Conceptual Blogging: The Seventeen Magazine Project

Jaime Keiles, an 18-year-old high school senior living in Pennsylvania, has a very interesting writing project. From 5/21 to 6/21--the date of her high school graduation--Jaime will be living "according to the gospel of Seventeen Magazine" and blogging about her efforts. As BoingBoing comments, "The result is a funny, witty observance of the discrepancy between what's being marketed as teen culture and what actually is--at least in her life."

For my part, I read this project as an example of how the techniques of conceptual art and performance have bled out into the culture and become ordinary, widely-accepted ways of thinking critically about the world--placing "conceptual writing" on a continuum with teen blogging. Jaime's blog is *not* conceptual writing in any sense, because it does not use the rules or constraints she has laid down in order to capture language primarily; however, it is documentation of what is effectively a piece of conceptual performance.

Here are the parameters of Jaime's work:

"The goal of this project is to simply explore a dying aspect of teenage culture. I will live my life according to the tips provided by the June/July issue of Seventeen magazine and Seventeen.com from today until the weekend of my high school graduation (June 21). Conveniently, this project will also span the Most Important and Magical Night of My Teenage Life (i.e. senior prom). I will use this blog to record my findings, and to provide commentary on teenage life/the adolescent experience.

Here are the rules of the project:

• I will read the entire June/July issue of Seventeen magazine from cover to cover.
  
• Every day I will utilize at least one "beauty tip" (hair/makeup/skincare/whathaveyou) and one fashion tip.
  
• I will follow all diet and exercise tips provided in the issue to a T.
  
• I will participate in every activity recommended by the magazine (i.e. host a fright night, score your hottest summer hookup ever, be confident in a bikini, etc.)
  
• I will apply for every single "freebie" offered by the magazine, every day.
  
• I will consume all media recommended by the magazine at least once. (books/movies/music)
  
• I will hang all provided pictures/posters of "hot guys" in my living environment.
  

Hopefully in following these rules I will be given the opportunity to shed some light on the modern teenage experience. On this blog, I will document my project, as well as offer commentary on media and teenage culture."

Read it here: The Seventeen Magazine Project

Bryant Park Chapbook

The chapbook of our Bryant Park project is available in a box placed by my office door, M109-E. I will leave the box there until the end of exams, Wednesday 6/16.

I tried to come up with a title that was descriptive of the project, and finally settled on "On The Passage of Certain Figures Through A Limited Space and Time," which I think captures it precisely. The phrase was inspired by the title of Guy Debord's 1959 film "Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps" (roughly, "on the passage of some people through a brief span of time"). Debord was an important avant garde filmmaker and social/political theorist of the 1960s -- his work is complex, but definitely worth exploring.

I've also made the PDF file for the chapbook available here. To produce your own copy, simply print the pages double-sided, stack them in order, fold them along the 11" axis, and sew or staple along the fold. However, you should still pick up one of the copies I had printed, since they have a color cover and the printer has trimmed all the edges for a cleaner, easier-to-read book.

It was great working with all of you this semester!

"I Am Sitting in a Room": Video Feedback Project

Process-oriented writing has come up a few times in class -- for example, using Google Translate to move a text back and forth between languages several times in order to observe the changes that are produced. This video project, which takes the idea of process-oriented art to an extreme, was made by uploading, saving and re-uploading the same video to YouTube 1000 times. During this process, the artist -- his physical appearance, the visual details of his video-making style, the content of his message -- gradually disappeared, to be replaced by the distortions imposed by the process itself. (If you watch the video, you'll find links to the other stages of the project on YouTube, so you can see it at different stages.) In other words, this project is not "about" the author and his message; instead, it sets out to explore the medium of online video, allowing the viewer to experience this medium rather than ignore it (which we usually do when we watch videos, paying attention only to what they show and not to what they are).