The Story of the Kelly Gang

I dropped in to ACMI's Screen Worlds exhibit. Included there is footage from the 1906 Story of the Kelly Gang (clips available from Australian Screen), transferred to video, preserving the distorting effects where the nitrate stock has melted, burned or otherwise reacted chemically with its environment prior to its restoration.

The result is a video which constantly oscillates between faithful reproduction of a filmed drama and the broiling deformations of the decayed filmstrip. The resulting video is a viscously attractive palimpsest of natural and historical process, a suture of fiction and material over which, once instigated, neither chemist nor filmmaker have no control. The telecine transfer must have proceeded frame by frame, given the deformity and fragility of the original, and therefore stands as a remediation which has as purpose to reconstruct an imagined ideal, reconstructing frame rate, aspect ratio, contrast levels and steadiness of illumination, so preserving as much as possible of the original while at the same time demonstrating both the archivists' art and the necessity and urgency of practicing it on the Australian visual heritage. Yet it is a profound and beautiful visual experience in itself, one is none the worse because, for want of an identifiable author and therefore of an identifiable intent, we cannot be justified in calling it a work of art. It is exactly that boundary of justification that takes us to the boundary of the 'uncanny valley' in a-life where rationalist conceptions of the posthuman meet its actuality, that marks a-life as significant even though it is a-signifying, or even (as chora) pre-signifying, even when post-human. It is the fact that the distortions in the ACMI Ned Kelly do not 'signify', in the sense of constructing meaningful differences inside an agreed system for the production and syntagmatic-paradigmatic management of signs. But this fact is itself significant, in Bateson's sense of 'a difference that makes a difference', that creates information, that occurs not within a system but at that boundary where system breaks out of its structural stasis and embraces the dimension of time. This is a proto-cinematic artefact of the uncanny imbrication of intentional human design (the 19th century realist drama and photographic record of the original Kelly) and processes unleashed (chemical or code) which operate in the medium, as medium, beyond the borders of human intent. It is an artificial life form, one that has evolved on a set of initiating chemical conditions according to its own un-human logic, remodelling one code in form of another, or to borrow from Metz, from a language without a code to a code without a language. There are lessons here for our understanding of the analog media.

The Rage to Order

from a chapter on the derivation of laser and fibre-optics from the principles of cinema projection, a first version of which was given as a presentation at the Screen conference in 2011. It argues that light has been increasingly organised in the interests of commodification and biopolitical management

Late in his life, affected by the cases of shell-shock he had witnessed after the first World War and perhaps even more so by the rise of Nazism, Freud proposed the idea of the death instinct. From 1920 to 1930, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to Civilisation and its Discontents (Freud 1961a, 1961b), he developed a dense theorisation of a drive towards entropy informing both personal and social structures. The child's fascination with the flaring match, which Lyotard sees as the epitome of cinema, illustrates that this drive, like every other, easily oscillates between positive and negative poles: between the drive to destruction and the drive towards order. If at one extreme, this leads to the repetition compulsion and to a collapse into the inorganic, at the other it leads to the kind of pathological command over physical reality which, paradoxically, no longer frees us from the contingency of the laws of physics but enslaves us to their organisation in global technical systems, themselves expressions as well as formative vehicles of an increasingly global order. The historical realisation of Kantian freedom from the laws of nature as foundation of the 'cosmopolitan intent' has in actuality come about not through international law, as he imagined (Kant 1983), but through the kind of normative technical structures underpinning the pursuit of coherent light. This pursuit was undoubtedly experienced in the beginning as an autonomous movement of the nascent techno-science of the late 19th century, but has become rigorously integrated into the hardwiring of contemporary global infrastructures. It will be one of the key challenges of the 21st century to develop both radical ways of working within this already ossified system, and to invent new modes of working with light that involve not simply freeing it, as an entropic gesture, but finding new ways to create in partnership with light, rather than through its enslavement.

The Freeze Frame in Source Code

(excerpted from a talk at St Andrews about David Jones' film Source Code. IMdB notes the cameras used in the film, analog and digital. The passage starts considering the properties of one of those)

The Phantom HD has a specific function in film production: the maximum speed of the Panasonic film camera is 50fps, that of the Phantom 555fps, giving it the capacity to record extremely small timespans, and to give the illusion of extreme slow motion on playback. This is the kind of technique used for filming fireballs of the kind repeatedly shown in Source Code, and almost certainly for the freeze frame that occurs at the climax. It is impossible not to evoke Laura Mulvey's critique of the digital freeze here: ‘film’s original moment of registration can suddenly burst through its narrative time ...The now-ness of story time gives way to the then-ness of the time when the movie was made...’ (Mulvey 2006: 30-31). Though I cannot do justice to her argument here, let's think through the function of the freeze in Source Code. Colter (the protagonist) has finally worked out how to fill his eight minutes: capturing the terrorist, wooing the girl, and creating a community (as much like the sing-song on the bus in Capra's It Happened One Night as it is like Groundhog Day) at peace and enjoying itself. A few minutes later, he will call this 'a perfect day'. The perfect moment – coinciding with the crisis back in the world of his mortal body – is arrested, almost certainly using the extreme speed of exposure of the Phantom. And yet, even at these extreme speeds, the structure of the image is bound to the clock function of the chip. Looking carefully at the language Mulvey uses, we can emphasise something explicit in the digital mode: she speaks of the time when the movie was made. This is not a moment, not a Husserlian Augenblick, instantaneous and whole. It is, most specifically, an image which is non-identical. Quite apart from its delivery as DVD or BluRay digital scan, even in the cinema, this shot is ontologically incomplete, even as it tries to capture the perfect moment perfectly executed. It is exactly time, time which can only exist as change, that is in the processes in which things become other than themselves.

The Latent Image

My essay on The Latent Image has just been published by the online International Journal of the Image, my keynote for the inaugural conferenc on the image at UCLA. The journal and the publishing platform are worthy of support; I'm grateful that they allowed me to make this essay available open source: here's the abstract

How can we describe a moving image, composed of thousands of successive images, as “an” image? I want to explore the possibility that the coherence of the image is premised on latency. A latent image is one which is captured in photographic film prior to development. It is by nature invisible. Similarly invisible latent states structure lenses, aperture ratios, compositing, grading and edits. Looking at the codec wars currently breaking out in preparation for HTML5, this talk investigates the relationships between the aesthetics and political economy of the image in the 21st century.

post-post-medium: Just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

The following comes from the close of an essay arguing that the divisions between film, video and digital media arts make no sense and weaken all three. At the same time it argues for a new medium-specificity, one based on what is specific to a specific work or practice: the specific assembly of devices, peripherals, software, operating systems, power source, lenses, architecture that make a particular edit suite or installation or cinema. The new medium-specificity is a new materials=ism, against the dematerialising, idealist claims of art critics since Rosalind Krauss's A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition a little over ten years ago. It is also a veiled response to attempts to assign a single aesthetic to "the digital" (information aesthetics, code). Instead, there's a claim that the history of the media arts is in some respects a mode of media archeology.

The role of media arts is to enter into mediation. They may in passing reveal the mediated nature of the message, and they may well speak to the specificity of the media employed (in the same way Beuys speaks to the specificity of felt and fat). They do speak to the material specificity of mediation – not to some generic and universal ether, nor to the primacy of objects over mediation. Our age recognises the primacy of the connection over the node, the flows that concatenate into nets, the needs and desires that aggregate into individuals and social groups. They assert that the mediation matters: an active verb, the becoming-material of connectivity. They render material the natural desire of the sunflower for the sun through photophilic biochemistry. Media arts insist that all art is made with media; that everything is mediates and every process mediates. This is the only universal for the media arts. An example: lithography ties Fox Talbot's experiments with halftone printing to the technology employed in fabricating chips. Mediation is the very medium of history. Thus the media history of art, and media art history as its avant garde, is a history of mediations within and between human, technological and natural processes, bodies in light and sympathetic vibrations. The power of media art history is its project: the truth of the future, not of the past.

Thanks to Domenico Quadrato for starting these thoughts, and to Eddie Shanken and Cate Elwes for te ongoing discussions

Getting specific about medium specificity

Mostly when we say "medium" we mean something of a pretty high order of complexity: TV, say. Or, saints preserve us, 'digital' (I once wrote a book called Digital Aesthetics: hubris, to believe that there was only one aesthetics for the whole digital realm). These media are constructs, not just feats of engineering but imaginary engines, imaginary in that we ascribe to them a coherence they do not actually possess. Convergence is the tip of the iceberg: so many elements which comprise the digital (and TV) are shared with other media. Take lens technologies for example. There are no analog or digital lenses.

Each medium is already a dozen technologies arranged in a system. To label one assemblage “photography” is almost silly: we have to look a) at the elements from which it is composed and b) the commonalities it has with other media. The term ‘medium’ would be better reserved for, say, a type of screen. And then we might be able to find some new results: coherent light operating in scientific instrumentation, fibre optics and a Jean-Michel Jarre lightshow has certain common characteristics but we rarely understand laser as a free-standing medium like print – and yet the commonalities are significant, as are continuities with pre-laser techniques for disciplining light waves.

(thanks to Kris Cannon for sparking this thought)

Imitation of Life, Truth and the Turing Test

Douglas Sirk's 1959 film opens when two young widows, one white one black, meet with their daughters. Lora prefers her career as an actress to her daughter Suzie or her lover. Her profession is an imitation. Her new best friend Annie is an Aunt Jemima who sacrifices her own welfare become Lora's housekeeper and to raise Lora's daughter. Her own daughter Sarah-Jane longs to be white, passes as white. Love interest Steve is a photographer whose images are just images (in the opening scene he appears to be trying to forge Weegee's famous 1937 shot of crowds on the beach at Coney Island). He is the object of a teenage crush from Lora's daughter. The whole thing is recounted in startling Technicolor, then as now a byword for gaudy and fraudulent colour.

John Gavin, who plays Steve the love interest, was half Mexican but passes here as authentically American, all-American. He would in later life be appointed ambassador to Mexico by another actor, Ronald Reagan, of whose presidency Gil Scott Heron would sing "This ain't really a life, ain't nothing but a movie". The real-life daughter of Lana Turner, who plays Lora, killed Turner's lover, though the inquest found she acted in self-defense, to the incredulity of Hollywood insiders and conspiracy nuts ever since. Turner herself had been, only a few years earlier, the target of a vitriolic attack by DH Lawrence on the faux sexuality of the 'sweater-girl'. All characters in the film are played by people who are not the people we see on the screen. Sirk's Brechtian heritage (as Detlef Sierck he was involved in the political theatre of Weimar) is all over their stilted performances, and the distances between them, filled with the things which fill up the spaces in which the characters' lives are not lived.

The problems only begin here. The soi-disant "truth" is that Sarah-Jane "is" black; and that Lora should have married Steve, so preventing the ghastly crush her daughter has on him. That is, the only available truth which they imitate is that of race and the Oedipal family. (That Annie and Lora are both widows suggests the Oedipal role of the dead father; and the suspicion that the same man might have fathered both daughters . . . ). But the finale at Annie funeral reveals that the only Truth is Death, and that truth is fatal. Except that we survive, weeping in the audience: we for whom the entire charade has been played out experience an imitation of emotion. And of course there is no Death, only a staged funeral with no body in the coffin. And we know it (je sais mais quand même): the only available truth is a disavowal, merely a Romantic willing suspension of disbelief, a conspiracy to act as if there were a truth, veiled underneath the appearances, underneath the ideologies. Truth is a projection, one we project as much as the cinematic apparatus does.

Nine years before Sirk's film's release, Alan Turing set out the terms of the Turing test. An interrogator in a room separated from a machine and a person asks questions, the answers to which are to prove which of the two unseen competitors is human and which a machine. In the cinema there is nothing behind the screen, only a loudspeaker. Not even a voice. Not even a recording of a voice, which is on the optical soundtrack up in the projection booth over our heads and behind our backs. The richness of this hall of mirrors and the cynical reading of the melodrama of manners that it reflects persuades us that an (authorial) intelligence inhabits it. Sadly it is also a remake - of a 1934 film by John Stahl.

In Imitation of Life, all the humans alive and dead, onscreen and in the auditorium, fail the Turing test, and only the filmic machine passes.

Communion as the end of ethics

Where communication appears in discussions of ethics, it is either as a problem or an instrument. In Susan Sontag's moving work on images of torture, for example, communication is a means for extending the suffering of victims, while for Jürgen Habermas, communication is a means towards the esteblishment of values and norms. Of the two, the position which sees communication as an exercise of power is the most persuasive: there is no question that in a universe of flow, somehow communication has ended up in the hands of the few: ammassed, delayed, detoured, and used as a weapon in information warfare, propaganda, and as both Sontag and Elaine Scarry argue, as an instrument of torture. The sad truth of Habermas' more utopian vision is that communicative agreement between free and equal subjects can result in values and norms which are anything but utopian. Although Arendt uses the case of the Eichman trial to demonstrate the weaknes of kant's categorical imperative, her thesis of 'the banality of evil' is in the end an emprical argument against the idea that discussion among peers will always result in rational results: here, the discussion among ome of the most highly educated populations in Europe resulted in general agreement to the terms of the Final Solution. Something is wrong.

A eudaimonist perspective, deriving from one of the oldest European staements on ethics, Aristotle's Nichomachaean Ehics. In Aristotle (Book 10, Chapter 8), the highest good is the life of the mind: the moment at which we are most godlike, and which as 'Contemplative Soeculation', points both backwards and forwards in time. It is clear today that Aristotle needs to be adjusted in one crucial aspect. The life of the mind can no longer be understood as the life of one brain trapped inside a bone box on the top of the hum,an frame. In what we share with the aimals, and in what we share – throug language and all the other media which form the vehicles of thought – with other human beings, the life of the mind is an entriely collective entreprise: what recent writers refer to as the intellectual commons. Yet here Hardt and Negri are as misled as habermas. The commons is no more an instrument for the realisation of something else than is rational communication. From a eudaimonst persp[ective, communication itself is the Good. It remains to be seen why, if this is the case, communication regularly turns out to be evil, in the cases investigated by Arendt and by Scarry and Sontag. At stake is the nature and definition of 'communication'

Thus far in human history, political economy has served to parcel out scarce resources on the basis of wealth and power, in order to produce and reproduce differential access to the commons of communication. That concentration is no longer necessary. There is enough to go round. There has been enough food, water, shelter, fuel and knowledge to go round for over a hundred years. But the falling rate of profit has ensured that throughout that period, more and more demands for more and more consumption has been necessary to preserve the privilege of the ruling class. Commodification of all sorts of human wants are no longer useful: this is the case with knowledge and communication, for which it is also true that the atomisation of knowledge into data and information is no longer productive. Only the falling rate of profit leads to intellectual property right sin knowledge, the rent-charging regime which poisons the very well-springs of the innovation process it pretends to defend. We do not contemplate or speculate about the Good, because we are already presented with the goods - with commodity consumption as the only path to enjoyment. These are the pleasures which Aristotle analyses before making his final eudaimonist step from pleasures to happiness.

For Aristotle, 'contemplative specualation' fails a final test of wholeness because (1) it dep[ends on a sufficiency of the means of life (including the means of liberality: enough to give away) and (2) it is incapable of persuading, through its own media -– rhetoric for him, mass or personalised media for us – the mass of people to accept it as doctrine. In answer to (2), the masses are devoted to the pursuit of pleasures because they do not possess them, so that, in answer to (1), they do not have those underpinning sufficiencies wituout which happiness is inaccessible. Therefore the purpose of political life – and here we might properly say the purpose of communication – is to provide those pleasures which enable happiness – comntemplation and speculation. What else is intended by Marx's 'Realm of Freedom' (Capital III 820; [Ch 48]) - a realm which begins to be possible with the shortening of the working day.

Neither action nor creation, in Aristotle Contemplative Speculation is not restricted to rationality but includes sensory and emotional life. This consideration should indicate the weakness of his assertion that such happiness escapes non-human creatures: rationality is not the sole copnstituent of happiness, which is therefore not reserved only for the rational animal. Lie his comparison with the gods, the distinction form the animals no longer persuades us. Similarly in Marx, while we take from him the idea of 'socialised man', we part company over the false choice between ruling or being ruled over by nature. Our happiness depends on collectivity, connectivity, and therefore on extending our relations from the means of production (techne) to the physical world in which our pleasures place us as fully physical beings. Communication is not a means to ecotopia: it is ecotopia.

Yet as we have seen communication is in itself an overdetermined, purposive, not to say instrumental concept. We need to revise what weunderstand by it. It ight be possible to speak of true and false communication (as we might of true and false hope - of 'hope' for a win on the Lottery as opposed to hope for a just, open, happy world). Ontologically, mediation is the flow of matter and energuy, which both physical law and human instinct forms into order through negentropic processes. It is these processes which, as Shannon and Weaver showed in the eartliest days of information theory, construct order. yet they too easily construct communication as orders given and obeyed. This is the 'false' communication, yet it is the historical process through which we pass, and which we cannot gainsay or rescind. Perhaps the term we need is something else, somehting of the commons, such as communion (I owe the term to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer), to distinguish from the command-and-control ethic of communications. From universal mediation, and its entropic characteristic, through the negentropic but equally catastrophic command regime of communication, we move towards a eudaimonist utopia of communion, a term which has the added benefit of centuries of usage in which communion with nature, and indeed with the divine, has been part of its meaning. Communion is the goal itself, not a means to anything else. We seek justice,, health, food, drink, shelter. clothing and a modicum of order so that we can be happy communing beyond the artifices of wealth, power, species and phyla.

3 Theses on black and white

Thesis One:
that the opoposite of black is white: a surface which reflects all wavelengths equaly, as a black surface absorbs them all. When an imaginary pure black surface absorbs all wavelengths, it annihilates differences between them. And so does an imaginarly pure white, subordinating all wavelengths to its own purity. Thus there is not so much difference between white and black as we might suppose: both draw difference into unity.

Thesis Two:
the opposite of black is not white but light. Against the darkness in which our eyes can perceive nothing, there is the light in which they do. But light, the purest, brightest light, like darkness, blinds, as the desert sun does. The closer it comes to absolute, the more light burns out the rods and cones, maculates the seeing eye with afterimages, in extremis takes sight away permanently, as it has for so many observers of solar phenomena. Blinding, and the maculation of vision, is common to absoulte darkness and absolute light, just as reduction to unity is common to absolute black and absolute white. Here too there is no true opposition.

Thesis Three:
the opposite of black is not white but a mirror reflection, which reflects each wavelength in its own discrete form. Against black, we would set the differentiating forms of natural as well as manufactured mirrors – rivers and streams, wet rocks, oil shimmering on puddles – as indeed we might include those natural and manufactured forms of prism which split the light into rainbows, as in the spray of waterfalls and surf. Against black's unity, and against its blinding of vision, we might cast as its dialactical pair the shattering and splintering of light, its endless multiplication.

Vector Politics and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

From a chapter drafted for John Armitage (ed) Virilio Now

To build a new future is the greatest of challenges. When Virilio forces us to look into the abyss of final catastrophe, he makes us consider not only what is at stake, but how we might address it. In his pioneering work on ecological politics he demonstrates how much depends on how we see ourselves in relatiuon to the world. Today, as the terrains of 'immaterial labour' and the physical infrastructure of the network coincide, Virilio, in common with feminist phenomenologists of digital media like N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Margaret Morse (1998) and Michelle White (2002), argues against the mind-body split that informs the cyber-visionary desire to leave behind the crumpled, painful 'meat' of the body. Instead, Virilio argues, we have to understand that the general accident is not just a technological flaw, as in his insight that the inventions of the train, the airplane, nuclear power, internet and bio-engineering are always simultaneously the invention of the train crash, the plane wreck, meltdown, information crash and genetic time-bomb. The condition is however more general and formative than that: Virilio notes that 'the production of any 'substance' is simultaneously the production of a typical accident (Virilio 1993: 212). As Jussi Parikka observes of this passage, 'An accident . . . is not in this context intended to mean the opposite of absolute and neccessary, as Aristotelian metaphysics has maintained. Instead, accidents are an inherent part of an entity' (Parikka 2007: 4). This might recall Adorno's praise of disappointment, and perhaps also signal the danger attendant on construing the future not as risk management but as unknowable other. In other words, Virilio points us towards an aesthetics of failure: of the inherent risk that any object – and phenomenologically therefore any subject – runs of failing to continue to be. It comes down then to a duty of care, for the planet, and consequently therefore also for the people who inhabit it. It seems then that Virilio is correct: a putative vectoral network, one that is not self-identical, that evolves without notice, that plunges into accident and disappointment, and in which machines have as much say as humans is a terrifying risk. But it may also be the only way to escape the stifling grid of destruction which is the military, economic, political and cultural standoff of a present which denies hope to the mass of humanity and the planet itself.

DECE and the cloud

The cloud adds mobility and interactivity to thin client computing, making it more energy and resource efficient to maintain than expensive software and document libraries on personal hard-drives. In theory at least, we should all be able to access a single copy of a book or movie, dramatically reducing the spiralling costs of proliferating, transporting and storing them locally. Even at high bandwidth, streaming is cheaper than downloading, and downloading media-rich files is the biggest drain on net resources.

Unfortunately, the cloud is also open to copyright, and in many respects makes it simpler. The recent DECE initiative shows why. A key problem has been the vast variety of formats and platforms on which consumers want to access movies, games, TV, sports and music, from tiny mobile phone screens to 1280 domestic high-definition and 3D. DECE, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, provides a solution. With a membership including Adobe, Microsoft, Comcast, Lionsgate, NBC Universal, Netflix, Panasonic, Paramount, Sony, and \Warner Bros. alongside most of the major chip, home entertainment and mobile phone manufacturers, DECE is a one-stop shop for all formats. Servers will deliver streaming video in the appropriate codecs for any platform for a single license payment. Not quite a monopoly – Disney is holding out for its own KeyChest alternative, possibly in alliance with Apple (whose Steve Jobs is also Disney's largest shareholder thanks to his involvement in Pixar) – DECE removes the risks associated with ownership of hardcopies, entrenching the limitation on rights purchasers of video have compared to other goods. It also provides tracking of users' viewing habits for commercial onselling. As long as we remain entrenched in the individualist ethos of the old disciplinary capital, we will be concerned with privacy; only when we learn to mistrust the database economy of the network will we learn to question the crowdsourcing that DECE, in this sense like Google, commercialises.

The likely upshot? DECE is an attempt to counter an unusual phenomenon in file-sharing: even when free downloads like Radiohead's In Rainbows is available, interactors still prefer to use Limewire and BitTorrent. Free still outsells cheap, and anonymous still outbids tracked. Just as the IPv6 transition threatens the universal internet, so the cloud, while offering the platform capable of delivering a universal library, is likely to split the internet between legitimate and illegitimate distribution. Meanwhile the sheer volatility of the hardware market, reluctance to pay twice for the same product (the vinyl I bought in 1980), anger at badly designed DRM restrictions (like DVD regional formatting and smartphones tied to unpopular service suppliers), the pleasures of sharing among peers, and the threat of legislation allowing searches of hard discs will lead more people to store more media-rich files on more clouds. Result: increased storage and transmission demands, lower efficiency, more format wars and hacker escalations. Ideally the cloud should lead to greater efficiency, but in conditions of the struggle between market and network, it will not. In the process it may terminally damage the future of the internet.

A couple of things I never knew about the Red One

The Red Corporation's Red One camera – the most widespread of high-def pro cameras – employs a Super-35mm CMOS chip which, through a structure employing amplification and a dedicated transistor for draining charge on every pixel, givies none of the smear and bloom or the noise of CCD cameras. At a notional 4.5K (4480x1920) resolution, this should be capable of the kind of accurate account of the optical scene that 35mm film has. But the RAW format data in CMOS is digitised in situ, rather than converted from charge to voltage at the chip and only subsequently converted to digital data as in CCD architectures. The result is that the latent image is inaccessible: the chip itself reduces the data by a factor of ten before it is even buffered in the cameras's hard drive.

Further notes on the history of invisibility

The characteristic cultural formation of the capitalist epoch was realism, and its characteristic visual form geometry, specifically the geometry of projection. This is the form of perspective, of cartography. Not primarily or exclusively illusionistic, realist projective geometry is about scale and dimensionality – making small things big, big things small, and round things flat.

By contrast, the fundamental cultural formation of the network era is the database, and its principle is no longer geometrical but arithmetic. The database is dimensionless: it has taken the logic of converting time into space (the graph, the calendar) and eradicated space as well. The database is decreasingly visible, hidden behind the screen displaying the results of a specific search. Thus the invisibility of database-driven sites to search engines.

The long journey from the dominance of hierarchic and semantic visual forms under feudalism has led to the layering of semantics under observation, and now under ubiquitous digital enumeration. The questions are whether this new form is so voracious it will consume the previous modes of visual culture; and whether this is a genuinely new form of political economy or merely the latest twist in the tail of capital.

Virtual History

Wriing history is made more difficult if we do not accept the axiom which opens Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "The world is all that is the case", or the recommendation he gives at the end, to throw away the ladder climbed in order to reach his conclusions. If the world is not given (the case) but a restless terrain of becoming and conflict, it is no longer possible to write its history as a map of certainties. And if on the other hand we cannot abstract certainty from flux, then we are condemned to climb repeatedly back down the ladder to sample once more both the contingency of the world and the emotional and perceptual turmoil "where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart" (Yeats). Theory differs from philosophy because it is premised on this repetitive return to a materiality which is never fully ascertainable. Materialism is an incomplete project because it cannot extrapolate an idea from the world without going once more back into the world to confirm the materiality of the idea. This does not mean that it fails; merely that it cannot claim the purity of philosophy's logic, or for that matter the apparent certainties of scientific data. Nor does it imply that no knowledge is possible. It means rather that theoretical knowledge is processual, tentative, falsifiable and dialectical, forged in the contradiction between formal rationality and the constantly reforming world.

Wittgenstein's 'world' is wholly actual; Bergson's fundamentally virtual. Materialist historiography understands that the actuality of the world at any moment is the result of previous virtual potentialities, and contains within it as many more. Kant recognised the contingency of this situation, the vast ocean of interacting elements producing humanly unforeseeable new states in and of the world. For Kant, reason is what separates us from that contingency and so permits us to be free. Materialist theory recognises that we who are subjects of knowledge are contingent; that the reason through which we know is contingent: and that our separation from the world, while perfectly actual, is also the result of previous contingencies. With that knowledge, we know both that we exist actually, but virtually too, in that we are constantly becoming other, and our ideas of reason and our relation with the world likewise. This makes writing history, especially the history of the media through which we know, represent and communicate with the world, significant not for what it tells us about the past, but for what we learn about our possible futures.

What we can speak about we must not pass over in silence.

Workplace media

Our key media of the 21st century are fundamentally spatial. Though it is still a truiism of film and video studies that the mainstream media are dominated by narrative and illusion, the truly dominant media of the early 21st century are geographical informatio systems (GIS), spreadhseets and databases. These workplace media operate by spatialising time. Where once voyagers recorded their journeys as narratives, the early imperial navigations turned to a more schematic system of recording space, turning to the grid of longitude and latitude to create a globe which already contained the unexplored regions of the Southern hemisphere. This level of control increased incrementally, through the Ordnance Survey's addition of contour lines among other features, until, with the introduction of ZIP codes in 1963, mapping could be associated not only with physical but with sociological information. This basic zoning tool could then be associated with such other datasets as census returns, and the move to geographical information systems commenced. The history of the spreadsheet is a denser one but covers a similar history. The critical move came in the migration from the double-entry ledger to the electronic spreadsheets, which no longer carried the residual chronological ordering that paired accountancy with narrative. That move had been achieved rather earlier in bureaucratic record keeping, with the invention of the vertical filing cabinet by Edwin Seibels in 1898 (and the slightly earlier innovation of horizontal filing systems). Again, the ledger had retained some aspects of temporal ordering, especially in terms of how searches were to be conducted. The filing cabinet spatialised these searches, allowing quasi-random alphabetical and numerical searches, as well as the use of 'metadata' such as labelled drawers to isolate files of particular interest. Te database completed this spatialisation of data, separating, for example, biographical from geographical, financial from medical records, but allowing for cross-referencing. These three instruments, GIS, spreadsheets and databases, express and enable the managerialisation of society noted by Foucault and subsequent scholars. These spatialising tendencies correspond with the arithmetic drive in digital media. The grid, and the arithmetical nomenclature for colour distinctions, identify points rather than continua, ideally replicable entities excluding both semantic reference and temporal change.

Snatched from a chapter drafted for Resolutions 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces edited by Ming-Yuen Ma & Erika Suderburg.

The draft chapter has discussions of some favourite video and animation work of the last few years. It argues that these and other examples from Robert cahen, Daniel Crooks and Susan Collins among others escape the confines of the cartesian grid and begin to create new orderings of space, or disturb the grid by bringing in time. Those with a good web presence are:
458nm, Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck and Tom Weber, Filmakademie Baden Würtenberg / Polynoid, Germany, 6 mins 54 sec, 2006, http://polynoid.org/polynoid_458nm.html
Asparagus, Suzan Pitts, US, 20 mins, 1979, http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/animation/watch/v6336800ArqyhghK
Ryan, Chris Landreth, National Film Board, Canada, 13 mins 54 sec, 2004, http://nfb.ca/film/ryan/
The Tale of How, The Blackheart Gang, South Africa, 4 mins 29 sec, 2006, http://theblackheartgang.com/the-household/the-tale-of-how/

Interview

In the course of recording interviews for the Genealogies of Digital Light project, I got interviewed myself. Terry Flaxton included a two-part interview in his Verbatim History of High Definition Technology and Aesthetics. Seeing Terry's artworks in hi-def was a real highlight of the trip: see the Somerset Carnivals and Glastonbury Portraits documentation on his site, and check his blog, High Definition - No Mercy, listed on the right.

Zoomorphism

We risk zoomorphism when we say a medium "wants" to depict, narrate, be flat etcetera. Zoomorphism (not anthropomorphism) because it is an ascription of instinct, not desire. We do not permit our technologies their tragic mirror phase, their Oedipal revolt. (This is the point of Asimov's 3 laws of robotics). That media appear to have instinctive tendencies towards specific kinds of performances is evidence of their persistent lack of autonomy.

ship shape

High point of an excellent conference in Bristol on cinema and colour, , Steve Neale discusses mise en scene and skin tones in the race discourse of Sirk's Imitation of Life. The freeze on the white roses in the funeral scene - which I have never managed to watch without weeping - as the central argument over race in the film. Steve as ever persuasive, innovative and precise.

why do media matter - and how?

For two centuries at least, philosophers have argued that the media through which power is exercised cannot be distinguished from the action of power itself. Such media include writing (laws), speech (parliaments), images (evidence), data (measurement), numbers (statistics) and their means of distribution (mail, telegram, telephone, internet). Only a slight change of focus is required to understand that money too is a medium, the medium of exchange. Media are the intrinsic forms taken by power and economy. This is why media matter.

But how do media matter, exactly? In the most general sense, media 'matter' because they are material, but material of a very specific kind. Every medium is actual: it actually exists, actually mediates. This actuality is its physical form, which derives from its past how it has been constructed, out of which elements, how those elements were constructed in their turn. If technological innovation is a process of reassembling old parts into new forms (Schumpeter), then technologies are containers of history, and the past accumulated in them is what makes up their actuality: the accumulated force of history.

But as Marx observed, we make our own history, albeit not under conditions of our own choosing. Media technologies are actual in the sense that they are the accumulation of the wisdom of the anonymous dead. But they are also potential. Potential derives from the Latin word for power. Power is the capacity for acting, that is, for making actual (Arendt). Everything that has potential has the potential to act, that is to bring about a new actuality. Without that capacity, nothing happens.

Every medium inherits its past, but also converts that past into a new present. According to both Kant and Hegel, technological devices are distinguished from living things because their purpose is external to them. Living beings live in order to live: their first task is to carry on living. Technologies have as their first purpose to produce something else, something external to them. They have no instinct of self-preservation. From this point of view, technologies are entirely the servants of humans. And yet we have the terrible image of the factory as the eater of souls: the technology as enemy and conqueror of humanity. Marx used the phrase 'dead labour' to describe machines: they are the accumulated skills of those who went before us, abstracted from the work of their bodies, made concrete, and subjected to the laws of whatever mode of production dominated at the time.

The opposition between visions of technologies as either master or servant is inadequate. They are the servants of some (the owners of the means of production) and the oppressors of others. But if it is the case that both power and wealth are media, then the technologies are not inert. They are the media through which power is exerted and wealth extracted. Technologies too mediate between people. All technologies are media technologies. All technologies mediate, as when heat is converted into velocity, or electricity into computer displays. They mediate when they convert energy into its representation (gear trains, code). All technologies mediate through a chain of transformations and representations. They also mediate between the past and the future, the accumulated past of both human skill and previous technologies, and the immediate future posited by their capacity for action, their potential.

Both actual and potential, media mediate between people, between natural forces (animal power, the laws of physics) and people, and between technologies and people. [It remains to be seen whether it is possible to mediate between technologies and natural forces without the intervention of people]. Because they also mediate between past and future (they are actual-potential), media are the medium of history, and they are temporal and historical in their nature. This is not to say that they have an essence: some ideal form which shapes every given medium. Rather, media are continually changing, because they are the medium of change.

This historical dimension of mediating between people, technologies and nature is basic to how media operate as media of power and wealth. Classes, cliques, factions and occasionally individuals conspire to seize control over particular media formations – the legal system, broadcasting, transport systems. In dong so they seek to restrain the potential of the media they inherit, restricting tools for inputting, distinguishing between types of access, delaying outputs for some while accelerating them for others. The minute adjustments required for these operations constitute a major part of media historiography.

But media formations must mediate. It is simply impossible to run a society without media: the two terms are synonymous. We cannot imagine a society without language, any more than we can imagine a language without a society (Lévi-Strauss). Media are the material of society: they are what we do when we are sociable: talk, share food, wear clothes, make love, make war. Mediation is society, and society is mediation. Even the highly specialised media formations – medicine, for example – are social in their essence. Even the most authoritarian media, the most deeply opposed to dialogue – such as weapons – are produced in, and produce, social relations.

Because they must mediate, media open themselves up to struggle over their own constitution. The boss may own the machinery, but it is the hands who most often make the adjustments that improve it. In a stable system, the improvement is taken from the hands and delivered to the bosses. It is as if we cannot, as a species, resist tinkering, improving, acting in dialogue with the materiality of our media. This is the secret of the open source movement; as it is of the argument that the gift of free labour to social networks is a gift to the bosses of unpaid work. Tinkering may then support the status quo, or it may bring about permanent change. It brings us joy, either way. It is joyful, I believe, because it brings us into dialogue with the ancient dead whose labour is accumulated in machines, and allows them to participate in the making of a new potential, a new future.

The struggle over media technologies historicises them once again. Technologies have their own dynamic, in the same way that music or mathematics have. But they also mediate constantly between themselves, between people, and between people and machines. The actuality of media is then the product of past struggles over their shaping. Their potential is also a subject of struggle: shall we use this factory to make bombs or bicycles? Both products and sites of struggle, media also mediate struggle, since they are the media of power and wealth. This is why to describe mediating technologies as either masters or servants is inadequate. It also explains a crucial feature of media technologies.

To the extent that they are the means of production, media technologies belong to their owners, and take their form from the mode of production. We could put this differently and say that they take their form from the regimes of power in place in a given period. Thus the newspaper had the typical form of a factory product: mass-produced for straightforward consumption; while the internet invites prosumers and produsers to customise and produce their own content.

But to the extent that they are arenas of struggle, the underlying technologies (the printing press, the server) are capable of more than the purposes for which they were perhaps initially designed. They can be repurposed, redesigned. Sometimes these tinkerings emerge in the form of activism, sometimes as art, sometimes as ideas, sometimes as innovation. Each and any of these is itself a mediation, and therefore opens itself up to struggle: to producing new innovations, new potentialities; or to being subsumed back into the status quo, the old actuality.

Media matter because they are the medium of history – of politics, of economics, of war, of love. How do media matter? They matter by their constantly changing designs, affordances, combinations and by their constitution in and as the struggle over mediation itself, that mediation which is the whole of the social, and beyond it our connection to the natural world and ultimately to technologies themselves.

To understand mediation, it is necessary to observe in detail the machinery of mediation. The grand epochs – agriculture and writing; the clock, printing and steam; automation, electricity and electronics – give us only the barest sense of the actual texture of either media or history. Especially when thinking about the digital era which we have only just entered, we need to look at the details of the design and use of media technologies. Comparisons with more remote epochs are valuable because they help clarify what is specific to contemporary mediation. They also tell us about what has been left behind, and therefore indicate something about what is to be done to maximise the potential of our media. Any future democracy, any future justice will be mediated. Understanding how the very fabric of humanity is mediated second by second is essential if we are to make possible a future other than the present.

Face-To-Interface

In an era when the face-to-face is typically articulated institutionally (family, workplace), the situation exists for the most part as mediated. So that the situation which confronts us is spectacle. Thus the first ethical imperative is to enter a relation with the media of mediation. Not to identify with, or to treat as transparent, but to confront.

Hence the critical nature of image ethics: there is no 'first' in First Philosophy when everything is always already mediated.