Steve Anderson teaches Interactive Media and directs the interdivisional PhD program in Media Arts and Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is also Associate Editor of Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. His research interests include historiography, the theory and history of emerging technologies, documentary and experimental film and video and interactive media design. He has a PhD in Film, Literature and Culture from USC and an MFA in Film and Video from CalArts.
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
This article maps two divergent trajectories within a narrowly defined sphere of
short-form, time-based digital media created between 1995 and 2005. These works are
considered in relation to the historical avant-garde - particularly the Structural
film movement of the 1960s and 70s - and analyzed as responses to a range of cultural
concerns specific to the digital age. The analysis identifies movement toward two
terminal points: first, a mode of remix-based montage inspired by open source
programming communities and peer-to- peer networks; and second, the emergence of a
mode of imaging termed the digital analogue
, which foregrounds the material
basis of digital production.
Film, remix and the future of digital media.
The title of this article refers to Hans Magnus Enzensberger's 1962 essay
avant gardeto radical social agendas. Enzensberger warns against the pretensions of movements like Futurism that were so easily swept up into the political ideology of fascism, and the avant-garde's general tendency to slip toward variously doctrinaire forms of political sloganeering. As Enzensberger argues, an avant-garde that is unconscious of its aporias — its internal contradictions and obfuscations — is even more dangerous than the reactionary politics that inevitably surface to resist it. Criticism about digital media, which has too often strayed into the realm of the utopian, would do well to heed such warnings. And while my present argument is largely framed in optimistic terms, it is particularly important to recognize the limitations of contemporary
avant-gardemedia practices, given the largely hostile political and economic climate in which they have emerged.
As lines between categories of digital art making continue to blur, it is also necessary to re-examine outmoded distinctions between the practices and tools of cinema, video, music, animation, graphic design and motion graphics. Just as digital practitioners move fluidly across these boundaries, theorists and historians of new media must develop similarly mobile strategies of critical practice unencumbered by the burden of past media and analytical paradigms. Whereas the Modernist avant-garde privileged materiality as a means of exploiting the formal potentials of medium specificity, the privileged objects in this essay preserve a relation to the material world that grounds them historically. Ultimately, it is not an avant-garde free of contradictions that we seek, but one that illuminates the position of digital media in relation to systems of control — including the rules of representation, technology, and history.
To do this, we will focus on a small number of short-form, time-based, digital media
— a disparate array of music videos, short films and motion graphics created during
the past ten years. Despite the fact that the work under consideration here has
rapidly proliferated and resonated with many of the key theoretical issues in cinema
and visual culture studies of the past three decades, it has been largely neglected
by theorists and critics of digital culture.experimental
or avant-garde
film and video, and the equally broadly defined field of practice termed new
media.
These works therefore do not fit into any consistent curricular or
publishing niche, are rarely a part of mainstream culture, do not receive theatrical
distribution or broadcasting, and are often regarded with suspicion as proper objects
of study within an academic context.
I am particularly interested in these works' expression of the status of narrative,
of relations between technology and material culture, and of emergent conceptions of
space, time, and bodies. As a point of entry, I will ask whether this work may be
meaningfully understood in relation to the historical avant-garde, particularly the
Euro-American Structural film movement of the 1960s and 70s. I do not, however, wish
to spend much time justifying my use of the term avant-garde,
which admittedly carries specific historical connotations
that are not all applicable to the present discussion.avant-garde
media art.open source
video
authoring, modeled after the combined practices of open source programming
communities and peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The second is the emergence of
what I call the digital analogue,
a mode of representation that foregrounds
material aspects of production seemingly in defiance of the conventional wisdom that
digital media are characterized by dematerialization and disconnection from the
physical world.
Because the title of this essay features the rather glaring oxymoron digital
avant-garde,
it may be useful to define these terms in isolation in order to
frame the use I hope to make of them in juxtaposition. The term digital
rarely
denotes a set of cohesive practices. Digital media are notoriously hybrid, often
bringing together images, sounds, and objects that are computer-generated or mediated
with others that originate in the analogue, photochemical, or textual worlds. There
is, however, a certain utility to digital
as a historicizing term,
particularly as it implies its own eventual obsolescence. I am less interested,
therefore, in defining digital culture
in terms of technology than in
attempting to identify the social practices and preoccupations that are particular to
the digital age. One of the things at stake within the consumer culture that
surrounds digital media is the growing invisibility of its underpinning technology.
Given the current movement toward ubiquitous computing and wireless networks, this is
of particular relevance; even flat panel monitors and microprocessors that are
embedded in everyday objects seem to negate the physical infrastructure of the
computer and by implication, its socio-industrial base.
For the purposes of this essay, the avant-garde
may be defined as a
non-singular and contradictory range of minor practices that are dialectically
related to — i.e., both resistant to and constitutive of — dominant media systems.
These works are characterized by multiplicity, micro-politics and formal
experimentation, and perhaps most disquietingly, they are often exo-commercial — that
is, positioned in a marginal but necessary relationship to the economically
sustaining infrastructure of the entertainment and advertising industries. This
working definition is indebted to David James' work on American avant-garde film of
the 1960s, which debunks the old avant-garde / commercial binary as both false and
misleading.
My desire to reclaim the concept of the avant-garde for the digital age stems from a
firm belief in the relevance of media to politics and culture. I see great potential
benefit in developing a critical apparatus for understanding these exo-commercial
practices as embedded in a broader context with economic and social implications.
Holly Willis has further argued for the value of seriously considering these works as
symptomatic indicators of cultural obsessions: Despite the general dismissal of these
works, many music videos, as well as design shorts, offer a compelling
examination of some of the central issues that we face as a culture, and
indeed, one might argue that these rather disparate artworks offer a map of
contemporary anxieties, fascinations and concerns.
digital
and avant-garde
is
our ability to relate these terms to the needs and struggles of everyday life. Put
more simply, the goal is to ascribe relevance to particular practices of digital
culture in a historical context. Thus, I believe it is possible to deploy the term
avant-garde
with respect for its historical specificity, but at the same
time, to make a claim for its continuing usefulness in discussing contemporary art
practices that have evolved in parallel with commercial-industrial media.
Within visual culture, digital imaging has come to signify an ontological shift away from the indexical trace of the photograph. Where photochemical imaging could lay claim to a direct relation to the physical world, both conventional wisdom and everyday experience suggest that digital images more commonly function as hybrid constructions of the world they purportedly represent. Although the problematic of representing reality long predates the appearance of digital technology, the early 1990s marked a point of no return for the representational capacity of images. In his 1991 book
[through digital sampling] The image becomes a series of bits, a pattern of yes/no choices registered within a computer's memory […] There is no original negative […] against which all prints can be compared for accuracy and authenticity. There may not even be an external referent. The implications of all this are only beginning to be grasped. They clearly set a historical framework around the discussion presented in this book, which continues to emphasize the qualities and properties of the photographic image.
a plane severed from a human observer […] Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in areal,optically perceived world. If these images can be said to refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic, mathematical data.
real world(which he revealingly equates with the
optically perceivedworld).
historicalworld; Crary opts for
optically perceivedworld, both of which introduce more complications than they dissolve.
In his essay
The old media avant-garde came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information […] The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media.
from the ruins of representation to the practices of processing
seeingand understanding the world. At stake in this investigation is an emergent understanding of the ways media practitioners are enacting new forms of networked subjectivity and creativity that are characteristic of an
open sourceauthoring mode. These networked practices should not be uncritically privileged — they are as readily deployed for evil as for good — but I want to probe the transformative impact of networks on historical avant-garde tactics of appropriation and recombination.
In her book
the actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that 'originality' is a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence.Indeed, she argues, originality and repetition are often bound together through shared formal and structural constructs, and she identifies one such construct — the grid — as a privileged technique of spatial organization within the painted modernist frame. For Krauss, photography provided the final seeds of destruction of originality as the
discourse of the copythat so aptly described the Appropriationist movement of the 1980s (of which Levine and Sherman were a part) still applies to digital media.
In digital media, the act of copying has moved from figure to ground, whether at the
level of the individual pixel, the sample, or the peer-to-peer network. In other
words, the status of the copy is no longer at stake — it is as much of a given to
digital composition as brush strokes are to painting. To further update Krauss' take
on the dynamic interplay between originality and repetition, we must revisit her
privileging of the grid as a structuring framework. The grid, for Krauss, marked
Modern art's categorical withdrawal from representation and mimesis. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is
antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its
back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is
the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with
the lateral spread of a single surface
That so many generations of 20th-century
artists should have maneuvered themselves into this particular position of
paradox — where they are condemned to repeating, as if by compulsion, the
logically fraudulent original — is truly compelling
Within digital media, however, it seems clear that the two-dimensional X-Y axis of Krauss' modernist grid has given way to work that places equal if not greater fetish value on the Z-axis, and the possibility, if not the imperative, of composing in depth using 3-D modeling software, video game engines, immersive and telepresent technologies, mobile media, etc. In his book
digital analogue,there is frequently a gravitation toward work that foregrounds the tension between flatness and depth, a kind of resistance to immersion that arguably un-privileges three-dimensionality. And in the zone of networked communication, a figurative Z-axis may be understood to signify the dimensional structure of the Internet or the datasphere of wireless media that concerns practitioners of mobile and distributed media.
Within the realm of what may be termed open source video
— i.e., re-edited
videos that are distributed online and via file-sharing networks — it is possible to
view the rhizomatic structure of the Internet as a corrective to the Cartesian
coordinates of three-dimensional space. This is particularly realized in the
structure of global peer-to-peer distribution networks, which can no longer be
regarded as external and posterior to the digital artwork itself. Instead, I believe
we are witnessing a transformation of the digital artwork's position as fundamentally
entangled with circuits of replication, recombination, dissemination, and along with
them, endless potentials for productive mutation. Both Lunenfeld and Manovich have
described this transformation as a shift to information-based aesthetics,
impacting a broad base of digital practices
from art and architecture to film and computational media. When addressing works that
emerge from the informational space of the network, we are dealing not with originals
and reproductions but memes and mutants — circuits of data flow and transformation
that assert their own ontological status. Perhaps most importantly, we must address
these networks in both material and functional terms, as cultural formations that are
the products of material and ideological necessity and not merely passive conduits
for data.
DJ Danger Mousepositioned in front of the drum set
A recent cultural object to emerge from this space is the
official
The
DJ Danger Mouse,the vestigial musicians Paul and George are perfunctorily replaced by dancers, and John performs a virtuosic break dance punctuated by a protracted round of spinning on his head and a screen-exiting backflip that leaves the singer's signature mop-top wig lying symbolically on the stage. On one level, all of this amounts to little more than a parodic gesture, but the electronic civil disobedience of Grey Tuesday and the visuals of the obviously hastily produced
Apart from the barely noticeable R+P logo that flashes on screen at the end of the video, Ramon & Pedro nowhere acknowledge responsibility for the
Among the most vocal advocates of the concept of a digital avant-garde that is
directly engaged in resisting corporate domination of media is the Critical Art
Ensemble (CAE), which argues unabashedly for work that places a high value on experimentation and on engaging the unbreakable link
between representation and politics.
electronic civil disobedience
After all, an avalanche of literature from very fine postmodern critics has for the past two decades consistently told us that the avant-garde is dead and has been placed in a suitable resting plot in the Modernist cemetery alongside its siblings, originality and the author. In the case of the avant-garde, however, perhaps a magic elixir exists that can reanimate this corpse
The avant-garde today cannot be the mythic entity it once was. No longer can we believe that artists, revolutionaries, and visionaries are able to step outside of culture to catch a glimpse of the necessities of history as well as the future.In practical terms, CAE propose
cellular constructions aimed at information disruption in cyberspace.They thus advocate hacking as both an art form and political weapon, which points to the importance of thinking not just in terms of media objects and practices but also of their evolving contexts of distribution and exhibition. Unfortunately, the vocabulary of Hollywood film distribution obscures the functioning of networks and communities — some physical, some online or virtual — within which digital files are copied, reproduced, and traded. Within such a network, distinctions between viewers and producers are irretrievably blurred, and the one-way logic of television broadcasting and theatrical distribution becomes the multi-directional, many-to-many dialogue of the BitTorrent network. But how might this abstract cultural transformation manifest itself in terms of actual production? Part of the answer may be found in the extraordinary proliferation of remix-based videos currently in circulation via the internet and peer-to-peer networks.
Mike Nourse's short remix video
terror,
Iraqand
weaponswas extracted from a single speech by President George W. Bush and grouped in the order in which they occurred. Nourse's deceptively simple conceit poses a surprisingly effective critique of both the Bush campaign's mendacious association of al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center with the regime of Saddam Hussein and the central canard of the administration's advocacy of war, namely the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the American military onslaught in 2003. At the same time, Nourse's video invites us to think about the functioning of the news media as a passive echo chamber for campaign and administration talking points. The low-tech simplicity of Nourse's process invites viewers to imagine creating their own variations on this project, transforming virtually any electronic broadcast into potential raw materials for re-editing and redistribution.
Nourse's deployment of an explicitly algorithmic process also exemplifies one aspect
of art production in the database age by emphasizing the importance of keywords as a
means of understanding and reprocessing the content of media broadcasts. The
attribution of metadata, such as keywords, to any media set constitutes a similar
process — the distillation of key concepts from a field of possibilities. The result,
as with the information-handling capacity of a database system, is to amplify the
power of recombination and use of the data set, in this case, turning media consumers
into producers of alternative or resistant meanings.
This type of algorithmic manipulation strongly resembles the Euro-American Structural
film movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was associated with filmmakers
such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Paul Sharits, Joyce Wieland, and
Peter Kubelka, and which finds an active legacy in the continuing work of filmmakers
such as James Benning, Su Friedrich, Morgan Fisher, and Martin Arnold. Although
highly influential among experimental filmmakers, this work was deservedly criticized
for its makers' decision to pursue a set of artistic interests that were
fundamentally apolitical and inward-looking, even in the midst of the cultural
turmoil surrounding the Vietnam war and civil rights movements. For David James, this
movement aligns seamlessly with the conceptual and minimalist movements in the art
world — posing an institutional critique of the art world's persistent effacement of
the materiality of its objects. Pure film,
as James calls it, constituted cinema's response to Clement Greenberg's call for
medium specificity, drawing attention to the surfaces and planes of the film image
and its unique, artistic properties by using techniques such as scratched emulsion,
loop printing, and mathematically derived editing structures.
Structural film is often misunderstood as a fundamentally reductive and solipsistic practice when, in fact, much of the most interesting work is engaged in broader questions of historiography, narrative, memory, perception, and cognition in the cinematic processing of space and time. Ernie Gehr's work is exemplary in this regard, fulfilling both the rigid structural impulse of the movement's most extreme adherents, while simultaneously engaging in broader philosophical, historiographical, and perceptual concerns. Likewise, Morgan Fisher's body of work, which offers cinema's most esoteric and monomaniacal examination of the processes and mechanics of the cinematic apparatus, also constitutes one of its most erudite commentaries on otherwise too-easily-suppressed aspects of the Hollywood film industry.
While Structural film has been largely regarded as a footnote within film studies, it has resonated with remarkable tenacity in certain sectors of digital media art. Lunenfeld's decision to include a chapter on Structural filmmaker Hollis Frampton in
the ascendancy of the digital image has rendered experimental film ripe for a renaissance […] the experimental cinema can serve as a model for computer-inflected art. I believe, in fact, that the most interesting new media works aspire to the condition of the experimental cinema without quite realizing it.
our era's primary focus of concern,noting that
A somewhat more literal case in point may be found in the work of artist Barbara
Lattanzi, who has created a series of image processing systems called idiomorphic software,
which function as handlers
for online media.
Although materiality is often elided within digital media, the physicality of film
images remains a source of explicit fascination for certain media artists. Perhaps
the most remarkable of these is Austrian experimental filmmaker Virgil Widrich. Along
with the filmmakers Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold, Widrich is part of a third generation
of Austrian experimental
filmmakers who all share an obsessive interest in fragmenting and decomposing film
frames and working with movement and repetition within the frame. Until recently,
Widrich was the only one of the three to work digitally. Both Arnold and Tscherkassky
have prided themselves on rejecting digital technology, even as they create works
that are deeply connected to the logic of digital media in their use of repetition
and recombination. Widrich's work is additionally provocative in its return to paper
as a substrate for moving images. In the last few years Widrich has completed two
films —
given enough time and money, one can create what will be the ultimate digital film: 90 minutes, 129,600 frames completely painted by hand from scratch, but indistinguishable in appearance from live photography.
Widrich's rejection of the ease of digital compositing in favor of laboriously captured, printed, torn and folded origami animations provides part of the justification for its existence. This labor, in fact, gives the lie to contemporary discourses about the ease and simplicity of digital piracy and the lack of creativity among those who remix copyrighted materials. The underlying labor is self-consciously referenced only once in the film, when a train chase ends by plummeting off the side of a cliff. After plunging downward through space, the animated cutouts crash through the Mardi Gras cemetery scene from
digital analogue— a small but growing subset of work that attempts to renegotiate the basic terms of digital representation as something that requires attention to the material substrates of even the most ephemeral practices.
It is a truism of the digital age that media have lost their specificity, that art history's cherished formal properties have been consigned to the dustbin of history, replaced by elaborately sequenced but otherwise undifferentiated combinations of zeroes and ones. The rhetoric of digital convergence began in the research laboratories at Xerox PARC in the late 1960s and has been a powerful trope of digital culture ever since. The concept proved agreeable to the computer and entertainment industries as they sought to articulate a vision of technology to consumers eager to purchase each successive generation of media technologies en route toward one vast interoperable digital system. Convergence also works effectively at the level of practice by describing the multifunctional software tools used by digital designers who often move fluidly across boundaries of sound and image editing, visual effects, CGI, interface design, and animation. Finally, convergence offers a useful model for understanding what is happening at the corporate level through mergers and the vertical conglomeration of media and technology industries.
For some theorists, however, convergence marks a dangerous turn away from the specificity of individual media. Friedrich Kittler, in
Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text, are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. […] And once optical fiber networks turn formerly distinct data flows into a standardized series of digitized numbers, any medium can be translated into any other. […] a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium
vapor theory— divorces the products and practices of digital culture from their position in history and in the socially and materially grounded circumstances of their construction.
According to this model, not only is it impossible for non-specialists to
myth of transparency
identified
by Laura Marks renders the material substrates of computer technology
sleeper cells
and international terror networks in the
visible register.digital artworks that refer to the social circumstances in
which they were produced, or that draw attention to the physical platforms on
which they were built
Another alternative to the homogenizing effect of convergence may be found in the
language of cultural anthropology. The term syncretism, which is used to describe the
layering of cultural practices brought about by colonialism or immigration — the
pantheistic worship of Catholic saints in the Santeria religion, for example — may
also be repurposed to designate the layering of technological practices within
digital culture. Unlike convergence, a syncretic relationship does not imply the
erasure or collapse of distinct practices. Rather, it describes the combination of
disjunctive elements into a functional relationship that bears the continued traces
of each object's former existence. One consequence of the rhetorical shift from
convergence to syncretism is the potential foregrounding of historicity. Where
convergence tends to be ahistorical, syncretism emphasizes the temporal gaps between
objects and artifacts that remain embedded in their historical and cultural moments —
not simply in a technological register, but in terms of their original cultural
resonance. The concept of technological syncretism, then, permits an understanding of
digital media with respect for the material elements of which they are constituted.
The hybrid works examined here announce a relationship to their medium that invites
us to ask the