Seminar Introduction

Sarah Farsad and Cheryl Younger

Cheryl Younger:  The thing you need to understand is that when we write our letter to the speakers--the people who are going to talk to you--we tell them what we’d like them to talk about, and where we want them to head off.  But we also say that we would like them to head off in a different direction or take another angle on topic because they know the field.  But every once and awhile we get somebody who goes off topic completely.  We had this one guy who is a critic and he wanted to start talking about photography, which he knows nothing about, when we really wanted him to talk about something else, like the book he wrote. So, sometimes we have to get them back on track.  We don’t always know what they’re going to say but hopefully they feel free enough to say what they want.  We want them to have that kind of freedom because the discussion will be so much better than any of us can conceive of and make it more interesting for you.  Also, since we’re doing some of these things as the questions and answers come, feel free to ask them questions a little bit off the topic.  I know your next speaker Darsie and I were having a discussion a minute ago so I may ask her some questions about that because I think it’s really pertinent to what we’re going to talk about at the end of the week.

The topic for this year’s seminar, which is projected images, really comes out of last year’s seminar, which was about performance art so it just seemed natural that we would do projections next.  We didn’t start on next year’s project until August or September--and then September 11 came.  The things that happened to us during that time were such a shock that it just became clear to us that projected images is really the topic we need to be talking about.  We were talking about projected images very broadly, not in the sense of, we’re going to show you this picture up here on the screen, but we’re talking more about projected images of race, projected images of women, and projections of sexuality onto children.  Also, how they relate to visual perceptions--the actual visual images that exist--and how that gets translated into our culture and how these kinds of things happen.  That’s what you’re going to see explored here today.  I think the thing that struck me most about 9/11 is that when it was happening, we were just standing there like this . . . with our mouths open, we didn’t know how to react, because for us it was like a movie--it was just like a movie and everybody was saying, “it’s a movie, it’s a movie.”  So, we were actually seeing it in real life, real time--not when the plane is hitting the building 18 times. What occurred to me then is that whenever the first film was made, which was the Lenoir film, it had a train coming right at the audience and people ran screaming out of the theater because they didn’t know how to deal with this projected and mediated image.  Now we are so into having our images mediated for us that we didn’t know how to respond to real life without some kind of mediation.  We went up on the roof, we ran down three flights to see the TV, we ran back up to the roof, we ran back down to the TV: all of us were trying to get the TV to mediate this experience for us.  I don’t know if any of you saw that film that two French guys made, but did you notice how everybody at first was just dumbstruck especially after the second tower went down?  Just totally dumbstruck.  And I think that really is a mediated experience, because if it would have been in another culture or in another time before projected images, I think people would have been running but they may have been trying to do something. We didn’t know what to do or how to do it because we didn’t know how to deal with that--we just don’t know anymore.  We might have run or hid in the trees or run down to try to rescue people but again, nobody knew what to do.  So, on television when they told us to give blood, thousands of people went to give blood.  There were four blocks of lines around St. Vincent’s and when we went over to this other one and saw people waiting in lines around that we finally just went home.  But we didn’t even need any blood – it was kind of obvious – they weren’t bringing in bodies, you know what I mean?  The thing we noticed was that there were no real interviews with people.  The mediation was being done by the media, which I think was really an interesting aspect of the whole situation.  All we saw was the news reporters because they were live on the scene, but there was also a whole city of 6 million people – why weren’t they interviewing those people?  Why weren’t those people having a voice?  Why aren’t the victims on television?  Why aren’t the people coming down from the 90^th floor getting a chance to talk and tell us what their experience was?  It was totally being mediated for us, and I think that really shocked us.  It really disturbed me, and that’s actually one of the reasons why I made the film.  I just wanted to say, “This is what a 55-year-old woman experienced; someone who’s just a normal person who lives here.”  But I think that’s important because nobody knows how New Yorkers experienced that.  Did you see anything that showed how somebody who lived here was actually experiencing it?  No.  So that’s what I tried to do in some interviews because I think that’s important; our personal experience is important.  For example, my daughter went to Smith College and they have all these diaries of the women who’ve gone to school there for years and years and years, and they have to do a research project on those diaries.  These are diaries of women who lived through the revolution and were sometimes raped three to four times by the Colonial soldiers and how they had these women who followed the armies so that whenever the British were victorious, they, the American women, would get raped, and whenever we beat the British, their camp followers would get raped.  But we don’t hear about that stuff.  We don’t hear about how when Germany invades Poland they rape all the women and then when Poland invades Germany they rape all the women – no wonder they hate each other.  Like what happens in Africa, when they go in and just chop everybody’s body up, you know.  So those are the kind of things that we don’t get in the news.  Because we don’t get that kind of history, it changes our understanding and perception of what goes on.  That’s why I think it’s really important that personal experiences actually exist as documents.  I would always encourage you to write down and keep a journal of that kind of stuff--otherwise it gets to be the story, the story of the culture, the story of the government, but maybe not what really happened. 

There is a guy, Tom Rosenthal, who has a program called, “Excellence in Journalism.”  They actually did a study of what went on TV and what was in the newspapers and when, which is the study that you read.  I thought that was really interesting because it confirmed what we were saying and what we were thinking. I don’t know about you but through the internet, maybe because I was in New York, I had messages from all over the world from people I knew, and they were telling us what they were seeing on television in Germany, they were telling us what they were seeing in Japan and Italy, and we didn’t get any of that stuff here.  We didn’t see the stuff that was happening right in our neighborhood because we don’t have a free press here.  I want you to think about that because you’re the photographers, you’re the image-makers; you’re the ones who are creating these cultural icons.  Use your power for doing that.  Whether we do it commercially or in art or we just do it personally, we are creating those kinds of things.  We need to think about what they mean, how they mean, how they affect our culture, how they affect us personally and how they affect our children.  That’s where we’re going with this, so we’re going to talk about each one of those segments as we go along.  I hope it becomes a back and forth thing about our mediated images. 

We’re also going to talk about augmented reality as well as virtual reality.  That’s another thing that’s becoming very much a part of how we live, and I don’t know if we’re really that aware of it, like how much of what we know and what we see is not real, yet we assume that it’s real and we give it a place that’s real.  It’s an interesting thing how all of this is pulling together, and then you look at something like the Mexican culture.  Have you ever seen the movie, “Like Water For Chocolate”?  We don’t even get a lot of foreign films so we don’t really understand the process of thinking or what other people think is reality because fantasy and reality get mixed sometimes in this culture.  But their religion then becomes so much a part of their reality that their reality is not like ours anymore.  Ours is like this concrete thing, like this is here so it’s here.  I know that my Aunt Mildred’s not physically standing by me but in some of those cultures my Aunt Mildred really is standing by me and really helping me.  So it’s interesting how those things all plan out.  I think it’s particularly important that we understand how things are being censored and what things are being censored, how the media works—if you think it does—and how it’s all been conglomerated.  I think there are seven publishing companies, period, in the world because they take over all these little ones.  There’s a lot of power in that.  So maybe it’s not directly what does or doesn’t get said, but there’s still that institutionalization of attitudes and images and what can and cannot go on TV and what can and cannot go in newspapers.  It tends to make the stories very simple.  Unfortunately, it’s what all newspaper and media is doing--there’s nothing else there, no more outside information.  I think one thing we need to think about also is our role as artists and as the only free radicals for that kind of transference of information.  To go in and look at a community where people have just been put down and put down, when there’s brightness there.  There is a life there, a community there, and for us to go in and say that to them, to mirror that to them, is the first time they’ve ever had something positive said about their community or have them think about themselves in another way that hasn’t come from the media.  That’s really important because I believe that’s a defense for the arts.  We are the only ones that go out – like we had people go and do pieces on muskrats, about taking the hides of muskrats, and we went and did a piece on how it’s very much a part of the economy.  She just went and did all these stories – like she’d go and photograph you and you were the P.R. person for this company that was a major polluter and which had several violations against them.  They would tell you the whole story about what they were doing and how there were no cancer-causing agents, and then you would go next door to your house and there you’d be with your baby and all of the things that were really happening and how many people had died from cancer and blah, blah, blah.  She did this--she did this in a Xerox book.  She took this little book in this binder and she took it all over Texas and actually changed a tremendous number of laws about how all those toxic substances get into our culture.  This is just like a photographer doing this one little thing that’s changing the world.  Often I think about what your responsibility is to do that when you see things.  Like when we saw what was happening here and how this story was very different from what was being portrayed on television, I ask where’s my obligation to actually document what I see that difference to be.  I want those questions to be in your mind. I’m not going to answer them for you because obviously it’s your answer, but I want you to think about them.  Everybody will come up with a different answer and everybody will have something different to say.  You start to think about all those kinds of things and what role you played in it.  When you create these images and you stick them on the wall and people come in and see them, what is it you’re trying to get across?  What are you trying to say?  What are you trying to juxtapose it to?  You can do it because you have the skills.  Why aren’t they teaching art in the schools anymore?  Why is it that they don’t teach design and design communications in the third grade?  You can.  It’s pretty simple to do.  Why aren’t they teaching critical thinking to children?  There’s one man in Ohio, he has this program where he goes around to schools and he talks in order to get kids to think critically.  He puts up Fruit Loops and Corn Flakes and other cereals, and he asks the kids, “Who buys these cereals?” Then they start to talk about how they’re advertised and what the communication is.  Because these kids are like in first or second grade, and this kind of critical analysis, it doesn’t mean they’re going to buy Fruit Loops, but they’ll understand why it’s happening.  And these kids understand it too, they’re not stupid, they can pick up on it, but nobody ever points it out, and nobody ever makes them think about it.  It changes these kids from this early time to be more thoughtful about those kinds of things and not to be so easily influenced.  I think that kind of information is suppressed because it’s certainly a tool of advertising in our culture and a tool of capitalism.  I’m not going to say I’m a communist but I think we need to understand and we need to know what we’re doing.  Why is it that all these products are advertised to poor people?  They can’t just be poor people and have a nice neighborhood.  Some people have really nice spots and I know people who live in the country in Arkansas and they live on a little piece of land and when they need something they go down and get a job for a while and then they buy a car, then they quit the job, because that’s all they needed.  It’s like a totally different structure and system.  They have pretty good lives and they’re not hungry, but then you come in with all the stories and all the advertisements saying that they need, and then all of a sudden there’s this great pressure to get us all into this system where we buy, buy, buy, until we’re so in debt.  We’re part of that--we cause that.  Whether you think it’s good or not, we need to examine it and our role in it as image-makers because those are all projections and they often don’t have anything to do with reality.  Those are the kinds of things we’re going to look at. 

Sarah, do you want to add something?  No?  Okay, because she’s going to do the lecture on the projection of sexuality onto youth, which is also an issue that was a focus in the large conference from UNICEF.  I want to open the discussion just a little bit before Darsie starts.  Where are we on time?  What are you thinking about?  When you came to this conference, were those the kinds of things you were thinking might be talked about?  Or are there other parts that you want to bring into this conversation? 

Audience:  There’s so much to explore so I appreciate you setting the tone and the direction that we can travel down the road on.  In terms of expectations, I’m sitting here trying to be open and see what comes forth.  I was looking forward to the introspective that would be coming out of the information that would be shared, so the situation I was hoping for is exploration and risk-taking.

Younger:  I hope it does, and I hope that we’ve chosen our speakers wide enough because there are some that disagree with each other. There are two people who won’t come on the same day, because they don’t like each other but I won’t tell you who they are – you have to figure it out but hopefully you’ll get exposed to some of those ideas.  I just wanted you to know that we don’t necessarily agree with any of those ideas, but I really, really believe that we should have all the ideas here that we possibly can so that you really get a chance to explore it from one side and the other side.  Explore it from the top and the bottom, from the left or right or do whatever we can to see that it happens.  You are actually critics of the media as well as media people so you can ask all the questions that you want, and I hope that you do.  Like when Darsie gets up to talk, I want you all to think of one question you can ask her.  Darsie will be our guinea pig today, so that you can get in the habit of asking questions and not just listening because I know there has been one of those awful formats where somebody’s talking up here, the authority, and they’re standing up and you’re sitting down and you’re just receiving, which is your typical classroom kind of thing.  But I want you to try to think for a minute, and I’m going to try to call it to your attention, but I want you to participate in this.  Think about questions, think about other directions you want to take it, because obviously if you have a direction you want to take it, like from the boat-builder’s perspective for example, what does that mean for projected images?  I don’t know what that might be, but the point is that I want you to bring that forward and continue to think that this perspective is something else. 

Audience:  I’m interested in the philosophical implications and metaphysical possibly of the mediated reality or the story of reality, and what is reality.  Can it be reality even though it seems like it’s not reality?  I’m interested in those kinds of things.

Younger:  Yeah, I really think that this whole concept of reality was pretty fixed probably since the 1900’s until maybe 10 years ago.  And it was a fixed American reality, and maybe it was, even in America, divided up into cultural reality.  A Western dominant thought, wouldn’t even consider these other kinds of realities.  Like what’s the name of that movie, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”?  Whatever that is, I loved that film, because it was like, Wow!  Different kinds of realities and metaphors for different kinds of activities--but it could all be real.  It could become our reality, and these things are becoming our reality.  These images really do play a role in our lives.  Like Barney, a little kid flies, that’s really a reality, even though it doesn’t even exist, like Mickey Mouse, they really do exist, and they exist in our lives and our reality, and maybe around the world, but the idea is that this fictional thing exists in some context.  But where are we going to draw the lines?  And maybe the whole idea is that we can’t anymore, and it has to do with that respect now for the fact that there are different opinions and perspectives, whereas before it was narrow, but I also think there are things that are being drawn on that are kind of dangerous, like this whole thing on the war against terrorism.  It’s just like the Cold War switched over now.  It scares me because for a while we had a good time in this country, we had an economy that was booming, and it was only for four to five years, or whenever Clinton was in, but it was like a time when the defense budget was down, and we were actually saving our Social Security.  I think about that because I’m getting close to retirement and Social Security might be there for me, but will it be there for you?  I know that doesn’t sound very interesting to you right now, however, when you get to be my age it’ll be very interesting because you won’t be able to exist and you won’t be able to feed yourself.  Because they cut all the social programs, that means there will be no food stamps and no medicine.  It’s like slowly phasing out old people and even just your personal independence and the ability to live without that economic system. You know, the people in Arkansas aren’t going to be able to do what they do anymore and I think that’s one of the problems we have.  We can’t get Al-Jazeera here.  I don’t get it!  Why not?  That drives me nuts!  I want to know what those people think.  I want to know what they’re thinking about us, so that I can either try to do something about it if I can, or at least know how to protect myself if I don’t. 

Audience:  Okay, you were talking about how we can’t get this Al-Jazeera information, and I’m an immediate junkie when it comes to news and newspapers and the Internet.  I found that to be a wonderful resource over the last two years, and have become even more obsessed with it since 9/11 in cross-referencing information between newspapers and now the Washington Post, but also all other nations’ papers in Mexico, Iran, Iraq, and I found it so. . . I grew up part of my time in Canada, which is a “socialist” country and it really surprised me after 9/11, how much stuff has really been blacked out.  How the United States really has a charge of the Internet, which I thought was pretty much free press.  But there is so much that I personally noticed that I can not get my hands on and other things that I’m terrified to even try to open up because I’m afraid that somebody might be watching me do it because they don’t want me knowing that information.

Younger:  Yeah, I think it’s really frightening, and I don’t mean to be the conspiracy theory person, but it really is happening.  There are all these huge pressures right now for huge companies to put rules and regulations on the Internet while we were thinking that this was our free information system.  Now all of a sudden it’s being clamped down on.  Why?  Why is it necessary?  I don’t understand that.  And I think we should be asking that.  We should be encouraging people around us to ask that.  That’s my opinion.  You probably might feel different, but you know . . ..

Audience:  It’s like “access denied.”  Isn’t this the land of the free?  You know? 

Audience:  I was going to say that that’s a projected image right there.  That’s sort of like projected reality.  It’s always been a surprise to me, coming from outside America, how much Americans think that they’re free when they’re not.  Especially if you come in as a foreign or international person, that’s when you see all the restrictions because you have to go through the loop holes that most Americans don’t have to.  If you don’t have to stand in line or don’t have to fill out too many forms, people are just somewhat oblivious, but if you do have to go through the system you realize that you have to account for, when you travel, things like, who were you with and what did you have for lunch?  It’s really obsessive in a way, and in other countries at least you know what the restrictions are.  If there are any, than you already know what you’re dealing with.  It’s funny to me the moment a lot of Americans begin to realize.  That’s sort of what 9/11 did.  For the few who did question things it just seemed like, okay, now you see what everybody else has been experiencing.  Just hanging out with other international students, like my roommate’s from Egypt, and we get, I don’t know whether it’s Al-Jazeera. . .

Younger:  You can get it with a dish, and in New Jersey Sarah was saying that they have the satellite dishes in the Muslim neighborhoods.  It’s actually the neighborhood where some of the guys that blew it up the first time were from--the same mosque.

Audience:  Yeah, I guess our cable, being close to Canada too, we can get the Canadian news. We also get the international news for the international students.  Like we get Russian news and German--it’s totally a different perspective that’s going on in the rest of the world and nobody here knows about it.  So there’s this wall that’s around that’s so well constructed, and they teach you how to build that wall, you know?  My undergrad is in communication and they teach you agenda-setting and gate-keeping.  It’s a chapter in a book!  And I sat there and I was like, “They teach you this?”  Great.

Younger:  That’s also something I was talking to the assistants about.  We were talking about group process and how things work.  How come you weren’t taught about group process?  How come you weren’t taught about roles that people play in groups?  Why?  Because somebody like me could then control you.  I’d know how to make you do this that and the other, you know what I’m saying?  Somebody that’s facilitating a group, who studies group process, can make you do just about anything.  Like if you’re a labor organizer, I could make you so mad.  Just go out and find out what you’re mad about, like the fact that you don’t get enough money or that you don’t get to go to the bathroom enough.  Okay, then I’m going to set you in a circle and every third person’s going to be somebody of mine, but you’re not going to know that, and then they’re going to say, “I’m pissed ‘cause I don’t get to go to the bathroom,” and the next person says, “I’m pissed ‘cause we don’t make enough money,” and pretty soon you all fall into saying the same things and making the same kind of complaints just because they’re making them.  Then all of a sudden everybody is saying, “Let’s do it!  Let’s do it!”  Suddenly the union leader says, “Yeah, I’m gonna lead you,” and then he takes off and does it.  But that’s communist organizing and that’s also how it happens in underdeveloped countries.  It’s how a rebel leader will do it too.  Like, let’s give the people what they want.  They want some wells?  Let’s give them wells.  Then all of a sudden, they gave us wells and next thing, you’re hiring somebody who would be blood bathing somebody else.  So it’s a very interesting thing.  But I think at some point you learn this crap, but we don’t learn.  It’s stuff to think about.  Oh, you have a question?

Audience:  Not a question, just to add to what they were saying about the news and the media because I lived in Arabia before I came here.  I knew a lot of things about the States that I learned from the media over there, which is different from yours.  Even from some American channels, like CNN, which is a different broadcast there than the CNN that you get here.  When I came here to cover how people are so isolated I saw that you don’t really get enough news about what’s going on in other countries.  After 9/11 I remember I was watching Al-Jazeera all the time because it was actually threatened to be shut down by western governments and by Arab countries, just because they wanted to bring some kind of reality.  What we’re talking about is reality. 

Younger:  I think that’s really interesting and it’s just driving me nuts because my friends were hearing Al-Jazeera in Italy and they were seeing images of the World Trade Center that we weren’t seeing at all, like the bodies.  And it’s like, why not?  Why don’t we know?  Not that I want to see bodies, but do you know what I’m saying?  Why can’t we know what’s going on?  And then why did Giuliani put a big fence around it so we couldn’t go down and see it?  And then, why couldn’t we photograph it?  We’d go down there and start to take pictures and they’d say, “You can’t do that!”  And I said, “Well, you arrest me because I’m going to have a million dollar suit against this city.”  They didn’t arrest anybody, but they threatened everybody.  Then several of the people here got together, and you’ll hear from Charles Traub who’s one of them, and all the people who took pictures here, they all took them to this place and they produced them for people.  It’s like a real movement by photographers to do something about it.  You go down and buy those pictures now, and see them, and they couldn’t keep you from making them, and they couldn’t keep you from seeing them, and I think that’s really, really important.  That was an action by photographers in our city that actually did something.  It’s important that we’re the ones that do this, that we’re the ones who have the skills.  And maybe our role’s more important; maybe we want something else to do besides make more pictures of pretty girls and landscapes.  Maybe even those pretty girls and landscapes imply something that might be important for us to look at.  I’m going to quit, take a short break, and then Darsie will be here.