Theoretical Groundings

While I have been working on Random for some time, I focused on finishing it and presenting it at the National Popular Culture Conference in March of 2005. Below are some of my notes and other information for that conference.

Abstract

What role does randomness play in the logic of the digital age? Random: The Internet is Funny experiments with randomness, comic strips, and electric logic. I briefly explore three theories that influenced the "Random Comic" experiment: Gregory Ulmer's notion of "conduction," the aesthetic logic of the image; Surrealist interest in the unconscious and the "exquisite corpse" game; and theory about image, language, and humor in comic strips. Finally, I present "Random Comic," my interactive Flash program that produces comic strips based on user input and a Google search, and discuss the value of randomness in understanding and harnessing Internet logic.

Gregory Ulmer's notion of "Conduction"

If it is true that in commodity or consumer culture human relationships have been displaced into things, then those same things, taken up into details of a diegesis, become the places of passage linking otherwise unrelated discourses (D. Miller). Conductive (electronic) logic, that is, supplements the established movements of inference between things and ideas (abduction, deduction, induction) with a movement directly between things (unconscious thought). (Heuretics 127)

Ulmer suggests, here, that David Lynch's films embody a movement emblematic of electronic logic. The passage of diegetic action, of thought, between objects rather than people may be part of the digital age.

It is the movement directly between things that leads to my project. If electronic logic moves directly (by "conduction"), then perhaps sentences associated by a phrase become diegetic and relate, for the reader.

The Exquisite Corpse

The famous Surrealist game serves, in many ways, as the direct grandparent of Random. The Exquisite Corpse game

works from a fixed syntactical structure:
What is a (noun)?
A (noun), (adjective) and (adjective).
The game requires four players, each of whom writes down (wihtout consulting the others) her assigned part of speech (either noun or adjective). The result is a collaboratively produced metaphor: in Breton's words, "With the exquisite corpes we had at our disposal--at last--an infallible means of temporarily dismissing the critical mind and of fully freeing metaphorical activity."(Ray 49)

Robert Ray introduces the game in the passage above to argue for its value as a research tool in film classes. I suggest that Random becomes the solitary person's way to connect with the unfettered "metaphorical activity" Breton and the other Surrealists sought so diligently. The exquisite corpse succeeds where other Surrealist tasks, like automatic writing, fail; automatic writing seeks to tap the unconscious, to "dismiss the critical mind," but it proved difficult if not impossible. With the imposition of a rigid structure and an external device (one another), the surrealists discovered a way to tap the knowledge of the unconscious more reliably.

Thus we return to Ulmer's association that conduction is the formalized logic of the unconscious; my project builds on the Surrealists' discovery that forced Randomness often yields interesting results.

Gutters

One of the more interesting questions, for me, remains the psychological understanding of what happens when a person reads a comic strip. This is the area of theory on which I'm least well-grounded (readers with suggestions are encouraged to contact me); however, it seems like the mental leaps required to move from panel to panel, particularly during a scene change (or a cut), must tap into the same areas of the brain that make the exquisite corpse metaphors work.

Randomness in humor

In my passing understanding of Freud, I understand that he thinks jokes serve to release pressures on the unconscious. The absurd joke (the kind I would also call "random") gives pleasure in the "liberation of nonsense"(NY Freudian Society 8/128). Since I conceived this project, I've become particularly interested in humor based on randomness or absurdity, such as Monty Python's Flying Circus, or Chef Brian, to name just two.

This sort of humor, which often seems entirely absurd, was part of what drove me to create the project.

So what?

Random is an experiment in internet art and programming. While the subtexts above guided me in creating it, I have not sought to expain the project very cohesively from a theoretical standpoint. I invite readers to contact me to discuss the project.

Works Cited

- New York Freudian Society. "Abstract of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious." http://nyfreudian.org/abstracts/abs_volumes/vol-08.htm 20 March 2005.
- Ray, Robert. The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
- Ulmer, Gregory. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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