Goldsmiths: The Ninth Week
In the real world, it’s January 2010, and I really need to finish typing these up before I go back – allowed a massive backlog to build up over the last few weeks of term, so forgive the multi-week delay.
In the Ninth Week (23/11 – 27/11), I ventured out into London, with events at the RSA and Hackney’s SPACE. As the week drew to a close, attempts to pull myself back into some kind of life structure & emotion balance were destabilised by a (as it turned out, relatively minor) health issue … which I dramatically overanalysed, sending my mind spiralling inwards … leading to my abandonment of Friday’s classes in favour of a flight back to rural Sussex & the solace of family.
From before then, though, a photo of the most enjoyable part of the week – the epic quest to Hackney for Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield (on which, more below), and the surreal return via Canary Wharf. It’s always good to get out of New Cross, and check out different bits of London – keeps me sane!
This week’s notes follow, under the cut.
Digital Media – Critical Perspectives
Lev Manovich argues that the cinema has profoundly influenced the development of the computer (the notion of the frame, the narrative as loop, editing and montage).
- Goldsmiths Course Syllabus
But, according to pretty much everyone else in the field, he’s wrong. Poor chap.
photo credit: Anne Helmond
Steering away from the relatively clear and concise definitions of new media in Lister et. al., Manovich argues that there are five characteristics that constitute new media –> [numerical representation / automation / transcoding / variability / modularity].
As a heuristic, we might be able to retrieve something of value … but as a definition, Manovich somehow manages to be obtuse, vague and unnecessarily technicist. This is echoed in his piece on ‘The New Language of Cinema’, in which he reduces the new digital cinema (?) to six areas, which distinguish it from its analogue predecessors –> [simulation / the loop / montage / information space / cinema as a code / narrative].
But this move of ‘rendering innocent’ (Haraway) the analogue is more a rhetorical tactic than anything substantive. It overemphasises the purely indexical, representative qualities of old media – diverting attention from historical manifestations of the experimental and avant-garde. Take Man With a Movie Camera (1929), which pursues indexicality within the form of the montage (database?):
Seduced by the logic of the computer, Manovich heralds novelty wherever he sees it – reducing media to its technical properties, he suggests that technological convergence (c.f. Week 4) is not only real, but a fait accompli.
For us, the reality is a question of hybridity, remediation and exchange. Convergence is never a finished product, and its not enough to say that because computer and cinema now exist in a relationship of remediation, they are now necessarily the same thing. Rooted in apophenia, Manovich’s arguments are seductive but (for our purposes) far too simplistic.
In a time of ever-increasing economic inequality, Žižek pointed to Venture Philanthropy and the Guaranteed Minimum Income as two reletavely novel approaches to the issue of charity, which – pitted against each other in some kind of … dialogue? contest? – he uses to illustrate many of the assumptions and biases which underlie our current moral/political/economic landscape.
21st Century American Fiction
Two novels, both supposed to shed light on the ways in which fiction of 2000s has dealt (is dealing?) with the darker moments of American history. The books: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Sherman Alexie’s Flight. The former is a sober, relatively grim look at the earliest days of American colonialism, telling the story of a Dutch man (Jason Vaark) who accidentally drifts into the slave trade, primarily from the perspective of the women of his household (wife, slaves, etc.). The latter is the Native American equivalent of something somewhere between Audrey Niffinger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife and Quantum Leap.
Both were well written and had their (powerful, affective) moments. That said, the Alexie did – at times – slide toward the facile and the emotionally manipulative, while much of the Morrison relied on the reader’s willingness to immerse themselves in the world and cosmology of a specific place and time far removed from contemporary experience.
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((There’s a separate piece to come on the Usman Haque & Adam Greenfield event, as my notes were sufficiently sprawling & meandering to deserve some serious post-Christmas analysis. Plus, I’ve just laid my hands on an Arduino starter kit & an RFID reader. Watch this space))