incidentally;

Girls Title Cards Good Bad Design

Thu, 30 May 2013 00:24:00 +0900

Ever since I started watching Girls the stark simplicity of their title card has caught my attention. The simple typeface and the variation on color themes each week create a lasting impression. I also love how they play with color and contrast conventions, sometimes breaking them in order to create good bad design. I love when the colors combine on the border of disgusting. That revulsion is a much stronger and memorable emotion than simple pop colors. I finally sat down and collected all of the color cards in one place to create a working color swatch. I see this type of design becoming more influential in all sorts of places like the Proenza Schouler SS13 campaign for example. These designs are difficult to pull off but work really well for a younger generation that is used to seeing millions of colors present on the Internet.

Digital Archives, Clouds, and Dust

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 06:34:48 +0900

We have seen steps taken further in recent years to engage us with the idea of outsourced memory with the introduction of cloud computing. Outsourced to major corporations, our personal data will now be protected by those most capable to do so. And if we choose to do so we can share as much of it as we like with our family, our friends, and even the public. Here then, we finally have the infallible archive that is an endless untapped resource for nostalgia.

These safe and secure off-site memory banks promise to hold indefinitely our precious photographs and music; our memories! But where is the assurance, let alone the insurance, that calamity will not strike. For anyone who has ever owned a computer, the paralyzing fear of data loss must surely have been faced at one point or another. The blank screen, the whirring drive, the gut-wrenching sense of loss when an irrecoverable amount of data(memories) has been lost due to some technical malfunction or other. Why do we believe that clouds are any more capable of indefinite storage ad infinitum than our own devices? For what are clouds but dust and water, two of the very enemies of the electronic circuit. In all seriousness though, these massive servers that house the clouds are equally susceptible to physical damage, power loss, and overheating, not to mention obsolescence (a sort of technological equivalent to senescence).

Nostalgia requires that we imperfectly remember our past and to this end the Internet as the archive of our age is an improper one. It is praised for its boundlessness, but it is actually just as fallible and capable of forgetting.[1] For Derrida, it is a precondition of the archive to destroy its contents.[2] To forget completely does not serve nostalgia, but to remember imperfectly does. The distance created by this imperfection, whether it be degradation, corruption, loss, deletion, erasure, or simply the timestamp imparted by the pixilated quality of the compressed archival methods, these are the hallmarks of nostalgic recollection and they remain very much a part of nostalgia’s transition to the digital.

[1] “Some have turned to the idea of the archive as counterweight to the ever-increasing pace of change, as a site of temporal and spatial preservation. From the point of view of the archive, forgetting is the ultimate transgression. But how reliable or foolproof are our digitalized archives? Computers are barely fifty years old and already we need “data archaeologists” to unlock the mysteries of early programming: just think of the notorious Y2K problem that recently haunted our computerized bureaucracies.” – Andreas Huyssen. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 26.

[2] “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.” -Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”. Diacritics. 25 (2) (1995), 9-63, pp. 9.

“But the point must be stressed, this archiviolithic force leaves nothing of its own behind. As the death drive is also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself, an aggression and a destruction(Destruktion) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced tomneme or to anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus ashypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesisas spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory.”. Ibid, p.14.

Its official

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:49:39 +0900

Its official

Sol Lewitt / Incomplete Open Cubes (detail of...

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 07:48:44 +0900

Sol Lewitt / Incomplete Open Cubes (detail of ‘index’) / 1974

how much is too much?

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 05:33:15 +0900

how much is too much?

Photo

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:41:00 +0900

Zizek at Birkbeck Talking about the end of seriality, transition...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:55:15 +0900

Zizek at Birkbeck

Talking about the end of seriality, transition from film to TV to DVD as the main mode of viewership.

Specifically examining the ‘Fuck’ scene from Season 1 Episode of the Wire

In the Wire he proposes that it represents a new form of realism, a realism more real than realism because it engages in community self-representation.

The Melancholy of Counterfactual Imagining image thanks to...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:59:56 +0900

The Melancholy of Counterfactual Imagining

image thanks to Rebecca Wright

Hashima Island, Japan ruin value ruin - collapse, rapid descent...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:23:00 +0900

Hashima Island, Japan

ruin value

ruin - collapse, rapid descent (ie of hawk), ruin and ephemerality of material

see the optimism that has been entirely disappointed, failed futures

detritus, debris, decay of the everyday becoming ruins of supermodernity

rather than continuities, now ruins point to discrepancies

Coffee, Nicotine Gum, and David Graeber

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:16:00 +0900

Jean-Luc Godard, Masculin, féminin (1966)

I woke this morning to find an e-mail in my inbox announcing an upcoming lecture at SVA’s Art Criticism Program by David Graeber with the description:

DAVID GRAEBER, On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time

The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all.

—

The name sounding more than vaguely familiar and the topic sounding more than vaguely interesting, I put the coffee on popped a nicotine gum and got to work (re)discovering the work of this (sometimes labeled) radical scholar.

I discovered that David Graeber had been an influential professor in anthropology during my time at Yale. Being in the history department I didn’t come into contact with his lectures directly, but I do remember his name being floated around various dinner party attempts at reviving the intellectual salon. This happened most frequently in 2007, my final year at Yale, due to the fact that David Graeber, beloved scholar mascot for the liberal left and socio-anarchists at Yale had not been offered an opportunity for tenure and was in fact going to have his contract lapse at the end of that year. The expected outcry ensued and petitions were signed, all to no avail.

Since then, Graeber has gone on to bigger and better things than the juggernaut of Yale would conceive of allowing, namely his influential role in the occupy movement, the publication of his most recent book Debt: the First 5000 Years, and his position as reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths here in London.

I was curious to understand why this activist academic and social theorist was speaking at SVA and what his relationship to art theory was in general, just as I am curious about the relationship of all social/media theory to art theory as well. I came across a 2008 piece of writing by Graeber called “The Sadness of Post-Workerism or “Art and Immaterial Labour” Conference A Sort of Review.” In this, Graeber writes his reflections from a conference that took place at Tate Modern in early 2008 and invited a group of Italian post-worker theorists/autonomist scholars Tomi Negri, Bifo Berardi, Marizio Lazzarato, and Judith Revel to speak about art and social theory in this, the most revered of contemporary art ampitheatres.

As it turns out, in this short piece of writing alone, Graeber has a lot of insightful commentary to make on the parallels between the artworld, the political world, and magic, art as industry, the false claim of immateriality, and nostalgia for the political power of the work of art - to name but a few. The following quotes on these subjects are useful reminders about the links between politcal and social theory and art history and criticism, as well as the informative perspectives that can be had when the art world opens its doors to criticism from outside itself.

The following is a sort of outline of his ideas illustrated by quotation at length:

Speakers: Maurizio Lazzarato, Judith Revel, Bifo, Toni Negri

The Unique Historical Moment, Art, and Revolution:

Why, for example, would one wish to argue that in the year 2008 we live in a unique historical moment, unlike anything that came before, and then act as if this moment can only really be described through concepts French thinkers developed in the 1960s and ‘70s—then illustrate one’s points almost exclusively with art created between 1916 and 1922?

This does seem strangely arbitrary but I suspect there is a reason. We might ask: what does the moment of Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and the rest, and French ’68 thought, have in common? Actually quite a lot. Each corresponded to a moment of revolution: to adopt Immanuel Wallerstein’s terminology, the world revolution of 1917 in one case, and the world revolution of 1968 in the other. Each witnessed an explosion of creativity in which a longstanding European artistic or intellectual Grand Tradition effectively reached the limits of its radical possibilities. That is to say, they marked the last moment at which it was possible to plausibly claim that breaking all the rules—whether violating artistic conventions, or shattering philosophical assumptions—was itself, necessarily, a subversive political act as well.

This is particularly easy to see in the case of the European avant garde. From Duchamp’s first readymade in 1914, Hugo Ball’s Dada manifesto and tone poems in 1916, to Malevich’s White on White in 1918, culminating in the whole phenomenon of Berlin dada from 1918 to 1922, one could see revolutionary artists perform, in rapid succession, just about every subversive gesture it was possible to make: from white canvases to automatic writing, theatrical performances designed to incite riots, sacrilegious photo montage, gallery shows in which the public was handed hammers and invited to destroy any piece they took a disfancy to, objects plucked off the street and sacralized as art. All that remained for the Surrealists was to connect a few remaining dots, and the heroic moment was over. One could still do political art, of course, and one could still defy convention. But it became effectively impossible to claim that by doing one you were necessarily doing the other, and increasingly difficult to even try to do both at the same time. It was possible, certainly, to continue in the Avant Garde tradition without claiming one’s work had political implications (as did anyone from Jackson Pollock to Andy Warhol), it was possible to do straight-out political art (like, say, Diego Rivera); one could even (like the Situationists) continue as a revolutionary in the Avant Garde tradition but stop making art, but that pretty much exhausted the remaining possibilities.

The Dilution of the Power of the New, Consuming the Avant-garde:

Just as purely formal avant garde experiment proved perfectly well suited to grace the homes of conservative bankers, and Surrealist montage to become the language of the advertising industry, so did poststructural theory quickly prove the perfect philosophy for self-satisfied liberal academics with no political engagement at all.

It is, ultimately, a subtle form of conservatism—or, perhaps one should say conservative radicalism, if such were possible—a nostalgia for the days when it was possible to put on a tin-foil suit, shout nonsense verse, and watch staid bourgeois audiences turn into outraged lynch mobs; to strike a blow against Cartesian Dualism and feel that by doing so, one has thereby struck a blow for oppressed people everywhere.

The Concept of Immaterial Labor:

The classic definition, by Maurizio Lazzarato is “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity”—the “informational content” referring to the increasing importance in production and marketing of new forms of “cybernetics and computer control”, while the second, the “cultural content”, refers to the labor of “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion,” which, increasingly, everyone is doing all the time.

Marxism, Capitalism, and Reproductive Labor Reduced

One could, even, start from the belated recognition of the importance of women’s labor to reimagine Marxist categories in general, to recognize that what we call “domestic” or even “reproductive” labor, the labor of creating people and social relations, has always been the most important form of human endeavor in any society, and that the creation of wheat, socks, and petrochemicals always merely a means to that end, and that—what’s more—most human societies have been perfectly well aware of this. One of the more peculiar features of capitalism is that it is not—that as an ideology, it encourages us to see the production of commodities as the primary business of human existence, and the mutual fashioning of human beings as somehow secondary.

Immaterial Labor and Culture as Fluff(or not!):

that very notion that there is something that can be referred to as “immaterial labor” relies on a remarkably crude, old- fashioned kind of Marxism. Immaterial labor, we are told, is labor that produces information and culture. In other words it is “immaterial” not because the labor itself is immaterial (how could it be?) but because it produces immaterial things. This idea that different sorts of labor can be

sorted into more material, and less material categories according to the nature of their product is the basis for the whole conception that societies consist of a “material base” (the production, again, of wheat, socks and petrochemicals) and “ideological superstructure” (the production of music, culture, laws, religion, essays such as this). This is what’s allowed generations of Marxists to declare that most of what we call “culture” is really just so much fluff, at best a reflex of the really important stuff going on in fields and foundries.

The Art World as a Form of Politics:

Consider Negri’s contribution to the conference. He begins by arguing that each change in the development of the productive forces since the 1840s corresponds to a change in the dominant style of high art: the realism of the period 1848-1870 corresponds to one of the concentration of industry and the working class, impressionism, from 1871-1914, marks the period of the “professional worker”, that sees the world as to be dissolved and reconstructed, after 1917, abstract art reflects the new abstraction of labor-power with the introduction of scientific management, and so on. The changes in the material infrastructure—of industry—are thus reflected in the ideological superstructure. The resulting analysis is revealing no doubt, even fun if one is into that sort of thing, but it sidesteps the obvious fact that the production of art is an industry, and one connected to capital, marketing, and design in any number of (historically shifting) ways. One need not ask who is buying these things, who is funding the institutions, where do artists live, how else are their techniques being employed. By defining art as belonging to the immaterial domain, it’s materialities, or even its entanglement in other abstractions (like money) need not be addressed.

This is not perhaps the place for a prolonged analysis, but a few notes on what’s called “the art world” might seem to be in order. It is a common perception, not untrue, that at least since the ‘20s the art world has been in a kind of permanent institutionalized crisis. One could even say that what we call “the art world” has become the ongoing management of this crisis.

The crisis of course is about the nature of art. The entire apparatus of the art world—critics, journals, curators, gallery owners, dealers, flashy magazines and the people who leaf through them and argue about them in factories-turned-chichi-cafes in gentrifying neighborhoods…— could be said to exist to come up with an answer to one single question: what is art? Or, to be more precise, to come up with some answer other than the obvious one, which is “whatever we can convince very rich people to buy.”

I am really not trying to be cynical. Actually I think the dilemma to some degree flows from the very nature of politics. One thing the explosion of the avant garde did accomplish was to destroy the boundaries between art and politics, to make clear in fact that art was always, really, a form of politics (or at least that this was always one thing that it was.) As a result the art world has been faced with the same fundamental dilemma as any form of politics: the impossibility of establishing its own legitimacy.

The Art Market, and the Creation of Value:

If so, for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game—a kind of scam.

Such then is the nature of the permanent crisis. In political economy terms, of course, the art world has become largely an appendage to finance capital. This is not to say that it takes on the nature of finance capital (in many ways, in its forms, values, and practices, is almost exactly the opposite)—but it is to say it follows it around, its galleries and studios clustering and proliferating around the fringes of the neighborhoods where financiers live and work in global cities everywhere, from New York and London to Basel and Miami.

Contemporary art holds out a special appeal to financiers, I suspect, because it allows for a kind of short-circuit in the normal process of value-creation. It is a world where the mediations that normally intervene between the proletarian world of material production and the airy heights of fictive capital, are, essentially, yanked away.

Ordinarily, it is the working class world in which people make themselves intimately familiar with the uses of welding gear, glue, dyes and sheets of plastic, power saws, thread, cement, and toxic industrial solvents. It is among the upper class, or at last upper middle class world where even economics turns into politics: where everything is impression management and things really can become true because you say so. Between these two worlds lie endless tiers of mediation. Factories and workshops in China and Southeast Asia produce clothing designed by companies in New York, paid for with capital invested on the basis of calculations of debt, interest, anticipation of future demand and market fluctuations in Bahrain, Tokyo, and Zurich, repackaged in turn into an endless variety of derivatives—futures, options, various traded and arbitraged and repackaged again onto even greater levels of mathematical abstraction to the point where the very idea of trying to establish a relation with any physical product, goods or services, is simply inconceivable. Yet the same bankers and traders who produce these complex financial instruments also like to surround themselves with artists, people who are always busy making things—a kind of imaginary proletariat assembled by finance capital, producing unique products out of for the most part very inexpensive materials, objects said financiers can baptize, consecrate, through money and thus turn into art, thus displaying its ability to transform the basest of materials into objects worth far, far more than gold.

Perhaps the problem runs even deeper. Perhaps this is simply the kind of dilemma that necessarily ensues when one two incommensurable systems of value face off against each other.

The original, romantic conception of the artist—and hence, the very idea of art in the modern sense—arose around the time of industrial revolution. Probably this is no coincidence. As Godbout and Caille have pointed out, there is a certain complementarity. Industrialism was all about the mass production of physical objects, but the producers themselves were invisible, anonymous—about them one knew nothing. Art was about the production of unique physical objects, and their value was seen as emerging directly from the equally unique genius of their individual producers—about whom one knew everything. Even more, the production of commodities was seen as a purely economic activity. One produced fishcakes, or aluminum siding, in order to make money. The production of art was not seen as an essentially economic activity. Like the pursuit of scientific knowledge, or spiritual grace, or the love of family for that matter, the love of art has always been seen as expressing a fundamentally different, higher form of value. Genuine artists do not produce art simply in order to make money. But unlike astronomers, priests, or housewives, they do have to sell their products on the market in order to survive. What’s more, the market value of their work is dependent on the perception that it was produced in the pursuit of something other than market value. People argue endlessly about what that “something other” is—beauty, inspiration, virtuosity, aesthetic form—I would myself argue that nowadays, at least, it is impossible to say it is just one thing, rather, art has become a field for play and experiment with the very idea of value—but all pretty much agree that, were an artist to be seen as simply in it for the money, his work would be worth less of it.

Artists as Revolutionaries, Still:

For two hundred years at least, artists and those drawn to them have created enclaves where it has been possible to experiment with forms of work, exchange, and production radically different from those promoted by capital. While they are not always self- consciously revolutionary, artistic circles have had a persistent tendency to overlap with revolutionary circles; presumably, precisely because these have been spaces where people can experiment with radically different, less alienated forms of life. The fact that all this is made possible by money percolating downwards from finance capital does not make such spaces “ultimately” a product of capitalism any more than the fact a privately owned factory uses state- supplied and regulated utilities and postal services, relies on police to protect its property and courts to enforce its contracts, makes the cars they turn out “ultimately” products of socialism. Total systems don’t really exist, they’re just stories we tell ourselves, and the fact that capital is dominant now does not mean that it will always be.

———————————————-

Reflections on Politics, Art, and Revolution

I am in some senses skeptical of Graeber’s declaration of the political aspects of art as both a radical sphere for revolution and divorced from capitalism. In the case of new media art, distributed art, and non-profit arts I can see a more direct relationship existing, but this is complicated in the commercial art world and it is somewhat of a false belief in the “pure” motives of starving artists as creative geniuses compelled to create regardless of money or fame. In fact, the (knowing) cultivation of this persona is directly proportional to the value of the work of art (as Graeber himself notes).

I am thinking mostly here of cases of the art superstar or the self-consciously capitalistic artists of the 1990s and before along a Duchamp-Warhol-Hirst trajectory, and although you could argue that the very self-conscious manipulation of commodity and capitalism was a commentary on the marriage of art and capitalism that had occurred in the twentieth century after a very long engagement that had been taking place since they first started seeing each other in the Renaissance, the radical and revolutionary aspects of art, even in its most politicized form, seem to have been overwhelmingly drowned out by the commodified and capitilistic approach to art driven by the market. Even the museum falls prey to this kind of activity in curating and inviting shows that will draw the largest crowds (either to bolster entrance sales ala MOMA) or to provide continued justification for its existence to belt-tightening austerity governments.

Ultimately, some of Graeber’s most intriguing delineations of the shoulder-rubbing of the art and finance worlds comes as he talks of financiers and consumers of art as producers of value in a duchampian readymade sense, and the paradoxical parallels of replication and commodification of industrialization returning to artists as a sort of a proxy for the invisible labor of everyday. In this way is it a sort of unacknowledge exculpation of guilt for the outsourced and invisible labor on which their fortunes rely? The glue guns and bolts and images of made in america labor hanging on their walls at night is a protection from the ghosts of the invisible labor that the denim they sell by day invite.

Near the end of his essay Graeber returns to the role of art and art theorists in this age of immateriality and their role in the production of culture with the notion of the “permanent need to conjure up a sense that we are in a profoundly new historical moment.” This certainly seems to be the case for art scholar standouts such as Nicolas Bourriaud. But as Bourriaud himself has argued, we are in an age of the “death of the new” and I would say that is what is new is new but what is new is also old (see earlier posts on retromediation for example). This can be taken in two senses, the old is reflected in the aesthetics of the new (as in new media art revisiting concepts of material art history) as well as in the currency afforded to artists working with older technologies in the face of technological change (such as 16mm film for example).

Graeber may relate this retromediating impulse to the “terminal perturbations of capitalism” and the collapse of the future into the present as he does at the end of his essay. But perhaps this return to old(er) methods and old(er) modes of inquiry is not as stale as it first appears. I have begun to question if the end of postmodernity is marked instead by a return to modernity - Late modernity as Robert Kaufman would call it, or as others have suggested, the return of the real. Is this once again part of a larger trend towards a search for authenticity in the hyperglobalized and hypermediated world we live in? It is already too late to protect the realm of the local and the authentic from capitalism’s long arm. The very products we consume in rejection of big brands are really extensions of those brands themselves, albeit carefully concealed and crafted to obscure this fact. But this conversation will have to wait for a different day. Suffice it to say that we have certainly exercised a collective cognitive dissonance in which we, even the artists, are unsettlingly comfortable and at ease with our existence as the hybrid children of marx and coca-cola.

Melancholy, Down, and Historicity

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:52:00 +0900

Paul Klee - Angelus Novus/Angel of History (1920)

Albrecht Dürer Melancolia I (1514)

Thinking today about the treatment of Durer’s Melancolia I engraving and Paul Klee’s etching Angelus Novus in Giorgio Agamben’s “The Melancholy Angel” (from The Man Without Content) I ended up running into and remarking upon the somewhat slippery, ill-defined and shifty temporal qualities of melancholy.

On the one hand melancholy seems to be very clearly sandwiched inbetween the accumulated past and the unknowable future. Agamben quotes Walter Benjamin’s treatment of Klee’s etching in his “Theses on the Philosophy History”

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History 1940, p. 249)

Melancholia is therefore very clearly marked by an inescapable and inexorable existence in the here and the now of the present. While, today, this is normally conceived of as a positive attribute, for the angel of history (both Durer’s and Klee’s) this seems to be a weighty and burdening proposition. Durer’s angel is looking towards neither history nor the future but is instead compelled to dwell on the present in a dreamlike trance. Most notably the gaze of the angel is sideways, not forward or backward, neither focused on the future nor the past, but instead a downward-focused gaze towards the side and a certain blankness that suggests an introspection that is another element of the pensive nature of melancholia.

This downwardness is represented in the engraving by the heaviness of all objects in the engraving, the sheer weightiness and flightlessness of the corporeal figure of the seated angel and numerous other symbols and signs of melancholy. There is a potentiality of all objects in the scene but all are static. For example, there is the octagonal(or more?) stone that seems poised on the edge of rolling, like a dice, but has exhausted its supply of potential physical force to come to a rest on this precipice of its own face.

Now that we have firmly situated Melancholia as firmly residing in and being concerned with the present perhaps we can begin to parse out its relationship with related terms along a sort of melancholia-historicity axis.

Melancholia and Historicity Axis

The axis can run temporally alongside the major three chronological assignments of past present and future:

past————————present—————————future

nostalgia—————melancholia————————apathy

At the moment this is about as far as my thinking on this quality/dimension of melancholy has reached. I have become aware of the ‘presence’ of melancholia in the ‘present.’ I think this is useful to distinguish it from the related term of nostalgia, which is most often associated with a longing for the past or a sort of rosy-retrospection leading one to pine for an imagined golden age (although it is important to keep in mind that the original meaning of nostalgia was a very physical and geographical sickness of the pain of soldiers’ longing to return home). And finally an analog of melancholy in the future could be seen as a sort of apathy. It has been suggested by some such as Patrick Wright that melancholy in the present can be brought about by a certain lack of collective political will or clear direction for the future and at these certain points in time there is a noticeable difference in the attitudes and predispositions of urban society and the objects of adulation. The future component of melancholy like all future components seems to be more variable and less definitively stated though.

Other question when thinking about melancholy certainly arise.

How do we distinguish and separate melancholy and depression and is it important to do so?

Are melancholy and down really such exceptional sources of inspiration and revelation in our hypermediated digital environment?

In what ways do we seek out melancholy? Has it perhaps become an even more important concept precisely because of its scarcity and/or stigmatization by the frenetic information culture that surrounds us? Perhaps a resurgence of cultural respect for the concept of melancholy could be included as part of the larger trend towards Internet vacations and even the most recent ode to quiet by Pico Iyer in the New York Times.

Is it possible to imagine such a thing as technomelancholia? We are normally so starkly opposed in views of the future — utopic or dystopic, can there be a “stasis in progress” (as Gunther Grass describes Melancholia in The Diary of a Snail) in relation to attitudes toward technology, a sort of dwelling on the present in the fast-paced world of technology.

Also, as postmodernists we purport to have abandoned a unidirectional sense of progress as the arrow of time inexorably leading us, or propelling us, forward in the march of time. Therefore, if we embrace this tenet of postmodernism and are willing to apply this to the attitudes and dispositions towards technology in society, there must be some sort of illustration beyond binaries like dystopia/utopia, beyond embrace/rejection, beyond Luddism/Technophilia that can illuminate a technomelancholic perspective.

Perhaps some of these could account for recent historical revisionist projects such as the counterfactual histories of RCA graduate Sascha Pohflepp described here or the “retroprojective” visions of the Vancouver design for their Roundabout Vancouver Project in 2011 could become to describe tecnhomelancholia, or at least a retroactively forward-thinking melancholia.

Goodweather Design Collective, “Roundabout Vancouver” Part of a Larger Project found here

These questions and more will be the subject of my inquiry into melancholia over the next few weeks as I explore these thoughts and findings publicly and welcome any and all feedback.

Retromediation Revisited, Material and Film Aesthetics, and Tacita Dean

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:51:00 +0900

So, I kinda-sorta ended up trying to answer my own question that I suggested a few weeks ago regarding the possibility of there being something I called ‘retromediation.’

I ended up defining retromediation as the intentional return to an earlier or old(er) form of media for the very material qualities of production that such a medium possesses.

In so doing I hit upon the work of Tacita Dean who happens to have been the latest artists to be invited to install her work in the grand Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern here in London. While the physical jump from my classroom door to the work of Tacita Dean was only a few feet, I’m hoping that the conceptual one I took was a little bit greater. If a muddled academic mix of media and art theory with a healthy dose of neologisms are your thing then please read on.

RETROMEDIATION: THE TRACE OF PRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF POST-MEDIA AESTHETICS

—————————————————————————————————————

“Re-presentation” … is less engaged in setting forth things or the image of things than it is in setting up the machine.”

— Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 1981 p. 238

It is more than mere coincidence that both of the featured artists at the Tate Modern for the duration of this course - Gerhard Richter and Tacita Dean - are living artists concerned with the materiality of media. These artists independently developed methods that allow them to showcase the tactility and materiality of their respective media. We occupy a particular historical moment in which questions of the materiality of media are becoming a dominant discussion in a very immaterial information age.

I use Lev Manovich’s term post-media a little bit self-consciously here, especially in relation to McLuhan’s “medium is the message.” Manovich has argued that technological (technical) developments have ended the need for medium-specificity in contemporary art criticism (Manovich 2001, 10). In fact though, I think that recent tendencies in art have chosen to emphasize the medium and to expose its materiality. In fact, it is this very self-conscious treatment of the medium that links the work of Richter and Dean together.

Viewing work in a post-media context does, however, allow us to read content and authorial intent; two admittedly outdated terms that have been prematurely banished from the art critical lexicon. There is an interesting intertextual commonality between the work of Gerhard Richter and Tacita Dean, namely that they have both, at certain points in their career, made use of found footage to create work. For Tacita Dean this was in her 2001 monograph Floh, while Richter created his first photo-paintings in the late 1960s based upon found photographs (see figures 1 and 2). Most notably for Richter, he has painstakingly recreated a realistic reproduction of the found photograph with his trademark brush blur or soft focus effect. Owing to Richter’s particular painting technique it seems almost as though he has artificially created a patina of age for the photo-painting, as if he had sealed it at that moment in time. The same could be said of Dean’s monograph of found photos since the reproductions enclosed on archival paper will surely not age the same as the original. They have preserved as a relic the ephemeral quality of the amateur photograph.

So as not to run into any surprises, I will let you know now that this exploration of trace will primarily focus on Tacita Dean, and her installation FILM (figure 3) at the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2011, and is mostly concerned with analogue film aesthetics. That being said, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that we will briefly venture into a digital realm to make some parallels with glitch art (see figure 4). It is interesting to notice that Gerhard Richter (see figure 5 for example), in his squeegee paintings especially, shares many technical and aesthetic attributes with certain types of glitch art.

From painting to film to the digital there is a constant dialogue between media that seeks to arbitrate and perhaps even to justify their continued existence. This will be the focus of the next section on remediation.

REMEDIATION

In introducing the concept of remediation, we are essentially asking the question of how media interact with each other and what happens when a new(er) medium seeks to encroach on the territory traditionally occupied by another medium. Drawing upon McLuhan’s trope that “the “content” of any medium is always another medium,” (McLuhan 1964, 8) Bolter and Grusin describe the interplay between competing media as a process of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000).

Remediation is therefore the refashioning of the language, the signs and signifiers, of one medium by another. Bolter and Grusin describe this refashioning in the case of new media and the digital but also go to great lengths to note that the process of remediation is not particular to the digital era.

A few concrete examples will help to define this concept more clearly. In the context of web aesthetics, for example, the very structure of the internet is based around a series of pages, borrowing heavily from print media, which some may argue it is intended to usurp. Similarly, and most relevant for our discussion here, the language of digital video production is clearly tied to that of earlier film cinema with its cuts and edits.

Going further back in media history allows, according to Bolter and Grusin, for an even fuller confirmation of this effect. Films, then, are the remediation of stage plays and photography, and as they point out were originally called ‘photoplays’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 67-69). It is worth pointing out that others such as Friedrich Kittler and Walter Benjamin have invoked similar descriptions in their treatment of early film history. Moving on from film then, photography can be seen as a remediation of painting borrowing the language of portraiture and landscape photography to cite a very simple example. Italian Renaissance painting and its incorporation of linear perspective as well as trompe l’oeil painting styles are the beginning of this march towards immediacy.

In fact, for Bolter and Grusin, the very definition of a medium “is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 65). It is this notion of representing the ‘real’ that becomes of most significance for them. Essentially, the goal of remediation and all contemporary media is to represent the real and to erase our awareness of the media itself. They call this transparency of the medium immediacy.

This tendency toward ever more ‘accurate’ representation of the real is dangerously akin to Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal (Baudrillard 1994, 12). In some sense then, the only way we can create an illusion of reality is by exaggerating the very reality we seek to represent. This is made abundantly clear when we take into account that Bolter and Grusin were, in 2000, writing about remediation, transparency, and reality in terms of the budding technology of VR or virtual reality. Today though, we are less concerned with VR than with AR or Augmented reality. This begs the much larger question of whether there is a return to the ‘real’ real i.e., an implicit acknowledgement of the futility of representation by media. I will return to this idea for a more extended look in the section ‘traces of production.’ For the moment though, this question must be put aside to return to the matter at hand – remediation.

As new(er) media encounter old(er) media there is a period of remediation in which the methods of production of the new(er) are restricted by the archetypes and language of the old(er). In fact, this is a crucial point for Tacita Dean and her choice to return to celluloid film in so much of her work including FILM (2011). As she states, “[d]igital cinema has not yet come into itself. It will, I am sure, when it becomes less preoccupied with imitating and destroying its antecedent, film, and more focused upon innovation and its own potential” (Dean 2011, 16). This implicit understanding of the pitfalls of remediation is a crucial dialogue to consider in relation to the sometimes blindly euphoric portrayal of remediation by Bolter and Grusin. It is quite possible then, that film with its extensive history of experimentation and representation is entering a period in which it is liberated from the shackles of remediation of previous forms – something that the immature medium of digital video has yet to achieve.

At the moment I would propose that there is actually a reactionary and opposing tendency towards a self-conscious exposure of the medium and a reactionary skepticism of the hyperreality of contemporary digital media. I call this reaction and the ensuing desire to return to a historical medium the process of retromediation.

RETROMEDIATION

DID NEW MEDIA KILL THE CINEMA STAR?

In Digital Baroque Timothy Murray asks the question “does new media stand forth as the memento mori of cinema?” (Murray, p. ix)

This question is a hallmark of the age of remediation between new media/digital video and cinema. It is almost as if a battle is being fought between the two and claims for territory are staked. Perhaps we are entering into a moment in which film and digital video can begin to end their complicated dance of remediation and go their separate ways, each with a valid sense of achievement. Put very simply again, perhaps film with its long and complex history is entering a moment, such as painting did in the early twentieth century, in which it will abandon realist representation to the more capable medium of digital video. Even as the statement ‘painting is dead’ has echoed through countless art school hallways painting has endured as an art form, and arguably had somewhat of a resurgence recently. So too, I would strongly argue that there is, and will continue to be, a very specific role for film in the artistic process.

Retromediation is the conscious return to an old(er) medium, especially faced with new(er) media that compete to occupy the same zones of production and creation. Retromediation clearly requires a self-conscious awareness of the medium and an explicit intent by the user/author in choosing to use an old(er) one. In our hypermediated environment of new media in the digital age I see a growing desire on the part of consumers, producers, and artists to return to old(er) media. Examples include vinyl collectors, independent music labels that release new music on vinyl or tape, 35mm camera enthusiasts, and most notably for our explication here artists working with celluloid film in the age of digital video.

In this section I will explore some of the impulses towards retromediation that could begin to describe this tendency. I can only begin to introduce the various contributions, each of which deserve a much more careful and lengthier treatment than can be afforded here.

HIGH-FIDELITY

As we venture forward into a digital era characterized by ever-higher resolution and increasingly high definition to borrow digital photography and video terminology, there is an implicit and embedded message that we are approaching a more accurate representation of reality. Paradoxically, the increasing level of fidelity has given rise to a skepticism of the verifiability and trustworthiness of the medium. The ease with which the ‘truth’ can be unrecognizably altered in a digital medium through photomanipulation or digital video trickery has called into question the believability of the medium.

Conversely, we enjoy a certain sense of comfortable familiarity with the techniques employed by old(er) media to fool and deceive viewers. Our perception and ability to read and locate these techniques of deception have evolved along with the medium itself, or at least we think they have. Therefore there is a level of trustworthiness when we see something represented on film.

REVIVALISM

Just as remediation is not specific or new to our digital environment, the act of revivalism also has its historical precedents. We can look back at Decorative Arts movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries to see a consistent revivalism, basically anything prefaced by the term neo-. Early on, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the mid-19^th century took a retrospective approach to avant-gardism. Examples such as these demonstrate that the new is sometimes the old.

NOSTALGIA

Many would argue that both revivalism and retromediation can be easily explained away by nostalgia. For me this is an oversimplification of something much more complicated. It isn’t even clear if nostalgia is at work at all. We can define this kind of temporal nostalgia as a longing to return to a previous time (alternately labeled rosy retrospection or the golden age phenomenon). Still, this does little to explain the kind of phenomenon we see today such as 17-year-old photographers like Olivia Bee developing an entire career using the tools of 35mm camera photography that pre-date her birth.

Furthermore, what does this nostalgia suppose about our digital age? If we acknowledge that nostalgia for a pre-digital past does play a part in retromediation this would imply a staunch opposition to the tools of the digital age at our disposal. I don’t believe this is completely the case. For example, Tacita Dean, who is often misread as a nostalgic artist, explicitly states that she has benefited from modern technologies such as 3D printing in the design of her installation (Dean 2011, 29). So many critics have presented Tacita Dean’s work as emblematic of nostalgia, decay, and obsolescence (Bowring 2008 160-167). This reading may on some level be valid but seems to be somewhat superficial. Dean herself is not so much concerned with a longing to return to the past but with carving out a place for the past in the future. Or as she puts it the “importance of analogue in the digital age” because “digital is not the analogue of analogue” (Dean 2011, 33)

LOGIC OF FASHION

There is also the haunting possibility that seems to have some merit that this tendency towards retromediation is some sort of logic of fashion. There is a clear and cyclical tendency towards revivalism in fashion, although the pace and predictability of this seems to be disrupted in our information age. Is it possible that there is a fashion or faddism for old(er) media as well? I think that this could apply as a partial explanation to certain aspects of consumer society. For example, in the past 10 or so years I have observed small independent record labels begin to release on first vinyl records, then on tape, and more recently on CDs. Still, there is an enduring quality to vinyl records, 35mm cameras, and celluloid film that lead us to retromediate towards them as I will soon explain.

NEO-LUDDISM

Retromediation could also be seen as a form of Neo-Luddism. Still, it is unlikely that most of the users, consumers, and artists who choose to retromediate have completely given up the trappings of digital culture. Instead there is more likely to be a hybridization or collocation of the two.

RESPONSE TO TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

There is a stronger possibility that retromediation is a tacit response to technological determinism. It is quite possible that this tendency towards retromediation is a willing reaction to the idea that our world, our society and values, will be shaped by technology. This threat seems to be more and more disturbing as technology become more and more pervasive in our lives and thus it makes sense that a reactionary response to this threat would be growing.

POSTPRODUCTION

Artists are responding and reacting to the dominant form of the nineties that involved appropriation, remix, and consumption of the past. A rejection of the predominance of postproduction – both as an aesthetic form, and a technique made so much more available by digital media. In essence, artists at the vanguard of retromediation are less and less postproduction artists and more and more production artists instead. I would like to argue that this rejection of the post- in post-production is indicative of a larger notion of rejecting the post- in post-modern and returning to some of the aesthetic ideals of modernism such as emphasis on the materiality of the medium.

Instead of reimagining uses for past products, the original intended use is returned to and celebrated. This is in stark contrast to Bourriaud’s description of the dominant aesthetic quality of the flea market in relation to art in the nineties.

To briefly sum up Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of postproduction artists these two quotes will be illustrative:

“An object once used in conformance with the concept for which it was produced now finds new potential uses in the stalls of the flea market” (Bourriaud 2002, 29).

“Postproduction artists invent new uses for works, including audio or visual forms of the past, within their own constructions.” (Bourriaud 2002, 45).

SCARCITY IN THE FACE OF PROSUMERISM

Following on from Bourriaud’s evaluation of the dominant aesthetic of the nineties in Postproduction, another useful concept can be gleaned from this text, the idea of prosumerism. Or, as he states it, the “ecstatic consumer of the eighties is fading out in favor of an intelligent and potentially subversive consumer: the user of forms” (Bourriaud 2002, 39). It was actually Alvin Toffler who coined the term prosumer as a portmanteau of production and consumer in 1971 while Lev Manovich arrived at its commonly understood usage today as a professional-grade consumer.

Essentially, an argument can be made that the ubiquity of professional quality equipment has undermined the privileged status of the artist/director. This democratization of production erodes the scarcity that contributes to value. As a result, some artists and directors are retromediating or returning to old(er) media for the scarcity value and rarity of technical expertise that is required to engage with such old(er) media.

MATERIALITY

I believe that above all the tendency towards retromediation has to do with the materiality and physicality of the medium and thus, above all, not simply a nostalgia trap. Against a background of post-media aesthetics in which the medium is not supposed to be of import, a number of artists are responding to the immateriality of such an approach by returning to mechanical or handmade methods of production. In other words they are retromediating. This material quality of the media could in some ways be thought of as a Derridean supplementarity as Gitelman and Pingree have suggested (2004, xiv).

In the case of film, the images captured on celluloid seem to express something very material about the medium they are captured on. We have come to read these signs of the medium as a marker for material quality. The grain, sprockets, and cue marks are essential qualities of the medium that we didn’t know were valued until they were lost. It is these imperfections, artifacts, and aberrations that are inscribed upon the very surface of the film that I would like to call the traces of production.

TRACES OF PRODUCTION

The traces of production are those elements and artifacts that remain in the realized product that point to the method used to create them. They are the graininess of a film grain, the dust on the lens of a camera reproduced in the image, or to use a classic example the stroke of the brush on the canvas.

I firmly believe that these methods of production are an essential quality of both authorship and spectatorship in a work of art. Harkening back to Lev Manovish’s assertion that we are in an age of post-media aesthetics, I must strongly qualify his statements. There is a stark distinction between content and context in this sense. Perhaps we can use the notion of a post-media aesthetic to explore new relationships, both intertextual(intermedia) and (a)historical. For this, I believe is the value of his assertion. This can only be done though by prioritizing the content and de-emphasizing the context.

In some cases, however, I believe just as McLuhan did that “the medium is the message,” at least in the context of contemporary art. In other words that the very awareness of the medium is the focal point of the work of art and that erasure or denial of the medium irrevocably damages our ability to view it. This self-conscious awareness of the medium and the valuation of traces of production is the very reason for retromediation by artists. As a spectator too we gain great pleasure from these traces of production, these indications of the hand at work. I am surely not alone when I admit that a large part of the museum experience for me is taken up by a sort of guessing game in which I attempt to speculate upon which medium each work was created. It is perhaps owing to the inability to touch most works of art that leads the tactility of the medium to take on a more immediate and visual urgency. It is this materiality of the medium in the traces of production that re-imagine the Benjaminian ‘aura’ in the work of art.

AURA

Put very simply, for Walter Benjamin, the aura of a work of art was its uniqueness originality, authenticity, and distance. Owing to the breadth of scholarship on aura I will not revisit an interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” but instead point you to three quotes that I have found useful in understanding the concept:

We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.(Benjamin 1968, 223).

“[aura] as an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity” (Hansen 2008, 340).

“the aura created through the artist’s imaginative labor, the trace-presence of something no longer literally, physically present but nonetheless still shimmering”

(Kaufman 2002, 46)

AURA STILL

In ‘Aura Still’ Robert Kaufman repositions Benjamin’s aura in conversation with Brecht and Adorno. He updates this conversation and most notably posits that:

“the real life of Benjamin’s mechanical-reproduction theory has occurred during its posthumous celebration in postmodernism, precisely the period in which the culture of the copy, simulacrum, and reproduction has come to make modernism itself look romantically auratic” (Kaufman 2002, 46).

This concept of romantically auratic modernism in relation to Benjamin’s original romanticization of painting and stage plays in the face of photography and film are important tools to helping us here to understand the auratic qualities of retromediation and traces of production in the digital age.

AURA NOW

Today aura is undergoing a reevaluation. The aura of Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction has clearly undergone a transition in the age of digital reproduction. Bolter may come closest to a conclusive statement when he points out that

“What Benjamin identified was not the end of aura, but rather an ongoing crisis, in which the experience of aura is alternately called into question and reaffirmed” (Bolter et al 2006, 21).

AURA AND HISTORICITY

To update Benjamin to a contemporary context, for he was writing during the infancy of film and writing in relation to painting, portraiture, and dramatic arts, one must look closely at the relationship between aura and historicity.

“The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well”(Benjamin 1968, 223).

Today, film has developed an aura of its own precisely because it is deemed to be scarce and rarified in relation to the work of art in the age of digital reproduction. There is a sense of historicity to the material quality of film that becomes evident in the traces of production.

Thus aura can be considered perhaps to be a relative phenomenon. In relation to digital video, film has come to signify a certain authenticity along the historicity-authenticity axis that Benjamin describes or as Grant Wythoff, quoting Benjamin puts it most clearly

“In a strange spatiotemporal convergence, spatial proximity to work of art entails a certain apprehension of the temporal distance or historicity, what Benjamin variously calls its “authenticity,” “historical testimony,” “the mark of history,” all of which must be encountered in the presence of “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (Wythoff 2009).

AURA AND TRACES OF PRODUCTION

The relationship between traces of production and aura is thus one of broadcasting or signification. It is the traces of production that signify the materiality of the medium and its uniqueness and historicity. It is these historical marks that are inscribed upon the very material of the medium that allow us to gain access to an understanding of the authenticity of the original in a Benjaminian sense.

SELF-CONSCIOUS FILM

Film and the cinematic celluloid provide us with a clear example of these traces of production. Film has always been a self-conscious medium. From the start it has been aware of its inability to represent reality in a straightforward sense. In order to achieve a sense of narrative it must employ the artificial methods of cuts and edits.

For film to succeed it has also had to become aware of the potential of the camera to influence perception. These camera techniques rely upon an awareness of medium itself, an awareness of the apparatus. The awareness of the role of the camera is made most clear in Hitchcock’s vertiginous dolly-zoom effect in Vertigo (1958).

CHINATOWN

In Roman Polanski’s neo-noir of 1974 Chinatown (itself a revival of genre), the director of photography John A. Alonzo employed a cinematographic technique known as the lens flare (figure 7). The lens flare relies on the anamorphic structure of the lens to diffuse light unevenly across the camera. This ocular property of the lens then creates an uneven distribution of light and dark. In Chinatown this technique was employed purposefully in order to create a heightened sense of the aridity of the drought-stricken Los Angeles of the 1930s.

The lens flare technique is an example of a trace of production, an ocular artifact of the lens, or might we say glitch of technology having become implicated in a signifying relationship with a spectatorial audience, creating a reality more real than reality (hyperreality). Let us unpack this statement. The lens flare is a glitch because it is an unintended effect of the technology or medium that serves to make the audience aware of the medium. It is therefore also a trace of production. It also an easily avoided glitch that had up until this point been negated by the use of the lens hood by cinematographers. It has been implicated in a signifying relationship with the audience because its purposive implementation has come to be associated with heat, aridity, and the desert. Finally, it is a Baudrillardian hyperreality in that it communicates the real only by exaggerating the artificial.

CELLULOID, CIGARETTES, and SPROCKETS

Film provides us with many more examples of traces of production. The celluloid materiality of the film embeds a certain graininess in its visual representation. It is not just celluloid that does so, all formats of film throughout the ages have a certain ascertainable mark of historicity that allow us to quickly approximate its vintage. In actuality, this is one of the most important concepts of the trace of production, as a marker of historicity. In all sense, the trace of production allows us to sub-consciously and visually access information regarding the epoch.

Another clearly visible marker of the trace of production in film is colloquially known as cigarette burns but are really cue marks. These cue marks appear as small dots in the upper corner of the film and go unnoticed to most audiences absorbed in the film. They are relics of the age of the mechanical projectionist to whom they signaled the impending end of one reel and to prepare to switch to the next. Similarly, the sprockets are the groove-like perforations on the edges of film that allow it to be fed through the projector. Also unnoticed by most audiences they are most clearly associated with the material quality of the film itself and its having to physically move through space. In early films these perforations are more often evident as the misalignment of the film with the projector would cause these edges to become apparent to the audience.

TACITA DEAN AND AURA

These traces of production in film, the graininess of the film, the cue marks, and the sprockets are what produce the filmic quality of film. In Tacita Dean’s 2011 work FILM these elements, the traces of production, are the very aspects that she seeks to highlight on a grand scale. She wishes for us to identify with the film as a material medium and to recognize the “importance of analogue in the digital age” (Cullinan 2011, title). It is by highlighting the traces of production emphasizing the continuing importance of its aesthetic qualities, and reviving the medium as a whole that Dean restores aura to that was originally the source of its decay. Tacita Dean’s work demonstrates that, in the digital age, there can be a distinctly auratic quality about film work that fulfills all of the criteria of Benjamin’s original aura – distance/depth, irreproducibility, and historicity.

—NEGATION OF NOSTALGIA

The return of the aura to film is in no way the same as nostalgically eulogizing the medium. In fact the traces of production that are the historicizing elements are what allows spectators to identify with the work. This is not to say as so many have that it is simply a case of artists like Dean having fallen into a nostalgia trap, but instead, as Tacita Dean’s curator for the Turbine Hall exhibition of FILM Nicholas Cullinan put it, a “revivification” of the medium (Cullinan et al 2011, p. 11).

—DISTANCE

As an epigraph to her essay in the accompanying catalogue Tacita Dean includes a quotation by French filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac

“The seventh art, that of the screen, is depth rendered perceptible, the depth that lies beneath that surface; it is the musical ungraspable.” (Dulac 1928, pp. 31-5 cited Dean 2011, p. 48)

In this way too Tacita Dean’s installation upends conventional notion of the non-auratic qualities of film. The scale and position of the installation in the massive space of the Turbine Hall invites the audience to choose to relate to the work at any distance with no clearly defined or proscriptive setting for spectatorship. Furthermore, there is an inherent transparency and distance to many of the scenes within the work as the back wall of the turbine hall itself is backgrounded.

Thus, Dean returns aura to film through the “phenomenon of distance.”

—REPRODUCIBILITY

Another key aspect of aura as we have noted is “uniqueness” or irreproducibility in contrast to mechanical or digital reproduction. With Dean’s installation exploring the aura of film she is denying this method of mechanical production its reproducibility. The very scale of the installation and the methods used to produce it including the vertically upended camera angle and anamorphism of the lens to name but a few clearly implicate the uniqueness of this installation in a particular place.

—HISTORICITY

Grant Wythoff most notably reads Benjamin’s notion of authenticity as linked to a notion of historicity and the marks of historicity. It is exactly this mark of history that can only be identified if the traces of production are evident, which they very notably are in the case of Dean’s installation.

“To be sure, a medieval picture of the Madonna at the time it was created could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries, and perhaps most strikingly so during the nineteenth” (as if aura is something cultivated). (Wythoff 2009)

It is here that we can again point to the 117 year-long history of film (as opposed to its 40 years in Benjamin’s time) as evidence of its ability to invoke aura. It is also true that if we believe aura to be a relative term, the auratic can only be defined in relation to the non-aruatic, just as Benjamin did in comparing painting and photography or theatre and film. Essentially then, aura/non-aura can be understood to be a relative phenomenon as opposed to a static one that privileges one medium over another. Therefore, in a digital age such as we live in, film can begin to take on an auratic quality in relation to digital video so long as it self-consciously expresses its traces of production rather than seeking to erase them.

—TRACE, ARTIFACT, AND GLITCH

The traces of production heretofore explored have a very material and textual quality. They can be created by hand. They occur naturally through decay and degradation. They are artifacts of the method of production. And they connect us to the authorship and perhaps even the authorial intent.

Glitches are a truly analogous digital mechanism for exposing traces of production. They also owe a conceptual debt to readymades and later found photography like those employed by Richter and Dean (figures 1 and 2) Glitches can also be intentionally created and made to expose their own traces of production (see Cory Arcangel figure 4).

We must strive to enjoy, preserve, and utilize the medium-specific advantages of film for its aesthetic benefits, but regardless of the medium, it is most important to expose the traces of production so as to create an intimacy with the spectator and a sense of aura through historicity, distance, and irreproducibility. It is exactly these auratic qualities that the glitch imbues in a digital work. As traces of production they are at once medium-specific and specific to the historical technology that created them. They could be seen to create distance and depth since they expose the backside or underlying architecture of the program that is creating the visual representation. And finally, a true glitch, in opposition to a manufactured one, cannot be reproduced; it is a unique, temporary, and temporal event. There can be kinship in this from across the digital threshold when we look at the glitch as a trace of production.

It has not been the purpose of this exploration to speculate on the future but merely to explore tendencies by artists working in both analog and digital environments to intentionally expose the traces of production and to suggest that they may have a linked concern with reinvigorating authorial intent in the face of yet another wave of auratic reality machines. Ultimately then, the purpose of retromediation is to reintroduce the concept of medium in an age of post-media aesthetic by recognizing, absorbing, and exposing the traces of production inherent in each medium thereby returning the notion of aura to the work of art an age of post-media aesthetics.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Benjamin, Walter (1968). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Shocken, pp.217-252.

Bourriaud, Nicolas (2001). Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg,

Bowring, Jacky (2008). A Field Guide to Melancholy. Herts: Oldcastle Books

Bolter, Jay et al. (2006). ‘New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.’ Convergence: the International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 12, London: Sage Publications, pp. 21-39.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cullinan, Nicholas (2011). ‘Film Still.’ In FILM ed. Nicholas Cullinan, London: Tate Publishing, pp. 8-13.

Dean, Tacita (2011). ‘Film.’ In FILM ed. Nicholas Cullinan, London: Tate Publishing, pp. 15-48.

Derrida, Jacques (1981). Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dulac, Germaine (1928). ‘Visual and Anti-visual Films.’ In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York, 1978, pp. 31-5. Quoted in FILM ed. Nicholas Cullinan, London: Tate Publishing, 2011 pp. 48.

Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey B. Pingree (2004). New Media: 1740-1915. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hansen, Miriam Bratu (2008). ‘Benjamin’s Aura.’ Critical Inquiry, 34, pp. 336-374.

Kaufman, Robert (2002). ‘Aura, Still.’ October, 99, pp. 45-80.

Manovich, Lev (2001). ‘Post-Media Aesthetics.’ In disLOCATIONS, ed. A. Sommer, Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, pp. 10-20.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1^st edn. New York: McGraw Hill.

Murray, Timothy (2008). Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wythoff, Grant (2009). ‘The Concept of “Aura” in Benjamin’s Artwork Essay’ Medium Cool: media, technology, and culture through the lens of various science fictions. Accessed: 01/07/2012

Appendix

(all images copyright the artist)

Figure 1

Tacita Dean, Floh (2001)

Figure 2

Gerhard Richter, Lovers in the forest / liebes paar im wald (1966)

Figure 3

Tacita Dean, FILM (2011)

Figure 4

Cory Arcangel, Screen Capture of Data Diaries 4 (2002)

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/

Figure 5

Gerhard Richter, Juno (1983)

Figure 6

Roman Polanski, Still from Chinatown (1974)

Werq I did in Tokyo in 2011

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 05:04:48 +0900

Werq I did in Tokyo in 2011

If Remediation ‘is the imitation of features of a previous...

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 03:54:00 +0900

If Remediation ‘is the imitation of features of a previous medium by a subsequent one,’ is there such a thing as retromediation.

~If so what form does it take?

photomanipulation via glitchnews

Shanghai 2010

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:07:05 +0900

Shanghai 2010

Desperately Thinking Coldness soulpowwerrz: Aurora australis...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:45:00 +0900

Desperately Thinking Coldness

soulpowwerrz:

Aurora australis (Southern Light) over icebergs (by zacharycellis)

Counterfactual History and Speculative Futures

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:54:34 +0900

Counterfactual History and Speculative Futures:

The Golden Institute, by Sascha Pohflepp, not only explores the energy issue through the lens of an alternate history of the USA, but also attempts to examine how visions of the future are being created and how they can make us reflect on contemporary issues.

Photo

Fri, 06 May 2011 13:19:14 +0900

Digital Nostalgia

Sun, 01 May 2011 18:09:00 +0900

Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds (2002)

I find it particularly intriguing that artists who choose to confront the role of technology in society (either as a subject or as a medium) often take a retrogressive stance. This type of work predominantly takes two forms: repurposing (to make something new out of old) or retro/nostalgia (to look towards the past from the present).

On the one hand, work that repurposes older technologies to make them appear new or to arrive at new functionality exists. These include artists working from an environmental perspective, working with circuit bending, game hacking, and creating digital/analog hybrids. Such works serve as a bridge linking our past with our technological present. These formats also comment on the rapid obsolescence of technologies.

Furthermore, a decidedly lo-fi, lo-tech approach is observed in artists working in the fields of 8-bit art, gif art, html and Ascii art as well. A notable example, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds strips bare the popular video game, removing all gameplay and interactivity from it. Instead, he takes the clouds that float in the background and excises from their context within the game to create a serene digital projection that playfully and purposefully connects with the collective memory of the millions of people who played this game.

In a commercial sense too, this nostalgia for a pre-digital aesthetic has become an essential marketing tool for such popular and ubiquitous technologies like Hipstamatic on the iPhone among others. Such commercially successful technologies allow users to move forward to new technologies without shedding the appeal created by artifacts from an earlier age.

It is ultimately this drive to connect technology with a sense of collective memory through nostalgia that fascinates me. For most purposes, technology is a driving force in creating social and economic change, and it is associated with the notion of progress. However, in the face of such rapid change, nostalgia seems to be employed as a way to reconcile the rate of change with our (false?) sense of loss.

Research questions:

* What role does nostalgia exert on shaping technology?

* How do artists, scientists, technologists, and culture in general reconcile the drive for progress and change with nostalgia?

* What do these early attempts at representing our collective memory of technology say about the way in which technology is remembered?

Many questions remain to be answered and I hope to use some of the background provided by philosophers and scholars like Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were, Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, Linda Hutcheon’s “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” and Baudrillard’s “Hystericizing the Millennium” to inform this research.

Glitch Architecture

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:24:00 +0900

Glitch architecture is a heretofore unexplored approach to looking at architecture. It draws on the concept of glitch art that explores often-unintentional disruptions that can occur when using technology. These disruptions are all-the-more disturbing in the context of architecture given our predisposition to believe in the highly planned and structured nature of building. Even the pairing of words seems to indicate a mistake or error leading to failure. But these glitches can actually lead to innovation and success.

The interstitial space between glitch and architecture are not as drastic as they may at first glance seem. Aside from the obvious connections between methods of architecture and means of technology, the Media Lab’s founder and esteemed computational architect Nicholas Negroponte was an early explorer in the field of algorithmic architecture along with cybernetic architect Gordon Pask. These two, along with many others, grew the field of architecture hand in hand with that of media art while exhibiting alongside each other at shows like 1968’s groundbreaking Cybernetic Serendipity.

In my intention to use the concept of the glitch as applied to architecture I envision two primary courses of inquiry:

1 glitch art based on architecture building as a subject

Here we see an example of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel seen through the now defunct net art portal “glitch browser.” This image disturbs the linearity of the structure and upsets our notions of the stability of architecture and buildings.

Secondly, an example from Olivier Ratsi’s series anarchitectures clearly weds the concept of the glitch and the building as the subject. This photomanipulation upends our assumptions of the nature of a building and intentionally uses the concept of the glitch to explore the impossible.

2 Glitch art informing architectural innovation and conceptual architecture

Renzo Piano’s singularly identifiable Centres Georges Pompidou was constructed to embody the principles of a new form of modernism that took into account the increasingly networked structure of society and the growing influence of computers, algorithms, and cybernetics.

More recently, some architects have been exploring the concept of the glitch as a method of architectural innovation. Here we see theoretical work by Hannah Durham at the Architectural Association in London that explores the effects of unintended duplication on the façade of the imperial plaza.

Related Tendencies

3 Digital Architecture

Of course, the concept of the glitch also brings us into association with the realm of the digital. Digital architecture projects that explore the way we inhabit digital spaces allow for a freedom of expression that references reality but also designs the impossible. Second Life and the work of Cao Fei’s RMB City pictured here demonstrate these principles in the digital sphere.

4 Glitches in the Urban and Built Environment

(Food Deserts)(Food desert Caravan) (Urban Farming) (Urban Homesteading)

As an extension of the concept of the glitch I imagine exploring failures in infrastructure and the unintended consequences of urban development and decay. This type of glitch can occur when urban design and infrastructure encounter an anomaly and become estranged from their original design. For example, urban food deserts occur in many cities in the United States where access to fresh produce is severely restricted for urban (often poor and minority) residents. This glitch arose from the unintentional results of extended economic depression and population decline in areas like Detroit and parts of South and West Chicago. However, these glitches also provide opportunities for ‘patches’ or solutions to ameliorate these conditions. Some examples include a proposed mobile grocer called the Food Desert Caravan in Chicago, and the revitalization of decaying urban areas through urban homesteading and farming in cities like Detroit.

I think it is most important to see glitches in their most expansive definition possible. A glitch can be defined as a sudden or unintended irregularity. Applying this concept historically in the process of architecture, as well as creating bridges between architecture and computational art, will help to elucidate the ways in which glitches have contributed to our current built environment.

Firstly, the project will be multidisciplinary in scope meaning that it will draw on a variety of methods used by architects, urban planners, and urban designers. I plan to investigate and find examples of glitches that may occur at any point in the process from sketches to modeling, implementation, and the realized product.

This approach will allow for an (a)historical methodology that will seek to highlight the cause and effect of glitches rather than a chronological progression. Since the concept of the glitch is so linked to the use of technology, and technology being such a foundational element of architecture and design through the ages, I expect to be able to compile a cross-sectional view of the concept as it has manifested throughout history despite the glitch itself being a relatively recent phenomenon.