Terri Senft

Role model.

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 23 May 2009 09:38:26 GMT

This is my partner. Two days ago, he donated his kidney to his sister.

Both brother and sister are doing quite well, now.

I think he is amazing. I love him more than anything in the world.

There is a man on the ward who has been waiting for a kidney since 2001.

If you haven't marked 'organ donor' on your driving license, please
do consider it.

Most people in the world don't have a brother like Mike.

Media Studies 2.0

tsenft@gmail.com — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:56:11 GMT

I'm only a year late to their party, but I'm really enjoying the conversation between William Merrin and David Gauntlett on "Media Studies 2.0" at:

http://twopointzeroforum.blogspot.com/

Wondering: why aren't more MS programs doing this sort of work? What would it take to get my program refitted along these lines?

Any media or comm. program recommendations?

tsenft@gmail.com — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:16:15 GMT

Do you know of any media or comm. programs that try to integrate theory, practice and activism? Any specific teachers who do things like David Silver does inhttp://silverinsf.blogspot.com/2009/01/digital-media-production-spring-09.html ?

I'm open to any and all thoughts, here...

Streaming now: Conference on YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle (US)

tsenft@gmail.com — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:14:07 GMT

The conference "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States" is
streaming live for the duration of the conference at the following URL:

http://youtubeandthe2008election.hosted.panopto.com/CourseCast/Student/Default.aspx

User: guest
Login: youtube

A complete program is available here:
http://www.umass.edu/polsci/youtube/final_program.pdf

You need to return to the home page, refresh and launch the stream for each
speaker.

Final questions on Micro-Celebrity

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:10:42 GMT

(Quick note: I started to get a little tired, so some of these are far more flip than they ought to be. I doubt anyone's been reading this far, but big thanks if you have!)

Does micro-celebrity threaten traditional celebrities? Does it cheapen them in some way?

I certainly don’t see the process of micro-celebrity as threatening the culture industries. If anything I’m a bit alarmed by the idea of armies of people busy doing the industry’s dirty work for them. It reminds me much like kids working for ‘street teams’ today to bring in information on the latest clothes and sounds, only to have that information packaged and sold back to them as commodity by giants like Sony and MTV.

think in the future, people who want to become bonafide celebrities will be expected to operate as their own promotion machine long before they are managed by places like Hollywood. Tomorrow’s starlets aren’t going to be ‘discovered’ working at the corner store; they’ll already have MySpace locales, online portfolios, and networks of viewers long before Hollywood finds them.

You ask whether the process of micro-celebrity ‘cheapens’ traditional celebrity. Let’s be clear on what celebrity is not, and what it is. Celebrity is not an impartial declaration of merit or talent; it is an economic mechanism designed to keep consumers from asking questions about media ownership, control, and taste-making.

Earlier I noted that celebrity runs on two contradictory messages: fame can come to anyone, yet only some people will be famous. Some people engaged in the process of trying to become celebrities figure this out, while others never quite get it. One of the things that fascinates me about micro-celebrity is the degree to which it helps people ‘get’ the culture industries quicker than they ever have before. As Mark Twain once said, “You learn some things swinging a cat by the tail you learn no other way.”

Is there a way to commercialize micro-celebrity? Are companies trying or are the audiences too small to effectively hawk commercial products?

Today, thanks to Google Adsense and programs like Amazon’s “power sellers’, no audience is too small to hawk commercial products.

What role does discovery play in all of this? Do audiences get upset when their micro-celebrity gets discovered?

That’s a really good question but I don’t have enough data to give you a quotable answer. I’m going to ask people for feedback on my LiveJournal on this one…

Do you think reality television is related to this phenomenon?

I think reality television is related to nearly every significant media-based performance of identity of the last decade, but that’s just me.

Do you see any political undercurrents to micro-celebrity culture?

I certainly do! But this is the topic of my next book, so you’ll have my fully formed thoughts on the matter when I do.

Questions 7 and 8 on Micro-Celebrity

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:23:34 GMT

Is micro-celebrity being studied in the academy? Is there any prejudice directed at studying micro-celebrity? Are there any other academics working on micro-celebrity?

I get about one or two pieces of email a week from students interested in writing about micro-celebrity. I can recommend two excellent academics doing this sort of work: Alice Marwick from New York University (see http://www.tiara.org/blog/) danah boyd from Microsoft (see http://www.danah.org/) There are probably lots and lots of other people out there. I often don’t know what’s being researched until someone’s standing next to their book at a conference!

Is there more of a proprietary feeling among audiences of various micro-celebrities than there would be with fans of actors or more traditional celebs?

This is a hard question for me to answer, because I don’t study fan communities in depth, but I think it says something that I bristled a bit when reading the word ‘fan’ used in combination with micro-celebrity (even though I’ve used it myself!) Take my own case of micro-celebrity: there may be people who think of themselves as my fans, but the idea of it sort of weirds me out. That wouldn’t be the case were I trying to position myself as a bonafide celebrity.

This talk of a ‘proprietary feeling’ is interesting to me, as well. We feel proprietary when we own something (or want to own it.) Again, while some folks probably do feel proprietary feelings for people engaged in micro-celebrity, I think a far more common feeling is a demand for accountability and connection to ones community. We don’t expect Jennifer Aniston to email us back, but many of us do feel sort of left out if we comment on someone’s LiveJournal and they don’t respond to us.

Questions 4, 5, 6 on Micro-Celebrity

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:09:55 GMT

(continued from the reporter's questions)

Does the rise of blogs and Youtube democratize the celebrity-selection process?

Yes, to the extent that celebrity can ever be thought of in the same breath as democracy (see my remarks on P. David Marshall, above.) I prefer the term ‘popularize’.

What about the fact that the celebrity of micro-celebrity seems based around people who aren’t that talented or who only have one talent, does that prevent them from going mainstream?

People engaged in micro-celebrity tend to reach certain audiences because they give interesting perspectives, offer what others see as useful information, seem quirky, or present something that touches others emotionally. They may strike viewers as professional, attractive, funny talented, gifted and so forth. However, and as one million episodes of Star Search have shown, none of this means these individuals have what it takes to enter today’s film, recording, or advertising industries.

The means of production is inexpensive, but do you think that the various stages on which micro-celebrities are performing (like youtube) are becoming more commercialized?

Certainly, and I suppose the convergences we are seeing between content in places like MySpace, YouTube and MTV is fueling lots of hopes among folks who would like to transmit their micro-celebrity activities to celebrity cash. Personally, I wouldn’t quit my day job.

Question 3 on Micro-Celebrity

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:56:05 GMT

You mentioned that micro-celebrities are more ‘real’ than their celebrity counterparts, but isn’t their personality still a performance or brand? Aren’t we deluding ourselves the same way we are when we presume to ‘know’ Paul Newman?

The simplest answer to your question is “yes.” That said, aren’t we deluding ourselves anytime we think we know someone else completely?

Sociologist Erving Goffman has an argument I find very useful when we’re thinking about who or what is ‘real’, online or off. For Goffman, identity amounts to little more than a series of performances directed to particular audiences in our lives. If you think about it for a moment, it makes sense. The ‘me’ who is a student differs from the ‘me’ who is daughter, and the ‘me’ who is a girlfriend has similarities to (but distinct differences from) the ‘me’ who is a best friend. Different audiences, different realities presented.

If we use Goffman as a starting point, the question switches from “Are people engaged in micro-celebrity practice just as unreal as Hollywood-style celebrities” to “what audiences are being addressed by each group?” The audience address of a Hollywood celebrity is quite specific: their sole function is to service a paying customer of some sort. The audience addressed by someone engaged in micro-celebrity is much harder to pin down.

When I was studying camgirls (women who webcam from their homes, attempting to gain a modicum of fame in the process), paying customers were often a consideration. When I study academics trying to reach students beyond their university by building themselves into a brand, money might or might not figure into the equation. When I was studying young girls circulating YouTube videos of their dancing to friends inside their high school cliques, money didn’t figure in the equation at all.

It’s important to remember that celebrities are commodities masquerading as people, while individuals engaged in micro-celebrity are people experimenting with branding themselves as commodity. We can never ‘know’ the Jennifer Aniston we want to know, because frankly, she’s not a person, she’s a product. In my experience, the same is not true of people engaged in micro-celebrity, who tend not to have things like managers, public relations assistants and other sorts of ‘handlers.’

Because they are human, people engaged in micro-celebrity are just as capable of one-sided presentation, spin and outright lies as are the rest of us. The difference between these people and bonafide celebrities is that for the latter group, misrepresentation is not a accident or a strategy: it’s a structuring fact of existence.

Question 2: In what ways does micro-celebrity resemble conventional celebrity? How does it differ?

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:10:55 GMT

(Continuing reporter's questions in this series...)

P.David Marshall writes that celebrity embodies two contradictory ideologies within American culture: democracy (in which everyone is equal) and capitalism (in which some of us are more equal than others.) Micro-celebrity likewise reflects this tension: while all sorts of people can engage in the practice of micro-celebrity, only some will get the sort of attention and notice they desire. Having said this, I think the differences between celebrity and micro-celebrity are more significant than the similarities.

Celebrity describes a product of the culture industries, and has gradations that are a direct reflection of the market: this is why we can speak of minor celebrities, niche celebrities, subcultural celebrities and so forth. On the other hand, micro-celebrity describes a process by which people express their identities online. If you ask whether someone is a micro-celebrity, you’ve missed the point. Micro-celebrity is something you do, not something you are.

Micro-celebrity looks like celebrity-fashioning, but it’s not, in part because there is no ‘man behind the curtain’ orchestrating our look, our lines, our communication for the world. Certainly, there are those engaged in the practice of micro-celebrity who may well want to become bonafide celebrities of one sort or another, but it’s certainly not the desire for most of us who engage in the practice.

Think of it this way: when I’m going to a party, I often put on my Marilyn Monroe dress. I don’t do this because I’m hoping to get discovered by Hollywood: I do it because it’s fun! Now, I’m not saying people who engage in micro-celebrity are blind to the allure of celebrity, of course not. I’m the product of a mother who thought Marilyn Monroe was glamorous, and I’m sure it’s rubbed off on me, which means Hollywood is having no small influence on my ideas about femininity, sexuality and so forth. But is this the same as saying that I dress like Marilyn because I want to be Marilyn? Certainly not.

Question: Did you coin the term micro-celebrity? Why that terminology?

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:03:59 GMT

(I've been answering some reporter's questions on micro-celebrity. I'm going to post my thoughts in the next few posts. Feel free to read or skip!)

To my knowledge, I coined the term micro-celebrity. I was trying to describe what I saw as a newish cultural phenomenon: the desire to present oneself to others over the Web using tools formerly associated with celebrity promotion.

To understand the development of micro-celebrity, it helps to remember the early days of internet communication, when people usually conceptualized online identity as a place of play and anonymity. The classic example is the famous New Yorker cartoon in the 1990’s that featured two dogs and had the tagline, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Although anonymity still flourishes in plenty of online places today, it seems to me that identity in a time of “Web 2.0” functions differently. Some of us think of our online identity in terms of our avatars in online gaming, but far more of us think of it in terms of the fonts we use on our home pages, the blogs we’re asked to post to for on behalf of our schools and companies, the networked photos others post of us on Facebook, the follows we receive on Twitter, the serialization of our videos on YouTube. We present ourselves through media, we are experienced as media, and we often experience ourselves as media.

When I took classes on personal identity, I learned about the ‘big three’ (race, class, gender) which then expanded into sexuality, religion, nation, language, age, and ability. I think it’s time to add two new categories to this list: market and brand. To make media (and that is what we are doing when we go online) is to determine an audience—a market-- or one’s message. One of the most successful ways to signal a desired market is to brand. We now have the tools to do this, the desire is there, and often, the process works effectively. Why wouldn’t we engage in these behaviors?

Come hang out with me in June at U. of Salford!

tsenft@gmail.com — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:15:12 GMT

2nd Digital Cultures Workshop: Social Media Publics
4-5 June 2009, University of Salford, U.K.

Final Call for Contributions

Organizers
Ben Light and Marie Griffiths, University of Salford
Sian Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores University
Steve Sawyer, Syracuse University

Confirmed Speakers
Dr. Carsten Sørensen - Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics
Dr. Theresa Senft - School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London

It is clear that the boundaries between the 'public' and the 'private' are becoming increasingly blurred within and amongst sites of home and work. Indeed, in the wake of reality television shows, national identity card schemes, increased social media usage and the like, publicity appears to be the order of the day. For this workshop we seek papers that discuss the issues raised for those living in environments where there is seemingly little room for privacy. As was the case last year, we intend for the workshop to be multi-disciplinary in nature, broad in the approaches participants take and issues they cover. If your work is about any aspect of digital culture, this is the workshop for you! The following are thus only indicative of potential topics that could be raised:

- How do people domesticate social media in their attempts to maintain a balance in publicity and privacy? Do they? Why do they, or don't they?
- What matters are raised by increased access to data about individuals and organizations?
- What does the blurring of boundaries between public and private mean for our knowledge and experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and disability?
- How are ICT mediated spaces created and maintained at home, work and those spaces in between? For example, how are 'geek gamers' finding spaces to play now the only console in the house can be in the living room?
- How are ICT policies shaping public and private spaces throughout societies around the world?
- What privacy issues are presented by media convergence?
- What role are mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies playing in public and private spaces?
- How is the increased commodification of social media affecting our privacy?

Following from the first workshop we continue to see this workshop having three purposes. First, we seek to give voice and structure to existing new media, ICT and technology related research which may not readily sit within conventionally accepted areas. Second, we wish to draw in research on new forms of digital technology, ICT, computing, organizing and social interactions. Third, we want to continue discussions regarding potential futures for ICT related research which combine research as related to the evolving forms and functions of work organizations and the changing boundaries and relations between these organizations and their social milieus.
We seek abstracts (of up to 600 words) that focus upon some aspect of digital culture. We hope to have a special issue of a journal associated with the workshop as was the case last year (a special issue of the Journal of Information, Communication, Ethics and Society was published early in 2009 - Vol 7, Issue 1). Abstracts should be submitted to Ben Light at: b.light@salford.ac.uk

Important Dates
Abstract Submission Date: 28 February 2009
Notification of Acceptance: 31 March 2009
Workshop Dates: 4 and 5 June 2009

Workshop Arrangements
The fee for presentation/attendance at the workshop is £75 GBP. This will cover refreshments and meals throughout the workshop and a workshop dinner to be held on the evening of the 4th of June.
There is no fee for PhD students, however they still need to register for the workshop. PhD student registration includes refreshments during the workshop but excludes attendance at the workshop dinner (This is subject to a £25 GBP fee, payable upon registration).

You will be able to register for the workshop at: https://shop.salford.ac.uk <https://shop.salford.ac.uk/>
Further details regarding the location of the workshop will be posted nearer the time at: http://www.iris.salford.ac.uk <http://www.iris.salford.ac.uk/>

Today's Truman Show

tsenft@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:25:20 GMT

So a reporter from Newsweek is calling me to briefly discuss the ten year anniversary of The Truman Show. I thought it would be funny to take the call while broadcasting myself and tell him midway through that it's happening. Feel free to join in!

The Elaine and Terri show

tsenft@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:13:12 GMT

We are live and drinking wine, for all my American friends.
Come chitty chat behind the cut

Request for brainstorming help on classes/instructors

tsenft@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:26:49 GMT

Hi Folks

So, my book is supposed to be winging its way to my door and now I am in the process of preparing for marketing stuff. I hope you don't mind me sucking your brains but I have a request that needs many heads.

Basically, I am assembling a list of academics to whom I might send a book announcement, or even a desk copy of the book for their consideration for use in classes. What I would love help is the following:

IF YOU ARE AN STUDENT:

I'd love to hear any memory of a class you took in the past or you've heard of being offered at your school in the following areas:

--cyberculture or internet studies
--cultural studies
--women's or gender studies
--film studies (particularly contemporary uses of film)
--sociology and youth culture or social networks
--performance studies
--anything else you think might mesh with a book like Camgirls

If you could tell me who is teaching it and/or where it's been offered, I'll do the legwork and locate the contact info. And I certainly wouldn't mention your name when contacting the person unless you said that was okay. My intention wouldn't be to spam anyone, but rather to send offers of desk copies to appropriate folks.

IF YOU ARE A TEACHER:

I'd love to know of any colleagues you have in the above areas who might be interested in getting a desk or review copy of the book. Again, I wouldn't mention your name unless you expressly told me that was okay. I'm just looking for knowledge-sharing along the lines of "So and so does that at my school; they might be interested, why don't you write and see?"

I'm also very interested in hearing from people who might consider reviewing the book, both for scholarly journals, but also for blogs around the net.

As ever, I promise free beer and a big smooch to anyone kind enough to help a sister out.

THANKS!

p.s. If you feel shy about writing here, you can always email me: tsenft at gmail dot com

This is a test

tsenft@gmail.com — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:43:04 GMT

Hot camgirl action!

UK pals, thoughts?

tsenft@gmail.com — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:24:45 GMT

I'm trying to make a list of people's favorite UK publications, radio shows and tv programming in the areas of:

1. Tech culture

2. Pop culture

3. Women's issues

Can you help?

I'll start: <lj user=rhodri>'s Cyberclinic column for the Independent

Now you show me yours.

tsenft@gmail.com — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:09:47 GMT

So here is a new blog I am reading and really liking

http://intersections.wordpress.com/

It's on migration and race issues.

Now please give me the name of a site I might not know of that you are reading.

Don't say Daily Kos, m'kay?

TIA

I am mad that my students didn't do this one.

tsenft@gmail.com — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:08:08 GMT

Thousands of Advanced Placement English students write "This is Sparta!" on their exams.

Podcasts, media and messages

tsenft@gmail.com — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:45:34 GMT

So I'm in the nascent stages of putting my lectures into video podcast format and it's a bit overwhelming. I don't necessarily mean the technological stuff; more like the looking at yourself in a mirror stuff. As we all know the medium of a classroom lecture is the live body talking at the lectern. Regardless of the coolness of PowerPoint slides, a lecture without an interesting/entertaining/commanding lecturer is lame. I feel confident in my lecturing abilities, and wanted to transfer that to a more permananet format (like video) so students could return to it to review and so forth. The answer would seem to be turn the camera on and go, yes?

Not so much. Turns out (and uh duh) the medium of the podcast isn't my live body--it's the film itself. I keep looking at this footage and saying not, "Oh good point captured on video," but rather, "Whoa this is a boring piece of film." At this point, the urge to learn documentary filmmaking NOW gets really strong.

The question I'm stuck with is, how deep should I get myself in, here? I know the point-the-camera-at-the-lectern stuff is the stuff of a million institutional podcasts, but does that mean I should have the bar that low? On the other hand, do I ask students to wait until I get ten minutes of video *just right* before they get their study aids?

Then I realize: I'm not pointing the camera at the lectern. I'm pointing at myself, seated, and talking into it like I would talk to a student during office hours. I've watched zillions of hours of people's video blogs shot this way and not been bored. Maybe I should approach this from that aesthetic--just talk into the camera and edit in the occasional slide and be done with it?

It also occured to me I could have done all this musing on camera and put it up. I really need to get more comfortable doing that, but does anyone even respond to posts made with the help of YouTube? I still think LJ is much more about writing than video.

I suppose I'm thinking out loud here. Thanks for listening.

Behold my punditry kung fu.

tsenft@gmail.com — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:58:36 GMT

Okay, so I am behind on this stuff. But it's up now, in conjunction with coming book promotion.

Click my head to hear five minutes of me from Aerlyn Weismann's excellent documentary Webcam Girls. This doc. is from a few years back, and many thanks to grass for the footage. I am warning you in advance that my hair is too big by half.

Click this link to hear me talking on Canadian radio a month or so ago. The topic is micro-celebrities, and the show is called Spark. I'm on with Merlin Mann (Merlin Mann!!) from 43 Folders and Sarah from Pop17. They were great, as was the show's host. I'm warning you that I sound lousy here. I was patched in by phone in the UK and for some reason I think this means I should say "ummm" about fifteen thousand times.

Excelsior!

tsenft@gmail.com — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:55:20 GMT

98 degrees in NYC?

tsenft@gmail.com — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:09:22 GMT

Homies, what are you doing to stay cool today?
(You probably don't want to hear that it is sunny and crisp here)

tsenft@gmail.com — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:26:58 GMT

Sweet Christ am I ever procrastinating today.

Interested in sound?

tsenft@gmail.com — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:55:35 GMT

For folks interested in sound, an essay I wrote a few years back is coming out in an new anthology from MIT entitled The Grain of the Voice in Digital Media and Media Art, edited by Norie Neumark and others. I've put it after the cut, for those with time on their hands today! Thanks to scopo, who first asked to publish this in the Australian journal Antithesis. Norie literally found a copy of my essay on the photocopier at her university and contacted me asking to put it in the book. How's that for providence?

Four Rooms
Theresa M. Senft

We would not give a page of Artaud for all of Carroll. Artaud is alone in having been an absolute depth in literature... But Carroll remains the master and the surveyor of surfaces--surfaces which were taken to be so well-known that nobody was exploring them anymore. On these surfaces, nonetheless, the entire logic of sense is located.

Gilles Deleuze, "The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl"1

(1)

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in right now. I dial the telephone. The phone rings, and then connects. The background music dumps into my ear. My shoulders drop. A year ago, it was great music, some sort of calypso tune that seemed to shout, "Glad you've made it. Have a frosty drink and relax!" Now the music is faster, whiter, something that might be Michael Bolton's next easy listening smash. I don't like it, but I do like this phone service, mostly because "Every night is Ladies Night." Women call free.

"Welcome to the Night Exchange," the digitized female voice coos, in a manner I now emulate whenever I want faster, nicer or smarter service in my day to day. The automated voice asks me for my first name, which the system records, and plays back for me. To "accept my name" and continue, I press "1." The electronic lady asks me to record a brief description of myself. "Remember, this is your first impression," she reminds me. "So be honest, and have fun!" I consider telling the nice lady that I am exhausted from a night of teaching a computer to speak. I wonder if she will care that it has now been one year and two weeks since my mother has died, that I am feeling bloated and premenstrual, that my throat hurts and I just want to come, already, but decide that this type of information does not fit the injunction to have fun.

"Hi," I breathe into the phone, trying sound at least as desirable as the background music that continues to play, providing my phone sex mise en scene. "I am looking for a dominant man." It is pretty common knowledge among users of automated phone sex services that the hardest working people on the chat lines are the dominants. In real-life domination, the top barks out order once in a while, and the sub runs around doing things. On the phone, however, the dom does all the work, all the imagining, while the sub breathes, "Oh, yes..." Tonight, I just want to oh yes my way to an orgasm, and then get some sleep.

After I record my message, there is the pause. The pause means that somewhere, a computer is listening, assessing and processing the sound of my voice. I have a theory that everywhere, all pauses are related: the pause between punching my PIN into the bank machine, and hearing the cash rustle. The electronic silence between songs on the radio. The emotional space that hangs in the air after the words "I love you" come out. I hear the faintest bleeds from the old calypso music in my mind, scoring this telephone pause, and I remember why my mother hated to hear music play during her last weeks in the hospital. It's wrong to pollute the pause with sound.

Finally the Lady returns. "If you are looking to meet in person, press 1, " she breathes. "If you are looking for conversation, press 2. If you are looking for intimate conversation, press 3." I press 3. The Michael Bolton music plays for less than 15 seconds. "You have a message," I am told. The nice lady moderates all incoming phone messages. There is no way to get rid of her voice.

"Hoyah" some person with a Long Island diphthong problem breathes, "You want a dominant guy, you got him, baby. I am not into head games, so press '1' and lets tawk, LIVE."

Wondering just what would constitute "no head games" during phone sex, I decide to skip this caller. I don't really like going live, for the same reason I don't like real-time computer bulletin boards, or leaving my answering machine off. I like to stay on the surface and surf the phone systems, hearing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, pressing and rubbing and pressing and rubbing. The men, who pay for this service, hate the women who surf. Time is money for the men, but time for ladies is not even cheap, it's free. As if we shouldn't all live, breathe, come, pay, and die the same way. I will never press '1' for this guy, and later, I know, I will skip his messages entirely. He is not my type. But for now, I want to keep him calling back, so I press the button to respond, only to be interrupted by the nice lady's voice: "You have made an improper selection. Please try again."

I press the number 2, and breathe back into the phone, "How would you handle me?" and then send the message. On the phone, I like to think of myself as something to be handled, tied up, tortured. Why not? I make pictures in my mind of women I would like to be, and then play them on the telephone. The nice lady tells me that I now have ten phone messages, from ten different men. I listen and press, listen and respond and press, listen and press.

And always, the lady moderates. She listens to vocal tone. Sometimes women use the men's line (for which they are billed) to search for other women. I always respond to female phone ads. I respect the ability to pay for what one desires. But not everyone gets to use the lines creatively. The transgendered women I talk to tell me that when trannies call on the Ladies Line, the electronic lady throws them off, telling them they are being removed from the system for being "unclear." The lady does the same thing if I say anything obscene, telling me my voice cannot be heard. One user of the system told me the Night Exchange hates prostitutes (for the obvious competition.) Obscene women are probably prostitutes--or at least that's the feeling of the folks at the Night Exchange. I suspect that the nice lady does not cut off the paying customers, as quickly as she does the trannies and the whores on the Ladies Line.

Because I know my continued calling privileges are being monitored, I try to straddle a space between naughtiness and vulgarity on the phone, feeling the answers of my male callers back for obscene intent, which is really what I want, after all. I listen, and reply, and punch a number, and hear a new message, and reply. It feels more like shopping than anything else. This man sounds okay, he wants to hang me from a hook and whip me in front of the neighbors, but there may be a better one, a faster one, a slower one. When I am exhausted enough, I agree to go live, or as alive as one is during phone sex. The lady helps me through it, by letting me know that from here on in, I will only hear a bell, a bing bong bell that lets me know when other men are trying to reach me with messages.

I am excited every time I leave the eavesdropping lady. I can finally be as filthy as I want to be. But strangely, in that moment I leave her, I want to hear her again, pacing my phone messages, narrating my sexuality for me to the bad rock n roll background. "Hi..." says some mystery guy. "Hi," I breathe and we begin. Its fun, but I know the rest will be predictable in a way the automated Law of the Lady never really is.

(2)

I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in right now, holding my mother as she weeps. She can no longer write her own name. Visual symbols don't make sense to her. After my mother's second brain surgery, the doctors stop talking about whether or not she will ever read again. Living through the pain, learning to walk, avoiding blood clots--these were the more pressing concerns of the Roswell Cancer Institute staff, which of course made sense. Because she can no longer read, people bring my mother audio tapes to play on her Walkman. One day, someone gives her a Bernie Siegal Cancer Care audio tape. After one hearing, she asks me to buy her the entire collection.

Bernie Siegal is an oncology surgeon who now specializes in self-help literature. His tapes have titles like, "Strengthening your Immune System," "Preparing for Surgery," and "Time for Meditation". I don't understand these tapes very much. For one thing, Bernie Siegal sounds uncannily like George Bush, and my mother has always hated Republicans. My mother believes in what the Republicans call Big Government. Now that she is being taken care of in a Big Government cancer ward, she believes in it even more. My own politics are likewise to the left of Cuba but I still want my mother to be a little more suspicious of Roswell Cancer Institute. I don't exactly know what it is I expect her to do about her situation, as she is more or less at the mercy of a series of doctors who have cut and stiched her brain on five different occasions. Still, I hate the tedium of her complacency, and I hate her stupid Bernie Siegal tapes.

Sometimes I demand her medical charts, but can make no sense information written down there. I try to talk about this with my mother. No, just give me the Walkman, she says. When the nurses change her IVs, boring me with their attempts at small talk, when the smug doctors usher themselves in to draw spinal fluid, when the helpful orderlies turn on the never-ending television news, my mother smiles at them wanly and says, "I can't hear you. I am listening to my tapes." Even her children know it after a while. The headset on means, "Don't Disturb."

After my mother's death, I use Dr. Siegal's tapes to keep me company. Lots of the advice on the tapes is practical. "Ask for a room with a window, where you can see the sky," Dr. Siegal counsels. "And if they say none is available, calmly tell them you will wait to check in until one is available." Actually, this is good advice. Many times, patients check in to cancer wards, and they never leave. Out the window is the last chance they will see the sky. It happened to my mother that way. The tapes, as Dr. Siegal intones over and over, are not meant to be substitutes for adequate medical care, but rather they should be used to strengthen and aid the patient. In one of the tapes, Preparing for Surgery, Dr. Siegal tells patients (with a synthesized Pachabel's Canon backround) that in order to help the prevent dangerous post-surgical blood clots they must "Feel the blood getting thinner, and concentrate on that feeling throughout and after the surgery." After my mother's second surgery, she began to hemorrhage, and my aunt Penny blamed it on "that damn blood thinning tape."

I am sitting in my room, different from the one you are in right now, and I am listening to my mother's cancer care tapes. I do not even pretend to understand these tapes meant to her. When she was alive, I fantasized that while the doctors irradiated and cut up my mother's body, she resisted through a place that medicine couldn't reach. I would look at her, drifting in an out of sleep, and pray that something good and powerful was going on inside her body. I would fantasize that if I stayed in her room long enough, I could absorb all the sounds of pain in this place, and that my Momma's tapes will take care of her insides. I listened to the tinny sounds of a hundred televisions blaring down the halls. I listened to the IV machine beeping, busy emptying bag after bag of antibiotic into dying bodies. I listened to the retching noises of chemo patients. Between the interior and the surface, between my mother and I, surely we can take on her illness, her madness, and her death, I thought. I was wrong.

(3)

I'm sitting in a room, different from the one you are in right now. The year is 1994 and the location is my friend Dana's apartment in the East Village. Dana, a male to female transsexual (we didn't really use the word 'transgender' then) and a Certified Voice Recognition operator, has offered to show me how I can get computers to respond to my voice. The wall to my right is thumping. Salsa music, I realize. The computer suddenly boots up, out of nowhere. I look at Dana, perplexed. "Oh its the damn vibration from the music." she tells me, and walks over to the terminal, picks up a microphone and says, "Go to sleep!" The machine shuts off, and we eat our dinner.

"Computer, wake up!" Dana tells the computer, and it begins to boot up. "Console on!" Dana yells, and the screen flashes on to an empty page. "Start Word! Good. Start letter! Insert date! Address book! Find Senft! That's it! Insert that! Dear Terri. Colon. New paragraph. Insert thank you paragraph. Insert no money paragraph. Insert get in touch paragraph. Love, comma, Dana. Save! Print!"

Dana is demonstrating a program called Law Talk, a voice recognition system that she sells to law firms. To run law talk in 1994, you needed a 486 computer with a sound card installed in the back. On the sound card were 1200 pre-recorded and coded phonemes.

"Do you want to try?" she asks me, and hands me the microphone device. "Uh, computer, wake up!" I say, trying to mimic Dana's intonation. Nothing. "Computer, wake up!" Nothing again.

"Hah. It is resisting you. It doesn't know your voice. You have to train it to understand you. You sound like a weather lady. You need to practice your trannie voice!" Dana starts up the tutorial program for me. I speak into a microphone, and teach the computer to recognize my voice as it combines phonemes into words. The Law Talk initialization software consists of 200,000 pre-existing words. My job is to speak into a microphone, pronouncing each word that appears on the screen, until the computer recognizes my voice, and spells out the words I speak without error. To do this, the Law Talk tutorial makes me recite passages from Alice and Wonderland for about three and a half hours. I also recite extraneous words like "plus" and the Arabic numbers three times each. There are 400 extraneous words that must be recited into the computer, before I can even begin to address this system. It is like teaching a child to speak, I imagine. Only I can't imagine having a child.

I begin to dictate to the machine, and the sounds I make then appear on screen as a word. I visually register each word printed, and then correct the computer when it is wrong, by saying the word, "oops". At the oops prompt, a bar comes up on the computer screen describe the bar of choices--visual arrangements of my spoken words all in a row, complete with "default choices", and I say, move left, choose three, okay. And then the computer replaces the word it thought I said with the one I tell it that I really did say. I spend the rest of the evening this way, marking the computer up with the sound of my voice, demanding that it yield text for me, and not just any text but rather, the right text. I am reading Alice in Wonderland out loud to this machine, and watching it get my words right, gloating like some stupid parent or doctor or phone dom when I realize that the machine has got it! It's with me! It is telling me exactly what I always already commanded it to hear.

(4)

"I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

This is the complete text to Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room."2 The piece, which is a dreadful technical exercise in 1980's sound art, consists of forty minutes of the paragraph above, spoken at least 300 times. That's it. As promised, the sound of Lucier's voice grows more and more distorted, until a huge acoustical flood of noise fills the room, blurring anything that might have given this piece meaning. I am sitting in a room, a classroom, being instructed that Lucier is a genius, and frankly, I just don't get it. I hear nothing in this piece that could ever move, or interest me. The last twenty minutes of the piece consists of nothing but audio feedback. The stereo blares into my face. I look at my classmates. One student is doodling. Another is sleeping. I am getting angry, really angry, I don't know why.

"I used to go to every new show Alvin Lucier did," my friend Phil James chats to me from his computer terminal. " He was like a cross between Mr. Wizard and the Wizard of Oz, demonstrating with each new work some magical principle of the physics of sound. But it eventually left me cold. As you can see from the score, the meaning of the spoken words is close to irrelevant; it's very frustrating if something human is hinted at and then you're only left with an exercise in science-art. For me, anyway, being pretty much a wordaholic."

A fat housefly lumbers across the chalk board. There is no air circulating in this classroom. I feel sweat pooling in my bra. I am sitting in a room. Bah bah BAH bah ba ba bahm. Lucier is right; nothing in this piece matters, save the rhythms of his voice. As the repetition builds into extended feedback and then a white roar, discerning rhythm becomes an act of blind faith on my part. I don't know how you ever endured it all without a pause. Perhaps it all seemed like one long pause, washed with sound?

I am sitting in this room, different from the one you are in right now, and I while you sleep, I take your hand in mine. Your arms are blue as fresh plums. Your chest rises. The bags beep when they are done. Every night is Ladies Night. You are too proud to ring, and I don't blame you. If the nurse won't come then I will change your needles. Everyone has their own way of fighting. Remember, this is your first impression, so relax and have fun.I will not leave. Faith is not a substitute for medicine, but an addition to it.

My classmate looks up from her doodle to watch me sobbing over the sound art. As I type my response to my friend Phil, I hear an angry voice silently raise itself in my head. When did we decide that "psychological" art is the kind that "means" something, versus "science-art" which is supposedly about nothing but technique and surface? Why would the art critics not trade a page of Artaud for all of Carroll? I am sitting in a room, different from the performance spaces in which people ordinarily exclaim "so brave" at the finish of my psychological, text-driven monologues. I am at my computer, arguing in silence with my friend, remembering Lucier, and I am shocked to realize I have lost all interest in performance work based on words. Except, perhaps, science-art based on words. I wonder if the Law Talk program could be trained to recognize my voice in anger. I don't want to do another monologue without a computer. I don't want to do art that "means" something. I can tell you precisely what about Karen Finley's work "means", what moves me, what does not, where her mythologies overlap mine, where they don't. I still cannot explain what happened to me the day I listened to Lucier.

I was sitting in a room, different from the one we are in now, when the line noise on my computer cued me into the fact that someone was tying to reach me over the phone. The call was from my brother. My mother had finally died, after hanging on in the hospice with a pulse rate that baffled the doctors. The end of the Lucier piece sounds like bells, just highly pitched bells, over and over. And then it ends. There is nothing rich and wordy about certain types of art, sex, or death. Which is not to say there is no sound. My brother told me that he only believed my mother was truly gone when he stopped hearing the chugging of the machines keeping her alive.

Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, "The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl"; in The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 93.

2. Alvin Lucier. I Am Sitting in a Room. Lovely Music, Ltd. 1981/90

Due in 4 weeks!!

tsenft@gmail.com — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:36:07 GMT

cover design courtesy of the mutli-talented delphizyx