ENGL 758A: Inscribing Media

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The Author, The Work, the Text: How Remediated Digital Videos are Creating a Shared Conversation Between Textual Studies and Media Theory

Monday, May 15th, 2006

What follows is a working excerpt from my seminar paper. This section comes in the beginning and is sort of the place where I am setting up the foundation for the conversations that I would like to join and initiate. I plan to add more detail in terms of providing footnotes for articles to reference and trace the history, etc., but I hope this portion will provide an idea of where I am headed.

YouTube has arrived.

If you haven’t heard about YouTube.com, you will. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, friends that met as two of PayPal’s first twenty employees, have created the website that is being hailed as an “Internet phenomenon” (Green). The website’s concept is simple: as Heather Green documents, Hurley and Chen had their idea for the website after a frustrating experience of their own trying to share video clips with friends via email. What Hurley (CEO), Chen (CTO), and Jawed Karim (advisor) have created is a website open to any user who wants to post, store and/or share her own video(s).

The website resembles Flickr, recently bought by Yahoo!, a photo sharing website that uses Ajax, Organizr, and folksonomic tags to allow users to post, tag, and discuss photos on the website. When YouTube first came on the scene, it was heralded as the “Flickr of video,” which many techies and lay-users feel it has proven to be; YouTube uses folksonomy to allow users to post, share, and comment on videos. The website is easy to use, and since it went public in February 2005 its viewership has increased steadily; in December 2005, the website found itself thrust into the limelight as viewers flocked to the site as a means of watching the very popular Saturday Night Live digital video, “Lazy Sunday.”

In the last few weeks, several articles have been published discussing the website; most writers take up one of three main topics found in typical YouTube-related articles: the authors remark on YouTube’s amazing rise to fame, praise and/or cite YouTube as an example of the more democratic and collaborative “Web 2.0,” and/or forecast the website’s soon-to-be demise a la Napster due to copyright infringement. The New York Times has featured articles about YouTube, specifically discussing “Lazy Sunday” “going viral,” as well as the most viewed YouTube video, “Pokémon Theme Music Video.” Slate.com has posted articles discussing “Lazy Sunday” and the potentially “most recognizable lip syncers on YouTube,” “Two Chinese Boys” or “The Dormitory Boys.” Numerous computing and business magazines have had recent articles about how to make YouTube, and other websites like it – Sharkle and Vimeo are two less well-known examples – financially sustainable and/or profitable, particularly with regard to increasing bandwidth costs, the introduction of ads, and the issues of copyright.

Yet, in all of the articles and blog threads discussing YouTube, no one seems interested in actually studying and analyzing the content uploaded to the website, even when authors take the time to mention specific videos. (Though, people have been interested in the commercial videos that have appeared among the amateur videos, for example Kevin Smith’s trailer for Clerks 2, and what that might mean for the website’s future.) In addition, no one is asking what YouTube offers, if anything, to creative artists (and consumers of creative art) or what will be lost if such a website is not, ultimately, economically sustainable. After spending extended time searching YouTube (all in the name of scholarly research, of course), I think scholars of media theory and textual studies are missing an opportunity: YouTube offers an entry into many exciting conversations that not only provide connections to topics of continuing interest to textual critics, such as how we might answer the question of the work versus the text with respect to digital media, but also YouTube is a rich source for furthering discussions of media theorists related to interactive media and remediation. By looking at a specific example from YouTube, it becomes clear that the questions of textual critics and media theorists begins to overlap: the ability of viewers to immediately remediate, respond to, and/or potentially re-enact a video expands the textual critic’s notion of both the text and the author, while, at the same time, providing media theorists with new ways to think about user interactivity and what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call the “double logic of remediation” (5).

In order to carefully consider questions of the author, work and text, as well as to demonstrate new aspects of interactive media and remediation, I would like to turn to a set of videos that, primarily, are locatable on YouTube. Minutes after “Lazy Sunday” appeared on Saturday Night Live, it appeared on YouTube, where it remained until mid February when it was removed at the request of NBC for copyright infringement. In the short time “Lazy Sunday” remained posted on YouTube, the digital video not only went “viral” but also it has grew to involve a network of videos that both remediate and respond to the work. Despite “Lazy Sunday” being removed from YouTube, it remains in the response videos of amateur users; moreover, despite is absence from YouTube since February, videos that respond to and expand the text of “Lazy Sunday” (a point I will later further defend and explain) have continued to appear. Carefully viewing “Lazy Sunday” and the responses to it not only demonstrate and complicate issues of remediation, immediacy, and hypermediacy but also raise provocative questions about authorship, the ethics of video or audio sampling as it relates to rewriting or remediating, and understanding how independent works might come together to form a larger text.

Before turning to the video responses to “Lazy Sunday” as a means of illustrating and discussing many of the above-stated textual and media issues, I’d like to first address a prevalent misconception about digital video that, I believe, is one of the main reasons digital video on the Internet has yet to be studied in the way I’m suggesting. In most of the articles I’ve read discussing YouTube, original content on the website is considered the amateur work of teenagers. Many articles do not even discuss the original content of videos on YouTube and, instead, present the website as only containing clips of commercial footage. At present, YouTube does contain both commercial and original amateur video; the type of original digital video varies greatly – digital blogs, original compositions, re-enactments, and direct responses to other digital video. This last example of original content is what I find most compelling and unique about YouTube and digital video. Like Flickr, YouTube allows users to comment and discuss videos, but, in addition to written comments, many users choose to comment by creating original video that is at once unique and also tied to a previous video to which it is directly responding. In this way, users are remediating our traditional conceptions of commenting and criticism by presenting their ideas using video as opposed to print.

Henry Jenkins first suggested fan fiction and other-such genres as an appropriate means of scholarly study in his book Textual Poachers. In the more recent Rethinking Media Change, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Jenkins presents an article specifically related to digital video and fan culture, again citing the importance of giving this genre serious attention. In “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,” Jenkins reminds readers of the stigma surrounding amateur work, particularly the work of amateur fans:

Too often, fan appropriation and transformation of media content gets marginalized or exoticised, treated as something that people do when they have too much time on their hands. The assumption is that anyone who would invest so much creative and emotional energy into the products of mass culture must surely have something wrong with them. (282)

In the fan community surrounding Star Wars, Jenkins sees the kind participation, interaction, and remediation that have exploded in the digital videos on YouTube. As Jenkins suggests in this essay published in 2003, “this new production [digital video] and distribution context profoundly alters our understanding of what amateur cinema is and how it intersects with the commercial film industry” (283). Jenkins argument will prove to be fruitful soil for this discussion because while his claim that “the unleashing of significant new tools that enable the grassroots archiving, annotation, appropriation, and recirculation of media content” (283) seems to prove valid, the further development of his argument also provides an example of the necessity of keeping in mind the consumerism that drives the Internet, lest we fall prey to the allure of a democratizing vision that is likely more fantasy than reality.

Works Consulted

N.B. This is an abbreviated list for this response paper. A more comprehensive list will accompany my full paper.

Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text,” in Image/Music/Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Garrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1999. 2000.

Boutin, Paul. “A Grand Unified Theory of YouTube and MySpace: Point-and-click sites that don’t tell you what to do.” Slate. 28 April 2006. 7 May 2006. http://www.slate.com/id/2140635/

Green, Heather. “Way Beyond Home Videos.” Business Week. 3979 (2006): 64-5.

Heffernan, Virginia. “Now Playing on YouTube: WebVideos by Everyone.” New York Times. 3 April 2006. 7 May 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/arts/03tube.html?ex=1301716800&en=caf7a5c6faee8d3f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Jenkins, Henry. “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.” Thorburn and Jenkins 281-312.

Johnson, Brian D. “Someone Call Karl Marx: The means of production is in the hands of masses and a revolution is under way.” Maclean’s. 118.51 (2005): 56-60.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.

McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Thorburn, David, and Henry Jenkins. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge: MIT UP, 2003.

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USB Flash Drive as Interface

Sunday, May 7th, 2006

This is a portion of my seminar paper (not quite done).
–Will

“I open the cupboard in my den and take out my PowerPod, the white lead that I use to connect the iPod with the G4. The connection is made, and the iPod begins uploading the new additions to the library, a further 154 songs. A few minutes later the exercise is completed, and my iPod is full–prone but proud. The iPod lies on the desk in front of me, looking a little like a speaker box. It is white, oblong, ergonomic, with perfectly rounded corners and a pale blue two-inch LCD window that lights up superbrightly for exactly two seconds when I touch one of its buttons (I have told it to do this and it does what it’s told).”
—Dylan Jones, iPod, Therefore I am

“Executive Attaché is a multi function USB 2.0 flash drive designed with the business executive in mind. Elegant styling of a fine writing instrument wrapped around state-of-the-art USB flash drive technology makes Executive Attaché the perfect device for the technology minded executive. Working on a presentation and need to take it with you? Simply copy the file onto Executive Attaché, put it in your pocket or briefcase and go. To access your data, simply plug Executive Attaché into virtually any PC or MAC — without the need for bulky cables or adapters. Access your files. Anytime. Anywhere.”
—From the PNY Technologies web site

The interface according to Lev Manovich, from his chapter “The Interface” in The Language of New Media, is a sphere that exists between humanity, computer, and culture. He argues that “we are no longer interfacing to a computer but to a culture encoded in digital form” (70). This argument is contrary to the previous notion of interface as a means of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): where the computer was considered to be a tool for use instead of a “means to store, distribute, and access all media”: a “universal media machine” (69).

Manovich’s cultural interface theory pays particular attention to the graphic user interface, pointing to its role as text, cinema, and human-computer mediator (71). But Manovich’s focus on the narrative of the screen causes him to miss an opportunity to dive into the narrative of the device: What is the physical design of the computer and its various peripheries trying to communicate to the user? How does a user interact with a computer-based device and how does this relationship differ from the user’s relationship with the graphic user interface?

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) Flash Memory Drive—also known as a Flash drive, thumb drive, or key drive—is a device that allows a user to store, transport, and transfer files from one computer to the next. The USB Flash drive is a member of a genre of personal media devices. Other examples include the Apple iPod, the Sony Walkman, the cellular phone, the floppy disk, even the humble notepad and pen. Although the USB Flash drive and other personal media devices occupies physical space rather than cyberspace, the device still contains an understandable user interface and can be analyzed from an interface design perspective in mind—despite the current trend to think of the user interface being solely in the domain of the graphical user interface.

Lev Manovich would most likely categorize personal media devices as being outside the boundaries of interface theory and more inside the boundaries of consumer theory or some other brand of cultural theory outside of the interface. He is not alone in his focus of the interface as an internal, abstract mechanism rather than an external, physical one. Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture, introduces his thesis by first defining all interfaces as “software” (4). In his discussion of the interface as The Desktop, Windows, Links, Texts, and Agents, he mentions that computer hardware only as it inhibits the capabilities of the graphic user interface:

“Because the computer was by definition so malleable, capable of shape-shifting from one visual metaphor to another, it was theoretically possible for the interface to look like practically anything: a house, a factory, a movie, a diary. But the limitations of seventies technology—minuscule storage devices, sluggish microprocessors, grainy monitors—meant that flights of fancy would quickly bump up against the ceiling of hardware shortcomings.” (45)

Manovich’s and Johnson’s attention is centered on the presentation and semiotics of the internal cyberspace: the aesthetics of web design, the textual space afforded by the screen, and the dynamics of computer cinema. They feel that this arena is both the primary level of user interaction with the machine, but also, as Manovich puts it, liberates media from traditional physical storage into the realm of access, navigation, and manipulation (73). This belief that physical storage is no longer a concern of media theory is the cornerstone of Manovich’s flight away from HCI principles and Johnson’s belief that hardware provides only limitations to interface design.

A disregard for hardware and storage technology is understandable. For years, the graphic user interface has been the mechanism that we use to compare computers to all other forms of media, particularly print media, as Johanna Drucker mentions in “Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation”:

“A language of usability, rather than compositional form, has appeared in parallel with the growth of graphical user interfaces and the realization that their design principles give the lie to the static nature of print artifacts. Books and graphics, after all, are interfaces through which readers interact with a document to produce a text.” (Drucker, 25)

The computer screen presents text and imagery in new ways and allows user manipulation and dynamic representation of media artifacts; it is, as the saying goes, “where the action is.” When we discuss how the computer is forcing us to examine how we write and how we think about text, we focus in on word processors and how the word processor interface aids us, annoys us, or frightens us as we type. Less focus is paid on the physical keys on the keyboard and the buttons of the mouse as is the text that is appearing on the screen. For example, in his essay “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” Matthew Fuller chronicles the effects of Microsoft Word on how text is created. He mentions the keyboard and the mouse only twice, in passing, focusing the rest of his time writing about the graphic user interface and how it affects the writer:

“Word’s graphic user interface is not simply one unremitting grey avalanche. The essential dilemma of a computer display is that ‘at every screen are two powerful information-processing capabilities, human and computer.’” (151)

While this reaction to the graphic user interface as being the “official” interface of the computer is a natural consequence of the immediacy of the screen, the USB Flash drive and other personal media devices clearly do have an interface. But that interface is, again, physical: taking the drive out of your pocket, taking off the protective cover, and inserting the drive into the computer. Only after that sequence of very real events can the user successfully interact with the Flash drive as part of her computer’s graphic user interface (and even then she is pressing on keys and moving the mouse about the table).

Personal media devices such as the Flash drive, however, either contain a screen or are required to be inputted into a computer that will have a screen; the graphic user interface reasserts its primacy and dominance over electronic data manipulation. Devices, keyboards, and control pads cannot allow the user to directly manipulate data in any meaningful or understandable way; there has to be a translator or mediator to convert the language of the machine into the language of the user (Johnson, 4). From there, the user may enter into a separate realm she is free to create her information through the computer, translating that creation into an iconic file, and at last creating the electronic bits and bytes that physically hold that file.

Once we are passed the Real effort of physical interaction, we are lead to the Symbolic effort of the graphic user, finally creating the Imagined cyberspace where the mental processes of the user and the electronic processes of the computer communicate in some metaphysical space inside the user’s mind—only to go pack through the chain in reverse to create the data. So while the interface does include more than the graphic user interface, that portion of the interface is essential. Even the Flash drive, one of the few personal media devices that does not contain any sort of screen of its own (yet) still has an LED light to signal when the memory chip is being written to and when it is being read. We cannot get away from screens: they are everywhere.

Works Consulted

Drucker, Johanna. “Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation.”
“Executive Attache.” PNY Technologies. 2005. PNY Technologies. 1 June 2005.
Fuller, Matthew. “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter.” Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn: Automedia. 2003.
Guillory, James. “The Memo and Modernity.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 108-132.
Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: Harper, 1997.
Jones, Dylan. iPod, Therefore I am. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive.” TEXT Technology 2 (2004): 91-125.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2001.

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Time and Space on the Net and in the Fantastic

Sunday, May 7th, 2006

To a reader of the 21st century, there is an obvious tone of anticipation for innovative technologies present in the text of The Invention of Morel, although it would have possibly been overlooked (or not viewed as such) by Adolfo Bioy Casares’s contemporaries. They would have noticed the explicit discourse related to existing technologies (such as the radio, which for the narrator is a device with the purpose of satisfying the aural sense), but an underlying, implicit technological structure is present as well. In the widely disseminated treatise, “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush made a call for continuing developments in the world of technological innovations. Looking back on this work, today’s reader can interpret Bush’s words with more significance than the reader of 1945 likely did, assigning more value to the thoughts he presented because we see the physical manifestations of what were-at the time-only visions of his imagination. These two contemporaries, although unknown to each other, created works that nearly predicted some of the technologies that are available today. What they wrote came true, in a sense.

Is employing a short novel from 1940 as a comparison to electronic activity of the early 21st century asking too much of the reader? I say no. Adolfo Bioy Casares included so many technological aspects in his work that he must have been writing in anticipation of inventions to come. The realm of the fantastic inserts improbable events into a seemingly normal world, so which shall we consider the invention? Is it an improbability or is it a part of the normal world?

The 21st century computer user has experienced a transformation of schemata to adapt to the new concepts of space and time present in the recently available technologies. Beginning with avant-guard video experiments as far back as the late 1960s and the early 1970s, artists have found new ways to treat space and time by manipulating what is viewed on a screen. One achievement of such experiments is the demonstration that technology allows its users to be “everywhere while really being nowhere” (Kathy Rae Huffman 203). Those new uses of the screen (now apart from standard movie and television viewing) opened up consumers for the eventual shift to the computer monitor.

The fantastic, as a genre, created similar apertures for its readers. Along with other categories of literature-such as science fiction-there is a distinguishable acceptance of the “other,” in this case another world in which temporal and spatial realities function in unanticipated manners.

Although it would perhaps be worthwhile to examine the fugitive as if he were a participant of virtual reality (VR) technologies (including the headset, gloves and other accompanying hardware and software), I have chosen to study him as simply a user of a virtual environment (VE). As Marie-Laure Ryan states in her “Immersion and Interactivity,” very few of us in society have actually donned the gear to experience the technologies of VR. Many more of us have participated in what is called a VE. This virtual environment is created by all users of the Net, a society that includes those who are the hermits of the Net as well as the more sociable members. I prefer this perspective because it is more understood, more inclusive, and more available to the average computer user.

The island of Morel and the fugitive is a simulacra of a VE and vice versa. Like a virtual society, the fugitive (representing the computer user) does not see the mechanics behind the machine is that is creating his world. It is shut away, typically not viewed by a normal user. The fugitive experiences a bit of rage towards this machine and the projections, like modern day computer rage. His rage does not stem, however from a malfunctioning machine, but rather from one that works all too well. He describes his “temptations” to destroy the machines because he knows that for him, “they could become an obsession” (Bioy Casares 67). Perhaps part of his rage stems from the inability to understand the mechanics of how it works: he states “I knew at once that I was unable to understand the machines” (Bioy Casares 77). He only sees what it produces in his “real” world, like a user, the fugitive does not see the real, physical bodies of the other participants within the space he is occupying, they were there in that space during a different time interval. What he views are the disembodiments of the people with whom he wishes to interact.

The fugitive attempts to open closed and locked doors: why shouldn’t he? Following his normal ideas of what is real, this should be possible, but in his repeating, recorded world, he is unable to change such details. As Craig D. Murray discovered in his study, people do bring real-world understanding to a virtual environment. Also, Kathy Rae Huffman indicates the importance of the depth within the electronic framework, just as Bioy Casares stressed that the characters of Morel’s projection are 3D, not just 2D like a film or a painting. The disembodied representations of a figure (in this case the vacation-goers) must be believable to the fugitive so that they will in turn be believable to the reader. Another consideration presented by Murray is the presence of people in a virtual environment. Their presence is sought out by computer users as an important quality for creating a sense of space. Without people, the space seems too empty or unrealistic. When the vacation-goers joined Morel on the island, he again felt the fear he had before arriving to the island. He was scared of being re-captured. There is a continuum established between the real and virtual worlds for the fugitive, so what was probable in the real world is also ascribed to the island. This occurs with participants in virtual environments as well.

In his “Trans Terra Form: Liquid Architectures and the Loss of Inscription,” Marcos Novak acknowledges that our current “understanding of territory is undergoing rapid and fundamental changes,” noting that space is no longer as concrete as one previously thought. There are now non-spaces and non-places out there. You can go to these places, but not physically. You can travel through cyberspace and visit sites all over the world, but where have you really gone? The current answer to this question tends to be nowhere and everywhere. Where did the fugitive end up after he recorded his image into the projection? He would have died as a result of the machine “recording” his life away, but he would continue to be there for eternity. Where does that leave him? On the island or nowhere?

Works Consulted

Bioy Casares, Adolfo. The Invention of Morel and Other Stories. Ruth L.C. Simms, trans. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Timothy Druckrey, ed. New York: Aperture, 1996.

Huffman, Kathy Rae. “Video, Networks, and Architecture: Some Physical Realities of Electronic Space.” Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Timothy Druckrey, ed. New York: Aperture, 1996.

Mitchell, William J. City of Bits. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996.

Craig D. Murray, et al. “Navigation, Wayfinding and Place Experience within a Virtual City.” Presence 9.5, 2000.

Novak, Marcos. “Trans Terra Form: Liquid Architectures and the Loss of Inscription.” http://www.krcf.org/krcfhome/PRINT/nonlocated/nlonline/nonMarcos.html

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Richard Howard, trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer

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Inscription and McCloud

Friday, May 5th, 2006

Well, after enjoying the McCloud lecture I decided to scrap my original response paper and begin anew. In his discussion of print comics vs. web comics, form vs. content, and successful/durable mutations, it was the concept of the “spatial disconnect” that intrigued me. I found it especially fascinating when McCloud sort of pooh-poohed the convergence narrative – the idea that all media are slowly merging into an amalgamation of form/content to be played on one device – and suggested an alternative trend. He implied that since media were converging so that they can be played on one device (the computer), rather than having form and content become similar, McCloud stated that each type of media will instead differentiate themselves from one another. In other words, different media will evolve into their own unique media “species” so to speak. Returning to the study of inscription and materiality, it would seem prudent to relate the act of inscription to McCloud’s vision of media evolution. In McCloud’s case, and the case of this short response, the focus will be specifically on the graphic novel.

Considering how much time we have spent on storage and memory, I figured a good place to start would be McCloud’s concept of the “spatial disconnect” and how a comic can manipulate time. We talked in class about the spatialization of the alphabet in new media: how letters themselves become images on a monochrome color background. McCloud talked about the spatialization of time in the graphic novel: where a sequence of images and text can (in the new media format) now represent a single temporal moment. He showed how several panels can now be used to represent what is going on at one time, as opposed to older classical forms when the movement from one panel to the next signified a linear temporal progression. It dawned on me that we can look to the hard drive as a place of inscription to study not only what makes McCloud’s vision possible, but also how the inscription technology influences the form of the digitized graphic novel. In Matt’s article about the hard drive, we received a very in depth analysis of the workings of the hard drive. So the question becomes: is there anything in the inscription patterns of the hard drive that relates to McCloud’s vision about the spatialization of time? The hard drive inscribes bits in an electromagnetic pattern on the disks (platters) in the device. The data is stored in fragmented clusters that are arrayed in different spatial patterns of organization on the platter. These inscriptions, or stored electromagnetic clusters, are then recovered by the Read/Write head that detects the appropriate electromagnetic markers on different places on the platter. Therefore, on the computer (the chosen device for new media), memory depends on the recovery of a set of spatially arrayed inscriptions. These inscriptions are culled together by the hard drive and then presented at the same time before the user. Spatial arrangement is essential to the inscription act in a modern computer. We can link this spatial process of data storage and inscription with McCloud’s discussion of spatiality and the digital graphic novel.

With the computer, time also becomes dependent on spatial organization. Each inscription is recovered and presented in a precise temporal organization. Remember that McCloud made explicit the spatial potential of the graphic novel in a digital medium as it relates to time. However, so far, all I have done is contribute to the convergence narrative I wanted to avoid. All data is recovered from a hard drive in this same spatially specific way. So what makes the graphic novel unique? What makes the inscription process specific to the graphic novel compared to the other mediums of text, film, and the digital art we looked at for last class? To proceed from these questions, we move from one of Matt’s essays to another. Specifically, I am thinking of his discussion on the “differences between texts and images [that] have proven all but irreconcilable” (138). At a superficial level, it seems obvious to note that the graphical novel relies on images, albeit images with text embedded, and not just text. Yet that seemingly obvious observation becomes important when considering the differences in the inscription processes of text and image. It is a difference that becomes apparent when working at a slower bandwidth (which both Matt and McCloud have noted). The difference originates from the huge disparity in storage space needed for an image compared to a text. Since the image requires much more space, I think we can safely say that more emphasis is being placed on the spatial configurations in its inscription. The differences in inscription processes parallel the differences in media. More required storage space means more emphasis on the recovery of spatially arranged electromagnetic clusters on the platter. And more emphasis on spatial arrangements translates into the medium’s unique manipulation of the space-time relationship (think of McCloud’s example of a sequence of panels simultaneously representing one moment). Of course this does make the rather simplistic equation of more size with more emphasis on spatiality, and once we examine film files our discussion becomes problematic.

To avoid the simplistic association of size with spatiality, we must further examine the processes of the hard drive. It seems to me that it is not only the inscription process itself that is important, but it also would behoove us to study the process of retrieval of inscriptions. McCloud constantly referred to the idea of the sequence and how important that is to the field of the graphic novel. Here lies a crucial difference in memory processes between image and film: film is recalled from memory platters as one large file; the comic “strip” is made of several images recalled as a sequence of images loading one after another. The sequence that McCloud talked about is built right into the inscription process itself! To further explain this difference just think about how an mpeg file loads on your computer, and think about how websites with images load. The mpeg may take a while, but once it is loaded from memory it represents a whole file that can be played from front to back. On the other hand, the website with images will load one or two images at a time proceeding down the screen until the page is completely loaded. There is an inherent sequence to the actual expression of those images on the screen, whereas the mpeg file appears all at once, completely loaded. This represents just the beginning of a larger discourse about digital film and inscription, but I think we can see the beginnings of an important exchange between media particularities and inscription.

At first, we discussed the physiological relationship of inscription: how the body was influenced by inscription and, conversely, how the body influences the device which performs the inscription. What I mean to suggest is that the inscription processes in the computer also affect the types of media that are used by the computer. Thus, when a particular form (such as the graphic novel) is used on the computer, it will evolve into its own “style” because of its relation to inscription processes.

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Inscribed in Ether: New Media Studies Excavates Mysteries of Communication

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

“…[M]agic is not lost, as it was in the age of enlightened fathers, when the Elf King’s whispering voice became rustling leaves” (Kittler, Discourse 219).

“A trick applied with intelligence can make visual that which is supernatural, invented, or unreal,” Melies quoted by Kittler (GFT 154)

The act of inscription, the production of any part of the human record, is simultaneously a radical individual and communal assertion of a range (or syntagum) of meanings for inscriber and audience in a given paradigm of communication. Leaving one’s mark, either in stone, in ink, in flesh, or in spirit is no easy task.
The “trick” of Melies is the application of the human will and imagination to use embodied (voice, dance for example) and disembodied (chisel, pen, or HTML, for example) technologies to make “visual” in the mind’s eye or on the page or in the ear the producer’s point of view. The structure and function of communication has been continuously in a state of change as people have learned to manipulate, contain, transmit, and store messages intended to close the interpretive gap (defined emotionally, economical, politically, spiritually) between producer(s) and consumer(s).
Responding (in the short-term) to the work of Bruno Latour, Michael John Gorman, Jeffrey Sconce, Robert Brain, Len Manovich, and Jerome McGann (in a March 28 class session) has sparked efforts of mine to respond (in the long-term) more completely to the issues they raise for this moment of emergence for the digital humanities scholar.
McGann models the predicament of the late-twentieth century scholar in what might be read as a kind of stand-up bit of scholarly vaudeville, The Textual Condition. With Charlie Chaplin-like brevity and decisive gesture, McGann models in miniature a larger puzzle: how does the modern scholar accumulate truthful expression given the constraints of the chosen medium in a larger cycle of accumulation of intellectual (and other types) capital. John Michael Gorman’s “immutable mobile” ponders a similar rhythm of “call and response” between producer and work in a given culture of knowledge production. Both vignettes show the gaps in the communication circuit of print communication specifically and the role of the textual scholar to refine the interpretation of scholars whose primary methods and objectives were not those of an editor. The Latourian loop (220, Figure 6.1), the Cybernetic feedback loop (Weiner, N. 84), and the revisions of the textual scholar are linear and circular, confounding students today much like ether (long described as a kind of vortex) confounded scientists of an earlier age.
Sconce, Brain, and Manovich share thematic challenges, constraints, difficulties (a matrix of similarity and difference) among them in their inter-connected disciplines as McGann and Latour share as textual scholars. The puzzles of form faced by the textual scholar become magnified in the mind’s eye of cultural analysts of a different tribe such as Sconce, Brain, and Manovich. The cycle of revisions of both the producer and the consumer of McGann’s conference summary and Latour’s explication of the role (or lack of a role) of pre-printed tools in the observation of Mars’ transept in 17th century Europe become meditations on what “noise” lives in the knowledge production channel when viewed through the lens of mechanized writing tools to record research data (Sconce), and the structure of databases used to interpret and disseminate later generations of those same tools (Manovich). While facing similar barriers to the use and interpretation of communicative forms with simultaneously ether-like linearity and circularity, these two sets of scholars differ in the scope of the application of their ideas when the center of calculation moves closer and closer to the disembodied and the scale of the more modern media explodes the theater of action and meaning from being a set of a few scholars to the means of macro-level, group, mass communication assisted by database-driven communication to whole populations.
Communication has always been associated with the “other worldly.” The higher truths of a society have come from oracles and prophets, from interpreters of dreams. The arts and sciences’ progress in the production of means to automate this essential element of human expression, to externalize it, allows for a business model of Pygmalion proportions. Narcissus’ mirror takes not the form of a shallow pool of water as ancient mirrors were just that, but in the form of telegraphs that pound out, letter out, messages with ghosts or wireless Internet connections that reach out into space with their signal to give the illusion and the reality that your interlocutor thousands of miles and many time zones away sits beside you.
Students of human expression have marveled at that space between, the gap, in which mysteriously meaning is transfered. They stand with their noses pressed to the glass, peering in at the theatrical employment and deployment of one Rube Goldberg after the next. In conversation, on the page, or through the channels of mass communication the energy or effort expended to act becomes the input, and interpretable performance the output. No matter in which discipline, the construction of meaning that holds an audience’s attention is a process that both producers and consumers find mysterious in some manner. The sciences have intellectual control over the physics, the arts control the message, and the spiritual (or the lack of spiritual–or other systems of value and ethics) influences the interpretation—but then each simultaneously has and lacks a piece of the truth that lies elsewhere. A discourse of ether spans the work of ancient philosophers to contemporary scholarly efforts to forward knowledge production using the best of what has gone before, leaving in the ethereal space between trace elements in the human record.
Ether has been to the history and philosophy of science what meta data has been to the information professional: a world between, a portal into the circularity of self-referential systems and the linearity of mass communication via radio, television, and the Internet. Ether holds a unique position in the history of the production of the human record and the human understanding of itself and the cosmos. By what method and with which tools is the Book of Life written, is any meaning inscribed? Has it happened or is it happening? For divine blessing to be written on one’s heart, how does that work? Is the Book of Life (or an analgous source of the highest level of knowledge) written on vellum or with UTF-8? (Is it written at all?) What wonder is a world that contains these multiplicites simultaneously? For the language arts scholar (any student of literary production, reception, interpretation, and application) the multiplicities (the internal and external and the vortex’ linear and circular aspects) of ether reveal new opportunities for collaborative, synthetic, knowledge production.
Ether has defied definition for thousands of years. Is ether in us or in the stars–or both? Like the debate over the wave versus particle theory of light, a definition of ether has challenged understandings of heat, motion, gravity, form, time and space. Indeed, ether could simply be seen as the metaphor invoked to permit those in communication to visualize in a personal way the limits of their knowledge. Yet the fuzziness of ether is not simply a tool to mythologize human ignorance (set completely aside any possibility of the Divine into the landscape). Human efforts at stabilizing expression of the glue of the universe leaves scholars today, who face an increasingly modular, fluid, digital world, to set a new course through the wilds of communication theory and practice. If ether is fairy dust and one does not believe in fairies, substantive interpretive gaps exist. If ether is both analog and digital, how does a generation in the midst of a paradigm shift in literary production (soap operas began on radio, thrived on TV, and emerge today in cell phones; poems are Perl scripts that self-destruct after a single reading) accept a synthesis of forms while material demands of one’s earning potential, the political and economic demands of segmented distribution, and the compartmentalization of knowledge production disciplines (secular and non-secular, artistic and academic, etc., etc.) “makes eyes” at only the mastery and exploitation of the digital? Enter, stage left, the digital humanities scholar: the magic Kittler mentions then indeed is not lost, in fact it is with us still.

Works Consulted

Aspden, Harold. Modern Aether Science. Southampton, England: Sabberton Publications, 1972.
Baker, Nicholoson. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. New York: Random House, 2001.
Bernstein, Charles ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bright, Charles. The Story of the Atlantic Cable. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1903.
Cantor, G.N. And M.J.S. Hodge eds. Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981
Clarke, Bruce and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds. From Energy to Information: Representation in Science Technology, Art, and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Daston, Lorraine, ed.. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Deutsch, Sid. Return of the Ether: When Theory and Reality Collide. Mendham, NJ: SciTEch Publishing, 1999.
Erlmann, Veit, ed. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Fenster, Julie M. Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001.
Fiske, John. The Unseen World and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1876.
Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship. Sanford: Standford University Press, 2003
Forster, Eckart. Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus postumum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Golding, John. Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Gorman, John Michael. “The Elusive Origins of the Immutable Mobile”: http://www.stanford.edu/~mgorman/immutablemobile.htm
Hakken, David. The Knowledge Landscapes of Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
–. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Kfrafft, Carl Fredrick. Glimpses of the Unseen World. San Diego, CA: The Borderland Sciences Research Associates, 1956 [1937].
Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Lodge, Oliver Sir. The Ether of Space. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909.
–. Ether and Reality: A Series of Discourses on the Many Functions of the Ether or Space. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Palmer, Helen, ed. Inner Knowing. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998.
Pearce, Joseph Chilton. The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2002.
Proctor, Richard A. The Poetry of Astronomy: A Series of Familiar Essays o nthe Heavenly Bodies, Regarded Less in their Strictly Scientific Aspect than as Suggesting Thoughts Respecting Infinities of Time and Space, of Variety, of Vitality, and of Development. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1880(?).
Schaffner, Kenneth F. Selected Readings in Physics: Nineteenth-Century Aether Theories. New York, Pergamon Press, 1972.
Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000.
Serafini, Anthony. Legends in Their Own Time: A Century of American Physical Scientists. New York: Plenum Press, 1993.
Steiner, Rudolph. Cosmic Memory. Karl E. Zimmer, translater. New York: Rudolph Steiner Publications, 1971.
Story, A. T. The Story of Wireless Telegraphy. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904.
Tuchman, Maurice and Judi Freeman compl. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. New York: Abbeville Press, 1986.
Whittaker, Edmond. History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity: Volume I Classical Theories. New York: Harper Brothers, 1961 [1910].
Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Avon Books, 1950.
Wiener, Philip W., ed. Readings in the Philosophy of Science: Introduction to the Foundations and Cultural Aspects of the Sciences. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.
Wilber, Ken, Carlo McCormick, and Alex Grey. Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1990.
Wildberg, Christian. John Philoponus’ Criticism of Aristotle’s Theory of Aether. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988.
Williams, Christopher, ed. Adrift in the Ether: The Current State of the British Underground. Glasgow: Borderline Publications, 1997.

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“Data Made Flesh”? Computer Codes and Human Language

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

In a 1998 interview conducted by IEEE Software shortly after she published “Close to the Machine,” Ellen Ullman comments:

We have always wanted to rationalize the process of writing software, to have it share the great advances in process engineering that have taken place in manufacturing. We like to talk about software as if it were hardware: we call it a “build”; we talk about “components” and “assemblies.” But there is a real heart of chaos in all this. Human beings just do not think and operate like machines, and the ways of human knowledge and understanding do not translate easily or quickly into computer code. That’s why most programmers are so wired: there’s something obsessional about having to translate the rush of thought into line-by-line statements” (Of Machines, Methods, and Madness, IEEE Software, May/June 1998)

I am inclined to agree with Ullman that there is a fundamental (and perhaps irreconcilable) difference between how machines and humans think. But the question remains: if there is such a profound difference between human and machine, why do we continue to conceptualize the computer in human terms?

In his chapter entitled “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” Matthew Fuller argues that: “To be effective, human-machine integration required that people and machines be comprehended in similar terms so that human-machine systems could be engineered to maximize performance of both kinds of components” (Fuller 148). How were these similarities established? At the most basic level of computer language, the difference is most transparent, for clearly, we do not think in ones and zeros. Where do the similarities with humans and human language begin? Code seems to resemble natural language, but not in a directly translatable correspondence.

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler writes: “In the founding days of media technology…everything centered on links between flesh and machine” (Kittler 74). Thus the first technologies were reconstructions of the body: the phonograph as an ear, the camera as an eye, the typewriter as a hand (Kittler 74). Can we add computer as brain or body? What do the chosen metaphors used to describe computers tell us about how we define what it means to be “human”? We speak of viruses and bugs, as if these were actual living threats to the body of the computer, not the results of human error or malevolence. And, even when we are fully aware that the language used to describe computers are imperfect metaphors, we have all felt like Jerome McGann at times: “I wish my machine were alive. I would like to kill it” (McGann 92).

I, for one, don’t usually think exclusively in if/then clauses except as part of a larger thought process. There are always other, sometimes unnamable, factors that play into any decision or action. By way of example (which I realize may seem silly, but I think works in this case), the following reflects my daily thought process while (trying to) train my puppy:

If my dog comes when I call him, then I will give him a treat.
If my dog does not come when I call him, then I will not give him a treat.
If my dog runs in the opposite direction when I call him, then I will be angry and I will not give him a treat and I will be frustrated that I wasted money on a puppy training class that did not achieve anything.
If I beat my dog, then I will be charged with animal abuse.

Even though this line of thinking is comprised entirely of if/then statements, there are clearly additional forces at work. Emotional: perhaps I was already frustrated or angry before I began the training session. Are emotions the cause or the effect in this case? Financial: regrets over money ill-spent tie into larger concerns that every graduate student deals with—how to pay for food, rent, etc. Social control: there are limits imposed on what we can and cannot do, although I should make it clear that I do NOT actually beat my dog.

Perhaps it is simply that programming languages serve a purely functional purpose, whereas human language can be used in many different ways, both pragmatic and otherwise. Or perhaps it is that computer code only refers to itself, while human language can refer to any number of physical, abstract, and/or nonsensical things and ideas. Human language exists within a social context, a constantly changing web of associations, referents, and nuances. It is fraught with ambiguity and subject to varying degrees of misunderstanding, misperception, and bias. I don’t as yet know how to answer all these questions, but in raising them, I hope to eventually get at the real issue I plan to address in my final paper: how have our understanding of language and “meaning” changed in an information-based computerized culture”?

Works Cited:
Fuller,Matthew. “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter” Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software.. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stabford, Stanford UP, 1999.
McGahn, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. (88-98)
Ullman, Ellen (interview). “Of Machines, Methods, and Madness.” IEEE Software, May/June 1998.

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Networks’ Products and Waste

Saturday, April 15th, 2006

Hello All,
This response paper deals with some of the issues I am grappling with for my paper. I’m not sure if it makes sense. There are definitely some theoretica and practicall issues to work out, but I figured what the hell.

There seems to have been a lot written about how technology and networks have been utilized within social, political, industrial movements to the extent that such formations are reshaping the structure of society itself. Some examples of this have been economic globalization whereby a product is created through multiple sites of production across the globe. There have been social movements like disparate groups protesting against the WTO in Seattle that utilized the internet and cell phone technology to not only plan the protests but also arrange the movements of protesters throughout the city. There is of course also the specter of terrorist networks whose use of technology and network organization to produce violence and fear is a germane topic in this day and age. All of these examples and numerous studies dealing with them are centered around what is intentionally produced by these networks and technologies. In other words there is a clear and conscious intentionality between the media, the subject network and the object produced or made transparent through that network. This is in fact one of the powers of the network and technology; it brings together far ranging elements to create a singular but often complex object. However, this is not all that such networks and such technologies produce.
What I want to suggest is something seemingly obvious. Media and the network formations they give rise to, always produce something in excess of their intended object. Language of course operates in the same fashion. Just as in language, what is in excess of the intended object is also essential to it. However, despite this importance the excess is often waste or even pollution. If the age of mechanical production produced and still produces by-products that are dangerous and unhealthy then the same may be true of the so-called information age. In a consumer culture this waste operates as the foundation from which value is created and abstracted. Now waste and pollution are themselves value laden terms and today’s waste is tomorrow’s gold mine. However, in order to affect this transformation from waste to gold, media must be applied to it such as technology and network formations. This process of application is what creates value. From this then it can be concluded that the production of networks operates on multiple valences producing both intended objects and waste. The waste then may become raw material for production as those same networks take it up as the object of its intention. Part of the efficiency of networks is that they produce both the object and the raw material for further production.
The examples mentioned in the first paragraph deal with human beings connected to one another through technology. This means organizing human beings into a singular force. People become reduced to a singular mass. Plurality is sacrificed for singularity. Memento is an example that might help illustrate this process. The narrator knows that there are numerous selves the poles of which he establishes as the potato chip eater and the enlightened one. All of these selves are organized for a singular purpose, namely revenge. All of the selves are engaged only in the moment. There is no transcendant consciousness. What is learned by each self is inscribed, and the inscriptions draw the selves together toward that singular purpose. The experience of the past moments are forgotten even though the inscription of those experiences are what drives singular pursuit of revenge. The selves of the networked protests, industrial production, or terrorists organizations operate in a similar fashion where multiplicity is drawn into a singularity.
It may seem like I am talking about two separate issues but I’ll try to draw them together now. To recap; there are two sets of tensions which I have been dealing with in relation to media, technology, and networks namely, multiplicity/singularity and product/waste. To an extant these tensions correspond to one another. Singularity is matched with product, and multiplicity is matched with waste. The arrow of correspondence works in both directions. A singularity allows the intentional production of a coherent object, but it also true that through creating a coherent object that the singularity comes into being. What is left over or perhaps erased like Earl’s memory in Memento is the multiplicity of selves. The waste is in the traces of the former selves that have not yet been recycled back into the network. The second date on the bell loses meaning. The absence of the watch has no history. These traces have are left overs, rendered meaningless while Earl sits in the back of the car. They have yet to be recycled into the clear objective of revenge. However, just as these traces of the multiple selves become by-products of the act of revenge they will also instigate the beginning of the process over again countless times as the movie intimates.
Memento offers a somewhat clear metaphor for the process I am trying to describe here. What is important is that value is only located in the singularity while the multiplicity is only the lack that must be turned into something valuable. In his essay entitled “The End of Temporality” Frederic Jameson says that, in the wake of existentialism, contemporary society is not dealing with death and finite existence but rather the spectacle of an “immense multitude of others” (709). Perhaps it has been media rather than existentialism that has revealed or perhaps created this spectacle, but the prioritization of media over philosophy is not my point here. What does seem important is the way in which this immense multitude is not only revealed but also devalued as both the raw material and waste products of networks and media. Now I would not make the statement that this is the inherent tendency of all modern media and network society, but it is important that the intended object of production whether it be social change or a laptop computer is not all that is produced. Where media also asserts its influence is in the excess of production, the objects that are either rendered secondary to the intended object or are the waste resulting from the production of those objects. It is the contradiction of some network formations that in the same instance of celebrating the disparate elements that form the network, those same elements are devalued so the singular object can rise in status and take priority.
I would like to conclude this torturous trip with one last example. Approximately a year ago, there was a push to allow cell phone use in airplanes. On one side telecommunication companies and business travel associations vocally supported the proposal for obvious reasons. On the other side, consumers and the Flight Attendant Union among others lined up against it. A final decision has not been reached as numerous delays for safety and marketing studies have been undertaken. One of the interesting aspects of this controversy is the repetition of an identical narrative among people opposing the plan. Somewhat predictably, people recount the fear of sitting in a middle a seat with a person on a cell phone on each side of them. One person is talking about unseemly details of their health and/or sex life and the other person is going on and on about mundane business affairs. The person in the middle is isolated, bombarded with countless other voices. Their presence is not acknowledged. Not only are they outside any given network they are made to experience that outside painfully through the half conversations going on everywhere around them. The narrative usually ends in a case of what Flight Attendants are starting to call “air rage”. The half conversations experienced by this person are a different kind of data flow than for the person talking on the cell phone even though it is made of the same material. It is both produced and rendered valuable only through the cell phone or more accurately the cell phones networked together. When John Paul Sartre had one of his characters in the play No Exit proclaim “Hell is other people!” he was not thinking of airplanes and cell phones, but this is exactly what the narrative of the person in the middle seat seems to be saying. The multitude of others is articulated and structured as so much invasive waste. This multitude is the waste of data flows occurring through networks. The cell phone even while connecting one person to another, isolates that person from many more. As well as whatever is being produced through that phone call, the by product is always the half conversation experienced frustratingly by others. Avital Ronell claims that the telephone always asks a question that must be answered. It creates an intentionality toward an object that cannot be ignored. If this was true before the ubiquity of cell phones, then the mobilization of the question that must be answered in every space and time only intensifies it. But the intended object is not the only one produced. The half conversations overheard in restaurants, subways, as well as airplanes are experienced as a devalued multitude of others that exist beyond the network and media which turn make sense of it by driving towards the singularity of an intended object.
I have been using the terms media, networks, and technology somewhat interchangeably. This is not because all of these ideas are equivalent but rather it is difficult to determine where one begins and another ends. It is also difficult if not impossible to establish a chain or sequence of determination between these elements. However, any real investigation would have to be designate historical context to use these terms intelligibly. Until then, their conflation only betrays a theoretical weakness.

3ae3

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Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Beyond Digital Animation: YouTube.com and Google
Video as Ways of Understanding Computer Media’s Influence on Film

“Media determine our situation.”
— Friedrich A. Kittler

As Manovich describes in his chapter “What is Cinema?”, “the challenge that computer media pose to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative” (293). Manovich focuses on the fact that computer media introduces animation and graphics into what had been a medium reserved for live-action actors. In today’s cinema, as Manovich points out, computer animation can “generate photorealistic scenes” making it impossible to distinguish “the real” from animation (295). As Manovich suggests, this creates a problem for those who define film as a recording of reality, such as Andrey Tarkovsky. Early film suggests that cinema’s history is rooted in the aforementioned purpose of capturing the real: a present-day viewer may be perplexed by the filming of seemingly everyday activities without any apparent narrative in “actualities,” the earliest type of film. In actualities, film exists to document and capture time, to record the real. In Jonathan Auerbach’s “Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema,” he remarks that the movement from actualities to early chase films had to do not only with making experiences “repeatable” through recording and production but also with a desire to have film’s subject begin to mimic the mechanics of its production:

the intimate relation between cinematic representation and repetition … helps us to situate the invention of film alongside other nineteenth-century cultural practices such as photography and phonography, all dedicated to ‘making experience repeatable,’ to use Daniel Boorstin’s memorable phrase. In its on-screen repetition of the biomechanics of running, then, the chase serves as a kind of metacommentary dramatizing how the moving picture machine works. (803)

So while early film certainly began as a way of recording the real and capturing time, it also provided a way to dramatize the medium itself. As technology has improved, film has also become a way to demonstrate technical proficiency. Cross-cutting may have been the technology that announced the advent of modern film as narrative, but, with regard to technique, cross-cutting is far from the apex of technological advancement in cinema. Filmmakers have continued to attempt to capture the most difficult of reproducible phenomena while constructing stories. Realistically rendering an explosion or thunderstorm is as much an opportunity to show what the medium is capable of doing as it is an opportunity to demonstrate the technical skills of the filmmaker. In cinema, we can observe a continued trend to both reveal reality and to use the very processes by which the medium of film is constructed – splicing, editing, cutting, dubbing – both to dramatize and celebrate the medium itself.

In addition to changing the “how” of cinema (using animation to enhance or replace live actors or scenery), what other changes has computer media introduced into the way we make and understand film as a medium? To answer this question, I would like to investigate how film is received and created on the Internet. Sites such as YouTube.com and Google Video depend upon their users for content. However, if you spend enough time on these websites, certain trends emerge that seem to offer indications of the way that the medium, that is video that is created and intended for publication on the web, differs from traditional cinema. I would like to begin to suggest how we might see this by pointing to examples such as the “Final Fantasy Re-enactment” available on Google Video (where it is one of many live-action simulations of role-playing-game sequences) and “Lazy Sunday” (available on the NBC website – scroll on the videos box) and the responses to it: “Lazy Monday,” “Crazy Muncie,” “We Drink Tea,” and “Lazy Monday” – the Middle East Coast Response (among others), all of which are available on the Internet. By looking at these examples, we begin to have a sense of the way that computer media has influenced the way that we make film and the degree to which the reality that we reference and experience as “shared” is virtual.
In the preface to Literature, Media, Information Systems, Saul Ostrow says,

This problem of our being absorbed into our own technology is not a humanist one; instead his primary concern is how this may effect how and what comes to be represented, psychologically as well as culturally. In turn, Kittler proposes the idea that our ability to interpret such texts is largely the result of historically determined communication systems. As John Johnston points out, these “discourse networks are the subject of representation as well as the mechanism of its changing meaning.’ In other words, the media creates the means of representation – its subject and content – and these are also the product of their storage mediums’ (the means of preservation and reproduction) effect on the author and audience alike. (x)

Google Video and YouTube.com seem to present many examples of the way that it is possible for us as users and consumers of technology to be absorbed into its production and representation. “Final Fantasy Re-enactment” and “Lazy Sunday” and the response to it provide an opportunity to see how the medium, in this case short film on the Internet, is both changing the way we think about the meaning and purpose of film and reinscribing the most basic purpose of film – to capture the real – within its own historical and cultural moment.

Final Fantasy is a role playing game (RPG) that is produced as an animated video game. The video game itself gave fans of RPGs an opportunity to “act out” traditional RPG narratives through the medium of the computer and digital graphics. What is fascinating to me about the “Final Fantasy Re-enactment” is the strange paradox that the video provides. On the one hand, the video does not provide any documentation of the real; it is mimicking a fictional world, with fictional characters, and a fictional plot. These things are not only fictional but also have yet to be rendered using live-action. (We might note that an animated feature-length film was made of Final Fantasy in 2001, with a follow-up film in 2004). Yet, at the same time, to those who know the game, “Final Fantasy Re-enactment” is painstaking in its effort to represent the world of the game in live action. The video uses the music of the game, and the actors coordinate their movements to match both the music and animated displays that appear to narrate the game; the actors “pulse” back and forth, as do the characters in the game. The creators of the video make an effort to style the font and display of the “spells,” “summons,” and “limit breaks” to accurately represent how they are displayed in the game. Therefore, the video can be evaluated on its ability to accurately portray the real – if we are willing to consider the virtual as a part of our reality, as clearly many fans of the video can and do.

“Lazy Sunday” provides yet another example of the way that computer media’s changing ability to preserve, reproduce, and distribute film is changing the way we think about the medium itself. “Lazy Sunday” is a rap parody that originally appeared on Saturday Night Live on December 17, 2005. The video featured cast members Chris Parnell and Adam Sandberg, and the rap was written by Parnell and the three members of The Lonely Island, of which Sandberg is a member; Akiva Schaffer, also of The Lonely Island, directed the short. The Lonely Island regularly makes short films which they post on their website, which is important to keep in mind lest we dismiss the short film as being understood only within the medium of television. “Lazy Sunday” implements many of the traditional aspects of amateur video on the Internet: it is a parody or re-enactment of an existing genre; it references well-known generational touchstones, such as Dr. Dre’s 1992 album, The Chronic; it conveys many layers of media so that within the film cell phones are used and allusions are made to rap videos, feature-length cinema, and the Internet. Like “Final Fantasy Re-enactment,” most of the references to the real within “Lazy Sunday” are fictional or virtual, for example the films The Notebook and Ghost, as well as the Internet’s Yahoo Maps!, Mapquest, and Google Maps. A close reading of “Lazy Sunday,” for which time does permit here, reveals that, like “Final Fantasy Re-enactment,” the video finds many ways to challenge and validate our notions of what is real and how reality is represented.

The added interest of “Lazy Sunday” within the context of computer media is what happened after the short film aired on Saturday Night Live. The film was quickly recorded and distributed via Internet users. Both YouTube.com and Google Video carried the short film for free. Articles appeared in The New York Times and Slate.com, among other publications, documenting the sudden ubiquity and relevance of “Lazy Sunday.” Within a short period of time, a West Coast response to Lazy Sunday appeared on Google Video, “Lazy Monday.” (A comparison of “Lazy Sunday” and “Lazy Monday” reveals something of a media war over the real, with “Lazy Monday” rejecting “Lazy Sunday” ’s emphasis on film and the Internet and instead offering reference points of writing, books, and pottery making – you have to see it to appreciate that final example. But, it is worth noting that “Lazy Monday” begins with the actors shutting a laptop, which is the means by which they have viewed “Lazy Sunday.”) “Lazy Monday” spurred the creation of the Midwest response “Crazy Muncie,” the UK response, “We Drink Tea,” and a version known as the “Middle East Coast Response,” which features spliced footage of Osama bin Laden from Al Jazeera with English subtitles and music. In the wake of all of this attention, NBC did ask YouTube.com to take the video down February 17, 2006, citing copyright infringement. YouTube.com reported that the video had been viewed at least five million times prior to its removal. The video is available on NBC’s website, though it is not compatible with Mac or Unix operating systems.

Clearly there is much to be said here in terms of the medium’s facilitation of interactivity, the layering of media, and the continuing question over access. “Lazy Sunday” provides a great example for the way that film has been changed by computer media in a way that is different from Manovich’s consideration of animation. “Lazy Sunday” is a video made for the Internet and, as such, much of its construction of reality blends the traditional real with the media. A video like “Lazy Sunday” is appealing to technologically-savvy young people for its accurate representation of reality for many upper-middle class people in this historical moment. The references to film and Internet, down to the stylizing of the phrase “Double True” in the Google-font, make for an authentic representation of the real for regular media consumers, much like “Final Fantasy Re-enactment” does for players of RPGs. In addition, the fact that the videos like “Lazy Sunday” and “Final Fantasy Re-enactment” are stored on websites that do not delete the short films for an extended period of time provides a new forum for discourse, much like blogs. Instead of using words, users can create videos as a means by which to have a conversation or further ideas. Finally, like the chase sequences of early films, filmmakers who make videos for the Internet are interested not only in showing what can be done in the medium but also dramatizing the medium itself in their very representations. By considering the videos on websites like YouTube.com and Google Video, we see yet another way computer media is changing the rules about access, length, subject, and style in film beyond the example of digital animation.

Bibliography
Auerbach, Jonathan. “Chasing Film Narrative: Repetition, Recursion, and the Body in Early Cinema.” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 798-820.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Standford U Press, 1986.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001.
Ostrow, Saul. Preface. Literature, Media, Information Systems. By Friedrich Kittler. Ed. John
Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997.

Quick Links
“Final Fantasy Re-enactment”

“Lazy Sunday” via NBC

“A Video Clip Goes Viral and a TV Network Wants to Control It” New York Times

“The Chronicles of Narnia Rap: It Won’t Save Saturday Night Live, But It Could Save Hip Hop” Slate.com

“Lazy Monday” (West Coast Response)

“Lazy Monday” (Middle East Coast Response)

“Crazy Muncie” (Midwest Response) and “We Drink Tea” (UK response) are both easy to find. I’m not linking them directly as they contain profanity (in case that’s an issue with regard to posting them to the blog).

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Typewriter Response Paper

Friday, March 31st, 2006

Dear Class,

I had a little anxiety about this response paper, as you might be able to tell:)

So the below may not fit what the assignment intended, which I’m sure I’ll figure out better for the next one.

I put this up as a word doc here: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kfries/758a.html

I’ll get my stuff up about Vannevar Bush’s Memex machine and microfilm up as soon as I can.

Regards,
Kevin

Text Means Tissue

“The typewriter veils the essence of writing and of the script. It withdraws from man the essential rank of the hand, without man’s experiencing this withdrawl appropriately and recognizing that it has transformed the relation of Being to his essence.” Heidegger in Kittler, GFT, p. 199

Slight of hand. Magic. Meaning’s mystical origins: Is the typewriter a machine that veils truth and allows for the mechanistic rape of the imagination regardless of subjective identity or role? If texts are tissues and typewriters are the primary tool during a span of years for producing texts, then unveiling the truths embedded in those texts would require an analysis of the typewriter. How do we know what we know? From what we are taught, from what is communicated to us through written material, often produced using the typewriter or a related technology. The skilled user of the typewriter may or may not be any more controlled by determinative constraints of her tool in shaping her products than any other producer of texts; however, if the interpreter’s task is to be reliable and complete, then the understanding of a text is gained by interrogating not only the content of the textual communication but also its context including the circumstances of its production.

Heidegger’s metaphor of the veil prompts consideration. The gap between the ways in which many writers and communicators (incompletely skilled) and a few (completely skilled) communicators labor at their craft is a crevice in the theory of new media. Whether or not New Media veils truth more or less than old media, whether or not the tissues produced by these transcoded, variable, automated, modular, numerical representations (Manovich) are organic and thrive in an information ecology or whether selective forces differing in power, nature, and influence relegate other texts to oblivion is one of the most challenging questions of power in the field of language arts ten years past the popular and commercial introduction of the World Wide Web and the Internet. With the introduction of new technologies, whether the typewriter or the Internet, this question of the veil also strikes at the heart of the authenticity of the communication: not only is it a speech-act in good faith among cooperating interlocutors, but moreover does the communication “ring true?”

The example of the typewriter in the production of New Media theory crosses significant landscapes including different academic disciplines. Given the wide territory simultaneously affected by and influencing the study of New Media, a certain amount of lawless creativity is allowed. The methodologies, the questions, and the applications of New Media studies are both robust with opportunity and vulnerable to the use of the broad ax rather than a scalpel. In such a context for the textual scholar, the task of considering the ways in which the typewriter can simultaneously veil and reveal truth is a productive and fertile territory indeed.

This response paper begins a questioning response to Heidegger’s veil, and provides a chance to briefly explore some other thoughts on the typewriter in the literary spheres of Henry James and Dracula (separately), historical elements of the typewriter, the device itself, eg. the keyboard and issues of interface, and the typewriter as an important element of knowledge transfer in the information age archives.

Selected Literature Review

The typewriter’s double edged nature is just as sharp as the sword’s. The might of both instruments is qualified by its own form, function, and use in any given feedback loop.

Both Thurschwell and Seltzer note the multivalent ways the typewriter can be become either the source of noise or dissonance in the work of Henry James or as a method of revealing previously unknown perspectives. Thruschwell looks at the typewriter in the relationship between Henry James and Theodora Bosanquet and notes the power relationship between them and the construction or obstruction of the meaning of love, meaning and experience shaped by the materiality of counting words, taking dictation, is constructed by the task of typing (20). At the same time the role of the typewriter and the secretary provide a chance to uncover new “portrayal[s] of class relations and commercial exchange, [and] allows us to think about how questions of communication and consciousness in other works [beside In the Cage] might also be related to economics and technology” (9). Furthermore, Seltzer discusses The Aspern Papers and notes that the interiority of sealed letters, even without the typewriter, allows “for the technical conditions of intimacy to get in the way of intimacy” (203).

Rosalie Silverston and Victoria Olwell separately discuss historical trends in the social history of women that are shaped by the typewriter. While social standards for the behavior of upper-class women and the market (economical) standards of the typewriter keyboard are different, the phenomenon, the presence of the typewriter affects both. These authors could be said to show how the typewriter does not so much obscure as allow for women to foreground their social power. Indeed, in a passage too long to quote here, Olwell (58-60) indeed promulgates the view that the typewriter can not be viewed as a monolithic tool of modern enlightenment but that as it provided new opportunities for women, the cultural phenomenon of the typewriter also broght to the surface anxieties about sex, gender, and labor that could be argued as veiling (the anxieties that is) one truth in favor of others.

Jennifer Wicke takes up the role of technology, including the typewriter, in the novel Dracula. Wicke highlights character Madame Mina’s observation that her typewriter has a “manifold” function that allows for the mechanized production of triplicates (476). The typewriter and the personal computer both offer effort-saving features, but the duplication of error is one threat that the mechanization of language in the arts and sciences poses. Duplicated errors, as any textual scholar knows, prove at times to be indeed an iron veil over truth.

Liebowitz & Margolis, Inhoff, and Berg separately address elements of the typewriter itself, focusing on some aspect of the typewriter key. Leibowitz and Margolis can be said to consider the ways in which the choice of standardized keyboards creates gaps and divisions (or veils) in perception. Inhoff et al. would make Bruno Latour happy indeed in an extremely technical examination of speed during copytyping, concluding that the findings support the understanding that “a model of eye-hand coordination that postulates the eye-hand coordination involves central and peripheral processes.” The mere suggestion of emphasis is the foundation of slight of hand maneuvers explicitly or implicitly that affect the life of any text, and the typewriter is then no more objectively accurate than any other tool. Thomas Berg’s analysis of submorphemic slips that are found in the published records of scientific research puts the nail in the Count’s coffin: the typewriter is forever as subjective as the pen, whichever appears to different audiences as more “authentic”.

Finally, Christopher Keep and David Bell address the typewriter’s presence in the information economy in the landscapes of archives, and more generally in the emerging information age where information and speed connect the typewriter to a later generation transmitters of information (or code).

Conclusion

The typewriter shapes what we see outside ourselves and what we inside ourselves know to be true. The unwary person who does not consider the tool’s power to both veil and reveal truth risks being controlled by the very mechanism in her use.

While some writers are simply unaware of inscribing technologies, the presence of Takahashi’s humorous web page comments on the current incarnation of the typewriter: the word processor. Takahashi’s Word Perhect points out that writers are in fact too well aware of the limitations, frustrations, even absurdities of the writing and inscription technologies available to them.

Beware the veil. The transformation of the typewriter into the word processor is not a seemless transition or substitute. The move toward the “ease” of the word processor hides and reveals; for example, a word processor hides and reveals the presence of the paper. The “Print Layout” view in Microsoft Word only mimics the paper page, relegating the paper to a peripheral device. This is a slight of hand indeed. What is right under the writer’s nose is mere suggestion of the truth, not the true paper itself. The meaning of each slight of hand of each typewriter technology differs, and here the point is not to definitively catalogue or map them, but to suggest that the uncritical reception of them, in their individuality or in their aggregate, threatens to recalibrate the interpretation of texts produced with them.

Works Consulted

Bell, David F. “Infinite Archives.” 33.3 SubStance (2004): 148-161.

Berg, Thomas. “Slips of the Typewriter Key.” 23 Applied Psycholinguistics (2002): 185-207.

Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen of the 20th Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Clarke, Arthur C. “The Steam-Powered Processor.”

Derrida, Jacques. “Word Processing”

Fleissner, Jennifer. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 22 (2001) 417-455.

Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003.

Inhoff, Albrecht Werner and Jian Wang. “Encoding Text, Manual Movement Planning, and Eye-Hand Coordination During Copytyping.” 18.2 Journal of Experimental Psychology (1992) 437-448.

Keep, Christopher. “Blinded by the Type: Gender and Information Technology at the Turn of the Century.” 23 Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2001): 149-173.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

—. Discourse Networks: 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Liebowitz, S. J. and Stephen E. Margolis. “The Fable of the Keys.” 33.1 Journal of Law and Economics (April 1990) 1-25.

Olwell, Victoria. “Typewriters and the Vote.” 29.1 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2003): 55-83.

Seltzer, Mark. “The Postal Unconscious.” 21 The Henry James Review (2000): 197-206.

Silverstone, Rosalie. “Office Work for Women: An Historical Review.” () Business History

Takahashi, Tomoko. Word Perhect. http://www.e-2.org/commissions_wordperhect.html. Accessed March 13, 2006.

Thurschwell, Pamela. “Henry James and Theodore Bosanquet: on the Typewriter, In the Cage, at the Ouija Board.” 13.1 (1999) Textual Practice 5-23.

Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” 59.2 ELH (Summer 1992): 467-493.

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Thoughts on the “Data-flaneur”

Friday, March 31st, 2006

Man’s inner concerns do not have their issueless private character by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience (Benjamin 158).

If we accept the assertion Kittler offers in his preface to Gramophone, Film Typewriter that “understanding media…remains an impossibility precisely because the dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions” (Kittler xl), Manovich’s claim that “the computer database and the 3D computer-based virtual space have become true cultural forms—general ways used by the culture to represent human experience, the world, and human existence in this world” (Manovich 215) becomes far more problematic. How are these forms of information access shaping our understanding of media and our perception of the world? To what effect? Kittler concludes:

What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of a technological era, but rather…their circuits, the very schematism of perceptibility. (Kittler xl-xli)

Are we simply a product of these two means of accessing and navigating through information? If we now conceive of perception and subjectivity not as located in a fixed subject position, but as movement on a trajectory through space (Manovich 279), is it still possible to stop and examine where this trajectory leads?

Manovich’s use of Baudelaire’s description of the Parisian flâneur was rather compelling and useful in thinking about how new media has created new roles for the “super-modern” subject—“the data-flâneur” and “the data-dandy.” But there is an aspect of flanerie that emerges in Baudelaire (particularly in Benjamin’s reading) that Manovich seems to leave out of his discussion. Although Manovich does suggest that the flâneur’s behavior can be seen as an attempt to “compensate for the loss of a close relationship with his group by inserting himself into the anonymous crowd” (Manovich 269), what is missing is the sense of terror that arises in the modern subject while moving through this anonymous crowd of strangers. “For the perfect flâneur,” Baudelaire writes, “for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite” (Baudelaire 795). Yet, the endless fear of collision, the overload of sensual information and experience, the overwhelming desire to see oneself reflected in an Other combined with the horror of exposure or recognition constantly undermine this “immense joy.” “To see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world” (Baudelaire 795)—this is the goal of the flâneur. “The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito” (Baudelaire 795). Thus, by definition, the flâneur must remain a non-entity, a face in the crowd, indistinguishable from all the other faces rushing by.

With the current overflow of information, our senses have been flooded by the accessibility of data. As Manovich observes in his opening to “The Forms”:

If traditional cultures provided people with well-defined narratives (myths, religion) and a little “stand-alone” nformation, today we have too much information and too few narratives that can tie it all together (Manovich 217).

Thus we have unlimited access to information, but little or no means to process or integrate this information into an effective narrative, as a tool to reflect on the world and our place in it. The database provides us with the capability to search, but not to analyze. The 3D navigable space allows us to conceptualize new media, but not to come any closer to a true understanding. We, like the “mere flâneur” who never removes himself from the bustling streets to reflect on and order the “mass of raw materials which he has involuntarily accumulated” (Baudelaire 795), have perhaps given into that “insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’.” For it is not the flâneur, but Baudelaire’s “man of genius,” the artist, who attempts to transform the “non-I” into something known, “at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive” so that “all the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized” (Baudelaire 795).

This solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier that that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other that the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’ (Baudelaire 796).

It is this figure and not the “mere flâneur” who is able to fully realize the potentialities contained in the present and to ultimately “distil the eternal from the transitory” (Baudelaire 796).

For Manovich to claim that the database and 3-D computer-based space has become true cultural forms, influencing our perception of ourselves and the world we live in, he must situate the subject not as a subject in a fixed position, but as moving through space on a trajectory. What have we lost in the shift to a “computerized society”? What constitutes identity in an age of virtual anonymity? What remains of the body in our current computer culture? Are we nothing more than a list of screen names, passwords, and search histories?

Works Cited:
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. (155-200)
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Lietch, ed. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2001. (792-800)
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stabford, Stanford UP, 1999.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

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USB Flash Drive as Interface

Time and Space on the Net and in the Fantastic

Inscription and McCloud

Inscribed in Ether: New Media Studies Excavates Mysteries of Communication

“Data Made Flesh”? Computer Codes and Human Language

Networks’ Products and Waste

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