Medium Cool

NEW SITE: http://wythoff.net

2009-12-12T07:25:00.001-08:00

I'm moving house from blogger to this new URL: http://wythoff.net

While I'll store my old posts here for a while, all upcoming work will be done at my new site.

I would say "update your bookmarks," but this is really just a matter of SEO.

Flexible Screens

2009-09-29T19:48:00.001-07:00

from sight gag, to the fantastic, to objective correlative. feel free to add more…

from Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902, dir. Edwin S. Porter, Edison Studios)

from Videodrome (1983, dir. David Cronenberg)

from Sony, flexible OLED:

and single single panel laptop mockup:

from Samsung, "flappable" OLED:

and "foldable" OLED:

from Kyocera, the Foldphone:

The Concept of "Aura" in Benjamin's Artwork Essay

2009-09-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” the second, less censored version of which I will primarily deal with here (1936), the concept of “aura” seems to thread its way in and out of multiple schools of media studies: aura becomes an index of diachronic shifts in “symbolic forms,” a synchronic marker of modern perceptual modes, and a key term in locating medium-specificity. What seems missing from the often one-dimensional treatment of Benjamin’s use of aura (it’s destroyed!) is the presence of a paradoxical investment in its positive potentialities. Tracking some of the modulations in the concept within the Artwork essay will more fully allow us speculate on the potential of aura within the mass media––the presence of which is much more apparent in the recently translated second version of the essay, as opposed to the now famous third version published in Illuminations ed. Arendt. What is accomplished in what Benjamin calls the liberation from industrial drudgery into a fantastic “playspace?” How much stress can we put on his depiction of the cinematic spectator going on “journeys of adventure” (117)? And, a question that I seem to be very personally invested in, can it be possible that vegging out can serve a revolutionary function?

Both Miriam Hansen, in her recent essay “Benjamin’s Aura” (2008) and Samuel Weber use as a common jumping off point the formulation of “aura” that has become most prevalent in critical discussions on Benjamin’s work. In the Artwork essay’s third and fourth sections, Benjamin refers to aura as “the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.” In a strange spatiotemporal convergence, spatial proximity to work of art entails a certain apprehension of the temporal distance or historicity, what Benjamin variously calls its “authenticity,” “historical testimony,” “the mark of history,” all of which must be encountered in the presence of “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (103). In this configuration of aura as a kind of uniqueness or authenticity, the profusion of reproductive technologies places the aura of the work of art in decline, a decline which Benjamin argues can be said to register new modes of perception in modernity. This is more or less the story we all know about the Artwork essay.

In Samuel Weber’s “Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin” (1992), he argues that the indexical relationship between aura’s decline and ephemeral shifts in sense perception sets up a series of binaries that are too often taken at face value, and that often do not hold up within the text: distance and nearness, ritual and politics, painting and cinematography, distraction and concentration, uniqueness and multiplicity, and so on. Weber’s essay performs a tactical collapse of these binaries when he calls into question the differentiation between the uniqueness of an auratic art object and the mass-like existence of a disseminated reproduction. Weber argues that aura is never itself, but always constituted in a process of self-detachment as demarcation of the self. The mountain scene, described by Benjamin in the third version of the essay as an “illustration,” and in both versions as illuminating the concept of aura, shows that distance and separation are already marked in the aura of the mountain scene by its shadows. (p.105 of Benjamin) “To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” Weber argues that these shadows can be read as “marking the space within which the relation of subject to object takes place” (86). And, as Weber postulates, the decline of aura is then somewhat of a necessary condition of perception. The narrative of aura’s decline as a detachment from the authentic original “might well turn out to be part and parcel of [aura’s] mode of being. So understood, aura would name the undepictable de-piction of distancing and separation” (87). In this sense, the technological media reveal not a break in aesthetics, but rather an estrangement of a process that was always a necessary condition of aesthetic perception.

Similarly, if we look at the seemingly definitive line on p. 103: “The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction.” The problem is that, this section begins by explicitly saying that the work of art has always been reproducible, and towards the middle, that authenticity is itself defined by technological means: “chemical or physical analyses.” Further, after this line that authenticity eludes reproduction, in a footnote that is only included in the third version of the essay, Benjamin writes: “To be sure, a medieval picture of the Madonna at the time it was created could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries, and perhaps most strikingly so during the nineteenth” (as if aura is something cultivated). The diachronic narrative of auratic decline particular to modernity ends up functioning as a natural element of aesthetic perception, a separation of the object from itself.

Because aura is never attached to the unique existence of an art object, its existence in the age of technological reproducibility is not precluded, but rather, comes to take on greater political significance with the possibility of its synthetic production. This leads us to a second modulation in the concept of aura that must be tracked: In addition to these false polarizations, the revolutionary or utopian potential of “aura” that Benjamin gives more solid and confident treatment elsewhere (and masterfully tracked in Hansen’s essay) is shot through by reservations and caution throughout the Artwork essay. Hansen argues that this false polarization and attenuation of aura’s potentialities is “deliberately restrictive,” a sort of “sleight-of-hand” in order to protect them from what Benjamin calls the “aestheticizing of political life” under national socialism. Hansen writes: “one strategy of preserving the potentiality of aura, of being able to introduce the concept in the first place, was to place it under erasure, to mark it as constitutively belated and irreversibly moribund.” It was “a fetishistic deflection that would protect, as it were, the vital parts of the concept inasmuch as they were indispensable to the project of reconceptualizing experience in modernity” (356-7).

In an attempt to recover some of Benjamin’s investment in the potentialities of aura in mass media, Hansen complicates this first definition of aura with a perhaps more intuitive understanding of the term “as an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity” (340). Through a long archaeology of Benjamin’s work, Hansen amasses under the heading of this third category many different instances of the term aura that show it not as “an inherent property of persons or objects, but pertaining to the medium of perception, naming a particular structure of vision” (342). These include: aura as the logic of the trace in the clothing seen on subjects in photographic portraits, a sense that is reminiscent of Kracauer’s early essay on “Photography” wherein time uses the raw material of clothing to make an image of itself. Other instances in Benjamin’s work that Hansen aligns under this definition of aura as a perceptual mode include: the aura of the habitual or the everyday (358, 341), aura as resembling Roland Barthes’s notion of the “punctum” or the singular element in a photograph that one finds inexplicably fascinating, that “which pricks me but also bruises me, is poignant to me” (Camera Lucida 27), and aura as a sense of futurity, or a “spark that leaps across time” that “emerges in the field of the beholder’s compulsively searching gaze” (341). Benjamin himself refers to aura as a medium of perception in section IV of the Artwork essay when citing Alois Riegl’s research on the late Roman art industry as a methodological precursor to his own project: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (104).

But Hansen’s essay makes the crucial distinction that a medium of perception cannot be conflated with a technological medium—any interpretation of the Artwork essay must keep this division consistently in view. Benjamin’s sense of a medium in which human perception is organized, Hansen writes, “proceeds from an older philosophical usage referring to an in-between substance or agency—such as language, writing, thinking, memory—that mediates and constitutes meaning.” The artwork essay seeks to use historical shifts in “aura” in order to define the perceptual modes specific to modernity. And yet paradoxically, Hansen argues, it is the technological media—film, photography, radio, and so on—that serve for Benjamin to crystallize what he refers to as “changes in the medium of present-day perception” (104). Herein lies one of the main difficulties in interpreting Benjamin’s Artwork essay. Aura, which is supposed to serve as the index against which the condition of modern sense perception can be registered, is simultaneously used in medium specific definitions of film and photography.

Thus, Benjamin’s synchronic formulation of aura in the mass media places the technological apparatus and modes of perception in a causally ambiguous situation. If genuine aura, as Hansen writes, “contained structural elements that were indispensable to reimagining experience in a collective, secularized and technologically mediated form,” (357) are these potentialities to be located in the formal analysis of film’s physical support or in the social structures that organize themselves around these media?

One possible way we could talk about this coupling of technological apparatus with modes of perception is that it places Benjamin in a difficult relationship with Riegl, who frequently railed against aesthetic materialisms (such as those of Gottfried Semper). Riegl critiques the emphasis on raw materials and technics as asserting an overly deterministic role in the creation of art objects, allowing “‘technique’ to become interchangeable with ‘art’ itself and eventually to replace it. Only the naïve talked about ‘art’; experts spoke in terms of ‘technique’” (Problems of Style p. 4). But of course, Benjamin’s evocation of technological material or objects is hardly deterministic: as Hansen points out, for Benjamin the medium-specific difference between photography and film is less one of technological difference, than one of purely aesthetic choice (p. 349). ((that still frames can be sped up, cropped, and so on)) What I mean to say here is that it is not as simple as saying, for example, the personal computer has been invented and our perceptual faculties are now fundamentally altered as a result. Such a schema would leave no room for the political agency or subjective will that is indispensable to Benjamin’s project as a whole.

But, at the other end of the spectrum, I don’t think it’s possible to say that Benjamin’s investment in a revolutionary aura lies solely in the fact of technology’s mass scale. Benjamin does cite a “quantitative shift between the two poles” of production and reception, a sort of democratization of aesthetic production. In section 13 he writes: “Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. The difference becomes functional. At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer. As an expert—which he has had to become in any case in a highly specialized work process, even if only in some minor capacity—the reader gains access to authorship” (114). The mass-scale of the media opens up a space for release, from the apparatus of industrial production into that of the film. However, what Benjamin calls the space-for-play or Spielraum that technology opens up is already, from the moment this essay was written, a space colonized by “film capital” and “fascism”. If aura has always named the endowment of an object with a value not its own, then the concept immediately offers itself up to violent mass mobilization and deadening commodity spectacle.

If you’ll permit me to apply some of Benjamin’s ambiguously subjective language, the question that wants desperately to be answered in the Artwork essay is, what is the nature of aura’s potentiality in the mass media that Benjamin places under erasure? The benefit of how the term is deployed here is that through some deep synthesis of the materials and the mode of perception, “aura” is able to name that which is “completely useless for the purposes of fascism,” and that which is “useful for the formation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (102). But at the same time, this leaves us with a set of incredibly difficult questions—because the space for play or Spielraum that the media opens up for us has almost always been a space that fundamentally does not belong to us. And here I can’t help citing Sony’s motto for the Playstation: “live in your world, play in ours.” Benjamin is fundamentally not talking about the technological domination of nature, or a dumbing down of culture, or an opiate for the masses, and I think this is something very difficult to fully wrap our heads around. So, the difficult question remains: at what point were the mass media utopian, and under what conditions could they still be?

review: Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past

2009-09-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

Since its publication in 2003, Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past has become a staple in the growing field of sound studies. A story about the development of sound-reproduction technologies, Sterne's book was one of the first in a now well-populated list of scholarship across many different disciplines that aims to rigorously examine sound as an historical, analytic, and philosophical category. Recently referencing The Audible Past on his blog, Sterne writes,

I guess the main thing to say is that the book was written at a time where there wasn’t a whole pile of other contemporary scholarship on sound that was aware of OTHER scholarship on sound. So there is a lot of effort to think through what it means to talk about sound in the humanities and why that matters. I’m not sure someone starting a sonic project today has to do that kind of work or deal with that kind of problem.

The foundational status of this book may account for some of its slightly awkward moments. Neologisms such as the “Ensoniment” (as opposed to Enlightenment) take some getting used to, and continuous polemics against the “visual bias” in the humanities at times become redundant (and not always because the field of sound studies has since gained so much traction). But the conceptual trajectory of the book as a whole is so well organized, one which makes such a pointed intervention not only in the historiography of sound, but of technology in general, that the reader can easily overlook these faults.

The Audible Past surveys the history of––to name only a sample of the devices Sterne deals with in this book––the stethoscope, sound telegraphy, telephone, phonograph, graphophone, gramophone, headsets, recording studios, wax cylinders, and hearing aids. However, Sterne is careful to characterize the scope of his study as “a deliberately speculative history” (27). In the book's introduction, entitled “Hello!”, Sterne acknowledges the massive task facing the historian of sound-reproduction technologies. Rather than aspiring to any claims of exhaustiveness or finality, Sterne writes, “this book uses history as a kind of philosophical laboratory” (27), an approach that requires the book to “continually move between the immediate and the general, the concrete and the abstract” (29). From long forgotten aberrancies such as the ear phonautograph (constructed out of an actual cadaver ear) to modern telephone networks, Sterne seeks to locate amid these various devices a unifying set of cultural practices and beliefs.

This is not at all to say that Sterne's account is a reductive one. Indeed, it is his central set of theoretical concerns or “speculations” that allows this wide range of technologies to serve as a good object of analysis in a cultural history of listening. Sterne writes in the introduction, “This book turns away from attempts to recover and describe people's interior experience of listening––an auditory past––toward the social and cultural grounds of sonic experience. The 'exteriority' of sound is this book's primary object of study” (13). To historicize sound through an account focusing on technology seems, if not all too obvious, then at least problematically determined––wasn't sound a culturally mediated object before sound-reproduction technologies? The Audible Past works in full view of these problems. To say that Sterne's book is too speculative to be a rigorous history, dealing with too great a number of technologies in too singular a manner, is to neglect the problematic placed rightfully at its core. Sterne's account problematizes technology's ability to frame our historically embedded techniques of hearing things, arguing instead for the cultural roots of technology. One must rigorously work through the assumptions of a history of the senses that begins with the advent of a technological incursion into that physiological process if it is to be a good history. Sterne's book does this, and succeeds.

The book's first chapter, “Machines to Hear for Them,” sets up one of the central points that allows Sterne's book to proceed analytically rather than chronologically: the social construction of “transducers, which turn sound into something else and that something else back into sound” (22). Sterne's emphasis on “transducers” falls not only on the technical function of inscribing sound waves or transforming them into electrical current, but also on the development of a physiological theory of hearing. “The objectification and abstraction of hearing and sound, their construction as bounded and coherent objects, was a prior condition for the reconstruction of sound-reproduction technologies” (23). Moving through the history of modern physiology and otology more specifically, as well as Alexander Graham Bell and his colleagues' interaction with these fields, Sterne argues that “the history of sound reproduction is the history of the transformation of the human body as an object of knowledge and practice” (50-51). By the middle of the 19th century, physiologists were conceiving of sound primarily as “the effect of a set of nerves with determinate, instrumental functions.” (61) This is not to rehash an old claim that a tree falling in the woods makes no sound without anyone to hear it, but rather to emphasize that the human ear defines a certain section of physical reverberations in space, and that sound as we know it is necessarily “anthropocentrically defined” (12). With this conceptual apparatus in place by the 19th century, “hearing, in other words is already an instrument” (61).

In the book's second and third chapters, Sterne charts the development of listening practices that grow out of these physiologically-based notions of sound. If sound reproduction required a concept of sound as the effect of a set of nerves and membranes, then it also required a set of specialized practices or techniques that shaped and perfected this instrument of hearing in various social contexts. Sterne argues that specialized listening practices such as stethoscopy and telegraphy helped develop the “audile technique” that will become instrumental in practices that are later disseminated on a mass scale by developing technologies. “From roughly 1810 on, audile technique existed in niches at either end of the growing middle class. It would not become a more general feature of middle-class life until the end of the nineteenth century, when sound reproduction became a mechanical possibility and the middle class itself exploded in size and changed in outlook and orientation” (98-99). Chapter 2 deals with the use of the stethoscope by physicians, and Chapter 3, whose subject matter bleeds into the two sections surrounding it, surveys the practices of telegraph operators and the gradual dissemination of these practices through growing public telephone networks.

By Chapters 4 and 5, Sterne has accumulated enough historical and conceptual material to make his central argument about the evolution of technologies and the development of media, one that is, in my view, extremely valuable for the study of culture and technology beyond the specificity of sound studies. Sterne writes, “techniques of listening do not simply turn sound technologies into media” (177). Rather, it is through a combined network of economic institutions and individual practices that media are constructed. Chapter 4 centers in on Sterne's useful definition of developing media as it took place in sound-reproduction technologies between the 1870s and 1920s:

A medium is a recurring set of contingent social relations and social practices, and contingency is key here. As the larger fields of economic and cultural relations around a technology or technique extend, repeat, and mutate, they become recognizable to users as a medium. A medium is therefore the social basis that allows a set of technologies to stand out as a unified thing with clearly defined functions. (182)

While the book's first sections dealt with the development of social practices, in Chapter 5 Sterne focuses on a specific instance of the industrial or economic side of this dynamic with the commercial rhetoric of sound “fidelity” surrounding reproduction technologies: “Manufacturers and marketers of sound-reproduction technologies felt that they had to convince audiences that the new sound media belonged to the same class of communication as face-to-face speech” (25).

The Audible Past is painstakingly organized––each of the book's sections is condensed into a series of focused arguments in the introduction which itself could serve as a standalone essay. Additionally, Sterne shows an almost overwhelming penchant for categorization: the three effects of mediate auscultation, the six elements common to medical, telegraphic, and popular listening practices, the four critiques of acousmatic theories of sound, etc. This mania for organization is what makes the book's last two sections somewhat surprising. In the overall conceptual trajectory of the book, which traces actual technosocial practices, a discussion of the Victorian “culture of death and dying” and the aura of “voices form the dead” surrounding the phonograph and graphophone seem a bit out of place, especially when Sterne tells us that ideas bubbling up about permanent archival and perfect technological memory were fundamentally inaccurate: “The first recordings were essentially unplayable after they were removed from the machine. […] If anything, permanence was less a description of the power of a medium than a program for its development” (288-9). Similarly, in the book's conclusion, Sterne launches a wide ranging discussion of the contemporary mania over digital technologies and the hopes invested in the possible futures supposedly enabled by them. Sterne's interest in these two sections seems to be taking him beyond the scope of this book in a way that renders his previously solid conclusions about the evolution of technology more problematic than this book has the space to resolve. While we have surveyed several causal agents––including physiological theories, advertising rhetoric, and social relations––here we move into the utopian imagination of technology's possible futures as itself a causal agent of technological change. This new interest seems to exceed the otherwise rigorous theoretical trajectory of the book.

These reservations aside, The Audible Past is a rare thing. Not only is it a comprehensive and well-organized history, but the book is an equally smart media theoretical engagement with questions of technics, the social origins of media, and technological change that should find a wide audience in many different academic fields.

brief notes on Bernard Stiegler's theory of "technics"

2009-09-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

For me, one of the biggest “aha!” moments in Bernard Stiegler’s mathemagical (for someone not proficient in continental philosophy but very much keyed in to the specificities of modern media and theories thereof, I swear this thing reads like alchemy––in a good way…) Technics and Time 1, the Fault of Epimetheus (1998 [1994]) comes toward the close of the first full chapter titled “Theories of Technical Evolution. After moving through the wildly different (yet excellently synthesized) writings of Bertrand Gille on technical systems, André Leroi-Gourhan on the technological origins of the human, and Gilbert Simondon on autopoietic “concretization” of technical objects, Stiegler moves us into the pressing need for a theory of technics in our present technological moment. After all, the “technics” (an anglicization of the Ancient Greek concept of technê or tekhnê) of contemporary, everyday life seem far removed from the term’s original sense of handicraft, skill, or artisanal invention, a “making” or a “doing” in opposition to the “disinterested understanding” of epistêmê. (Ideally, I will put together a subsequent post tracking some of the shifts in meaning between technê andepistêmê, which tend all too often to stand as anchors in the virulent opposition between theory and practice). Today, we no longer work with tools, per se, but with machines and complex systems. We do not make or invent, but operate (and this goes far beyond some sort of programmer/end-user, mod/newb distinction; rather, it gets at a historical movement from technology and science to technoscience, from invention and discovery to institutionalized research and development).

…the human has no longer the inventive role but that of the operator. If he or she keeps the inventor’s role, it is qua an actor listening to cues from the object itself, reading from the text of matter. To draw further on the metaphor, the actor is not the author—and that is why existing technical objects are never thoroughly concrete; they are never consciously conceived and realized by the human from out of this ‘logic,’ which is strictly speaking empirical, experimental, and in a sense quasi-existential (it is the object’s mode of existence), the sense, namely, that this logic is revealed only in its realization, in the experience of the object itself, or, as it were, on stage, and not at the time of conception.” (75-6)

This gets at the very problem of writing about technological media (Stiegler problematically never mentions “media” save for references to the “mass media”––more on this below): media refer to an in-between substance rather than any particular object or event in itself. This perhaps could explain the fantastic variety of approaches to “media studies” and the great number of academic departments now positioning themselves as the discipline from which so launch a study of (the) media. On what does one’s focus fall in an account of a medium? What is mediated, and how? Rather than focusing on particular objects (gadgets, inventions, etc.) or specific contents (movies, news, undifferentiated data), Stiegler’s account zones in on a sort of performance theory of media, of a becoming-medium in the moment of use (for “medium” is surely what we mean once we speak about the potentialities and anticipations of the technical object rather than its hard material existence––the distension of the gadget in time rather than its silicon actuality). This is what attracts me to the concept of technics as a paradigm of media theory. This is the great virtue of books like Lucy Suchman’s Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (2007 [1987]) which includes transcripts of first-time user interactions with a XEROX machine, complete with typographical annotations to show inflection and a representation of lights and linguistic signals put out by the device. It is probably a safe claim that Stiegler’s theory of technics, the “realization” technical object “in the experience of the object itself,” is indeed a theory of media.

What I just can’t seem to swallow about Stiegler’s account is the sense that during this moment of interaction with the technical object, what Suchman would refer to as the “situated actions” of a user, the specificities of the operator’s interactions, the nature of her selections, and the volition behind them seem to have little presence in Stiegler’s text.

“The maieutic proper to the empiricism of what we are calling the experience of the technical object, which is its functioning, corresponds here as well to a selection of combinations. Operating on a backdrop of chance, the selection follows phyletic lines whose necessity is their horizon, dotted with mutations whose accidental effects become the new functional principles.” (76)

The “selections” made by the operator are seen here as a property of the technical object itself, in its particular configuration of limitations and possibilities, as if this set of limitations and possibilities attenuates in advance the “selections” to be made. Weaving in and out of Simondon’s texts and feeding off of their resonance with biological evolution, Stiegler continues:

“In evolving, the technical object constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line, a ‘family’ of which ‘the primitive technical object is the ancestor,’ and this generation is a ‘natural technical evolution.’ … The technical essence is the identity of the lineage, its family resemblance, the specificity of its patrimony, which is the secret of its singular becoming: ‘The technical essence is recognized in the fact that it remains stable through the evolutional lineage, and not only stable, but productive as well of structures and functions by internal development and progressive saturation’” (77).

We see a perverse flip on the horizon here, as if the machine is operating the human, determining in advance the kind and number of selections to be made by virtue of its cold “technical essence.” If the operations of the user are not determining this technical identity, what is? The presence of what Stiegler relegates to the category of “other systems”––economic, linguistic, sociological, educational, political, military, etc.––can perform only an “artificial attenuation” on the “natural evolution” of the technical system. So that when a state power with particular set of economic interests implements protectionist measures to influence the development of a certain technology (as when the Department of Defense announced a $550 million R&D initiative on flat panel television in 1993 to beat Japan to the market––no lie), this stands outside and separate from the “patrimony” of the device. But if this type of attempt to influence the selection of certain technical traits made on the macro-level of economic policy is deemed “artificial,” what makes selection on the level of the individual operator any less so?

Socially Mapping the 1920s Midwest

2009-07-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

In both Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922) and the sociological study by Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929), an attempt is made to systematically document and map the practice of everyday life in a representative American town. For the Lynds, this meant choosing the midwest as "the common denominator" of the US, a city with a population between 25,000 and 50,000, one in which there were more than one industry, and a city in which "social problems" would not overshadow the study's findings (race is carefully elided throughout the book). For Lewis, this meant constructing a fictional city Zenith in the fictional state of Winnemac, a state which would be "more typical than any state in the Union" (Lewis's own maps of which are included throughout this post--more info on them below).

"Middletown" was revealed later to be Muncie, Indiana--most famously by photographer Margaret Bourke-White who was sent by Life Magazine to document the town in May 1937. Muncie underwent a "gas boom" when a massive natural gas reserve was found in the area in 1886, ballooning the town to a population of tens of thousands and attracting outside capital to this thriving "gasopolis." Due to severe misuse and waste--it was thought cheaper to keep gas valves in the house open and burning than to waste a match relighting the flame--the field was all but depleted by 1890. The Middletown study takes place in the wake of this unevenly distributed and underdeveloped industrialization of the formerly agricultural town.

Characterizing Muncie's current state of labor and production in 1925, they write:

“If the working class in Middletown does not make the material necessities of its everyday life, the activities of the business class appear at many points even more remote. As the population has forsaken the less vicarious life of the farm or village and as industrial tools have become increasingly elaborated, there has been a noticeable swelling in the number and complexity of the institutional rituals by which the specialized products of the individual worker are converted into the biological and social essentials of living. It is by carrying on these institutional rituals that the business group gets its living.” (44)

Paradoxically, this "increasing elaboration" of the technics of everyday life is coupled with an "increasing standardization of leisure-time pursuits." Perhaps the most significant change found in the Lynds' study can be attributed to the triad of automobiles, movies, and radio, which together spawned a "cluster of habits that have grown up overnight." They write: “Indeed, at no point is one brought up more sharply against the impossibility of studying Middletown as a self-contained, self-starting community than when one watches these space-binding leisure-time inventions imported from without—automobile, motion picture, and radio—reshaping the city.” Here, the case study of social anthropology seems to come up against its limits when the "underlying groundwork of folk-play and folk-talk" is integrated into a web of cultural production and technological innovation that necessarily extends the boundaries of this town beyond its traditional patterns.

Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt on the other hand provides us with a very different type of perspective on the networks and systems organizing a representative midwestern town. George F. Babbitt--perhaps a reference to the frequently worn out automobile babbitt metal, a soft alloy "used for bearings connecting the piston rods to the crankshaft"--is the quintessential middle man. Breaking with the precedence of American businessmen novels that gave us portraits of tycoons, leaders of the masses--Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Norris's The Pit(1903), Dreiser's The Financier (1912)--Babbitt is little more than middle management in a small real estate development company owned by his father-in-law, spending his non-working hours at booster club meetings and indulging in flights of heroic fancy while parking his car in tight spots: "It was a virile adventure masterfully executed" (28).

But Babbitt, as a real estate developer and booster has a particular kind of vantage point on his city of Zenith:

Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial righteousness about the 'realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes'--which meant that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This guessing he called Vision. In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, 'It is at once the duty and the privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own city and its environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in all its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically arching o'er a mighty flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, and all its faults and virtues.' (38)

Despite Babbitt's rhetorical flourishes--he is a great devotee of "the poetry of industrialism" (meaning tobacco ads)--his understanding of the city is absolutely one dimensional.

Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts of Zenith, he did not know whether the police force was too large or too small, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution. He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of insurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firemen there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not know that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished.

This is not just to say that Babbitt merely understands prices and ratios and abstract figures of the housing market; Lewis is pointing out here that there are thousands of other kinds of relations that make up this city, relations that Babbitt not only doesn't have access to, but that he wouldn't know how to understand in the first place. This is what makes him ultimately a sympathetic character--though Babbitt is unhappy with his life, he cannot even begin to understand what change would mean or entail. Babbitt understands the monetization of spatial relations, but in no way has access to detail or depth, let alone any sense of an outside. And, as Robert and Helen Lynd's study shows, any "outside" available to this representative small town may have been by that point paved over by a wave of "leisure-time inventions imported from without" to the point of total homogeneity.

One wants to say that Lewis's painstakingly drawn maps of Zenith and its surroundings are themselves an expressive act of Babbittry, a visualization of his understanding of the city. But the degree of his planning for the novel just doesn't bear this out. In a sociological research trip on part with the Lynds, Lewis traveled through the Midwest for eight weeks in preparation for his novel, transcribing his notes by topic in a large ring binder that serves as the index for an entire fictional world (the binder is now preserved at Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale). It contains countless pages of character biographies, a genealogy of the Babbitt family, the courses George would have taken in college (put together by consulting the 1888-89 University of Michigan course catalog), sketches of Babbitt's clothing, and lengthy back stories of minor characters who have little more than a single walk-on role in the novel. The binder also contains a "Locutions" section, a catalogue of expressions Lewis jotted down during his travels which would make their way into the novel. Some of my favorites: "all these free classes and flipflop and doodads;" "they say I'm a roughneck and a never-wuzzer;" "horse feathers!" "Yuh, I'm just as much agin the cranks and blatherskites an labor unions and so on as you are!"

The "Babbitt Maps," separated from Lewis's main research binder along with his wife in a divorce, were found in a Syracuse University archive (The Dorothy Thompson Papers). They consist of 13 holograph maps on separate leaves in Lewis's own hand, each of which was found slipped inside the dust jacket of an oversize edition of H.G. Wells's Outline of History. A fourteenth map, "Blocks Most Familiar to Babbitt", was sketched on the inside of the dust jacket itself (below).

Further maps show the interior of Babbitt's office and home, and even the arrangement of furniture in each room. Winnemac (and Zenith) would serve Lewis as the fictional setting forArrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and the minor novels The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928) and Gideon Planish (1943). Details are built into these 1921(?) maps that show Lewis had planned several elements of this narrative world that wouldn't be fully developed until several novels later.

The degree to which this narrative world has been fleshed out is breathtaking, and one wonders if anything comparable had been attempted before outside of genre fiction. But the--what can we call it?--verisimilitude aspired to here seems wholly out of sync with a work of satire, the mode Lewis is most widely remembered for. I wouldn't say that Babbitt is a completely successful novel, and the existence of these maps only compounds this sense when one sees the scale at which Lewis was thinking. Lewis apparently intended George Babbitt to be less of a caricature, but he ended up cutting much of the material that would have shown introspection in the character. As James Hutchisson writes, "Instead, Lewis focused on the city, drawing it as the embodiment of machinery and consumerism and showing its deleterious effect on Babbitt." But on the other hand, maybe we can better understand Babbitt not as a character being subsumed by systems of modern consumerism, but an earnest desire to portray what it is like to attempt to think from within them. In this sense, the distance between the encyclopedic planning and the actual novel is less one attributable to Hemingway's iceberg theory of fictional composition than one of distance between drafts. The novel Babbitt constitutes the character George F. Babbitt's cognitive horizon as he navigates the totality of relations Lewis himself attempted to map.

Hugo Gernsback and SF's Handicraft Roots

2009-06-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

While Hugo Gernsback's 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+ (a wordplay on "one to foresee for one") is one of the foundational works of science fiction, it's also widely agreed to be "the worst science fiction novel ever written" (Everett Bleiler; similar sentiments in a talk recently webcast on SF and architecture by Warren Ellis). Setting aside this work's questionable merit ("Ralph 124C 41+, his heart thumping in a most undignified way, was acting more like a schoolboy than a master of science"), Gernsback's work as a magazine editor provides some fascinating materials when considering the emergence of science fiction within an environment of fin de siècle technological utopianism and DIY experimentation with radio homebrew. I've been digging through some of the Firestone Library's Gernsback materials and came across a few interesting points.

The Luxembourg-born Gernsback began his career as a publisher in 1908 with Modern Electrics, a hobbyist's guide to wireless experimentation, including how-to articles, descriptions of the latest developments in the field, and speculations on the future of wireless technology. It was in this steampunk incarnation of Wired magazine that Ralph 124C 41+ was first published, and here that, strangely enough, Lewis Mumford published his first bit of writing at the age of 15, titled "A Portable Receiving Outfit." Gernsback's next big success wasScience and Invention, running from 1913 (originally as Electrical Experimenter) to 1931. In the August 1923 issue, Gernsback first edited a collection, calling on many of the same writers contributing technical pieces to write for this "Science Fiction Number."

This issue served as a sort of trial run for Gernsback's most famous publication, Amazing Stories, appearing in April 1926 and continuing, in one form or another, until the present day. In its early incarnations, the magazine largely published reprints of authors Gernsback wanted to appropriate as canonical works of "scientifiction," a term he patented and attempted to popularize with Amazing Stories. One finds in the first two years of the magazine stories by Wells, Verne, and Poe. There simply wasn't a large pool of authors writing in the genre (indeed, the "genre" at this point is little more than a business venture with no product), and those who were writing fiction along Gernsback's lines of "a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision" were put off by Gernsback's less than attractive editorial style (he believed that publication is payment enough). Burroughs was too expensive to contract, and Lovecraft had a good enough following of his own.

One of Gernsbacks' most important contributions is his development of a forum in which a community of genre fans could develop, in which a medium of popular criticism could develop around a particular set of aesthetic questions. He was one of the first magazine editors to regularly publish a letters to the editor section, responding each month. Indeed, in many of the correspondences between Gernsback and his readers, he seems to be behind the curve when discussing the poetics of the genre. In the July 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, nineteen year old reader Green Peyton Wertenbaker writes, "Scientifiction goes out into the remote vistas of the universe, where there is still mystery and so still beauty. For that reason scientifiction seems to me to be the true literature of the future. The danger that may lie before Amazing Stories is that of becoming too scientific and not sufficiently literary." Gernsback's unfortunate reply in the next month's issue: "we should state that the ideal proportion of a scientifiction story should be seventy-five per cent literature interwoven with twenty-five per cent science."

Gernsback never abandons his earlier technical publications, continuing with titles such asShort Wave Craft (seen above), Everyday Mechanics, and Technocracy Review. He opens a radio station WRNY which in 1928 broadcast one of the earliest radio programs with a live classical concert (conducted by fellow wireless enthusiast Joseph Kraus) and conducted experiments with television in the late 20s and into the 30s, though never with simultaneous image and sound--an image would be broadcast and then a sound over the same wavelength in a sort of shot countershot. One of the most interesting things about Gernsback's regular editorials and critical writings (publishing a short essay in each of his several publications each month) is the degree to which his (if you want to call it this) literary criticism and technical writings feed into one another--and this seems to be the case in the fan letter, pop critical discussion that flourished in his magazine empire. In the passage below from the Feb-March 1931 issue of Short Wave Craft, one can just as easily imagine the "experimenter" to be the writer of fiction as the hobbyist tinkering with tubes and resistors. (And note the way that the nature of television--a medium which has yet to come into being--is already seen to be determined not by the nature of its technological support but by a certain aesthetic of its use--potential technics?)

With television on the threshold, an entirely new radio paradise has been opened to the experimenter; because television will, no doubt, be transmitted on the shorter wave lengths for a long time to come. The up-to-date experimenter is, of course, thinking about this and is following the new art in all its different branches; so that, when television finally 'breaks,' he will be equipped to work with it as thoroughly as he has been familiarized with transmission and reception, 'phone as well as code.

Henry James considered as a hippopotamus retrieving a pea

2009-06-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

In several essays on Henry James, I've found mentioned a duality in his critical description of writing fiction. The process is simultaneously described as projection and reception, as self-expression and recording.

Dorothy Hale:

A superior sensibility is revealed precisely to the degree that it ‘records’ ‘dramatically and objectively,’ without, that is, the self-interest that would interfere with the appreciation of the subject’s virtues. By the same token, the more beautifully—which is to say, vividly and completely—the ‘thing’ is represented, the more it bespeaks its indebtedness to the viewer/artist’s sensibility.

What interests me about this seemingly insoluble cornerstone of the realist aesthetic is the degree to which it resurfaces in discussions on the materialities of inscription in James. In other words, I want to think through the way this toggling between privileged subject and unmediated object resurfaces (and is perhaps better thought through) when one considers, for instance, James's method of dictation to a typewriter, and the presence of cables and telegrams in his fiction. In Jamesian language, this is a question of "relations"--not only between individuals but between raw materials and their organization--relations between infinitesimal clues given meaning by the particular, "frail structure of wood and wire" of "In the Cage" (1898) or the "wild weed of delusion [that] easily grew too fast, and the the Atlantic cable [that] alone could race with it" in The Ambassadors (1903). Perhaps a bit of a jump, but let's just see what happens. And, disclaimer, what follows is some provisional rambling.

In any discussion of James, one can't help but draw on/push against some of the caricatures and complaints about his unwieldy prose style or trivial subject matter. My new personal favorite comes from H.G. Wells, who devoted an entire satirical novel--Boon (1915)--to the topic. "His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle. … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost even at the cost of its dignity upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things it insists are beyond it but it can at any rate modestly and with an artistic singleness of mind pick up that pea…"

By the time of his late work, James was almost exclusively composing his novels by dictating to a typewriter (a term which at that time referred to both the machine and its operator, most likely a young woman), and some attribute the peculiarly maundering quality of his sentences to this method of composition. Several bits of biographical history deserve mention here. According to one of his typists, Mary Weld, James's dictation was "remarkably fluent" and "when working I was just part of the machinery." According to another, Theodora Bosanquet, James wanted his typists to be "without a mind." As in James's Preface to The Ambassadors, the presence of the "author's vision" fades into the background; it paradoxically "hangs there ever in place like the white sheet suspended for the figures of a child's magic-lantern" … upon which it is the "charming office" of the protagonist Lambert Strether to project "a more fantastic and more moveable shadow" (again, here we have the unity of projection and reception).

But further testimony from Bosanquet, who, like brother William James, had an interest in automatic writing, reveals a decisive resistance from this apparatus of inscription/projection/reflection/etc.

Indeed, at the time when I began to work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found it almost disconcerting to speak to something that made no responsive sound at all.

Interpreting these lines in Bodies and Machines, Mark Seltzer positions James next to "the dream of perfect referentiality in realist writing," arguing that he seems to feed off the clicking noise of the Remington typewriter as "the concerted response of an ideally responsive and automatized first reader," rendering the circuit between composition and reception illusory, a "dictatorial practice of writing [which] precisely obviates the conflations of the materialities of writing and technology visible, for instance, in Jack London's or Mark Twain's writing as working at the machine, or…" etc. etc.

However, there is obviously something to this breakdown of equipmentality, to the failure of line breaks or keystrokes (whatever the click corresponded to) to make themselves present and thus obstruct the telling of a story. It is important to recognize that, with the expansion of telephone/telegraph networks, public electricity grids, wireless transmission, etc., a rhetoric of technologically mediated immediacy flourished within the same milieu as literary realism, and Seltzer is right to note that "the entire question of the referentiality of later nineteenth-century writing might be reconsidered in terms of such technologies of automatic and immediate registration" (196). But James fell prey to bald fantasies of telepresence no more than he did to some vulgar realist desire for unmediated reality.

Which is why we must return to his strange preservation "superior artistic vision" in the context of such obviously determined relations to practices of composition. Surely similar conditions must obtain for James as for the telegraphist In the Cage: "The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she believed, more than anything else could have done, that it was quite the most diffused" (187). I'm left wondering, how can we can locate an "art of the novel" in which the autonomous presence of artistic genius, as James would have it, persists among the wired relations with which he works?

Review: Moon (2009)

2009-05-05T17:35:00.000-07:00

(Warning--several spoilers below, beyond what can pretty much be inferred from the trailer.)

It's remarkable the lengths to which one must go these days to completely isolate a character in science fiction. Much of the work of Moon (dir. Duncan Jones) is spent explaining just how it is that a person can become utterly disconnected from the live flow of networks while still being able to receive prerecorded media. So, the conceit here is that we have discovered a way to supply 70% of the Earth's power with solar energy; that "H3" from the sun is trapped in lunar rock on the dark side of the moon; that Lunar Industries, Ltd. employs a staff of one in its mining colony, Sam (played by Sam Rockwell), whose three-year contract is almost up; that communications relay satellites have been damaged by some solar flare; OR that mysterious dark pylons have been erected around the base in order to block any communication with Earth (not to neglect the 'fiction' elements in favor of the 'science' determining the protagonist's seclusion).

This is the first in a series of reversals that Moon performs in relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey. These obelisks, rather than appearing as unknown technological wonders and beacons of interplanetary communication, are used to block any transmission, carving out a solitary, dark space within already given technological systems.

Jones (born Zowie Bowie) obviously wanted Rockwell to have the space he needed in this role, and Rockwell's particular style works nicely with the overall themes of the film. Hinting at the compressed life span and strange familial ties between identical Sam clones, a humorous father/son relationship develops between various versions. Sam shows Sam how to properly carve wood with the thumb closer to the blade. Sam tells Sam in his more decrepit state, "Jesus, your fly is down. You're embarrassing yourself."

The lunar base's AI, named Gerty and voiced by Kevin Spacey, is also there for Rockwell to play off of. In yet another 2001 reversal, HAL 9000's strangely emotive red eye is replaced here by Gerty's small LCD screen with a severely limited range of emoticons––smile, mumble, blank, cry. Gerty's sole function is to keep Sam safe, apparently even at the expense of the station and its mission. Seeing as this company is willing to dispose of (living) clones and reproduce them ad infinitum, it seems unlikely that they wouldn't program their steward more thoroughly. If the clone-on-clone relationship more or less works as comic relief, the one between AI and clone is a bit more sappy. Sam at one point declares, "We're people Gerty, you understand?" When Gerty agrees to erase his own memory so that no trace is left of the Sam clone who rockets back to Earth.

With the dialectic of command/control paranoia and utopian space boosterism of 2001 thoroughly undone, we are left in the face of these sentimental closing moments wondering just what it is the film is getting across. Moon was screened at the Tribecca Film Festival, and the Q&A afterward detracted a bit from any interesting take on the place of the space opera genre in contemporary network, post-cyberpunk culture that the film itself may have had. Especially notable was Jones's groan-inducing response during a Q&A after the screening to the question of whether this was a critique of corporate culture: "I dunno man, you tell me. I'm just a filmmaker."

Regardless, the premise itself of isolation within networks does serve as a striking thought experiment--it seems that it's not just Sam's psyche that becomes isolated on the dark side of the moon once off the grid. Based on the very logic of this isolation, stored memory (which is implanted and uploaded into the clones) slips out of sync with the "liveness" of the present tense of networks. If there is one thing to take away from Moon's mash-up of space opera with our contemporary networked discourse, it is the degree to which memory is now fundamentally reliant upon being distributed, networked.

InterNyet

2009-02-05T21:14:00.000-08:00

Attended a talk today titled "the Free Market Failure of the Soviet Internet" at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The speaker, Ben Peters, described the fascinating ways in which the political ideology and the institutional structures of the Soviet system influenced the construction of an ultimately unrealizable data communications network--a top-down, hierarchically centralized network that never fully took off in the way that the distributed organization of ARPANET did in the United States.

According to Peters, the Soviets attempted to build their data network as if it were an economy. It's data center was physically located in Moscow (though outside the city center to avoid missile attacks), with secondary nodes located in strategically placed locations, each feeding the rest of the country.

He also argued for a complicity between these designers' plan for the computer allocation of resources (a factory reports its production rates, depots and stores report their inventories) and the dream of the eventual triump of socialism becoming communism. According to one of the Soviet scientists, economics was "a scab on the healthy workings of the political body" that a cold computer logic would correct. See also this article by Slava Gerovitch.

So I'm thinking about this relationship between economic policy and network architecture, and then I read the following from Nicholas Carr's recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. Commenting on the fact that we now tend to Google a piece of information two or three times rather than choosing to remember it for ourselves, Carr writes,

On the Internet, we seem impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link. And this is precisely the behavior that the Internet, as a commercial system, is designed to promote. We are the web's neurons, adn the more links we click, pages we view, and transactions we make--the faster we fire--the more intelligence the Web collects, the more economic value it gains, and the more profit it throws off. (228)

Michael Fried's "absorption and theatricality."

2008-12-04T17:02:00.000-08:00

Briefly: I just came from a lecture by Michael Fried, and in the discussion session afterward, the question of subject/object interaction kept coming up in Fried's constant employment of the pair "absorption and theatricality"--Yves-Alain Bois described it as "the engine that allows you to see." This was challenged at several points--it seems that your (Fried's) criticism only takes into account the presence of a single beholder. What about a crowd viewing the work? Similarly important to Fried's "absorption and theatricality" is the staging of a kind of absorption. But in so doing, how do you ascribe the intentionality of the artist to that work and stage a sort of direct one-on-one confrontation with it? Fried keeps going back to the art object 'performing' these types--performing the address to an observer (anything else is virtually impossible?), performing a kind of intentionality of its creator. The art Fried is interested in does not provide raw access to intentionality, but thematizes intentionality itself.

It strikes me that this debate never seemed to be resolved in discussion--the various partisans remained entrenched. And it also strikes me that Benjamin seems to easily skate across this binary of subject-object interaction in his discussion of folk art and kitsch, when he writes "Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch teach allow us to see outward from within things." And it's even more striking to me that the media through which Benjamin 'solves' this problem, or at least finds a way to think beyond it, is through a (sort of) technics of mass art, through collective, popular culture.

the need for a megatelescope

2008-11-06T19:02:00.000-08:00

from The Arcades Project:

From Fourier's last work, La Fausse Industrie ,1835-1836>: "The celebrated American hoax associated with Herschel's discoveries about the world of the moon had raised in Fourier, once the hoax was revealed as such, the hope of a direct vision of the phalanstery on other palnets. … Here is Fourier's response: 'The American hoax,' he declares, 'proves, first, the anarchy of the press; second, the barrenness of storytellers concerned with the extraterrestrial; third, man's ignorance of the atmospheric shells; fourth, the need for a megatelescope.'" Ferrari, 'Des Idées et de l'école de Fourier," Revue des deux mondes, 14, no. 3 (1845), p. 415.

-Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute W [Fourier], W6a,4

steampunk

2008-11-06T18:11:00.000-08:00

from The Arcades Project:

Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the light of day at the time of the world exhibitions: the briefcase with interior lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and revolver. And near the degenerate giant creatures, aborted and broken-down matter. We followed the narrow dark corrider to where--between a discount bookstore, in which dusty tied-up bundles tell of all sorts of failure, and a shop selling only buttons (mother-of-pearl and the kind that in Paris are called de fantasie)--there stood a sort of salon. On the pale-colored wallpaper full of figures and busts shone a gas lamp. By its light, an old woman sat reading. They say she has been there alone for years, and collects sets of teeth 'in gold, in wax, and broken.' Since that day, moreover, we know where Doctor Mircale got the wax out of which she fashioned Olympia.

--Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute H [The Collector]

Hobbes on worldbuilding?

2008-11-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

from Thomas Hobbes, "On Epic Poetry" (1650):

There are some that are not pleased with fiction unless it be bold; not only to exceed the work, but also the possibility of nature. They would have impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, which are easily feigned by them that dare. Against such I defend you (without assenting to those that condemn either Homer or Virgil) by dissenting only from those that think the beauty of a poem consisteth in exorbitancy of the fiction. For as truth is the bound of historical, so the resemblance of truth is the utmost limit of poetical liberty. In old time amongst the heathen such strange fictions, and metamorphoses, were not so remote from the articles of their faith as they are now from ours, and therefore were not so unpleasant. Beyond the actual works of nature a poet may now go; but beyond the conceived possibility of nature, never. I can allow a geographer to make, in the sea, a fish or a ship which by the scale of his map would be two or three hundred miles long, and think it done for ornament, because it is done without the precincts of his undertaking; but when he paints an elephant so, I presently apprehend it as ignorance ,and a plain confession of terra incognita.

from English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford 1999. p. 614.

Net Neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine

2008-10-28T17:52:00.001-07:00

In order to speak about what I want to during the extraordinary and utterly insane times of this presidential election, several apparently disconnected points must first be made in order to build up a semblance of neutrality and approach a point. That is to say, this post is for now a dump of disconnected points and links that I'll probably come back to later.

First, let us attempt for a moment to aggregate the critiques of fair journalistic practices coming from both the right and left by positing that "the mainstream media" (MSM) refers to all televised news (ignoring on the right both support of Fox News and critique of the New York Times), while online journalism--not only the blogosphere but not the whole of the internets either--can be posited as an entity over and against the MSM (ignoring critiques on the left of talk radio). I apologize for being so reductive, but it appears these are the lengths one must go to to make sense of things.

Second, in order to get at the structure of this momentary fiction I am setting up as new media journalism, an entity existing over and against the MSM, we should recall the recent comments by Geert Lovink on the profitability of distributing digital information: "venture capitalists openly admit there is no money to be made in content. The business plans that make sense are not so much content creators as aggregators and filters" (from Zero Comments, p. xxvi). However, content aggregators have become not only the most profitable business model for Web 2.0--to the point where some now speak of the content economy becoming the 'link economy'--but content aggregators have become the mouthpiece of choice for both the far right and far left in a network environment: Drudge Report and Huffington Post, respectively, to the point of total saturation. Many more could be named, and even old media are now beginning to test the waters of link journalism.

Third, this past month FCC commissioner Robert McDowell stated that the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine--which many prominent Democrats (including Sen. Obama) have been advocating--cannot rightfully be considered apart from arguments pushed by the same Democrats for the institution of net neutrality legislation. The Fairness Doctrine, in effect between 1949 and 1987, required FCC licensed broadcasters to "to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced."And the net neutrality movement has been pushing legislation to forbid any bandwidth restrictions by internet providers on its subscribers based on their network usage.

McDowell argues that several mental backflips are required to reconcile simultaneous support for the Fairness Doctrine and net neutrality--how can one advocate limits on journalistic content while arguing for complete removal of controls on the reception of content? The debate over the Fairness Doctrine has been framed on the right as a full on assault on the freedom of speech. Check out the forums on the news aggregator Digg on this article, "Liberals Poll Against Free Speech". And I must admit, I think twice every time I reflexively go to click "bury" on comments such as, linuxdad: "Talk radio will move to web a place where the FD [fairness doctrine] can't touch them. The reason to squelch free speech is that you do not have the balls to handle what they say, or argue against it." (my citation of this comment has omitted its racist undertones and threats of a populist revolution if Obama is elected)

who is barack obama?

2008-10-22T18:32:00.000-07:00

If I hear one more pundit brandish the term "socialism" I am going to vomit. The contradictions involved in saying that the American worker is the "engine of our economy" one moment, and using "socialist" as the rhetorical equivalent of "terrorist" the next should be painfully apparent. Each time the shell of these concepts is touched, voided of all historical content, the inherent contradiction wants desperately to be revealed. This is a Daily Show segment begging to be aired.

Apparently there is a bias, perhaps even a conspiracy, deep within a mainstream media that investigates Joe the Plumber's status as an actually licensed plumber or a relative of Charles Keating and ignores repeated pleas from the pro-America portions of America to investigate Obama's socialist leanings or his ties to terrorism. On this latter point, there is deeply hidden information, bubbling up in knowing nods and looks from the pro-America portions of America that desperately needs retrieval before socialism reigns and the legacy of a great American is tarnished.

"Think about it," pro-America says.

Not, "look it up." Not, "google it." But, "think about it." This information does not need retrieval. It does not need research. It does not need evidence, since it is already information, given voice and spread like wildfire. It needs only thought.

The significance of the fact that the chosen form of content delivery for conservatives is talk radio cannot be overstated. Radio, the medium of revolutionary politics in the years leading up to the second world war, takes information and provides it with form as a disperse and yet still centralized broadcast content. Sarah Palin will never respond to, and frequently derrides charges from "some blogger." But the information bubbling up on talk radio desperately requires attention and deep thought, before it is too late.

In the face of this unbelievably dangerous and outmoded form of information retrieval, I am forced to espouse the seductive technological determinism of Hans Magnus Enzensberger--poet, essaysit, and author of countless childrens' books about magical encounters with history through technology. In his endlessly provocative essay from 1970, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," he repeatedly references the politically desirable effects that are "only the natural consequences of technical development."

The new media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned. They do away completely with 'intellectual property' and liquidate the 'heritage,' that is to say, the class-specific passing-on of nonmaterial capital. That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is always manipulation. But the memory they hold in readiness is not the preserve of a scholarly caste. It is social. The banked information is accessible to anyone, and this accessibility is as instantaneous as its recording.

Think about it.

new media, possible worlds

2008-09-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

This Wired article, Daniel Pink's "Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex," is about a year old, and I'm just getting to it now, but it reveals yet more evidence of the fictional universe phenomenon I have been thinking a bit about recently, thanks in great part to Matthew's work done here.

Discussing the existence of 'dojinshi' in Japan, or self-published manga similar to fan-fic, and the conventions that draw tens of thousands of people, the article's author is shocked that intellectual property suits haven't been filed left and right by the media conglomerates that more or less all swirl around a core of manga production, which spawns tv, film, and merchandizing content. These amateur manga are produced with old-fashioned tracing, copying, and scanners, Photoshop, and other programs. Pink interviews one of the dojinshi convention organizers:

"The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," he said. Then, gesturing to the convention floor, he added, "This is where we're finding the next generation of authors. The publishers understand the value of not destroying that." And as the manga weeklies falter and decline, new talent is more important than ever. Meanwhile, Takeda said, the dojinshi creators honor their part of this silent pact. They tacitly agree not to go too far — to produce work only in limited editions and to avoid selling so many copies that they risk cannibalizing the market for original works.

To replace the marketing terms with media critical ones, the nebulous existence of some ur-text [the "original work"] forms a center [business model] that readers ["market base"] are drawn back to. (Such a neat mapping of critical terms onto business ones is probably a bit irresponsible, but oh well). But really, what constitutes an "original work" in a manga like the 1980s cyberpunk classic Appleseed, whose fictional universe's origins have been told and retold by countless manga publications, two feature films, an OVA, and video games? Where do we locate the center of this narrative universe of Appleseed, for instance, that readers/viewers are drawn to? Certainly not in the intellectual property rights. Perhaps in the continuity provided by the geography as it is gradually expanded not only by subway and street maps within that universe, but also the spatial relations opened up on an even smaller scale between individual panels?

Interesting how palpable the sense is of the stifling effect American intellectual property laws have on genuinely new narrative potentialities in new media. I mean, fictional universes are more important than ever in all sorts of current US popular culture, but nowhere near the scale of dojinshi. "What's less obvious is that anmoku no ryokai ['unspoken, implicit agreement'] isn't just a deft way to avoid conflict. It's also a business model, one that's exportable to the US." I'm less optimistic.

superstruct

2008-09-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to be a member of the Superstruct advisory board! Superstruct is basically a massively multiplayer online forecasting game, set up by the non-profit Institute for the Future. The game designers have written the framework of a scenario that takes place in 2019, organized by five interlocking "superthreats" (disease, food distribution, power distribution, mass migration, internet attacks), in order to see trends in how players would react to these changing global conditions in the course of their everyday lives. I'll be posting more about this as the game approaches launch on September 22. In the meantime, you can check out the game's teaser site, or this article about it in Discover Magazine.

review: Mundane-SF issue of Interzone

2008-09-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

Led by Geoff Ryman, the subgenre known as Mundane-SF was recently showcased in the June issue of Interzone Magazine. The short stories published there follow the program for SF laid out by Ryman's Mundane Manifesto (no longer online), which, at first sight, seems like little more than a tirade against space opera (no interstellar travel, no extraterrestrial life, no alternate dimensions) and a conservative turn toward the 'science' in science fiction (sustainability, genetic engineering, biocomputers, virtual reality). Sadly, much of Ryman's SF reform movement builds off of a conception of the genre as escapist and childish, as growing out of "an adolescent desire to run away from our world." Ryman chides, "it's never too late to grow up."

In a response to the Mundanes, Ian McDonald writes, "A little thought experiment: if this manifesto had existed in the 1950s, how closely would its SF resemble the world as it exists today?" Does the general lack of rigor Ryman locates in SF extend back to the genre's earlier days? Should all fiction dealing with interstellar travel and its moral, political, and religious repercussions be dubbed 'childish' even though the possibility of a space-faring society was the hard SF trope for at least thirty years? McDonald: “It’s a poor manifesto that would venerate Verne (tech-speculation) but consigns much of H.G. Wells’ core texts to the ‘bonfire of stupidities’ (interplanetary war, aliens, time-travel . . .)." Mundane SF highlights a tension that has existed between the genre's two poles since its beginnings, between Stanislaw Lem and Robert Heinlein, between Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry. If anything, the concerns of the Mundanes at this moment seem to confirm a science fictional projection by Lem in his 1973 essay "On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction":

I believe that the existence and continuation of the great and radical changes effected in all fields of life by technological progress will lead science fiction into a crisis, which is perhaps already beginning. It becomes more and more apparent that the narrative structures of science fiction deviate more and more from real processes, having been used again and again since they were first introduced and having thus become frozen, fossilized paradigms.

While Mundane SF seems to respond to this crisis, an intervention at the level of form would be more welcome then a condemnation of the content of the entire genre as childish escapism.

My reservations aside, the results in this issue of Interzone are mixed. The stories tend to foreground objects, the more successful of which weave them into the everyday life of the characters, the less successful merely listing them like an inventory ("plastic cubes for currency, long cheese, textiles, copper and gold wire from Ormud, wine and distilled wine from Karpat…") A narrative focus on objects is in itself nothing new, a classic example of this being Maria Irene Fornes's play Mud in which a set of objects that will be set into motion in the coming action is ceremoniously placed on the mantle at the opening of each scene.

One odd similarity between these stories, with the possible exception of Élisabeth Vonarburg's "The Invisibles"--an amazing account of, impossibly, becoming lost in isolated bubble cities with five districts, one for each finger--is the relative ease of orientation into the story worlds. Part of the distinct pleasure of reading SF is the process of cataloging those initial elements of narrative noise in the story or novel's opening pages, the neologisms--"I can't keep in mind at all times which inertials are following what teep or precog" (Dick)--or oxymorons--"east european steel" (Gibson)--that the reader saves for later assemblage into a coherent world system. Immersion into the Mundane stories is, well, mundane. The transition from our world to that of the story is not very stark, save for its fancy proper nouns: "The distance from Sola to the island of Ureparapara is approximately three hours by boat with an outboard motor, assuming the sea is calm" (Lavie Tidhar, "How to Make Paper Airplanes"). "It was a bright chilly day when the ship came into the harbor, turned gracefully as her sails were lowered while she slid into the end of the dock, her flotation out-riggers nudging up to the tarred wood" (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, "Endra-From Memory").

This sense of familiarity, of orienting the stories within our own world, is most successful in R.R. Angell's "Remote Control," where a sysadmin watches over a MMOG. Gradually, we realize the avatars of these players or "riders" exist in physical reality. The movements of the riders control "Web-Cam-Servo-Rifle" robots that patrol the US-Mexico border, and players pay for the privilege of logging on and shooting at Mexicans as they attempt to cross. Newbies are harassed for merely maiming the "sheep," who adapt by crossing en masse and hoping for the best, since the machines can only hold so many bullets. The story is punctuated by the sysadmin's repeated appeal--"don't touch my screen!"--pointedly drawing the line between fantasy and reality in the tactility of the first-person shooter genre. Users get ten minutes or three shots, whichever comes first, and players who happen to spawn into an overheated robot must painfully endure "looking around without being able to shoot." This is simple, effective, classic "what if" SF.

If Mundane SF is to have any significance, it will not reside in a mere shift of locus from outer space to bioterror; it will not be in an attenuation of those themes that have always marked SF as SF (although cross pollination between 'mainstream' lit and SF as well as other genre fiction has been very important in the fiction past 10 years--see Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and collections of McSweeney's Astonishing Stories). This significance could only be located in what SF has always done best not with its content but with its form, by estranging the flow of everyday life, by seeing its processes through a totality of links with the past.

When Ryman writes, "If there is an estrangement between science and science fiction, then it should be possible to do something about it," he seems to be pointing toward the perceived atrophy in SF's ability to imagine probable futures through a significant engagement with current science and technology. The problem seems not to be that "the future is now" and therefore SF has no more purpose, or that our contemporary moment is more science fictional than any work of SF could possibly imagine. The problem as I see it resides with the completeness and speed with which the new is immediately appropriated in contemporary culture. Our blindess to the future is a byproduct of an amnesia toward our technological past. "Cyberspace" is a prime example of this. The internet and its rapidly expanding infrastructure is not some singularity borne directly out of the pages of SF, rendering the genre obsolete and exceeding it in ways that the genre could never hope to encompass (here I'm thinking of William Gibson's recent, reactionary forays into the present tense). The internet and its thoroughly televisual architecture is an intensification of the same at the price of imagining anything differently. If there is no other configuration of the web thinkable by SF today, then why not?

A true revolution in SF would engage with the possibilities of the form outside of traditional genre fiction boundaries. What do I mean by this? Al Gore's speeches ten years ago on the "information superhighway." Advertisements for gadgets that have the ability to prefigure our ineteraction with that technology before it is released. Fiction like Chabon's and Lethem's. Media theory that uses close readings of SF as jumping off points or inspirations for its own speculative inquiry (see N. Katherine Hayles and Fredric Jameson).

This is the great danger of Mundane SF: that in its misguided emphasis on finding new content for the genre (even though one story is basically the plot of Waterworld, and another is bad cyberpunk), it will forget what the form is capable of. Their use of the term "mundane" itself seems to forget that this word was used as a counterpoint for SF critics in the 60s and 70s. Mundane comes from the latin for "world," and these critics (esp. Samuel R. Delany) used the term to set SF apart from fiction located in our world. SF would "poise in a tense, dialogic, agonsitic relation to the given" (Delany). While conceivably the term "Mundane SF" could be used as an oxymoron or a program for deploying science fiction's cognitive estrangement much more closely to the given world (as do Lethem and Chabon who recently won a Hugo), there is little evidence to support this idea. Instead, Ryman glaringly and repeatedly misspells Delany's name in his writings outlining a program for Mundane SF. In its fetishization of the new at the level of content, Mundane SF forgets the heritage of its own namesake and risks propagating the very historical (and speculative) blindnes it wishes to critique.

amazon unveiled

2008-08-19T07:58:00.001-07:00

I took this screenshot of a couple months ago because I just thought it was pretty amazing to actually see some of the inner workings behind the ubiquity of Amazon placed right on its front page, which sometimes feels like nothing more than a print-on-demand operation. The image gives us a small peek into the heart of its distribution operation--a warehouse stocked with goods waiting to be shipped, in this case the Amazon Kindle.

But this momentary alignment of Amazon's glossy, digital public face with its byzantine material reality does little to give us a sense of the corporation as a whole, a possibility which was realized even in the first decades of the 20th century to be near impossible. Brecht, upon seeing a photograph of the interior of the Krupp factory by Renger-Patzsch, said "the situation is rather complicated by the fact that less then ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works ... tells us next to nothing about these institutions. The reification of human relations - the factory, say - means that they are no longer explicit. Something must in fact be built up, something artificially posed." (qtd. in Benjamin's Little History of Photography).

iron man and digital cinema 3--motion capture

2008-08-15T06:43:00.001-07:00

[Part 3 in a series. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.]
In an earlier post, I contrasted Bazin's theory of film as "physical reality as such" with Georg Tholen's formulation of the digital as "transmissibility as such." While celluloid contains a chemical inscription that directly relates to the object it records, digital cinema is constituted by generic code--the pure difference between 1's and 0's. How should we conceptualize the middle space wherein text-specific cultural codes are grafted onto generic digital codes? In other words, at what level does actual meaning, or signification come into existence in the transition from "physical reality as such" to "transmissibility as such" in digital cinema?

Motion capture seems poised in a conceptual freeze frame within this transition from the physical to the transferable. Rather than recording images which are put through some recondite process of transduction into digital code, motion capture records discrete points of movement as data.

This technique was a significant part of the collage of digital effects behind Iron Man's digital armor. From this great article:

For Stan Winston's Shane Mahan and his suit design team, this required making a suit that could be worn in sections over the visual effects suit Downey wore. "The big challenge was trying to find ways to blend, cross-cut and inter- cut combinations of practical and CGI shots,"says Mahan. "It would be absolutely foolish for me to think that I could pull off every shot in the practical suit, so we created a combination for Robert consisting of the chest piece, helmet and arm sections combined with a full-body motion capture tracking marker suit underneath. It’s a great way to blend the practical with the computer-generated effects, enabling ILM to bridge any gaps between the physical pieces.

Iron Man's armor itself contains this tension between the trace of physical pieces and constructed code. But motion capture seems to highlight a deeply troubling question about the ontology of the digital image, namely a question of degrees of indexicality. When the raw material taken up by the motion capture camera eye contains no indexical relationship to the physical appearance of the actor, but rather consists already of raw data abstracted form movement, is the "indexical contingency" (as Hansen refers to it in an earlier post) of the motion capture portions of the armor any more compromised than those portions that had existed in material reality on Robert Downey Jr.'s body?

The all or nothing critique of the digital as heralding the death of photography and film seems to lack a significant nuance. Thinking through the “degrees” of indexical contingency in the varieties of the digital image would entail a thorough engagement with Barthes’s “reality effect” (which perhaps finds its counterpoint in motion capture: a hidden language, unreadable between the process of recording and transmission, comes into the service of believably depicting the utterly unrealistic).

In an interview with animation supervisor Kenn MacDonald on the possibilities afforded by the motion capture technique for the recet Beowulf film, “This method of filmmaking gives him freedom and complete control. He doesn’t have to worry about lighting. The actors don’t have to hit marks. They don’t have to know where the camera is. It’s pure performance.”

What “pure performance” seems to imply for the actors is a complete liberation from the constraints of the cinematic apparatus. What “complete control” implies for the filmmakers is the possibility of ubiquitous and invisible manipulation. The actor performs freely on an empty stage while the process of image production and transmission takes place elsewhere, unseen. In this account, it seems as if the actor in the motion capture suit exists somewhere in between cultural and digital codes. She is an organism operating outside the technological apparatus whose body is nevertheless already encoded with data, and it is merely this data that the camera is interested in capturing instead of any indexical image.

Motion capture is at once a separation from or an invisiblity of the apparatus that enables transmissibility—pure performance—and a total saturation of the digital language that enables image production—complete control. The rhetoric of indexical contingency, of realism itself is inverted: the invisibility of the semiotic language (digital code) allows the depiction of the utterly unrealistic: Tony Stark testing his Mk-1 boot-jets and flipping upside down into a wall. In motion capture, the Byzantine process of digital transduction is condensed into the figure of the actor covered in data points: it is an encoding of the body prior to its encounter with the cinematic apparatus.

space as a media type?

2008-08-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

I'm rereading Lev Manovich's wonderful The Language of New Media, and have come up against a wall. In a section on "navigable space," Manovich writes that the phenomenon of navigability is not merely "a particular kind of interface to a database," but "a cultural form in its own right" (252).

Manovich admits that the representation of space is basically the fundamental axiom of all western art, he argues that with the advent of computing, space itself becomes a "media type."

For the first time, space becomes a media type. Just as other media types--audio, video, stills, and text--it can now be instantly transmitted, stored, and retrieved; compressed, reformatted, streamed, filtered, computed, programmed, and interacted with. In other words, all operations that are possible with media as a result of its conversion to computer data can also now apply to representations of 3D space. (252)

This just sends the mind reeling. Can't basically anything be converted into computer data? Images of Mars are sent back from a fleet of satellites in orbit in the form of digital code. These images can be stored, retrieved, interacted with, etc., in especially fantastic ways with Google Maps, as I posted about before. But does this make Mars itself a medium or a "media type"? Or this just something else to post under the category of space as a media type. And, by "media type" does Manovich simply mean medium, as in one of the new media he seeks to define in his book?

What about an objects themselves, independent of the spatial field in which they are placed? Look at Shapeways, a website where people can upload designs of 3D objects, and have a company produce them using 3D printers. This object, uploaded in the form of an AutoCad file or something similar, is originally computer data (not converted into such), and it can be stored, retrieved, and when actually printed or made real, can be interacted with. But does this digital reproducibility of objects make the category of objects--any and all objects--a "media type"?

from steam capital to… biomass capital?

2008-08-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

In a recent issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly, Imre Szeman asks, "what if we were to think about the history of capital not exclusively in geopolitical terms, but in terms of the forms of energy available to it at any given historical moment?" (806) Steam capitalism begins around 1765, oil capitalism by 1859 (with oil's discovery in Titusville, PA).

With peak oil looming as a crisis, or, in Szeman's view "disaster," the essay surveys three dominant narratives of what must come next: strategic realism (largely on the Right), techno-utopianism, and eco-apocalypse (largely on the Left). The first consists of nation-states securing access to energy through various methods, and therefore securing their existence in a time when they are overshadowed by corporate transnationals. See the Advanced Energy Initiative (AEI) and the War in Iraq. The second assumes a flurry of technological innovation that somehow works in perfect synchrony with the current global economy. Quoting a Scientific American article, Szeman somewhat sarcastically writes that "deeply ingrained in the patterns of technological evolution is the substitution of cleverness for energy. The natural temporal flow of scientific discovery will resolve the energy and environmental problems we have produced for ourselves" (814). The last of the three narratives, eco-apocalypse, foresees the growing demand from China, India, Brazil, and so on to drive the current capitalist global economy headfirst into "system failure."

This last narrative looks toward "disaster" with an eye that seems a bit too approving: "Indeed, there is a sense in which disaster is all but welcome: the end of oil might well be a case of capitalism digging its own grave, since without oil, current configurations of capital are impossible."

Since the promise of this essay is a call for future projections to use "existing social narratives of expertise, technology, progress, consumption, nature, and politics" (things that actually effect the practice of everyday life) rather than "precise statistics and measurements" that give a cold objective picture, it's difficult for me to see how Szeman (or anyone) can readily embrace the possibility of disaster. Disaster becomes an answer in itself, rather than a call for further projections, scenarios, or action. This response seems emblematic not only of the Left's inability to imagine a new paradigm of political economy, but also a perceived catatonia in SF as a genre (see this great interview with Charlie Stross), gratuitous disaster movies, and basically anything on CNN.

In the face of an inability to imagine the future, disaster is all too quickly accepted as a welcome alternative. But then again, "cleverness as energy" doesn't exactly sound viable.

The president's female athlete inspection

2008-08-11T05:18:00.000-07:00

These were too good not to post.
http://gawker.com/5035209/bush-knows-how-to-enjoy-the-summer
and
http://deadspin.com/5035136/the-george-w-bush-female-athlete-inspection-continues

iron man and digital cinema 2--the reality effect

2008-08-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

In the introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Miriam Bratu Hansen writes, “Digital technologies such as computer enhancement, imaging, and editing have shifted the balance increasingly toward the postproduction phase, thus further diminishing the traces of photographic, indexical contingency in the final product” (vii). A powerful trend in post-war film criticism was the argument for the literal quality of the cinematic image, what Hansen here refers to as “indexical contingency.” As Erwin Panofsky described it in a 19** essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” “the medium of the movies is physical reality as such. Cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real.” André Bazin similarly argued that the cinematic image “redeemed from sin” the false perspectivalism of Western painting. A film theorist deeply influenced by his Catholicism, Bazin writes, “The cinema is objectivity in time.”

While of course this unproblematic collapse of the signifier into the signified has since been tempered, as Hansen’s comment suggests, the mutability of digital images resurrects the discourse (rightly or otherwise) of our fundamentally intuitive understanding of cinema’s direct referentiality, if only as a “trace.” Roland Barthes’s diagnosis of the “reality effect” comes to mind, which posits “a break between the ancient mode of verisimilitude and modern realism,” a discourse “which accepts ‘speech-acts’ justified by their referent alone.” The “reality effect” is constituted by a language whose signified is the very absence of a signifier; it is a language whose aim is to simulate immediate presence. Now that the “indexical contingency” of the cinematic image is no longer a given, one would assume that the mutability of the digital would render the representational apparatus visible. In other words, whatever “traces” were left of the reality effect after theoretical attacks by poststructuralism now flare up because of their (ostensibly) final destruction by the technological attacks of digital code.

Digital cinema therefore, could be assumed to hold a productive relationship with the reality effect, in that it pushes the condition of the image as a signifier to the fore. Bazin's faith in physical reality becomes skepticism in its digital reproducibility.

But this line of reasoning ignores several key facts about the specificity of this language, or rather the lack thereof. Digital cinema forces us to grapple with the fact that its smallest constituent level exists as the pure difference between 0’s and 1’s, a language that does not consist of linguistic codes or shared systems of meaning. Unlike the grooves of a phonograph record, for example, whose shapes have a direct correlation to the sounds they represent, digital code contains no semiotic specificity. It is a language that need not refer to moving images at all, that could exist as an instruction manual, an x-ray of a tooth, or a scan of a manuscript. The smallest constituent level of digital cinema is simply a neutral delivery system, what Georg Tholen calls “transmissibility as such.”

As Tholen articulates it, “Once ‘0’ and ‘1’ no longer represent something, but become markers of a system within which something appears, it makes possible not only the alternating oscillation of presence and absence but also ‘the universal medium of the electric current’ as a carrier that stays neutral to its message” (SAQ 101:3, 667).

We are faced with a significant problem then: while digital cinema provokes an awareness of the image as a representational language, it is only as a delivery system “neutral to its message” that the digital makes any sense. Nothing of this language remains to be seen, and the critique of the digital is itself rendered binary, a yes/no decision as to whether or not a represented action or object actually happened, was actually there. The problem is that this comes to resemble, once again, the “reality effect” wherein mimesis becomes invisible.

As we stare directly at the (cinematic) apparatus as it constructs a (CGI) biomechanical suit around the body of Tony Stark, what exactly do we see? Not, I think, a representational technique that gives the lie to the super hero genre's realist aesthetic lifted from Moore/Miller's 80s graphic novels (the desire to pull every SF element of the super hero genre down to the realm of the possible in the present day). The computer graphics are actually foregrounded here, but to what effect?

jumbotron etiquette

2008-08-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

2 interesting things about the JUMBOTRON after seeing the Boss in concert last night.

It looked like they delay the image feed so that it perfectly matches the time the sound takes to echo throughout the stadium. Little Max Weinberg from a few thousand feet off consistently looked a half-beat off from the sound and his image up on the huge screen.

People behave completely differently when they know they're on the jumbotron at arena shows than people at sporting events. At sporting events recognize themselves on the screen, scan the stadium for the camera, go nuts, wave signs. Last night at Bruce, people who happened to see themselves on screen (you could tell from the slight glance) would quickly snap their attention back on stage and act as if they didn't know they were on camera, act as if they were in a famous live recording. Maybe this was something unique to this concert, or maybe the specific postures people take toward the insertion of a single video feed within a massive crowd says something about the different aesthetics of these events.

I'm sort of glad I was sitting in the back, because it seemed like I was the only one who didn't know all the words to every single song.

iron man and digital cinema 1

2008-07-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

I know, after The Dark Knight, Iron Man feels like it came out about five years ago. But for the sake of my absence from blogging and the backlog of ideas I've been meaning to put up here, let's look back.

To create the effect of the marvelous iron armor, a variety of technologies were used. From this article from Last Broadcast on "Tony's workshop:"

For Stan Winston's Shane Mahan and his suit design team, this required making a suit that could be worn in sections over the visual effects suit Downey wore. 'The big challenge was trying to find ways to blend, cross-cut and inter- cut combinations of practical and CGI shots,' says Mahan. 'It would be absolutely foolish for me to think that I could pull off every shot in the practical suit, so we created a combination for Robert consisting of the chest piece, helmet and arm sections combined with a full-body motion capture tracking marker suit underneath. It’s a great way to blend the practical with the computer-generated effects, enabling ILM to bridge any gaps between the physical pieces.'

In this interview, Faverau says that part of the realism of the movie hinged on being able to show various parts of the suit being gradually constructed, culminating in Iron Man's iconic red and gold Mark III armor. This trope in almost every superhero movie of the suit gradually being constructed or put on shows the gradual transformation of the human body into an icon, that is to say, into something that can be transmitted, disseminated, or broadcast.

This may take a few posts, but I'd like to consider the digital rendering of the superhero as symbolic of the inner workings of digital cinema itself. Iron Man, made up of various levels of physical reality, motion capture data points, and digital video encoding, is representative of digital cinema's transformation of physical reality into transmissibility as such (1's and 0's rather than chemical inscription on celluloid). More to follow…

"that spooky post-geographical feeling"

2008-05-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

A curious add-on is now available for Google Earth, the proprietary software that synthesizes satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data into a searchable, virtual globe. If one turns off all Earth-related layers—roads, traffic, borders, labels, and terrain—it is then possible to overlay what is called OnMars, a series of .kml files that “wrap the Earth’s sphere in Mars basemaps.” The result is a virtual model of the red planet, updated weekly with the latest images from the fleet of satellites currently in Mars orbit. This three-dimensional globe, accessible from any PC with broadband access, can be tilted, zoomed, set rotating, and when angled just correctly, takes on the syntax of a flight simulator’s camera eye. Yet when one enters a Martian location into the “fly to:” field such as “Victoria,” the crater on whose rim the SUV-sized Opportunity rover is currently perched, Earth’s skeleton of geographic coordinates surfaces from under the image of the Martian sands, and we are given a list of ports, streets, cities, and islands within the former British Empire as it stands grafted onto the virtual space of this synthesized alien landscape. OnMars unearths our originary experience of Martian space as the image itself. Find out how you can help!

The Circus

2008-04-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

Part 1

Part 2

Around 3:25 minutes into the first section, Chaplin begins playing with one of his most famous themes: the Tramp, aimlessly wandering around the outskirts of some field of action (namely a Circus, established in the film's first sequence), by some stroke of absolute chance gets pulled into this apparatus (another paradigmatic Chaplin theme--a robbery that while not of his own doing, is still much appreciated).

The genius is not in the hilarity or ingenuity with which the Tramp attempts to escape this situation, but how, in his accidental insertion into this field of action, he plays with its rules. The rules of the game are, in the beginning, unknown to the Tramp. But gradually, coming up against the limits of the apparatus (the circus) and transcending them, the Tramp mimetically replaces and becomes the rules of the game. Benjamin: "An action performed in a film studio therefore differs from the corresponding real action the way the competitive throwing of a discus in a sports arena would differ from the throwing of the same discus from the same spot in the same direction in order to kill someone. The first is a test performance, while the second is not. Film makes test performances capable of being exhibited, by turning that ability itself into a test" (Selected Works 3, 111).

SF in HD

2008-03-20T10:44:00.001-07:00

Cory Doctorow has a recent article in Locus Magazine on why high definition is bad for science fiction films. Basically, the argument is: in the case of CGI special effects (SF films being the perfect genre for showcasing the next unimaginable spectacle), their quality--or at least definition--exponentially increases each year, as does the amount of money poured into such projects. While a film released five years ago might seem laughably outdated by today's visual standards, a certain amount of longevity can be ensured by small-screen formats on which it may be harder to see the primitive blemishes of last year's computer graphics. But with an attendant decline in the cost of bigger, high definition LCD screens, Doctorow says "Whatever longevity can be wrung from a movie by releasing it to smaller, more forgiving screens is cut short by the living-room behemoths that are being pushed on us today," and the returns that can be anticipated by major studios for investing in $200 million SF blockbusters will be less and less. There is an inverse relationship between Moore's law and the valuation of filmic SF spectacle.

But I think this argument might not consider the internal mechanics of SF's reception and the increasingly small epicycles of nostalgia that we seem to be going through in popular culture, which becomes especially pronounced in the case of science fiction films. SF seems to have a different sort of half-life than other fictional modes, it ages much more quickly, in a way that I'm not sure how to talk about. Perhaps SF films draw off of a particular a mode of being in the world that is more easily forgotten, more fragile than the raw materials used in the construction of other types of (realistic) films? A mode of being with technologies that would otherwise be forgotten, but can only be recovered in any sense through some sort of patronizing nostalgia?

Neil Armstrong's physiology of floating

2007-11-11T23:47:00.000-08:00

Apropos the recent death of Norman Mailer, I figured I'd cite a passage of his from his 1970 book Of a Fire on the Moon, which grew out of his coverage of the Apollo mission for Life Magazine. Initially bored to tears by NASA's alphabet soup of technical terminology, Mailer's penchant for sweeping statements is reinvigorated when Neil Armstrong describes a recurring childhood dream he had. As it did for Mailer, this dream has stuck with me since I first learned of it. In this dream, Armstrong is able to hover just above the ground when he holds his breath. Mailer is blown away by this first sign of life from the otherwise mechanically dry man:

On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality (which is to say that world where every question must have answers and procedures, or technique cannot itself progress) yet to inhabit—if only in one’s dreams—that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself.
--Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, pp. 46-47

For Mailer, the opposition of this image of floating while holding the breath with the language of technology and "technique," distills the very essence of that 1960s dream of existence in outer space. This opposition no longer holds today. If anything, the plane has shifted and its poles have been synthesized. As the media of technique shifts from code to sound/image/text, the deployment of technique itself is moved from the outer to the inner:

The literally unheard-of is the site where information technology and brain physiology coincide. To make no sound, to pick your feet up off the ground, and to listen to the sound of a voice when night is falling--we all do it when we put on a record that commands such magic.
--Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), p. 36

objects-on-demand

2007-11-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

Cory Doctorow's introduction to his recent SF short short story "Printcrime" explains that it stems out of a talk attended by a friend at which a British recording industry exec talked of the "industry's great and hysterical spasm." It's assumed by this that he means the gradual chipping away of DRM by consumer dissatisfaction and lagging sales, and the inevitable formation of a new form of intellectual property law/media copyright. The recording exec claimed that this "great and hysterical spasm" of the recording industry would become the template for virtually every other industry that deals in trademarks or patents once the development of rapid prototypers (wanna know how to build one?) and 3D printers becomes viable. For those who don't want to click through the links, these are machines, in existence now and being developed for personal use, that "print" actual objects. That's right, just like the replicators on Star Trek.

Doctorow, really one of the most interesting SF authors--among other things--working today, finds the connection between music copyright and 3D printers incredibly strange. In one of his characteristically witty historical analogies, he says that to worry about the future of trademark and patent law in the face of object-on-demand technology is "as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses."

Perhaps this is a problem today with SF and futuristic thought in general. Politicians began using phrases like the "information superhighway" (Al Gore's pre-global warming pet project/marketing campaign) ten years ago. When SF concepts and the discourse of speculative thought enter the political and popular domain outside of any traditional generic conventions, what is there for SF to do? When advertisements for new technologies have the strange ability to prefigure or even simulate our interaction with these as yet unreleased tools, how can SF react with counter prefigurations of future technologies? And how does any futurist deal with objects whose complexity can only be explained by teams of tech people?

Steampunk, a subgenre of SF that deals with Victorian-era technologies, seems to serve as a valve for some of these frustrations in many interesting ways, especially the challenge of dealing with overdetermined technological complexity. Steampunk Magazine is one online magazine working with this stuff. It looks back to a moment when technological objects were still intelligible as objects, when their development and evolution could be seen as moving in many different directions, when one didn't have to read through an entire wiki in order to build a tool that made more objects.

(P.S., the lolbladerunner was done by Jamais Cascio)

advertising torrents

2007-07-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

I am trying to download the 2004 Korean movie 3-Iron (dir. Kim Ki-duk--an interesting article on him here) through bit torrent sites. Apparently, only five people in the world currently have this complete .avi on their computers. Which is why the file is being assembled in fits. I'll have a strong download around 20 kb/s and then for long stretches of time absolutely nothing. Currently at 19.73%, it has stalled out, and the file as it stands on my computer looks like this:

The application Transmission graphs out the motion picture in a single freeze frame, tracking its progress as it assembles itself. That film can now be mapped out in such a way is dizzying enough as it is, but the topic of my post leads elsewhere.

As I'm staring at the list of peers fall from 4 to 2 to 0, I find myself wishing that more people knew about and had the film. When a new episode of a tv show or a recently released film is posted, there are hundreds and hundreds of peers plugged into the torrent file, and the video can easily be downloaded in a matter of minutes. I find myself wishing that I had a way to disseminate both the knowledge of the film and the .avi of the film itself.

Basically, I want to know how to market the film. Like the Hollywood production companies who outsource their leg work to trailer houses such as The Ant Farm and Mark Woollen & Assoc., my motives are purely self-serving. But I don't want money in return, I simply want to see the film. If more people know about 3-Iron and more people have the film or are currently downloading it on their computers, then I will be able to download, watch, and enjoy the film that much faster.

What would advertising would become in a post-DRM, post-RIAA lawsuit world. The specters of this possible future are already out there. Take axxo, for instance, the nickname of a teenager who uploads movies which are downloaded literally a million times per month (see an interview with him here). This nom de plume(?) has become a brand name when searching for bootlegged and ripped movies, "axxo" being searched for more than any individual movie title. It's like going to Blockbuster.

Similarly, when users upload films they often include summaries about both the content and quality of the file, asking peers to please seed. Here's one for Jacques Tati's Playtime that I recently got:

"Jacques Tati's Playtime is cinema at its precise best. There's not much of a storyline, as the camera loosely follows a group of American tourists in 1960's Paris and, of course, the bumbling but gentlemanly Monsieur Hulot, payed by the director himself. The movie took three years to complete and by the time it was released to a lukewarm audience, Tati was virtually bankrupt. The director died in 1982, suffering from pneumonia, but by then, he had sealed his place as celluloid [sic] visionary, who would inspire a thousand ideas to bloom -- the most notable being, as some claim, Spielberg's Terminal. [...]The audio is 2 channel AC3 (224kbps). The file plays fine in standalone DiVX players."

Where do these compositions and the people writing them come from? What's amazing to me is that even in a marketplace stripped of any consumerist structure, a forum in which all the goods are completely free, the rhetoric structuring the dissemination of these films basically parrots the copywriting on the back of DVD cases, in reviews, and in the worst kind of sentimental trailers all produced by corporate ad teams.

The reasons for this kind of promotion and rhetoric must go far beyond any desire to create some sort of utopian community, or any dreams of living the life of a pirate for that matter. For me, I just want to see 3-Iron and would do anything to advertise the thing at this point. What does it mean to advertise when its impetus is not commerce but entertainment itself? Hints of what is to become of advertising once the entertainment industry figures out how to adapt to a file sharing market are beginning to reveal themselves.

Just an afterthought, you'd think more people would have the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. Why, why is it taking this long to get.

And for those of you interested, see why Harvard is one of the few universities pledging to protect its students from file sharing lawsuits.

Martian Photography

2007-07-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

As I was passing in between the range of NPR in New York and Philadelphia on the NJ Turnpike a few days back, I struggled to hear a brief interview with Jim Bell, geologist at Cornell and researcher on the Mars Rovers. I was only able to hear chopped up words interspersed with the "thats the way, I like it" song. Luckily, the interview can be found here.

Despite the report's several bogus or grandiose claims--that landscape images of Mars are "becoming part of our collective visual vocabulary," that one day poets will travel to Mars and be able to give us better interpretations than these photographs, that much like the way Eskimos apparently have 50 words for snow future colonists will have the same gradations for red--there was one point I liked. In the description of the interviewer's experience of viewing a Martian landscape, she says, "Actually there's nothing in this picture that isn't rock and shadow; and because there are no trees or anything else connected to life, I have no idea how big or far away anything is. The sense of scale is a complete mystery."

Space, spatiality, and distance continue even here to be critical in discussions of Mars. Looking at some of these photographs here and here, it's as if the images challenge us to construct our own sense of scale, to imagine a place in or experience of not only the image but the spatiality that Mars provokes.

"Mars is under attack!"

2007-07-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, the commerce, justice, and science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee announced in a press release the drafting of a bill that would put NASA's annual budget $290 million above the President's request for the FY 2008. However, they also announced that the bill to be put before the appropriations committee would contain language that forbids "funding any research, development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests."

In response, The Mars Society, led by Robert Zubrin (outspoken advocate for Martian exploration and designer of a direct human mission), began a fax and phone blitz, calling on members and interested people to contact their local representatives. The slightly ridiculous campaign announcement reads: MARS IS UNDER ATTACK!

The appropriations committee met yesterday, and approved the commerce, justice, and science spending bill. The bill does not appear to contain any of the threatened anti-Mars language.

It makes me uncomfortable that the highest placed push for a human expedition to Mars has always seemed a mere (or FINAL!) stepping stone in the Bush Family policy, with Bush Sr. promising a return to the Moon and to Mars in 1989, and Jr.'s Vision for Space Exploration in 2004.

It makes me even more uncomfortable that the number of accounts from credible scientists and politicians who say that the human exploration of Mars is simply unnecessary is always tempered by the incredible amount of positive Mars-related press that NASA receives. In the rhetoric for and against human missions, the quality of data we have been receiving from robotic missions is simply too good to ignore.

So while the debate continues, something strange is happening to the red planet. The response by one reader of the Space Politics blog to this post gives me pause. "[...]we have maps of Mars that are an order of magnitude better then those of the Moon. In fact Mars is better mapped then most of the Earth."

The map currently being developed by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter is available online. The map ranges from a global perspective to a resolution the width of a beach ball.

What is so interesting to me about this discussion on the future of Martian exploration is that even while it goes on right now, a material tangibility is being married with evocations of some fantastical, dreamlike existence on both sides of the debate. While I can't go very far with this right now, it seems fitting to quote the opening of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy: "Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up in the night sky, and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from the very beginning--a great sign, a great symbol, a great power. And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place."

"A Feel For The Game"

2007-07-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Mostly because I seem to have so much time on my hands recently, I’ve found myself playing video games again. However, I’ve only been playing those games that I’ve put many many hours into in the past, because I can’t really find the patience to ride out the learning curve and play something new. Halo, Starcraft, Civilization III (really a subspecies of my original love of starcraft), Super Mario, Waverace and Goldeneye—all of these games contain a set of movements that are second nature to me, a type of acquired knowledge. The phrase that McKenzie Wark uses in his recent book Gamer Theory—“organic intellectual”—hasn’t left my mind for some weeks now, and seems to aptly describe this process of interiorizing a set of operations within a field of data.

In reading Jonathan Sterne’s book The Audible Past, I came across this quotation from Marcel Mauss on the concept of technique which is worth quoting at length:

"The body is man’s first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body....Before instrumental techniques there is the ensemble of techniques of the body....The constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical, or chemical aim (e.g. when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself alone but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it" (qtd. in sterne p. 91, orig. from “Body Techniques” in Sociology and Psychology).

So, these media which encourage the development of technique—be they video games, television/channel surfing, computer interface, or the keyboard I’m typing this on—are always building off of previous methods of sense perception, both on the level of individuals and societies.

This stuff really becomes interesting at the point where the medium or technological apparatus that has initiated this development of technique begins to erase itself in that process. (When am I no longer interested in playing the game itself, but exercising this series of interiorized functions and movements?) For example, Sterne’s exploration of the early practices of the stethoscope cite the efforts of early practitioners to overcome and ignore a superficial humming sound produced by the apparatus itself in order to concentrate on the “intrathoracic sounds.” Sterne writes, “In classic technological deterministic fashion, the tool stands in for a whole process from which it erases itself.”

What I am interested in here is how the semantics of a certain technique, and the process of its establishment in individuals (the learning curve?) can create, participate in, or disseminate certain social codes. For example, in the case of the stethoscope, its inventor R.T.H. Laennec advocated its use by arguing that the device would eliminate the improper, direct contact with women and lower class people. The use of the stethoscope, or mediate auscultation, became a way to distance the self from unpleasant social difference, both spatially and by abstracting the body as an abstract code of sounds.

The repercussions of technique in contemporary media require much more thought. This acquired knowledge, this second nature, I think at this point is best described by Susan Sontag when she advocates “a style of knowing something.” Watch this video and see what I mean.

Super Heroes and The Phonograph

2007-07-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

This passage from Adorno’s 1927 essay, “The Curves of the Needle”:

“With its movable horn and its solid spring housing, the gramophone’s social position is that of a border marker between two periods of musical practice. It is in front of the gramophone that two periods of musical lovers encounter each other. While the expert examines all the needles and chooses the best one, the consumer just drops in his dime—and the sound that responds to both may well be the same.”

Setting aside the sort of dated yet often repeated point that the audience member enjoys not the film or music she goes to see but the money she spent on it, I think the real brilliance of this passage lies in the conflation of the audition with the auditor, and the needle with the curves--no matter what is played, the sound remains the same to all. What is the selfsame sound that each type of musical lover hears? It is, of course, the sound of the dime dropped to purchase the needle. It is the sound of the music subsequently enjoyed in the privacy of the home. And it is the sound of the needle itself, that is to say, those crackles and shifts in pitch that reveal the actual machinery of reproduction. This triad of commerce/sound/technology will most likely structure any discussion on the semantics of listening in popular culture. Today, the latter two terms, sound and technology (along with the listener floating ambiguously somewhere in between), create the most productive and interesting tensions.

Adorno goes on to say of the apparent improvement in the quality of sound reproduction technologies that “The moment one attempts to improve these early technologies through an emphasis on concrete fidelity, the exactness one has ascribed to them is exposed as an illusion by the very technology itself.” The rhetoric of technological fidelity is a productive paradox. Constant improvements such as Hi-Fi or Dolby 5.1 are not necessarily steps forward in sound quality, but a shift towards a new style of hearing things. This point was made in Sound Theory Sound Practice, I believe it was. This is to say that the spectacular sounds that accompany the otherwise awful Spider Man 3 straddle many points of audition. The recent spate of super hero movies humping claims of realism (the "this could actually happen!" aesthetic) are not only rehashing/warping the Frank Miller led The Dark Knight Returns aesthetic of the 80s, but are constantly making an argument for the medium through which these mythologies are now pushed.

I met Jonathan Lethem (see his list of the five most depressed superheroes) at a book signing and nervously asked him something inane like, “what do you think about the new Superman movie?” In my defense, the teaser trailer was absolutely breathtaking—it looked like a scene right out of the 1940s animated serials, an aesthetic that would pull cgi and tights out of dimensions other than the ostensibly real. He said that he had learned not to stop getting his hopes up for comic book movies, as there is something in the medium that is inherently untranslatable.

But the superhero is not a medium, it is a perfectly translatable commodity--television, action figures, games, costumes, film, books, etc. The mythology of superheroes today is squeezed through the nascent field of digital cinema ever proclaiming its fidelity to the our world so that we can look up walking the streets of New York and half expect to see a red and blue blur sling overhead. Going into Spider Man 3, I expected the cgi to be significantly improved on the previous film, there having been years elapsed and most likely technological leaps made. Spider Man always looked a little awkward and unnatural in 1 and 2. It wasn’t until halfway through the movie that I realized not only have the graphics not really changed, but their verisimilitude is not what matters anymore. The sound of Spider Man 3 seems to take an unprecedented amount of control, to the degree that the most spectacular way possible to defeat Venom at the end of the film is, and I’m not making this up, with sound. Spider Man discovers the symbiot’s weakness to sound waves, and beats a series of metal pipes, driving the black goo away.

While the plasticity of the image has been made virtually infinite thanks to cgi and digital film, it is still strangely anchored in some rhetoric of ever greater fidelity to the real or photographic. Sound is employed to an ever greater degree in recent popular film as a sort of filler, enhancing these images through synergism and sync points and added dimensions that allow the spectator relief from the images that often fail, look flat, seem taken out of a video game. And this is why digital film today is such an exciting sound medium. While cgi is bogged down in claims to verisimilitude, sound is free to improvise in countless dimensions with breathtaking results, making up for the mistakes of the clumsy image. Seriously, go see Spider Man 3 and listen to the Dolby TrueHD.

Soundscapes

2007-07-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

An abstracted and tentative outline of history professor Emily Thompson's interesting book, The Soundscape of Modernity. Note that this is not her table of contents, but my own sense of the book’s formal arc. Maybe it’s strange to extract this outline from an already mapped out narrative of events, but there has always been something about historiography—that is, the writing of history—that makes me uneasy. Using narratives to stitch together an event makes more sense to me than using events to stitch together a narrative. The former construction seems more proud of its stitches.

1) traditional sound, space, and listening – surveys some final intersections of reverent performance spaces and music as Art with a capital ‘A’ before the opening of Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1900, the first building engineered with the new science of acoustics developed by Wallace Sabine. The strange condition of listening as “a way to worship at the temple of great art” (47) and “an elevating mental recreation which is not an amusement” (49). The relationship of these three elements—space, sound, and listening—begins to shift around this historical period.

2) sound rediscovered - The experienced (shells) and applied (proto-radar) sound of WWI. The process of listening and the concept of sound become increasingly externalized as machines come to help us understand the physics of sound. From its very inception, our understanding of the physical reality of sound is mediated. Amazingly, a formal science of sound didn't really exist until the early 1900s.

3) noise - the new problem of uncontrollable "noise pollution" in the modern city from 1900-1933.

4) listening redefined - cathedrals and temples begin using new sound muffling technologies in order to hollow out a silent, reverent interior space by merging new technologies with classical design. The natural sound signatures that had always been ascribed to certain types of spaces become a thing of the past.

5) space redefined - “modern” architecture in late 1920s begins to hermetically seal off outside noise pollution and integrate all interior systems: acoustic insulation, ventilation, and lighting all work in concert. The advent of wholly manufactured interior environments.

6) sound redefined - newly engineered sounds that are freed from spatial restrictions by radio, phonograph, and telephone, begin to fill these hermetically sealed spaces.