Agency and You

Agency is one of those things that we all have. I feel silly saying something like that but it seems to be that when acedemics are theorizing about our lives and how we live it, agency is the first thing that gets thrown out of the window. For example, the idea of women wanting to become porn stars, and living satisfactory lives as porn stars is inconvient. So they come up with arguments like the ecconimic nessesity of their lives is such that there is no way they couldn't become porn stars. It is the same thing with video games, the poor and crime rate, or that the media programs our outcomes due to its unending influnce. There are all things I reject because I believe that we as individuals take in, filter, process, and store massive amounts of information. As indivduals, how good we are at working with information genrally reflects on how well they do with life. Autism being an extreme example of a failure to process information in a productive way. I believe that this is part of what a liberal arts education teaches us. I also believe that somewhere along the line we lost the ability to prize our own senses of self, our ability to react, and our ability to control our own outputs.

I want to focus on art for now. This idea started to come to me while I was playing city of heroes. I was happy because the enemies in the story arc dropped the right sort of enhancement I needed for my charecter. This makes getting the right type of gear for him easier. I then thought it would be easy for them to come up with a truely random mission generator that lays out a map, puts the villians of your choice and even comes complete with a set of complications that could randomly show up...like more advanced radio missions. Then I joked to myself I would prolly end up playing the most brilliant story arc ever made and it would all be random, then I realized that 1000 monkies recreating the works of shakespeare on a typewritter, purely by chance, wouldn't have nearly the same worth to me because shakespere sat down and wrote all that shit out on purpose. The monkies were just being monkies.

By creating something then deliberatly putting it on display for others to comment, is an act of self. As a result the thing creation becomes something seperate, it occupies a different internal space once we look at it, and it takes on its own special set of properties.

Oh shit I forgot who said it...I believe it was Hiedegger that came up with the idea that the observation of a phenomena inherently changes the phenomena.

Lets get some examples to work with:

Recently someone entered into an art exhibit a 1tb hard drive full of pirated materials. Along with the hard drive was a list of everything that was supposedly on it.

The cut ups method.

Hitler's art.

I don't have time to work with these now but each of these three examples show off a very different aspect of the thing I am talking about.

Yep I am going to go wash dishes instead of doing this. I hope everoyne is happy.