What Did I Miss? With Konrad Steiner

It is my great shame that I avoid making commentaries in class. I seem to go to great lengths to do so.  Because of that, I found myself with unanswered questions from last week's visits/shows with Konrad Steiner. 

Therefore, like most other times when I find myself in this situation, I create assumptions and answer the questions I didn't ask.  Which I'm sure results in wrong answers. 

That being said, if anyone reads this and remembers if these questions were answered in any of the visits or shows from Konrad, or in anything that was read that I might have missed, please tell me.

The first question I assumed would be immediately asked of Konrad in each of his visits to the classes I was in was how he addressed the criticism of his decision to name his movement "Neo-Benshi."  After seeing where the conversations were going in each class, I was at first surprised this wasn't addressed, then I understood pretty quickly the direction of each conversation, and knew this was not the way either of them were heading.  If I actually raised my hand to ask that question, my follow up would be to ask how much of what we had been covering the entire week would fall under his definition of "Neo-Benshi." 

Essentially, the conversations I witnessed covered a spectrum of media art that is far beyond what I would call Neo-Benshi, and created a loss of constitution, at least to me, of what the possibility of this medium of Neo-Benshi could be about.  What began as a discussion of the Benshi turned into conversations about dubbing, mash-ups, remixes, commentaries during and about movies (either satirical, serious, or just plain silly), and kept expanding to include nearly every form of modern media mixing technique.  Does all this get absorbed by Steiner's Neo-Benshi?  I should hope not.

Media art, in all its incarnations that were discussed, can be valuable assets to utilize in a community.  The question of what progress this "movement" can make (whatever "movement" was actually being addressed in the conversation is up for debate) moving forward was brought up at some point in one of the classes, and my answer to that question something I'm planning on exploring in another class, in another paper.

It does have something to do, again, with the title of this blog though.

I see Neo-Benshi as a water fountain.  If it was Neo-Benshi we were talking about.