Joanie 4 Jackie: Free Distribution Systems in Feminist Punk Movements

The rationale undergirding this project is personal. Upon leaving the nest, I negligently left mixtapes given to me by friends and admirers in my mother’s care. Needless to say, years of sonic memories are irrevocably buried underground.

Fusing performance art practice and archival research methodology, this project is interested in presenting a way to “mine” sensation and memory. As such, precedents may be traced to notions formed by Fluxus artists as a precursor to data for data’s sake, as well as algorithms deployed for the purpose of personalization (the specific example here being The Music Genome Project paradigm used by Pandora). The question posed by technocriticism is broadly concerned with what information might be lost if algorithms are left to do the heavy lifting. Is there something to be gained by regressing to a point in time where a mixtape’s construction was contingent on a radio DJ? Using digital technologies to subvert the overarching intent of the tech industry to monetize (operationalize, formalize, etc.) data, the expression “art for art’s sake” can be applied to Miranda July’s app, Somebody, as well as one of her earlier projects, Joanie 4 Jackie. For the purpose of this analysis, I will be looking at Joanie 4 Jackie as a precedent project, though there are several works that specifically index mixtape culture and ideology (e.g. “Attention K-Mart Shoppers” archive by Mark Davis and the WebCassette app by Klevgrand come to mind) [1] [2].

 

Originally ideated as a “free distribution system,” Joanie 4 Jackie operated as a video chain letter for female filmmakers to share their work in the mid-1990s (Hoffman, 2009, p. 23). July passed the project along to Bard College in 2003 and donated an archive to the Getty Research Institute in 2017. While the project continues to operate, it also serves as a critical collection of early feminine (and feminist) experimental film as well as a monument to the videotape format. July is known for her interest in human connectivity and collaboration, “characteriz[ing] her work as ‘always [having] to do with other people’” (Hoffman, 2009, p. 24). Her interest in compiling, and subsequently sharing, films by women was primarily to develop correspondence between participants, inviting feedback and the opportunity to collaborate on future projects (Hoffman, 2009, p. 24).

This communication and relationship-centered epistemology is embedded in the methods implemented to extract and bequeath knowledge. Much like a mixtape in traditional cassette form, Joanie 4 Jackie is subject to a finite duration of content, resulting in a temporality in information exchange. Limited to ten filmmakers per tape, the intention here is retrieving purposeful, meaningful data. Interestingly, all submitted work was accepted, an admirable feature given today’s ultra-curated and oftentimes non-inclusive creative programming and exhibition processes. Part of the underground feminist punk movement in Portland, July’s vision for Joanie 4 Jackie was set in motion by a simple printed message to interested participants: “A challenge and a promise: Lady, you send me your movie and I’ll send you the latest [Joanie 4 Jackie] Chainletter Tape” [3]. A textual accompaniment from each filmmaker made its way to the next participant, emphasizing July’s hope for an intimate collective intelligence ‒ a far cry from the algorithmic approach taken up by the likes of Pandora, Spotify, and other streaming platforms.

My hesitance to propose a weakness in Joanie 4 Jackie is perhaps indicative of my inherent bias toward “old” media and the belief that it is weak only insofar as the technology accessible at the time of its fruition. There’s a kind of physicality in the crafting of a mixtape (similar to analog filmmaking, which requires actual splicing and cementing of material) whereas “algorithmically designed playlists” preclude this haptic sensation. The playlist as a digital interface, according to writer Liz Pelly, is anesthetizing [4]. I wonder how July would reimagine this project in the digital age. The multimedia artist has made her opinion on technologically mediated communication very clear: at the very least, pixels should be accompanied by performance or some variation of human intervention. As Alison Hoffman suggests, “July’s work activates the persistence of feelings and hand-touch sensibilities both to model and to build coalitions that locate agency in a shared openness and (bodily) vulnerability” (2009, p. 22). July’s insistence on multiplicity in sense engagement stands diametrically opposed to streaming services like Spotify, the interests of which include venture capitalists and corporate sponsorship ‒ not the people who create the actual content.

Because July’s works are more concerned with sense engagement rather than commenting on the prescribed teleology embedded in most information technology, they do not neatly fit into the same categories as a typical test-kit project (perhaps it’s more appropriate to identify this work and my proposed project as a performative method). While I certainly have grievances with streaming services and their disregard for creative sustainability, I’m still working out the most appropriate means to share the “ecological anthologies” resulting from cumulative, collaborative memory mining. While my sensibilities would certainly lend themselves to cultural probe methods, which would definitely feed my nostalgia to send participants home with a cassette deck, I’m more interested in the idea of the mixtape rather than its materiality. At this point in time, I imagine the extraction of knowledge/intelligence would probably take the shape of a survey, where participants would respond to a prompt through written communication. The intention here is to move away from digital interfacing (even if it’s just temporarily), focusing more on sentient environments (within interior and exterior spaces), especially in terms of the collaborative effort to express a specific mood (affect, memory) and the “[breaching] of psychological space” while building on July’s idea of shared openness [5]. Not surprisingly, two of my very talented musically-inclined friends prioritize the cassette format when releasing their music, but also make their work available on most streaming platforms. In any case, I’m interested in holistically extracting information from willing participants and looking forward to learning of new artists ‒ perhaps people will share the work of new, underrepresented talent. I intend to do the same, but I might also add a disco song.

Where less performative human interaction lends itself to data for the sake of commercialization, more humanistic and less goal-oriented projects lend themselves to data for the sake of memory formation and retention, social interaction, and curiosity. Returning to Sophie Calle’s work, we can also qualitatively determine ‒ and learn from ‒ the “output” of intelligence across disciplines.

 

References

Alison Hoffman’s chapter, “The Persistence of (Political) Feelings and Hand-Touch Sensibilities: Miranda July’s Feminist Multimedia-Making” from Columpar, C. & Mayer, S. (Eds.) (2009). There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Notes

[1] https://archive.org/details/attentionkmartshoppers

[2] https://webcassette.klysmafax.se/

[3] Retrieved from www.joanie4jackie.com

[4] Pelly, L. “The Problem with Muzak.” Retrieved from https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-muzak-pelly

[5] Jefferson, D. “Perth Festival: Siren Song turns skyscrapers into surround-sound system.” Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-22/perth-festival-2018-siren-song-turns-cbd-into-sound-system/9469906