Blog 4: Visiting Artist Darrin Martin

Wallace Stevens explains in his article, “Art, Entertainment, Entropy,” that media such as television uses dramatic elements and emotional responses to include a message possible unrelated to the narrative or content. He heavily attacks the concept of genre as the single most limiting system of classification by creating expectations of content that cannot normally be broken. He explains these concepts of his in terms of science, which are very comforting to me as a analytical scientist. His explanation of feedback loops are especially applicable to the internet phenomenon, youtube. Youtube is a case example of work creating more work as when one searches something; one will find many, if not hundreds, of the same video done by different parties. Although youtube’s genre system is not the same as film genre breakdowns, I can summarize the classification system as music videos, video blogs, candid capture, informative, and mashup. Each of these videos if inspirational enough, create an onslaught of works that only parody them. Youtube’s response video feature makes this loop very evident. Twitter and Facebook both are good examples of Steven’s give and take model represented by the laws of thermodynamics. When one posts or messages something, it almost always elicits a response of sorts. This level of causation only emphasizes that everyone has an opinion. Media such as television exploits our desire to speak out and presents imagery or situations that subliminally sell us something in return.