background or authority to speak on this at that level. Therefore the report will exist as a sort of speculative fiction. I intend to write it out on a long scroll, similarly to my project from Artist Writing last year, and install it as a kind of immersive manifesto. I like “scrolling” as a didactic medium because it both speaks to the way that scrolling online has become an addictive behavior for information consumption, as well as the fact that scrolls are often a source of religious, and therefore indoctrinating, scripture. I hope that through translating the size of online addiction into tangible space, I expose the immersivity of indoctrination and slow the viewer down in their process of learning, of belief, via narrative.

For my methods, there are a few categories of literature I will explore: Theory of Ideology & Fascism, Futurisms of Yesterday & Tomorrow, Media Psychology, and Immersive Propaganda. I will process these categories in that order. At the beginning of investigating each category, I will outline guiding questions that I hope to find answers for. Then in each reading, I will collect quotes that are relevant to the questions. When I feel that I have sufficiently gathered evidence from that category, I will synthesize in a written summary what I have learned. I hope to have all summaries complete by the beginning of November, after which I will gather examples of artwork for a few days. Finally, I will piece everything together as I begin to write the report. 

I have provided a sample of sources for each category in this proposal, but I foresee that I will also find more in the process of investigating. Much of these readings come from philosophers, psychologists, and HCI researchers. I plan to find relevant artists/artwork after I gain this theoretical knowledge, as I don’t completely know what kind of work I need to be searching for to support my thoughts right now.

I also plan to consult various professors at CMU for other sources and topics they suggest: Maria Versari, whose work is about Italian futurism and the aestheticization of politics; Geoff Kaufman, whose work is about persuasive design; and Alisha Wormsley, whose work is about afrofuturism and science fiction. I will email them within the next week.

Theory and Ideology of Fascism

Albright, Madeleine Korbel, and William Woodward. Fascism: A Warning. Harper Perennial, 2019.

A book outlining fascism in the early 20th century and the ways that we see it coming back in modern times.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books, 2009.

A philosophical inquiry into the origin of desire and ideas.

Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.

A psychological and economic inquiry into fascism.

Versari, Maria Elena.

A critical theory professor at CMU who is an expert on fascism.

+The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise by RD Laing

Futurism of Yesterday and Tomorrow

Adamson, Walter L. “Avant-Garde Modernism and Italian Fascism: Cultural Politics in the Era of Mussolini.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2001, pp. 230–248., https://doi.org/10.1080/13545710110047001.

An article on the ways that early modern art and fascist ideology affected each other.

Bard, Alexander, and Söderqvist, Jan. The Futurica Trilogy. Stockholm Text, 2012.

A series of books which philosophically and historically inquire into the relationship between technology and society.

Berardi, Franco, and Gary Genosko. After the Future. AK Press, 2011.

A book about the ways that digitization has shaped the relationship between media and society.

Bowler, Anne. “Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism.” Theory and Society, vol. 20, no. 6, 1991, pp. 763–94. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/657603. Accessed 14 Sep. 2022.

An essay about the relationship between 20th century futurism and fascism.

Byrne-Smith, Dan. Science Fiction. Whitechapel Gallery, 2020.

An anthology of essays about the relationships between art, science fiction and society.

Humphreys, Richard. Futurism. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

An overview of the futurist art movement.

Versari, Elena Maria.

A critical theory professor at CMU who is an expert on Futurism.

Wormsley, Alisha.

An art professor at CMU who is an expert on contemporary futurist themes.

+Angela Washko

Media Psychology

Broadhurst, Susan. Digital Practices: Aesthetic and Neuroesthetic Approaches to Performance and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

An inquiry into the psychology of immersive and performative technology.

Bujić, Mila & Salminen, Mikko & Hamari, Juho. (2021). Effects of Immersive Media on Emotion and Memory: An Experiment Comparing Article, 360-video, and Virtual Reality. 10.31219/osf.io/rtmcw. 

A paper about how immersive media affects emotion and memory.

Kaufman, Geoff. “Persuasive Design Syllabus.”

In my Persuasive Design class this semester, we will be reading a selection of 15 HCI/social psychology papers about the relationships between persuasion, self, narrative, and interactivity.

Kaufman, Geoff.

An HCI professor at CMU who is an expert on persuasive design and narrative inquiry.

Various. Journal of Media Psychology.

An academic journal focusing on the ways that media affects psychology.

Immersivity as Propaganda

Various. “Generative Art Conference.” Domus Argenia Publisher, Proceedings of the Generative Art Conference, Accessed 14 Sept. 2022.

An academic conference that brings together works about the state of generative art.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Michael Mateas. Center for Games and Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, 2014, pp. 1–92, Envisioning the Future of Computational Media. 

A report made about the future of computational media.

https://immerse.news/why-immersive-4f1ecb19ae8a

An article from an MIT lab connecting immersive technology to fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity

The Wikipedia article about computational creativity, or using generative technology to make art.

https://mediaengagement.org/research/virtual-reality-immersive-media-and-journalism-2/

An article about the ethics of using immersive technology for journalism, which also cites a lot of other good articles on the same topic. 

Bailenson, Jeremy.

A media psychology professor at Stanford who is an expert on the psychology and design of immersive media for social change.

Artwork

Bifo Franco Berardi. The Post-Futurist Manifesto, https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm.

Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others. Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016.

Futurist artists: Marinetti, Boccioni, Balla, Carra, Severini, Stella

Quayola, Davide.

Sunyuan & Pengyu.

TeamLab Museums.

Tiltfactor, University of Dartmouth.

Self Evaluation 1 — September 15, 2022

So far in this class, my process has included a lot of research and reflection. I have used my log mostly for brainstorming and talking through ideas with myself. A lot of planning and practice properly articulating myself happened for my proposal. Coming into the class, I had bits and pieces of ideas surrounding my futurism essay from a few semesters ago, but it has taken a lot of work to organize all my thoughts and understand what I actually wanted to do with them. I’m really proud of and excited by my idea now, so I’m happy with where I’ve arrived. This reflects many of my criteria for self-evaluation. 

First, I want to make sure I’m being thorough with my research and learning in this class. It’s important to me that I end up with a strong portfolio piece and can apply the knowledge and skills I gain through it later on in my research career. The fact that this is a self-guided class could make it really easy for me to slack on absorbing the theory that I plan to read about, so I want to make sure I’m retaining that learning. I also want to make sure I’m exciting myself through risk-taking. I’m happy that this project is already a scary venture for me. The concepts I’m used to discussing in my work have a lot to do with my emotions and identity, and I notice that I am comfortable there because I can’t get those kinds of personal things wrong. Exploring politics and history in my work has always scared me, and I think this is because my prioritization of STEM subjects over the years has conditioned me to fear being incorrect or offensive in responding to problems that aren’t technical or personal. I want to grow in this way.

I think taking advantage of my log is the place where I can already improve the most. I often tend to work in hyperfixated, inconsistent bursts of energy, which is effective in the end, but often feels exhausting in the process. This is not a sustainable work ethic and I want to fix that. I also don’t think I logged as much of my proposal writing process as I should have. I had many thoughts that I didn’t write down, which was mostly a matter of remembering — often in my hyperfixation I forget to slow down and reflect. I will make a better effort to plan out the goals I have for a given day and reflect on them in order to not get sidetracked and overwork myself.

Rubric

1. Risk - Am I taking risks in this project? Is this project helping me grow as an artist? (x/10)

2. Thoroughness - Am I putting significant effort into the work I’m doing? Am I covering all the research ground that I should be? (x/10)

3. Progress - Do I have new work since the last time I evaluated myself? Am I consistently working on the project? Am I documenting what I have done so far? (x/10)

4. Timeline - Am I on track to finish the project? Do I have a clear understanding of what I have left to do and how I plan to execute it? (x/10)

5. Learning - Am I gaining new knowledge in the process of this project? Am I proving and applying this knowledge somehow? Am I excited about the work I’m doing? (x/10)

Evaluation:

Risk - 10/10

Thoroughness - 10/10

Progress - 6/10

Timeline - 8/10

Learning - 10/10

Update — September 15, 2022

Cross-crossed in green flower chair in sunroom, sun flickering onto the page through the trees through the window. Temperature is so pleasant. Borderline metal music in my earbuds — maybe not the vibe? Too lazy to change it.

I have submitted my proposal and first self evaluation. I’m really excited to actually get started on this research. I’m trying my best to do consistent, short bursts of work and record all my thoughts in here. I’m starting to feel a bit guilty using this nice sketchbook just for writing, but I can use that and actually draw stuff. It is mixed media… maybe I can print stuff out and paste it in here. Make collages. Hm. Maybe I’ll do that for each section of theory.

Ok. Today I’m gonna write my guiding questions for Theory and Ideology of Fascism and start Anti-Oedipus.

• What is fascism?

• How have we become successful at being social creatures?

• Why do some want to control others? Where does desire (for power) come from?

• Who was important to fascism?

• What should we be afraid of today? How do we see signs of this ideology now?

There will probably be more questions that I come up with as I read, but these are the ones that I can come up with to start.

. . .

It’s clear that Anti-Oedipus is a lot about fascism, after reading the prologue, so I think Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism should be first so I actually have an understanding of it before going into its critique.

Reading Quotes — September 16, 2022

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “viewed with respect to man’s character, ‘fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life” (4-5)

• “[fascism] betrays all the characteristics and contradictions present in the character structure of the mass individual. It is not, as commonly believed, a purely reactionary movement — it represents an amalgam between rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas” (5)

• “race ideology is a pure biopathic expression of the character structure of the orgastically impotent man” (6)

• “fascist mentality is the mentality of the ‘little man’ who is enslaved and craves authority and is at the same time rebellious” (6)

• “[fascism] is the expression of the irrational structure of mass man” (9)

(All the papers I’ve read in Persuasive Design until this point:)

[Placeholder for A Psychologically Embedded Approach to Designing Games for Prosocial Causes]

The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention:

• “Threats and affirmations arise from the self’s fundamental motive: to be morally and adaptively adequate, good and efficacious” (334)

• “Timely interventions can channel people into what we refer to as a cycle of adaptive potential. This is a series of reciprocally reinforcing interactions between the self-system and a social system, such as a school, that propagates adaptive outcomes over time (cf. Elder 1974, Wilson 2011)” (335)

• “Greenwald (1980) likened the self to a totalitarian regime that suppresses and distorts information to project an image of itself as good, powerful, and stable. However, unlike a totalitarian regime, people can be self-critical (335)

• “Storyteller rather than totalitarian regime seems an apt metaphor for the self. The self has a powerful need to see itself as having integrity, but it must do so within the constraints of reality (Alder 2012, Kunda 1990, Pennebaker & Chung 2011, Wilson 2011). The goal is not to appraise every threat in a self-flattering way but rather to maintain an overarching narrative of the self’s adequacy” (335)

• avenues for maintaining narrative:

  • “appraise a difficult circumstance in a hopeful and non-defensive way” (336)

  • “[changing] appraisal of themselves” (336)

• why we need self-integrity = self-affirmation theory:

  • “maintain a global narrative of oneself as a moral and adaptive actor” (336)

  • “to be competent enough in a constellation of domains to feel that one is a good person, moral and adaptive” (336)”

  • “act in ways worthy of esteem or praise” (336)

• “a self-affirmation is an act that demonstrates one’s adequacy” (337)

• “their confidence in their ability to overcome future difficulties may grow and thus buttress coping and resilience for the next adversity, in a self-reinforcing narrative (Cohen et al. 2009)” (337)

• “spending time with friends, participating in a volunteer event, or attending religious services can anchor a sense of adequacy in a higher purpose” (337)

• “a key aspect of the affirmation intervention is that its content is self-generated and tailored to tap into each person’s particular valued identity” (337)

• why self-affirmations work:

  • buffering: “affirmations remind people of psychosocial resources beyond a particular threat and thus broaden their perspective beyond it” (339); “because a threat is seen in the context of an expansive view of the self, it has less impact on psychological well being” (339); “can reassure people that they have integrity and that life, on balance, is okay in spite of an adversity before them. Social relationships appear to have this kind of power” (339)

  • reducing defensiveness: “affirmations foster an approach orientation to threat rather than avoidance” (339); “reduce defensive responses, adaptations to protect the self from threat” (340)

• “time does not necessarily weaken the influence of the past, but can, it seems, preserve and strengthen it… a successful intervention is not an isolated event but rather a turning point in a process (see Elder 1998)” (340)

• why affirmations trigger cycles of adaptive potential:

  • “because of recursion, the output of a process such as self-affirmation can cycle back at its input, thus perpetuating itself (Cohen et al. 2009, Wilson & Linville 1982)” (341)

  • “because of interaction, the output of a process can interact with other processes in the environment” (341)

  • “because of subjective construal, an intervention can trigger an enduring shift in perception (Sherman et al. 2013; see also Ross & Nisbett 2011, Wilson 2011)” (341)

  • in conclusion: “an intervention may thus have lasting effects by changing the way people filter information about themselves and their environment” (341)

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Reading Quotes — September 17, 2022

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “a la coue — the camouflaging of defeats and the covering of important facts with illusions” (16)

• “the Marxists bad failed to take into account the character structure of the masses and the social effect of mysticism” (17)

• “reactionary politics automatically makes use of those social forces that oppose progress; it can do this successfully only as long as science neglects to unearth those revolutionary forces that must of necessity overpower the reactionary forces” (17)

• “to be radical, according to Karl Marx, means ‘getting to the root of things’. If one gets to the root of things, if one grasps their contradictory operations, then the overcoming of political reaction is assured” (18)

• “a reorientation of one’s thinking and one’s evaluations was the precondition of a new revolutionary practice” (19)

• “to the vulgar Marxist, psychology is a metaphysical system pure and simple, and he draws no distinction between the metaphysical character of reactionary psychology and the basic elements of psychology, which were furnished by revolutionary psychological research and it is our task to develop” (21)

• “our political psychology can be nothing other than an investigation of this ‘subjective factor of history’, of the character structure of a man in a given epoch and of the ideological structure of society that it forms” (22)

• “the ideology of every social formation has the function not only of reflecting the economic process of this society, but also and more significantly of embedding this economic process in the psychic structures of the people who make up the society” (23)

• “the psychic structures lag behind the rapid changes of the social conditions from which they derived, and later come into conflict with new forms of life” (24)

• “that political reaction in the form of fascism had ‘befogged’, ‘corrupted’, and ‘hypnotized’ the masses is an explanation that is as sterile as the others’. This is and will continue to be the function of fascism as long as it exists. Such explanations are sterile because the fail to offer a way out” (25)

• Freud’s discoveries:

  • “every psychic experience… has a function and a ‘meaning’ and can be completely understood if one can succeed in tracing its etiology” (28)

  • “sexual and genital are not the same” (28)

  • “childhood sexuality… is usually repressed out of fear of punishment for sexual acts and thoughts… manifest[s] itself in various pathological disturbances” (28)

  • “the conflict that originally takes place between the child’s desires and the parent’s suppression of these desires later becomes the conflict between instinct and morality within the person” (28)

• “it was not until relatively late, with the establishment of an authoritarian patriarchy and the beginning of the division of the classes, that suppression of sexuality begins to make an appearance” (29-30)

Updates — September 17, 2022

Called mom, told her about my project and she gave me some art/artists suggestions:

• Gas mask immersive war breathing experience

• Cave in Canada immersive art by Charlotte (?)

Reading Quotes — September 18, 2022

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “the interlacing of the socio-economic structure with the sexual structure of society and the structural reproduction of society take place in the first four or five years and in the authoritarian family… it becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are moulded” (30)

• “morality’s aim is to product acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order… the family is the authoritarian state in miniature, to which the child must learn to adapt himself as a preparation for the general social adjustment required of him later” (30)

• “the effect of militarism is based essentially on a libidinous mechanism” (31)

• “‘repercussion of ideology on the economic basis’: sexual inhibition changes the structure of economically suppressed man in such a way that he acts, feels, and thinks contrary to his own material interests” (31)

Reading Quotes — September 19, 2022

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “the practical problem of mass psychology is to actuate the passive majority of the population” (32)

• “the rally speeches of the National Socialists were very conspicuous for their skillfulness in operating upon the emotions of the individuals in the masses and of avoiding relevant arguments as much as possible… Hitler stresses that true mass psychological tactics dispense with argumentation and keep the masses’ attention fixed on the ‘great final goal’ at all times” (32)

• “a fuehrer, or the champion of an idea, can be successful… only if his personal point of view, his ideology, or his programme bears a resemblance to the average structure of a broad category of individuals… only when the structure of the fuhrer’s personality is in harmony with the structures of broad groups can a ‘fuhrer’ make history” (32-33)

• “whether he makes a permanent or only temporary impact on history depends solely on whether his programme lies in the direction of progressive social processes or whether it stems them” (33)

Reading Quotes — September 20, 2022

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “it was man’s authoritarian freedom-fearing structure that enabled [Hitler’s] propoganda to take root. Hence, what is important about Hilter sociologically does not issue from his personality but from the importance attached to him by the masses” (34)

• “had he not promised to take up the fight against big business, Hilter would never have won the support of the middle classes” (37)

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Update — September 20, 2022

Sent email to Versari describing my project and asking for more Futurism and Fascism sources. She finds the project interesting and tells me to check out the following:

• https://cmu.academia.edu/MariaElenaVersari (all of her publications)

• The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism by Emilio Gentille

• Politics as Religion by Emilio Gentille

Update — September 21, 2022

Field trip to the fourth floor of Hunt. We looked at artists books, which I didn’t know about before, and they are insane — I might end up making one of those for this project. Looks like a good way to communicate narrative. Also checked out a big stack of books:

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Reading Quotes — September 23

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “the interlacing of individualistic modes of production and authoritarian family in the lower middle class is one of the many sources of the fascist ideology of the ‘large family’… the economic pitting of the small businesses against one another corresponds to the family encapsulation and competition typical of the lower middle class, notwithstanding the fascist ideology ‘common welfare comes before personal welfare’ and ‘corporate idea’” (42)

• “in [the middle class man’s] effort to differentiate himself from the labourer, he must rely essentially on his family and sexual modes of life” (42)

• “a touch of dishonesty is part of the very existence of private merchandizing” (43)

• “within the family the father holds the same position that his boss holds towards him in the production process. And he reproduces his subservient attitude towards authority in his children, particularly in his sons” (43)

• Hitler: “the people in their overwhelmingly majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and action far less than emotion and feeling” (43)

• “for one thing there is the competition between the children and the grown-ups, but of more far-reaching consequence, this is the competition among children of the same family in their relationship to the parents” (44)

• “it is the original biological tie of the child to the mother and also of the mother to the child that forms the barricade to sexual reality and leads to an indissoluble sexual fixation and to an incapacity to eater into other relations… in their subjective emotional core the notions of homeland and nation and notions of mother and family” (45)

• “the lower middle-class man is especially accessible to imperialistic ideology. He is capable of fully identifying with the personified conception of the nation. It is in this way that familial imperialism is ideologically reproduced in national imperialism” (46)

• “[the authoritarian family] is a factory where reactionary ideology and reactionary structures are produced” (47)

• “it is the highest task to make the founding of a family possible… its final destruction would mean the end of every form of higher humanity” (47)

• “need for protection on the part of the masses of the people that enables the dictator ‘to manage everything’” (48-49)

• “the more helpless the ‘mass-individual’ has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the fuhrer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the fuhrer. This inclination to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence that individual man derives from the ‘greatness of the nation’” (49)

• “international consciousness of one’s skills is opposed to mysticism and nationalism” (49)

• “the communist assertion that it was the Social Democrat policies that put fascism in the saddle was correct from a psychological viewpoint” (54)

• “[natural selection and three races theory] conceals the imperialist function of fascist ideology. For if the Aryans are the sole founders of civilization, then, by virtue of their divine destiny, they can lay claim to world dominion” (56)

• “the fascist race theory and nationalistic ideology in general have a concrete relation to the imperialistic aims of a ruling class that is attempting to solve difficulties of an economic nature” (57)

• “by forming ideologies, man reshapes himself; man’s material core is to be sought in the process by which he forms ideologies… this it is clear that the irrational formation of an ideology also makes man’s structure irrational” (58)

• “the patriarchal authoritarian sexual order that resulted from the revolutionary processes of latter-day matriarchy… becomes the primary basis of authoritarian ideology by depriving the women, children and adolescents of their sexual freedom, making a commodity of sex and placing sexual interests in the service of economic subjugation” (62)

• “surrounded by and imbued with human sexual structures that have become distorted and lascivious, patriarchal man is shackled for the first time in an ideology in which sexual and dirty, sexual and vulgar or demonic, become inseparable associations” (62)

• “the change in the social attitude towards sexual intercourse also effects a change in the inner experience of sexuality” (63)

• “religious mysticism denies the sex-economic principle altogether and condemns sexuality as a sinful phenomenon of humanity, from which only the Hereafter can deliver us. Nationalistic fascism, on the other hand, transfers sexual sensuality to the ‘alien race’, which is relegated to an inferior status in this way” (63)

• “the permanent monogamous marriage became the basic institution of patriarchal society - which it still is today” (64)

Update — September 25, 2022

Sitting in bed. On bed. Surrounded by all my technology. (Laptop, iPad, phone, speaker, headphones). Listening to music. Kinda sick today, feeling kinda better now but still not sure if I’ll go to my classes tmrw. Headache, stuffy, throat hurts. I hate missing school though.

Okay so clearly reading Mass Psychology of Fascism is taking me much longer than I thought it would. It takes me like five minutes to read one page, it’s so dense. I still wanna try to get through as much of it as I can, and I’ve already pulled a significant amount of good information out of it, but I’m not even halfway yet. I feel like I’ve been reading it for over 10 hours. And then transferring all the quotes takes a long time too. I’m getting better at deciding what kinds of information is important to pull out though. In the beginning I was highlighting so much, now it’s every few pages that I get a good chunk to transfer.

I also transferred all my journaling and quotes to this website over the last few days. The guilt I mentioned before about using a nice sketchbook just for writing never went away. Plus I want documentation of all this at some point, so it’s easier to start now.

Let me add to my questions based on what I’ve read so far:

• Why was fascism so successful in the 20th century? How does it work psychologically?

• How did fascism end in the 20th century?

• Why did Hitler target the Jews specifically?

I also wanna make a clearer outline for reading deadlines. By these dates, I should have finished reading the following

Week 5 — Oct 2

• Mass Psychology of Fascism

• Anti-Oedipus

Week 6 — Oct 9

• Fascism: a Warning

• Avant-Garde Modernism and Italian Fascism

• The Conquest of Modernity

Week 7 — Oct 15

• Versari article

• Futurism and the technological imagination

• The Politics of Art: Futurism and Fascism

Week 8 — Oct 23

• The Futurica Trilogy

Week 9 — Oct 30

• Effects of Immersive Media on Emotion and Memory

• Media Psychology Journal Papers

Week 10 — Nov 6

• Immersive Propaganda week

Week 12 — Nov 13

• tie up loose ends

I will go further into detail with the media psychology and immersive propaganda readings when I get closer to it. There are also those books I picked up at the library last week — I left them in my studio, so next time I go in I’ll integrate some of those in here too.

So what I’m thinking right now is I’m gonna create some kind of fictional narrative about a character in the future who is an immersive artist and wants to establish an immersive art protection plan to save themselves and other artists from a dictator. I’m not exactly sure what form it’s gonna take yet, but I want it to be interactive/immersive in some way. I really liked the idea of an artist book but that doesn’t feel gamified enough to me. Yea I’m thinking something like a board game. “Game”. Or maybe the artist book is something you can play with, a toy. Like a choose your own adventure situation. Or a text-based game?

Reading Quotes — September 26

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “when the entire social organization is plunged into a state of political upheaval, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality will of necessity reach an acute peak. Some will view this state of affairs as moral degeneration, while others will see it as a ‘sexual revolution’. In any event, it is the breakthrough of natural sexuality that is looked upon as ‘cultural degeneration’. This breakthrough is felt to be ‘degeneration’ only because it constitutes a threat to compulsive morality” (64)

• “at first the morality of chastity applies most rigidly to the female members of the ruling class. This is intended to safeguard those possessions that were acquired through the exploitation of the lower classes” (66)

• “if the lower middle class would lose its moralistic attitude towards sex to the same extent that it loses its intermediate economic position between the industrial worker and the upper class, this would constitute a very grave threat to any dictator.” (67)

• “in times of crises, a dictatorial power always steps up its propaganda for ‘morality’ and the ‘strengthening of the bonds of marriage and the family’" (67) !!!!!!!

• “the reactionary politician cannot divulge his real intentions in his propaganda” (70)

• “more than the economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family. For the suppressed classes, this dependency is endurable only on condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in women and in children. The wife must not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a child-bearer” (71)

• “sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology” (71) !!!!!!!

• “the ideology extolling the ‘blessings of large families’ is necessary for the preservation of the authoritarian family. It is necessary not only in the interest of warlike imperialism; its most essential purpose is to obscure woman’s sexual function as opposed to her function as a child-bearer. The drawing of a clear-cut distinction between ‘mother’ and ‘prostitute’ as we find, for example, in the writings of the philosopher Weinin-ger, corresponds to the distinction that the reactionary man draws between sexual desire and procreation. According to this view, to have sex for the pleasure of it degrades the woman and mother; a ‘prostitute’ is a woman who affirms pleasure and lives for it. The notion that sexuality is moral only in the service of procreation, that what lies outside the pale of procreation is immoral, is the most important feature of reactionary sexual politics.” (71) !!!!!!

• “the man reared under and bound by authority has no knowledge of the natural law of self-regulation; he has no confidence in himself. He is afraid of his sexuality because he never learned to live it naturally.” (74-75)

• “marriage is an institution for the gratification of sexual needs in a less dangerous and more convenient way’ (75)

Reading Quotes — September 27

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “if fascism relies so successfully on the mystical thinking and sentiments of the masses, then a fight against it can be effective only if mysticism is comprehended and if the mystical contagion of the masses is tackled through education and hygiene. It is not enough that the scientific view of the world gains ground, for it moves much too slowly to keep pace with the rapid spread of mystical contagion… scientific elucidation appealed only to the intellect of the masses - not to their feelings” (79)

• “sexual inhibition prevents the average adolescent from thinking and feeling in a rational way. We must see to it that mysticism is countered with appropriate means. To this end knowledge of its mechanism is urgently necessary” (81)

• “mysticism’s function is clearly articulated: to divert attention from daily misery, ‘to liberate from the world’, the purpose of which is to prevent a revolt against the real causes of one’s misery.” (82)

• “extensive experience at mass rallies shows that the political reactionary role of mysticism in connection with the suppression of sexuality is readily comprehended when the right to sexual gratification is medically and socially explained in a clear and direct fashion. (83)

• “what religion calls freedom from the outside world really means fantasized substitute gratification for actual gratification. This fits in perfectly with the Marxist theory that religion is the opium of the people… vegetotherapy was able to prove that mystical experience actually sets the same process going in the autonomic living apparatus as a narcotic does.” (84)

• “patriarchal family attitudes and a mystical frame of mind are the basic psychological elements of fascism and imperialistic nationalism in the masses. In short, it is psychologically confirmed on a mass basis that a mystical upbringing becomes the foundation of fascism when a social catastrophe sets the masses in motion” (85)

• “while national feeling is derived from the maternal tie (home feeling) mystical sentiments original in the anti-sexual atmosphere that is inseparably bound to this familial tie… without exception, all children brought up in a patriarchal society are subject to this sensuous inhibition” (88)

• “the inevitable result of this inhibition (‘orgastic impotence’) characteristic of every authoritarian upbringing and experienced as unconscious guilt-feelings and sexual anxiety, is an insatiable unconscious intense orgastic longing, which is accompanied by physics sensations of tension in the region of the solar plexus” (88)

• “the continuous tension in the psychophysical organism constitutes the basis of daydreaming in small children and young adolescents. This daydreaming is very easily converted into and developed as sentiments of a mystical, sentimental and religious nature.” (88)

• “the gruesome fairy tales of early childhood, the detective stories that follow later, the mysterious atmosphere of the church, only prepare the ground for the later susceptibility of the biopsychic apparatus to military and fatherland consecrations” (88)

Generative Propaganda Posters — September 28

Reading Quotes — September 29

Mass Psychology of Fascism:

• “to fulfill this responsibility (for the consequences of pleasure), human society has founded the institution of marriage which, as a life-long partnership, is intended to represent the protective framework for the sexual relationship. And the complete register of ‘cultural values’, which fits into the fabric of reactionary ideology as parts into a machine, is immediately appended: Marriage as a tie, family as a duty, fatherland as a value in itself, morality as authority, religion as an obligation deriving from eternity” (91) !!!!!!!

• “the revolutionary negates perverse and pathological pleasure because it is not his pleasure, is not the sexuality of the future, but the pleasure born of the contradiction between morality and instinct; it is the pleasure of a dictatorial society, debased, sordid, pathological pleasure” (91)

• “there is a correlation between the phenomena of orgastic excitation and the phenomena of religious excitation, ranging from the simplest pious surrender to total religious ecstasy” (92)

• “if religious feelings are not imposed on man, but are imbedded and retained in his structure, opposed as they are to his own vital interests, then what is needed is an energetic change in man’s structure. The basic religious idea of all patriarchal religions is the negation of sexual need” (93)

• “since he [genuinely religious man] expects to be rewarded in the Beyond, he succumbs to a feeling of being incapable of happiness in this world. In view of the fact that he is a biologic creature and cannot under any circumstances forego happiness, release and gratification, he seeks illusionary happiness” (94)

• “in reality, the religious man has become completely helpless. As a result of the suppression of his sexual energy, he has lost his capacity for happiness as well as the aggressiveness necessary to deal with life’s difficulties. The more helpless he becomes, the more he is forced to believe in supernatural forces that support and shelter him.” (94) !!!!!

• “children do not believe in God. It is when they have to learn to suppress the sexual excitation that goes hand in hand with masturbation that the belief in God generally becomes embedded in them. Owing to this suppression, they acquire a fear of pleasure” (96)

• “when a child invokes ‘God’, he is really invoking his actual father” (96)

• “genital shyness and pleasure anxiety remains the energetic core of all anti-sexual patriarchal religions” (96)

• “sexual anxiety is the main vehicle in the anchoring of the authoritarian social order in the child’s structure” (99)

• “the youth’s sexual drive develops in a passive homosexuality. In terms of the drive’s energy, passive homosexuality is the most effective counterpart of natural masculine sexuality, for it replaces activity and aggression by passivity and masochistic attitudes, that is to say, by precisely those attitudes that determine the mass basis of patriarchal authoritarian mysticism in the human structure” (104) !!!!!!

• “healthy sensuousness and the ability to gratify one’s desires produces natural self-confidence. The defensive formations in the mystical man result in a pathological self-confidence that is rotten at the core” (108)

Reading Quotes — September 30

Anti-Oedipus:

• “We may well ponder the possibility that the analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex led Freud to discover, and to lend all the weight of his authority to, the unfortunate misapplication of the concept of autism to schizophrenia. For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics. He doesn’t like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers—’an undesirable resemblance’” (23)

• “before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines” (24)

Reading Quotes — October 1

Anti-Oedipus:

• “psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as production of desire so as to recast is along entirely different lines, making of it a ‘dirty little secret,’ the dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factor of Nature and Production” (49)

Update — October 1

So my pacing is definitely off. I read much slower than I planned for. At least this dense theory stuff. I decided to cut my reading of Mass Psychology off because I was spending so long on it. I started Anti-Oedipus yesterday, but that’s even longer, and I hardly understand any of his terms lol. So I might honestly read a summary of it instead. I don’t think I’m gonna end up using quotes anywhere, I have just been collecting them for my own comprehension.

Update — October 2

Did some streams of consciousness research framed around the meaning of terms in Anti-Oedipus and some of the themes on my mind. Notes taken below.

Update — October 3

Based on the artist lecture we had in class today I thought of an idea for the final presentation of this project that is very different from what I have proposed in the last few weeks. Or perhaps maybe it’s a project in the process I will do sooner, because it doesn’t have much to do with futurism. From what I’ve learned so far it seems that the suppression of sexuality, lack of childhood freedom, a patriarchal family framework, and religious mysticism are the most central themes to fascism. This is according to psychoanalysis, which is not perceived as an accurate framework for psychology anymore. Whether or not psychoanalysis is an accurate method to deconstruct fascism, I think it is an incredibly fascinating point in the history of psychology. I like the idea of using it as a metaphor to examine one’s relationship with childhood and sexuality over time.

When I was working for the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry during summer 2019, I was a counselor for a media arts camp that the STUDIO ran for Golan’s kids and a bunch of their friends. One of the most memorable days was building a massive box fort that spanned the entire room — I remember feeling so joyful and childish. Since then I have wanted to explore the fort as a space for conceptual art. I think forts and closets and other small places of enclosure are such an exciting part of childhood. It seems like it must have an effect on identity formation. At least for me, the spaces that I built and only allowed myself to enter helped me express my imagination both through the decoration of the space and the safety I felt inside to engage in my interests without judgment or bother. It reminds me of what fascists don’t want a child to do, pleasure themselves and investigate what lies beyond their normal conception of “home”.

This makes me think that environments which generate sexuality, freedom, playfulness, safety, love, awareness — everything that generates individualism and pleasure — are ones that are most effective in combatting fascism. My sketch below is of a mini box fort that will immerse the viewer in a safe interactive experience, either about sexuality or family (I’m not sure yet). The viewer must crawl through a tunnel to get to the main environment. Buttons on the inside will trigger audio and lights, which the viewer can experience while interacting with the other content on the walls and the floor of the box. I’m thinking there will be some sort of interactive narrative that the viewer can participate in creating, leaving an artifact of their creativity and individuality for the next viewer.

I’m wondering how I could relate this to futurism. I mean, this is an example of immersivity, so it somewhat already is. It’s not as computational as I was planning on exploring in my later research.

Update - November 1

So. It has been a complicated month. Towards the beginning of the month I lost track of this log. Guilt built up. Then I went to Italy. Then I died for a week. I am now dumping everything I’ve done in the last month in somewhat of a chronological order.

Questions for Futurism:

• Why was art an important part of the success of fascism?

• What types of art were best for communicating fascism?

• Did futurism or fascism come first?

• Are there other times/movements in which art was used to control the public? to shield the power of science?

Readings:

Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity by Mark Antliff

• “appeal to past values in the name of a noncapitalist future society is a key characteristic of fascism” (2)

• “concepts associated with modernist aesthetics—including regeneration, spiritualism, primitivism, and avant-gardism—were integrated into the anti-Enligthtenment pantheon of fascist values, with the result that many artists found common ground with these new movements” (2)

• “Nazi imagery used the countryside as ‘the focus for the palingenetic myth of renewal and sustenance, not for a retreat from the twentieth century’” (4)

• “Since fascist politics were premised on mythmaking, artists had an important role to play in the development of myths capable of sustaining a revolutionary spirit once the fascists gained power” (5)

• “Since Sironi associated naturalist verisimilitude and didactic imagery with an appeal to reason and conscious reflection, he rejected such stylistic features, relying instead on pictorial fragmentation and disjunction, expressive brushstroke, and figural deformation to operate subliminally to inspire an emotional rather than a purely cognitive reaction to his art” (5)

• “fascism seeks to overcome the sociopolitical dissension caused by capitalism by imposing an aestheticized ideology on the fragmented and pluralistic flux of contemporary society” (6)

• “the battle between fascism and communism has an aesthetic correlate in the closed order of organic form and the fragmentary dynamism of collage” (7)

• “montage techniques in film and photography as an aesthetic medium attuned to the dynamism of the fascist industrial producer” (7)

• “glass not only allowed Terragni to integrate the building with the surrounding evnironment, it also served as a metaphoric reference to Mussolini’s declaration that fascism be a ‘house of glass’ open to all” (9)

• “asymmetrical spaces that made use of collage elements, irregular proportions, and strong diagonals to evoke a sense of dynamism as well as sensations of dislocation, rupture, and shock (Fig 3). Braun has astutely labeled this stylistic feature a mode of ‘modernist defamiliarization’ indebted to the collage techniques of the Soviet artist El Lissitzky” (10)

• “the visual syntax of modern art and that of past eras were combined within the ideological framework of mythic activism” (10)

• “space and time were now socially constructed as quantifiable commodities to be bought and sold” (13)

• “fascists condemned the ‘clock time’ of capitalism, claiming that it emptied temporality of meaning and thereby denied that human actions could have a spiritual or epic significance that transcended mudane materialism” (15)

• “this capitalist ‘disenchantment’ of time reduced all products of the creative process to a quantifiable commodity, subject to monetary speculation; fascism, by contrast, sought to infuse time with qualitative value as an expression of its ability to transform human consciousness and society” (15)

• “revolutionary events fall under the rubric of an ‘alternative’ time, since ‘a revolution is a moment when a mythically charged “now” creates a qualitative change in the continuum of history…’” (15)

• “proliferation of imagery devoted to ‘the sanctification of creative work’ as ‘the instrument and guarantee of the future salvation’'“ (16)

• “Hitler and Mussolini were not the only ‘creators’ able to mold society according to their ‘sublime’ vision; the people themselves were to take on such creative agency under the impact of fascism’s mythic constructs” (18)

Fascism and the Intellectuals: The Case of Italian Futurism by Emil Oestereicher

• “the original and profoundly important contribution of Futurism to this ideological stew was its emphasis upon the desirability of technological development and rapid industrial transformation” (7)

• “‘Democracy’ was singled out as the major obstacle to all efforts directed at a radical breakthrough in the arts as well as in politics” (11)

• “…Futurist poetry, introducing such radical stylistic devices as the abolition of syntax, punctuation, and metrical rules. They maintained that the artistic presentation of the excitement of modern life and technology required the elimination of grammatical limitations” (12)

• “The first manifesto of Futurist painters… argued that objects should not be presented in isolation but should absorb their surroundings. The painted should be able to insert himself in the midst of things in such a way that all these things could enter his consciousness and induce empathy between object and subject” (12)

• “manifesto of Futurist sculpture… necessity to represent movement and insisted that the block of sculpture should ‘contain within itself the architectural elements of the sculptural environment in which the subject lives’” (12-13)

Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism by Anne Bowler

• “Futurist art, Marinetti declared, would act as an incendiary device, upholding the new values of speed, destruction, an violence necessary for a new age of Italian national grandeur” (1)

• “History and tradition, as the first manifesto attests, as cast as nothing less than the diseases that afflict and must be violently eradicated from the Italian corpus” (7-8)

• “Jarry demonstrated the importance of the theater as an incendiary device and crucial arena for the destruction of the boundaries between artist and audience” (8)

• “The rejection of the romanticist conception of beauty for the Futurists means the rejection of an art and literature entrapped by the conventions of love, sentimentality, and the melancholic longing wrought by romantic passion” (9)

• “For Marinetti, the task of Futurism lay in the heroic liberation of Italian culture from this all-encompassing feminized body” (10)

• “it is the eroticization of the machine that allows the Futurist to transcend the romanticist conception of woman and beauty in favor of a new art that will act upon and transform the fabric of modern life” (13)

• “The portrait of Mussolini also reiterates the Futurist preoccupation with brute force and the eroticization of domination and submission” (15)

• “Futurist painting sought to break down the boundaries between artist and audience in order to create works that would merge with life and form the basis of a new social order” (16)

• “What became especially important for the Futurists, however, was the force of the line: the kinetic representation of objects in sequence whose paths of real or potential movement, past and future, are now indicated by the line — as force, spatial or temporal. Central to this pictorial representation of the line as movement then is the expansion or absorption of objects into their spatial surroundings; not only the interplay between an object or figure and its environment but, as Taylor observes, ‘the effect on forms of actual motion in space, since our perception movement changes the shape of an object quite as much as does light’” (17)

• “The abolition of punctuation… provide the elements of shock and surprise that will alert the reader to new social and aesthetic structures of meaning and the ‘divinity of speed’” (20)

• “Fascism relied on the kind of agitational propaganda and crowd-stirring spectacles that the Futurists so brilliantly provided” (22)

• “the manifesto thus emerges as the form over and above Marinetti’s other literary-poetic innovations that succeeding in dissolving the boundaries not only between artist and audience, but politics and art more generally” (23)

• “Futurism meant, as the name implied, the utopic belief in a new art of the future that would break with the rules and strictures of tradition and inaugurate the investigation of a form leading the way to a new art that would no longer serve as an escape from life but directly engage and transform it” (23)