"Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers"

Still from "Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers" by Justin Katko (2008)

For the first presentation, my group decided to talk about Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw by Donna Leishman. When we were trying to pick which piece to present on, Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers was one of my choices. This 2 minutes and 42 second video is by Justin Katko and talks about the constant request for devotion by screened technology. According to ELC, the graphics for the video were created by utilizing the CAVE writing text editor. I am really intrigues as to how the software works and was able to generate the visuals. Sadly, I did some minimal research while writing this post and could not find a specific tutorial that could explain how it was accomplished. I am assuming it is through some form of coding and by trial and error to create exactly what he wanted. The visual choices of this video remind me of early 90’s videos from artists like Pipilotti Rist (who I previously mentioned in another blog post), or Jeffrey Shaw's work in the late 80’s and early 90’s, specifically "Legible City.” The chosen visuals are an interesting choice for a piece that is talking about the oppression of screens because of its use of layering imagery on top of one another through a few different keying techniques. The visuals look as if they could only be constructed on a computer. So, this push and pull of what is presented visually vs. the idea of screens demanding unrelenting devotion is quite fascinating.

The piece requires no physical interaction from the user’s computer because of the format of video but it does have some interactivity. The video does a really good job of sequencing and making the viewer’s eyes move around the whole screen. The color, pacing and imagery choices also convey a sense of emotion, for me is was anxiety and feeling overwhelmed by what was presented in front of me. He does this with the bright colors and the symbolism of using imagery of men in army gear.

The audio is a recording of Justin Katko reading a poem about the vicious cycle of using a digital device and the tether it has on people. This poem is combined with noises of “digital” beeps and bops to even further aide in the generic computer experience that the visual choices provide. The narrative of Katko’s poem is just about the hold that digital screens have on us and the amount of attention it demands.

This piece is a nice transition into next week’s topic on network aesthetics.

For further clarification, Katko writes about this piece saying that: “The poem is an abstract rendition of the rotten silk that fetters us people to these our awful screens. The graphics were generated in the CAVE writing text editor, by taking an ill-performing video screen capture of a spectral tube of "O"s in the editor's desktop preview mode. The audio was separately generated by improvisations into a Max/MSP patch. The title is after the late 60s anarchist affinity group, Up Against the Wall Mother Fuckers. I was inspired by their dramatic final exploit: cutting open the fences at Woodstock. The phrase Up Against the Screen Mother Fuckers started as the title for a CAVE piece, in which one thousand units of the people would enter the CAVE and break through its 4 screens to the vestibule holding the mirrors behind it.”