shu lea's response: Re: [spectre] swiss 56k bastard web

[Andreas Broeckmann]

(300K attachment removed, -a)


Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 15:20:35 +0000
To: Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck at transmediale.de>
From: shu lea cheang <shulea at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [spectre] swiss 56k bastard web channel censors project
Cc: spectre at mikrolisten.de, geert <geert at xs4all.nl>,
         reinhard storz <rstorz at xcult.org>


dear andrea

thanks for the comment
and thanks for geert's posting.

please let me correct one thing about geert's posting..
the curator reinhard storz was not afraid or forced into
censoring my work. i did not call the case a censored case.
i volunteered to make a snow version so that it can be
presented on pro-helvetica website (soft version) while xcult.org
can still represent the hardcore version.
pro-helvetica is the state funding afterall. Mostly i am more
amused with the idea of hard and softcore version of milk.


As for artistic value of the piece, maybe it has none.
if all art has to be taken so literally and accouted for its
obvious correlation of numbers.
Maybe the piece is after all a play on your liberal consciousness??
Why would showing the numbers of HIV infection among sex workers
in Europe would make you feel better about the piece? compared
to the dealth toll in Africa?? There is nothing spectacular
in the number count, is there? it is after all numbing feeling
of the overflood of porn icons and numbers combined that makes
the piece... There is also the play on 56K web-tv concept as commissioned.
if you did allow yourself 30 minutes of boring web TV experience,
Milk does give you a punchline and a screenshot. (attached).

referring to your comment-
>(i know that there is a whole regime of images around the sexualised 
>female body which feeds all sorts of social regimes affecting the 
>submission of women, etc. - you can be brief if you mean _that_ 
>structure is adequately referenced in the Milk piece.)

I do not wish to get into the recent controversy surrounding showing
submission (of TheoVG). i have no qualm with sexualized female bodies,
i love them. it is the self-rightuous sense of salvation from the liberals
that kills me.... Milk is the white fluid for the 21st century what the
white powder for the 20th century high. This is my propaganda.
Get high, sniff it or suck it ... in public, in vogue.

I do have a very supportive curator for the piece, quoting reinhard storz,
"But the real content of the piece, I think, is the handling of 
pictures (in two different degrees of nakedness), and the handling of 
overwhelming quantities (dead + greediness / but also the 30 minutes) 
overwhelming and boring at the same time."

yeah, the state of 56K download as art...
can it be accepted as a genre of its own?
spurious and fabulous...


yours

sl


>imho, the censored version of the piece is artistically as 
>unconvincing as the uncensored one; i think that the correlation of 
>internet porn images and AIDS victims in africa is spurious - it 
>would maybe make sense to relate it to cases of HIV infection (and 
>AIDS deaths) among sex workers in europe, for instance, but i guess 
>that the speed of the counter would be less spectacular - which 
>seems to be the main (or only) point of the piece? how does the 
>voyeurism/consumption of internet porn affect AIDS deaths in malawi? 
>and does the project then not suggest that if there was less 
>internet porn, there would be fewer AIDS victims? can somebody 
>explain, how? (i know that there is a whole regime of images around 
>the sexualised female body which feeds all sorts of social regimes 
>affecting the submission of women, etc. - you can be brief if you 
>mean _that_ structure is adequately referenced in the Milk piece.)
>
>i don't know whether pro helvetia actually protested; if they did, 
>might it be that they would have accepted the same sort of imagery 
>if it had been used in the context of a stronger artistic concept?
>
>greetings,
>-a
>
>
>
>ps: call a spade a spade.
>
>>the artist shulea chang asked me to fwd. this message. shulea made 
>>a project for the new swiss 56k-bastard web
>>channel that was censored. the 'milk project' was deemed too hardcore.
>>56k organizer reinhard storz got afraid and pushed shulea chang to
>>produce a 'snow (soft) version' in order not to upset his funder, pro
>>helvetia.
>>
>>the direct address to milk-soft is
>>www.56k-bastard.tv/b_milk2
>>
>>and to milk-real
>>www.xcult.org/milk
>>
>>http://www.56k-bastard.tv/b_milk2/warn.html
>>
>>the news is already out. see for instance:
>>
>>http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=256973
>>http://www.fluctuat.net/blog/article.php3?id_article=1232
>>
>>
>>
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