The Gleaners

The first obvious parallel that I drew between this movie and new media is that with this photoshop project, each of us became a gleaner. We rooted through the online detritus of images and selected other people's leftovers to create new meals of imagery...Bringing it back to notions of authorship, isn't there a sense of releasing an image to the wind once it goes online? It becomes a possession of whoever takes the time to get into their online car, drive down the information highway, and pick it up from the website-field. And outside of new media, perhaps we're reaching a time where if we want to truly "own" anything, or to truly protect our ideas from being gleaned and reworked in other pieces of art or other people's lives, you would have to hide that idea under your mattress and keeps the lights off in your room so nobody would ever see it. Anytime you release an idea into the world, others begin feeding off of it, changing it, and using it for their own purpose--or ideally they do, if the idea is any good.

I think gleaning also relates to advances in technology and individualization in modern society. Gleaning was once a bonding activity for French women--now gleaning is a largely individual process for those who live alternative lifestyles. The type of people she interviews makes it clear that gleaning is not a mainstream activity, not like it used to be. My instinct is to blame technology for this--after all, a field can now be harvested by one man in a tractor, and the rest of us are all going to our isolated office jobs at our singular computers. The demise of gleaning represents the ways in which we can hide ourselves from the real world and real human interaction when we escape into the computer.

Unrelated to new media, I found the movie very compelling. The filmmaker had a curious eye and brought forth very diverse ideas and opinions about gleaning, a subject that sounds banal at first listen. So i end this post with a quote from her, when she describes the nature of harvesting with machines:

"Some people are quite pleased when the machine malfunctions."

Thank you, I'll take a walk in the cabbages.
Kelly