Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Wednesday 2pm Section
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
[Wednesday] Beyond the Screen
A device known as the Sixth Sense, developed out of MIT Media Lab, is eerily similar to the eye implant that Manovich describes at the conclusion of her chapter. It further blurs the boundary between virtual and physical spaces by projecting onto a hand or wall or any other object of the user's choosing, epitomizing the merger of screen and physical surroundings: "From that moment on, we will carry our prisons with us-not in order to blissfully confuse representations and perceptions (as in cinema), but rather always to 'be in touch;' always connected, always 'plugged-in.' The retina and the screen will merge." (114)
Like Sean and Tristan, this passage also brings up questions of liberation and control for me. How does connectivity free/control us? How might this scenario redefine what we think of as freedom and control?
Wednesday 2pm Section
I am interested in the implications of Friedberg's discussion of the connection between the screen and subjectivity. Particularly, her thesis seems to be that cinema, failing to meet its capability for a radical challenge to univisual convention outside of a few noteworthy exceptions, reinforces a singular subjectivity while "computer multitasking makes it possible to combine work with leisure…and hence serves to equate productivity with a fractured subjectivity" (233). Though she goes on to make her main point about multitasking aside format the specificity of screened interfaces and presentations, I am struck by how she doesn't mention that in her version of multitasking, there is never any actual 'brain-splitting' involved; her multitasking, like the computer itself, is managed serially, and thus seems to be in contrast to the possibilities of dual apperception allowed by the radical potential of the screen. Multitasking here seems to be no more than rapid switching from tasks.
My complaint follows Joan Copjec's critique of film studies appropriation of Lacanian theorization of the mirror phase to the screen (cf. The Orthopsychic Subject in Read My Desire). That is, of the screen as constitutive of subjectivity via the gaze of the spectator, which seems to be an unarticulated assumption for Friedberg. However, as Copjec remarks, film theorists, and, we can say, Friedberg in following them, miss Lacan's later reformulation of the mirror stage with its emphasis on the object a. In this, Copjec notes that conflating optical operations with psychic operations is an easy, but inappropriate move. We must utilize semiotics instead, and view the problem not as one of an optical relation but as one of signification, which manifests itself nicely in the visual media with which we are concerned here. It allows us to imagine a purely visual relationship outside of representation, a relation we take to be the operations of our own subjectivity, unified or otherwise.
The error here is in assuming that the outside is in any way a kind of presence, as Friedberg goes on to say. We might want to consider what, following Lacan, we could say about the computer screen here as pointing out in multiple detail the fundamental absence that is constitutive of both our subjectivity and the symbolic order. What happens when we realize that our computer multitasking does not see us?
WS Multiples and Multitasking
Wednesday Section Blog #3: Body/Screen or Input/Output- Discipline or Control?
Despite this, the text clearly anticipates that which has yet to be seen. I think this is perhaps why Manovich in his chapter "The Interface," leaves the question of the body and the machine to the end. Manovich begins the section "The Screen and the Body" with an example of Peter Greenaway's film The Draughtsman's Contract, for which he states:
Throughout the film we repeatedly see the draughtsman's face through the grid, which looks like prison bars. it is as if the subject who attempts to catch the world, immobilizing and fixing it within the represntational apparatus (here perspectival drawing), is trapped by the apparatus himself. The subject is imprisoned. (104)
Manovich makes it clear how in the cinematic medium, the spectator and her body, like the "subject of the apparatus," are forced into an imprisonment. Even early VR technology seems to imprison the spectator despite that their body is not completely immobile and the scale of perspectives between real and virtual space are equal. Rather than freeing this stage in representation renders the body into an input device, "the body was reduced to nothing less--and nothing more--than a giant mouse, or more precisely, a giant joystick" (110).
It was impossible for Manovich to fully anticipate new technological developments such as the Wiimote which features an accelerometer and IR to break some of the restrictions of the wired or even wireless input devices seen in modern computing. In addition motion-capture technology promised by Microsoft's Project Natal does away with any restrictions of an input device truly using the body as "a giant joystick." Are these technologies "freeing" or are the simply a more elaborate trap to keep the body fixed in-front of the screen?
One interesting point Tristan brought up in his blog post was Manovich's terrifying prediction that VR technology "may be reduced to a chip implanted in the retina....the retina and the screen will merge" (114). I think it is right that his prophetic vision describes (though with great doubt) what Tristan identified as "Augmented Reality" (AR). AR is moving beyond mere predictions as projects such as iphone applications are now making this dream technology a 'reality.' Interestingly Tristan described these technologies while "limiting," as liberating. While I do not necessarily disagree or agree with him I would like to question this idea of liberation.
I think AR technology begs many questions only some which I would like to lay out. The first of which concerns liberation. Surely AR would liberate the body and eye free in their movement, yet still it restricts the field of vision to a frame, to the screen. In addition, as Manovich discusses throughout his chapter, technological forms both shape and are shaped by ideological forces. I think it is important to remain skeptical of the ideology behind AR. Is AR a freeing or liberating technology or is it merely a product of the ideology of control?
The other question concerns materiality. AR seems to answer the an impossibility of both cinema and any computer representation. It plays with, distorts, but ultimately derives its image from the material world. As Manovich who was born in a Soviet state and who seems to be interested in digital art projects that engage with the question of materiality, would he see this technology as beneficial and positive or as enslaving or deluding?
Finally I would like ask if these new forms of input (Controllers with accelerometers, IR, the body through motion capture) and output (AR, even though still mediated by the screen) are in any way linked to what we now can recognize as "control society." If film and even early computing are seen as imprisoning for the body, in a sense serving a disciplinary function, then are these new technologies reflections of a new society not based on discipline but rather control?
I hope we can address some of these issues in class.
Locating the meaning of a text within the text’s own meaning (or another title as equally disorienting)
Wark’s piece, The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual, posed a very interesting delema for me.
Firsts thing’s first. I found it very interesting and relevant that the story arc of the article hyper focuses – if you will – on the one global media event of the September 11th. While I don’t argue that 9/11 wasn’t a pivotal moment in the trajectory of world political, social and media order, I do contest that it contradicts the central point of the piece – namely that compressing an event into the constraints of a narrative form, whether that event is of global or local media coverage, highly skews the objectivity it attempts to engender. Rather, this action creates a notion of “Wedome vs. Theydome” and provokes misunderstanding, hostility and erects borders in our increasingly globalized world. Wark does not cite any other “Weird Global media events" and instead employs the same tactic that the the article critiques. The fact that Wark Organizes his/her(?) argument around one example and declines to use the excess of rich examples of media coverage to support her claim is problematic.
As I neared the end, the main point seemed to converge and collapse under the weight of this flaw. It left much to be resolved. As an optimist I attempted to figure out if this was in fact an intentional way to prove her point by employing the very devices she critiques….
The ending makes a seemingly abrupt tangent into the solution that the Afghan eXplorer provides the media’s problem. She asserts “The media tactician presents an image that endangers the conventions of journalistic narrative time, yet which is capable of inserting itself into it. The is kind of tactical media ironically displaces the boundaries drawn by the machine of the news story.” For a moment I was almost convinced that she was inserting her self into the narrative arc of the story (aka the “journalistic narrative time”) and “displacing the boundaries drawn by media”. But then again I don’t see how that resolves anything nor does the birth of one machine seem to provide all the answers to medias flaws.
As for me, I will keep questioning, That is the point isn’t it? Ahh finally! I got it. The point is to never cease to question and probe so that you come to you own conclusions. No no there must be more. ….
# 3: Screens, prisions, multiplicity; Wednesdy
I'd like to also focus on the idea of "multiplicity" and the "codes." I think that with societies of control, one argument was that they operate on people subscribing to these meanings already created for them. So what does it mean that these protocols, these screens, these media already have very concrete "meanings" and "protocols"? It just seems very mathematical and seemingly very easy media in which to practice control... and imprisonment. Especially since that the user "thinks" that s/he is "controlling" the actions, but all possible actions that they could take are already completely mapped out for them -- a bizarre, disturbing, pre-destined fate...
Blog 3: Screens as Imprisonment, Wed. section
Wed: Is it the form or the content of the screen that is controlling?
Hypertext Is Still Language, Wed section
Lev Manovich argues that hyperlinking eliminates hierarchy. She asserts: “But in the case of hyperlinking as implemented by HTML and earlier by Hypercard, no such relationship of hierarchy is assumed. The two sources connected through a hyperlink have equal weight, neither one dominates the other. Thus the acceptance of hyperlinking in the 1980s can be correlated with contemporary culture’s suspicion of all hierarchies. (76). I think, however, that Manovich overlooks the fact that language is inherently hierarchical. We read in a linear fashion. Also, in every sentence that we read or write certain words are given more emphasis than others. For example, if I were to write a list of attributes, we would see that certain words are given more importance than others: “Sam is cute, funny, tall, charming, talented, and modest.” The word “cute” in this sentence dominates “tall” or “charming.” Perhaps, one could even argue that each word as we read the sentence loses more and more emphasis. Grammar, furthermore, structures that hierarchy. We still maintain then the basic distinction between content and form in our everyday speech and communication.
If language is culture then it also is an ideology, and as much as interfaces change the way in which we conceptualize culture, they cannot alter it. Don’t you think that the content remains the same even if we can perceive it differently? Hypertext is still text, and as long as we read it as we do all other language we are perpetuating a hierarchy. Is this too cynical?
Wednesday section, Friedberg post
Blog 3, Wed. Section-Medium/Message
In film, a single frame has a particular time code unique to it alone. The film Time Code seems to negate this fundamental concept, giving four time codes for every moment in filming. The physical process of making film, in which a physical, tangible frame on a reel is exposed to light, then hundreds of these frames are spun (24 fps) to create the illusion of movement, even though the movement actually happens, the representation of this movement is only an illusion of it. It is, in essence, a very, very good fake of what actually happens in front of the lens. But now, with the advent of digital filming, “information” is captured in pixels, and the classic process of film, and while the time code still exists, it seems as though it is in place merely to uphold the older version of filmmaking that holds the “dominance” of a single frame, holding onto the “symbolic”, as Anne Friedberg puts forth. As the future progresses, we should become more fluid, in which everything happens all at once, in any time. The “dominance of the single frame image” (199), is a fundamental lesson in the craft of filmmaking. The medium, film, informs what stories we decide to shoot. An epic blockbuster demands 35mm or HD, a shoestring budget horror demands a handheld DVR, so on and so forth.
Technology changes and provides new media with which to express oneself, and yet at the same time it seems that the message and the media inform each other. Manovich says that “content and form cannot be separated…artists have continued to invent concepts and procedures to assure the impossibility of painting some preexistent content” (Manovich, 66). Going back to “the medium is the message,” McLuhan perceived of a “shift in media” in which the idea of space changes, and one’s viewpoint is no longer primarily or essentially visual, and one’s perspective is no longer “formal.” This is really the first insight into McLuhan’s argument that’s shown up in the readings, whereas usually his title can stand up on its own, suggesting that his argument may have been drastically reduced. As it relates to the Manovich quote, as a sound bite, artists actively make the medium a part of the message. Yet, McLuhan is positing a shift, in which the medium will not be limiting: one won’t be limited by the frame, as it were.
I would really like to know more about McLuhan’s argument, as his title seems very self-explanatory, but he seems to be a pin used to keep many of these arguments together, or at the very least his ideas factor in largely to Friedberg. Can his entire argument be reduced to his title? And is this perhaps compromised as one comes closer to finding all sorts of messages through the same medium (i.e. Internet)?
Monday, February 22, 2010
S03 - blog post #3
I found Lev Manovich’s discussion of the evolution of various forms of screens to be intriguing, especially in the way he related modern cinema and computer screens to early photographic practices. The relationship between the mobility/immobility of the spectator and the mobility/immobility of the screen is something that I would like to focus on, because I think that Manovich did not focus enough on certain aspects of the dichotomy between the two.
In my mind, the distinction of whether or not a screen is mobile is something that needs to be given much attention. Rather than simply distinguishing whether or not the screen itself is a mobile unit, I think that attention needs to be given to the interplay between the screen and the item that it projects. In his discussion of photography, Manovich looks at the inherent immobility of both the “screen” (or photograph, in this case) and the subject that it captures, focusing on its portrayal of the world as static. He says that it was cinema that shattered the “petrified world” (107) of photography. Yet I would argue that photography was not as static as Manovich portrays it and that mobility within a screen should not have to be blatant to be considered present.
Early photographic exposures could require numerous hours, as Manovich points out. While Manovich claims that living things had to be immobilized in order to be captured by photography, these long exposures could actually be beneficial for capturing the essence of human movement. The blurred traces of human activity that could be seen by using a long exposure to capture a scene serve as a testament to the mobility behind the screen. As photographic practices improved, photographers could utilize short exposures to capture the decisive moment of action in any event, an idea often attributed to Henri Cartier-Bresson. Thus, rather than simply immobilizing the action within the photograph, photographers called attention to the inherent mobility of human existence. The photograph/screen in itself may have been static, but it was still able to call attention to the mobility of human existence.
I don’t think Manovich is right, then, in saying that it was not until cinema that the stable world of photography was challenged. The relationship between screen and viewer should allow for the viewer’s understanding of the complex undertones of mobility that the screen may present. All forms of screens and all types of viewers have some level of both mobility and immobility, and Manovich’s discussion of the evolution of the screen did not, in my opinion, give this fact the emphasis it deserves.
Friday, February 19, 2010
S03 - Blog 02
We talked a lot last week about the differences among sovereign, disciplinary and control societies. We mentioned that control as a ruling principle of our age is not necessarily bad, but rather dangerous. After that, I listened to the lecture delivered by Mr. Rushdie and it seemed to me that some of the things he said were relevant for our discussions too.
For example, Mr. Rushdie talked about how the film that was made about him had literally no audience in England. He also explained that it was not due to the fact that the film was censored, but due to the fact that the choice was left to the people. Mr, Rushdie then explained that, had the film been censored, it would have had its audience that would watch it simply because it would be banned.
Control society functions in a possibly similar way. Both sovereign and disciplinary societies did not allow as much democratic freedom as control society does. Public executions that were characteristic of sovereign society had an ambivalent nature - they could bot induce fear and sympathy in the spectators. Disciplinary society, with its never ending system of institutions, also had an ability both to inspire people to be obedient and to rebel.
Control society, on the other hand, offers almost all democratic freedoms we might wish for. Internet gives us opportunities to research and learn about anything we want. That is exactly where we can detect the paradoxical nature of control society - at the same time it allows greater freedoms and establishes stronger control than ever before. However, that is not necessarily bad, only dangerous.
Similarly to the way the film about Mr. Rushdie did gain enough public attention simply because it was given all the freedom it could get, the contents we encounter every day become uninteresting because they are so available. Censorship is probably the most effective way to awaken interest of an audience. As soon as content becomes easily available, it becomes less interesting. By making everything easily available, control society leaves it to us to decide what we consume. However, it also makes everything look more ordinary than it would look in the sovereign or disciplinary societies. What we consume becomes less important to us, but nevertheless control society remains there to observe what we do. It does not even seem that uncommon to us because the availability of information reduces its real value in our eyes.
Yet, as Mr. Rushdie pointed out, people often seem able to determine the quality of the information they get. That might be because proliferation of information, while making us appreciate the information itself less, made us appreciate our time more. We are forced to make choices and, naturally, we base our decisions on quality of the information.
That is why control society is not necessarily bad, but only dangerous. Even though the control over us is always there and subtly influences judgements we make, it also grants us the access to information that seems so common that we sometimes cannot give it as much appreciation as it deserves.
Michelle Foucault, in his text Truth and Power, explains that truth is always inseparable to the power structures because it is the power structures that form the rules according to which the truth is created. As systems change, the regimes of production of truth change too. In comparison to sovereign and disciplinary societies, control society has a much more democratic regime of the production of truth. However, the truth still remains produced by the power structures, not genuinely discovered by us. I am wondering whether it is possible to have a society in which the regime of the production of truth would be so loose and undefined that it would in the end be non-existent? The regime of production of truth is basically the protocol that directs us from one information to another while making us feel that we are controlling where we are going. Is it possible to navigate any sort of space without a protocol?
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Section 03: The Galactic Village of Joss Whedon's Firefly
In the cult television series Firefly which aired on the Fox network from 2001-2002, creator Joss Whedon created a program notable not only for its unique cast of characters, but also for the image of the future it created.
Having left, “Earth that was”, centuries earlier after over population and pollution made our home world uninhabitable, humans left in a mass exodus, eventually arriving in an inhabitable galaxy lightyears away filled with many Earth-like planets and moons ripe for terraforming and the transplantation of our civilization. Struggle continued however, for while there are no aliens, differences of opinion between proponents of big and small galactic government escalated into full blown combat in the “Unification Wars”.
In In the Realm of Uncertainty: The Global Village and Capitalist Post-Modernity, Ang discusses his position that uncertainty is inherent in our current condition of “Capitalist Post-modernity”, “What I would like to do here is take this uncertainty onboard, not only as to the state of the world today, but also regarding the current state (and status) of theory, let alone ‘communication theory’.”
Discussing the flaws of McLuhan’s theory of a “Global Village” in which the world exists as a single community resulting from the annihilation of space and time, which Ang views as the ultimate culmination of capitalist modernity, he refers to James Carey’s statement that Modernist Capitalist culture is a “space binding culture”, pushed forward by the pursuit of real estate, discovery, empire and generally control. Ang carries this a step forward declaring that desire to expand to further markets increased the technology of communication, and vice versa, (see his example of the simultaneous growth of railroad and telegraph infrastructures) building to the line, “Spatial integration was the result of the deployment of these space binding communication technologies, first at the level of nation, then extending over increasingly large areas of the globe.”
While Ang confesses, “the globe becoming more integrated paradoxically is not leading to an easily comprehensible totality, but to an increasing diversity of connections among phenomena once thought disparate and worlds apart”, his comments are critical of Western Culture and imperialism in particular. Citing James Carey again, Ang posits that communication is culture and that Carey’s desire to “build a model of and for communication of some restorative value in reshaping our common culture”, implies a naïve nostalgia for local culture and community independent of external influence. Ang seems to suggest that a global village can only exist at the expense of replacing less dominant cultures with a “ruling” Western one.
One of the most interesting things about the world in which Firefly takes place, is the culture that has been created by the refugee human race. Separated from the age old delineation of nations by the lightyears between themselves and Earth, people in the Firefly universe, or “verse” as it is called in the show’s slang, are torn between a sense of local identity to their individual home world’s and the single body in charge of the larger solar system.
Life on each planet and moon varies more from a technological and monetary perspective: wealthier worlds are better terraformed, booming metropolis’ complete with flying cars and floating neon billboards, while the people occupying the more backwater ones’ routinely suffer from ailments produced by the improperly converted atmosphere and are more likely to have horses running around. This element earned the show its pigeon-holing classification as a “sci-fi western”.
A predominate culture is shared between all the civilized words in the “Alliance”. Following the collapse of “Earth that was” the two remaining superpowers of the US and China merged into a single governing body, creating a blend of the two cultures. Characters regularly converse in English only to swear in Mandarin. Billboards and Advertisements are written in pictograms, and while the captain of the titular Firefly-class starship eats from an Old Western style tin cup, he does so with a pair of chopsticks.
In the Firefly universe, Joss Whedon’s vision of mankind’s future inherently conflicts with Ang’s idea that the spread of communication and capitalist culture must inherently be Western. While there is some truth to the statement that communication’s ultimate pursuit is the creation of a compliant population, the series’ spinoff movie dealing with this issue specifically, the idea that the resultant “functionalist sociology” seeking the dissemination of a central value system must go hand in hand with the “domestication” of non-western societies conveys the writer’s own bias that the present state of Western domination is in fact a permanent truism of cultural expansion.
Just as in the future we may need to look beyond the idea of a Global Village to a “Galactic Village”, with the rise of China as an economic and political power on the verge of (if it already hasn’t) taking over the United States spot as a global superpower, we may need to look beyond the framework of a predominantly western common culture.
Section 03 Twitter, Vectors, Iran, Noise
“In every weird global media event, new dimensions to the vector field are “discovered,” and new technical properties of the vector implemented” (Wark).
This phenomenon is best explored through the use of Twitter during the recent Iranian election. When media coverage was insufficient, the new vector utilized by the Iranian citizens was twitter. Twitter allowed Iranians to express their dissidence and/or support for President Ahmadinejad. As the Iranians felt constrained by the current political climate, new ways of communication through twitter were explored; new lines of communication were formed.
In June 2009, The U.S State department contacted Twitter to ask the startup to hold on running a server update “to protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12.” (Time Magazine). Iranian tweets had created a new vector of communication that had brought a local situation out into the global.
Inevitably, for the same reasons that Twitter was useful for the Iranians (instant anecdotal information can become public), it was perhaps counter-productive because of the constant, instant, and numerous flows of information; numerous vectors of communication were flowing from many people. I am interested in discussing the role of “noise” based in the Shannon-Weaver model mentioned by Ang in the context of this example. I also want to discuss the role of the sender and receiver when the sender sends information without a known receiver/destination.
media vectors and [re]production
-Emily Martin (Matt's section)
Friday - 11am Section - Modes of Control Are Not Black and White
Similarly, on page six, I understand what Deleuze is saying about the difference between the factory and the corporation, but I also disagree. In the middle of the page, he explains that “capitalism is no longer involved in production” because it relegates it to the Third World and that it there is a difference between “capitalism for production” and “capitalism for the product.” There’s a direct implication here that the Third World is not capitalistic and if I take the argument further, that the Third World is still a disciplinary society. However, we live in global economy and (to a much lesser extent) the Third World participates in the technological era. Furthermore, I don’t like the thought of “factories giving way to the corporation” because corporations need factories to produce their products. Production has always been about the product and by that token, so has capitalism. Like I said, it’s an interesting analysis, but it is fundamentally not valid for me.