Inscription and McCloud
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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May 7th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Dan,
The whole question of what impact all those deep, technical processes in the drive have on actual compostion/creation in new media did indeed bedevil me; I’m not sure I ever found a convincing answer, other than that some things are worth knowing and understanding on their own terms, if only to crack open the black box a little. The issue, of course, is that the way a hard drive spatially distributes clusters of data around its platters is ultimately arbitrary, or if not arbitrary the product of a logic that is not easily recoverable by human standards. If this line of inquiry is something you want to pursue, I think Manovich’s remarks on the database can serve you at leasxt as well, where he argues that new media is essentially the construction of interfaces to databases. It would be very interesting to think about what that might mean for graphic novels, and online comics specifically. (Of course in my piece I do point out that Manovich’s database logic is predicated on random access storage technologies like the hard drive).
What was interesting to me about a lot of the online comics examples McCloud showed was the way the played, flirted even, with the edges of the screen–this is the infinite canvas as he describes it, but it seems to me that many of these artists were cognizant of the tension that followed from having so much of the work out of view so much of the time, hence the preponderance of zooming fields of view and similar optical tricks. Very different, it seems to me, from the affordances of the book, a random access device like the hard drive, but one whose heft we can weigh and measure in order to orient ourselves to the extent of the fiction within.